Just a very short entry: Blogger have shifted all their accounts over to Google-mail, which is hellishly slow on broadband, and nigh on impossible to access on dial-up, so again I may have to lay off the Blog soon. All I've been up to really in the meantime was go out last week to Le Pattie Cafe on Tuesday evening, to see Dean and Jim play another couple of sets of great new songs (I missed the following week's actual Rumiko Jr gig at Brass Monkey, where some of these new tunes were promised, partly 'cos of the entry fee, but mainly 'cos we'd gone along to see Kim and Liam's installation at Bar Blue instead - see below). Carolyn came over and went to Pattie Cafe with me, we met Michael and Caroline there, and Kim sat with us too. I had the impression all evening that Kim was on good form, but I gather he may have been a bit different towards some of our lot when I was out of earshot, naughty sod. Jamie, Wookie and Ollie were at one table; Lily, Christa, Alice and some othere were at the next (taking photos); one table down from us were Helen, Jo and Sally; and Danielle stayed down the front near Deano. Mainly we all just drank and chatted and ate bar snacks (I think we may have worked our way through the entire bar-snack menu, of nuts, nachos, and huge salty olives, during the course of the evening), and as I was facing away from Dean and Jim, not a lot of their performance sank in (in retrospect, I ought to have paid them some closer attention). I tried chatting to Christa briefly, but she was more interested in listening to the music, so I left-off there, and soon Paul had come and collected her anyway. It was nice that everyone in the venue knew each other though, and after some last-minute drinks (for those of us who reached the bar in time for last orders, at least: there was some confusion over this), everyone disappeared quite quick to get on with whatever it was they were planning on doing (preparing for Valentine's Day the next day, if they were lucky). I chatted quickly to Alice about her forthcoming Create/South article, ideas for accompanying pictures, etc, but that was about it.
The aforementioned installation at Bar Blue the following Tuesday was titled Escalate, and featured various items that belonged to Rockabilly Liam (toy cars, bits of musical instruments, junked cassettes etc), which he'd unsuccessfully offered for sale previously on Ebay, apparently, and that Kim had arranged in piles of orange-painted crates, with one corner made up of back-lit gutted wirelesses. Kim's biography from the Saachi website had been printed-off and displayed along one wall, and attendees were free to rummage through the boxes, play with different items, and possibly attempt to purchase them off Kim (Liam was absent for the evening). I'd gone along with Caroline, and when we arrived Wookie was Djing. Reuben came along, as he was DJing too that evening (as was Kim's friend Dave), and we were joined by the backroom installation by Xanten, Leofwin, Jamie, Helen and Ollie (at different times, and in different stages of sobriety). At one point, Kim stopped Dave's DJing in order to plug some Casio or Yamaha keyboard in, for an arpeggiated version of 'Chicken In A Box' (which Dave then tempo-matched on the decks with The Normal's 'TVOD', which may help you imagine Kim's performance). Good on Dave, he even played The Fall later on, and eschewed any obvious, vaguely crowd-pleasing tunes in favour of 'The NWRA'. Kim did the electro to Kraftwerk's 'Pocket Calculator', and I surreptitously filmed him doing so on my phone. Ollie had already had a spin round the bar in Liam's large plastic toy car, and I then did the same for Xanten, but I don't think even she was light enough not to give it some engine trouble. Jamie chatted about his recent discovery that the band Killing Moon, who he had been a member of a couple of years back at the University of Kent, had now become minor chart-contenders Battle, and shed some unofficial light on the coincidence of their name to our nearby Keane-spawning village. And, as you would be, he was only mildly put-out that he'd failed to stick with the band long enough to share in their Top 40 hits (I took his chart research on trust, 'cos I didn't bother to research exactly how high any of Battle's singles have charted over the last eighteen months or so). No-one who was down Bar Blue with us seemed too enthusiastic about heading into town afterwards to see Rumiko Jr playing, but only 'cos the tickets (for the whole afternoon & evening's Mardi Gras events in Frenchs and the Brass Monkey) were a prohibitive £7.50, so we all stuck to our St Leonards bar until time was called, before getting ourselves home again (where, I found out the next day, I fell asleep on the toilet, and had to be woken up by one unfortunate housemate). From the texts and posts I read the next day from various band members, it did look like Mardi Gras was a bit of a washout in the end (certainly the persistent rain and fog that cold Tuesday night can't have helped either). So, for a change, art won the day.