Alternative Three (1977)

Via Ballardian

MIKULÁS

So: Mikulás. I have nil capacity for doing a poorly-wrought rendition of non-English festival tradition this morning. All I know is gleaned from Wikipedia: go read about this folktale-with-menaces here. Suffice to say, I think you can probably guess who ended up with the virgács :(

SIMPLETON PLEASURES

We did it. We're here! On the back end of a week of chronic social discomfort and headspin, I'm reclining in my Euro-tastic new apartment in the Erzsébetváros. Although I had planned to document the initial adaptation process, inside-outside anthropology-style, I (with a characteristically drippy excuse) simply couldn't find the appropriate notepad.

We now live off an ochre-ish courtyard in Budapest's VII district, in a studio apartment with a bath in the middle of the room. Now, armed with a 18HUF yellow exercise book, allow me to take you on a tour of our new neighbourhood. Roll your eyes heavenward as your host - very definitely the awe-struck provincial - marvels at the 24 hour supermarket (0-24 élelmiszer) at the end of her street, the utterly decent bar across the way and the mack-off (second biggest in the world) synagogue down the road.

This is Szimpla Kert, a gigantic romkert (ruined garden) and almighty jawdropper a stone's throw away from our pad. Entered through an unassuming set of industrial strip doors, it's an abandoned building transformed into a late bar and cinema, festooned with all manner of picturesque debris, de-tuned televisions, heeeeavy fag smoke, car parts pot plants, grafitto, flotsam, jetsam, &c, &c.

For future reference, you can view pictures of confectionary, buildings and fairground kitschery, as well as pseudo-exploitative photos of my boyfriend, Joe, (amongst other things) at my Flickr here.

* And the relevance of the picture at the top of this entry? Well, I like to sample my cultural difference at the supermarket - here the milk (tej) is sold, udder-style, in bags. You slide it into a jug, snip the top, then chill in the fridge.

In Every Tourer Caravan a Portatoilet: The Roxy Music Story

On Saturday I watched More Than This: The Roxy Music Story. I'm certain the BBC only have the one narrative arc for these rockumentaries, interspersing the talking heads with stock footage of Thatcher, the Miner's Strike, football hooligans or the generalised white dog shit Britain of the 1970s, as chronologically appropriate. The social realist rags to outrageous riches yarn is British pop music's favourite bedtime story and Bryan Ferry's is pretty outré, “escaping” Tyne and Wear for art college, then London, Jerry Hall, Bel Air, Miss World, Marks and Spencer &c &c &c.

However, what interested me wasn't so much the fabulously strange records of Roxy's early career - Ladytron, Virginia Plain, In Every Dream Home a Heartache and Do the Strand – but their other lineage, the one that held vast appeal for the core 35 – 44 audience of medium wave radio stations specialising in smooth, contemporary classics. During my early nineties childhood, grotesqueries like Dance Away, Avalon and More Than This were still in heavy rotation on Yorkshire Coast Radio. As the hiss n' crackle soundtrack to summers spent in a tourer caravan on the coast of Filey, those records, along with Weather With You by Crowded House, Spandau Ballet's True, Hazard by Richard Marx and Save the Best for Last by Vanessa Williams, still smell of car sick, soft furnishings and boredom. And I'll never be able to associate them my Dad's copy of Virginia Plain on lilac 7”, which was the mainstay of our front room discos on nights that mum was at work.

Watch here.

A little sloganeering seen on the canvas tote bag of an innocuous-looking lady on Rogue's Alley outside work:

We Might Not Have a Future.
And This Might All Be a Waste of Time.

Hex Induction Hour

Like Joe’s, at the moment this blog might better be subtitled Things That Have Aroused My Ire Today. I’ve given the righteous indignation a rest today – though only just, BBC3 schedulers take heed – to serve up these morsels of weird on the web. I wrote about the worst of the internet last week – these outrageous compilations of estoterica and maverick science are some of the best, I think.

Professor Hex compiles strangenesses here

The Heavy Stuff searches for wonder with Husserl

The Anomalist

News from a lost neighbourhood

File under: the Rightful Uses of the Internet.

P.S. On a related sidenote, here's a snippet from the most incongruous of publications, the Yorkshire Post, about West Yorkshire spiritualists.