Waiting to go

Time does go slow when you don’t do any thing all day at work. At home it just flies by, you can be watching every single episode of a series of 24 and it would only seem like about 5 hours. Here, the time may even be going backwards.

My new boss said I can go straight after lunch, which, for me is 3 o’clock. Great stuff! That means I can go home, get changed, have a 6 mile run in the sunshiii-iine, shower, changed, and then be at the National Gallery for 6pm, where I am to get right cultured up. Init?

As I type this, I have just received an email inviting me to an Employee Of The Year awards dinner at the Marriott hotel in Birmingham a week on Thursday. I nearly laughed myself silly. I have been offered an award for my work for charity (I did a half-marathon last year). What a thoroughly, bloody decent bunch of people.

Wire- Are all things with this name excellent?

How have I missed it? For so long, I have been searching for a magazine to take me to the next level. I want superior, no-nonsense journalism, which entertains and, more important at the moment, educates.

I have stagnated in the past for the past three years. Mojo magazine has been my Gideons Bible for the past 10 years. Other titles died, some became unreadable, populist pap and the rest were just glossy lists masquerading as music journalism.

Wire magazine, like its Baltimore based namesake TV show elevates a dying trade to a level previously unseen since whichever heyday you can relate to. It's on issue 301, I have a lot of catching up to do.

At 100 pages, it is slim, classy, attractive, uncluttered and oozes quality writing from its pores. I have always sought new music but, obviously, Mojo is not really where to look. Even the Fleet Foxes, who were championed across the board, are household names, leaving no room for the seasoned music Nazi to cock-a-snook.

In the next 2 weeks I will be seeking out the possible pleasures of Andrew Cyrille, Joe Morris, Kong Nay and Menace Ruine. The only thing that connects them is their independent spirits and originality. I will even try my ear at jazz once more. Never got my head around it before and this is the last time. But the magazine makes it sound so fascinating. I am excited about music again.

And I haven't felt like that for years. 

Working out my notice

The resignation letter landed in my boss’s lap on Friday afternoon, plonked there by myself, stifling a smile as broad as Cheshire itself. It was the start of winding down and being invisible.

I am just approaching a week of being dispensable and it is feeling really rather good. It is getting to be quite difficult to fill my days, but enough aimless wanders to the deli or the library seem to do the trick.

When I do finally get back to my desk, the mountains of paperwork are not there, the queries too have been funneled toward the new boss. People are even saying, “Why am I asking you? You don’t care!” And it’s true, but there’s no need to vocalize it. Surely my slouched seated stance and distant stare out of the window is evidence enough.

I even woke up an hour late today, which made me late for work. But I still found time to arse around on Twitter at home before my shower, safe in the knowledge that no-one is going to give two hoots if I walk through the door late. And no-one did.

It is a bit like being invisible. Arguments are breaking out among my staff and I am sitting back and watching, like I am at a tennis match. And smiling. It justifies my decision to leave. No-one looks to me for a resolution, no-one asks for an opinion. I have another week left, at least, and I think you are going to see my blog count go up. Because I am writing them all at work.

Las Iguanas - Eat Latin, Big Breasts

At night, the South Bank transforms into a sight London can be proud of. Its shafts of light and subtle neon and electric signage pump a life blood through the concrete carbuncles, which in the stark honest daylight deflate any sense of pride.

Circling the Royal Festival Hall are shops and restaurant chains which come from the accepted higher end of the retail and dining spectrum. A Giraffe nuzzles alongside a Strada beneath the old Hall, and Ping Pong forms an Eastern Bloc with Feng Sushi on its west side. In prime position, jutting out on the corner of the top deck is the vibrant and colourful Las Iguanas.

Imploring you to ‘Eat Latin, Drink Latin’, and if you could get a table, you would more than likely love to. We visited at 9pm on a Wednesday evening and had to wait half an hour to get seated. To the bar, then!

It is a small, functional bar, which serves the whole restaurant and the two guys whizzing up cocktails and cracking open ice cold bottles of Cusquena coped admirably. We weren’t allowed to get our drinks on a tab, even if we were eating. With the bar area right by the bar, this seemed reasonable.

We were seated at a cute corner table, which was right by the stairs (apart from the odd clumpy footed office type it wasn’t noticeable) and scanned the A3 sized menu. The delights on offer were plentiful and straightforward to follow and we ordered from the 3 for £12 tapas option for starters and had a risotto and xinxim for mains.

The drinks were a mixed bunch. My caiprinha was, and always will be superb. It’s a very hard drink to get wrong and all about the cachaca, which at Las Iguanas is their own brand. Made at their own plantation in Brazil, it has a simple, pleasant taste – as you would expect from a drink made with only sugar cane and water – and the trick is to keep mixing the ice and the lime in the glass while you enjoy it.

The passion fruit and orange cooler for my tee-total wife, however, was a wash-out. Essentially £3 for an orange juice. No zing, no zang, and no repeat sale. The tap water was excellent.

As the calamares, chorizo and quesadilla starters swamped our little table for two, my wife decided to point out the big, perfectly formed breasts, which would be in my line of vision for the duration of my meal. Not hers - a blonde floozy who, because of this corner seating thing, was not 6 feet away and with no-one to obstruct the view. I will try and remember the food though.

The chorizo in a rioja jus, was tasty, although a little stingy with the sausage. If they are going to scrimp, maybe better to put them in a smaller dish. The quesadillas were stuffed with giant portabello mushrooms and topped with creamy brie, fired up by a beautiful, chunky salsa. The calamares come drizzled in a light aioli dressing, which used to be spicy but alas, no longer. They are small crunchy pieces that melt in the mouth. The breasts – “Are they real?” my wife enquired. I was trying to concentrate on the food, honestly.

The xinxim, a creamy chicken and crayfish concoction, is tangy and fragrant and served with green beans and plantains. The green beans are always difficult to keep warm and I don’t think they have ever reached my table above around 10 degrees. The broth itself is a guilty pleasure but there was too much of it and the poor bits of chicken looked lost. A bit like a pair of small hands cupping giant breasts.

The wife – oh there you are – was a tad disappointed by the seafood content of the Bahian risotto, which was also a bit dry and needed pepping up with some of my surplus xinxim lake. The flavours in both are fantastic and you can get every one of them in spades, however, the balance of ingredients is a bit lopsided. Unlike those perfect breasts, pulsating across the way.

We skipped the desert. A mass of naughty chocolate puds being devoured in the flightpath of zeppelin one and two may have edged me into Bill Clinton territory. The service was friendly and unobtrusive, the prices, more than reasonable for a sell-out South Bank eatery and the funbags truly….OK this has got to stop. Recommended
Price for 2 including 2 cocktails and glass of wine and service - £50
Food – 7
Drinks – 7
Atmosphere – 8
Breasts – 36DD

Daily Mail penetrates the young

I am always shocked and saddened when a perfectly normal looking person sits next to me on the train, unzips his manbag or rucksack and pulls out a copy of the Daily Mail and starts to read intently. I can half-understand him picking it up from the luggage rack for something to do, but even then, given the choice, I would just leave it there and glower at it every now and then as though it was listening to Rhianna too loudly on its tinny headphones. This guy yesterday was young, late twenties, wearing a suit, no tie. His hair was spiky and, dare I say, funky? I would have been disappointed if he had pulled out a copy of Q magazine as he appeared to me to be more of a Uncut or Word reader. If he was your young professional, and not just wearing the jacket and trousers as a Superdrug team leader, I would have expected a New Statesman or Economist. (I couldn’t, at that point, hazard a guess at the guy’s political stance – I can now.) The Daily Mail emerged from that Jansport back pack like a radioactive sanitary towel, contaminating and horrifying all who come into contact with it. In the readers case it horrifies him or her with its mild invective on the decline of this scepter’d isle and its degenerate inhabitants. It contaminates their minds like an unstoppable cult, spreading its hate and ideologies on Middle England. What is it about this rag that attracts my traveling companion and his peers? This was one of the issues I had to address in my essay to get on to a BA course at university and now, coming up to completing my second term, I am no closer to understanding the answer. The free CD’s are probably the bait, but the hook has to be the content, and the content, both in layout and actual words, is dated and regressive. It really should only appeal to people who are too set in their ways to know, or want to know, better. It takes all sorts to make up a democracy and for the under thirties it would be foolish to think everyone thinks along the same lines as me and my peers. Maybe they are too young now to remember the Thatcher years, the Major years, even. But they cannot all be unaware of the antipathy held toward them. Conservative politics with conservative values were all but consigned to the dustbin with fluorescent day-glo and white rimmed sunglasses. Now it seems they are all coming back with aplomb.

The retro attraction of the eighties music scene, seems to have gathered pace and with it the return to the Tory values of old. The mixture of right wing politics and a young, fresh faced leader of the Conservatives, a la Blair in the nineties, are helping to revive the Mail’s brand at a time when the whole industry faces ruin in some of its constituent parts. Should I, as a journalism student, be happy that young people are reading the printed word at all? Possibly, but with the dumbing-down of content across the board, I don’t see how I can defend any of them at the moment. As Patrick Wintour states in The Guardian, “Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.” This could quite easily apply to newspapers.

Mystery shopping

Tonight I assumed the nom de restaurant Mr Linehan. I went undercover in one the outlets of a chain which boasts my brother as ops manager. Having nothing else in my head at the time other than the recently scanned pages of Graham Linehan's website, I decided to steal part of his identity.

Las Iguanas is a South American, Latin food and music extravaganza with a healthy whack of cachaca thrown in. The colours are bright and the food plentiful and is a great place for large groups to sample the various tapas and multi coloured cocktails.

I will post a review, maybe not from this visit but from A visit at a later date.

Review: Morrissey - Years Of Refusal

His recent activity on our shores have caused the legions of fawning fans to rise to the surface once more, defending their fay hero to the hilt.

It seems our Moz would do anything rather than stay in this country. It seems he is less loyal to his loyal following than, I'm sure, they would like. He is no better than Phil Collins really. Stay in the U.S. or Italy, anywhere, just not Britain. Just nip over, raid their manbags and purses and flee like Raffles into the night.

Before he starts his biannual theft of the nation's overdrawn bank accounts he has dropped another one of his much hyped solo albums. The man who railed against the record companies so effectively on 'Paint A Vulgar Picture' is doing the rounds, laughing at Wossy's gags on his chat show and looking very uncomfortable. The credit crunch truly must be universal. He has even resorted to a strip with his band to try and shift a few extra units. Sellout? Well let's look inside. 

It's a hairdrying, furnace blast opener in 'Something Is Squeezing My Skull'. He sounds positively masculine, barking the names of prescription drugs out against the howling tsunami of his full-on band. It has the light thrash of a limp Therapy? under his Manc-Irish Proclaimer-lite chorus. 500 miles?

The next two bang along in a similar fashion, like Spector has burst in to the studio and told everyone to play like there were 50 of them at gunpoint. 'I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris' takes the foot off the pedal in a Stranglers on the Bontempi kind of manner. 'All You Need Is Me' is fine, it has a great lilting verse but the chord changes are somewhat pedestrian.

The Spanish clippity clop of 'When Last I Spoke To Carol' is a welcome respite from the unnatural tone of the album and provides one of the highlights. It's playful, and shows the humour that Morrissey used to display so well and in such abundance. He also manages to stray of the lyrics and 'wo-wo' giving the tune an air of spontaneity.

Halfway through and I am just crying out for a lead guitar line or a frickin' piano or something to break the monotony. The beautiful bass of Andy Rourke is a very distant memory and this very tiring album wears thin very quickly. Even when the Spanish trumpet reprises for 'One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell'.

'It's Not Your Birthday Anymore' and to be honest I am not looking forward to it if someone is going to get me this half-arsed, one-trick pony of an album. I'm going to get my copies of Strangeways and Vauxhall and pour myself a Baileys. Hopefully next time Morrissey deigns to darken our shores he can come bearing finer gifts than this.

4/10