I have been trying to compile adjectives and verbs to describe seeing Regina Spektor live. I am not sure I can do it. It was one of the best gigs I have ever been to, and the only bad things I have to say are about the PA and equipment in the venue, which could be a lot better, and some people in the audience who, very loudly, talked through the entire gig.

None of this was enough to stop me being mesmerised by Regina Spektor’s music. She performed most of my favourites, which is always great. I really want to see her again now, immediately. Ideally at the Royal Festival hall with none of the infuriating streaks of anal leakage who could not just shut up and enjoy the spectacular brilliance of Regina Spektor.

These photos would have less heads and cameras at the bottom if I were not slightly under 5 foot, 4 inches tall. It is a miracle and testament to the sloping floor of the Hammersmith Apollo and diminutive stature of the average Regina Spektor fan that I even saw her, let alone managed to get some reasonable photographs of her. Sometimes I go to gigs and I don’t even see the band at all.

Seeing Regina Spektor live was one of those experiences that makes this pointless existence worth it all. Most of the time may be dull, full of stress, depressing, filled with misery, torment and despair but when things like Regina Spektor gigs exist it is all worth it. I wanted to weave a blanket out of the moment so I could pull it snugly around myself and stay in it forever.

I just hope that next time everyone at the gig decides to listen and not rudely talk amongst themselves, much to the annoyance of the majority, who came to listen and enjoy the beautiful music.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

Following on from my previous entry, I disembarked from my train and prepared for some photography. I decided I could spare about half an hour and took a series of very disappointing photographs of the architecture. The light in there is a bit weird and my camera is only a compact digital, the flash is just not enough for long shots in unevenly lit buildings. I think I’d need a DSLR to get some photos worthy of the architecture at St. Pancras.

I am aware that the police in London have been unfairly targeting photographers recently, I’ve seen numerous reports of anyone taking photos being accused of being a terrorist and told to stop. So, I went out for my photography session in St. Pancras (which is an international railway station for those unaware, it has customs, security and such things for the trains from Paris and Brussels and other European destinations as well as to Nottingham) ready for a fight.

The only photographs worth showing are those of the statues, commissioned for the renovations and only a few years old currently.

I love the pose that Martin Jennings chose for this portrait sculpture of Sir John Betjeman, a poet that many British people have a great deal of affection for, and who was an enthusiastic admirer of St. Pancras station.

It was at this point the thing I had been mentally preparing myself for happened, I went to shoot from a different angle and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a policeman looking at me. “Aha, here we go…”, I thought to myself as I deliberately continued, pretending to have not seen him.

I caught another glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, approaching and taking something out of his pocket. I started running through my arguments in my head, and prepared to defend my camera with my life. There is no way I was going let anything I had taken be deleted or be stopped from doing an entirely reasonable thing, taking photographs of a beautifully renovated public building and the art that was commissioned for it.

The policeman spoke, I paraphrase because of my shoddy memory, “Hi, let me show you something, if you come around this side”, he gestured, “it is a really good angle with the clock above, especially at night. Here, look at this photo I took last night.”, he showed me the iPhone he had taken out of his pocket. I agreed that it looked really good and thanked him and he went back to his job of being a policeman in a building.

This put me in a fantastic mood for the entire day, I am usually disturbingly optimistic, much to the amusement of my friends. “No, give Gordon Brown a chance. He might be really good at being Prime Minister. Everything might change, things could get better!”, I once suggested in the weeks before he became Prime Minister. Later that day I also wondered out loud to Patrick whether the Hammersmith Apollo might sell better beer now that it is sponsored by HMV rather than Carling. What happened is that they just overcharge for a plastic glass of Carlsberg instead of Carling. I honestly entertained the notion that they might have a range of nice beers and ales now.

So, when I am being pessimistic and expecting the worst I absolutely love being proved wrong.

Paul Day’s Meeting Place is a spectacular and imposing work, more of a portrait of all the people over the decades who have used the station, especially lovers who met under the clock, it being a meeting place from the days before everyone was contactable no matter where they are. Mobile phones have reduced the meaning of this work but it is perhaps because of this that it should be there, as a celebration of generations of people greeting or waving off a loved one.

Meeting Place stands as a tribute to the people who have begun and ended journeys there.

I also took some photographs of parts of the frieze, which extends around the base of Meeting Place, for no other reason than particularly liking a lot of it. This woman with a book, especially.

I would love to write about Meeting Place for my Open University course this year, I think it would be very interesting to plan and write my independent assignment on, but there is one rather important reason that this is unlikely to happen, my course is called Art of the Twentieth Century and this statue is from 2007.

After a while I decided I had better go and check in to my hotel and head down to Leicester Square to meet Patrick for coffee and sushi before the gig.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

I am going to post the account of my weekend in chunks, probably over the next few days. There is this entry, about my journey and getting to places, another about St. Pancras station, one about seeing Regina Spektor live in Hammersmith on Friday night, one about getting lost in Chelsea, one about the Abstract America exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery and possibly one about the universe’s attempt at thwarting my journey home and my epic victory against the evil forces of public transport.

I was in London last weekend too, but for a Mesh gig in Islington and I went to the National Gallery and British Museum. This was all such familiar territory that it didn’t quite warrant even one journal entry of its own. The venue, museums and food were all standard favourites and the only new thing was staying in a rather dilapidated but warm and cosy £30 a night hotel near Finsbury Park. I could write about this hotel but it would be unfair, it is very cheap but also very clean and warm. It is only the snob within me that wants to write about it, the guy who owns it is also a very nice, friendly and welcoming chap.

So, I didn’t set off for London until quite late on the Friday. I’d booked the day off work and my train was not until 12:30pm because this was the earliest of the cheapest tickets when I booked. Trains, buses and tubes trains are my default mode after having lived in North London for a few years and also commuted to London from elsewhere. I also do not drive so I have always used public transport for every distance over a couple of miles that I need to travel.

I gathered my ‘travel light’ bag and threw in the absolute essentials for an overnight and little else. Clean underwear, hair brush, deodorant stick, eue de cologne, one day’s medication snipped off a blister pack, nail clippers, ibuprofen, scarf and umbrella – both required, book, ipod, camera and all the tickets, reservations and printed maps I need. The idea is that I can carry this all around with me the following day without discomfort.

I walked to the railway station unable to stop myself grinning like a drugged retard, I was off to see Regina Spektor play at the Hammersmith Apollo that night and see the Abstract America exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery the following day – this is too much excitement for me!

I arrived at Nottingham station quite early, and ate a sandwich and oat bar I’d bought whilst I waited for the train to arrive, watching all the people coming and going and transitioning between places. I was trying to work out which people milling around were locals starting or ending their journeys from or to elsewhere, who were foreigners in the land of Nottingham and which of them were caught in the liminal state of switching trains just passing through without really being there, using Nottingham as a sort of nexus for an entirely different journey.

Train stations, bus stations and airports – airports more than anything else – are not real places, they are gaps between real places. When I hear of people living in airport terminals or on a tube/metro/train network it fills me with a deep, existential dread, as if these souls are just looping around in a constant liminal state, between place, time and reality, like a lost call in a telephone exchange.

Setting foot onto the train is leaving this state, it is where the journey begins, even for the fifteen minutes of waiting while the train fills up with people and waits for its scheduled departure it is the journey. If I step into a train carriage which is not going to move, which I have at museums and other times, such as a cafe in an old railway carriage I vaguely recall, it confuses me. It is like traveling to nowhere.

Twitter: “Sitting on an East Midlands train is like visiting the 1980s.”

Some of the trains on the East Midlands line are getting rather old, and the carriages have not been refitted. I was one of the first onto the train (as demonstrated by the above photo – it was a packed train when it left). Sitting there it felt like I had stepped into the 1980s by accident, I was in this environment from the past with no clues or signals that twenty-five years had passed since this carriage was fitted. It is one of the original Intercity 125 sets, and the only change has been recovering the seats with material that could have easily been used by British Rail in the 1980s. When people filled the seats and got out their laptops, netbooks, smartphones and idiotphones – I can’t think what else to call the mobile phones that have not been deemed ’smart’ by people in marketing departments – it suddenly felt like I was back in the present.

I listened to Regina Spektor on my iPod and read some more of Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, a book which is taking me ages to read – I can only read it in small chunks because I want to think about half an hour’s reading for an hour before going back and reading more.

There was some minor annoyance of having a hyperactive university student sat opposite me, unable to sit still or shut his pointless disconnected mouth. He stank of many unpleasant things all at once, both literally and metaphorically. He never said a single thing that did not use the words “I”, “me” or “myself”. He seemed to put all of his effort into micromanaging a social life and network of people that act mostly as self-assurance for the self-obsessed ego that was slopping toxic psychic waste all over the place.

Twitter: “Urgh! I hate boys. They smell of farts, noise and lynx.”

Approximately one-hundred and five minutes later I was deposited at London St. Pancras station. Armed with my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS15 camera I went for my first proper photography binge in a very long time.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

I found this Edgar Allan Poe fingerpuppet behind a bin snuggling up to a dead Upsy Daisy doll that had thrown herself in front of the ninky-nonk because Iggle Piggle had shown photos of her tits to everyone in the night garden.

p.s. My Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS15 arrived today!

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

This entry is to prove anyone who ever said I waste time and spend ages doing pointless stupid things, despite having more useful and important things to do entirely wrong correct.

Top five animal sneezes on YouTube!

5. Elephant

4. Bear

3. Horse

2. Baby Panda (Everyone has seen this one)

1. Monkey

Never let it be said that I do not tackle the important issues of the day.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

I should really find more time for the bloggery.

It seems most things I want to say are not for public consumption at the moment, and I am also not really in the right mood to be communicative about other things.

But I see a dozen fantastic things a day and I should use this to share things more. I just seem to use Facebook and Twitter at the moment, maybe blogging just isn’t the right medium for me at the moment?

Who knows…

I am still reading Desolation Angels and haven’t gotten onto a second book of my backlog of things to read yet. I also have a backlog of comics and magazine articles though, so mostly I’ve been catching up on bits of Fortean Times and various comics, I’d fallen behind on X-Men and several other things including Wasteland, Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Eight, DMZ and various others.

I still can’t decide which novel to read next. I suppose I shall just see what mood I am in when I finish Desolation Angels. I might read another Caitlin R Kiernan novel, I loved Low Red Mood and Silk so maybe I shall read Threshold. I also still haven’t read Necrophenia by Robert Rankin yet and I really want to read Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and The Butt by Will Self as well as dozens of others.

I don’t have much else to add at the moment. If things don’t pick up I suppose I’ll just kill the blog. I don’t like leaving failed and dying bits of internet lying around.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

In to my bed I now shall go,
Though work tomorrow makes me frown,
Around my bed; traps placed just so,
Lest I be eaten by a clown.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

I appear to have built up a backlog of things to read that has actually shocked me with its sheer scale. I had thought I was terrible and that I had about forty-fifty books I had bought and not yet got around to, because I buy books a volume several times by ability to actually read them. Over the last couple of years it has gotten worse, because I’ve kept up the buying and had even less time read due to work and studying.

I have decided that I am not allowed to buy more books until I have made a significant dent into the backlog I have already built up. I moved all the unread fiction into it’s own section, split from the read fiction earlier today and was shocked to discover the true scale of my unread book collection….

The number is EIGHTY. This just covers fiction, I have a few dozen more in poetry, folklore/mythology, non-fiction and biography as well…

So, here ends the buying of books and I shall get on with the reading, I shall try to read more than I usually do as well. I don’t read quite enough these days because of the internet and DVDs. This laptop is a terrible influence on me. I am tempted to go back to a desktop computer like an iMac rather than buying another MacBook Pro.

This backlog reading project is something I am going to keep track of with my blog, I am going to make a big list of everything I have to read and make a page on my blog with this list, and then use the tag ‘the backlog’ to follow my progress, or lack of it, through this giant pile of reading material I have amassed over the last nearly-two decades. I think there are some from the early-mid 1990s I still haven’t gotten around to.

This list includes the book that I am currently reading, Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, something I’ve kept starting and then leaving to one side to read more accessible things. I have no studying to do at the moment so now is the perfect time to read it, I wasn’t capable of anything more challenging than P. G. Wodehouse or Terry Pratchett whilst I was doing my OU course, as well as working full time.

I do love Kerouac, and Desolation Angels is something I desperately want to read, I just only have so much brainpower to go around and between work and the Open University I have had none spare of late.

So, now that I only have work to worry about (for at least four months) the reading shall commence!

Desolation Angels makes me want to go and live in a wooden shack up a mountain, it makes me want to withdraw from this terrible world where I spend all day staring at screens and typing. I like being alone with my thoughts and being disconnected from the world, but the internet sucks me in and won’t let me go. When I was in London for a few days recently, the lack of internet was fantastic. I didn’t miss it at all, but for some reason when I have access I cannot resist it.

Maybe I need to be tougher with myself about time spent online. I should probably, at the very least, stop taking my laptop to bed with me.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

It is about time I said something vaguely blogish on this blog.

I have done nothing of any worth or real interest. I have been going to work, coming home and studying. That is about it.

In less than a week my OU course ends for the year and I get some time to relax. When I leave work and reach the weekend from a week’s time I get to do nothing except sprawl on my sofa in my pants, watching TV and occasionally scratching myself. When I am not off out going to gigs and other things that I now have the time for.

Christmas and New Year weeks are going to be especially good. I have both booked off work. I do not plan to do a single useful thing for those two weeks.

I am going to make myself a reading list so I can get some reading in that is not either Art History of comics as well. These books shall be read, I think….

Necrophenia by Robert Rankin
JPod by Douglas Coupland
Liver by Will Self
The Butt by Will Self
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac (which I keep starting and delaying)
Threshold by Caitlin R Kiernan

We shall see how many of those I actually get around to…

Must update this thing more, even if it is just with pointless piffle and worthless waffle.

p.s. I hate to agree with Boris Johnson, but he is right about the tube map. It SHOULD have the river on it. South London is a shithole and I want to be pre-warned if I ever have to go there.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.

Captain Picard would be really disappointed with me today. I have interfered with and decimated a pre-warp sentient civilisation, thus breaking the prime directive.

I have cleaned my cooker. If any of the creatures that had evolved on it survived I will be spoken of in the mythology of their people as ‘The Great Disinfector’ and be feared as a God of destruction and death. I am fairly sure something behind one of the back hobs shook a pitchfork at me at one point.

I’d do the bathroom next but I think the things living in the plughole have probably invented the hydrogen bomb by now. So I’d better wait for their economy to collapse and the fall of the current civilisation before I go in with the Dettol Spray and cloth.

Originally published at alwayscrashing.co.uk. Please leave any comments there.