are we not men?

sunday's JUNKET CLUB began the "week of amazing fun" TM. this month's junket club was in CARDIFF MUSEUM, we were given a tour by our unreliable guides ben and elis. unreliable as in pointing at a picture of a man in restoration garb and declaring "this picture is an early portrait of tom jones..." type tour content. the jokes were a lot better than that though. we were first given colour co-ordinated dinosaur stickers to designate which tour we would be going on, another lovely little touch from lisa and ben. shamefully enough i'd not actually been properly to the art gallery, only really to see the bi-annual artes mundi exhibitions. for shame! its actually a really good collection and the building is beautiful. we vowed to come back and do it proper. after this elis did a turn, mildly embarrassing me when i signalled that i'd been to the dino exhibit when i was a nipper in the 80s and talking a lot about oakwood park. he is a handsome, talented chap. next up were GINGER AND BLACK, a sort of flight of the concords-style duo comprising of a black man and a ginger lady. they were awkward and funny. we had a break where we were treated to lisa's ace cakes and had a chat with our friends chris evans and carl chappel and headed upstairs to the law courts, an imposing looking dark wooded room where we were treated to LLOYD WOLF, a proper comedian who travelled from london via neath to treat us to his potential edinburgh show which is rejected versions of his show. it was great and it got us doing games like texting the last person in our phone odd statements and seeing what their reaction was. mine was steen, so that was boring, but one girl had a bloke who didn't have her in his phone and he got quite aggressive. brilliant!

monday was movie night! we went to see LET THE RIGHT ONE IN with the patti ladies and our friend david deans and on our own went to THE DAMNED UNITED. let the right one in was one of those movies that i'd heard rave reviews about and was afraid that it would turn out to be a bit disappointing but i needn't have worried. it was one of the most haunting, beautiful, creepy films i've seen in a long time. it was about a teenage boy in 70s sweden who is getting routinely bullied and dealing with his parents' break up. along comes a neighbour with similar feelings of alienation and isolation to release him from this misery, unfortunately the neighbour comes with her own problems. rather than being 12 she is an unknowable age but has just been 12 for a very long time. this was a vampire story told very straight and full of beauty and sadness. rather than a glamourous fantastic life, you feel eli's hunger and loneliness. THE DAMNED UNITED was an enjoyable romp. i don't know much about football and i didn't really need to know much to enjoy the story, which was a relief. this was more about brian clough's relationship with his team manager and his rivalry with leeds united's manager who bred a team of dirty winners. i love timothy spall, he's always great to watch and michael sheen did a great version of clough. the only criticism i would have is that it seemed like almost exactly the same story as FROST NIXON in places, written as it was by peter morgan, there was even a late night phonecall which may or may not have actually happened.

on tuesday we went to an under-attended electronica gig at clwb with ANTONI MAIOVVI and ZOMBIE ZOMBIE. i think there was about 4 people there including us for antoni maiovvi. he played a set that sounded a bit old fashioned, it idled by well enough, if the crowd was right i'm sure it would go down well it really needed a massive field full of people to take off. ZOMBIE ZOMBIE came on and blew the boredom away. there was a bit more of a crowd for this, but still by no means full. one looked like a mad scientist and the other proto geeky indie boy but were both more interesting than that. indie boy was on the drums and mad scientist was tinkering behind a stack of synths and effects buttons that pleasingly reminded me of seeing pet shop boys and erasure on the tv as a nipper. the beats were erratic and urgent and the last song brought up thoughts of a zombie apocalypse with screams and paranoid synth sounds. they were great! they also had great merch. i really wanted to buy lots but funds being tight i just bought a bag that is so cool i might have to send it to the wife. i am developing a slow burning love of tote bags.

the next day was the day of DEVO! we caught an early bus to london and given the gift of nice weather decided to have a wander down to exhibition road, home of the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. steen hadn't been since he was a kid, which i was amazed by. the tate and the natural history museum are my most visited london landmarks, i always seem to incorporate them into my list of stuff to do every time i go. i showed him my favourite bit in the whole museum first, which is a tree from the petrified forest. i know it was created over millions of years but to me its still a work of magic. staring at the truck and counting the rings, all hardened minerals and a spectrum of reds just gives me goosebumps. we went into the dinosaur exhibit (which i still don't think is that great since they modernised it) and saw children crying at the animatronic t-rex. we then played in the hall of mirrors and went around the taxidermied mammals, ending up in the whale room and then up into the darwin exhibit. the animals are all great but the building itself is always my favourite, its so beautiful and i always notice something different, like the monkeys built into the rafters. amazing!

we then went to the VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM. to my shame i have never been inside before and we didn't have much time to look at it this time either. we did a quick look at the classical sculpture section, looked around the fashion exhibit and then spent proper time in the photography room. i was stunned to find the scream house, a bygone cardiff landmark in riverside, the first photograph when we entered the room.

but onward to DEVO! the gig was in the forum so we got off the tube and tried to find reasonably priced food. we were in london so presumed this would be impossible but found an amazing ichiban-style japanese restaurant with fantastic noodles for about the same price! then we went to the pub for a bit to see our friends jenny, jack and jenny and alex. it was lovely seeing them again and we had a good ol' natter. after a couple of pints and the sunny weather i was feeling warm and fuzzy and incredibly happy and all this was before devo! my excitement was growing and growing. we got to the venue, took our places and found it easy to get to the front. ROBOTS IN DISGUISE were the support and although they get criticised for being a bit inconcequencial and only famous for being involved with the mighty boosh but i've never seen the mighty boosh and i don't care, from what i saw they did a few ace pop songs and they had men dressed in cardboard robot outfits. surely, that's ace, right?! i enjoyed them. the crowd started to get burlier and drunker. these people are here for devo? i thought only geeks like us liked devo, there certainly was no-one who liked them when i was at school, only when i lived in the US did i find anyone who liked devo and again, they were geeks like me. this bunch of neanderthals seemed like they'd stumbled in from an oasis cocert. we were suddenly surrounded by 50 year old men on a devo trip like it was a rugby outing. ugh. i started to get a bit aggressive with one of them in particular when he started pushing me in an attempt to start an early mosh pit and resting his arm on my head, dislodging my glasses. this brought back horrendous memories of being at the front for ash in reading festival when i was almost crushed and i lost my glasses. not wanting to risk such a scarring moment a second time i relinquished my place at the front with steen and we hung back a bit, just in time to avoid a massive mosh pit. my expectations of the crowd shattered at least my expectations of devo were intact. they began with a video for an early single "secret agent man", one of my favourites that used to get played on oldies 101 fm in eastern washington! i was very excited. they played the entire album of "are we not men? we are devo!", an album i've heard over and over and so that made me very happy. there were lots of people wearing energy domes on their heads and i met two nice ladies in queues who were similarly excited about the gig. a very very very good night. we then went to meet jack at jenny's house and went to the west bank where he lives in a jewish area. i'm not kidding.

the next day we went with jack to check out the SAATCHI MUSEUM in sloane square. i'd read in the sunday glossies about the exhibition NEW MIDDLE EASTERN ART and thought it sounded interesting but wasn't prepared for how good it would be. it was on many different types of media, all expressing a myriad of ideas and emotions about what it is to be middle eastern, to be themselves, it was great. the list of favourites is long but the ones i couldn't get out of my mind were the out of focus photographs by halim al karim, the sculpture of women praying by kader attia and the sensual collage photographs by ramin haerzadeh.

we got on the bus back but didn't have much time to cwtch the cat before we had to head to buffalo to see some bands LOOSE and LESSON #1 were putting on EXPERIMENTAL DENTAL SCHOOL and a couple of other bands tba. the tba was due to the fact that both the supports had had to pull out, meinz heinz due to steve being in west wales working on euros childs' album and king alexander cos simon had a poorly throat. i was excited about the gig for the supports alone so was a bit disappointed but then we managed to help RIFFMONSTER on the bill, a new project with steve from zail, tom raybould (aliases are many but does electronic music and owns acoustic wallpaper) and andy fung from cymbient, no thee no ess and way back when derrero. they were very math rock and it became intense and interesting, a very good first gig. PRETTY GIRLS i didn't see much of but quite enjoyed their noisy lads-in-bad-drag act. EXPERIMENTAL DENTAL SCHOOL had good songs and a nice bit of twiddly mathy guitar and urgent beats but my interest waned a bit, but that might have been the tiredness from the already ace week.

the final bit of joy for the week was the CHAPTER MAIBOCK. twice a year chapter bar puts on a german beer festival and very popular it is too. this one rocked. it was so busy people were queueing out the door and around the corner and we had to have a one in-one out policy! for a space less than half the size we used to have we took about 80% of the money, a fact that all us staff were very happy about. it showed off chapter's bar at its buzzing best and all of us spent the night with massive grins, running around busy but happy. i am getting butterflies in my stomach thinking about how great things are going to be when the building work is finished.

and that ended our "week of amazing fun" TM but then these days i seem to have a lot of fun most weeks!