The proudest day of my life

Europe Tour Part 2!

After ten days hanging out in London together I followed the Crayon Fields to Sweden for a week of gigs, free beer, and two-minute noodles. We stayed in lots of different peoples apartments, which ranged from impeccably pristine to gross and cat-ridden. Everybody in Sweden seemed to have cats- they kept sitting on my head as I slept, filling my mouth with hair, eating the money out of my pockets, and gnawing on all my electrical cords. In Stockholm Geoff got poisoned by a glass of bad red wine after the show, and spent the next 24 hours throwing up. They had to play at a swanky hotel that night, where we all got free luxury accommodation and meals, and he had to spend all day in bed. Ten minutes before the gig he staggered upstairs, threw up in the hotel bathroom, then jumped on stage and they did an amazing show. I explored Stockholm for a couple of days and went to lots of galleries, then caught an 8 hour bus up to Gothenberg to meet up with the bands again. The only show in Gothenberg was a really relaxed afternoon gig at an art gallery, where everyone sat around on pillows on the floor sipping tea, and we saw an awesome psychdelic American band called 'AU'. Afterwards, the organiser invited us to a private live recording of El Perro Del Mar at a tiny radio studio in the back warehouses of Gothenberg, which was the most amazing show ever. There were only about thirty people in this beautiful little room, and she came down the spiral stairs, all beautiful and elegant, and gave the most incredible, flawless performance I have ever seen. We were so lucky! The next day we got the train to Jonkoping, which is a small Christian town outside of Gothenberg, where the Crayons and the Motifs played a show at what felt like the local youth centre. The guy who organised it, Pierre (in the picture at the top), cooked us all vegan danish pastries and lentil stew, and after hanging around for hours playing musical chairs he took us back to stay the night in his parents country farmhouse. It was so beautiful in the countryside, we went for a midnight walk among the cherry trees to see the horses and the other farms. Next morning I had to head back for London and the others left for Latvia, Finland and Estonia. This is Jacqui relaxing at a cafe in Gothenberg where the girls from Liechtenstein took us for toasties- And Geoff playing solo at the Gothenberg art gallery-
Neil passed out in a pile of cat hair at Mathias' apartment in Stockholm-
And me, very very grumpy at having to go home-

Europe Tour Part 1!

I finally handed in my final disastrous round of essays, just as the Crayon Fields and the Motifs arrived to crash on my couch and play some awesome London shows. They're in Europe for six weeks, yay! Its so nice to see Melbourne people. I went to Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg with them, where we lounged around in cafes and ate nothing but bread, cheese, and beer for a week. The first show in Berlin was rad, it was at this place called Madame Claude's where all the furniture was glued upside down to the ceiling, just like in the Twits. I ran into my old housemate from Fitzroy, who now works there behind the bar, its was bizarre. The first night we were homeless, so Geoff and I stayed at a crazy little hostel on a boat moored in the river, and then for the rest of our time this lovely German woman called Ursula, who plays under the name 'Skirt', put us up in her beautiful apartment. Her kids were away for Easter so I got to stay in one of their beds, which was shaped like a castle. In Dresden the bands played at an amazing old-fashioned GDR style venue, called Ost Pol, where the organizer cooked us a massive feast of vegan curry with grapes, which was a little odd. Then in Hamburg we went to a three day festival called the POP! Weekender, and got to stay at this crazy place called the Rock n' Roll Hotel, which had incredibly loud music til 4am every night and pictures of naked sailors all over the walls. They greeted us with whisky shots on our arrival, and all the bands from the festival were staying there so there were many hilarious drunken hallway and awkward shower moments. One of the bands we met in Dresden, a Swedish group called Liechenstein, were playing the festival as well, and we all went together on a tour of all the sites where the Beatles played there in the early 60's. Later on they put us all up in Gothenberg, and took us on a tour of the city-After Hamburg I went home while others went to Glasgow, Nottingham and Cardiff. It took me 12 hours on the train to get back to London and I threw up the entire way from general exhaustion and alcohol poisonning. To make matters worse I was stuck in the middle of a German hens party, who were passing chunks of sausage and bottles of beer back and forth over the seats, and making me feel even worse.

This is Alexis writing set lists for the show in Jonkoping, Sweden-
And a crazy psychodelic American band called the Lexie Mountain Boys (actually girls) who we met in Gothenberg-
And this is a hideously obese cat belonging to one of the girls we stayed with; it was so fat it couldn't climb onto the couch by itself, and when it wanted to eat it just lay down on its belly in a massive tray of food and gorged itself for hours on end-

G-20

Been at a lot of the G-20 protests in London this week, there are so many cops about its insane. These photos are from the Climate Camp protest outside the climate exchange in the centre of the city- everyone set up tents and blocked off the whole street. There were heaps more anarchist crews than I'm used to seeing and the police were being pretty brutal. Someone kicked my bike and broke it, which sucks cos I've just spent the last month building it up from scratch. I saw brat London celebrities Daisy Lowe and Will Blondelle at today's protest, looking lost and being followed round by a film crew:

This is my baby- I bought the frame for 30 pounds off some guy on Gumtree. I converted it to single speed and it rides like a dream, even though I only have one brake. The only problem is I can't go down any big hills because it takes me about twenty metres to stop, and cycling in London is a bit of a suicidal mission what with all those big red buses trying to kill me.

Dungeness

Last week my Lab group from college went on a massive day trip to Dungeness to see Derek Jarman's garden. It was supposed to be a collaborative effort but I think I was pretty much the only person who originally wanted to go there. The beach was spectacular, all flat stones as far as you could see, with the massive nuclear power station rising out of nowhere, and these huge concrete constructions called 'acoustic mirrors' which were used during the war to magnify the sound of approaching aircraft. There was something super creepy about the actual town of Dungeness- kind of cultish and supernatural. Every garden had strange conrete gnomes with crazy faces and there were no people on the streets, only flickering shadows behind curtains. We were such an oddity that a bus full of school children that drove past had to literally pull over so they could scream and point at us. Then they chased us a little way down the deserted street. Kids in the English countryside are creepy.
We had fish and chips for lunch in the only pub, which was also the local library and tourist information centre. It felt like something out of Twin Peaks, but even more creepy. I was pretty happy since over the last few months I've become uncontrollably addicted to mushy peas, and they gave me a massive serve.
My addiction seems to be spiralling dangerously out of control though lately; I've discovered you can buy mushy peas in a can for 83 pence at the supermarket, so I keep having them for breakfast like porridge. This might explain my unnatural pallor and slight greenish tinge.

Table tennis championships

Spring has sprung in London and I've been celebrating this week by doing some wood work in our back yard among the daffodils. I built a full-sized circular ping pong table for a workshop I helped organise yesterday in a gallery/project space called The Two Johnny's in East London. It works perfectly but its harder than normal table tennis cos there's less table, and every time we've played it seems to descend into a kind of general squash game using every surface of the room. I had to donate the table to the guys who run the gallery though, I could see the look of panic in my housemates eyes when they thought it was going to stay in our living room.

The workshop involved four visiting artists who were invited to discuss their work, a screening of some films we had made, a bookbinding session, some epic table tennis and a massive authentic Korean lunch cooked by my friend Gaeun. It was mostly a success but incredibly stressful to organise, I feel like I've been holding my breath for about a month. Afterwards someone force-fed me about fifteen tequilas and I ended up at a jazz bar in Dalston til 4am, then crashed on a friends couch, so I'm now feeling rancid with only three days til my thesis presentation is due. PANIC.
The only thing thats cheering me up is this plastic sailor hat my housemates friend Blair gave me. He's been staying on our couch for a week, but I've got no complaints since he's a model and likes to wander around in a towel. The cap is from one of his shoots. No offence to Sam but it doesn't look quite as good on him:
Why do I always end up talking about hats? I think my life has become very small. In the hope of extending my range of interests, my new hobby will be photographing odd skywriting instances. I'm pretty happy about this perfect bit of alignment:

The Rat King's Birthday

Its been a month of birthday parties in London, these are the seventy rat-shaped biscuits I made for my friend Lawrence's 25th last week. They're supposed to look like a rat king, all tied together at the tail, but it didn't quite go as planned. I had to take them to school, which was embarrassing, and I ended up being mobbed by academic staff stuffing their pockets with chocolate rats for their kids at home. One university cleaner was so pleased he took me into his little cupboard and showed me his wall of cat photos. Its amazing how many friends you can make when you carry sugar. Lawrence was less thrilled, I've never seen anyone go quite so red.

This month I also:
1) Tore my skirt up to the waist at a crazy Scottish Ceilidh dance for my housemates birthday, at which the dancing was so violent we all had huge black bruises on our upper arms and went home drenched in sweat.
2) Went to Norwich for three days and experimented with a diet of straight whisky and mushy peas (delicious in the short term, disastrous by the fourth day). I went with a friend for an opening at Outpost gallery, where he used to work, and we ended up on an epic drinking and op-shopping binge from which I still don't think I've quite recovered. It was an educational trip really; I learnt that if you put mint sauce on mushy peas they congeal like snot, the best topping for hot chips is apparently a combination of mayonnaise and peanut butter, and if you steal a security guard's walkie talkie and throw it into a canal at 4am it will make a noise like a dying whale.
3) Tried to steal a variety of other people's pets, and learnt that cats (also) enjoy peanut butter, but not olives. This is me trying to lure a neighbours dog into my bedroom. Shortly after this photo was taken it peed on my floor, yawned, and made a wise dash for freedom.
I also went to my friend Sharma's birthday, for which I made her this hat, which is entirely collaged from pictures of rainbow synthesizers. Other than this I have been doing nothing except procrastinating over schoolwork (classes end in two weeks!) and going to conferences. Tomorrow is the beginning of a three day mega-conference with Alain Badiou, Jaques Ranciere, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Slavoj Zizek, which I'm pretty psyched about. I'm debating whether or not to wear the hat, I think it makes me look more academic.