Category: Bitesize

A somewhat soul-searching start to a Thursday morning.

It all began with a triple-shot cappuccino. The problem of being a monosyllabic moron redressed, Stavros’ wisdom in his Easyjet brochure sprang instantly to mind. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Meaning that on top of being woken the hell up, said amount of caffeine has a side effect of shifting everything through your system. Fast. To call it a side-effect is a bit unjust. It’s an effect.

Healthy Stuff is like being in someone’s living room. It’s got that homely feel to it, unsurprisingly it’s the kind of place that gets pram-heavy, but it’s resolutely not the kind of place you drop the kids off in. And yet somehow three shots of caffeine removes all choice from the equation.

The pram-brigade not yet arrived, asides from a biddy in the corner enjoying history’s most over-brewed cup of tea, I was on my own. Having paid for my coffee and asked if I could duck into the loo, I then emerge fourteen minutes later. Walking back past the bar where the Finnish chick owner is having an in-depth conversation on the merits of activated almonds with some Australian dude made exclusively out of hemp, she clocks me.

The look on her face can be broken down into 3 key stages:

1. You’re still here? I thought you’d left ages ago.

2. Oooh, you’ve been in the toilet.

3. Oh.

This is where the soul-searching comes in.

Separated by a hair’s breadth of plasterboard, that loo can’t be more than 2 feet away from where she spends six hours a day frothing up babyccinos for the little ones. It’s a violation of all sorts of stuff. It was plainly there, in the lines of consternation etched onto her face. Yes I felt two stone lighter, but my heart was heavy. How do you come back from that. I’m not sure I can go back there for a while. Probably not until I have kids of my own. Which now I’ll be sure to take with me when I leave. Both sets of them.

There’s a moral in this story. There’s a certain sort of business that needs handling before you leave the house in the morning. Or more aptly put, buy your food in departures before you get on the flight. That way you won’t have to pay Stavros six quid for a packet of mini cheddars.

Who’s this cat.

Myles is the name, smooth operation’s the game. When he’s not poolside at Centreparks modelling non-ironic sunglasses Myles stays up well into the witching hour swiping left with his pussy finger while writing seamless code into complex computational systems.

It didn’t always come easy.

At school Myles displayed a dearth of motor-neurone activity and was demoted to basic woodwork. He would stare blankly into the middle-distance as the teacher completed the entry-level shelving unit required to pass his exams, which he did, scraping through with a B in attendance.

Myles has made up for lost time.

Lamentably for the ladies he is a kept man. Myles ingeniously fabricated an obsession with house cats and hoodwinked his current beau off-tinder and into a romantic tete à tete. Here they are on their second date, she still none the wiser.

You’d be right in noticing the alarm on the kitten’s face. Tragically, flashbacks from his woodworking days lead Myles to unconsciously grip living things with an unnatural aggression. In evidence below his nephew can be seen fighting for breath as Myles styles out the photo while applying slow steady pressure to the back of the newborn’s neck.

But staring into the pixelated glow of his Samsung 49″ G9T Odyssey Gaming Monitor Myles come alive. Myles built the entire dropthebeatonit website on a toilet-break. He’s good at what he does and knows it. An algorithm assassin, a magician of the monitor. He takes your vague design ramblings and comes back with one long lucid screen daydream. Not unlike the chosen hue of his favourite smart casual summer jacket, Google Hangouts with Myles are like being splashed by straight-from-the-source Volvic in a non-erotic but no less enjoyable manner.

I’d give you his contact details so you could solicit him for some coding fine-art but à la Jason Bourne, Myles leaves no trace. When you think you’ve got him in your sights, just like that…

… he’s gone.

Myles is an absolute gee, and herein is an ode to the man of the hour. If you want to send compliments his way regarding the freshness of the site, you go through me, I give my life for that man.

Sconez

don’t

fuck

widdem

When I look back at old photos I always end up here.

I read somewhere that looking at old photos leads down some strange neurological pathway and lulls you into thinking they’re still there and then you realise they’re not and you’re five steps back from where you started. But also scared that if you never look at old photos they might disappear altogether.

As I sit here locked in combat with thought, knuckles bloodied from fist-fights with memory, lacing words into sentences into paragraphs between therapy sessions trying to find the right way, the only way, to do justice to the meaningless of existence, here’s a photo of my mate’s mum in Venice.

Any time a plane even half-full of Argentines touches down on the runway at Ezeiza International Airport in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, applause and hollering and general uproar sweeps through the cabin. When my brother and I went to watch American Honey one evanescent night of winter a few years back, as the credits rolled two hours forty three minutes into the film we channeled the latin in us and hollered and applauded and brrrap’d from the far right of row G, causing the rest of Screen 3 to fumble about in the darkness for their coats and scarves with extra-specially furrowed brows. I think one person joined in. With good reason.

The film is unbelievably good.



I watched it again last week.

I can’t remember being made this happy by a film since Pride Rock went apeshit at the end of the Lion King.

One reviewer called the film a Youthquake.

Sasha Lane who plays the main character Star had no previous acting experience. The director Andrea Arnold who did Red Road and Fish Tank found her on a beach somewhere and convinced her to come for a casting.

The sex scenes make Normal People look like SpongeBob SquarePants.

There’s a shot near the end in a van where QT this girl turns around and an extended smile breaks across her face, that captures the whole thing in the shell of a nut.

I spoke to someone the other day who said it was too long and rambled on and nothing happened. Two sets of people walked out of the cinema half way through. My bro and I spent almost three hours with mouths wide open forcing our bladders to seven times their natural size because we didn’t want to miss any part of it. The silences, the close-ups of faces, the spaces in between. The music. Everything.

A mate of mine used to borrow his sister’s lapdog and nestling it inside his right arm, he’d walk into west London pubs around the same time brunch tables were three bloody marys down and kicking off. Before he’d even got to the bar…

he’d be surrounded by beautiful women.

When it comes to magnetizing members of the fairer sex towards your vicinity, the next most proficient thing you can do in place of nuzzling a rat-sized canine into your chest hair, is to crouch by the roadside with a smile on your face, blowing up pink balloons and tying them to a bicycle made for 2-4 year olds.

In fifteen minutes I’d say I was approached by no less than six women, and it goes without saying much smouldering and batting of eyelids ensued. That the average age of these women was around 63 was more a reflection on the residential aspect of my godson’s parents house, than anything I was specifically doing wrong. I’ve concluded I just have to pick my street corners better. 

So yes Joseph, your new bike is our new bike.



Your godfather will be over soon to take it for a spin.

The people have spoken.

Word on the street is that a picture can tell a thousand words.

After careful analysis of the above photograph, I’ve condensed a thousand words into 12 specific points.

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1. The sheepish looking character in the bottom left is none other than my old flatmate Ceeborg, one of my best pal’s younger brothers, who lived with me for over a year during a beautiful period in the near past.



2. Here’s a selfie he took whilst chilling in the flat, with a gaggle of fine-looking women, the early stages of a good-looking house party in the mixer.



3. No males appear to be present. Just ladies.



4. None of which are his girlfriend.



5. Closer examination of the bottom right reveals that at this particular gathering, narcs abound.



6. And are apparently being thoughtfully laid out on my book of Argentine Estancias.



7. None of which would seem overly remarkable.



8. Apart from one thing.



9. Ceeborg moved out of my flat five months ago, with a casual ‘yeah I’ll drop my set of keys round when I get my plant mate’.



10. No plant was ever collected.



11. This photo is the first thing that landed in my inbox when I touched down from Canada at the back end of the May bank holiday weekend.



12. Which is remarkable, given that last time I checked I wasn’t in the habit of operating a mi casa es su casa open door policy, not when I’m in a different continent, not five months after move-out day, not after over a year of charging a back-breakingly generous £125pw all-in. An agreement that was arranged on the premise he would fill the flat with smoking-hot 26 year old broads. Which I’d say he fell short of, seeing as this photo is three times as many as I ever saw. I mean this whole situation is just one monumental serving of insult to injury.

Disclaimer

The sheepish looking character in the bottom left, Dominic by birth, is the rock salt in the seabed that gets extracted to make the salt of the earth. Like Gold to Midas and skittles to the old guy in the skittles ad, everything Ceeborg touches turns to good vibes. Being pissed with him is impossible, it just makes you kind of pissed off with yourself.

So I’ll leave the doghouse for his girlfriend to take care of. Plus this happened over two months ago. Retroactive doghouses are so much more meaningful. Especially when they come out of the blue. And especially on a golden floodlit balmy day such as today, one in the tantalising grip of a weekend on the horizon, a day full of possibilities, the special kind of day only one of mid-summer can bring, when the birdsong from the trees seems to be dancing in the breeze’s embrace, pirouetting in the air in a harmonious chorus just for you.

We all like to think we’re inherently good people. But if you put a kid in front of a bowl of sweets with no adults there, they’ll steal sweets. If you put a kid in front of a bowl of sweets with a mirror behind it, they’ll still steal sweets. But not quite as many. Because they can see themselves. If you’re in a situation where you can do pretty much whatever you want without anyone calling you to account for it, it’s probably a good idea to compare your view of yourself with other people’s now and again.

Mike Skinner 1978-present rap bard


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Mike Skinner’s autiobiography The Story Of The Streets is incredible. All about growing up in Birmingham and the start of the garage scene and going from nothing to something and all that entails through the eyes of someone who’s glaringly clever but sees it as his aim to write as simply as possible. And if you liked the sound of his voice on all his tunes, you’ll like the audiobook even more because he narrates it.

‘It was on of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I’m really into audio books. When the writer is reading it, I rate them so highly. It’s really hard. It took three days in a studio behind Kilburn. It was so weird, because it was at the end of this very glittery period in my life and it was like being back at my first job. I’d get up at 8 o’clock, head across London to a place I didn’t really know, go to an office with people I didn’t really know, get a cup of tea, and read this book for eight hours. Have you ever recorded yourself reading a book without making a mistake for eight hours?

It’s not easy.‘

With the cold weather unrelenting, and The Beast From The East 2.0 pushing another icy front across the horizon, it’s no stretch of the imagination to assume some of us might be taking the next direct service to…

S n i v e l   C e n t r a l

Never fear. There is an answer.

Not those tunes, friend.



These.

Scorcese ain’t no mug.

As well as most of the best gangsta films since forever, he made a couple of music documentaries, one about the Stones, and the other one about Dylan called No Direction Home.

I rewatched it again recently.

Best things about it were:

1. Dylan.

2. The advent of folk music and the cultural a-bomb exploding out of Greenwich village in the 60s.

3. Allen Ginsberg the beat poet saying that when he first heard Hard Rain, he cried.

4. Footage of crowds everywhere booing Dylan and shouting Judas! at their idol, when he decided to go electric and perform with a 3-piece band, instead of doing his classic solo with acoustic guitar and harmonica act.

5. Dylan being told someone was about to shoot him, because of this.

6. The general feeling that this man was one of the most important things that happened in the 20th century. That he wasn’t human. That he was only a portal, for something far bigger beyond our understanding. Someone upstairs chose him to be the messenger. As one of his friends said, ‘Look… I like to give credit where credit’s due, but Dylan don’t deserve none. You know when they say ‘the hand of the Almighty reaches down and taps you on the shoulder and all that, well the Almighty kicked him in the goddamn ass. You only need to look at him to see there’s something of the holy spirit in him’.

At one point Dylan looks into the camera and says…

And then adds…



If you can understand this, you’re gonna be alright, I think.

Perhaps what he was saying was that every single thing that happens to us, every little detail, be it good or bad, all elation or tragedy or fear or love or lack of it, even sitting in your Y-fronts alone as the rain thrashes against the window thinking you can’t go on while you calculate how many days and hours and minutes until the first robin of spring appears and bounces gingerly from one shivering branch to the next and says whaddup I’m back, even when you’re not doing anything you’re still somehow doing something. Each one of these moments is integral to your state of becoming. 

They are all ingredients that make up the dish. The dish never gets cooked, it is one long drawn-out session in the kitchen that lasts a lifetime. Important thing is to keep adding ingredients. At times it tastes awful, at times it’ll be michelin-starred. But we’re never there. We’re always becoming.

B a n k s y   o n   A d v e r t i s i n g

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.


You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.



Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.



You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Huh.

The morose slide into winter has its plus sides. As our libidos fall like the leaves that litter the grey wet pavements of our city, this time of year is far from all doom and gloom. It marks the return to prime time television of the main man.

G r e g g  2  G’s  W a l l a c e

Some worried he might be losing his edge.

But a nation’s collective sigh of relief dropped temperatures last night as Gregg tore up the script again, reminding us all why when it comes to sheer entertainment and raw class no one even comes close.

At one point he made his intentions about a quinelle absolutely crystal. 

It looks like Gregg has turned over a new leaf since his last fairly public appearance when he decided to beat the shit out of someone at his own charity do.

Princess of porridge and DTBOI fangirl Alex ran into him at a food fair the other day and lensed this keeper especially for me. Yes Alex. And this now means by the six degrees of separation rule I’m only one away from him. 

Masterchef is on pretty much until Christmas. After 6 weeks of intense competition I’m always in awe of how the judges still find a way to narrow it down to a single Masterchef champion.

When Gregg’s involved, everyone’s a winner.

When life gives you lemons there’s still Conspiracy Keanu.

I don’t want you to get the idea she was a goddam icicle or something, just because we never horsed around much. She wasn’t. I held hands with her all the time, for instance. That doesn’t sound like much, I realize, but she was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think you have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get in the goddam movies or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

Ma boy Holden just keeps holdin on.

Pleas from Walthamstow as average London house prices hit half a milli.

I saw and smelt blossom in the shadows yesterday evening.

Monday morning in the clutches of early spring is a fat kid kicking a football against a wall and into his face.

If you’re gonna get ink.

Get some real ink.

Calvin and Hobbes bumming out about my Art School dissertation.

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