Managed to get a bit further afield over the weekend. On Friday, to Old Street - yes, technically it's walking distance, but still. I've never been to the Foundry before, in spite of its KLF connections, but I like it; proper East London eccentricity, as opposed to East London dullards desperately trying to look eccentric like so many venues in the area. Admittedly I did briefly think that the latest Barley craze was for stupidly oversized bags which are really inconvenient in a crowded bar, but then I realised that the place was popular with genuine cycle couriers, which is fair enough. Then on to the Bedroom Bar, which looks like the 'cool club' set from a TV show, and for all I know may have been used as one. Not quite my scene, but in the sort of way where I can still wish it well and feel happy for the people who've found their place there, even the ones who aren't already my friends.
Saturday night was Hackney, specifically the Old Ship, return venue for darkmarcpi's birthday after a break last year. Formerly a pleasantly shabby pub, it is now an 'urban inn'. In brief, that means a gastropub with random capitalisation on the signage, a bit of apostrophe crime, and rooms upstairs. "Why not turn a Good night into a Great night." ask signs in the loos, without a question mark. Translation: "If you've pulled, but you reckon even the taxi ride will be long enough for her to sober up, why not drop £70 on a room upstairs and get right down to it? Yeah, this is Hackney and that's considerably more than you'd pay for a prostitute round here, but the clientele here are considerably cleaner and slightly less likely to nick all your money for crack." Classy.
Then on Sunday, properly out of home territory and down to Putney for the Tubewalk. Sunshine! Riverside! Flowers! Parkour! A large dead fish! A pub with a sign forbidding buggies that implied a terrible past! And no fewer than seven pugs, although I imagine atommickbrane will be blogging them in more detail.

I'm reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop - A History of the Hip Hop Generation and, after the preamble setting the scene in the Bronx and Jamaica, I'm just at the part where DJ Kool Herc invents hip hop. The best bit of which is that, in a music subsequently so handicapped by an obsession with "keeping it real", Herc tells us about how important it was to lose his Jamaican accent, a process which in places involved singing along to his parents' Jim Reeves records.
(And the godfather of subway graffiti, Cornbread, was apparently just doing it to impress a girl called Cynthia. Just like poor bloody Davis in that Graham Greene book I was reading. Similarly, while reading about Kool Herc I also find myself with another volume of Marvel's The Incredible Hercules, featuring the original Herc. Connections everywhere)

Bruce Sterling interview which I strongly suspect has been filleted for a 'death of the novel' angle. The death of decent interviews in the mainstream media might be a better topic; see also that Pet Shop Boys interview in Saturday's Guardian mag, which devoted about half as much space to interviewing one of the best and most readable bands in Britain as it did to pictures of them in £1300 parkas which look functionally indistinguishable to the ones various of my friends have and which, in the cases where I know how much they cost, seem generally to have been in the low double figures. Still, not quite as offensive as the Alexa Chung 'recession chic' special a couple of weeks back (buy British - but designer British, ie still hundreds per cardigan and 45 frakking pounds for socks).

Off to Devon for most of this week; see you all on the other side.

America: thank you. And thank you BBC for coverage which trounced any of the US networks', not just in the increasingly irascible presenters but in the quality of talking heads. Jay Macinerney looking old! Gore Vidal looking even older! An atypically sober but still venomous Christopher Hitchens eviscerating Elizabeth Dole was good, but Simon Schama's effortless superiority when faced with The Bad John Bolton, his spurious outrage and his improbable moustache was even better. I was worried that starting the evening with the Vichy Government's annual London show might be bad juju, particularly when their new song 'The Man Delusion' echoes my own fears about humanity's inherent limitations, but last night, the US - or enough of it, at least - rose above that. Not enough that there wasn't some booing from McCain's viler supporters as he conceded - which, to his credit, he was having none of (like Michael Howard, nothing became his political career so well as his leaving of it). But against that - well, like the man said, we have the audacity of hope. Also: new puppy! Bless.

Also - RIP Michael Crichton. You may have been a climate change denier, but DINOSAURS! Also ROBOTS!

From some of the press its minor rebrand received, you'd have thought Rise was being transformed into Nuremberg N4, rather than having its slogan tweaked from "Unite Against Racism" to the cheerier "Celebrating Diversity". I can attest to a disappointing lack of torchlit rallies, lynch-mobs or BoriSS corps. Although the pedestrian Brit rapper on the bill ("before Oysters there was two pound travelcards" - bless) did get everyone to put one hand in the air and chant "One nation, one people", which perhaps could have done with a rethink.
Highlights: Kitty, Daisy & Lewis' old-time rock'n'roll worked surprisingly well in a sunny field at lunchtime (where 'lunch' = 'gin'). The Aliens would have bored me rigid in a traditional gig setting, but as very loud background noise, they were just the ticket. Beardyman is impressive in a way very few beatboxers can manage, and once the Dub Pistols got Terry Hall on (for 'Our Lips Are Sealed', 'Problem Is' and 'Gangsters'), they were glorious.
Also, the man who'd got around the ban on dogs by smuggling his dachshund in a bag.
Lowlights: The aforementioned rappers, comprehensively pwned when the DJ followed their set with 'Witness (One Hope)' to show how UK rap should be done. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings - even if I hadn't seen them on Jools Holland, I would still class them as 'Jools Holland music'. Everything I saw on my brief tour of the other stages, including one band who sounded like the Brand New Heavies, and some clowns called Yabba Funk with a song whose title translated as 'Victory to Africa' - whatever angle I look at that sentiment from, it's at best meaningless and at worst vile.
But below all that - CSS. Dear heavens. I was never quite as caught up in them as some people - possibly because I only thought Lovefoxxx 'quite cute' rather than collapsing into the same paroxysms as many - but they made some fun party tracks. Since when they've got miserable, learnt how to play, improved their English and stopped being randomly rude - ie, systematically erased everything people liked about them. Oh, and picked up a new drummer from The Cooper Temple Clause, a band I liked but who judging from this and the other one's stint with the tit from the Libertines, have taken some sort of oath of post-TCTC rubbishness so as not to eclipse their legacy. Lovefoxxx attempts to bring some liveliness to proceedings by coming on in hard hat, facial stripes and a cloak, but that cannot disguise what a dreadfully dull band they have become. A couple of songs in, I cannot take it anymore - "If the next song's not 'Death from Above', I'm going". It's not. I go, and sit on the Parkland Walk reading Philip K Dick for a bit instead.

Other than that I have been:
Seeing MJ Hibbett's My Exciting Life In Rock preview;
Reading Ian Kelly's new Casanova biography, which is extremely funny, very well-researched, and was apparently proofread by a dyslexic chimpanzee;
Building castles in the clouds.