Vile by Keith Crawford actually is a really violent Frozen

Vile by Keith Crawford actually IS like a really violent Frozen and I can prove it with five minutes and an etch-a-sketch!
But if you don't have 5 minutes here's TEN things they both have:

1) Strong lead characters whose names begin El...
2) Snow, lots of snow
3) Family power plays
4) Ice, it's cold up north you know
5) Awesome Castles
6) Single word titles, which let's be frank is just plain cool.
7) Magic and mystical creatures
8) Big explosions!
9) Nuanced characters with ambiguous motivations that drive a compelling plot as they strive to do the right thing as they perceive it or at very least the right thing for them
10) A talking snowman.

Ok, so Vile doesn't have a talking snowman but it is really violent and very very good. It also doesn't have songs that are going to get stuck in your head what with being a book an' all!

Don't believe me? Get involved with the kickstarter, help it get published and then you can find out for yourself: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vile/vile

Whilst you wait for your copy of the book to arrive I suggest you listen to the author being very silly (trust me he writes better than he sings): https://twitter.com/keithcrawford77/status/1194885225597349888?s=20

I hope Disney don't read Vile (or this) because I hear they're crazy litigious.

Radio Charades

My blog writing has suffered of late. I've got excuses, of course I have. If you wish I was still churning out words and opinions on the things I like most in life then the news is good - I've gone audio!

I have been working on a podcast called Radio Charades, a name which I hope conveys how much use I expect it to be!

Radio Charades is probably best describe as geeky light entertainment and is the continuation of a conversation that's been going for about 25 years with my friend Toby. There's news (of sorts) and discussions ranging from almost serious to entirely ludicrous.

We're now up to 20 episodes and you can find them all on iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress. Go to one or all of those places and like and subscribe and tell your friends (unless you hate it in which case feel free to keep your opinions to yourself). You can also email us at radiocharades@gmail.com

A selection of some of our episodes:

Episode 1: The Gritty Reboot - we discuss reboots, sequels and remakes.
Episode 6: Giraffatitan! - getting old and why it's good.
Episode 8: A Surfeit of Muppets - we considering which fantasy worlds we might like to live in
Episode 11: 15 Amazing Ways to Store Yarn! Number 12 will Blow your Mind!
Episode 14: Roborumble! - a tournament to discover the finest robot every built

I'm not really sure what the purpose is or who it's for but I'm proud of having done it and it looks set to continue. Who ever you are I hope you enjoy it!

A boy and his tiger

There is a a big (metaphorical) clock ticking down in the Sunburnt Tiger household currently - in September we are expecting our first child! It's a magical mix of excitement and panic that's a bit hard to believe or really comprehend. So whilst my wife is doing the most important and creative job I can imagine it's hard not to feel a little left out of the process. If you'll indulge an analogue I'm like the second wheel on the unicycle of gestation - hopefully I make the whole thing a little easier but am not actually required.
When we first started talking about having a family I thought that I'd really like to paint a mural for the nursery. I've always liked painting and writing on walls, I'm not really sure why! I had seen this kids bedroom and the idea was firmly planted - Calvin and Hobbes. I love Calvin and Hobbes. So here then are a few pictures, I hope you like them.

The room was pretty pink and pretty disgusting, full of holes and grime.

Decorating done I scaled up Bill Watterson's painting. Pencil first... then colour...

 

...then black. Hobbes was finished first... followed by Calvin and the tree.

 

The finished thing looks like this, the baby's crib will go in that corner so most of the tree trunk and grass will be unseen.

  

If you want to see more pictures or larger ones you can see them on my Flickr page.

All that remains is for me to put up some curtains and build some more furniture and then I'm about as ready as I can be for my little Sunburnt Tiger Cub!

It's never just painting a room...

I own a house, this is a good thing. The people who owned it before me treated it badly, this is a bad thing.

The décor stands as a good illustration of how two wrongs don't make a right - they had bad taste and were bad at decorating, the results were bad, violently bad. This is a double-edge sword for me - anything I do to the house will be an improvement however seeing the slapdash nature of what they did I see the need/benefit of doing things properly.

I keep making the mistake of thinking I need to paint a room, whilst not technically wrong it obfuscates the bigger picture. Painting a room in fact requires repairing, filling, sanding and cleaning, oh and I suppose painting too. 

A few weeks ago now I started work on our spare room, again it needed lots more than just painting. Extensive preparation has been completed to undo the damage done by the previous "decorators" and I was braced to spend my evenings for the next week painting, my body however had other plans and told me quite simply to stop. I have a problematic spine, 99% of the time it does me proud supporting my over sized noggin and allowing me to do amazing things like walk around. 1% of the time it does pain and suffering. This is never what you'd call good but I have managed to get something positive out of it, so what's been good about a having bad back?

1. It wasn't as bad as it has been, I've been able to move a bit and sit up and the need to not do anything only lasted from Monday evening till Wednesday afternoon. 
2. I couldn't do any decorating and felt no guilt.
3. I spent a day dosed up on painkillers reading comics.
4. I read the first three chapters of a new book by Toby Frost (and saw him to give him my thoughts) 
5. As my strength has returned I've tidied and sorted some stuff that was getting overlooked.
6. I've had some time to reflect on the work I've done on the house so far.

So here's a few pictures of the decorated bits of the house (apologies for the poor photos they weren't taken in sensible lighting - believe it or not the walls are not all just white)

The Master Bedroom with Walk-in Wardrobe (previously an en suite)

The Study/Geekotorium

The Lounge 

Tonight I'll be burning my guzzolene soaked bra!

I'm going to jump on this suped-up smoking bandwagon and play my flame throwing guitar and talk about Mad Max and, yes, feminism. For what it's worth I've avoided reading anyone else's opinion so far, I wanted (as mush as possible) for these to be my thoughts. I should say that I am a man this probably needs saying to give context to my opinions, and please note that they are just that, my opinions, and I welcome any intelligent debate on them.

Feminism has become a dirty word mostly because it's poorly understood. In very simple terms feminism is just the belief that women and men should be equal in everything, something that most reasonable people are (or should be) behind. Sadly we are still along way from achieving this and perhaps as a man in the developed West it's not that easy to spot the imbalance, or worse perhaps its easy to ignore. The bigger problem for the feminist agenda is phrases like "the feminist agenda", they just sound scary and are misunderstood by many (not just men) as meaning "we want to put women to the top and men to the bottom", when all it really means is "we want it to be ok for a woman to be at the top if she's better than her male counterpart and wants to be at the top".

Equality might be a better word than feminism because, for mankind, it's manifestly frightening to have to manage when you feel manipulated by so many maniacal mandates, manuscripts and manifestos that manoeuvre under a mantle manufactured to start with something that seems to exclude your gender in favour of the other! Manatees mango manganese, but that's a different story.

So why is Mad Max at the forefront of feminism right now? For 2 reasons an obvious one (which probably isn't really feminist at all and will feed the misconceptions) and a subtler and considerably more awesome one.

I will be avoiding proper spoilers but if you're concerned then this is the point to stop reading, I doubt I'll give anything away that the trailer didn't

Reason 1 (The Rubbish Reason)

The main villainous warlord has a harem of ladies that he is using firstly to give him children and then later to be milked like cattle. Now I'm going to go out on a terrible limb here and say he's not that bad a villain - sure those things he's doing are truly horrible and should not be allowed but in the context of the world of the film he is actually doing quite well for his people - they have a water source, they grow crops, and they have safety in a world which offers none, the harem in fact lives like princesses or as close as this horrible future allows. Amusingly one of the princesses (for want of a different word) is said to have all her own teeth at one point - a fact that points to a good life considering most people are wandering round with titanic boils and cists all over them. It's mediaeval and barbaric but when the world and it's population have been nearly annihilated then perhaps mediaeval and barbaric is the best you can do. So naturally the plot revolves around freeing this harem of mothers to be and getting them to safety - they are metaphorically and very literally the mother to our future in the story. And if this is feminism then yawn, seen it all before. Anyone who tells you that the plot if feminist is probably an idiot - the plot is an excuse for a prolonged and extremely awesome car chase and little more.

Yes, because of the plot there are some damsel in distress types, maidens who need rescuing and they have various levels of patheticness and practicalness but this is more about their sheltered protected lives than anything else. Yes all the villains are men. Yes women are portrayed as the seed bearers - in one case literally as one woman actually carries a bag of seeds, the metaphor is pretty thin here. So at surface level it's swings and roundabouts for feminism and ultimately is probably just a film with all the tropes we've come to know and suffer. But there's more here if you want it...

Reason 2 (The Real Reason)

Mad Max is a film where people drive vehicles, crash vehicles, kill, maim, injure, punch, spit, curse, try to survive and maybe look for redemption or a better life. People. Not men, people. That includes women. Gender does not get in the way of anything. Women are allowed to kill and be kill as though they were just as mortal and evil as men. This is a grim world and grim things happen without respect or concern for your gender - it's brutal and uncaring and has a pure equality to it that says "you are in may way and I will run you over".

One of my favourite scenes is the first meeting between our two lead protagonists - Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa and Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky. The driving force for both characters is survival, Furiosa has also charged herself with keeping the princesses alive too. Neither is inclined to explaining themselves to the other, nor should they (this is a film thing rather than a feminist thing). A number of things happen with little or no allowance given just because some of the people there are women.

Max doesn't give a fuck, Max's character motivation is stronger than any concern of gender (or even other people at all) so it just feels right that he is prepare to hold a gun to the back of someone's head, it also feels right that he has assessed the situation and has spotted that the others value the heavily pregnant women most and so it's her he chooses as his hostage. It feels right that he is prepared to drive off and leave them all for dead, he just doesn't care he's not a hero, he's just a double hard bastard with a talent for survival. 

Max is not the hero. Furiosa is the hero. Both clearly have troubled pasts, which we don't need to know about and thankfully don't get told about, and both are pushed to do good things by their pasts. Furiosa is hoping for some kind of redemption and Max is driven by ghosts of his past failures. Of the two Furiosa seems to be the one to have taken a moral choice where as Max is an unwilling hostage of his madness, doing the right thing against his instinct to run.

Max and Furiosa fight, they properly fight, like two people fighting for their lives, no apology is made for this. He hits her and he certainly doesn't pull his punches and she beats him to the ground with one hand tied behind her back (sorta). The only reason they don't kill each other is due to external factors and other people joining. Even pregnant women are shown to be violent in the fight for survival, throwing punches and shooting guns - as they should be, surely nothing fights more fiercely in nature than a mother protecting her young? And Furiosa has the upper hand at points (pun intended) she's not better than Max but she's definitely his equal. She's a better shot, he's smarter, she's more sane, he's better in a fist fight, who's a better driver is open to debate but that honour probably goes to Nux (Nicholas Hoult has come a long way from About a Boy)

Another arguable point is that she is the better character (ignoring previous films now). Max is very hard to empathise with and as a character boils down to two things which he details neatly for us at the beginning "My name is Max. My world is reduced to a single instinct: Survive. As the world fell it was hard to know who was more crazy. Me... Or everyone else.". Good well, rounded, detailed female characters are in short supply - we could probably list them, sad to say to often female characters are lightweight, flimsy and two dimensional relying on stereotypes and resulting in forgettable roles. This is particularly true of action films as a genre and on the rare occasions where a woman rises above "love interest" it often feels very deliberate and forced

Max, Fury Road, Charlize Theron and George Miller don't seem to care that Furiosa is a woman, it's irrelevant to the story and the character could easily have been portrayed by a man. It seems to me that not caring is important. Women and man are different but most of the time in the modern world those differences are irrelevant and should be ignored. We shouldn't care and that should be really easy, so easy that even a man could do it!

I've been busy, see?

I have things queued up that I want to write about but I feel they deserve time, care and attention. 3 things I'm short of these days. This has meant I have put off all other posts and writing, some what illogical perhaps, but I am so that's ok.

Most notable things I've not and am not writing about but plan to when I find the time and correct state of mind are: getting married, moving home, and most recently finding out that I'm going to be a father. It's been an eventful year to say the least - ticking off a big three. My wedding was amazing and probably deserves about 7 blog posts so is somewhat intimidating as a topic to do justice to. Likewise the news that I'm going to have a child is rather monumental and as such difficult to get my head around let alone write my thoughts down.

Thanks to the timing of the pregnancy my wife was too unwell/tired to help with the house move very much, and has had to bow out of the redecorating due to trying to avoid paint fumes during pregnancy (much as Gemma has wanted to help). Unfortunately the house was in a much worse state that we had anticipated having been ruined by the previous owners and left in a poor state, it's hard to believe it's only 8 years old. So there's been  lot of work to do and it's all been me which has been a bit hard, working during the day and painting and such like during the evenings. On the plus side that means that I get to feel pretty proud of what I've achieved, currently however that has manifested in just feeling rubbish about the state of the rest of the house. (My negativity and general state of mind is another blog that needs some thought).

At this point I have painted 3.5 rooms (0.5 for the inside of a walk in wardrobe) and have 2 rooms to go (ignoring the things we're putting off for a bit). It doesn't sound a lot but each room has needed completely emptying, before the removal of mirrors/screws/nails/wallpaper/general dirt and grim, polyfilla-ing, sanding, painting of skirting, masking, painting of ceiling, masking, and several coats of paint on the walls, before finally recarpeting and getting/building new furniture and moving things back in. It has been expensive in terms of time and money, we're still in boxes some of which I've moved dozens of times. But the rooms I've done look good and I feel I'm building a home.

So at the moment I'm tired, I'm doing enough to be tired, I'm doing enough to be sleeping well, I'm not though.  

I don't know why I'm not sleeping well, it also means I'm not being awake well. I'm sure I'm in line for a series of "It'll only get worse once the baby arrives!" but at least then I'd feel like I had a reason. I suppose it could related to my current inability to breathe properly, thank you sinuses/allergies/hayfever or whatever! Being tired I'm eating poorly or at least eating a lot - so all the hard work I put in for the wedding has been totally undone, so I'm overweight again which doesn't help me feel good about things. Decorating the room I've just started seems like quite a drag right now.

However at the same time as all of that we are think of names for the baby which is thoroughly awesome, so it's swings and roundabouts, and definitely on the up-swing!

2014: A Year in Review

I've not got any resolutions for the New Year, not because I'm not resolved to do anything but more because I'm already in the middle of doing the things I've previously resolved to do. Most notably, perhaps, is buying (and then moving into) a new house - the chaos of which means the typical resolutions towards healthier life style are just a bit trickier and are being filed under "things to do after we move". Also on that list is a whole truck load of domestic things - it may surprise you to know that "paint new house" requires me to be in the new house before it can be undertaken.

I've been toying with the idea of not drinking, but I don't think I would say I'm resolved to it. Certainly the genealogical leanings play on my mind from time to time and in 2014 I think I thought "I'm getting too old for this shit" too many times. I haven't quite worked out if I've quit and if so for how long or if I'm just going to work out a more age appropriate way to enjoy alcohol. 

At the start of 2014 I decided to record one thing everyday that was good. It would be like a micro-diary or calendar, I did it for a number of reasons:

1. I like keeping records of stuff. I keep a journal of films I've seen, my photo everyday for a year is something I'm immensely proud of, and of course I record losses and victories of board games I've played.
2. I knew 2014 was going to be a big year for me (what with getting married and all) and I liked the thought of having a log of it all. I suppose point 2 might be the same as point 1.
3. Regardless of how much I like my job (which of course varies wildly from day to day) I wanted to remind myself that I was capable of being more than just a teacher and regardless of how busy or tired I was I could, and should, always make a little time to do something I enjoy. A bit of a work to live move rather than live to work. It didn't have to be monumental, watching a TV show for half an hour or reading a comic.
4. I'm prone to negativity. Sorry. I thought that taking a moment each day to reflect on something positive, and moreover to ensure I did something deliberate that I'd enjoy, would be a good thing. A little something to show I was in control.

And it was good. I can now tell you one enjoyable/awesome/fun/nice/good thing for everyday of 2014 and that feels good. The variation of "things" is like a microcosm of life in that they range from the mundane to monument. The box I had to write in was about 4cm long so comments were fairly limited here are a few highlights (with added explanation)

May 29th: End of Empires
Toby Frost still asks me to "proof" his books, I'm not convinced he needs or wants me too but it means I get to read it before it hits the shelves! I did the majority of End of Empires whilst overlooking the Bay of Naples, which was nice.

July 7th: Black Science

Comic book discovery of the year, Black Science is reminiscent of the 1950's TV series of Forbidden Planet ...on acid. It's a wonderful celebration of everything Science Fiction can be - truly free and more than a little unhinged.

July 13th: Tringe

Full day of stand up comedy including Marcel Lucont, Rob Deering, and Tony Law

July 19th: I am Batman
Outstanding stag do in North Wales, some kinda blog entry for this is overdue/necessary.

July 31st: Ginstitute

Making Gin with Aled!

August 9th: Wedding!

That's right, got married! Likewise blog overdue.

August 20th: Helicopter and August 26th: Sharks!

Not a reference to 1966 Batman but 2 highlights of my honeymoon!

September 6th: Vinyl
Bought myself some record to play on this

September 18th: First viewings + valuation
Got the ball rolling on moving house!

December 22nd: Lip Sync Battle

Inspired by Jimmy Fallen, we had a lip sync battle, it was awesome.

Not surprisingly the build up to and the day of the wedding. Regular appearances came in from seeing people, food, drink, and playing games - these four best combined in named events: Brofest, Geekend, and The 4 Boardmen of the Apocalypse. Also top scores for making things, comics and oddly sorting and tidying.

I have played a lot of games this year (see reason 1), 258 to be exact, of which I've won 133. Pretty good really. I also know how many games you played here and how many you won, of course you may not care for stats the way I do.

So let's go 2015, what you got?

All for one. And one alone.

I'm pretty new to co-op gaming, and have only really bothered with cooperative board games in the last year or so.

I suppose that roleplay (which I've been doing off and on for half my life!) is a co-op of sorts so I shouldn't be that surprised that I have been enjoying them greatly. Of course roleplay has a games/dungeon master who keeps the difficulty level balanced, ultimately letting the players win, the skill here is to make them feel as though they have won against great odds. Done well it lends an epic and heroic feel to the game, done poorly it can either undermine any sense of peril or just feel totally unfair.

But a boardgame doesn't have anyone to manage this and coming up with a game mechanic to emulate this is a bit hit and miss. People who play games want to win but they don't want it to be easy, there must be a sense of achievement. A poor co-op game mechanic can result in flip-flopping between ridiculously easy and brutally hard on the roll of a dice (figuratively and sometimes literally). How hard things should be is no doubt a matter of taste so the mechanic also needs some way to scale the difficult to suit the skill, masochism, or familiarity with the game of the player. It seems a difficult balance.

Enter Matt Leacock, Matt is the current king of co-operative games (if such a thing is not a contradiction). He's the author of Forbidden Island, Pandemic, and Forbidden Desert. All are excellent and have that balance down perfectly. And vary in complexity and theme to suit a range of players. Forbidden Island is a fantastically quick and simple game that feels very much like a race against time as the island sinks beneath your feet. Pandemic is the most complex and probably the most rewarding as a result, it also adds a sense of gravitas - instead of reckless treasure hunters you are now doctors and scientists trying to save the world from disease and bring it back from the brink. Despite loving Forbidden Island I ignored Desert for sometime assuming that it would be basically the same and an unnecessary addition to the collection, however it is more than worthy in it's own right adding a level of complexity and new mechanics. Most notably increasing to 5 players and an additional way to fail with each player needing to keep a canteen of water to survive the ravages of the desert.
 

Forbidden Desert was introduced on a recent gaming weekend and we failed 5 times in a row and we're quite good at games! More impressive than beating us is the fact that on our defeat we become more determined to beat it. To quote Ross: "With most games I want to play most when I haven't played them for a while, with Pandemic the time I most want to play it when I've just finished a game!" This then is the heart of a successful game (co-op or otherwise) wanting to play it again, and maybe when it's all of us together against the game it's easier to want to try again, there's probably something psychological there, but whatever it is consider me converted!

So I bought myself another co-op game. I'm a big fan of H.P.Lovecraft's books and had previously played Arkham Horror. There are a few problems with Arkham - firstly, it's a long game with quite a lot of faff, and secondly the difficult swings so wildly that you can end up playing for hours safe in the knowledge that you have definitely won or lost, because when things go right they go very right and when things go wrong they go really really disastrously horribly wrong! But I suppose that is pretty true to old H.P.'s stories (except the bit about things going right!) So perhaps not the best of co-op games, maybe they need to be shorter or quicker to make failure an acceptable option? But I liked the theme, artwork, and general style so I was willing to give Elder Signs a go, also I'm quite a fan of rolling dice. What I hadn't notice was that it could be played one player! Solo play is not something that has ever really appealed, for me part of game playing is the social aspect, the dynamic back-and-forth and the competitive nature of gaming. But this is a game designed without that player versus player competitiveness in mind, so perhaps the game doesn't suffer (mechanical at least) from a smaller number of players.

Elder Sign feels very like Arkham Horror but with a neater tighter scenario: the sprawling town of Arkham is replaced with the museum, and this shift helps the theme seem less nebulous. The mechanics seem less of a faff and the time invested is reduced, both of these are big wins. It plays really nicely as a solo game - I've played twice with massively differing results - first victory by a narrow squeak and secondly a crushing and brutal defeat. Whether this is symptomatic of unevenness is yet to be seen but I enjoyed both games and the loss does make me want to play again, so time will tell!

Fallout

Seeing as the current topic seems to be fancy dress and costumes I'll throw this in to the mix. My good buddy Aled wanted to go to a post-apocalypse themed party as the Vault Dweller from the third game in the Fallout series. It's a nice simple costume, primarily because you design your own character's face and build so all you really need is to get the outfit right. The starting costume is basically a jumpsuit and a wrist-mounted computer, here's my attempt for Aled:

The PipBoy 3000 - built out of a Pringles tube card and an assortment of bits and bobs.

 Painstakingly masked and painted - yellow over blue needed lots of coats!

 

 Aled modelling the full ensemble.

Of course Aled ended up wearing a long coat - ideal for the character, less so for the hours I put into the "101" on the back of the jumpsuit!

What did you do, Ray?

A couple of years ago I made a Ghostbusters costume for a party, complete with scratch built Proton Pack. Sometimes I get a little over invested in a project, it took over my life for a bit. This may be why I didn't post any pictures at the time but seeing as it's Halloween it seems appropriate that I dig them out, so here you go:

Everything from Celebrations to toilet rolls... Pepsi Max to Pringles!

  

The wand (with glowing tip naturally!); the complete pack and wand undercoated; the final costume. 

Proton pack sprayed black, drybrushed, dusted, and stickered. The red disks have small lights behind them to make them glow. I was Stantz in case you were wondering!

... and here I am at the party with a (arguably) less authentic but (arguably) more attractive Ghostbuster:

p.s. Adam Savage bought a kit! Never thought I'd out do Adam at making prop costumes!

I have a problem...

The first step, I'm told, is recognising that you have a problem. I like containers, there I said it! I like containers and I like collecting things. Containers are useful and you shouldn't throw away things that are useful...

They're useful, ok? I'll use them!

But often useful containers look alike and then having a set of them means they'll tessellate well making the most of the space... and also they'll look cool!

Maybe I'll refill them with spice, it'll save us money!

Then of course some things have nostalgic value as well. I have fond memories of being allowed Golden Syrup drizzled on my rice crispies when visiting Nain and Taid. It's also the only food stuff that comes in paint tins. 

Come the apocalypse I'll have to choose between using these for target practice or storage

And then sometimes containers contain good things and keeping them is a way to keep a sort of journal of your other hobbies. Bottles with cork stoppers are cool.

Referring to Gin as a hobby is probably a bad sign.

These four photos catalogue everything I'm throwing out today*, inspired by the possibility of moving house and not wanting to carry empty containers! I am ashamed to admit that my collection extends far further than this, but I've made the first step on my path to recovery.





*except those 4 identical jam jars, they'll be useful!

Vinyl: Continuing thoughts

Some more thoughts on vinyl and possible future purchases, in no particular order.

The Black Keys
I saw The Black Keys play the Astoria (rip) back in 2005 (?) It remains one of my favourite gigs. The stage was virtually empty just two men, a set of drums and a stack of amps but the sound produced was immense. Stripped down blues roots rock at it's very finest, and if I was buying on vinyl I'd probably want to go back to Rubber Factory. Their latest album Turn Blue is to my mind a bit of a disappointment it's not bad as such it just doesn't meet expectations and doesn't reach the heights that the previous two albums Brothers and El Camino do.

Nirvana
Somewhat clichéd I know but Nevermind is an album that defined my generation. I will confess to only having a passing interest when they had their day, Inutero and Bleach meant very little to me and I liked bits and pieces from Nevermind but not the whole thing. The first of Nirvana album I loved start to finish was Unplugged in New York which my brother and I used to play on loop whilst we played Doom. I've grown up a lot since then or at least got older and I've come to love Nevermind and recognise how brilliant it is and worthy of every piece of praise it's receive or the years! Add to all that the seminal cover art.

The Beastie Boys

The Beastie Boys seem have always seemed like good fun, three friends who liked playing word games and being a little bit silly. I can relate to that. Their music has a playfulness and a freedom that comes from having enough success to do whatever they like, which luckily has always sounded good to me. Their are plenty of worthy albums to choose from with excellent songs and equally iconic album artwork: the Blues Brothers-esque drive through of Ill Communications (arguably the "best" album); the plane tale of Licence to Ill; the 360 street photo of Paul's Boutique (an album I listened to extensively whilst designing ducts!)

But, for me, nothing quite sums the Beastie Boys up as well as Hello, Nasty. It may lack the raw brilliance of Ill Communication's Sure Shot or Sabotage and the cheeky humour of Licence to Ill's She's Crafty and Girls but it makes up for it in consistently lively and entertaining songs. The cover says it all here are three friends apparently riding through space in a sardine can, intergalactic pioneers!

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
One of the things that amazes and amuses me in equal measure is how Nick and co  can produce such diverse songs from some of my favourite songs to a rare few which I struggle to listen to all the way through, and every thing in between. This makes picking a single favourite album very difficult.Murder Ballads will always have a place in my heart as the first Bad Seeds album I owned and as such was my intro to Nick definitive style of blood and rhetoric (with that album very much dwelling on the blood). In my late teenage years this loving violence or violent love seemed a perfect antidote to the nauseating pop of the day, much aided by the Nick and Kylie collaboration Where the wild roses grow. I've always (perversely perhaps) enjoyed the image of Nick recovering in Australian rehab (which I imagine to be something like One Flew Over) obsessing over the girl on the TV in the only program deemed calm enough to show the patients - Neighbours.

Dig, Lazurus, Dig! is raised to deity level by the inclusion of More News from Nowhere a tale of life on the road for an ageing musician retold as the Odyssey and is quite possibly my favourite song of all time. The double album of The Lyre of Orpheus and Breathless fits together so perfectly, The Boatman Calls is an album that I keep rediscovering and find more in each time, so much to choose from!

Thoughts, comments and suggestions welcomed!

Wedding: Draw Down the Stars

As wedding photos go I always tend to prefer casual to formal, I'm not particularly comfortable posing for photos. Harriet and Tim's greatest skill then is perhaps their ability to seamlessly integrate themselves with whatever event they're shooting. They felt to me like any other guest at our wedding and very quickly the fact that they were taking photos didn't bother me at all. Between Harriet's sincere and effervescent enthusiasm and Tim's easy natured friendliness they were in fact very welcome guests. Tim and I bonded over a clearly similar taste in music - I complemented him on the Tom McRae reference of "Draw Down the Stars" and he complemented me on our table names being song titles and the Wedding CD we'd created. It seemed, throughout in fact, that they had a clear understanding of what was important to us.
On writing this I haven't actually seen the photographs but having seen Chris and Kennedy's (who recommended Draw Down the Stars to us) I am very excited and itching to see ours!

Wedding: Lavender Dining

Obviously the catering is a huge part of any wedding but Lavender Dining go far beyond just providing food. We cannot recommend Lavender highly enough. Ben and Clare make an excellent team, husband and wife as well as business partners - Ben in the kitchen and Clare seamlessly managing front of house.

From our very first meeting with Ben it was very clear just how different they were from any of the other caterers we had looked at. Too often companies we looked at made it feel like you were just another in a long line of weddings to be churned out, picking from a list of standard menu options and feeling more like you were organising a buffet for a corporate event.

Ben took the time to get to know us and the style of the wedding we had planned, the menu itself developed organically with us sending ideas back and forth until we had the meal that was perfect for us. Then we got to taste everything in our own home - a great insight into the boutique home catering that Lavender offer. It was an excellent evening after which we felt we had to temper our expectations to the effect that, when scaled up for the wedding, it wouldn't be as good.  Turns out we were wrong!  The food at the wedding was amazing as many of the guests commented. We had a number of people with dietary needs including a lactose intolerant bride, vegetarians, gluten intolerants, and one guest who has a plethora of serious allergies, all of which Ben took in his stride, subtly adapting the menu to accommodate. All of this was at a considerably more reasonable price than others we looked at.

To us though Lavender's greatest asset is Ben himself who has constantly gone above and beyond the role of caterer to ensure that our wedding day was perfect. He had an excellent understanding of the kind of thing we were looking for and added tweaks to the service to suit - little touches that made a big difference. Perhaps the best example of the lengths Ben went to was the Sunday after the wedding when he stuck around long after his things were tidied away to help us sweep and clean the venue itself before helping us load all our things into various vehicles to take away from the site. On seeing us struggle for space he loaded his own car and followed us back to our place and helped unpack! Judging from the time, energy and enthusiasm Ben was prepared to dedicate to us it'd be very easy to assume that we were his only wedding, but we know they have had functions nearly every weekend this summer!

It didn't really feel like a business relationship, despite being very professional in all our dealings, Ben was just another friend helping us with our wedding and we are sad that now the day itself has passed that has ended. We will be looking for any excuse to use Lavender Dining again in the future!

Vinyl: Purchases!

Yesterday I bought some records! The experience of going into Sister Ray Records was equal parts exciting and terrifying, a voyage to a new world with no idea whether you will be welcome or even if you'll like it. It reminded me of when I started to collect comics - rows and rows of things to buy with little real knowledge of what you wanted and whether they'd have it, all of which were being flicked through by people who seemed to know exactly what was going on and what they wanted.

"I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smith singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I'd feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn't... well... kinda one of them."

I tried not to think about it too much, not to worry too much about my collection being perfect from word go, just to relax and see what they had. First thing to note of course is they don't have the infinite range of choice that we have grown used to thanks to the internet, and then there's first/second hand to consider, again much like collecting comics. Obviously I had thought quite a lot in advance about what records I might like. I thought 3 or maybe 4 would be good to start the collection off and in no time at all I had found 4 I wanted. I briefly questioned whether I needed them all, which obviously I didn't, but I wanted them so I bought them anyway.

The National - Boxer

I first bought Boxer (on CD) on a whim, I'd never heard of, or heard anything by, The National but I wanted some new music and the cover spoke to me. This might be your kind of thing, it said, give it a go. Turns out it was a thoroughly awesome album start to finish. I have listened to it more than any other album in my collection, according to iTunes I've heard the whole album over 250 times and one of the songs 400 times, of course I've also listened to it on other computers iPod and CD. So yeah it's an album I needed to own on vinyl. Alligator and High Violet have similarly high play counts and are both spectacular albums, the pre-Boxer albums are good but don't really measure up. I haven't listened that much to their latest album Trouble Will Find Me much yet but am enjoying it greatly so far.

Beck - Guero

Beck has for a long time been a favourite artist but picking an album to have in the collection was always going to be tough! The styles of the albums he's produced are so varied it's pretty hard to compare them. Mellow Gold certainly has palace in my heart as the first Beck album I owned and obviously includes Loser but if you're looking at early Beck it's hard not to go straight for Odelay as a classic with instantly recognisable cover art to boot. Midnight Vultures despite some excellent tunes probably comes across as too electronic to really fit listening on vinyl, somehow it would seem at odds. If inclined more towards a full album experience with something more melodic to wash over the listener Sea Changes or Morning Phase are both very good options and to most people probably sound least Beck-ish.

I've only seen Beck play live once and it was a truly amazing experience, the high point of which being whilst Beck himself did a little acoustic number, Golden Age, on guitar the rest of the band sat down at a laid table and were served food as they listened to Beck play. Then, slowly at first, they began to tap along, growing louder as they chinked glasses and hit cutlery against crockery building to the massive percussive sound of Clap Hands. All of which was repeated in miniature by marionettes at the front of the stage, this in turn was filmed and projected behind the band so you could watch the whole thing unfold in triplicate! Guero was the album Beck was touring with when I saw him, it might not end up being the only Beck I buy but it's an excellent start.

Radiohead - The Bends

When thinking about buying/owning vinyl it's very hard to not give in to nostalgia. I suppose it is in its very nature nostalgic - hearkening back to a previous technology which somehow is better than anything and everything since. For me that nostalgia manifests in two ways: firstly in classic albums that were originally released on vinyl and secondly in albums that were important to me, favourites listened on constant repeat through sixth form and university. Radiohead and Portishead are both very firmly in that second category. The Bends is one of a few albums that reminds me of sixth form and uni in equal measures, for me it is the quintessential Radiohead album. Definitely worth listening in its entirety, whilst all the songs are excellent somehow the album adds up to that much more. Portishead's Dummy is still an exceptional album and I probably don't go back to it often enough. At the time it was something entirely new to me, I kind of music that was unlike anything else I listened to. Haunting and beautiful. I suspect it will benefit from the extra depth and deliberateness of vinyl.

Portishead - Dummy

I haven't listened to them yet, but that's my plan for the rest of Saturday!

Vinyl: Desert Island Discs

"...what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films - these things matter."

The ownership of a record player raises the obvious and important question - which albums do I want (or need) to own on vinyl? I like collecting things so this has dangerous cost implications and must be carefully controlled! I have a very large digital music collection which will remain as the body of the collection, in fact I don't imagine owning any thing on vinyl that I don't already have on some other medium.

So (and excuse the pretension here) but the record collection will be reserved for albums that warrant listening to in their entirety and not just hearing piecemeal. Albums which will benefit from the visceral experience and depth of sound (again excuse the pretension). Favourite albums which are the heart of the collection.

So what is (or would be) in your collection?

If I was a more measured man I might try to limit myself to a new album a month/quarter/year but I don't have that kind of discipline so I'll make no such promise. My (more in depth) thoughts on what I might buy will follow and after that I might even review some vinyl!

Things of Ginterest

I like gin, I've liked a gin and tonic since a uni friend introduced me to them. When buying you a drink he tended not to wait to find out what you wanted instead you drank whatever he was, which was usually a few pints of Guinness followed by G&Ts to round the night off. A rather excellent combination, the light crispness of the gin is the perfect counterpoint to the heaviness of the stout. In case you hadn't realised it gin is having a pretty big revival and reinvention - the gins that remind you of your grandparents are still around, medicinal and pretty hard but more and more are becoming available with subtler flavours and greater depths of taste.

It turns out that the gin industry took a huge battering thanks to Smirnov who owned the spirits market through the 80's and late into the 90's. The rebirth is at least in part to the Bombay company who added more botanicals (shown on the side of the bottle) to their gin to give it a more floral taste, served it in a blue bottle, called it Bombay Sapphire, and marketed it primarily to women. It showed the greater potential of gin with the addition of extra botanicals. The trend now is to have anywhere from six to twelve botanicals. A botanical is just something derived directly from a plant - seed, bark, berry, etc. to make a gin you get alcohol (pure as possible ethanol) and bung all your botanicals in it, boil it up and condense it down!

Earlier this year I went to the Portobello Road Ginstitute, it was amazing. Best described as a school trip where instead of having to look after children I had to "look after" gin! There is education, science and gin, a fine combination in appropriate proportions. On arrival  naturally there's a gin and tonic waiting for you as you wait for everyone to gather in the bar (about 12 total). Once assembled we we're taken upstairs to the Ginstitute proper by master gin maker Jake. The Ginstitute is a small room done out in the style of a gin palace - ornate mirrors, brass detailing, and glass cabinets filled with ancient bottle and cocktail recipes. 

Jake makes us a Tom Collins and begins to tell us about the, let's face it wretched, history of gin. On talking about Hogarth's gin alley we sample a truly unpleasant gin which has been created based on historic accounts to taste as it would have done then, I've tasted better paint thinner! We're told of the military's struggles to get the men to take their malaria medicine (having recently had to take some I can sympathise) and someone coming up with the cunning plan of combining this tonic with their daily gin ration and lo the G&T was born, for purely illustrative purposes we get and gin and tonic at this point. Jake is a fantastic raconteur, who has a great passion for his subject matter and is consequently a delight to listen to.

His story done he takes us upstairs to the distillery/mixing room it's a clean crisp white room that speaks of great works of science! Clear bottles of great size line the walls, smaller ones with taps sit on shelves, Jake sits at the head of the table, in front of him is a massive array of botanicals in different size jars, phials, and dishes. He talks us through each in turn and how they add to a gin's flavour and what combinations work well. We smell the botanicals themselves, but better still for each the Ginstitute has distilled a gin with a single botanical flavour so we can taste each individually. Now it's our turn to do some work as, under Jake's careful guidance, we have to decide on a blend of botanicals for our own personal Gins. Jake then makes them for us, mixed from the single botanical gins, we taste them all and have a bottle each to take away with us!

Science!

Technically of course it's a bit of a cheat creating them this way instead of mixing all the botanicals first then distilling but it's a very worthy shortcut to do it the other way round, makes for an excellent experience, and of course lets me walk away with a bottle of my own gin!

Proud father

So gin made we head back down to the bar and are furnished with a martini for the road and we wend our merry way a bottle of our very own blended gin and one of Portobello Road. A final cherry on this magnificently alcoholic cake is that they keep all the gins people make on file so you can order more of your gin if you feel you've done a particularly fine job! Mine is 5302 if you are looking for a summery gin with tones of lavender!

Find an excuse, find someone to go with, get yourself to Portobello Road and get Ginstitutionalised! Huge thanks to Gemma for buying this experience for me and to Aled for being my partner in Gin that day at the Ginstitute.

The Brothers Gin