'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Managed to get a bit further afield over the weekend. On Friday, to Old Street - yes, technically it's walking distance, but still. I've never been to the Foundry before, in spite of its KLF connections, but I like it; proper East London eccentricity, as opposed to East London dullards desperately trying to look eccentric like so many venues in the area. Admittedly I did briefly think that the latest Barley craze was for stupidly oversized bags which are really inconvenient in a crowded bar, but then I realised that the place was popular with genuine cycle couriers, which is fair enough. Then on to the Bedroom Bar, which looks like the 'cool club' set from a TV show, and for all I know may have been used as one. Not quite my scene, but in the sort of way where I can still wish it well and feel happy for the people who've found their place there, even the ones who aren't already my friends.
Saturday night was Hackney, specifically the Old Ship, return venue for darkmarcpi's birthday after a break last year. Formerly a pleasantly shabby pub, it is now an 'urban inn'. In brief, that means a gastropub with random capitalisation on the signage, a bit of apostrophe crime, and rooms upstairs. "Why not turn a Good night into a Great night." ask signs in the loos, without a question mark. Translation: "If you've pulled, but you reckon even the taxi ride will be long enough for her to sober up, why not drop £70 on a room upstairs and get right down to it? Yeah, this is Hackney and that's considerably more than you'd pay for a prostitute round here, but the clientele here are considerably cleaner and slightly less likely to nick all your money for crack." Classy.
Then on Sunday, properly out of home territory and down to Putney for the Tubewalk. Sunshine! Riverside! Flowers! Parkour! A large dead fish! A pub with a sign forbidding buggies that implied a terrible past! And no fewer than seven pugs, although I imagine atommickbrane will be blogging them in more detail.

I'm reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop - A History of the Hip Hop Generation and, after the preamble setting the scene in the Bronx and Jamaica, I'm just at the part where DJ Kool Herc invents hip hop. The best bit of which is that, in a music subsequently so handicapped by an obsession with "keeping it real", Herc tells us about how important it was to lose his Jamaican accent, a process which in places involved singing along to his parents' Jim Reeves records.
(And the godfather of subway graffiti, Cornbread, was apparently just doing it to impress a girl called Cynthia. Just like poor bloody Davis in that Graham Greene book I was reading. Similarly, while reading about Kool Herc I also find myself with another volume of Marvel's The Incredible Hercules, featuring the original Herc. Connections everywhere)

Bruce Sterling interview which I strongly suspect has been filleted for a 'death of the novel' angle. The death of decent interviews in the mainstream media might be a better topic; see also that Pet Shop Boys interview in Saturday's Guardian mag, which devoted about half as much space to interviewing one of the best and most readable bands in Britain as it did to pictures of them in £1300 parkas which look functionally indistinguishable to the ones various of my friends have and which, in the cases where I know how much they cost, seem generally to have been in the low double figures. Still, not quite as offensive as the Alexa Chung 'recession chic' special a couple of weeks back (buy British - but designer British, ie still hundreds per cardigan and 45 frakking pounds for socks).

Off to Devon for most of this week; see you all on the other side.