Entries from March 2005 ↓

Via Feeling Listless, what’s your Digital Iq?   The questions are hilarious, and with a score of 152, it unsurprisingly dubs me a nerd.  Thanks Microsoft.

Dim T – Oriental Food – Charlotte Street, W1.

On Good Friday evening at about 9pm we headed to Charlotte Street in
search of some food.  We normally eat at the La Perla (Mexican) or on
occasion Chez Gerard and thought we would probably end up in one of
those.  However due to our taxi dropping us slightly higher up the
road, the first restaurant we came across was Dim-T, specialising not
so suprisingly in Dim Sum and East Asian food.  The outside is silver
with pink writing and it looked nice and busy, so we ventured in.

Inside is nice and relaxing looking, with long couches and cushions
against the walls, generally creating a very warm and relaxing
atmosphere.  The music was first loungey jazz and then Dido’s No Angel
album all adding to the stylishly casual mood.   

This was the first time I had tried Dim Sum since being a child so was
unsure what to expect.  We selected the dim sum selection which let us
choose to be given 6 Chicken, Seafood, Vegetarian or Meat dumplings. 
We went for chicken.  After about 5 minutes, they arrived in a basket
(the same type you get pancakes with duck in) and looked very much like
alien embryos!  But we were not put off.   We were given 2 of 3
different varieties and they were all very tasty.   I even managed to
eat the spicy one, although I normally hate even slightly spicy food.
And throughout the whole meal I used chopsticks for the first time.
Normally I just can’t do it and give up straight away but chopstick
ability now goes straight onto my cv

Onto the main course, I went for the same Crispy Aromatic Duck and got
more than enough for a bargainous £8.   J had a noodle stirfry.  For
about £7 you could pick your meat (or not), the type of rice, and the
toppings you wished from about 5 or 6 options, with something for
everyone.

So all in all Dim-T was an unexpected bonus to the evening.  It was a
very tasty, relatively cheap meal and has crept into our very favourite
restaurants list.  Now I don’t know how to review food, other than to
say it was yummy, but I thought I would put this here to encourage you
to go if you are ever stuck where to go to eat in W1.

I have just wasted about an hour playing this.  It’s very addictive and very shonky.

Best score I got was 450.  You?

Harold’s Flinging Food Frenzy on bbc.co.uk
(via Minor 9th )

I’m going to watch some boxing today.   I work with one of the competitors so how much I will watch between fingers I’m not sure.

Rawk!

This Thursday at Koko  (*snork*) sees a Eat your own ears event.

The lineup is

Live: Tom Vek, Electric Soft Parade (RANDOM!), Hot Chip, Whitey, The Beat Up, Park Attack and Deaf Stereo.

Then DJing: Richard X, Optimo, Druzzis’ Nathan Gregory Wilkings & Ben Rhymer, Paul Epworth, Filthy Dukes, Eat your own ears DJs and Our Disco Djs

I’ve seen Optimo twice now.  One was for their album launch night at The Cock @ Ghetto which was really really amazing.  The music was very electo and the whole atmosphere was just dirty, filthy sex.  The second time was at the  very dark coked up punters orgy that was Our Disco on friday night (read more about that here)  where they played a much older sounding set, with surf guitars a plenty.   Anyway seeing them again will be good, particularly as it’s in a much larger venue.  And I’ve been wanting to see Richard X for yonks!

The second thing I am very much looking forward to in my musical calender is Fabric Live at Fabric, one of the weeks in April.   Jacques Le Cont is playing alongside Etienne De Crecy in Room 1.  Fabric is probably my favourite venue in London.  The layout is amazing and the music is always great.  I saw Jacques Le Cont there in December alongside Soulwax, Mylo & DJ Yoda to name but a few.  The lineup that night was amazing, but being the friday before Xmas, it was an absolute nightmare to get in.  Even in the guestlist queue we were outside for nearly an hour.   And then to top it all off both J & I were really weary and got very sleepy at about 1.30.  So sleepy that we went home which was a major disappointment.

So this time it will be different.  Hopefully J will take the pm off work and I probabably won’t be in either.   We will get there early and Red Bull ourselves to the max.  If you haven’t heard of Jacques Le Cont, he does a lot of remixes of chart hits as well as being the force behind Les Rhythms Digitales and a new project Juliet whose single Avalon you may have heard.

Milly is a the best of all the small, welsh ladies I know.

We got to know each other in 2003 through both lusting after the same man and soon discovered a whole bundle of other things we both enjoyed.

She is hot, fluffy, blonde, talented and a little bit wrong.  Just how I like them.

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  CIMG2199 
  Originally uploaded by trixie.

Sites like Gumtree and Craigs List  are sometimes useful, but also full of some very strange people.  If you’re feeling adventrous take a gander at the casual relationships page for some giggles.

The job pages also throw up random stuff every so often, some are obviously just WRONG.  This one sounds somewhat dodgy (but not as dodgy as others) and it made me laugh.  Why exactly does he want a british guy?

WANTED: TECHNO MALE

Very wealthy businessman is looking to augment his personal staff with a third personal assistant. Employer has a strong preference for a Brit. He does not need to have prior experience in PA work but does need extraordinary computer skills. He’ll travel extensively with the employer via private jet. He’s responsible for all the computer hardware and software requirements of a large entourage as well as many other organizational tasks. Travel includes the US, middle east and a personal yacht as well as numerous homes around the world. While working, long hours will be required for extended periods of time.

Anyone?
Great opportunity for young, sharp, eager person with good
presentation. All expenses paid. Salary in the 30K-35K range to start.
Contact Gary or Michael.

I’ve been reading Music for Robots a lot recently.  This mp3 blog is always full of great tracks, and it introduced me to a band called Out Hud.  Maybe I’m really behind the times and you have all heard of them before, but this was the first time I had come across them.  I managed to hear two tracks off their forthcoming album Let Us Never Speak of This Again – How Long and It’s For You.  How Long really really stood out to me and off I trundled to buy the album.  It came out on Monday but play recently seem to have lost the plot on deliveries so who knows when I will get it.

3 of the members of Out Hud are also in punky band !!! who I saw at Reading last year.  I’ve got their album but not really listened to it much.  Out Hud are a much dancier version though (or at least the 2 tracks I have are).

I love how crazy All Music’s descriptions of acts are.  When I’m not wanting to gauge my eyes out from how slow the site is, I can often be found rolling around on my floor laughing my ass off at it.  Mmmm.  Anyway allmusic describes the band as

• Restrained
• Playful
• Plaintive
• Anxious
• Complex
• Clinical
• Boisterous

Nice!  When play deliveres I shall tell you which of these it fits!

MfR also mentioned how they were the best live act he had ever seen.  And this is my main point.  They are, to my delight, playing at Koko (god how much of a radio geek am I that that venue name always makes me giggle – you will understand if you ever heard the koko.koko.koko.com song. Oh dear.) at Club NME sometime in April.   So you should go and experience some great music!  Just don’t buy all the tickets because I need some too!

So the day that I upgrade to a Flickr pro account, Flickr is acquired by Yahoo!

I seem to have done nothing the last week or so but go to gigs.  I’ll upload photos when I can find my camera!

We started with the Camden Crawl – 40 bands on in various venues round Camden all on one evening.  A ticket was £15 and this got you entry into all the venues involved.  There was an added bonus as Milly came down from the Midlands to enjoy it too.

We picked up our wristbands midafternoon and headed to the World’s End pub to plan our itinery.    There were 8 venues and 5 different slots at each venue, meaning there were far more clashes than I had originally envisaged as I expected slots to be shorter.  The venues were across Camden with the two extremes being Koko (formerly Camden Palace) and Barfly down on Chalk Farm Road.

First up we headed to the Oh! Bar on Camden High Street to see Weapons of Mass Belief .  I thought their website was broken for the last two weeks but it turns out it *only* works in IE.  Bah.  They are a punky-rap outfit from South Wales doing the nu-metal style thing perhaps 3 years too late (or is it due a comeback).  Black Line Ninja was released on March 7th and is definatly worth a listen.   We only really caught the tail end of their set, annoyingly being held back from entering while they were playing the single because the bouncers were having a chat!

Off then to Koko to attempt to see the end of Do Me Bad Things .  Ricky had seen them the night before and liked them a lot.  Unfortunatly we got there just as everyone was leaving, and instead ended up with Milly having a mass GLC debate with one of J’s friends.

Next up we hit Lock 17, at least I think that’s what it was called, to see Hard-Fi.  I’d been listening to a bundle of camden crawl band tracks for the week leading up to the event and Hard-Fi’s single Tied up Too Tight was the most immediately striking of the lot.  The venue itself was very nice, quite large and quite full.   Milly had seen the band earlier in the week supporting The Bravery, and we bopped along to a really enjoyable set.   There were some sound problems, but nothing really to detract from the greatness of some of the tracks.   There should be an album out in June, I think, and they are playing at the 100 Club on Oxford Street in London on April 28th so I would wholeheartily recommend you get tickets for that if you can.  Unfortunatly I am seeing the Kaiser Chiefs that night, round the corner at the Astoria, but there might be some running between venue antics!

After Hard-Fi we briefly dropped into the Caernavon Castle to see someone who I can’t even remember for about 2 songs.  They were quiet and not very interesting.

For the final set we had a lot of people to pick between.  It could have been Graham Coxon, Buzzcocks, The Subways or many others, but we took ourselves down to Barfly to see Le Tigre.  I’d seen them before doing a PA at Popstarz but not really paid that much attention. Since then I have heard a lot more of their material and so really really enjoyed this gig.  It was marred somewhat by some plonker who thought he was being Nathan Barley and was ‘dead ironic’.  I particularly enjoyed his ‘Get off me you queer cunt’ to someone in the audience.  Oh, people!

So all in all it was a fun night.  If you haven’t heard of the bands above, the tracks you should check out are:

Hard-Fi : Tied Up Too Tight / Cash Machine
Weapons of Mass Belief : Black Line Ninja
Le Tigre : Decepticon / TKO / On the Verge