peteashtondotcom

Jamie at work’s father is Denis Lawson who played Wedge in all three Star Wars films. When Jamie told me this I went all geeky and amazed. I phoned Dave who lives and breaths Star Wars and told him I was working with the son of the guy who played Wedge and he said that he once worked with the son of the guy who played Gold Leader. Life is good.

Of course, this also means that Jamie’s cousin is Ewan MacGregor. That didn’t really faze me in the slightest. His dad though… I mean, like, WOW!

Saddo corner (yes, even more so). Warwick Davis who played the Ewok Wicket, played the goblin in Harry Potter who takes Harry and Hagrid to Harry’s vault. I know this because I recognised his name in the credits. Yes, I’m that sad.

Rather nasty hangover this morning, as was to be expected after getting rather rat-arsed last night. Thankfully I don’t think I wrote anything embarrassing online and managed to only say to Kate that I loved her lots and never really said so, although I did but not really enough. Which is a relief.

Anyway, so I made it to work, did a couple of hours work and announced that I needed a greasy spoon. Was recommended one on Old Compton Street, which is just around the corner from the shop.

The Old Compton Cafe is brilliant. At least it’s brilliant at 10.30am-ish on a weekday. There’s something wonderful about that area in the daylight, possibly because it’s by rights a night-time place so if you’re there in the day it’s because you belong there, or something. Anyway, while the Full English Breakfast wasn’t quite as greasy as I would have liked, this being gay Soho, it did the job and came it an under a fiver with tea. And the staff were really friendly, which is a novelty in a central London eatery. Apparently it’s open 24 hours and I’d heartily recommend it.

After I’d finished eating and was drinking my tea with a cigarette letting the salt and grease and sugar do it’s job, I gazed blankly at the opposite wall which had the name of the cafe on a mirror. I swear it said The Comfort Cafe.

And I think I’m going to be drunk / busy until Saturday. So while I have lots to write about it’ll be a while before it gets here. If I remember.

What I did today.

Talked to Kath on the phone for the first time in three or so years and aranged to meet up.

Learned that Heather has her first bookseller boyfriend, which makes her 100% one-of-us.

Went to the pub with cartoonist Nick Abadzis and talked about all kinds of stuff.

Got very drunk later on with Brett and Sarah and weird people from Foyles. Thought about getting a job there. Then thought again.

Came home and woke up Kate, who claimed not to have been asleep.

Discovered Frazer is off to Croatia to meet some bird which is why he was bugging me for details on the Croatian comics scene at 1.00am last night. Of course, I had lots of information.

Wrote this. Apologies for drunken typos.

Okay, here’s a plea. Now the computer is back in the living room and the window looks over Mile End Station and the City, I’d like to get a webcam that runs on Mac OS 9 so I can show you the freaky sunsets that happen over London and the freaks that wander around outside our flat. Problem is the Mac ’specialists’ on Tottenham Court Road can’t recommend one. I want a full webcam thingy that uploads automatically when I’m online and all that, not just one that take pictures I can save as JPEGs. Any ideas?

Back from the Nan Goldin show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Words nearly fail me. It’s quite stunning. Emotional, honest, universal, painful, hopeful and ultimately inspiring. I urge you to go see it before it ends, and set aside a good couple of hours to fit in the slide shows which are certainly the highlight. The autobiographical “All By Myself” is positively draining, as in draining yet positive.

The gallery is free on Tuesdays, I discovered, and about a fiver on other days. Well worth it. Ends April 1st.

Continuing the Art theme, I’m off to see the Nan Goldin exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery this afternoon. Again, this is a Graham recommendation. He reckons you need to spend a good 2-3 hours there watching the slideshows and crying.

I remember seeing her work for the first time at Tate Modern last year. The thing about Tate Modern is it’s got so much stuff in it that there’s a danger of overkill. Too much art too quickly. So it’s saying something when, towards the end of our visit, I was dumbstruck by the selection of Goldin’s on show.

Currently I am throwing myself headlong into Art. Last night I went to the ICA with Graham to see part of their Kenneth Anger Magick Lantern Cycle program, specifically Scorpio Rising which is one of Graham’s favourite films of all time ever type thing. Graham was a little worried about dragging me along to this as we’re talking about pretty difficult work. But I have to say I enjoyed it and wish I went to more stuff like this.

Observations on Anger…

He was using trashy pop music in the 60s to soundtrack his films (which, as far as I can tell, don’t have dialogue) which was unheard of then. Every movie, from Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Goodfellas to Gross Point Blank, which uses this technique owes it to Anger.

Cutups and juxtaposition of images. Lots of iconography, some of it blatant (contrasting the wanabe bikers with Brando and Dean) some of it more subtle, and some of it completely outrageous (splicing the 50’s religious film of Jesus and his followers with the bikers out on the town was particularly smart, especially the merchants-in-the-temple scene). Current film makers are a hell of a lot more subtle than Anger but if you keep your eyes open this is used a lot. Especially with people like David Lynch. It’s not the scenes that make sense but the connections between them.

Following on from this, the repetition of ritual. The title Magick Lantern Cycle is something of a give-away. This comes straight out of the 60’s post-Crowley psychedelic occult scene so, in Lucifer Rising in particular, you’ve got scenes of guys in robes and Egyptian garb doing rituals again and again, looped in with cuts to occult imagery. Kinda stupid in places but very powerful in its way.

Trashy pop culture. From when trashy pop culture was uninteresting. Obvious implications for this modern era when people think it’s very interesting indeed.

Finally, the debt MTV owes him. Tie up all these things and you’ve got a pretty average modern pop video. Quick cuts, ritual, music, non-linear. The kinds of today are being exposed to the children of Kenneth Anger. Interesting to think of directors like David Fincher who came from music videos to make movies like Se7en which are very Anger.

There were about 10 people in the ICA to see the films, and one person walked out half way through (c’mon, you’re in the ICA for gods sake! What did you expect?). I think this was quite a good turnout for them.

I’m not crying for attention or anything, but this weekend I’ve had nothing but spam in my in-box (mailing lists aside) save an angry missive from Scottish Bird saying I forgot her birthday. Is there some big party going on I wasn’t invited to?

Schnews, the direct action newsletter, has relaunched it’s site with more resources and such.

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials look pretty good. About time I started learning about stuff like CCS, etc.

As an antidote to the previous post, Kate found this game which is rather addictive.

This mutant horror is what people in the sales department of Random House kids books find “amusing”. God. Help. Us. All.

Blimey!

Just had an email from my old mate Kath who I haven’t seen in three years after she moved to Paris. Turns out she’s training to be a war photographer after a spell in Kurdistan. Or something. We will no doubt be meeting up soon as she’s moving to London. And she has an ickle site.

My area manager has left the company. This is an interesting and hopefully I’ll remember to write about it soon. Unfortunately the CXR effect means I’ve been a bit drunk since Monday….

All the best, Lisa. Hope things are okay. For an area manager you were a good egg. Hate to think what kind of wanker they’ll get to replace you.

Can anyone recommend a UK credit card that had good web access? I mean, it can’t be hard but my Lloyds Mastercard won’t do it.

Just had my first piece of fan mail from someone who’s read my entire blog in one sitting over 6 hours. “You’re an obsessive
compulsive bordering on depressive with a slight pinch of schizophrenia and
megalomania” he says. Which is nice!

This weekend was spent at Mother’s, who can now read this after I showed her how to open the web browser. We went for a long walk on Saturday around St Catherine’s Hill outside Winchester. I used to spend a lot of time there when I was a depressed teen but hadn’t been back since the M3 extension was built in the mid 90s and they got rid of an A road replacing it with a huge cutting. It was kinda weird but still pretty much the same. The strangest thing was the number of people up there - 10 years ago it was pretty much empty but now it’s a big nature reserve family walking place. Which is nice, but strange.

From the biog in the 1954 Penguin edition of Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime:

But material success had coarsened him. His flouting of conventional morality had become blatant, and he courted disaster by suing Lord Queensbury for criminal libel. He lost the case, was arrested, and imprisoned for two year.

Of course, flouting conventional morality was not allowed in the late 19th century.

6.55, eh? Not bad going, Mo!

(apologies to everyone else…)

Electricity is for seeing with, listening to music with, plugging computers into and making trains run. Electricity is NOT for cooking with.

I have the misfortune of having an electric oven/hob combo jobby. I have the double misfortune of a long history of gas cooker usage.

When we first tried to use the grill last year is smoked like a bugger. This is because it’s on the roof of the oven and therefore gets splattered everytime something that spits is baked. Like that’s not going to fucking happen, but hey. So after cleaning it yesterday I thought I’d give it a go with four sausages. Half a bloody hour later they look like they’ve been kinda cooked and this is mainly because the oven door has been shut and it’s 180 degrees in there.

This would never happen with a gas grill because gas flames are fire and you can cook with fire. You cannot cook effectively with a ponced up light bulb in a box.

To finish the day, I cleaned the cooker, top and inside and the splashed wall behind. This was a novel experience, not because I’d never cleaned an oven before - I have. It’s just normally I clean the oven in a vain attempt to get the deposit back on wherever I’m living. Since we just signed for another year in this flat I was cleaning the oven for us. So I did a good job and it looks good. Problem is I neglected to buy rubber gloves so my fingers are all tingly and I have the cleanest nails known to mankind.

Since Mr Mooncat told me about Audiogalaxy four days ago and how there are Macintosh Satellites available, I’ve squeezed over 100 megabytes through my phone line, mainly tunes by the irascible King Missile who raise a smile all round. So thank you Mr Mooncat. Napster’s back!

(As I was writing the below, Andy KK sent through this link)

Had a couple of days holiday left over so I took Monday and Today to chill before starting at CXR and, shock horror, managed to actually get stuff done. In fact, I do believe I got everything done. Fucking hell.

Monday I arose a bit later than intended but was up by noon, which wasn’t bad. After posting some eBay sales and trying to buy a light bulb for the cooker, I went to central London and dropped off Konky’s comics at Gosh, like I’d said I would three weeks back and investigated getting a PO Box. Turns out you can’t just walk in and get a PO Box, you have to phone up, get the application form from their site, print it out and send it off. So, should have a PO Box in 10 days or so, which will be ginchy as a couple of my eBay purchases failed to turn up this month, plus I discovered you can open our letterbox with my work locker key which is a completely different size. Then I came home, ate some eggs and finished working on Mark Stafford’s sub-site for BugPowder (to launch once he’s approved it) just as Kate came home from work. Cooked tea and chilled out until her brother turned up to stay the night.

Tuesday, again slept a bit longer than intended and was awoken by Kate coming home ill at eleven. Not seriously ill, just a slightly runny bum, but there’s a pregnant woman in the office and apparently that’s an issue. So, got up and went out. First to the City to pay in some cheques and buy and ink cart, then a number 8 Routemaster bus (one of the jump-on-the-back old ones that everyone says were much better than the new ones, even though they rattle like a bugger) to Bethnal Green and onto the Roman Road shops where you can get everything you want at half the price. On the bus some ‘youths’ got on talking about guns and stuff, which was nice. Apparently the Asians have ’straps’ so it’s better to sink your money in an Uzi. The Roman Road estate is ‘like the projects’ and they once got chased by the ‘feds’ through there. One gets the feeling one just doesn’t have a fucking clue what’s going on on one’s doorstep. Got off the bus and found the hardware store where they did have the right light bulbs and some 3in1 oil for the bedroom door (which creaks). I remembered this was the shop that sold garden stuff and also bought a couple of troughs and some more compost to finally begin my window-box experiment. Admittedly you’re supposed to plant bulbs in the autumn but it’s so relatively mild in Zone 2 I don’t think it’ll matter. We’ll see anyway.

Got home, cleaned hood of cooker of two years grease, potted bulbs, and went to Sainsbury’s where I somehow managed to spend just under £40. And then somehow managed to carry it back on the tube. In rush hour. Kate wanted a present so I bought her a Butternut Squash because it looked funny.

Nice cuppa tea and it’s time to go online. Back to Leadenhall tomorrow, then on to CXR on Thursday for a coupla days. Nice.

PalmPizza (via MeFi)

One of Kate’s work chums has been hard at work on Amazon. Made me smile, anyway. Something to do with this aesthetic monstrosity, by all accounts.

Interestingly, the thing I use the handheld for most of all (after the diary and address book, which is what it was intended to replace anyway) is reading weblogs on the AvantGo browser. It’s got to the stage where I read not.so.soft every morning on the tube. I rarely read the
Guardian or BBC news even though they’re there for free. Just weblogs. Oh, and the Onion, which seems to work perfectly in that format. But I’m seriously finding I want more weblogs on my handheld, which can only be a good thing. With that in mind, I was thinking I ought to beef up the content of this weblog a bit.

Work has, as ever, been noteworthy. As you’ll know, I’m a bookseller for the a large chain and have been for a good number of years now. Last year my shop at Cheapside closed during which time I made it to the giddy heights of “acting assistant manager deputising for management” before being busted back down to senior bookseller on closure when I went to the nearby Leadenhall branch. This was a strage experience I wasn’t expecting to be strange. Having been thrust into running pretty much everything at short notice I was suddenly back where I started, but come January I’d adjusted to it and was settling into running the travel section and spending as much time in the office doing ordering. Take it nice and easy, I thought to myself. No need to kill yourself. Only a job. Etc.

Sidenote. My old manager at Cheapside, Tim, left before the closure to run the Charing Cross Road shop, hence my “acting assistant manager deputising for management” malarkey. Just before Xmas they announced Charing Cross Road was closing due to a rent hike. Be warned. CXR is going to be pretty bland in a few years time as they ‘redevelop’ the area into something ‘nicer’. So Tim’s pretty pissed off. To lose one shop is a shame, to lose two in a year is just careless. They shop is due to close it’s doors in 2 or 3 months time and they’ve been gradually scaling it down over time and relocating the staff. Currently it’s just Tim, a few full timers who haven’t been placed yet and a load of temps left over from Xmas. The assistant managers get placed over the next week and then, and here’s the punchline, I start there as, you guessed it, acting assistant manager.

I agreed to this for a number of reasons. I get paid a bit more for 10 weeks, which will be handy given the post Xmas debt I seem to have accumulated. I also get to work with Tim again, which will be cool as we got on really well and Cheapside. And Heather who’s become a really good mate over the last year or so. And I get to say I’ve managed CXR, which was quite a legendary store in it’s time. Maybe I’ll post up some of the stories here some time. Plus there’s always the brownie points scenario, which is never a bad thing when stores are closing left right and centre. And then there’s something else.

I’m now in my sixth store as a full time member of staff for this company. I’ve also helped out in another six or seven over the years. I’ve run most departments and can run them all if need be. I’ve made it to the highest grade of bookseller by accident. And I’m really not sure if I want to go into proper, non-acting, non-deputising management, especially having done it for a bit. But I do like popping into a shop and sorting bits of it out for a while before moving on. My job at CXR is to make sure the closure goes smoothly so that it’s empty on time. I like that kind of job. It looks like if the London region wants someone to do a job like that they’re going to call on me. And I like that. Keeps life interesting.

Oh happy joy! Shockheaded Peter is back in London this spring (April 4th to be precise). We went to see it last year and it was stunning, amazing, wonderful. The best. Problem was we got the cheap seats and the action takes place all over the stage so we missed a ten minute bit at the top of the stage, if you get me. So, no cheap seats this time!

Thanks hugely to Captain Fez, booking details