plasticbag.org

PHEW: Managed to save Mark‘s recent blogs from the abyss. Thanks to everyone concerned!

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CRISIS: Everyone who hasn’t been to riothero yet today must follow these instructions IMMEDIATELY. I posted a note to the site (Katy and I still have access). Anyway – for some reason it erased the last weeks posts completely. Absolute horror on my part. Complete and utter horror (how/why could this have happened?). You people have to help me fix this crisis:

1. Immediately go OFFLINE. If you are using IE then go to FILE, and select WORK OFFLINE.
2. Go to www.riothero.com – if you can get to it without going online, then this is a CACHED copy.
3. You should be able to see posts from between Sunday and Friday.
4. Copy and paste these days and e-mail them to me immediately on tom@no-spam-please-barbelith.com.
5. Then I can put them back on the site where they belong. This is SO important. PLEASE GOD, SOMEONE HELP!

I’m surprised by the response I’m getting to the megnut/kottke pairing that I alluded to earlier. Seems that there is quite an undercurrent of gossip in the weblogging community, and that everyone wants in on the action. Quotes from an unnamed source:

“I too noticed the “Perfect Storm” reference from both Meg and Jason. But did you notice these?

Meg – “Only one to-do scheduled on the whole day stretching before me: bake a blueberry pie”
Jason – “Jason’s 4th of July wrap-up: made blueberry pie”

Meg – “… parties and tete-a-tetes-a-tetes and tours and tastings”
Jason – “Went wine tasting yesterday”

Meg – “The Right Stuff is one of my favorite movies of all time”
Jason – “recent movie viewings: the Right Stuff …”

… and then of course there is their appearance together in Jezebel‘s Mirror…”

So, I missed seeing Mark and Vance last night because I had to work late and because I left my mobile phone at home, which meant that neither of them could get in touch with me all day. Absolute disaster all around really, as Katy had too much work to do and had to hide at home as well. I have sent Mark a tremendously apologetic e-mail and hopefully we’ll all think of something cool to do this evening.

Sam turned up out of the blue(-ish) last night as well. He’d left his rolling tobacco on our TV. He watched Ally McBitch with me and my flatmates and seemed completely unable to grasp who it is just about OK to like (Ling, Biscuit) and who must die in unending torment (Ally, Nell etc). I still contend that it is a Nazi TV series. Anyway, at some point in the evening, when I was chasing Kate around the flat trying to blow a raspberry on her stomach, I got clocked by his huge metal watch on his arm. Last night I had a black-eye, and I’m too scared to look this morning. Mella says it makes me look macho, but she’d say anything, frankly…

OK. I think it’s time certain people came clean. Megnut and Kottke go and see The Perfect Storm on exactly the same day and have pretty much exactly the same reaction to it. Question de jour: did they see it together?

Mark says:

In London, from what I can tell (people screaming and such), people love the Internet. They are willing to pay these ridicules prices to play for a just few minutes…

Load of bollocks. Go to an Easy Everything net café and you’ll be able to get around an hour of net time for £1 ($1.40) – if you go in the middle of the night they’ll even give you up to six hours for the same price…

Quotes from recent Salon article about the Patriot and my increasing frustration with Hollywood film-making:

The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film Patriot “racist” in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films like “Titanic,” “Michael Collins” and “The Jungle Book” remake that have depicted the British as “treacherous, cowardly, evil [and] sadistic.” Roberts had a theory: “With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else.”

• Pullquote: The Evil English

Now I don’t like the Daily Express, and I’m not claiming for one moment that the British haven’t been culpable for some pretty bastardly things in the past (but no more so than the Dutch, the Spanish, the French – in fact every other major Old World Country). But you know – I can’t help thinking the guy above has a point. The British have been the bad-guys too long – there is simply no need for this characterisation by Hollywood. No need at all. We’re either effeminate fops (Hugh Grant), Nazis or we are dirty people who live in mud huts without electricity and speak in “impenetrable” regional accents. Any visitor to these shores would see that it just ain’t so.

Yowser. Had a great laugh with Mark, Vance and Katy last night. Katy and I scrambled for hours across the Wastelands of the Westway, emerging damp and confused between Paddington and Bayswater. Having finally found the hotel residence of our young associates, we met each other, looked a bit nervous (especially Mark) and tried to work out what to do next.

At which point, Mark’s mother introduced herself, which meant that I immediately had to make a joke about getting her son drunk and dumping him in a strip joint in Soho, which went down remarkably well considering, but I probably wouldn’t make again if put in the same situation.

So Katy and I dragged them off to find a restaurant so we could soothe our cravings for food. We found this appalling tapas place, which cost far too much and really wasn’t very nice and chatted and made bad jokes and swapped stories of other webloggers, and heard all about Mark’s experiences at SXSW, and which bloggers were tall, which were short and which were great big spotty geeks.

Basically, much fun was had by all – and hopefully we will be meeting up again either tonight or tomorrow night – depending on when they are leaving for the next stage of their trip. One last thing though – MARK! I FORGOT TO BRING MY PHONE TO WORK! E-MAIL ME OR RING UP KATY!

Guess who Katy and I are off to meet in about fifty minutes. That’s right – the young riothero himself – currently staying in a hotel in Paddington. It’s a pity the weather is so bad at the moment, though – he’s really going to get the wrong idea about the UK. Anyway – let’s see what he thinks of London so far?

“Harrumph! The English has no consideration for the 4th of July!”

<snarkiness follows>

I don’t think we really need to go into too much detail about why that is a pretty weird thing to say. I mean, much as it would be cool to celebrate the UK finally disposing of it’s wayward nephew [Rupture agrees], it is after all the celebration of America’s independance from this “old country”. Actually I got into another mood with America after watching Chicken Run and U-571 and realising that American media is all about self-congratulation, while UK media is all about self-deprecation, and that some Americans don’t get that our media is no more representing the truth of our country than theirs represents the truth of the good ole USA.

</snarkiness ends>

Actually really looking forward to seeing Mark. I’m a bit concerned that I have a stomping headache and am all stinky and smelly and that he’s going to look at me as if I fell from Planet Kak. Still, we shall see what we shall see… Oh, and apparently Vance will be there as well!

Saturday night at the Groucho Club: I felt apprehensive all day – after all, I was going to a party hosted by friends of my flatmate, and felt like a bit of a hanger on. I talked to Mella about it and she quite properly said that it wasn’t like we had a chance to go to the Groucho Club every day, that I should just get over it and try and have fun. So I arrive at the party around 10 and within a few moments have found Nick C, Kate, Mella and Rachel sitting chatting in a corner. We muck around for a bit, get some drinks, and sway in between the hordes to have a look around…

The party is held in two rooms on the side and back of the Groucho club, and we don’t really have much contact with the main part. I’m a little disappointed about this, since an old friend of mine, Tall Michael, works there. I thought it would be really nice to stumble upon him (as it turned out he wasn’t there anyway). One room looked a bit like ballroom only much smaller – a fair amount of faux glitz on the walls, a decent amount of light and a tressle-tabled bar on one wall. The other room was much more interesting – comfortable sofas, a bit more darkness, and a selection of DJs.

I had been advised to do a little celebrity spotting – although almost everyone at the party worked in an even more media occupation than mine, and were either singularly unimpressed by celebrity or were trying extremely hard to pretend to be. That’s not to say that this was a celebrity party – most of the people there were behind the scenes film and media people of various (young) levels. It reminded me a bit of the parties that Kerry and Sean took me too in Hollywood while I was there, although with less gay people…

Around 11.30pm I bump into Ben Chaplin. I say “bump into” because I’m too embarrassed to go into the complicated arrangements that I engineered in order to be in a position to “bump” effectively. After a singularly brief exchange we go our separate ways, at which point for some reason I feel compelled to pat his stomach. I have absolutely no idea why. He cheerfully exclaims, “see you in a bit, yeah?”, with a big grin on his face, and that’s the last contact I have with him in the evening.

At this point (having been rounded set upon by Kate and Tara for my appalling behaviour), we set to dancing with great enthusiasm. The DJ that we weren’t so keen on has been replaced by the lead singer of the Bluetones, who is a tiny bloke, with infinitely cooler taste in music. I’m too embarrassed to ask him to put on a Moby track, even though the album is lying right in front of him. Kate decides to ask on my behalf, but he tells us that the next DJ is more into dance, so we should leave it until then. Disappointed we continue to dance. At which point, he puts on Talking Heads. I am so delighted that a plant a smacker on his cheek. Kate looks on, amused but exasperated by my increasingly entertaining/exasperating behaviour…

I have a sit down at this point, because I am increasingly worried that I look like some form of scaffy monster with increasingly bad hair. But this allows me the thrill of watching Kate in her tight red dress and (hidden) black proppy-up underwear thing dance around likea maniac with Rachel. I am summoned up by Mella at an opportune moment, and we bounce around franctically to whatever is playing at the time.

By about 1.30 I am considering leaving – I’m completely exhausted. While the others resolve some of the tensions of the party behind the scenes, I decide to go to the loo. I spend about a month and a half waiting for the cubicle to empty (only one punter, a hundred years of waiting). When it does open, this bloke emerges who look remarkably like Jeremy Northam only thinner and with longer hair. I mention this resemblance to one of my friends who stares at me like I’m some form of root vegetable and assures me that if he looked like Jeremy Northam and sounded like Jeremy Northam, then it probably was bloody Jeremy Northam.

Duly chastised, I drink more… About 2.30 we emerge from the club, eyes blinking and get in a cab. And then for some ungodly evening the whole way back we belt out versions of Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares For Me” as we drive down the Edgeware road… All in all, an entertaining evening…