Every couple of months I hear a tune that I become obsessed with. I play it many times a day for a few days. Normally it's some crunchy electronics with a synth hook that just catches me emotionally for some reason (e.g. Plaid's Bo Bootch or Aphex's Laughable Butane Bob). This time it's Dokaka's cover of Metallica's Creeping Death.
Why is this insane? Dokaka are an Otaku A Cappella act. One guy, he covers tracks by paintakingly imitating each instrument layer of the original track and mixing the lot together to form a really dense but highly nonsensical sound. It's utterly compelling though.
0:01, Wednesday August 27th, 2003 • feeling thoughtful • no comments
I made Tom Yum soup. A spicy citrusy Thai soup. I made it with two recipes and some "innovation". It was good but I used chicken stock as the base which was OK except it was a bit greasy and a bit strongly flavoured. I also stuck too much lime juice into it, it came out with those flavours grossly blocking out most of the others. This is the usual outcome when I cook, it comes out brash and over-flavoured. I need to learn subtlety.
2:49, Tuesday August 26th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
Notting Hill Carnival is cool.
Charlie and I got there quite early this morning. It was before the procession started and long before the crowds really intensified. We wandered around the "eye of the storm" area in the middle of the U-shaped procession route, checking out the soundsystems and chicken roasting operations. Eventually we found ourselves up behind the Westway at the point where the procession was setting off from. We saw the king and queen kicking things off followed by the highly energetic initial dancing.
We kind of lost the plot a bit after that. We couldn't be content with letting the procession go by, so we ended up walking along the route with the first people for much of the way. That was weird. As a result we got very knackered, walking and walking, and also failed to see a large percentage of the floats and groups of dancers. Oh well. We saw a lot of people having a good time and meandered around looking at stuff for ages.
As the day went on it got pretty damn busy, to the point where it was taking half an hour to move a few hundred yards. We lost a good hour when we sat down and then walked from Portobello Road to Ladbroke Grove only to discover that I had left Louise's mini-umbrella where we were sitting and then going back. It wasn't there unfortunately. Not long after that we decided we were wasted enough and came home on the number 295 to Fulham Broadway via Hammersmith.
The procession was really cool. All the people had made so much effort and put so much thought into their performance. There were some huge costumes, 20+ feet high and the same wide. There was a lot of glitz being shaken. One thing that I noticed at the beginning was that the women in the procession all looked like they were having the best time ever. Dancing in the street in exotic shiny costumes while thousands of people line the street just to (seemingly) see you, you can see why! That made me happy as well. Lots of things made me happy really. All day long. Another good one was the kids that were involved, some of them carrying pretty big outfits. They must have been worn out by the end, but they danced along the route with the best of them.
I'm definitely going to go again and next time I'm going to go and find myself a great vantage point on Westbourne Grove and let it all come to me. Although, watching the procession did kind of make me want to join in and I would definitely be up for playing on a soundsystem somewhere around the place. One thing is for sure, I'm going to walk less. I'm absolutely knackered.
Photos in iPhoto, hopefully will make gallery at some point. Shaky shaky! Ra!
1:25, Monday August 25th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
My Emusic score is now 5.5Gb. Some 80 albums, of which I've listened to about 15. I'm going to run out of disk space of my laptop sometime next weekend.
We spent today up at Camden where Louise's parents had moored for the day. We got food from the market, which was fit, and pottered down the canal to Little Venice, about an hour round trip maybe. We explored the market a bit and did some clothes shopping. I nearly bought some trousers (they didn't have my size in the right colour, they're in another shop) and Louise nearly bought a skirt (she was too indecisive). Quite remarkable for us really. What with Portobello yesterday, the is the weekend for markets.
Watched Dickie Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far tonight. It was an awesome, huge war movie, with absolutely everybody in it. Really gritty as well, I almost cried and not because of a pull out all the stops schmolze ending, because it depicted a lot more of the really horrible bits of war accurately. I thought the Thin Red Line was good, but A Bridge trounces it.
