THE STICKS

Went up to my (long-deceased) grandparents' house in Wales this week. Haven't been for ages. It's in the country. It's a real pile. And I always forget how nice it is. I'm using the word 'nice' to mean exactly that. No shame in nice. I acted so civilized that I ended up making a pie from scratch. It was a pretty big moment. As you can probably tell from my need to photograph and blog about it. Made me wonder if I will ever own something to put my name to like a house or something to leave the bairns. I dunno. I'm saying probably no. But it's cool to be reminded that if you work hard sometimes you can end up with something 'nice'. Like a pie.

THIS GUY

Makes me pretty uncomfortable. Dude.

SF . PS

When I visited San Francisco last year I ended up hanging out with randoms I'd never met before. They turned out to be great people and I'm glad they let me crash their weekend for a day or two. One of them was a girl called Heather and she talked about her band a lot. I probably assured her (and everyone else I met on that trip) that I would definitely check peoples' various bands/blogs/personal endeavours/whatevers etc out as soon as I returned to the UK. And I probably meant it too. And then I probably forgot. Because people do that kind of thing. But that's my loss. As a video came to my attention recently that it turns out is her band Wax Idols and it's actually really, really good.

Who knew?

Erm... Me. Apparently.

FAKE SUMMER

Keep listening to this song at the moment. All kinds of awesome. If I had something more interesting to tell you then I would do so.

NO STAIRWAY

WHY TRY?

Barbican gallery has a load of old-skool consoles hooked up to show bowling games where all of the bowlers miss over and over again. It's made by a dude called Cory Arcangel. Something quite ridiculous to it (obviously), but also quite darkly humorous about it too. Like how many times should you try? I know you should always try. But maybe some things don't have an answer or an end.

I had never been to the Barbican before. It's a pretty imposing, dark and dated looking place. Reminded me a bit of 1970s sci-fi film Logan's Run. That was meant to be set hundreds of years in the future but was actually obviously shot in a 'jazzed up' real life hotel or a shopping centre or something. Which I always found quite funny. Today it probably looks very similar to this.

But I still find something quite cool about the vision (or lack of) applied to the tower blocks from that era. A weirdly admirable quality in designing a building with no consideration for how ugly it's gonna look in a few years. Not because you're stupid. But because you were excited and genuinely had no idea that this could be a bad thing. You just thought concrete was frickin' awesome or something. People don't have that singular vision anymore. Probably a wise development. But then maybe we're less inspired and less brave now. Perhaps we don't try hard enough?

SOMETIMES

Sometimes I make up weird jams. Today being one of those times.

OH YEAH

Don't care what he's saying.

STAND AND DELIVER

Adam Ant's toilet. F'reals.

ELEVENSES

Happy new year. Don't remember any of it so far.

AMATEUR DRAMATICS

Sky was pretty weird tonight. Suppose it's pretty weird every night.

"RUSTY"

BANKING IN-JOKE MEGA LOLZ

Was trying to figure out my earnings for this tax year when I spotted this little anomaly paid into my account by a friend. Luckily it's nothing that needs declaring.

MORE OLDE

OLDE

RUBBISH

Why use a 'v' when a 'u' will do?

RAYOGRAPHS

My friend Astrud is in a band called the Rayographs. They just made a video for their awesome tune 'Space Of The Halls'.

I originally suggested to them a treatment involving measuring the distance between the disparate members of my own scattered 'Hall' family on any given day. But that didn't happen. They politely declined. Something about the idea being "really bloody stupid."

FLUFF'N'PUFF

There was a party.

In a launderette.

Jerome got in a tumble dryer. So did June.

Fluff.

 
And puff.*

(*P.S. Jerome took a couple of these photos. He does real ones sometimes too. Here).