Went to Twickenham yesterday to see REM. As a pro-football, anti-rugby man I really wanted to have a moan about the venue but annoyingly I could find nothing wrong with it. Even though the station isn't as near the ground as Wembley, the crowd control and journey home were as good as they could realistically be. Curses! I arrived just in time for Guillemots , between whose songs the screens either side of the stage displayed adverts for their album and downloadable songs, which even in these days of commercial saturation seemed a tad vulgar. The 'Mots (as nobody calls them) are as erratic a proposition as you'd expect from a band whose members include a fat Brazilian drummer, an impossibly exotic double bassist/percussionist named Aristzabal Hawkes, and a hyperactive indie-boy leader who goes by as strange a moniker as Fyfe Dangerfield. Take Kriss Kross , which begins with a killer keyboard riff that proceeds to go missing for a couple of minutes as the song tears through a...
Sadly, mine look nowhere near as cool as these. A new branch of [well-known optical emporium] has just opened up the road from the office and, mindful of the fact that I’ve regularly had to squint to read text on my TV such as teletext, subtitles on foreign films etc (oh alright, it’s usually the scores on Sky Sports) for a while now, I took advantage of their aggressively-marketed free eye test offer. Lo and behold, I am now the owner of two brand-new pairs of glasses. Leaving aside the commercial considerations of the said opticians (in possible borderline cases such as mine where my eyes clearly aren’t that bad, do they prescribe specs anyway in order to gain customers?), I’m now adjusting to the fact that I’ll be spending large portions of my life with bits of glass and metal on my face. Things look subtly different when I put them on. It’s a very strange sensation. I also felt even more self-conscious than usual when I put them on in the office for the first time this morning. Wou...
Saturday began with a leisurely breakfast followed by a visit to MOMA . If you think that website is cool, the museum itself more than lives up to it. The modern painting and sculpture galleries contained works by the likes of Van Gogh, Rothko, Giacometti and Warhol that even a relative artistic philistine such as myself could recognise and appreciate, and the lovely little sculpture garden seemed a fine place to relax. I, though, was off to Greenwich Village to meet up with cousin Steve and his wife Nancy. My great-grandfather and Steve's grandpa were brothers, so that must make us first or second cousins once removed, or maybe twice. Who knows, or cares? Because Steve and Nancy were fabulous, a bohemian older couple who lived in a wonderfully cluttered flat above a Cuban resturant in the heart of the village, and who seemed to know everyone . Yes, Greenwich Village (and West Village, which appeared to be two sides of the same coin) genuinely has a village atmosphere, where people...
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