Tuesday 29th of August 2006 – August Bank Holiday Weekend
This was my last weekend without you. You’re coming back to London on the 2nd of September, then back to school on the 6th… You’ve been going swimming every Monday/Friday and it would appear you’re quite a little swimmer now, although I want to put you into swimming lessons, but you refuse to go! I used to swim lots when I was growing up (including lessons) and it’s a good way of getting strong shoulders as well as not drowning, hopefully you’ll warm to the idea eventually.
It was a long weekend and I did a lot of sleeping, I think I needed it as I spent the previous week feeling a bit under the weather, like a cold that just wouldn’t materialise but made me feel tired. J felt the same way. On Friday we went to Offline at the Albert, then we went to Unsound at the Redstar in Camberwell, with a group of friends, and then after that we went to a house party in Shakespeare Rd. (Brixton). We had to walk for a while to get there and by the time we got there I just wanted to sleep.
So myself and J left at 5 in the morning, we were a bit lost but somehow found our way back to Herne Hill. We were nearly getting back to J’s when two black guys walked on the opposite direction to us, on the other side of the street. For some reason I turned my head around to look at them, and one of them did the same thing. He said ‘please excuse me’ and come over to us. He had the most beautiful speaking voice and accent and I think he said he was from Zimbabwe (whereas J thought he said he was from South Africa).
So he enthralled us for about 5 minutes telling us his life story, this beautiful person (I actually feel like crying when I think of him) said he’s a refugee and that every day he has to queue up at some sort of ‘job centre’, but the only thing he’s entitled to is medical assistance. He had scabies all over his face and said they’d given him medicine for it, but basically he had nowhere to live and wanted to spend the night in a hostel. He asked for precisely £3.20. There are a lot of crack addicts/homeless people in Brixton asking for money, and they always have a tale to tell, but for some reason this guy got to me. Don’t know if was his voice, which was so sweet, or his story, or his friendly face, or all of those things. Anyway, he said he used to work for Medicin Sans Frontiers and said that he was an educated man, which I didn’t doubt for a second and it really broke my heart that such a charming, sweet man ended up wandering the streets of Brixton.
Was the money for drugs, drink, food, hostel? I don’t really care what the money was for, I just wish there was more I could do to help people like him, we’re so lucky to have everything we have, I can’t begin to describe how guilty I feel that the world is all wrong and all the good people have nothing and all the greedy bastards have everything. It’s all wrong. I’ll never forget his smile, he was asking us about us, he seemed genuinely interested, even after we gave him a bit of money, he beamed the loveliest smile and I’ll forever be haunted by this man’s face and voice.
We got back to J’s and I couldn’t sleep for ages, I couldn’t stop thinking, tic toc, so I had to watch some telly that was the only way my brain would switch off for a bit… The world we created is all wrong, there’s some beauty in it: friends and family, but the systems we ended up with are actually going to be what kills us… So, be it, I don’t think we deserve to have much more time around the planet, we had our chance and we blew it. Earth will survive and we’ll be nothing more than 60 seconds in the history of the universe.
After about 4 hours sleep on Saturday, I went off to Ade’s hen night. I’d never been to a hen night before (they are atrocious anyway, absurdly tacky. I was invited to one once and found an excuse for not going). Being that Ade wasn’t about to have a conventional hen night and the fact that I think she’s wonderful, I went. Ade had been out the night before as well, to the same places as I had, and was just as shattered as I was, so at least she knew how sleepy I felt. There were 6 of us and it was really lovely, Ade made a speech and ended up a little tearful which made everyone else feel tearful!
Photos of the night here
I finally got home at 2, then I spent another hour putting all the photos up online, then I finally slept, for a good 12 hours!!! I didn’t do much on Saturday night, as I still felt tired, but I watched a very interesting film called Dig!, and now I’m downloading lots of tracks from ‘The Jonestown Massacre’ and will listen at some point, I had never even heard of them before but now I’m fascinated! The synopsis of Dig!:
DIG! is the feature-length documentary shot over seven years about musicians Anton Newcombe, leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Courtney Taylor, head of the Dandy Warhols, star crossed friends and bitter rivals. From the moment they met, The Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre quickly bonded over a desire to not conform to the tastes of the recording industry. Yet, the bands’ choices over how to express their creativity and originality in a profit-driven industry eventually put them at irreconcilable odds.
Culled from 1500 hours of footage and narrated by Courtney Taylor, DIG! follows the underground giant Anton Newcombe, unearthing him to be an important yet largely unnoticed artist of our time. In 1996 Anton Newcombe and his band the Brian Jonestown Massacre – who in a decade independently released 11 albums, 3 recorded in one year – are hell-bent on staging a revolution in the music industry. They are convinced their friends, the Dandy Warhols, will join them to create a united front. But Anton’s creative psychosis takes him to the most remote areas of the human mind to find his original art, and as a result, he destroys every opportunity for financial success.
While tracking the destructive path of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, DIG! also accompanies the more ‘well-adjusted’ Warhols through their leader Courtney Taylor, as they navigate the corporate sea, trying to maintain their creative edge while starring in mega-budget music videos and entertaining crowds in the tens of thousands. DIG! is about both musicians’ love and obsession, gigs and recordings, arrests and death threats, uppers and downers – their choices between art and industry, which unfold with the passage of time.
Brian Jonestown Massacre
The Dandy Warhols
Basically, Anton Newcombe has a serious problem with heroin and keeps sabotaging his whole career. It always fascinates and saddens me a bit how (and why) some people live life on a whole different level of self destruction. Perhaps your generation will take the Brian Jonestown Massacre out of the underground scene, perhaps they will become big. I know nothing of the Brian Jonestown’s music, but I used to like the Dandy Warhols. The great thing about the BJM is that you can download ALL of their albums from their website, and that’s quite amazing!!!! Anton makes music because there’s absolutely nothing else he can do, I think that’s unusual – lots of musicians could end up doing something else, but this guy seems to live for the music, it really is a shame that drugs got in the way so much… Time will tell what is to become of him, right now, he’s a cult figure that no one can work with…
On Monday, myself and J gave Notting Hill carnival a miss (I’ve done it to death and I’m not that keen on huge crowds and even the atmosphere at Notting Hill), so we headed off to Hyde Park, for the Caribbean Showcase. There is talk of moving the Notting Hill carnival to Hyde Park, and this Caribbean showcase has been running for two years, I think as a way of investigating the possibility and interest of the public in general.
It’s a great family day out, it was busy but not overcrowded, it was relaxed rather than having that edge of Notting Hill, which can be fun, but maybe I’m just getting old, and I like it more chilled. The most unexpected moment happened when I got incredibly excited and dragged J to the serpentine, he kept saying he didn’t really fancy going on the pedalling boats, but I’d never been before (to the one in Hyde Park anyway) and I couldn’t understand why he was being so grumpy about going in!
He waits until we’re in the middle of the serpentine, struggling to keep control of the thing because it was very windy, to tell me he’s afraid of being in the water like that, on small boats. Never seen him so stressed, he was worried we were going to hit the edge of the serpentine (which really is not big deal, as we weren’t going fast and those boats can handle it), he was really really stressed about it. Next time I’m taking you instead.
It was a really fun day though, some great music, Bob Marley’s son played ‘No Woman No Cry’, which brings so many memories from my school days it’s not real!
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