Queer Royale

Don't know when I'll be back again

2009-10-03T02:35:00.009+01:00

Bit of a maverick blog entry this, 2.30am and all the drunken sentimentality that entails. I apologise for none of this.

A couple of weeks ago, I made it along to my very first Bar Wotever. It's moved to Vauxhall now, so convenient for me for a drink on the way home and an early evening of Joe Poppism. I'd never met Joe Pop but had seen his very lovely photos. The man himself lived up to them in every sense, a beardy tattooed music meister, comin' atcha though the cornflakes!

Highlight of the night, for me, was Mr Pop's evocation of Mary Travers, the human-and-recognisable third of Peter, Paul & Mary. Joe P played Leaving On A Jet Plane, which is so wonderful and poignant it just has to be linked here:

I had a very pleasant discussion that night about the significance of Mary in terms of my early childhood. I was born in 1970, to parents who were, to some extent, limited by being the first in their respective families to aspire to a university education, and having both ventured outside the UK to practise their teaching.

I think they were confident professionally but less so in other areas of their lives. They'd have liked to have been hippies, but were too responsible to be properly bohemian. They made an effort, though. I grew up amid brown-painted walls, cane furniture, ostrich and peacock feathers (although this was a fairly brief trend) and my mother wafting around in maxi-dresses, sometimes risking the faintest hint of patchouli. Musically, my abiding memory of long car journeys is a mixed bag: Carpenters, Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, Boney M...

Mary Travers' was the voice of my early life. I described it as a "female Oliver Postgate", and I stand by this. Postgate's was the voice of Bagpuss, the narrator of the Clangers. Hers was a profoundly reassuring tone, somehow pure and airy. And she was such a fabulously good Liberal, her voice seemed imbued humanist values. It really does come with a host of happy associations.

So... nice Wotever, but that's all for now. Later.

It got colder, that's where it ends

2009-09-06T04:38:00.013+01:00

Haven't posted here for months. All sorts of reasons and, simultaneously, no reason at all. It happens or it doesn't. Many's the time I've started writing a post and it's never come to fruition. That's just the way it goes.

There've been all sorts of lovely and important cultural events since I last posted. Maybe I'll get round to talking about them, maybe I won't.

I'm not long back, this evening, from a standard (I'm thinking of it as equivalent to Classic Coke) Duckie in terms of both Readers Wifes being present and correct. Amazing music, played in just the right order, some of it having gradually accreted danceable fabulousness over time (MGMT's Kids) and a good dollop of old favourite loveliness.

Amy commented on there being a "Back To School" vibe and, although my own work is constant through spring, summer, autumn and winter, I can see where she's coming from. I agree with Chelsea Kelsey about the crappiness of autumn creeping in and infecting everything. At the same time, I rather like the fact that it's chillier and we can start wearing different clothing. I've always liked coats; I suspect Echo and the Bunnymen scarred me.

The whole BAK TO SKOOL thing used to majorly hack me off as a child and teenager. I remember raging (in a middle class way) to my parents about the fact that shops placed huge placards outside their doors at this time of year ("why do they have to remind us our holiday's almost over?") and they assumed the most stupid, appalling spelling. If any sentient felines exist, I imagine they feel similarly about the lolcat phenomenon.

Forever Autumn has always linked, in my mind, with the War of the Worlds soundtrack. I can't listen to it without worrying - albeit distantly - about FUCK! ALIEN INVASION!!

(Possibly going to see District 9 tomorrow...)

It was an unusually quiet Duckie in terms of numbers. Rapunzel was there, as was my friend Justin. Amy made popcorn (which I smelled immediately upon entering the Tavern and) which troubled my dodgy teeth for a while and got irritated by the audience's apparent refusal to engage/click with her. I think they were actually distracted by Lazlo Pearlman's final reveal:

Sexy fucker.

The other act was a rather endearing punk-pop duo (or trio, counting their keyboard) Jean Genet, beautifully accessorised with eyeliner, black electrical tape and not much else. Sang a song about a fatal accident caused by Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time ("She's evil") and didn't take themselves at all seriously. Very cute.

Melanie Griffiths and Sal Solo were both present in our audience, or at least their lookalikes were. It was definitely a slightly autumnal, bittersweet Duckie. If it were me DJing, I would've played California Dreaming at some point. The whole thing that makes Duckie work, however, is the fact that the Readers Wifes aren't me. They're smarter than me, infinitely better at delving through past and present mehness to find the gems. That's what they're good at.

This is it, then, really. Lots of stuff since my last update and God knows when there'll be another. But hey ho.

On such a winter's day

2009-03-10T11:49:00.002Z

Gawd, it's been bloody aaages, hasn't it? Months. There's been reasons for my falling out of the habit of updating this blog but they're mostly a bit boring so I won't go into them right this minute. Here's a post I started writing on The Day It Snowed and never quite finished. Better late than never (and the photos are quite nice). Expect more catch-up over the next few days...

----------

Snow started falling as I went to bed on Sunday night. Although doubtful that it'd lie, I set the alarm on my new 'phone for extra early o'clock. I woke to an odd light, the bedroom walls gently bathed in soft yellow sodium streetlamp diffused by and reflected off a thick layer of white. Pure white, blanketing everything. The other thing that was noticeable, at first almost subliminally, was the hush, a muffling of the usual distant London traffic roar.

Transport for London was all blue Suspended and Severe delays but my route to work seemed just about doable. So I piled on my heaviest sheepskin jacket, gloves, hat and boots and headed out.

8am South London was as I've never seen it before. My street was near-deserted, only a handful of sets of footprints breaking the ankle-depth white. No cars or buses. The sky was television static grey with a hint of yellow, promising more snow. Walking between half-submerged vehicles, with no-one else around, I got a flash of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and fancied myself sole survivor of a frostbound nuclear winter. Drama queen.

Turning into the more arterial roads, an overcoated businessman handed me his camera ("not as fancy as yours") and posed on a set of snow-coated steps for me to take his photo. In the park, more photos: a couple filming their young kid whooping and gurgling, possibly his first experience of snow. A group of Australians were throwing snow around and laughing; I wondered if it was also their first time. Londoners generally seemed lighter-hearted than usual, smiley and appealingly childlike; Narnia Englishness. I wished it could be Christmas every dayyy.

When I arrived at work, they marvelled at my having got here from South London, saying, "we were just waiting for you to call in" (which immediately made me wish I had called in). Ah well.

Much of the day was a bit of a wash-out. I bunked off and went home early, wandering through a cemetery and various parks and marvelling at the various snowmen. Already, the snow was looking trampled and off-white, and I missed the virginal crispness of the morning.

Here's the inevitable photos:

That last one is a snowy South London homage to Don't Look Now...

Suddenly you're older

2009-01-31T22:12:00.009Z

Another Saturday night in, I feel positively middle-aged. Oh well, Duckie next Saturday and both nights of the Big Bexhill Valentine's Weekend. Outfit crises a-brewing.

And it's not like this week has been a solid run of abstemious school nights. Wednesday was the Peter Tatchell fundraiser cabaret event at the Phoenix Artists Club. I'm not quite sure why Tatchell needs funds at the moment - maybe he's saving up to punch the Pope or something - but no-one could argue with the line-up of fabulous gay artistes, many of them familiar from the Axis of Duckie.

Bit of a last minute decision on our part but me and TSB hung around in Soho after work for a few hours before toddling along to the Phoenix, where everything is setting up. Coincidentally, I'd seen the venue only a week earlier when Mel took us there, and I'd liked it so much I'd joined up on the spot. £120 a year isn't bad for a quiet(ish) spot in Soho where one can be guaranteed a seat of a Friday. And I like the general atmosphere, the clutter of theatrical bric-a-brac.

On Wednesday, there was a clutter of theatrical queens. Having lived a while in London, with its large-enough-to-self-segregate gay scene, I don't tend to come across that particular subgroup of Gay Men Of A Certain Age very often. When I lived in Scotland, the scene was much smaller, so bars and clubs and "gay events" were more diverse, in terms of age range. Here, the likes of Duckie (with its "playgroup for the over-30s" vibe) are more varied than most, but one would have to venture to the Quebec to see the sixtysomethings at play.

Chatting with DawnRightNasty, we agreed that it was refreshing to see so many of this older demographic: it bolstered one's confidence that queer social life doesn't end at thirty, or forty, or sixty, or whenever. Lots of nice cashmere coats and a sprinkling of growing-old-disgracefully leather. If I'm as attractively dapper in my sixties as these guys, I'll be very happy indeed.

Oh, speaking of sexy older men, Brian Paddick was there for a little while, looking very fanciable. I think I'm developing a bit of a crush on him...

And so, on with the show! We parked ourselves in the Members Bar at the back and watched the main area become progressively busier. Nathan Evans, David Hoyle and DawnRightNasty were sitting nearby, and were later joined by Fred Bear - all very Vauxhallville. My eye was caught by a rather dashing (and oddly familiar-looking) chap in distinctly Victorian white tie and tails. Turned out he was one of the MCs, Mr Meredith (Luke? I didn't catch his first name). The acts were introduced, the first being Earl Grey reprising his Queen's Speech. Clever, funny stuff, but I rather missed his Vivien Leigh. Caught him afterwards:

I missed a few of the following acts, having become engrossed in conversation with the ever-fascinating TSB. There was a poet called Ernesto Somethingorother, a striking latex geisha Miss Akimbo, QBoy and the very lovely Le Gateau Chocolat. I'd seen the latter (very deservedly) win one of the voguing categories at Liverpool Is Burning but it was a bit of a revelation to hear him sing. I liked his version of The Man That Got Away. Here he is with Miss Akimbo:

I pushed through the crowded main bar to grab a photo of Dickie Beau then retreated to a more comfortable spot to enjoy his extraordinary Judy Garland monologue. Despite having seen it before, this was just as emotionally engaging, holding the audience spellbound. Where I was standing, people were making little gasps at points of particular intensity.

I briefly chatted to Dickie Beau afterwards and drunkenly gushed at him a bit. As I do.

An angelic-looking David Hoyle was introduced as the last act. I think I liked him; he's so out of the ordinary that sometimes it's hard to tell...

Fred Bear had got togged up in a very cute outfit (I got to feel his scut!) and I was initially disappointed that they'd run out of time for him to perform. David Hoyle brought him up on stage, though.

How does he get his facial hair to look so immaculately handlebartastic? I have moustache envy.

He finished off with a spot of bearbacking:

We drank far too much wine for a school night and indulged in the traditional-but-ill-advised ritual of popping into filthy, seedy ol' 79CXR for a final one for the road. Boozehounds.

Face it, she's Madonna

2009-01-31T13:19:00.009Z

Well, the tickets arrived in today's post for Morrissey's birthday concert at the Manchester Apollo on the 22nd of May. He'll be fifty. Hopefully the ol' fella won't pull a sickie this time, as he did with his Roundhouse gigs a year or so ago. Predictably, I Have Forgiven Morrissey. Live, when he's good, the cantankerous old bugger is very very good. I do miss the stage invasions of old, though.

He's looking really rather buff on the contttrroversial artwork for the new album:

It strikes me as a sort of cross between an alternative Madonna & Child (Moz wearing the Holy Virgin's blue) and the Michael Jackson's infamous Dangling Blanket Over The Balcony pic. His forthcoming 7-inch is also pretty impressive. I'm throwing my arms around all of them.

Oh, and here's a sample of my Moz-themed attempts at atheist bus sloganeering:

Paved paradise

2009-01-26T21:48:00.058Z

Home after working late this evening, and still a bit adrenaline-jittery from having been rude to a black cab driver. Sort of. I'm never rude to London cabbies. Generally speaking, I quite like 'em: the stereotypical right wing ones are rarer than one might think and when I do encounter them, they seem almost quaint; clichéd bit players in a panto Life On Mars. Comedy bigots. If the drive through Vauxhall is lightly drizzled with homophobic banter, I ponder whether to out myself as one of those before the end of the journey, watch the backtracking. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

Anyway, I decided to indulge myself and catch a cab home. Very much against le craquement de crédit but I felt I'd earned it. Like in Fame but I'd paid in paperwork rather than sweat.

January's not a good time for taxi drivers anyway, and I approach a rank full of cabs but empty of punters. At the head is a burgundy-coloured vehicle with a nondescript Leo Sayer-haired chap up front. I've cabbed it home many times in the past, just south of the river. I confidently tell the driver my destination. He looks at me suspiciously.

"Where?"

I tell him the street name and he shrugs dismissively. I tell him the nearest arterial route. I know from previous cab rides that it's a central element of The Knowledge; all cabbies have heard of it. He makes a "whatevs" gesture. Slightly irked that he's leaving me standing in the wind while he reluctantly considers my fare potential, I glance at the long line of cars behind Burgundy Boy. Any one of them would happily take me, I'm sure. Burgundy Boy purses his lips.

"I'll take you but I'm not going through any estates."

(The same tone one might employ for saying, "I'm not doing scat". And the same expression.)

"Uh, okay. No estates." I said, bemused. And get in.

He pulls away from the taxi rank, starting to explain himself in a manner verging on accusatory:

BB: Thirty years I've been driving and I've been mugged twice. Guess where.

Me: I don't know.

BB: Guess!

Me: Um, South London?

BB: South East London. I'd be happy never to cross a bridge again. I work up here, I never have to go there. It's a loss leader; you can't get a fare back...

He continues to mutter and tut, radiating resentment. He seems to want me to feel ashamed of where I want to travel to, where I live. I start to regret not having made a break for the second taxi in the rank. Or the third. Ruefully, I conclude that we're already far enough away that I'd have to stand around and wait to hail another one if I got out. And there'd be confrontation, a scene; I'm not good at that.

I marvel that a cabbie reportedly of thirty years' standing seems completely unaware of one of the main routes through South London - and wholly unconcerned at his own ignorance. Proud of it, even.

We proceed in silence for a bit, save for the occasional sigh from the front seat. I text. I'm not great with silence and, after a while, I break it.

"Um... did you get mugged recently?"

Wrong question.

"Three years ago, the last time. Shithole. Animals."

Okayy, I think, that's my shithole. Let's try some empathy, though. I make the right noises. Then, recalling the time I was rather ineffectually mugged (once in eight years; not yet sure whether that gives me a better or worse batting average than Burgundy Boy), having made the somewhat unwise decision after a drunken Christmas night out, to take a short cut home across an unlit stretch of parkland in darkest Kennington, I begin telling him about it. BB cuts straight across my anecdote:

"That's what you get for choosing to live there."

Rrright. Another quick mental calculation of how long it'd take me to get home from here, on foot or waiting to hail another cab. I know TSB has dinner cooking. I stay in the cab, quietly hating the back of BB's head. He seems to be warming to his theme.

"We've had a run of attacks on cabs. They wait at the lights, jump on the bonnet, try to smash through the windscreen. It's not worth my while going south of the river, I'm not paid enough. It's one big shithole. Walworth Road used to be okay in the '70s but not now. Not now."

He seems palpably pissed off now. I wonder why he even took the fare. Feeling faintly disgusted with myself for succumbing to such a classist tack, I try to reassure him that he won't have to stop in any "estates" to get to my Victorian terrace.

"If it's a nice Victorian street, that probably attracts them."

This is all really weird to me. I remember when I first came to London, I'd worried about choosing to live south of the river. Would taxis go there? I've probably discussed this with a dozen or so cabbies over the years and, before BB, they'd all laughed at me. Apparently the no-fares-south thing was true in the moderately distant past but hasn't been for well over a decade. It's passed into the realms of mythology. BB doesn't seem to have got the memo and, as we cross Vauxhall Bridge, he continues to grouse and grump. Over the bridge, he gets into the wrong lane and comes to rest at the traffic lights straddling left and centre. When the lights change, he'll have to nudge left into the traffic stream.

"I'm going to drive very defensively," he informs me, "in case I need to get out in a hurry."

He gestures toward another black cab on his left, next to the pavement.

"I'd be shitting myself if I was him."

Fucking hell, I think, we're at the lights opposite the sodding Hoist. Faintly threatening (in a camp way), possibly, but downtown Gaza it ain't. A third black cab moves across to the right, and BB takes this as validation of his paranoia ("he's got the same idea as me, getting out of here"), a paranoia that's now making me very angry indeed. Okay, I'm sorry he got mugged but, frankly, he's been a rude, sullen arsehole, rolling out sweepingly negative generalisations throughout this journey, making me feel he's doing a colossal favour rather than, y'know, his job. My sympathy is eclipsed by mounting irritation. And I'm almost home.

"I tell you, the Association will soon stop us crossing the river. No point going somewhere you know you're not going to be safe. I don't get paid enough to risk my neck coming here..."

As he finally reaches the end of my (utterly unremarkable) street, I tell him to stop. He does so, peering around fearfully. He keeps the cab door locked until I hand him the money. I'm usually a good tipper but I make an exception for BB. In the course of my journey, he's made me feel shitty, almost apologetic about where I live, a bit of London I love. I hate that he's been able to engender this shittiness. I'm trembling with cold rage.

I pause, before closing the door. As is customary, I thank him, impulsively adding, "and grow a fucking spine."

And speed-walk smartly down my street toward my front door, repeating don'tcomeaftermedon'tcomeafterme. He doesn't come after me.

Big yellow wanker. Tube next time, certainement.

Too many people

2009-01-25T22:52:00.011Z

After a typically raucous Quiet Drink on Friday (Retro Bar, Phoenix Artist Club - sans Peter Kay - then home for more) it's been a low-key weekend, not just for me and TSB but for most people we know. End of the month, I guess. I've certainly caught up with sleep, to the extent that I got that weird grogginess that comes sometimes from too much shut-eye.

Although feeling generally cheerier, I've been feeling slightly more irritable than usual with my fellow human beings this weekend - the straight, white middle-class London stratum in particular. I'm not entirely sure why, I guess I've just been noticing 'em getting in my way more. We decided to take advantage of the excellent value Sunday roast at the Oval Lounge today. Meal went fine but towards the end, a vast group of thirtysomething couples seemed to descend on our end of the room. They occupied the two large round tables, dumped their square acre of baby/toddler paraphernalia around our little table-for-two and began milling around. One or two (the women, generally) realised they were crowding us and other diners and apologised; the others just carried on. It felt oddly claustrophobic and we paid our bill and scarpered. Heterosexual privilege, eh? I wouldn't mind them so much if they didn't evidently feel an exhibitionistic need to shove their lifestyle in my face...

I remembered feeling crowded earlier in the week, seated on a District Line carriage which filled up at Earls Court. Three blonde women, maybe mid-20s, stood over me, bellowing into each others' faces in the manner of Masterchef's John 'n' Greg, despite being only a couple of feet apart. One was American, the other two slightly braying English. I realised they were talking about their mutual experience as stewards/counselors in some sort of summer camp.

American Woman: You remember that fat girl?

English Woman 1: Yah.

AW: The one with diabetes?

English Woman 2: Yah, what about her?

AW: I hope she's dead now.

What lovely specimens of humanity. Must admit, though, I did titter.

Dissipate shadows

2009-01-25T13:46:00.009Z

It's been a while, eh? Bit of a musty smell in these parts. Time to open some windows, I think.

"Green shoots of recovery" is, in the current economic climate, acquiring a bit of a dimension of naivety but, this last week, it summed up my gentle pricklings of... for want of a better word, optimism, for the first time since early December. In retrospect, although there's much I've enjoyed over Christmas and New Year, the last month or so has felt unusually cobwebby somehow, draggy, and now that faint sense of gloom is finally lifting.

I think B's death probably affected me more than I realised at the time, not just in terms of the feeling of great and abrupt loss (which has receded but still hits me, vertiginously, when I'm in certain places or have certain thoughts) but also the knock-on effect in terms of concentration at work. Over the last month or so, a huge paperwork backlog had built up and that's taken a while to work off - and, whether symptom or cause, the amount of outstanding paperwork always seems connected to my general mood.

Buuut, in the last week or so, I could feel myself getting back on top of some of that faintly emo stuff. I'm almost caught up with myself, work-wise, and it feels good. Of course, the fact that the planet's sole remaining superpower is now run by someone intelligent and sexy and cool (in a geeky way) helps. I'm sure I'll relocate my cynicism eventually but, in the meantime, I'm quite enjoying a bit of optimistic honeymoonery.

(How fabulous was Michelle O's inauguration outfit? The embroidered white/gold coat, I mean, with superheroesque matching green gloves and shoes. Loved it.)

One of my New Year resolutions was to wear everything in my wardrobe or get rid of it - and I'm trying to be ruthless about this. I'd quite forgotten the dubious joys of EBay selling but have made quite a bit of cash already, which is helping me feel relatively buoyant in the face of, ooh, capitalist meltdown. And I'm eagerly awaiting delivery of a new Little Camera, which'll make it easier to take photos at the likes of Duckie and KUNST. Pics won't be as good as with the Good Camera but at least I won't have to check it into the cloakroom when I'm sick of looking like an American tourist.

Mind you, maybe it'll now be cool to look like an American tourist? Well, less uncool, anyway.

Incidentally, this entry's title comes from the Fleet Foxes' Mykonos, which I'm absolutely loving:

I'm finding the apparent cultural mismatch surreally amusing, though. For the Fleet Foxes, Mykonos apparently conjures up images of wispily exotic coastline, magical "ancient gate"s and the like - whereas the word makes me think of this. Ancient gays, perhaps?

Reminds me of reading Lionel Shriver's The Post Birthday World (on the back of We Need To Talk About Kevin, flawed but invigorating) and finding unintentional American-writing-about-the-UK humour in her description of the dangerously seductive glamour of the world of, er, professional snooker.

Here comes the rain again

2009-01-15T01:09:00.002Z

Back to the usual British rain-and-wind winter. I rather enjoyed the drama of last week's "cold snap", with its chill, crisp mornings and icy evenings. It felt like a Snow Queen splinter of true winter amid the wet grey mehness that now characterises January and February.

I feel bad because, although I bought spring bulbs, the compost didn't arrive for ages and, when it did, lethargy prevented me planting the stuff I meant to plant. I'm a terrible fair weather gardener.

Duckie this weekend, I think. We've all missed it.

You talked of politics

2009-01-10T03:01:00.003Z

It's almost 3am, we've guzzled three bottles of fairly good white wine (from my mother's belated Christmas present, arrived yesterday morning and cannibalised this evening) and TSB is asleep on the settee. I'm awake and in need of easy sentiment. ABBA ticks the boxes.

Actually, that's unfair. ABBA is not a band of cheap sentiment. It's all well-earned stuff, especially in my favourite period, Late ABBA, when it all turned wintry and Swedishly distant, melancholy.

One of my favourites:

Our Last Summer always makes me cry. In Mamma Mia (the stage play, not the film), it's the first of a triptych of sobbery - Slipping Through My Fingers then The Winner Takes It All - which invariably renders me a snivelling wreck. There's something about Our Last Summer that plucks my nostalgia strings in a particularly bittersweet manner. I think it may be partly because the events described in the song - a faintly romantic tourist's take on Paris - are doubly familiar to me: I remember having those experiences with my dad and my mother as well as, later, his second wife, my stepmother. And her children, one of whom was my best friend at school (which is how his mum and my dad first met). Paris is, for me, complicated.

Our Last Summer adds an extra layer of plangency in the musical, because it becomes a sort of gay swansong, the plaintive reminiscence of a boy who met a girl and, despite his natural inclinations, went with it. I can understand that. As a gay man who went through a really heartfelt period of trying very hard not to be gay (and falling in love with a woman - but not being sexually excited by her), something in the song strikes a chord with me. It's a kind of bittersweet appreciation of a perfect summer city and perfect company but everything being transient somehow. It couldn't last and you knew it couldn't last. It was wrong.

Lovely song. Colin Firth doesn't ruin it in the film version but the decision to place the song elsewhere in the score and open it up to all the male leads denudes it of intimacy somehow. I preferred it when it was about a one-to-one dialogue between two middle-aged people (one gay, one straight) about a past affection transmuted into enduring mutual fondness. I suppose it speaks to my own idealised relationship with one particular straight woman.

Hmm. And the "politics" bit of the title? I was going to write more about my work night out, but I feel a bit energy-sapped, still. Basically, an American colleague started opining on Palestinian "terrorism" and the rest of us slightly rounded on her, talking over each other about Israeli hypocrisy, controllingness, murder. Heavy conversation for a night out.

More to come there.

Back on the chain gang

2009-01-05T22:14:00.002Z

For some reason, I've taken the post-festive period return to work particularly hard this year. My inner woes seemed reflected/compounded in the morning's journey, too: bone-tingling cold (although colder tomorrow, I gather); queues for London Underground ticket machines; being held above ground for what seemed like aaages while "congestion on the platforms" slowly dispersed.

Pah.

Still, at least I have a job and remain (mostly) above water, financially speaking. Here's a rather doleful clip of The Last Days Of Woolies:

In the depths of my comedown, I'm even prepared to forgive the wild apostrophising of "Pic 'n' Mix".

No more champagne...

2009-01-01T15:19:00.005Z

... and the fireworks are through. Were there any fireworks? England's a bit crap at New Year.

That said, last night's Duckie special, in the unfamiliar environs of The Eagle (formerly South Central, formerly Dukes), did exactly what it said on the tin. Key ingredient: The London Readers' Wifes, and thank the Lordy lords.

Crowd vibe was a bit office party if one works in an office populated by stocky, hairy men, beardily chic geeks and slightly mumsy secretarial types in their best glittery tops. Something a bit disorientating about hearing the Wifes' Favourite Record Of All Time then having a further hour and a half left to dance. And dance we did. After five minutes, we'd already heard more good tunes than we did last year.

I really need a working mini-camera; the Big Camera is okay but occasionally temperamental with its flash in Duckie-type settings, insisting the mechanism is blocked then working fine the next day. It's also a bit of a pain to dance with, so this time I checked it into the cloakroom after a few shots. Blurry but quite atmospheric, I reckon. Here's a handful:

(Something about that last one reminds me a little of Blake's Ghost of a Flea.)

My head's not too sore, considering; a full English breakfast at the (packed with hungover gayers) Oval Lounge helped. Vague thoughts of detox will have to wait.

Only regret: despite 'phoning four times in quick succession yesterday, Galasheila never left a message. I feel abandoned.

Choosing my confessions

2008-12-31T15:26:00.016Z

Our last RVT event before Christmas was KUNST on Dec 23rd. The theme was "AntiChristmas", which immediately made me think of Damien Thorn, the 1980s Hammer Horror version of the Antichrist. Feeling suitable Omened up, me and TSB (having necked a bottle of wine between us) decided to go ecclesiastical before heading out for Dusty Limits' monthly extravaganza.

I really liked the bleakness of their flyer.

Of course, the morning of the 23rd, the news was full of Ol' Uncle Fester's edict about gays and/or transsexuals being as bad for humanity as environmental damage (some sort of "queerhouse effect", one assumes) so my Papal garb became suddenly topical. When we pitched up at the Tavern around 9pm (feeling somewhat self-conscious, as beardy blokes in dresses and skullcaps), the costumes went down well with Dusty L and the delightful Fancy Chance (with whom I shared a condom later...). We were given tokens for cocktails on the house, which were pleasantly drinkable.

I've only recently felt I've got the measure of KUNST, in terms of what to expect from the general vibe and the tone of the cabaret. I like the emphasis on dress codes but wish more people made at least some effort to observe them. I like DawnRightNasty's soundtrack, which somehow manages never to jar.

We were joined by Mel, diabolically horny in red. The cabaret started with a song from our host and a set by Ophelia Bitz. I'd never seen her before (all this evening's acts were new to me) and thought she looked amazing, a distinct hint of Bettie Page.

She was good (opening song a Sandie Thom pisstake with the chorus, "I wish I was a cocksucker with jism in my hair") but seemed a little ill-at-ease and I thought her set went on a little too long; by the final song, a drunken woman near me had completely forgotten the stage existed and was gabbling loudly.

Next up was a bit of a curve ball ("a serious, grown-up act"), one Stephen Pelton, dancer. We were told that all dance moves were "taking from the body language of Adolf Hitler". He was mesmerising, holding attention absolutely. Difficult to photograph, though, either as a result of the low light or the fact that he was always moving, or both. As a result, these are the best of an absolutely shite bunch of pics:

Hard act to follow but the next performer, Ruby Blues, was excellent. She tiptoed onstage as the Sugar Plum Fairy, resplendent in candy-striped tights and blowing flurries of snow at us from piles at either side of the stage. Until she tasted the "snow" rubbed it into her gums and decided it might be worth a snort.

Some rather more vigorous dancing followed (possibly not dissimilar to that of cokehead bees) and a costume change.

At some point, we had an alternative Queen's Speech...

Fancy Chance was the penultimate performer, and lovely she was too. Appearing in flouncey 1950s Hollywood Christmas dress and fluffy cape, she danced to something which included the line, "I love being a girl".

Additional girliness followed, then a quick-change to a fabulous gown made out of inflated condoms.

Aaand, finally, a Papal frock. Beeyootiful. I had definite hat envy, though, hers being bigger than mine.

Final act was one Patti Plink and her Boy (in a rather fetching gimp outfit). I'm ashamed to admit I remember little of her set. Too much communion wine.

Just to show he wasn't completely lacking in festive spirit, Dusty Limits launched into a rendition of Feed The World, complete with backing vocals from Bitz, Blues and Chance (sounds like a supergroup).

The evening wound down very pleasantly indeed and relatively gently too, compared with the Holy Ghost Revival's rawwwk-out of the previous month. After a last nightcap, we hoisted up our vestments and disappeared into the night.

Sparkle up the dark

2008-12-31T14:09:00.013Z

Well, it's been a longish time since I've updated this blog: the usual ho ho ho festive period excuses. Another blog from a train this time, as I'm travelling back to civilisation after three days visiting my and TSB's families in Scotland. It actually didn't go too badly, all things considered; felt like just the right amount of time to see parents, siblings, nieces and nephews and leave 'em wanting more rather than reverting to boredom-induced sullen sniping and picking irresistably at old wounds.

Nearest thing to a spat was TSB's somewhat arsey little nephew (only recently out of his teens) opining of Boris Johnson "at least he has the brains not to be a socialist" and me responding, "well, he doesn't have the brains not to be a racist"... and subsequent awkward "I can't be a racist because..." hole-digging. I really ought to keep my mouth shut more.

(Someone on this carriage has a mobile 'phone text alert that sounds exactly like one of the bleeps from Hot Chip's Ready For The Floor. Everytime it goes off, I get the urge to sing, "I can't hear your voice, do I have a choice?")

Prior to our trip northwards, there was much sparkling up of the dark. I'll probably talk about this over a couple of blog entries, as my attention span's eroded by gewürztraminer bought in the M&S in Edinburgh station. 'Tis good, nicely floral and still good and cold.

December 20th was the last Duckie before Christmas. Having trekked up to Scotland for a funeral a week or so earlier, we were very much in the right headspace for a good, hearty Duckie. We'd also had our usual Christmas argument over the Norwegian spruce (bought at the last minute from Clapham High Street and hauled back home, painfully, via taxi), which I'd decorated in a state of passive-aggression.

Thankfully (thankyou, Baby Jesus) it was just the right Duckie to heal all wounds. Gareth was there, as was Mel, the crowd was sparser than usual (as one might've expected) and the mood convivial.

Ms Lamé looked lovely as ever, in a white fascinator.

First act was Tim Spooner & Matthew Robins (featuring Gavin) - formerly known as The Society of Wonders, dramatic puppeteers supreme - who performed a very Tim Burtonesque little shadow psychodrama, Flyboy and the Haunted Snowman.

It must be said, the fellow manipulating the puppets (clad in a sort of Ashes To Ashes surfsuit of white funfur) was exceptionally easy on the eye.

The Society of Wonders has never disappointed. This show, in their new incarnation, was more contained than their Punch & Judy shows and also, somehow, oddly moving. I talked afterwards to Wee Lee (who later danced to, I think, Hounds of Love - it was Classic Duckie), who agreed that the show made him feel like he was five again. I know what he meant: there was a childlike, dreamlike quality to the plot and an emotionally engaging punch to the finale. Lovely.

It would've been hard to follow that. The second act was Marcus Reeves, who appeared onstage in a frankly terrifying Christmas tree outfit and sang a medley of festive tunes. I liked his substitution of Wham's Last Christmas, "this year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone ugly".

He chucked cotton wool snowballs and Roses chocolates into the audience. Very evocative but I ended up picking cotton woolly chocolate gunk off the soles of my shoes for the rest of the night.

It was a good night, though. Made me feel properly Christmassy.

I like pie

2008-12-24T19:34:00.013Z

I do love Christmas Eve. Or rather, I do these days, since making the decision a few years back to stay in London with TSB rather than doing the frantic train/'plane trip north to visit parents. Now, it's a time for sitting back and relaxing: everything's done, presents are wrapped and under the tree all seems still and calm. I'm listening to one of my favourite Christmas carols, In The Bleak Midwinter, on TSB's playlist, while updating my own on iTunes.

Here's Frida-from-ABBA's somewhat abbreviated version

and, more traditionally, the whole song:

Dinner this evening was a second helping of what's been one of my favourite presents Of All Time, from our lovely friend Mrs B: on Monday, she presented us with a huge and delicious game pie. Here it is, teasingly wrapped

and denuded!

With the flash:

See the layers! According to Mrs B's home-made label, this pie "might contain" Pheasant, Partridge, Quail, Sparrow, Veal, Wild Boar, Bambi, Pig Foot, Bigfoot, Foie Gras, Sweetbreads, Cock, Cock Robin, Plymouth Dry Gin, Port, Lies, Lice and Mice.

This is why I'd be shit at vegetarianism and why I am shit at anything low-carb. Meat just tastes better in a pastry parcel. I realised, disturbingly, that the two films I can recall which made me think, upon leaving the cinema, "hmm, I fancy a pie now" both featured cannibalism: Titus and Sweeney Todd.

Mmm, pie...

Three feet high and rising

2008-12-13T14:53:00.003Z

There's a storm outside and the gap between crack and thunder is closing in...

It's mid-afternoon and I'm lying in bed listening to the rain outside. Apparently there's flooding in the southwest, water almost three feet deep in some places. When I lived in Scotland, we used to scoff at this sort of report: bloody English can't even cope with weather. Of course, Scotland's full of pointy mountains. On a flat plain, it's rather a different matter.

I rather like rain, and still get excited by thunderstorms. I've always found James' Sometimes invigorating:

I associate this song with Morocco, a trip from Marrakech into the Atlas Mountains. Returning, with Sometimes on my iPod, I was amazed to find floodwaters waist deep, traffic chaos and kids splashing through the swirling brown puddles.

Vous êtes jamais seuls

2008-12-11T16:47:00.006Z

The funeral went well, at least as well as these things go. It's only the fourth funeral I've ever attended and I realised they've all been winter funerals - December, January or February. That's probably a good thing: it feels vaguely appropriate to be chilly, wretched and draped in black.

I felt a little bit sick beforehand but attributed that to the hurried Burger King in the station before catching the train out to the wilds of nowhere. Stilted hellos beforehand, with people I only vaguely knew. I did okay until the hearse arrived with the long wooden box, and then I got a bit wobbly. Then there was the order of service, printed with a really nice photo of B smiling in the sunlight: when I saw that, the tears started to flow. I had to keep it turned over because his picture kept giving me a wrench.

The ceremony itself was unfamiliar but nonetheless reassuring; it did what funerals are meant to do. I sniffled my way through a pack of Handy Andies, trying to avoid a saltysnotty moustache. Best of all was the bit at the end when, all of a sudden, the hall resounded with the chant, "YOUR DISCO, YOUR DISCO, YOUR DISCO NEEEEDS YOU!" and everyone, myself included, seemed to laugh and cry simultaneously. Kylie's never been my favourite but I like that song and, right then, it was exactly what was needed. Apparently the choice of B's partner. Good choice.

Afterwards, getting a lift to the wake, the car radio played my obsession of the moment, The Killers' Human, and I felt quite uplifted by the daffy-but-fuzzily-inspirational lyrics. Another case of just the right song for the moment. Me and TSB sang along:

I still feel sad but less so now. And I slept well last night, which was much-needed.

He's gone 2000 miles

2008-12-09T01:05:00.003Z

Heading to Scotland tomorrow for B's funeral, second of three trips north this month. I know this is going to be harrowing but necessary.

I cry like a baby at funerals - any funeral - and I've a feeling there's a lot behind the floodgates this time. I've been finding myself getting wobbly at unexpected moments at least once a day. I guess the function of funerals is to get it all out, mutually remember the deceased, drink a lot and otherwise have a sort of emotional radiator-bleed. My radiator needs bleeding.

I don't currently have a good dark suit that's not pinstripey but at least I have a subtle stripe that'll be fine with white shirt and black tie. And funerals are always good for a long, flappy black leather coat.

Je suis superficiel. It's what B would've wanted.

The carnivores and the destructors

2008-12-07T12:07:00.028Z

It's been an odd, doomy week for me. B is still, obviously, in my thoughts and me and TSB have been making arrangements to attend his funeral next week. That'll involve a train ride Up North, the second this month. First was a work-related trip up to Manchester on Thursday, back yesterday. Not bad because I was staying with my sister and caught up with her, my brother-in-law and all the little nieces and nephews. The eldest is just old enough that he's becoming fascinated with the concept of older people having family relationships other than parental ones: he's intrigued that his mother is also my sister, just like he's got sisters. His younger sister's disbelieving that such a thing is possible.

So that was nice. The trip back was annoyingly sluggish, because of scheduled work going on blah blah fishcakes, meaning I had the equivalent of the Slow Train To Euston via Birmingham International. I did, however, have a carriage almost entirely to myself and could stare out at the darkening countryside and imagine myself a lone survivor of some Terry Nation-penned catastrophe... I dozed off (which I usually do on trains) and woke to find the train was motionless with complete blackness outside, no lights at all. I'd no idea where we'd stalled or whether there was now a delay. Eerily disorientating.

Of course, it didn't help that I was nearing the end of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning The Road, a beautifully-written but terrifying piece of postapocalyptica. There's a lot of it about at the moment, what with Dead Set and now Survivors. I guess the recession causes one to consider other scenarios of civilisation collapse, from nuclear holocaust to plague to zombies. As I've remarked before, I find myself drawn to these doom-laden tales and in a weird way they're perversely comforting. The Road, however, is just so unremittingly (for the most part, anyway) bleak that I think that sense of bleakness (struggling to survive in a blackened, lifeless, cannibalistic world of grey ash and dead bones) suffused me for a while, mixing with the more particular ache of B's death.

Anyway, I'd planned to return to London by tea time so there'd be the option of Duckie. Slightly torn between the urge to cocoon at home with TSB (even short trips away make me feel like that) and the desire to get out of the house but be somewhere familiar surrounded by The Gays. A hot bath and the reflection that That's What B Would Want Us To Do saw us tending toward the latter. B not having been unacquainted with excess (wonderfully so), I suspect this won't be the last time he'll be invoked as rationale for getting out and partying.

To be frank, it felt a little like a post-apocalyptic version of Duckie, too. Some of that's undoubtedly carry-over of my general mood but the club itself was the sparsest I've seen it for a long while: Amy remarked on the credit crunchiness of the "smattering of applause" which greeted her appearance onstage and assured us we wouldn't be asked to dig deep for more. Just as well, really, in the case of the first act, Ruby Somethingorother (Nesk? Nesh?), a well-proportioned woman in a black satin basque and marabou-trimmed robe. She came on the strains of the Kaiser Chiefs' Ruby and... well, she walked around a bit, grinning. That was largely it. She said stuff that wasn't quite funny enough to be comedy, wasn't developed or engaging enough to be "character" and wasn't weird/unusual enough to fall into the Intriguing Duckie Oddities category.

What she did do spectacularly well was misjudge both audience and host to the point of alienation. Firstoff, she referred to Amy as the "compere" (to which Amy took exception) then made some half-cocked jibe about preferring male comperes and wondering whether Amy was a man in drag. That didn't go down well. She then started hassling a man in the front row, asking what he did for a living (worked in a museum bookshop) and taking the piss out of the fact that he had ginger hair and wore glasses. Not a great move, given that

a) the guy in question was really rather cute,

b) within the particular geek-chic beardygay demographic which attends Duckie, ginger hair and glasses are not only not automatically seen as bad/sad/undesirable, they're frequently fetishised as being especially sexy

and

c) Amy's partner is a bespectacled redhead.

So. All things considered, a bit rubbish really; she really lost the crowd. A less polite audience would've booed her offstage (as it was, there was a fair bit of disgruntled not-quite-booing at a couple of points). She wasn't called back to take her applause. Gareth and I wondered whether her act would've been successful in any sort of club setting, gay or straight. It just seemed weak and lacking in substance and, where audience banter was concerned, verging on nasty.

(I should say also that there're no photos of this week's Duckie. I brought my Good Camera along and stupidly left the detachable lens at home. D'oh!)

The second act was better (they'd have been hard pushed to be worse): Stewart Somethingorother (neither act is named on the Duckie website, hence my uncertainty), a naggingly familiar-looking chap who's apparently played guitar as part of David Hoyle's act in the past. He came on in a sort of genderqueer early Bananarama drag, full slap, cap, shirt, baggy slacks and really rather lovely shoes. A kind of mimed finding a guitar, licking it and starting to strum chords. Eventually, he became entangled in the flex, fell over and lay still - only to be dragged offstage by a menacing, portly chap dressed like a football hooligan and snarling song lyrics at the audience. All a little bizarre but at least interesting to look at and deserving of applause.

Thank Gawd for the Readers Wifes. They pretty much saved this week's Duckie: almost despite myself, I ended up jumping and air-punching to the likes of Laid and He's On The 'Phone. Bought tickets for their New Year bash and am in the process of enjoying their annual CD mix.

Oh, and Maur Valance was there, so I got a chance to congratulate her for winning the Femme Realism prize at Liverpool Is Burning. She's lovely.

"Destructors" would, I think, be a fitting description of the last hour or two of KUNST, a couple of Fridays ago. This was my second time (the first being the fabulous night featuring Our Lady J's debut solo performance) and I'd made a token gesture toward the Narnia/History of Art dress code by wearing a black shirt and spidery jewellery, gingering up my beard and sticking a large dressing over one ear. I was Vincent Van Goth, ho bloody ho. No, no-one else got it either but I did receive several concerned enquiries as to my aural health. Halfway through the evening, I got pissed off with hearing everything in mono and ripped the dressing off. Shame sunflowers were out of season.

In the event, the couple of punters who actually paid any heed to the dress code went as Narnians, specifically the White Witch. Our lovely host, Dusty Limits, had gone pale and witchy too (not to say a tad consumptive):

KUNST is, I'm coming to realise, more cabaret-heavy than either Duckie or Vauxhallville. I liked Miss Leggy Pee, who showed us her puppies:

She later did a couple of really rather cute Doris Dayesque lip-synched duets with her little old man-puppet:

There was also a rather pleasing operatic version of Psycho Killer

and some excellent poetry from Salena Godden (seen here with truly goddess-like sun-disc balanced on her head):

Nathan Evans did his Queen puppetry striptease:

It's a clever act but I've seen it before at least twice now and I agree with Gareth that some of the trampled-upon rights mentioned in his critique seem to date faster than others in terms of audience response.

For me, however, the oddest part of the evening was the finale, a live last-ever-performance (well, before they return to the US, I don't think they're splitting up) from KUNST's resident house band, Holy Ghost Revival. Apparently they traditionally come on and play toward the end of each KUNST but presumably Our Lady J took their place the last (and first) time I was there.

I guess I found them odd because it all seemed really un-Weimar Cabaret somehow. It wasn't bad, necessarily - there was something quite exhilarating about all that rawk 'n' roll energy - but it did seem to go on about twice as long as it should've done. When Dusty Limits called for a lock-in and an encore, I found myself thinking, "couldn't we just have the DJ back, playing music I actually like?" It was all a little bit jarringly hetero, too, but queered up a bit by Dusty's tales of snogging various band members, reenacted for us onstage.

Here's some pics:

I dunno, though. I don't really understand the appeal of that sort of rock/metal interface; it really has always seemed to me a peculiarly heterosexual thing, the straight boys' opportunity to strut and revel in glitter, spandex, tight leather and big hair while aggressively proclaiming their rampant desire for the ladeez. I was slightly surprised, at one point, to find myself mouthing the words despite not remotely recognising the tune (or even a tune): it was a cover or a part-sampling of Like A Prayer, probably my favourite Madonna song.

How queer.

Another man has lost a friend

2008-12-02T12:57:00.005Z

I was going to post about last Friday's KUNST but I'm not in the mood for it. I've been feeling numb and cold and a bit unreal since hearing yesterday evening about the death of a great friend of both me and TSB. Today it's sinking in a little more.

B died suddenly over the weekend. He was in his early 40s, apparently in fine health, recently (last couple of years) moved in with a good partner after many not-so-good partners. The partner came home from work on Friday and found B slumped dead in front of the computer. Presumably something cardiac; I don’t think anyone knows yet.

B was my partner’s friend for years before I met him. At that time, he was a nurse. He’d moved to London a while before and the summer me and TSB got together (1995) we came down for Pride and spent a couple of weeks in the city (B insisted we lodge in his bedroom while he took the couch). I think it was that summer that convinced me I wanted eventually to move south: in my memory, it's a haze of sunlight (on the strikingly sunflower-gold walls of B's small flat; we later stole the colour when we painted our living room), the smell of baking pavements, a hugely exotic (to me) gay scene, Britpop at its height and glorious daytime boozing in Soho and Camden and King's Cross with B's seemingly vast and diverse social butterfly network of friends, neighbours, admirers, ex-shags, future shags and acquaintances. All of it tinged, naturally, with the rush of my being in the first giddy flushes of love.

B was the first gay Londoner I’d met and initially his combination of metropolitan archness (at times, frankly, screaming campness), gregariousness and fearless confidence intimidated the hell out of me. He was HIV+ve too, that was acknowledged but only ever talked about obliquely. As far as I know (and I don’t know much), he must’ve been diagnosed in the early ‘90s. I always got the impression he was faintly surprised - but delighted - at having lasted so long, and embraced life accordingly. He certainly seemed to do phenomenally well on whatever therapy he was taking. I’ve no idea whether his HIV status is anything to do with his sudden death.

Talking about him in the past tense is strange. It’s still difficult to believe I won’t see him again. His Facebook page mentions his November trip to Berlin with his partner, and his most recently-tagged pics are all cosy domesticity, watering plants and dozing on the settee with his large fluffy cat sprawled beside him. His latest status update is “[B] is bolloxed”. I reckon he’d probably have liked that.

Looking like a true survivor

2008-11-28T00:02:00.006Z

Feeling like a little kid: Galashiela's 'phoned this evening, four times without leaving a message, at 10.16, 10.17, 10.18 and 10.23; it feels exciting but a little scary having her trapped in my 'phone, like when I was 5 and caught a bee in a jar. It hummed furiously until I was sure I could feel the glass vibrating with its anger and I started to worry that, when I let it out again, it'd exact a painful revenge upon me. Galashiela in my 'phone feels like that...

So far, I'm loving Survivors, to the extent that I'm considering getting hold of a boxed set of the original series (it was a little before my time) for comparison. It's exactly the kind of slightly down-at-heel British apocalypse I like, what Brian Aldiss (in a spot of SF authorial bitchslapping of John Wyndham) termed "cosy catastrophe".

I like the cosiness - and occasionally clunky dialogue, the hint of twee (even Dexter, this week's gun-toting New Warlord is basically a minor Mad Max baddy in zip-up Fred Perry), the hovering spectres of Tom and Barbara Good. I quite like the fact that the lesbian doctor isn't out about being a lesbian or a doctor. I'm even tolerating the Lost-like tendency of this particular bunch of survivors to maintain immaculate make-up and/or clean-shavenness weeks after the catastrophe itself.

The only thing that's annoying me is the repeated montage of Alim and Najif unconvincingly "bonding" over football and chickens. Let's hope the sentimentalised Irresponsible Playboy Redeemed By Lovable Orphan (which, let's face it, began and ended with Annie) doesn't become a weekly fixture...

Band of gold

2008-11-25T21:30:00.004Z

Bit of a panic today when, arriving at work, I realised my wedding ring (the word "wedding" sets my teeth on edge a bit in this context but "civil partnership ring" sounds more wrong somehow) was no longer on my finger.

A little over two years ago, shortly after we got hitched, I wrote the following:

Jewellery. Possibly more of an issue for men than women, but that's largely speculation and may be bollocks. I'm sitting here twirling the civil partnership (okay, wedding) ring on the fourth finger of my left hand. It's a simple band of white gold, slightly convex. Most of the time, I'm acutely aware of its presence: I feel like my finger sweats more underneath it and, in the shower, I worry that the little band of skin underneath won't get properly soaped/cleaned.

I'd love to put a psychological spin on this - ambivalence about partnership, fear of committment, etc - but I think it's largely about feeling uncomfortable with stuff on my body. When I sleep, I have to take everything off - clothes, watch, any jewellery - and the wear-it-alwaysness of my civ... wedding ring is still impinging upon my consciousness. I was hoping that, as with cats and their collars, I wouldn't notice it after a while. It's been a week, and I'm still acutely aware of it. It cost so much, though, that I daren't take it off; I know I'd lose it.

In the intervening time, I've got used to it to the extent that I feel acutely conscious of its absence. I wear it in my sleep. When my hands are cold, it seems looser (possibly it's the micro-stickiness of sweat that holds it in place) and can rattle up and down, sometimes slipping over the knuckle. When it's like that, I keep my fingers slightly crooked to stop it dropping off - but I worried today that it'd happened without me noticing.

The other possibility was that I'd forgotten to put it on again after this morning's shower. Heading out the door, I 'phoned TSB and asked him to check the bathroom... then promptly found it inside one of my gloves. I'd pulled it off my finger when I'd removed it.

Phew.

Knee deep in the hoopla

2008-11-25T19:08:00.003Z

Hmmm. You can tell it's been a good (or at least an alcohol-soaked) Duckie when it takes me several days to pen the comedown post.

Me and TSB undoubtedly drink more than the somewhat arbitrary Government-set Recommended Maximum Number Of Units. We went through a period not so long ago of not drinking at all during the week: this was all well and good but, come Friday, we were practically bursting forth from our respective workplaces like Bart Simpson on his skateboard, hurtling o'er bridge and under tunnel for Soho. Set the controls for the heart of the pub!

This weekday/weekend distinction's been relaxed a little and we sometimes break open the wine or G&T of an evening. We've yet to completely lose the Friday pub-scramble, though. We likes our booze, we does.

After the exotica of Liverpool Is Burning and last week's more cabaretastic pleasures, we were hankering for a chunk of ye olde original Readers Wifes. Kim Phaggs awol this week but Chelsea Kelsey ably assisted by Jock (with both Cloths on the door plus Amy and Simon, making a healthy five out of six) did the business, tickling our aural G-spots to perfection.

There's usually something visually engaging playing onstage at Duckie before the cabaret starts. We found ourselves increasingly engrossed in an evocative little black-and-white film about two apparently deaf-and-mute grafters in a grotty bedsit in 1950s London. The industrial landscape was all-encompassing, making both me and Mel (sporting the black version of her teardrop necklace) think of a host of Smiths songs. It occurred to me that the basic message of many (most?) of this kind of British drama of the period was Life Is Grim, Don't Get Ideas Above Your Station. In this case, there was a "moral" dimension too, as one of our hapless deaf-mutes canoodles, post-pub, with a young woman who's clearly No Better Than She Should Be - and subsequently dies, pushed off a wall into a canal by some feral children. With horrible irony, his friend passes by but doesn't see him and can't hear his cries. So he dies. The End. Life's a bummer. Don't Have Sex (With Tarts-With-Hearts).

We were all, including Gareth, briefly traumatised by this abrupt and rather shockingly downbeat ending. TSB later discovered the film is called Together and features the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi (designer of the Tottenham Court Road Tube mosaic!) as the surviving main character.

Amy was working a vaguely '80s silver-and-black look, including a chunky pendant fashioned from what appeared to be a tea strainer.

Starting cabaret act was the first of two turns by Probe, a duo who performed a Fred 'n' Gingeresque dance in vintage evening dress. Very swish. As Theo, the handsome male half, stood at the front of the stage at the beginning, a voice to my left said thoughtfully and appreciatively, "quite big bulge" and we all tittered like big ol' gays.

They made it all look sooo easy.

Their second act was a more contemporary piece that took the piss out of po-faced contemporary dance ("and then I did this... and suddenly the gap between here and here became significant"). Quite a few Duckie virgins around (I'd found myself becoming Mr Crankypants Thirtysomething around them, particularly when they squawkily invaded the stage between acts and I felt compelled to tidy away a pint glass that seemed permanently on the verge of being knocked into the audience) and their attention seemed to drift a little during this part.

At one point, Antonia, the female Probe, put a foot wrong and fell backwards off the stage. There was an audible gasp of maybe half a second but she was caught in the arms of someone standing in the front row and sprang immediately back onstage as if on elastic. Impressive.

Final act was Marawa, hula hoop artiste extraordinaire. I've seen her before at Duckie (I think - Amy seems to have a particular love of hula hoopery and there've been a few hula girls over the years) and was excellent this time too, really working the crowd. Her calypso outfit, moves and some of her expressions (exaggerated by enormous fake eyelashes) reminded me of the bit at the beginning of Belleville Rendezvouz featuring the Josephine Baker caricature.

(Armwavey pint of beverage not photographer's own.)

'Twas a bit of an odd night for me, as I kept glimpsing an ex-colleague of mine in the middle of a moderately rowdy group of people (one of several birthdays in the RVT that night) and wondering if I should go over and say hello. At one point, I turned around to find him directly behind, looking right at me without a hint of recognition. I said (shouted) hello. Still no recognition. After a minute or two, I was reminded that my ex-colleague had a twin brother; it was he I was talking to. Heh.

Another in-house arts installation thingy, this time "being photographed taking poppers for free" (as Amy put it) in the Tavern's upstairs bathroom. At 1.30am, the results were projected onto the onstage screen and I was moderately glad I hadn't taken part.

Motherfuckers gonna drop the pressure

2008-11-18T00:55:00.011Z

Saw Oedipus at the National Theatre this evening, starring dear dear old Ralphie Fiennes as the titular (and, frankly, tit-u-titter-at) Theban boy who loved his mother.

First time I've actually seen a Greek tragedy performed, and possibly the last. Not a great many laughs - not intentional, anyway - and little suspense. I spent much of the play thinking "oh for fuck's sake, how many hints do you need?" in response to Oedipus's phenomenal slowness on the uptake. Mind you, the clue's in the name, innit? I might as well criticise Shakespeare for being full of clichés.

The set was beautiful, a big, slowly revolving disc of tarnished bronze with an enormous set of double doors in the same verdigris. The all-male chorus was good too, vaguely reminiscent of a Welsh male voice choir when they burst into song. I liked the way the three shepherds (well, two shepherds and a messenger) echoed the three ages of Man, the answer to Oedipus's earlier answering of the Sphinx's riddle.

Ralphie himself was okay, possibly a touch hammy. For some reason, I've always found it difficult to warm to him as an actor and bits of Oedipus seemed overdone to the point where the audience was giggling. He had a tendency to leave odd ac-torly gaps in his phrasing and the bit at the end where he crawled around, blinded, seemed to go on forever. Clare Higgins as Jocasta was subtler in her mumsy grief; I found myself watching her quieter but somehow more expressive gestures. Mind you, she'll always stick in my mind as Julia, the blood-smeared yuppie from Hellraiser.

Our homeward Tube was stuck in a tunnel for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes because the driver of a train in front had felt unwell then collapsed. Considerate of him to do it in a station. A substitute driver had to be called. I twiddled my thumbs, while TSB commented loudly on which colours of nail polish might suit me rather than the coppery apricot I sported for Liverpool Is Burning.

Sunday girl

2008-11-17T00:33:00.009Z

It's Galashiela again, Sunday evening 10.02pm:

"Leanna, 'phone the shop and get off the house 'phone. Bye."

The plot thickens. No way am I 'phoning back and explaining it's a wrong number. That'd put an end to future voyeurdrama.

Relaxed Sunday, which is euphemism for Did Nothing Constructive Sunday. TSB and I react to boozy nights in completely different ways: I sleep late; he wakens early and wants to do stuff. Him still being on the current gym kick, he heads uptown, goes through his routine of cycling and rowing and sweating and showering, then 'phones me to plan lunch. I'm usually still dozing (this morning, I was phasing in and out of an alarming dream set in an exaggeratedly brown ITV version of the 1970s, in which I'd survived some kind of event that had turned almost everyone else into monsters-to-be-avoided but, I told myself within the dream, not zombies). I used to feel really guilty at my relative lack of exercise but, over time, that wash of guilt has faded to the merest twinge.

Leaving Duckie last night, we noticed that a Kennington hostelry, The Oval Lounge, seemed to be doing a special promotion for frequenters of the RVT (presumably because so many gayers schlep up and down Clapham/Kennington Park Road on their way to and from Vauxhall) so we decided to head there for Sunday lunch. Here's a pic from their Facebook group:

We found ourselves seated near a couple of appealingly camp black guys loudly discussing sexual technique (that all-important relaxing of the sphincter muscles) and a pair of vaguely Sloaney twentysomething women who were, bizarrely (because they really didn't seem the type), talking about the Bible. We decided one was inducting (indoctrinating?) the other into some sort of religious cult. I reckoned it was a cult with weird dietary restrictions because both of them were stick-thin and had been toying with glasses of water since we arrived - but they surprised us again by suddenly ordering the same main course that we'd plumped for, a towering roast-beef-and-veg based creation in an enormous soup bowl, drenched in red winey-tasting gravy and topped with a Yorkshire pud. A bulimic break, perhaps.

Anyway, lunch was delicious and there was plenty of it. We were just finishing up when the sound system - which had hitherto been playing inoffensive background muzak that sounded a bit like Air - started playing Return To Oz and we both went a bit melty. It was always my favourite Scissor Sisters track but never a single and they only rarely played it live. Realised I hadn't listened to it - or indeed, much of the first album - for aaages.

Here's a rather good fan video:

Keep keep bleeding

2008-11-16T22:29:00.023Z

After last weekend's jaunt up to Liverpool, me and TSB were all up for taking it easy this weekend: not straying too much from the pleasantly familiar routine of lunch, alcohol, Duckie, bed, lunch, alcohol, bed. In that order, obvieusement.

Saturday evening, though, we paid a flying pre-RVT visit to the Bread & Roses in Clapham, for our friend S's 30th birthday drinks. Getting off the Tube surrounded by slightly braying white boys in shirtsleeves, I was reminded of that tendency of straight people to band together in large, loud, underdressed packs the better to wander the High Streets of Britain. Hadn't seen S for ages and he'd put on weight but in the right way: always a looker, he now has an appealing upper body solidity. Yum. He'd been in the pub since 5pm but amazingly wasn't trashed. I remembered turning thirty and actually feeling quite good about the whole thing - like suddenly the pressure was off me to pay lip service to fashion or know what was Number 1 or whatever. I was free to indulge my incipient fogeyness.

Got to Duckie a little after 10. Only two of the Six there, Amy and Simon, making us somewhat apprehensive. Simon lovely as ever, though (his Movember 'tache noticeably bushier), chatting to us about Liverpool Is Burning and asking after the "beautiful woman" who'd accompanied me there, ho ho. Later, Amy acknowledged us from the stage as "hardcore" for having trekked up north and back. We felt duly smug. Our hostess was looking particularly good, in a long floaty blue-and-white ensemble, the Virgin Amy:

DJ Lush was standing in for the Wifes. I've said it before but it's true enough to bear repetition: the Readers Wifes really have spoiled us for other DJs. Lush is better than most and, if I'd never heard Kim Phaggs and Chelsea Kelsey, I'd probably be an enthusiastic, committed fan. She plays pretty decent stuff really, last night's selection a distinct improvement on the last time she DJed at Duckie, but her timing was wrong, somehow. With the Wifes, there's a sense of momentum steadily building throughout the evening - some songs are unfamiliar but consistent within the whole - whereas DJ Lush's choices seemed more random and, at times, misjudged. She played Starman really early in the evening and it was wasted on a not-yet-drunk-enough-to-sing-along audience. Ditto The Boy With The Thorn In His Side. There was a tendency toward recent indie rather than the from-any-era oddities characteristic of the Wifes, and she had a greater tolerance for longer, atmosphere-sapping tracks like Siouxsie & the Banshees' Monitor, which seemed to go on for a thousand years. I wouldn't even have known what it was if Gareth hadn't cheated by using Shazam. Suffice to say the pacing didn't really work for me.

I dunno, it feels a bit unfair to criticise a DJ for not being the same as the Wifes. On the other hand, Gareth left early and we followed shortly afterwards, around 1.15, only the second time ever we've left Duckie before the end. It just wasn't happening with the music and the crowd was an unusual one, too. A brace of scary blonde women had dumped their coats on the activity island (the new cloakroom?), a group of directionally-hairdoed Baby Gays were crowding us from the direction of the stage (for reasons which will become apparent in a moment) and the throng seemed more difficult than usual to push through to bar or toilet.

But! But but but! The cabaret was really rather good, with a thematic consistency uncommon to Duckie, that theme being mess. Ick. Gunk. Stickiness. Eww.

First up, one John Joseph Bibby, auburn-tressed beauty in an intricate frock apparently made entirely of paper. White paper had been taped over the whole stage, too (some tit spilt their drink on it earlier and several sheets had to be replaced with fresh ones).

Bibby began to sing, while an attractively monobrowed Frieda Kahlo lookalike daubed him with various colours of poster paint.

She finished up by tipping whole pots over him. By this time, we were being pinned against the activity island by the cowering Baby Gays. Paint is a nightmare to get out of one's Abercrombie & Fitch.

Act No.2 was a couple of Duckieites turned performers - according to Amy, a not uncommon trajectory - Justin Sweets and Caramel Miranda. The stage was set with all manner of sugary sprinkles, chews, hundreds & thousands... and a beeyoootiful high-calorie titfer was contrived:

The ickiness? Well, the tower of sundae glasses was glued together with liberal applications of lurid technicolour goo, squeezed from an icing bag. As with Bibby's paint, it went all over her hair. TSB, who's mildly phobic about such things, shuddered by my side.

There were occasional pauses to throw confectionery into the audience. I felt my tummy rumble and my fillings squeal.

"What," teased Amy, "could possibly follow that?"

A genuine(ish) beauty queen, Miss Teen South Carolina:

Apparently this was the burlesque performer Gypsy Wood, doing a word-perfect pisstake of this famous moment in beauty pageant history:

Poor (real) Miss Teen South Carolina...

A quick costume change later, our own Duckie version then proceeded to launch into her own dance interpretation of Whitney Houston's high Glycaemic Index gloopathon, The Greatest Love Of All (before she discovered crack, one assumes):

This in itself would've been funny enough - she managed to hit just the right note of hilarious almost-sincerity, without lapsing into all-out slapstick - but, all of a sudden, the crotch of Miss Teen South Carolina's pristine leotard began to well crimson...

... and blood seeped out and down her legs. This would've been shocking in any context (blood-red on white just is, presumably tapping into some ancient OMGbleedingtodeath reflex) but, happening in a roomful of (mostly) gay males, there was a collective gasp of horror as we were all reminded of womeny bits that bleed. Misogyny? Perhaps, but at least this act made me examine my own instinctive gay male "urgh" and it did so in an amusing way.

Miss Teen South Carolina slopped around in her own menstruum, finishing up blood-streaked and triumphant, Carrie-turned-cheerleader, to huge applause.

I was reminded of Amy's occasional scary headmistress persona, though, when a drunken arsewipe from the back of the room threw a piece of ice up onto the stage. Amy looked daggers into the audience, identifying the culprit; after the act's conclusion, she publicly invited him outside. Barred? Presumably. Throwing stuff at the performers is a definite Duckie no-no. Unless they invite it.

So... yeah. A Duckie where the cabaret was markedly better than the music. Not often that happens.

All of the boys and the girls

2008-11-15T14:28:00.013Z

(I started something I couldn't finish - well, not for almost a week. It's the picture-adding that's been particularly time-consuming. Here's my spiel pretty much verbatim, though.)

I'm writing this from the First Class compartment of a Virgin train, speeding back to Euston from Liverpool. I've always had a bit of a weakness for the Weekend First option whereby one can upgrade a Standard ticket and acquire, for the princely sum of 15, additional legroom, attractively Tripodsesque table lighting and unlimited tea, coffee and biscuits. I particularly associate the Weekend First option with Sundays, as during the year TSB and I were apart (2001-02, I think) one of us commuted every weekend - and that 15 upgrade was a real comforter during the depressing Sunday journey away from one's partner and back toward the working week.

I'm sipping my second half-bottle of Hardy's Nottage Hill Chardonnay 2007 and listening to Uptown Top Ranking, part of TSB's gym playlist on a borrowed ipod, the better to drown out a large woman with a larger voice, which is cutting through the privileged calm of Carriage J. Why is it that some people's voices seem to carry, particularly? It's not always about volume. American accents carry but our fellow passenger isn't American. TSB reckons it's about bass notes but I reckon it's about hardness/softness: I've experienced shrill or cut-glass accents that are equally hard to block out.

But! Blocked out she is, and I am enjoying a pleasingly mellow return trip to London Euston after the phantasmogoria that was this weekend's Duckie Grand Vogue Ball side-project, Liverpool Is Burning. A half-hour's scrubbing has (mostly) removed the Rimmel Gold polish from my nails but I'm very aware that I still have glitter in my beard...

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's go through it all in order. Firstoff, we arrived in Liverpool early afternoon on Saturday, having got up for what felt like an incredibly early Saturday 09.17 King's Cross train. Nice countryside but I'm not used to Saturday before midday and slept through about a third of it. Another intrusive voice on the way there but Liverpool-accented and thus a taster of things to come.

I'm a bit funny with accents. When I first came to London, it took me a while to get over the novelty of hearing accents I'd sort of considered fictional: for a few weeks at least, I felt like I was living in an episode of Eastenders. Same thing this weekend, except Brookside. Or Brooochhsayyyde.

Another stereotype was confirmed for me when the Adelphi Hotel - our accommodation and venue for Liverpool Is Burning - seemed full of people in cheap nylon shellsuits. Harry Enfield's moustachioed Scousers leapt to mind ("caaalm down") but it transpired that these were actually Russian (and/or East European) folk. At one point, a trio of giggly nylon-suited chaps tried, very ineptly, to take my and TSB's photos in the hotel lift, as we headed back to our rooms at a little after 1am. "If you want, we're happy to pose," I offered, slightly bemused at the fact that they were taking our photos when there'd been a wealth of much weirder and more wonderful creatures to goggle at, just a room or two away from Reception.

So... yes, we arrived at the Adelphi (wasn't it in some sort of hotel-based reality series a few years ago - The Hotel or something?), dumped our things in the room (comfortable bed but generally unimpressive for the price - no wi-fi, tacky marble-effect linoleum on the bathroom walls, chewing gum on the ceiling and a general sense of stickiness) and decided to explore Liverpool a little. Bumped into Ms Lame in Reception; she was in search of nail polish.

I liked Liverpool, what I saw of it. I seem instinctively to like or dislike cities and it had a good buzz, although it seemed peculiarly Caucasian (after London, almost everywhere seems jarringly white). We wandered down to the Albert Docks and ate at a rather impressively converted building called The Old Pumphouse (or something similarly faintly innuendo-suggestive). I'd got it into my head that I needed a black silk hanky to complete my outfit (it's all about the details, sweetie) and we couldn't find a pocket square anywhere - but eventually found a shinyish cotton handkerchief in Next.

Back at the Adelphi, things were hotting up. The public areas were much sexier than our bedroom, and we wandered through the grand atrium to the ballroom behind. Duckie's Simon was busy setting up a catwalk and lighting rig (the lighting was one of the best things about the show) but recognised us and took a moment to thank us for coming. Sweetie. He looked very cute later, in top-to-toe white with a Movember 'tache:

Meant to snooze - needed to snooze, really - but too excited about preparations and decided to run a bath and paint my nails. First time I've ever done it, but I think I did an okay job - it's not that different from painting window frames. The hair mascara (Copper and Gold) I'd bought to make my beard glittery was less successful: too subtle by half; I wanted something that'd make my face furniture shine like burnished bullion and it just looked like blonde highlights, not that metallic at all.

(Some odd noises outside our room while we were getting ready: sounded like someone in the corridor making grunting sounds while doing martial arts, or perhaps doing a David Brent style hip hop-inspired dance. Or maybe vogueing. Disconcerting.)

We'd spent aaages planning our outfits for Liverpool Is Burning. TSB had bought a rather lovely gold cocktail dress from Marks & Spencer and had been carb-bashing to fit it (in the event, he popped all three buttons over the the course of the evening). He'd rediscovered a dark bobbed wig we bought for Hallowe'en two years ago (when he was Clarice Starling and I Hannibal Lecter) and I'd bought him a black velvet pillbox hat with veil. His niece had got into the spirit, gifting him some wonderful black opera gloves and he'd decided on a sort of Jackie O vibe, buying a clutch bag, shades and jewellery to match. Make-up being something of an undiscovered country for both of us, he'd only bought lipstick (which became wilder and more Divine David as the night progressed).

My outfit was simpler, as it was defined by TSB's: I'd dressed as a sort of pimptastic companion, in coordinating black and gold. And, er, beige - lacking a white suit and hat, I had to make do with a cream suit and fawn-coloured Borsalino fedora, with my two-tone shoes and a sequined black shirt. Actually, the suit made me look vaguely '70s-seedy (especially with aviator shades), which was good. I pretended that's what I'd meant all along. TSB reckoned I looked like August Darnell (Kid Creole to me and you).

Gussied up to the nines, we moseyed down to Reception and the ballroom itself. It took a while for the place itself to open so we hung about, downed a couple of G&Ts and had our photos taken. When the ballroom opened there was something of a rush but we managed to secure catwalkside seats. This, it turned out, was a mixed blessing. We were excellently placed for maximal posing (especially if I used my camera flash - voguers quickly realised this was a good direction in which to strrrike a pose) but also seemed prime attractors for all manner of detritus from the stage: various grades of glitter, pages from a book (scattered by a most becoming Naked Civil Servant) and, memorably, a jacket kicked by Rikki Beadle-Blair almost directly into TSB's face. I don't think he meant to do this - he disrobed and I think he meant to dramatically dropkick his clothing over our heads into the crowd but, what with being a gay and therefore automatically rubbish at sport, went low - but it was shocking nonetheless. TSB's pillbox/fascinator went flying and had to be retrieved.

Beadle-Blair wasn't bad, actually. I've not really followed his career and tend to associate him with Metrosexuality, which was confusing to the point of unwatchability (although it included some sexy men, especially the motorcycle courier...). He was a good Master of Ceremonies for Liverpool Is Burning, mouthy enough to cover all eventualities.

Amy was leading the panel of judges, and did her job well. Other than Amy, Simon, the Readers Wifes and a few of the performers, I didn't recognise any Duckie regulars - an unusual situation. Amy was as glammed up as ever.

I tried to get a decent photo of the Readers Wifes but 'twas hard to get both looking in the same direction, engrossed as they were with the sound decks.

Vogueing. Other than the Madonna single and what little I'd gleaned about its subject, I knew nothing at all. I mean, I got the gist about it being a dance/performance craze among (mainly poor) black kids in the '80s, co-opted by Lady M. I hadn't realised it had endured, apparently developing and metamorphosing into different forms. I liked the idea of different Houses (very Harry Potter) competing in a number of sub-categories.

What I hadn't bargained for was the sheer bloody fabulousness of it all. Me being the one in charge of the camera, I wanted to photograph all of it. I had several camera crises in the course of the evening, the biggest being when I managed to fill a 1GB chip only around one quarter into the show. 317 high-res photos, me getting a tad snap-happy. I had to retire to the loos and delete a whole load to make space. We were perched down near the front of the wide bit of the catwalk and I soon realised that, in contrast to Duckie where using the flash can distract the performers, our beautiful voguers actively gravitated toward camera flashes, spinning on their heels and giving good face. I felt like a fashionista in the front row of a Paris collection, particularly with bearded Anna Wintour at my side.

TSB was very ladylike, sitting primly with legs together and clapping politely (whereas I, fingers festooned with cheap jewellery, found that, by the end of the night, I'd applauded so vigorously that I'd actually smashed the low-grade metal Gothrings out of shape and had some difficulty pulling them off the knuckles).

I was interested in how weirdly protective I felt of TSB en femme: I bought the drinks all evening and had to fight the impulse to hold doors open for him. Introjected chauvinism.

The show itself was opened by a live act and a performance from the House of Suarez. Even I realised the titular Darren Suarez's choreography was top-notch.

The categories themselves... First was WAGs: a cavalcade of shopping bags, mobile 'phones, tiny dogs and general blinginess. Enjoyable but, after a while, a little samey.

This category was won by the wonderfully exuberant (too much so for a decent pic) Gateau Chocolat.

Next was Retrosexual, any outfit from any period in history. This was a gorgeous section, featuring Wildean and Crispean dandies...

... and what was, for me, the most impressive procession of the evening (and not just because it featured beardy czars in uniform) from the House of Romanov, lead by Rasputin (looking not unlike Alan Moore)...

... with a massively crinolined Catherine the Great bringing up the rear, skirts sweeping the entire width of the catwalk:

The Retrosexual prize went to the hugely popular Miss High Leg Kick, whose fringe-peeping Diana (complete with camera-flashing paparazzi on tricycles) went down a storm. Gays and the People's Princess, eh? There was a collective rush to the stage, a reaching out to touch Diana's hand, as if she were the real thing. A deserved win.

Duckie performers were pretty well represented, really. Kicking off the Choreography round was a betailed, fandancing (and slightly Martin Degvillesque) Wee Lee.

Johnny Woo's House of Egypt built an impressive pyramid of sphinxes. Sturdy arm muscles on the bottom tier, there:

Femme Realness seems an odd concept to me, given the glorious unreality of the whole shebang generally, but apparently this is an authentic harking-back to the voguing contests of the '80s. To our delight (and despite stiff competition from local girl Beyonce), the prize went to another Duckie face, the lovely, statuesque Maur:

Beadle-Blair worshipped her. And rightfully so.

An honourable mention must go to the effervescent Miss High Leg Kick again, flashing glimpses of the scarily tumescent kapok cock beneath her frock.

I love Miss High Leg Kick. Everything she does has a twist, one in which she subverts expectations/stereotypes. She's effortlessly elegant but absolutely ready to put herself in performance situations which are anything but. After the show itself, she wandered around in little but a wig, heels, a comedy merkin and some alarmingly profuse sproutings of synthetic armpit hair.

The "Scally's Mum" category made me slightly uncomfortable. It's not that I've never laughed at Duckie cabaret acts which poke fun at Teh Working Classes but somehow, when act after act relies on the inherent funniness of badly-dressed "slags", smoking, drinking and smacking their kids up, it all starts to wear a little thin. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the scrunchietastic winner, making us all duck for cover by whirling her child-on-a-leash in a wide circle over the heads of the audience.

The sexiest member of the judging panel, a Brandoesque Mr Roy, complained that the Fantasia category wasn't fantastic enough, and I'd have to agree. I was hoping for marvellous transhuman creatures aplenty and, in fact, it wasn't much different from Retrosexual. A few high points, though:

After Fantasia, a break then Orphans, a category for those individuals or groups unaffiliated with a particular House. Mr Roy gave a masterful demonstration of catwalking both masculine and feminine...

The Orphans were entertaining enough in a sort of Kids From Fame way. Highlights included a rather tasty piece of acrobatic manflesh close-up...

A suitably jazzhands finale (which was consistent with my general impression that, at least in Liverpool itself, many of those at the forefront of vogueing seem to be young and straight) and it all finally rolled to a stop. We'd been wondering all evening what would happen for the hour or so afterwards: would it switch abruptly to Duckie-at-the-Adelphi? Nope. It wasn't the Readers Wifes who took over but a chap from Horse Meat Disco, who continued in the same vein of (what I assumed to be) more-or-less authentic '70s/'80s New York disco. On the one hand, I felt a little disappointed that it wasn't the Duckie blend I know and love; on the other, the Readers Wifes' usual fare might've jarred after an evening in which the soundtrack was very much secondary to the visuals. That said, it did make me hanker for Duckie Classic choonz to dance (as opposed to vogue) to.

Here's a video of some of the performers preparing

and an excellently shot photo-montage here.

A not-too-horribly-drunken hotel room photo session later and we tumbled into bed. Got up in time to wander through a rainy Armistice Sunday Liverpool. Felt vaguely embarrassed not to be wearing a poppy.

The previous night's images still hanging in my head, there were moments when I'd clock a handsome man in an elaborate uniform and think for a split-second "ooh, he was in the Csar's parade!" before realising he was a bona fide member of today's armed forces...

A fabulous weekend. And, on the way back, no-one came and charged us extra for sitting in First. Hah!

GOODNIGHT AMERICA - WE LOOOVE YOU

2008-11-05T07:58:00.005Z

He did it!

In the event, I sat up until around 4am despite having to get up for a full day's work today; watching that blotchy map go blue was just too exhilarating. I went to sleep after Ohio and, I think, just before New Mexico. The BBC's coverage had been amusingly partisan (they weren't trying too hard to conceal their obvious delight) and Simon Schama was gently baiting John Bolton.

The booing Republicans during McCain's speech were truly pathetic.

I'm finding myself slightly obsessed by Michelle Obama's outfits, and was tickled that she seemed to have dressed as a black widow spider. Wonder what kind of puppy they're going to go for?

It's a relief to be able to like America again. I'd quite got out of the habit.

All gone to look for America

2008-11-04T18:39:00.004Z

Good luck, 'Merkins, we're all counting on you.

Let us be lovers again!

Watching roaches

2008-11-04T01:43:00.005Z

Having unsuccessfully attempted an early night, I've just woken from... not quite a nightmare but a disturbing dream of some sort involving cockroaches. Brrr.

This is because my Monday was spent at a work-related doodah which involved travelling to a luxuuurious (that would be sarcasm) three-star hotel in West London for a series of training sessions. Maybe fifteen minutes into the first one, one of my colleagues put her hand up and the speaker paused, anticipating a question.

"There's a cockroach on my table and it's really distracting."

Everyone looked. There, clambering obscenely over the starched white tablecloth was an ugly great fucker of a 'roach maybe two inches long. She'd trapped it beneath an upended water glass and its antennae twitched as it attempted to scale the sheer wall of its prison. The speaker, to give him his due, paused, slid a bit of promotional bumph under the glass and carried the whole thing out to reception. Wish I'd been a (ho bloody ho) fly on the wall there.

I'm not sure why cockroaches creep me out the way they do but they're second only to wasps in my Most Hateful Insects Of All Time chart. Even the cute one in WALL·E caused me a slight shudder.

Crushed by the wheels

2008-11-02T17:49:00.017Z

Here we are again, the by-now-traditional post-Duckie blog entry! TSB was remarking the other day on how easily we seem to have slipped into the habit of going along there every Saturday night. It's true: we always thought of it as Our Local but it's also become the backbone of our weekend socialising. Which is quite nice, really. I enjoy the familiarity of being a Duckie regular, our habitual place at the activity island (it would feel slightly strange now if we had to stand in another part of the club), the mix of old faces and new... There's a sort of shared sensibility there.

As I edge toward 40, I find I'm developing all sorts of comfortable routines. Saturdays, for example: usually, we'll have been out after work, come back and watched the telly with a bottle of wine (this week, the harrowing/moving finale of Dead Set), so the day begins gently for me. In contrast to TSB , who heads gymwards, I either luxuriate in bed, get up and head out to the Post Office if I've got parcels to collect (this week, my spangly shirt arrived for Liverpool Is Burning - hooray!) or, if in a self-indulgent mood, trek to New Covent Garden Flower Market. Even if I'm not planning on buying plants or flowers, just looking around the place is exhilarating. If one gets exhilarated by that sort of thing, which I do.

Next, I'll meet TSB in town for lunch. Again, we've drifted into a routine of Saturday lunchtime in Balans - but only if there's a table in the front section, as near the window as possible. More than half the attraction of Balans is watching the world go by. Yesterday, Novice Theory wandered past, looking attractively rainswept. Balans bills tend to mount up but watching The Restaurant (poor Owlboy and Muscleboy wuz robbed, robbed I tell you!) has been instructive in this regard. We now know the real money-spinners are cocktails, side-dishes, bread and desserts, so we tend to avoid those (apart from dessert; I regularly succumb to their sticky toffee pudding). Not completely in the spirit of le craquement de crédit but there y'go.

Sometimes haircuts or a geekular visit to Gosh! Comics then home to cocoon, notching up at least a couple of hours' sleep prior to Duckie.

So... that's the standard Saturday chez QueerRoyale and TheSpectacledBear. This week, we were half-thinking of heading out to the ICA's Hallowe'en party. TSB had been away in Scotland, though, and had only just returned, so a night in seemed nicer. Had my costume all planned too! Here's me as Rorschach from Watchmen:

Blurriness intentional (*koff*). Let's call it "arty".

Wonderful having TSB back: even a short period of separation is enough to remind me how much I love, want and need him (yes yes, sickbags under your chairs). An afternoon snooze and we were up and ready for the "Boxing Day of Hallowe'en" (copyright, Kim Phaggs) Duckie. Was vaguely thinking of attempting a cravat this week, having previously envied Father Cloth's natty neckwear but, as I was wearing a black shirt, it was difficult to contrive anything that wasn't unpleasantly reminiscent of Russell Brand. Topical, but not a good look for me. In the end I went without but did take along the Good Camera this time, in part because I want to take it along to Liverpool Is Burning next week and reckoned I needed practice handling it on a dancefloor. It was less problematic than expected, really, not much more hassle than dancing with a drink in one's hand. I dropped the lens cap on the floor a couple of times but managed to drop my glasses once, too; I was Mr Butterfingers generally. But actually dancing with it was okay: slung across my shoulder, I could curl one hand protectively around it; it jutted from my right hip like a stubby, anatomically misplaced erection but didn't seem to get in anyone's way. Mmm... Freudian...

Amy was red, white and blue and a large star-spangled banner was draped above the activity island, where a ballot box was available for one to vote in a Duckie special election for US president. Unsurprisingly, there was an Obamatastic 54-vote majority but five people would've voted for McCain. Amy diplomatically commented that "we will hunt you down and kill you". You betcha!

Also wandering around the floor was a large cardboard box on legs, with a handle:

This contained Roy Kerr, one of the evening's acts. When his door was opened, he'd act the part of a concerned neighbour, apologising for taking up one's time and engaging one in a doorstep conversation. When I obligingly grasped his knob, he talked about wanting to organise a neighbourhood protest against a family of "dwarfs" who'd moved in. Could he count on my support? Don't want no short people round here. NIMBY. Enjoyable nonsense.

First stage act was Bourgeois & Maurice, who I'd heard about but never seen. They sang two songs, about self-harm (pushing pins into one's skin) and voting for Bourgeois & Maurice (chorus something about getting on a train, a bus, a 'plane and fucking off because "YOU DON'T MATTER AT ALL!". Or thereabouts). I liked them a lot but felt they suffered from having the first slot, when the crowd's not quite at the optimal level of boozy participation. They were the best act of the night, and I'd have reversed the running order, putting them on last.

Niiice blue leather suit...

... and a pleasing strip to red sequins:

Here they are on YouTube:

The second act, Villain, was a sort of Europunk affair. At least, I think they were; they'd just been performing in Moscow and lived in South London (Peckham and Camberwell) but one of them was Danish. Or something. Their music was catchy enough (including a rather good deconstruction of Madonna's Like A Virgin) but I must admit I was more tickled by their visual presentation. Great make-up:

The last act, Ambrose Martos, was pants. Literally. He came on in a white bathrobe and stripped off maybe a dozen pairs of underpants, periodically flashing to reveal... his cock. Oookay. As Amy said, "potential boyfriend material for someone here".

The memorable element of this particular Duckie, for me, wasn't the cabaret or the music or the interactive stuff, but something that happened on the dancefloor. Just before Amy went onstage, a man in a stripey top came through the crowd asking us to move back. We did, and a man and woman in wheelchairs came through, the crowd (mercifully not a sardine-tin Duckie) pressed back to let them park themselves in front of the activity island to watch the cabaret.

Having shuffled back to allow them to pass, then found myself displaced, my first response was one of irritation. That's our place! They're taking up all that space! I recalled a time when someone had done something similar then, at a certain point in the evening, got up from their wheelchair and danced, absolutely incensing me. These guys didn't pull an Andy Pipkin, seemed to be enjoying the evening and I quickly began feeling ashamed of my initial reaction to their presence in the club. I'm told the only London gay club with full disabled access is XXL. Everywhere else has parts which are difficult or impossible for the non able-bodied. Duckie is frequently packed to capacity (and beyond) and can be tricky to traverse at the best of times. It's not at all well suited to a wheelchair. But should this mean wheelchair users feel obliged to stay away? Obviously not. And the fact that the club, like the vast majority, isn't designed to accommodate their wheelchairs is hardly the fault of the occupants themselves.

Thinking about it further, I wonder whether my initial annoyance was also partly because the people in the chairs were male and female, and I made the assumption that we were being shunted out of our stagefront position by heterosexuals. A lot of assuming going on there and even if I'm correct, I'm not sure to what extent sexuality is of relevance in this situation. If they were straight, would my piqued entitlement be any more valid? I really don't know.

In your head, they are fighting

2008-10-29T09:56:00.020Z

Yesterday, I reaffirmed my dislike of Wagamama, allowing myself to be dragged to the Waterloo branch for lunch with TSB. We passed a perfectly good Canteen on the way there, and my stomach growled at the aroma of pies (mmm, piiies...) but 'twas not to be. A lank-haired Wagawaiter brimming with positivity seated us across from one another on one of their long benches, sandwiched between an older and younger woman pairing (mother and daughter?) and what looked like a standard-issue London gay male couple having an argument.

Usually with Wagamama, it's the food itself that irks me. Sure, it's healthy, but health-smugness only goes so far in the face of identikit blandness: indistinguishably sloppy half-soups that taste like unseasoned meat and vegetables floating in warm water in which quarter of a stock cube has been dissolved. I always come away craving flavour and crunch.

This time, however, the food was the least annoying element. Being fair to TSB, it was half-term; I don't suppose it's usually that packed, the entrance so clogged with pushchairs and other child-rendering paraphernalia. The staff took a good twenty minutes, half an hour to even take our order and, in that time, I think we'd both become hugely uncomfortable with the ambient level of neighbouring mano e mano conflict poisoning the atmosphere.

As arguments go, it seemed a peculiarly one-sided one. I'd taken the two men for partners but, while they clearly were having A Talk About Us, there appeared to be a financial dynamic too, with one haranguing the other (in soft but persistently aggrieved tones) about "how much I pay you". Absolutely relentlessly, for at least twenty minutes, leaning across the table, broadcasting murmured pique and a repeated it's-for-your-own-good-that-I'm-doing-this refrain. Agh. TSB, who was in the collateral damage zone of the aggressor's line-of-admonishment, looked sicker and sicker. The haranguee spoke maybe twice then stopped trying to defend himself and just sat, eyes downcast, accepting it all.

Scrupulously avoiding any sort of acknowledgment that all this emotional scab-picking was happening only inches away, I inclined slightly towards the couple on our other side, and kept accidentally making eye contact with the older woman. When I said something to TSB, she'd start slightly; I think she wondered, on at least two occasions, whether I was addressing her. I felt trapped, elbow reined in, able to look only straight ahead at TSB until the slop arrived.

It was too much humanity, too close.

A bit like the premise of Dead Set, then, Charlie Brooker's Big Brother zombie meltdown (hey, there's that apocalyptic theme again). It's running all this week and the first episode, set during a BB eviction night was absolute must-see television: slick, well-shot, much more straight-out horror in the mix than Sean Of The Dead and much scarier zombies (I blame Danny Boyle for teaching zombies to run - and yesss, I know those weren't technically zombies). Plenty of humour, though, both in the uncannily well-observed lines ("do toes have bones in them?" clearly referencing the likes of "East Angular?" and "I love blinking, I do") and the absurd juxtaposing of familiar and horrific: carnage erupts to Mika's Grace Kelly.

(Incidentally, the moment at the end of that song where Mika goes, "ker-ching!" still sets my teeth on edge more than any amount of fire extinguisher skull-bludgeoning. I usually rush to change CD/ipod track to avoid it.)

Jaime Winstone excellent (her character much less flaky than in Donkey Punch) and Andy Nyman's beary producer (the most identifiable mouthpiece for Brooker's trademark rants) both engaging and really quite fanciable, but it was Zombie Davina that stole the show. Zombie Davina!

I actually thought she acted being a zombie better than she acted herself. The bit where she's slumped against the wall, throat torn out, is good too; they'd made her zombification a literal Watercooler Moment.

I'm looking forward to seeing the real ex-BB Housemates as zombies, too. Brian Belo, with his weird blue contact lenses, is over halfway there already.

I think of you and let it go

2008-10-29T08:36:00.003Z

As an update to my recent posts about Richard DeDomenici at last Saturday's Duckie, the man himself has uploaded videos of the performance I described.

Sway along to his Greenham Common nostalgerie!

Squeak along to his balloon dissemination and helium-fuelled singsong!

Panic, lads, it's a red alert

2008-10-27T14:19:00.009Z

Impromptu pic: a shaft of mid-afternoon autumnal sunlight falling on one of Richard DeDomenici's red balloons, from Saturday's Duckie. The hydrangeas are two weeks old now, their blue increasingly flecked with brown crispiness. They've lasted well, though.

Here's a blurry-but-cute pic of DeDomenici avec balloons:

His was, I think, my favourite of Saturday's acts. It combined fun audience participation (and it's not often I'll type that oxymoron) with just the right amount of nostalgia. When he took his bow at the end, the audience chanted "off! off! off!" (well, we are Gayerz, and like a bit of cock in our cabaret) and Dedomenici obliged, letting the central double-zipped panel of his Hazmat suit fall open to reveal a rather nice pleasure trail leading to a pair of red tartan boxer shorts. Levels of squee were dangerously high.

'Twas in the gently ravaged post-Duckie dénouement at home with Mel that I blew up my own luft ballon. I must've been drunk, because I'm mildly balloon-phobic and Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing. I'm not sure where my aversion stems from but I have faintly traumatic memories of a childrens' party where a treasure hunt had been arranged, complete with clues. Some of the clues were inside balloons, and we had to blow them up until they burst. I absolutely hated having to keep blowing something I knew would explode in my face (insert innuendo here) and I think I started crying and had to be taken aside and consoled with cake (good strategy).

Anyway, yes, I get a bit antsy around balloons, especially when people are rubbing and squeaking them. Brrr. I like this one, though.

Acceptable in the '80s

2008-10-27T10:52:00.019Z

So, Saturday we went back to bed in the afternoon and stockpiled sleep before Duckie. I got into what my Dad used to call "your night's sleep" and felt disorientated when I woke, not knowing for a moment whether the time on the clock was 9am or pm. Almost made the decision to stay in my nice cosy bed but dutifully hauled my weary carcass to the shower and headed out to the Tavern.

Not only was this the end of British summertime in terms of putting clocks back; it's also the first Saturday evening cool enough for me and TSB independently to don jackets. We usually try to avoid getting trapped in the cloakroom queue at the start of the night. On the way to Duckie, some guy leaned out of an upper floor window and shouted at us, "HEY GUYS, GOING TO HARDON?" and I realised we were both somewhat black and leathery of outfit.

All six there again, with Amy (fresh from a Moustache Fiesta that was seemingly more moustache than fiesta) looking particularly fetching in black and pink and expressing only a tiiiny amount of faux-bitterness at coming second to Lisa Maffia in CelebAir (she was robbed). At least she beat autograph-pimping slacker Chico.

Kind of an odd night in terms of punters: big fluctuations in crowd mass, with plenty of dancing space one minute and crammed in tight the next. It seemed to get a good deal busier after the cabaret, which is unusual.

First up was one Luci Brixton ("she liked Brixton so much, she changed her name", apparently, having originally been billed as Luci Briginshaw). Opera backed with a Yamaha beat, the not-at-all-unattractive mismatch putting me in mind of Pet Shop Boys. Very nice.

During the first "musical interlude", I nipped outside and across the Grassy Knoll to see the outdoor act, part of Duckie's De Trop season, where it spills out of the main body of the Tavern and into other parts of Vauxhall. Harriet Poole's Darkroom was a good example. This time, a crowd had built up around a rather post-apocalyptic brazier and someone dressed as a Hassidic Jew, cooking fish suppers (I'm not quite sure how she was making chips over an open fire).

Amy had suggested we look in the pushchair so, braving the windblown flames, Gareth and I peered in at... a large dead fish!

From the Age of Aquarius to the Age of Pisces! The juxtaposition of fish and cryptically evangelical (and, let's face it, slightly nutjob) note made me think of a JG Ballard flooded metropolis and the return of the Nummos... Perhaps we'll all be saved by fish-gods from Sirius?

Inside, Martin del Amo was taking to the stage in nowt but his pants. A piece of interpretive dance to Antony & the Johnsons, in bluish light, the effect was contorted and subterranean, like we were looking at him through water or old, thick, rippled glass. Still feeling deliciously spooked by the evocative reference to Pisces and the fishbaby, del Amo's watery movements seemed a continuation of my pseudomystical Drowned London imaginings.

Something completely different next: one Richard DeDomenici, hirsute and cute in a Hazmat suit.

He introduced two films, the first a spliced-together montage including footage of him as a child in the early '80s at Greenham Common, to the strains of This Used To Be My Playground. He and Luci Brixton then led a mass singalong to Nena's 1983 hit, having handed out exactly 99 helium-filled red balloons so the entirety of Duckie could join in on the chorus in comedy falsettos.

Ahh, Nena! 99 Red Balloons was the first single I ever bought with my own money (the second was the somewhat less memorable Hole In My Shoe by Neil from The Young Ones; let's draw a veil over that). At the time, I was going through a major early teens fear of the bomb thing, and thought Nena's one-hit was incredibly deep. I listened the 7-inch single repeatedly, obsessively poring over the sleeve photos. I even tried to convince myself I fancied the Germanic chanteuse. I was doing a lot of that at the time.

So... jolly balloon-toting Come Armageddon Come nuclear anxiety fed nicely into the evening's dystopian future theme. Would the coming fish-god messiahs save us from the bomb? Would chips of plutonium be twinkling in every, er, gill?

We'd noticed Our Lady J at the back, looking gorgeous in a beret, and it wasn't too much of a surprise when the final act turned out to be Novice Theory again, this time singing about his mother's difficulty accepting his maleness (nice rhyming of "daughter" with "slaughtered").

I found his Vignettes more immediately engaging than the accordion piece from Friday's Lustre. Just the one song, but it went down well. Here it is:

Home, with Mel in tow, and a drunken flicking through the music cable channels while TSB dozed on the settee. Britney's Womaniser (I like!), ill-advised vodka and playing with the solitary red balloon I'd saved from Richard Dodemenici's piece.

I think of you and let it go...

Sunday, we'd arranged to meet J (not Our Lady, another one) at Tate Modern, for the Rothko exhibition: bit of cultcher for a grey, hungover Sunday, just the thing. I've been to the Tate's dimly lit Rothko room before but not for a while. It had been beefed up with some extra pieces (the Seagram Murals) and formed the centrepiece of the exhibition. It was chock-ful of people, making the experience somewhat less than contemplative. I also found that there was almost too much to look at, the sheer number of Rothkos in one space was almost too distracting.

Some of the oranges seemed harsh, brash, garish. My favourites are still those that hum, the combination of colours making them seem to float and hover, vibrating slightly, off the surface of the canvas:

I liked the black paintings too, subtle shades and gradations within the darkness. Impossible not to see them without thinking of an increasingly depressed Rothko, wreathed in grey cigarette smoke, inching his way toward suicide. His mood state is communicated so intensely that some of the paintings are almost menacing. I'd have liked an emptier gallery and more time to sit there on my own with them - but then, I almost always think that at the Tate.

Downstairs in the Turbine Hall, we pushed through a claustrophobic curtain of heavy red and green plastic strips/sheets and found ourselves in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's vision of future London, the latest in the Unilever series. In her 2058, the remnants of society have taken refuge inside Tate Modern, on a series of bare bunk beds, to the sound of rain. The rainforest conditions have also somehow caused sculpture to grow beyond its proportions, so there were 20%-bigger copies of Henry Moores, Claes Oldenburgs and, dwarfing all, Louise Bourgeois' colossal Maman, a particular favourite of mine. Here's a pic from a year ago:

Rain and radio static fill the space, an enormous screen plays clips of suitably apocalyptic films and one can sit on the prison-like bunks and leaf through selected paperbacks (I gravitated towards Jeff Noon's Vurt and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451) to get into properly downbeat mood. As Nummos and Nena had already filled my head with End Of The World imagery the night before, I was primed and ready for more dystopian miserablism, and I think I liked the whole experience more than TSB did. That said, it did feel less cohesive than previous Turbine Hall installations, more cobbled-together.

Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth had been filled in but was still quite visible, a huge crack in the floor. I liked the fact that there was no attempt to conceal it and the concrete floor will always now look a little imperfect.

In-between Rothko and Gonzalez-Foerster, we found the members' room (TSB is a member, as is J) and braved the weekend middle-class bloodbath for seats on the balcony overlooking the Thames. J forced a second bottle of white wine upon us and we watched the light change over St Paul's Cathedral as an increasingly leaden sky slid into night:

I love living in London. It's my dystopian ideal.

My so friendly lens

2008-10-25T12:45:00.004+01:00

Seeerious camera envy recently, at the Tavern, and at last night's KUNST I was introduced to the owner of the impressively tumescent lens, AbsolutQueer. I'd noticed her exquisite photography online, as she seems to gravitate to many of the same events as I do. I love her composition, particularly.

Anyway, the crispness of AbsolutQueer's pics is making me reconsider taking the bigger Canon (which I think of as The Good Camera) along to some of these bashes. I originally bought it out of frustration with the pocket-sized Canon: if at all possible, I prefer not to use the flash (it tends to bleach the atmosphere from lowlit subjects); the problem is that I then risk blurring. I usually compensate for this by a) trying to steady my camera by bracing it against a table or pillar, and b) taking lots and lots and lots and lots of pics, in the hope that the law of averages might favour me.

The reason I don't routinely take the Good Camera to the likes of Duckie basically boils down to lack of space, quantity of alcohol and exuberance of danceage. I'm terrified I'll drop it or otherwise damage it, squeezing through the crowd. Memorably, I once ruined a baby Canon Ixus by reaching for my pint while it dangled from my wrist. D'oh.

The non-Duckie RVT nights are something of a revelation, though: weekday moderation, more room to move and I still enjoy myself! I might risk the Good Camera at some of those.

Come taste the wine

2008-10-25T10:37:00.015+01:00

What can I say? Tonight was one of those evenings I wish my whole life consisted of: impossibly glamorous. I took the Tube into town after work, met Mel for drinks then rendezvoused with TSB and Gareth at the Soho Theatre. Pricey cocktails: rather than my namesake Kir Royale, I had a Rossini, a sort of raspberry puree and champagne mix, with knobs on.

The show itself was what I've come to expect from Justin Bond: a collection of (increasingly reflective) songs with a vaguely apocalyptic theme. My favourite was the one dedicated to his bipolar friend - Stars And Bars, maybe? Although there was an excellent foot-stomper (which began with "I've got nipples on my tittles as big as the end of your thumbs"), I think I always prefer Justin's ballads. There's something about his voice that, whether singing as Kiki or himself, effortlessly communicates the bittersweet end of the emotional spectrum. Nice costume changes, too, although I think my favourite is still the dress he wore to Duckie last week.

The guests were Novice Theory (introduced as "a half and half" but looked like a big-haired Dominic Cooper) and Martyn Jacques of The Tiger Lillies, who sang a falsetto version of Banging In The Nails:

Our Lady J, Justin's keyboard player, stole the show a little, not merely with her extraordinary glamour but with her cameo song Pink Prada Purse. Here it is:

Mel, TSB, Gareth, Rob and I caught a cab and dawdled through the Soho masses before speeding south across town... still reaching the Royal Vauxhall Tavern before Our Lady J and her entourage (Justin Bond) got there. Just. When they did arrive, there was a palpable sense of excitement. Celebrity had entered the building!

It was my first time at KUNST. I really liked it. Having gone there via the Soho Theatre via work, I was still clad in pinstripes. Didn't feel overdressed, though, given the Weimar vibe (if anything, I should've had a bowler hat). I was in top Mr Sociable form, running into Ben and his photographer friend (we recognised each other from last night's Vauxhallville and liked each other's pics). Had a great chat with an ex-Retro Barman (or two) and met a beautifully side-parted Poor Little Kitsch Boy, whose blog I started reading via Gareth's. I even started chatting to the Gay Times editor over urinals.

Anyway, here's the very lovely Our Lady J in her very first solo spot (world exclusive at KUNST!), bathed as pink as her Prada purse:

When she first took the stage, a host of cameras appeared. I'm not sure I've ever seen an RVT act photographed quite as much. It's easy to see why: she exudes charisma.

Oh yes, and KUNST host Dusty Limits sang a very funny song elaborated from Hugh Grant's baked beans 'n' childhood cancer outburst of yesteryear. And then we danced to some excellent '80s/'90s-tinged stuff, courtesy of DJ DawnRightNasty, who surely deserves credit for orchestrating Our Lady J's solo debut there.

Will we make it a hat trick with Duckie tonight? Watch this space...

Turn the lights out before you leave, goodnight

2008-10-24T18:41:00.003+01:00

I'm posting this in the hour or so before finishing work and heading out to meet TSB and Mel at the Soho Theatre for Justin Bond's Lustre. The plan then is to grab Gareth and scoot across town to the smuttily-named KUNST for an evening of "neo-Weimar cabaret for the fabulous generation" (I'm wearing one of my more dubious Stasiesque coats especially) - hopefully in time to catch the very lovely Our Lady J, who'll also be hot-footing it there from the Soho Theatre, having been invited (by DawnRightNasty) to headline the cabaret.

Keeping up? Now read on...

Okay, I'm playing up the social butterfly thing but it is an unusually hectic week for us in terms of going out - credit crunch be damned! Luckily, I've just discovered that I'd booked a week's leave from work next week then promptly forgotten about it (don't ask) so I'm very much in the mood for celebration.

Last night was the final Vauxhallville, the very last one ever. I felt surprisingly sad, considering I only really discovered it in the last month or two (it's been running for two years). If anything, that makes me feel all the more regretful at not having made more of an effort to check it out. Must try harder.

The last run of Vauxhallville has focused on the history of Vauxhall itself, from the Pleasure Gardens to modern day - or, rather, the 1990s. Why the '90s? Because 1995 is when Duckie started up in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and Duckie's what made all the difference.

In Morrissey-circa-Vauxhall And I mode, Nathaniel DeVille reminisced with sexybeardy bar manager Jason...

... then performed his puppet show musical based on the songs of The Smiths. We'd seen this before, at the Duckie Morrissey Special, a few years back, but it was good seeing it again. Sweet in a vaguely x-rated way:

Timberlina glowed in a rather lovely robe...

... and Gareth trounced Yanni (it's Swedish for Johnny) in a nailbiting Duckie quiz as well as scoring a prize for the cardboard Crack House he designed for the model Vauxhall Village. He was made of WYN!

We watched a very entertaining piece of film, in which David Hoyle (dragged up in the manner of his former incarnation, The Divine David) wandered around a sunny Sunday Vauxhall, teasing builders and chatting to assorted blingy passers-by, cannabis-wreathed moxen on the Grassy Knoll and - in a surprisingly touching segment - mottled porkers and precociously angelic kiddies in Vauxhall City Farm. David Hoyle came onstage afterwards, sans drag, and seemed mellower and, well, happier than I've seen him before.

Nathaniel got his kit off (I've always liked his William Morris tattoos).

Finally (well, penultimately), the stalwarts of Vauxhallville got together onstage for a glass of champagne (we quibbled over the source of the quote "champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends") and what seemed like a genuinely moving mass goodbye. Even DawnRightNasty left her box. Briefly.

Then the lovely lovely lovely boys from Bearlesque (and, more recently, side project The Dream Bears) did their thang, to the thundering strains of Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out For A Hero - possible the perfect way to go out with a bang.

Bearlesque have been a consistent high point, and one of the main reasons I wish I'd made it along on more Thursday nights. Ah well.

Dreams that gliiitter.

I've got something in my eye and I want to bathe it.

*sob*

Goodnight, Vauxhallville.

Thoughts of yesterday

2008-10-22T14:20:00.003+01:00

I'm an ignoramus when it comes to classical music. On hearing, by chance, Sibelius's Symphony No.5 on 't telly recently, I squealed, "ooh, it's Strawberry Switchblade! I haven't heard them in aaages!"

Hilarity ensued.

Sibelius, Symphony No.5 (Finale)

(If you're as classicsrubbish as I am, it's about one-and-a-half minutes in.)

Strawberry Switchblade, Since Yesterday

Rose and Jill so ought to sue.

Shades of Scarlett conquering

2008-10-22T08:23:00.009+01:00

Fiddle-de-dee.

Rummaging for my keys this morning in the junk-that-comes-out-of-your-pockets bowl in the kitchen, I automatically picked up my current Lucky Conker, as I usually do, and had another flashback to the past weekend's Duckie, when I talked chestnuts with live artist/photographer Harriet Poole. It made me aware of this particular quirk that I have - even if I didn't have the LC on me on Saturday. Here it is, though, with Saturday's Tube ticket:

I call it lucky but that's really just to justify carrying it around; I'm not especially superstitious and don't think of it as any sort of talisman. It's more a throwback to the childhood hoarding of "treasure", magpie-fashion: very shiny coins, shells, glittery pebbles - essentially worthless objects considered inherently pleasurable. I suspect quite a few people do this to some degree.

I picked up the current LC a week or two ago, when meeting a colleague for dinner, in Twickenham. There was a big horse chestnut tree, spilling grizzled brown-green casings and excitingly shiny, new-looking conkers onto the pavement (one landed on a car bonnet with a metallic bonk, as we passed). If I hadn't been in self-consciously sensible work mode, I'd have stopped and, in all likelihood, stuffed my suit pockets. As it was, I surreptitiously bent down and scooped one up when he wasn't looking.

We used to live just off a park which had several chestnut trees, and I'd collect them every day to and from work. They'd sit on windowsills and kitchen surfaces until, eventually, I conceded that I had to throw them out (they're not as seductive once they lose their fresh-from-the-shell gleam) to make space for more. These days, I've pared down my conker-acquiring urge to just the one at a time.

Apparently the game of Conkers was originally played with snail shells or hazel nuts, the horse chestnut not being native to the UK. Oddly enough, although I have all sorts of memories of throwing sticks in trees to try to get 'em down, I don't recall much actual playing of the game itself. I suspect many kids were, like me, more attracted to the idea (having seen Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids get overexcited about Conkers) than the pastime, which all seemed a bit of a hassle. I did, however, dutifully file away in my head all the sneaky conker-hardening methods (baking, soaking in vinegar) in case I ever did find myself competing in the World Championships.

I seem to remember a brief craze, on Blue Peter, for stringing huge numbers of conkers on string, with groups of people proudly claiming to have strung five billion (or however many), pointlessly. This is what we did before t'Internet.

Ah, well. A woman must have everything.

She never meant to call

2008-10-21T11:34:00.005+01:00

She did anyway. Eight times in quick succession, leaving a message only the once, with the first call. Short and sweet, she almost shouts, "call me back!" in a moderately thick Scottish accent. Her tone is a mixture of exasperation and pleading.

I've no idea who she is: it's an unfamiliar number with an 01896 prefix which, Google informs me, is Galashiels. I don't know anyone in Galashiels. Mysteeerious.

Well, very probably not that mysterious at all. She's obviously got the wrong number and, now I come to think of it, I'm pretty sure she's called before. She left a message maybe a year ago, jolly and somewhat inebriated-sounding, your basic "I'm on my way to X, 'phone me back, you lazy bastard" instruction. I ignored it at the time but I feel I'm starting to get drawn into the saga of Galashiela (take a bow).

Should I 'phone back and explain it's a wrong number? Irrationally, having ignored eight redials from her, I'm a little scared of direct communication...

We all feel better in the dark

2008-10-20T10:06:00.058+01:00

Ah, Duckie Duckie Duckie! A great Duckie night is surely unparalleled 'pon this Earth - and Saturday's was a true classic. Not that it's ever had a slump as such, not with the Readers Wifes playing, but the club really seems to be hitting its stride at the moment, maybe because it's building up to an excellent programme of events in the coming months. I've no idea how, thirteen years on, it retains the same freshness and verve but, hallalujah, it does.

Autumn weather really makes me vacillate over the eternal problem of What To Wear. On work days, the morning chill is excuse enough to succumb to my weakness for big, flappy overcoats or belted leather macs (the fashion nuclei of my brain were horribly warped by early exposure to '80s pop videos). As the day heats up, I then feel self-consciously sweaty. Duckie presents the opposite problem: wanting to avoid the cloakroom if at all possible, one is tempted to underdress for the cold then shiver if there's a queue to get in. Me and TSB seem to be getting better at timing our arrival to avoid that, though; knowing Johnny Woo, Timberlina and Justin Bond were all on the bill, we got there early so as to avoid the anticipated hordes of painted acolytes.

And rammed to the rafters it was, from early on. Good-humoured, though, in contrast to previous sardine-tin evenings. Funny how the crowd can take on a very definite mood, distinct from one week to the next.

Six out of six, with Wifes, Cloths, Amy and Simon all present and correct. Amy seemed slightly subdued, possibly just in contrast to last week's exuberant DJing as an honorary Readers Wife. Standing by the activity island with Gareth, we were approached by a harness-clad fellow, seemingly lost on his way to the Hoist. He asked if we were up for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of experiencing the Royal Vauxhall Tavern's darkroom. We were, naturally, so he gave us each a sticker to wear, a glowing lightbulb. Curiouser and curiouser. It was all part of a piece of live installation/immersive/participatory art by Harriet Poole - more on this later...

Up The Junction was playing onscreen when we arrived, and the Readers Wifes echoed its panda-eyed beehivery with I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten. I love Dusty and this is one of my favourites - lovely to hear it at Duckie. Just in front of the stage, a large, fortysomething chap was clearly In The Zone, eyes closed, and doing what looked like robot dancing (with just a hint of choreiform arm movement). It's not easy to clear a cordon sanitaire on Duckie's dancefloor but this guy had managed it, fellow dancers nervously moving back from his near religiose ectasy. Must remember that trick.

Amy "Two Belts" Lamé introduced what turned out to be a stellar evening.

First up, a big-haired, bespectacled Johnny Woo (looking a little like a mildly genderblended Sebastien Tellier).

Despite having moved in vaguely similar club/cabaret circles, I'd not seen Mr Woo perform. Me and TSB have a friend who's a big devotee of his Gay Bingo but we've always been loath to schlep along to Shoreditch to drink on Sunday evenings before a typically busy Monday, so have never been. I really enjoyed his Women Of Mass Destruction and pill-popping tongue-twister, and he justifiably reaped huge applause.

Timberlina next, who I knew from Vauxhallville (last one this Thursday - *sob*) and who didn't disappoint with a tender ditty about Sarah Palin, ending in a flourish with the line, "because she's a cunt". Somehow, the good old c-word is both big and clever in Duckie, and Timberlina's ode to La Palin brought the house down.

(Amy joked that Duckie rarely has drag queens perform - and when it does, they're contractually obliged to have full moustache and beard "so tonight we've ticked all the boxes!")

What new can be said about the ridiculously talented (and inhumanly photogenic) marvel that is Justin Bond? He looked and sounded wonderful, in what looked like a vintage or at least '20s-inspired outfit, singing a belter of a set, again nakedly political (one of the things I love about Justin's performances - as Kiki and as himself - is that he doesn't shy from excoriating where excoriation is due). He was accompanied by a keyboard player I've not seen before, Our Lady J, beautiful and a great match for Justin's vocals. She threw herself into the performance with gusto, her enthusiasm and flying blonde mane making her seem almost muppetlike at times. In a glamorous way. She and Justin were the ideal closer for a near-as-dammit-perfect Duckie cabaret line-up.

(Our Lady J lost her earring but found it again. Phew!)

But! Superb as it was, it wasn't the cabaret that made this Classic Duckie for me. Back to the lightbulb badges. Before even Amy took to the stage, myself, TSB and Gareth were approached by an attractive young woman who asked me if I wanted to go to the darkroom now. Earlier, I'd been admiring her dress and general look (dark silver with black polka-dots, glasses, a bit '40s) and was a tad taken aback (when's the last time I was propositioned in a pub, by a woman?) but decided to go with it. I remembered Punchdrunk's amazing Masque Of The Red Death, earlier in the year, and how rewarding the one-to-one interactions could be, if you were lucky enough to be chosen by one of the actors. With this in mind, I allowed Polka-Dot Lady to take a photograph of the two of us together (me looking beardily sinister, as ever) then take me by the hand and lead me through the crowd (nervously clutching my can of Stella) to a door I'd never noticed before, in the corner of the bar next to the cloakroom.

Still hesitant, I was ushered up a flight of narrow stairs, an abrupt transition from the crowded, noisy Tavern to a much quieter hallway half-lit by fairy lights, black doorways hinting at darkened spaces beyond (occupied?); I was suddenly acutely aware of the thud-thud of music from below (Adam Ant's Prince Charming) like a reassuring heartbeat (Duckie as the beating heart of the Vauxhall Tavern - an image I like). Another set of stairs wound upwards and my companion sat down, smoothing her dress and motioning me to sit next to her. Gingerly, with flashbacks to ill-remembered (and usually ill-advised) moments at teenage parties, I did so. Other than knowing I was A Part Of Art, I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. That in itself was oddly exhilarating.

We had a short conversation, initially about what I had in my pockets (sadly, having changed into my not-skinny but just-tight-enough-for-comfort jeans for Duckie, I'd neglected to bring the Lucky Conker which sometimes accompanies me at this time of year, so we had to imagine it) and associated memories/emotions. Polka-Dot Lady showed me a train ticket which had particular significance for her and I gave an example of my own of the written word taking on personal meaning: a letter which, through a quirk of time zones, arrived weeks after the sender was suddenly, unexpectedly dead. Without going into too much detail (because, for various reasons, it doesn't feel right to blog about this in detail), it was an unusually intimate conversation to be having with a stranger who'd basically pulled me out of the crowd. It didn't feel intrusive, though, that's the truly odd thing; it felt quite comfortable, even cathartic. I felt a sudden swell of emotion when relating my own anecdote, not enough to make me teary but enough to surprise me.

At one point, another woman appeared briefly with what looked like a fellow participant from the pub downstairs. They disappeared into one of the doorways and I wondered how much was scripted, whether his experience of the interaction would be the same as mine.

After talking for maybe ten minutes, Polka-Dot Lady got up and I followed her into a bathroom lit by a red bulb. I was instructed to place my rail ticket (which had been tangential to our earlier conversation) on a piece of photographic paper between us. A light clicked on for a few seconds then off, exposing the film. She took it to the sink and instructed me to pour developing fluid on it. This was the promised darkroom, ho ho!

Then to a darkened kitchen/scullery (the rooms all seemed a bit dilapidated and I asked whether anyone lived here; she told me someone lived on the top floor) where strings ran at above head height, with drying photographs pegged to them. I did what I was told and pegged our photo in place. I was then led downstairs, given a card with a URL (my lightbulb sticker was affixed) and I stumbled blearily back into the body of the pub, just in time to hear Amy allude to the darkroom I'd just visited. I felt quite smug. TSB, fearful of the prospect of being spirited away to the dread spectre of Audience Participation, had removed his sticker.

It was quite a short interaction but peculiarly intense (the intensity sharpened, as I say, by sudden physical hand-in-hand contact, having very little idea what was happening and not knowing what my part in it might be). The combination of familiar-yet-unfamiliar (unlit or fairylit halls, bathrooms and kitchens used for unexpected purposes), the slightly fluctuant sense of time (immediate, here-and-now but also moving from moment to moment with a sort of dreamlike disjunction) and the not-unpleasant novelty of confiding in a stranger lent the whole experience the character of a dream, or a hypnogogic state. It stayed with me for much of the rest of the evening.

That's the added ingredient to Duckie, the extra something that takes it from being The Best Club Night Ever to a whole different plane altogether. "Best audience this year!" said the lovely Chelsea Kelsey, as the night reluctantly drew to a close (after a mass singalong to Take That Look Off Your Face). For me, it was probably the best Duckie this year, with music, cabaret and individual interactive art melding into one exciting, affecting whole.

Oh! And our lovely friend (and occasional dykon) Mel turned up for the final hour, having been elsewhere for the evening but decided, on the way home, that it was worth queuing in the cold for the last golden hour of Readers Wiferie. Clearly she too felt the inexorable pull of Classic Duckie.

We love this exaltation

2008-10-18T20:25:00.003+01:00

I'm feeling quite remiss in not having posted last week's Duckie pics before this Saturday's is almost upon us. What can I say? I'm a lazy git.

Actually, there's been all sorts of worky type stuff this last week and today's the first day I've really had a chance to draw breath. Last night's Quiet Drink at the Retro Bar after work wrought its hangover havoc but I toddled uptown to meet TSB for a rather nice Balans lunch. I had their chicken & ham pie, which was lovely but looked naggingly Fray Bentosish. Bernard Cribbins would've been proud.

Anyway, last week's Duckie was made special by the return of Amy Lamé, briefly touching down from CelebAir. She's down to the final... what? two? three? Sounds like it's her versus Lisa Maffia. Go Amy! Last week, though, she seemed to be very much enjoying standing in for Chelsea Kelsey, getting dancey in the DJ booth.

'Twas good to have an Amy-presented evening too. Lovely fascinator.

First act was one Claire Benjamin, with a character called Obsessia Compulsia D'Sorda. A string of paper Prozac pills made an appearance and there were some nice little touches (when she marvelled that her accordion was playing without her, then quizzically pulled back the curtain to reveal a deadpan - and very good - accordionist behind it). She played I've Seen That Face Before and Shine On You Crazy Diamond, interesting choices. Overall, though, I thought she was a bit meandering and the act went on a tad too long.

Next up for two turns was Duotard, an apparently husband and wife team (although I'm uncertain whether that's just the characters they play) who, surreally, usually perform at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. Spandex fetishists? You decide.

Here, courtesy of the wonder of YouTube, is their Blame It On The Burgers number:

I thought they were pleasingly off-the-wall, and could well understand Amy waking up the morning after having seen them on their home turf and thinking, "did that really happen?" Second number was longer, a sort of compilation of mostly '80s-looking fitness videos, artfully edited in time to (I think) three songs, the last of which was Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Huge audience applause when either Cher or Angela Lansbury appeared onscreen (that would be The Gayz, then) and the whole thing was carried along on a tide of joyous silliness. That said, if there'd been room in the Vauxhall Tavern, I'd have been echoing their Mad Lizzie moves...

Hmm. Should I start using my flash more? Maybe.

White snow red as strawberries

2008-10-10T16:14:00.003+01:00

This morning: my first white beard hair.

I hesitated, unsure whether or not to attack it with the trimmer, before deciding to let it be. While it looks a little lonely there, all on its own, I'm in no way opposed to white hair, facial or otherwise. Quite the opposite, in fact: I really like premature grey on a man, and have a particular penchant for salt & pepper. Thing is, I'm reasonably fair haired(ish) and my beard tends toward the ginger, particularly in sunlight.

Salt & paprika?

Then take your money

2008-10-09T13:08:00.000+01:00

At the start of this week, my sleep pattern was all over the place. For some reason, I seem unable to sleep for more than five hours without waking; if I'm lucky I can then doze off again. If not, I'm faced with the choice of either tossing and turning until dawn or going with it, reading or going online until it's time to get up. Worst case scenario: I doze off an hour before it's time to get up then rise and stagger off to work, zombie-like, feeling like I haven't slept at all.

Anyway. I made the mistake, at around 3am Monday, of logging on and perusing the online Guardian - then getting sucked into all the credit crunch/recession/depression panic. Now, my job and mortgage are reeeasonably safe - at least at the moment - but at 3am, one's sense of perspective can become skewed and one's moodometer tends toward Vague Existential Dread. Which is what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, too (last night, I forbade myself from taking the laptop upstairs, which did the trick).

I've always been shit with money and don't really understand basic economics. Turns out that the same is true of quite a few of us (including several who Do Something In The City). I'm always amazed at (and often slightly suspicious of) people who're able to save the sort of sums being "guaranteed" by our own and other European governments. My financial crapness has, I suppose, been a protective factor in terms of shielding me from anxiety. I did, however, during my 3am insomnia jaunts, find myself looking up "recession" on Wikipedia and Googling "how will the credit crunch affect me?"

On balance, I think it's better not to know. Denial is good.

More angst: it's rumoured that, at the end of this (first) series of No Heroics, simian-summoning Thundermonkey will die.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

No Heroics is a bit hit-and-miss (which, for an ITV sitcom, is superlative) in terms of laughs but the cast is likeable and, for a comics geek like me, the in-jokes are wonderful (Shazamstell! Gin City! Von Doomenbrau!). And Jim Howick as Thundermonkey is the sexiest thing in the show. Here're some bits from the first episode:

Considering whether or not to do Vauxhallville again this week. I'll be sticking around after work for a colleague's leaving drinks so will have to watch my intake...

Healthy recipe

2008-10-06T20:14:00.000+01:00

After weeks of being moderately careful of carbohydrate loading I missed lunch and, queuing in Sainsburys at 5.30, succumbed to the lure of a packet of five All-Butter Cookies (with chocolate and hazel nut bits). Scoffing them in a oner, I now feel bloated, slightly nauseous and very tired.

Still, it could be worse. I could be Mr Gay UK '93. Which reminds me of a snippet of conversation from last Thursday's Vauxhallville wherein I became briefly misty-eyed on the subject of early '80s girl bands, when Dawn Right Nasty played the sublime Sign Of The Times by the Belle Stars:

(It's a Song With A Spoken Bit. I like SWASBs. Is there a proper term for them? There should be.)

In my tangential meandering, I remembered the somewhat less sublime Toto Coelo hit I Eat Cannibals. Looking it up here, I rediscovered the somewhat overshadowed Milk From The Coconut and agree utterly with the YouTube poster's comment that it contains "the complete blueprint for the Spice Girls whole act". See what you think:

And, on the subject of gay male intimacy being bad for one's health, it seems the Rev Peter Mullen reckons we should have our backsides tattooed with public health warnings. Presumably in case healthy hetero blokes accidentally put their willies in there.

But, ho ho, it's all right because he's only joking! And judging from his photo, he's already been laughing on the other side of his face. A lot.

(It's okay for me to say that because it's in "the tradition of English satire".)

Oh, gin

2008-10-05T12:52:00.000+01:00

Agh, Mother's Ruin. Cursed fiend with fury fraught indeed...

So... Saturday, me, TSB and our friend Mel caught the train to the deep south for The Rognon's "gin tasting". Gin's probably not my spirit of choice but I'm certainly not averse to a nicely mixed G&T (preferably by someone other than me - I always make them too strong), so I was looking forward to comparing different varieties. TR picked us up from the station and was in fine form, pointing out that all had been blue skies before we arrived, trailing dirty rainclouds in our wake. In fact, it was rather lovely getting gradually drunker in TR's light-filled living room, listening to the rain against the windowpane and watching a nearby copse of trees (a remnant of Lobb's Forest, apparently) swaying in the wind. And eating pie. Mmmmm, pie...

We brought a bottle of Blackwood's ("handpicked in Shetland") and started with that. It was delicious, quite fruity but perhaps a little subtle for me. Then moved onto Plymouth, Tanqueray (still my favourite, I think), Gordon's... At one point, I decided I needed a break from all things ginsome and moved onto champagne. The healthy option.

Mel's American, and confirms that, by US standards, quite a few Brits would be viewed as alcoholics. I'm pretty sure me and TSB would; we love our booze, especially when it's good quality - and TR's gin party was fuelled by good stuff. I suspect that's the only reason I don't feel horribly hungover today. That and the fact that we've stuffed ourselves with an excellent value Sunday roast at the Oval Lounge. With a cheeky wee Pinot Grigio.

Ah well, we've got the working week to atone.

We'd tentatively planned to hop on the train back to London in time for Duckie. TR hummed and hawed about joining us but, in the end, decided not to. That was the sensible choice. The insensible choice was to pitch up at the Vauxhall Tavern ready-sozzled after an afternoon's gin-guzzling, and that's what we did. It's never a great idea to arrive at Duckie already drunk but, in the course of the one-and-a-half-hour train journey, we managed to convince ourselves we'd sobered up. Dear reader, we hadn't.

I'm a sociable drunk, by and large. Last night, I was in full I Am In Love With The World mode, and found myself chatting to all and sundry, including a particularly elegant lesbian couple who were sipping champagne ("cava", they said, dismissively) from an ice bucket perched on the edge of the stage. One looked like Sharleen Spiteri (although she bridled when TSB remarked on this) and the other like a slimmer, better-dressed Beth Ditto. Ms Ditto hailed from Ayrshire, and seemed to have taken a shine to Mel (who, although straight, is very lesbosocial). They left somewhat abruptly, hopefully not as a consequence of Mel's relationship-wrecking dykonicity...

It was a classic Duckie, albeit without Amy again. Guest host Scottee (who I reckon works better as host than actual cabaret act) was somewhat unkind about CelebAir - it's candyfloss but I quite like it - and I do wonder whether Amy's missing Duckie. I don't think she's ever been consistently absent for such a long period. Makes me realise how much commitment the Duckie Six put in over time. Simon was particularly resplendent, in canary yellow jacket and three-quarter trousers - making me feel positively dowdy. Must make more of an effort to dress for Duckie.

The Readers Wifes were sterling as ever. We really do take them for granted. High point of the evening, for me, was Paper Planes which, since I discovered it via Chelsea Kelsey's excellent blog, feels like my own secret aural gemstone. It's impossible to listen to it and not do shooty-gun motions at the chorus. Me, TSB and Mel gave full vent to our inner Sarah Palins, gunning down every moose and bear in the joint (and there were many of both).

Intriguing cabaret. First act was one Buggerchops, a yellow-eared fellow who sang a number of songs, including a notably instructive piece entitled The Best Hepatitis Yet. Actually, STDs was the theme throughout, with such detail that I wondered whether Buggerchops himself came from a medical background. Catchy, well-written stuff with a music hall vibe - do visit his site and have a listen. Hugely enjoyable.

There was a sort of buskery thing going on too, in the nearby railway arch/bypass, something Bob Dylan themed, I think. They later came in an performed one song on stage. It was okay but, after Buggerchops, nothing special (or maybe I was just too gin-addled to appreciate them).

Cringey Oh God Did I Really Do That Moment: I have a slightly murky recollection of scaling the DJ booth at the end to burble some sort of incoherent "I love yous, yous're my besht matesss" dribble at the Readers Wifes. Oh dear.

I met a strange lady

2008-10-05T12:01:00.000+01:00

Three strange ladies. Friday after work, me and TSB met at the Leicester Square Theatre for The Kransky Sisters. Mourne, Eve and Dawn Kransky (only recently did I realise they're all named after times of day) are a trio of weird sisters from Esk, Queensland. Theirs is a compelling Australian Gothic premise with a beautifully mordant backstory that's revealed as much by facial expression, body language and what's not said as by the between-songs monologues. It's lovely dark stuff that creeps up on you, comedy that's not afraid to take its time.

They're apparently a cult phenomenon in Australia; there's plenty of them on YouTube:

They played Born To Be Wild as well as Werewolves Of London (complete with howls), Ça Plane Pour Moi, Dah Dah Dah (which segued into Puppet On A String) and many others. I think my favourite was their inimitable version of Pull Up To The Bumper...

We first encountered the Kranskys in a ten-minute slot at Duckie (with music and cabaret, Duckie's an endless treasure trove; they've introduced us to countless gems) but here, they had room to unfold gradually, over an hour and a half (their show was great value), transporting us to their subtly drawn, Addams Familyesque world of dust, wirelesses and tightly repressed sexuality. Afterwards, they signed merchandise in the foyer, unnervingly never slipping out of character. Tentatively, I mentioned that I'd seen them at Duckie.

Mourne Kransky: Such nice people! How did you find us here?

Me (earnestly): Umm... expanded. You had the time to give us a fuller, richer experience. I really liked it.

MK (after a slight pause): How lovely. But that's not what I was asking. I wondered how you'd found us.

Me (feeling a bit silly): Ah. We, er, saw you on the poster and bought tickets

MK (socially adroit): Well, thankyou for coming.

We're now proud owners of a signed Kransky Sisters teatowel - which will never see dishes!

They're there for another week or so, and really deserve to sell out, so go see 'em. You won't regret it.

Make me smile

2008-10-03T23:07:00.000+01:00

Vauxhallville again last night, this time dragging TSB along with me. I say "dragging" but he didn't need much convincing, despite the odd sense of taboo that comes with drinking alcohol in the Vauxhall Tavern on a School Night. Bought a bottle of wine between us this time and, predictably enough, found ourselves buying a second after guzzling the first in record time. Back to the three pints of lager limit next time, I think.

A different crowd from last time, rowdier and, frankly, better looking: a particularly sexy group of bears (what's the collective noun? a woof? a hirsute?) at the back, all attractively gussied up in braces and flat caps. Our own rather pitiful gesture toward the dress code (1863-1945) was to wear vaguely 1940sish jumpers. Garethwyn had obviously had the same idea and, sitting on three stools by the side of the stage, we doubtless resembled some sort of unholy Val Doonican threesome.

Timberlina seemed ripped to the tits, delightfully so. She and Polly Vinyl meandered off into a sick-but-very-funny riff about Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. Volunteers from the audience equally inebriated:

Underbling & Vow provided the bulk of the cabaret, basically a Cockney singalong with comedy character stuff between the songs. I'd seen them before, at Duckie, but here they had time and space to expand their schtick. Almost despite myself, I got drawn into the whole knees-up-Mother-Brown thing - they were impossible to dislike - and found myself heartily singing along. There's something very warm and inclusive about Underbling & Vow's routine.

Not sure if this was a joke but they're apparently planning, when the Olympics come to London, to organise the world's biggest gathering of Londoners simultaneously singing Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner. Sounded like quite a good idea. I was reminded that I now think of myself as a Londoner in a way that I've never really thought of myself as "British" or even as "Scottish". National identity's a strange and complex thing...

Bearlesque finished the night, as seems to be the custom at Vauxhallville. The very lovely Simon Bear did his Singing In The Rain striptease. I'd seen it fairly recently but one can never have too much wet-shirted Simon Bear.

I have forgiven Jesus

2008-10-01T06:36:00.000+01:00

From the ever-wonderful Joe.My.God. comes this frankly incredible 1984 Specialsesque ska performance by *koff* Sonseed, Jesus Is My Friend:

Once I tried to run
I tried to run and hide
But Jesus came and found me
And he touched me deep inside
He is like a Mountie
He always gets his man.
And he'll zap you any way he can... zap!

Surely surely surely this must be an elaborate fake/prank? The gayger counter is registering dangerously high levels of camp. The mengines cannae take it, Captain. Etc. Catchy, though. I'm particularly loving the near-motionless Keith-from-The Office backing singer on the far right - although the Osmonds-inspired lead (Sal?) is my favourite.

I'm rubbish at spotting well-crafted fake viral campaigns: I fulminated at the appalling McCain Girls video (I'm pretty sure if I turned up the volume, neighbourhood dogs would join in) before that was revealed as a hoax. I'm remaining sceptical about this one for the time being.

In other news, I've got a bit of a taste for Vauxhallville and may well pop along to this Thursday's The Lambeth Walk. Dress code 1863-1945? Blimey. I have a pair of 1940sish two-tone shoes and I might wear a cap. I imagine that'll be it, costume-wise, for me. Saving other theatricality for Hallowe'en, I think.

Oh, the pain in my legs

2008-09-30T22:28:00.001+01:00

Well, leg singular. I was woken from sleep with a sudden attack of either cramp or weirdly pulled muscle in my left calf. I think it's because that leg was poking out from under the duvet so was colder than the rest of me and I'd flexed my ankle in my sleep. Or something.

Whatever caused it, ouchy.

Suspended under a twilight canopy

2008-09-25T23:59:00.000+01:00

Tonight I went to my second ever Vauxhallville.

The only time me and TSB ventured out to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern on a Thursday before, we'd just finished work and were due to fly abroad on holiday next day - so there was a Schoooool's Out feeling and we drank accordingly. Since then, I suppose I've always associated Vauxhallville, like Duckie, with unable-to-work-the-next-day hangoverness. Which, as I was able to establish tonight, isn't really what the evening's about.

It helped that Garethwyn was there. I've been to clubs on my own and certainly wouldn't have minded sitting through Vauxhallville's acts alone; I like being able to chat between cabaret turns, though, and appreciated his company. He pointed out Adele Anderson sat in the audience. Tonight's theme was a sort of historical celebration of Vauxhall (introduced by Nathaniel deVille reading a passage from Thackeray's Vanity Fair), including people blowing up and decorating balloons (as a nod to the Pleasure Gardens entertainment of yore). Now, I'm mildly balloon-phobic (don't ask) so didn't take part, but this led onto a very interesting discussion of phobias and (what with Nathaniel's co-host Timberlina mentioning the - for me - traumatic beginning of Enduring Love) nightmares. More on that some other time.

Anyway, I was on a three pint limit and it wasn't too difficult to stick to this - unlike Duckie, where the five, six hours of music mean alcohol's consumed at varying rates and we drink as fast as the fastest drinker ("another?") in the party. No, this evening felt positively civilised by comparison with Duckie's bacchanalia. Although I succumbed to the Pavlovian walk-in-the-door-and-buy-a-Stella impulse, I noticed several people drinking wine and thought, "ooh, that might be nice in future".

Timing it well, I arrived just as the acts were starting. Nathaniel introduced Fivesome, a five-piece woodwind group, impeccably dressed with a bit of a red shoe theme (which garned its own little mini-applause). They played Entrance Of The Queen Of Sheba, then some Gershwin backing for the dulcet Gill Manly:

Timberlina was in vaguely Les Miserables Wench Mode, necking Mother's Ruin:

Highlight of the night (and I took my cue from Garethwyn's eager readying of the camera in anticipation of his turn) was Ari the Aerialist, who hung, draped and spun himself around a hoop suspended from the ceiling, improvising to Nathaniel's (non-pink) oboe accompaniment from the stage. The juxtaposition of a beautiful, classically muscled male form within a circle made me think of Mapplethorpe, although obviously Ari's performance was dynamic rather than stylised/static.

Exchanged a few words with Luke Bear, who was looking attractive as ever, with his beard looking slightly longer and more defined than usual. He and Bearlesque did their can-can. I've seen it before but the live backing added an extra element. Nice pants, too:

And here they are exposing their mimsies:

Really appreciated Dawn Right Nasty's DJing this time, too. I noticed it before, at our previous pre-holiday, drunken Vauxhallville but more so this time. An eclectic, intuitive music selection, less obtrusive and more... sedate? (not the correct word, but in keeping with a pub/cabaret as opposed to dance/club setting) than the Readers Wifes, but quite Readers Wifesish in the sense that it suited the night and hit my choonspot. Was too shy to go say hello - and she was trapped in her illuminated hermitage.

Will definitely do Vauxhallville again.

Happy to be a bachelor boy

2008-09-25T16:01:00.000+01:00

Is it just me who reckons Sir Cliff has done pretty well to pull his burly "companion", ex-priest-turned-property-manager Father John McElynn?

Hmm. Which one's the top, then?

God bless Ma McElynn:

His mother, 85-year-old Betty McElynn, also admits he is no longer a priest, saying: "He left for the same reasons so many of them leave." Although she declined to go into details about a decision that was clearly painful for her, she added: "I know about his new life and Sir Cliff, of course. I hope they are happy. But I was surprised to hear that he was advising Sir Cliff on property. That never was John's thing, as far as I know."

Mums. They know just what to say for major embarrassment...

Size of a cow

2008-09-24T22:07:00.001+01:00

Our 12 year old cats are officially fat. Both of them. Me and TSB tricked them into their wicker carry-baskets (Stupid Boy Cat gullible as ever; Clever Girl Cat sussed what was going in and tried to make a break for it) and schlepped to the vet for their annual check-up and vaccinations. Last year, CGC was reckoned to be overweight. This time, the vet said told us, "you could feed them both about half of what you're feeding them". I know being a fat cat risks becoming a diabetic cat. We're such bad parents.

Here's SBC doing his gormless Barbarella impression, in the bath:

To a certain extent, I can sympathise with feline obesity. Having been on a moderately successful low-fat diet over spring/summer, I've slid off the wagon in recent weeks. Today was the worst: was involved in a training day with a "finger food" lunch which was absolutely sodden with greasy batter and sticky-sweet plum sauce. And gorgeous. Apparently we gravitate toward more carby stuff in autumn.

My relationship with my body is a weird one. Until my mid-20s, I couldn't put on any weight at all; my trousers averaged 27/28" in the waist. Never having found puniness attractive (in myself or others), I was actually quite relieved when, as a twentysomething, I began gaining a little bulk. When I met my lovely partner, portion size went up and so did my trouser size.

I'm definitely happier fatter - but I wish I were more in proportion ie. had something resembling muscle somewhere. I'm a wannabear.

Where the suburbs meet utopia

2008-09-23T19:46:00.000+01:00

This morning was taken up with a trip out to the suburbs on work-related stuff, out past Ealing. The little railway station seemed to have preserved quite a few of its pre-war trappings (the black-on-white enameled signs in the written equivalent of BBC English were my favourite); that, plus the greenery, aged brick semis, gently pruned hedges and odd feeling of semi-rural quiet made me think of Rupert Bear:

Growing up in Scotland, Rupert Bear's hometown (or Daily Express idyll of a green and pleasant village) was pretty much how I imagined all of England to be. Nutwood (City Limits) was a large part of my frame of reference, and discovering it in the London suburbs gave me a little jolt of childish pleasure. For the briefest of nanoseconds, I thought, "hmm, might be nice to live out here". Then I thought, "apart from it being, y'know, boring". And, when I play back the YouTube videos, I'm reminded that not only was Rupert an insufferable little prig but his family, friends and everyone he knew was stiflingly middle-class. Of course, as a north-of-the-border kid, I didn't find that stifling but oddly exotic.

I still have a certain cheesy affection for this, though:

Bum. Bum bum. Bum. Bum bum. Bum bum bum bum bum.

We run green

2008-09-22T22:59:00.000+01:00

Blame it on the Hadron Colliders (which, it seems, are already broken), blame it on the CERN-inspired boogie or blame it on the rain, I seem stuck in a state of peri-apocalyptic fascination.

Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily. Having heard about it and meant to read it for years, I finally tracked down John Christopher's The Death of Grass (or No Blade Of Grass if you're a 'merkin):

Read it in almost a single sitting, such is its page-turniness. Chilling stuff, recognisably British but not at all British in the sense of fundamentally decent chaps all standing together (most likely in a queue) against the catastrophe, stiffened upper lips a-quivering with fair play and Spirit of the Blitz. No, it's nastier than that, painting a terrifying picture of Blighty's sharp descent into barbarous survivalism once famine starts to bite. It made me think of the aphorism about how a dog is only one square meal from a wolf. Or something.

Not having previously made the connection, I was delighted to discover, from the man who gave us that other humanity-in-crisis classic, The Tripods.

The Tripods is one of my all-time Favouritest Things Ever. Only recently did I read the novels (a timelessly well-written childrens' trilogy plus excellent explaining-how-it-all-happened prequel). What I truly remember is the big budget 1980s BBC series, which had me hooked from Episode 1. I defy anyone to watch the first two minutes of this and not want more:

I've always been drawn more to British dystopias than the more common American variants. They're usually bleaker, more depressing, more Fallen Empire. I liked the fact that the heroes of The Tripods trekked across Europe, through shattered Paris and countless more generically Mittel-European towns and hamlets (full of overstyled peasants, often uncannily reminiscent of vintage Adam Ant/Spandau Ballet videos) on their way to the semi-mythical White Mountains. Even as a child, though, I think I registered the increasing desperation of the contrived plot devices for circumventing the language barriers ("come, let us all practise our English!").

Anyway, I've just realised the entire run is on YouTube, including the later episodes that weren't collected on DVD, those in the strangely homoerotic City of Gold and Lead. I think I may not sleep for the next 48 hours...

Lost in a riddle last Saturday night

2008-09-21T21:00:00.000+01:00

(Bloody hell, three posts in a day! You'd think I was avoiding the gym or something!)

In the early part of last night's Duckie, the ever-fragrant Kim Phaggs stirred a host of teenage memories by playing Mike Oldfield's Moonlight Shadow:

Apparently it came out in 1983, but I remember Moonlight Shadow from the very first Now That's What I Call Music album. I can't remember whether we owned the first one legitimately or whether it was pirated for me and my sister by our Dad, from a bloke at work. Dad had access to a tape-to-tape cassette recorder (the technological exoticism!) and would surprise us with recordings on C60 (actually, I've a feeling the Now albums needed C90 length), with track listings crammed in in his too-large handwriting.

(That was the year he and Mum separated, amid much angst, and the gift-giving to us kids increased on both sides. We weren't complaining. Not about the pressies, anyway.)

My memory of the song has always been connected with my memory of the video. Back then, MTV was only beginning and I used to sit for hours in front of the UK equivalent, Music Box (Mum had had cable television installed, possibly in an attempt to trump Dad's tape-to-tape pop affection-bribes), agog at music videos. I really was a child of the '80s in that sense: when I started buying music of my own, I not infrequently bought stuff on the strength of video alone, or mainly because I'd been seduced by the visuals (Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer comes to mind). I discovered a lot of excellent music this way: I got into Kate Bush largely through Running Up That Hill and Cloudbusting, working my way backwards through her (considerable) canon. I also bought quite a few one-hit wonders - like Moonlight Shadow.

I was fascinated by songs with narratives and always tried to work out the story in the lyrics - or impose a story of my own. The video's very evocative, with moonlit duels, '80s wind-machine hair and plenty of flicky-cloak running down corridors flanked by spooky servants bearing candelabra (although not quite as memorable in this regard as Bonnie Tyler at her classic best). According to Mike Oldfield, the song's inspired by the Tony Curtis Houdini film, with its theme of lovers reunited through spiritualism. I'm not quite sure what I thought the video was about: ghosts from the future and the suggestion of changelings? Whatever, I loved it. And Maggie Reilly reminded me of Kirsty MacColl, which is never a bad thing.

(Listening to it again, I'm reminded that the "4am in the morning" bit irks me slightly. As opposed to what, Mr Oldfield, Ms Reilly? 4am in the afternoon? Pedants R Us.)

Ah, memories. Proust had his madeleine; I have the marvellous Readers Wifes. Long may they surprise me.

There'll be Over The Rainbow for me

2008-09-21T14:08:00.000+01:00

And so, once again, to Duckie. We're becoming quite the regulars, these days; I think it makes a difference having discovered the little Duckie-flavoured corner of the blogosphere and knowing people to chat (or at least nod) to. The place was quiet too (relatively speaking), and it was good having more room than usual to dance. Is this a reflection of Credit Crunch Duckie, a shape of things to come? Perhaps it was just the Last Saturday Before Payday effect.

Having grabbed a (very) brief nap after early evening Eurobeat, I'd decided at the last minute to accessorise with my Blue Peter badge. Dominic at the door noticed, and I had to admit I'd bought it from eBay. The shame! In the course of the evening, another three people remarked upon it and I decided I really ought to make up something more exciting, claim I sucked off Peter Purves, perhaps, or deflowered Percy's garden. Ho bloody ho.

Initially a four-hander, with Amy still in the air (in Ayia Napa, apparently) and Richie Rich standing in for Chelsea Kelsey. I noticed that Chelsea did arrive later, though, and finished off the night. I'm never very sure what governs the comings and goings of the Readers Wifes - they move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform - but I like to imagine that even when he's officially absent/awol (can a DJ pull a sickie?) Chelsea can't resist the siren call of Duckie.

The cabaret was introduced again by Amy replacements, Nathan Evans (and, having chatted about it with Gareth, I'm more convinced than ever that I ought to break the No Going Out On School Nights rule and make it along to Nathan's Thursday night Vauxhallville more often) and some nameless chap dressed in a cub scout/schoolboy uniform. Hmm.

First act was one Dickie Beau. Ho hum, I thought, another bog-standard lip-synching drag queen with a Judy Garland fixation. Wrong! Within a minute or two, I was absolutely rapt, held spellbound by what turned out to be an extraordinary performance piece of unusual intensity.

Yes, the obvious Judy Garland references, dramatically displayed (a scarlet Dorothy!), but more than that: the initial distorted Chasing Rainbows mash-up (with handfuls of pills and shots of blood-coloured liquor) segued into an utterly riveting spoken (or ranted) word piece, presumably taken from one of Garland's more out-of-control recorded monologues (I wondered if it was from the same place as the defiant quote at the end of The Other Side). Dickie Beau performed the monomaniacal rant perfectly, capturing the attention of all in the club, with jerky, doll-like movements, expressions and gestures which, while exaggerated, never lapsed into slapstick. When he fell over backwards in his chair, face bloodied, it was shocking rather than funny. There were a couple of moments when, for a second or two, I felt suddenly tearful.

There was music playing softly in the background of Dickie Beau's monologue but, other than Sakamoto's refrain from Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence - which fitted beautifully, affectingly - I can't recall what. I think everyone was caught up in it: even allowing for the fact that it was a smaller audience than usual, the pin-drop silence was eerie. Quite incredible. Afterwards, I found myself thinking about Liza Minnelli (the streaked mascara and handfuls of prescription drugs were, I think, meant to reference her as well as her mother) and the nod toward Little Red Riding Hood. Child stars as babes lost in the woods, gorily consumed by the Big Bad Wolf of celebrity? Okay, possibly too much analysis but it did seem a multi-layered piece which could be read into a number of ways. It reminded me a little of Geoff Ryman's WAS.

Second act was Nathan Evans as the Queen, a sort of puppet striptease act making a series of points about the shedding of various human rights. I was sure I'd seen him do this one before, possibly on YouTube:

It was a good and clever piece but, coming hot on Dickie Beau's ruby heels, seemed a little lacking in bite. Perhaps we're more used to the one kind of nihilism than the other? Still, after last weekend's disappointment at the zoo, it was nice to finally catch a glimpse of the Queen's beaver. Just the one, though.

Following from Gareth's Duckie Commandments, I think the biggest unspoken rule of thumb would have to be

Thou shalt not remove thy shirt.

That said, there's something amusing about those gayers who've obviously strayed into Duckie for the first time and take a while to realise the ways in which it's not quite as other gay clubs. The punters are, by and large, there for non-pectacular reasons: the music is not simply an aural backdrop for muscleboy adoration; the music is the principal raison d'être, the reason people are there. Getting one's disco tits out for the lads is neither big nor clever and will generally be met with averted gazes and embarrassment (such a social gaffe...) rather than gasps of appreciation. Put 'em away.

Then again, there are exceptions to every rule. Standing out from last night's crowd was a dark-haired fellow, bare-chested beneath a rather nice black leather waistcoat. Somehow - possibly because he was pleasantly hairy, possibly because he didn't strip off entirely, possibly because he didn't seem to be soliciting pec-worship - he managed to carry it off.

Don't try this at Duckie, kids.

You want a Euro lover

2008-09-21T12:09:00.000+01:00

Such a packed Saturday it has to be divided into two blog entries (ooh, get me!): after a longish lie-in (after Friday night's Quiet Drink With Mel in the Retro Bar) I rolled uptown, braved the mouth breathers of Forbidden Planet (for the final piece of Grant Morrison's ASS), met a post-gym TSB for lunch in Balans and then headed off to the Novello Theatre for the 5pm showing of Eurobeat the Musical.

Credit goes to TSB for booking tickets; I'd never heard of it until quite recently. A premise so simple it's difficult to imagine why it's never been done before: a musical satirising the euphoric silliness of The Eurovision Song Contest. Eurovision really divides people, even The Gays; I have friends who host extravagantly boozy Eurovision parties every year and I know people who go to great lengths to avoid it. I love it, not so much for the music (which is generally forgettable - although I still occasionally find Latvia's gloriously daft Wolves of the Sea inhabiting my head - "we are robbing you blind, I hope you don't mind", camply performed by the politest pirates ever) but its eventness, the peculiar combination of European earnestness and, well, glittery nonsense.

Anyway. One might legitimately ask, is it possible to parody something that's already so parodic? Somehow, Eurobeat works - on the same level as Mamma Mia, I think, in that one almost instantly suspends critical faculties in the face of an onslaught of sheer joyful exuberance. Ridicule is not only nothing to be scared of; in the case of Eurobeat, ridiculousness is to be actively embraced. We bought in to it wholesale, quite literally, purchasing flags, "clackers" (rattly affairs which made noisy clapping much easier) and flashing light-up horn/klaxon affairs. One is encouraged to cheer, clack and hoot in support of the acts (with much horn/clackers innuendo), and it's the only theatre production I've been to where one is advised to leave one's mobile 'phone on.

On entering the theatre, one is randomly allotted a country by taking a badge from baskets offered by sequined ushers. As luck would have it, TSB and I were both Germany for the evening. The merchandise stand then beckoned, and we accessorised appropriately. Helpfully, drinks can be brought into the auditorium. It was a little disappointing to see the stalls seats only half full; I imagine Eurobeat with a full audience would be a thing of beauty and wonder indeed.

The set-up is that we are at an actual Eurovision show, hosted by "sunny, safe and secure" Sarajevo. Our master and mistress of ceremonies were Sergei (Les Dennis) and Boyka (a superb Mel Giedroyc - the non-lesbian half of Mel & Sue), and we rolled through a series of performances from ten different European countries (mercifully truncated - apparently the real Eurovision is now up to 40something). These accurately lampooned a variety of Eurovision styles, from Ireland's Johnny Loganesque dry ice power ballad of gratingly sentimental Oirishness (the chorus is "la la la la la la la - sing along if you know the words!") to Greece's bespectacled Nana Mouskouri lookalike who suddenly turns poledancer.

At the interval, one had to vote by text (apparently there's a different winner each night). My three choices were:

Poland's Toomas Jerker and the Hard Pole Dancers, with Together Again

Hungary's Molnar Sisters, with the chicken entrailtastic Apró Madarakkal

and Russia's KGBoyz, with Ice Queen.

Having worried that we might not get into sufficiently party mood, we found ourselves drawn in almost immediately, cheering and honking along with the best of them - and laughing in recognition of all those Eurovision flourishes (the concept of the Big Reveal, exploited so successfully by Bucks Fizz, is noted), including Boyka's halfway song, I'm Sarajevo (Taste Me!), in which she starts off dressed as a turnip picked to be part of a stew eaten by a king. In clumsier hands, this could all be offensive, even racist. Because it's all so affectionately, skilfully done, it doesn't come across that way at all.

In our showing, there was a Russia/UK cliffhanger, with the UK winning. That'd never happen. Failure of audience imagination, I suspect. The UK contribution was an authentically anodyne nul points duet, I Love To Love To Love (Love), performed again to much celebratory hooting and clacking.

And then we went home, snoozed and went to Duckie.

Nothing more than confetti on the floor

2008-09-18T00:35:00.000+01:00

Fresh up on the Duckie website is the Autumn/Winter Collection 2008/09, an array of sparkly gems including this:

New Years Eve

Wednesday 31 December 9pm - 3am
Tickets 14.99 in advance from The Retro Bar
Eagle, 349, Kennington Lane, Vauxhall, London SE11

After last years debacle, Duckie thought we better give it another go around the corner from the RVT. The theme is The Leather Boys are having Mental Health Issues as choreographer Russell Harris stages stunning durational performance interventions with 6 Go-Go 'Boys'.

It's a knees-up and the Readers Wifes go mental on pop through time.

I am practically hugging myself to asphyxiation. I love it. I love the theme (I can do leather and Mental Health Issues!), I love the Readers Wifes, I love the fact that the Duckie Six are big enough and honest enough to admit that last year's New Year bash disappointed many, myself included - and do something about it. TSB and I had gushed mightily to our friends about the fabulousness of bidding farewell to 2006 at the Eagle, soundtracked by Kim 'n' Chelsea and several of them had taken us at our word and booked tickets for what they (and we) thought would be a riproaring Duckie event.

It kiiind of was a Duckie event but featured only Jay and Father Cloth plus David Hoyle. I could sort of see what David H was getting at with his excoriation of the idea of picking a completely arbitrary date to (supposedly) wipe one's slate clean, but his delivery seemed fuzzier than usual, lacking in the usual edge. The real stinker was the music, however, which tended to the extremes of techno (too hardcore to dance to) or nursery rhyme (too jarringly twee to dance to - The Teddy Bears' Picnic being one example). I later discovered from Luke Bear that the songs were chosen to be deliberately irritating and unlikeable before midnight and joyous after. Not necessarily a bad concept but a) if one wasn't aware of it, the prospect of an evening of hateful music might well cause one to bugger off home, and b) while there was a noticeable improvement after midnight, it wasn't such an improvement that the distinction was clear.

Although, looking closely at the tickets and flyers, there was no mention of the Readers Wifes, I'd mistakenly assumed that Duckie = Kim 'n' Chelsea, at least musically. I felt embarrassed at having dragged my friends along to a party with crap music (at least initially).

So... I'm utterly utterly delighted at this turn of events. And, come February, there's a double helping of Bexhill-on-Sea! With these parties, messieurs and mesdames, you are really spoiling us.

(PS WTF are "durational performance interventions"?)

I can see my house from here

2008-09-16T22:02:00.000+01:00

Banks and airlines may be crumbling but one aspect of the scary credit crunch is making me happy: I'm no longer having to wade through glossy property brochures and Are You Willing To Sell Your Flat For A Premium? leaflets every time I open the front door. We bought our flat with the intention of living there for a good long time, if not indefinitely, so the idea of not being able to sell for years isn't hugely worrying. I'm quite pleased we're no longer being hassled by estate agents.

Giraffes are insincere

2008-09-15T21:13:00.001+01:00

Excellent Duckie on Saturday, despite only three of the six being present (Amy had taken to the skies and the Cloths were awol). Our proto-Lamé mistress of ceremonies was Robin (Robyn?) Hood, who seemed generally fine (if a little overfond of the word "cunt" - which rather diminishes with repetition) and there was a grand total of four separate acts.

Schwanzen Sänger Knaben, the Danish Dancing Penis Boys (something has either been lost or gained in translation, I'm not sure which):

Tortoise Shout (with kazoo-toting Bin Lady):

Slippery Fish (with lucky-it-didn't-end-in-tears audience participation from Drunken Pam Grier):

The Lady Gardener (through a camera haze of flowery nipplewater):

Said hello for the first time to Garethwyn, a fellow denizen of Duckie's activity island. Having seen him around at Duckie and Vauxhallville, I was intrigued to discover his blog a few weeks ago: odd-in-a-good-way reading someone else's account of the same evenings. Genuinely nice talking to him in the flesh and, as ever, I came away thinking, "hmm, I definitely ought to be more sociable with my fellow Duckieites in future". Here's my favourite pic of the night, the three of us fresh from bellowing along to Total Eclipse Of The Heart:

"We're livin' in a powder keg and GIVIN' OFF SPA-ARKS!"

Pleasantly minimal hangover the next day. I have a theory that the problem isn't so much the alcohol consumed at Duckie itself (which is copious but all of a type - beer) that causes the hangover as the ill-advised "let's open a bottle of wine" when we get home after 2am. Managed not to do that this time, and kept up the water-drinking (in addition to Stella, not instead of) throughout the night. Not quite up to TSB's impressive morning-after gym-going (he was already gone by the time I woke - it's like living with Jane Fonda) but I did make it along to Gay Sunday at London Zoo.

I'm not quite sure what I expected. I think I had a vague idea of the pathways and bowers of the zoo completely, gloriously thronged with Teh Gayz. What I hadn't factored into the Gay Sunday of my imagination was the same number of straight people as usual for a sunny weekend: couples hand-in-hand or wielding pushchairs the size of 4x4s, squalling children everywhere and, in one case, a set of luggage (who takes luggage to the zoo?). It was sort of Mixed (But Still Overwhelmingly Straight) Sunday. Why do the breeders have to shove their sexuality in our faces? Can't we test for queer at the front entrance and exclude them?

(Actually, quite a distance from the gates, a gay chap seemed to be in earnest discussion with a bespectacled man holding an ominous-looking book; I heard the phrase "same-sex couples" as we breezed past. I wondered whether Specky Man was a lone Bible-wielding Godwarrior, fighting to keep Sunday straight. I was carrying The Observer and considered reading aloud the review of Madonna's Sticky & Sweet tour to him in a sort of "it is written that..." tone but suspected he'd miss my point that something dodgy isn't less dodgy just because it's in print.)

Comedy Moment Of The Day came from one of the many parent/child spats. A chubby, red-faced 8-year-old, presumably on a sugar-high and literally stamping her feet in tantrum at something or other, was being remonstrated with by her father:

Near-End-Of-Tether Father (in exasperation): We'll go and get a drink. Do you WANT a drink?

Tantrumming Child (through hot tears of rage): Yeeesss...

NEOTF (firmly): Well, stop whingeing!

TC (wailing, her pain unappreciated): I CAAAN'T!!

Disappointingly, there were no gay animals in evidence (I mean, hell, "flamingo" is only a vowel away from flaming). The nearest we found was this bi-curious meerkat:

Mind you, in the truly excellent (if child-infested) Bug House, a fascinating glass window decked out as a filthy kitchen to showcase the holocaust-resistant insects that live in human mankiness evoked the shout, "Aidan! Come here and see this cockroach's anus!" That was, I suppose, a bit gay.

No bears of any variety - until, latterly, we found the Fish & Chips serving area and there they all were, beards, bellies and baseball caps in full display. Watch them, catch them unawares, and see them picnic on their holiday.

Sadly, we missed the Queen's double beaver:

I didn't know it was traditional for Canadians to present their beavers to the British monarch.

We caught the giraffes being fed:

I couldn't be certain but suspected at least one of them was an evil herbivore, eating extra leaves so that other giraffes would starve:

It's the bomb...

2008-09-13T12:07:00.000+01:00

... the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together. (But only if it's not love.)

Garethwyn talked about how this week's slightly queasy anxiety over the powering-up of the Large Hadron Colliders at CERN (vague disquiet mixed with childish snickering at the fact that it looked a bit like "Large Hardon") made him think of the video for Midge Ure's Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, the doomy scenario of Ure travelling home, on the eve of global destruction, to die with his wife. I vividly remember that video and that early '80s preoccupation with nuclear warfare. In particular, I recall being traumatised by a 1984 television drama, Threads.

And - eek! - here it is online:

Threads scared the bejesus out of Teenage Me. Even now, watching it two decades later, I'm feeling a distant echo of that sphincter-tightening terror. For a good bit of my adolescence, I really thought events would unfold exactly as depicted. I'm half-listening to the long, slow build-up (when we're introduced to the main characters - working class boy shacks up with middle class girl - and hear news reports of escalating US/USSR tension). Haven't got to the scene with the mushroom cloud over Sheffield and I might not watch that far. I am Teh Scarred!!1

(I'm intrigued, though, by the '70s-hangover brownness that's still evident in those early '80s interiors. And loving Lesley Judd as the newsreader.)

Anyway, I was also thinking about how the theme of apocalypse pervaded 1980s pop. Aside from obvious stuff like Blondie's Atomic and Frankie's Two Tribes ("when you hear the air attack warning, you and your family must take cover at once..."), lots of songs referenced bombs and war. One of the first singles I ever bought with my own money was Nena's 99 Red Balloons, about setting off global military defences via the medium of, er, balloons. Then there was La Bush's Breathing ("chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung") and the Smiths (Ask) and of course Morrissey's Armageddon-calling Everyday Is Like Sunday. And even Culture Club, Gawd bless 'em, with The War Song:

I remember having the piss taken out of me for liking this; the repetitious lyrics were much-derided but they're incredibly catchy - and there's a subtler poetry to lines like "and love means nothing in some strange quarter" and "I heard the banging of hearts and fingers". I thought so, anyway.

There must be more of this doom-mongering '80s stuff. I wonder if there's enough for it to constitute an actual genre?

Baby baby, I'm in love with your degeneration

2008-09-12T22:37:00.000+01:00

HEREIN BE SPOILERS!

Just back from Sadler's Wells and Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray. I had a knackering day at work and was wearing in a pair of new shoes, so I took a cab there (walking was agony) and damn near dozed off a couple of times on the way. Dorian Gray has had mixed reviews and I began to experience that familiar doing-kulcher-on-Friday fear of falling asleep.

I didn't fall asleep.

As we took our seats, someone in the row behind us said, "get ready for some raunch". It wasn't raunch. It was sexy, though, in a weirdly (or perhaps deliberately) hollow style: slick surfaces containing relatively little by way of emotional engagement. I don't mean this as criticism; I actually really liked the mood created. Although there were nods to here and now (a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Jonathan Ross/Four Poofs pastiche and Damien Hirst mirrorball skull), it made me think of that spell in the late '80s/early '90s when male bodies came to the fore in advertising - buffed, plucked, waxed male bodies, shot in ever-so-tasteful black and white. Denatured Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber shooting jockey shorts for Calvin Klein, Madonna's Sex beefcake a-voguing.

At some point, the monochrome glossiness itself became erotic, detachedly so. My favourite segment was, I think, the bit in the first half when (the lovely Richard Winsor's) Dorian and the photographer who's discovered him engage in a sort of predator-and-prey camera tango. I realised that the camera shutter sound itself is quite alluring - I was reminded of Morrissey's The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye - and the exhibitionist/voyeurist to-and-froing was intriguing. By the interval, I was feeling quite touchy-feely and other people seemed the same: lots of kissing and nuzzling in the bar. I was convinced I was floating around with hugely dilated sex-pupils. Big time sensuality.

The second half charted Dorian's descent into absent-minded orgies (with men and women - as ever, casual bisexuality seems to be shorthand for moral dissolution), escalating mutilation imagery and rampant narcissism (signalled by a giant lightbulb-festooned letter D à la Elvis Comeback Special).

I could've done without the doppelgänger strand. I mean, it was interesting enough but a bit fuzzy, conceptually, and muddied the whole deteriorating-portrait thing (Dorian's double remained pristine as he grew increasingly bloodstained). I read it as his conscience/superego, from which he detached when he allowed his tiny dancer to die at the end of the first half. That said, some of the doppelgänger scenes were genuinely creepy - making me think of this:

("You're the devil in me I brought in from the cold". I still love the breakdancing policemen.)

The music was excellent, teasingly reminiscent of all manner of '80s delicacies. I heard hints of Yoko Ono, Bryan Ferry (and the vampiric Lady H made me think of the long, lithe models of his Slave To Love period), even Ryuichi Sakamoto. I suppose that could be perceived as distracting but, for me, it all contributed to the evocation of a particular era.

The politics of moving

2008-09-10T23:00:00.000+01:00

Saturday's Duckie was, I think, our third in the month - August's (very loose) theme having been Duckie Goes Dykey. Me and TSB got there 9.30ish, a little earlier than usual and took up our customary position between the activity island and the stage. Chatted with Robin for a bit, as the place began to fill up.

And boy did it fill up fast! Not sure if it's just me but Duckie seems much busier much earlier these days. It's always been packed but the last couple of times, it's become unpleasantly full, especially during the cabaret spots, when all the outdoor smokers pile in to see the acts. First act was Jessica Delfino, a New York comedian who's apparently been damned to Hell by the US Catholic League for singing about vaginas. I liked her winsome little ditty Don't Rape Me, played on a rape whistle. Here it is, with charmingly homespun video:

Afterwards, she spent a minute or so chucking freebie CDs and t-shirts into the audience as part of a plug for her show - which seemed, I dunno, oddly unDuckie somehow.

Second up was Bearlesque, who are always good value. The crowd seemed a bit unwieldy, though, talking through the acts (especially the trio of shouty lesbians in front of me, one of whom could barely stand) and not really joining in on the audience participationy bits. I felt a bit sorry for Fred Bear, having to hold the fort while (the very sexy) Simon and Neil Bear (I'd not seen him before - an addition to the original five) changed costume. Bear Necessities, a strip to Singing In The Rain (complete with real sprinklywater lamppost) and Mein Bear. I love 'em.

Brief snippet of Simon Bear's Gene Kelly homage in this compilation:

So two above-average acts, all six of the original Duckie team there (which isn't so common these days, what with Amy off trolley dollying) and I still felt oddly lacklustre, like the music was taking a longer-than-usual time to warm me up to singalong level. I think it was La Moz's The More You Ignore Me that finally got me going.

What was truly out of the ordinary about Saturday, though, was TSB and then me getting involved in a spat which seemed to escalate dizzyingly fast into something that looked for a moment like a potential punch-up. That's never happened to me before, in Duckie or, I think, in any other gay bar or club I've been to. I've certainly got pissed off with people in bars and they've got pissed off with me but this felt somehow different.

Basically, we were standing at the central island with our drinks on the table. A group of maybe five or six guys took up residence behind TSB, the one nearest him being quite dancey and expansive. We shuffled our drinks along the table a little bit, as you do, and he expanded to fill the space. TSB started to get that pained look in his eyes: Dancey Expansive Bloke was apparently knocking into him repeatedly and we were running out of tabletop to shift along. This went on, and TSB was eventually growling with irritation. Both of us were essentially standing still at that point, so no wild and exuberant arse-bumping coming from us.

Or so we thought. Dancey Expansive Bloke turned around and started shouting something in TSB's ear. TSB looked hangdog but said nothing and I had to ask him what had been said: apparently DEB reckoned TSB was repeatedly banging into him and wasn't too pleased about it. TSB was obviously a bit taken aback. I offered to swap places.

And, sure enough, DEB (you keeping up with the acronyms?) seemed to be moving backwards into me. I had one arm on the table and he repeatedly brushed against it. I decided not to bump back against him but to stand my ground. As I say, I wasn't dancing myself at this point.

DEB turns around again and I see, with a sudden shock, that he's really furious. Not just look-I'm-a-bit-pissed-off-with-this angry but outside-for-a-fight-NOW angry. Angry enough that I wonder whether he's coked up or something. He screams something about me (or maybe TSB) being very rude and if we knock him again, he'll have us - DO YOU UNDERSTAND?! Like a twat, I start to explain that, look, we've shunted our drinks a good couple of feet along the table so, actually, it's us that's moved to accommodate him. His response is to shout DO YOU UNDERSTAND?! at me again. And again. I should just say yes but instead I start to mutter something stupidly provocative along the lines of "I can understand that that's how you see it". TSB tries to say something but has SHUT UP! screamed repeatedly in his face until he shuts up. I can actually see the flecks of spit flying out of DEB's mouth as he leans closer. I keep my back half-turned, reckoning that's less confrontational. I raise my hand, though, putting it between DEB and TSB in what I hope is a caaalm down gesture (and is shielding my partner's face from spittle). DEB really seems to want a fight. Repeatedly, he asks us if we'd like to go outside and fight him. Er, no.

I see a couple of friends of ours, including lovely Man Mountain Neil, materialise behind TSB's shoulder, having pushed through from the raised gallery bit. They said later they'd moved because they thought there'd be more space down the front (ha bloody ha) but I wondered whether they'd seen the situation escalating and decided to be at hand. Whatever, I was grateful for their presence - particularly as the moment of tension seemed suddenly to pass, DEB turned back to his mates and Bearlesque took to the stage. I was incredibly careful not to budge an inch towards DEB during the act. He and his friends (who hadn't got involved in the fracas) disappeared fairly quickly once the cabaret was over.

It sounds a bit pathetic but the incident really did shake me and TSB both and cast something of a shadow over the rest of the night. The following day I couldn't stop thinking about it, I'm not sure why. Possibly because, since living in London the vast majority of my outside-work socialising has taken place in gay bars and clubs; I've forgotten that sudden mix of adrenaline and nausea when one realises one has said or done the wrong thing and a minor skirmish threatens to spin off into physical violence. For a few seconds, I really did think DEB was going to punch me or my partner. I was half-planning what I'd do if he did. That alcohol plus fight-or-flight combination is a feeling I associate with the straight pubs of yesteryear, a consequence of accidental pint-spilling, looking at someone a bit funny, dressing, walking or talking a bit poofy in a built-up area. I've never really felt it in a gay bar, and certainly not in Duckie.

Now, with the benefit of half a week's hindsight, I think, well why DIDN'T we just move further away? Okay, the club was rammed to the gills but the few inches of tabletop/dancefloor territory wasn't worth risking a broken nose (actually, at the time, I found myself thinking, not the teeth - they're expensive to fix). There was an element of stupid, booze-fuelled machismo on my part too, in standing firm and refusing to keep surrendering space to DEB's exuberant arse. Oh well. Maybe I just need to get out more.

The politics of dancing
The politics of ooo feeling good
The politics of moving
Is this message understood...?

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!

I got my head checked

2008-09-09T22:12:00.000+01:00

Got my hair (what little has yet survived the ravages of male pattern baldness) cut on Saturday morning, in preparation for that evening's Duckie. I'm a creature of habit and have, for the last five years or so, used the same £5-any-style barber just off Compton Street. As my hairline's receded to resembling-the-Batsignal-outline extremes (the only thing I have in common with Jude Law, looks-wise) I've had it clippered back shorter and shorter. These days, I ask for a half on the sides and two on top. I don't really mind losing my hair.

Since starting back at work this week, three of my colleagues have asked me (in carefully neutral manner) if I've had my hair cut. They don't usually comment. I'm starting to wonder whether the chap who wielded the clippers has used the wrong guard or gone extra-high, or maybe shaved the word CUNT into the back of my head.

Did get complimented on the facial shrubbery, though, which was nice. Beards really do seem to have been in vogue for gay and straight men alike for what seems like years now; I see that as the influence of the whole bear thing as it spread, cross-fertilised and diversified. Apparently tartan is very in this winter too, and I suppose that could be seen in the same light. According to the same fashion mag (can't remember which one), Victorian handlebar moustaches will be huge, sweetie. I look forward to it.

Decide it's time to reinvent yourself

2008-09-09T19:34:00.000+01:00

Self-reinvention is overstating the point but I've decided to start a blog of my own. I'm not exactly a stranger to online wordage, being something of a message board veteran. I've also dabbled with LiveJournal in the past, mainly as a way of keeping in touch with old friends. LJ's well and good but for various reasons, everything I write there is Friends Only and I miss the randomness of unfiltered bloggery: sending one's bottled witterings out into the gulf of cyberspace (does anyone still call it that?) where Googletides wash them up unexpectedly on foreign shores.

I'm also coming to the conclusion that, having been a stalwart of the Duckie axis for a few years now, I ought to get over my shyness when it comes to saying hello to familiar faces. Me and The Spectacled Bear have a bad habit of settling into a sort of faintly coupley insularity (partly because we both have trouble hearing people over music) which I suspect can come across as self-contained to the point of stand-offishness. Until the power of strong lager kicks in, that is, at which point we become Mr & Mr Chatty McChat from Chatsville, Chatizona (we've both previously cornered poor Amy and subjected her to our earnest, boozy blatherings) but subsequently can't quiiite remember the details.

Lately, I've realised that a few of those familiar faces have blogs of their own. This shouldn't surprise me and it doesn't, really, but it is a bit of a novelty - like reading Geoff Ryman's 253 for the first time.

So... I'm joining 'em!