Igor’s stuff

A small crowd gathered ’round these two guys having a good ol’ bash underneath the railway bridge over Old Street. It sounded quite fresh, but the sax (is that a soprano sax I saw before me?) was a bit annoying on its own; what it really wanted was some propa ruff bass — or even some evil, thunderous ghetto death bass — to go with the really quite shit-hot d’n’b drumming the guy with the hair was doing. Still, all very impromptu and street and basically yeah. I particularly liked the guy stood at the side of the sax player just looking involved and generally caring a lot about it all.

Saw this new place a couple of weeks ago, walking past on the way home from the Easton, near Exmouth Market, and having just enjoyed a good meal there, felt inspired to check this out at the next opportunity. Unfortunately, it was quite a let-down. For a start, the pace was extremely rushed, to the point where I had to tell the waiter that we needed a bit of time to digest even slightly before choosing a pudding. Secondly, though my starter of ham hock with jalapeños and nuts was good, the rest of the food really just wasn’t up to much. The steak was fine, but if you can buy in decent meat, which they obviously had, then you really ought not to be running a restaurant if you can’t serve it decently; the roasted cassava chips accompanying it were a tasteless waste of space; the cheesecake was too cold and hence also fairly tasteless, insufficiently crunchy for something advertised as containing hazelnuts, and generally uninspiring. A decent Malbec went well with the steak, perking things up a little, but the pudding wine which the waiter recommended to go with the cheesecake (out of a choice of only two served by the glass from the seven or eight on the menu) was too sharp, mismatched with what taste I could elicit from the pudding itself, and so merely constituted yet another disappointment. In summary: great location, nice décor, could be good, but seriously, don’t bother until they’ve had a few critical slatings and consequently got their act together.

Here at POKE we’re not generally ones to blow our own trumpets – not really flexible enough – but this is worth a mention. Having been tech director here for more than three years, I’ve seen a fair few awards come through the studio, and have been involved with a fair few of the projects involved; this, however, is a bit different. Rather than a paid–for industry love–in with associated award ceremony, booze–up and the rest, this is part of a survey conducted amongst POKE’s peers by New Media Age. While we came out 44th of the top 100 overall (not bad in itself considering our turnover and size), we were voted “most respected by other agencies”. That’s a little bit of warm glow right there, now isn’t it? Thanks folks.

I very rarely order liver in restaurants because frankly it’s just so easy to fuck up. However having eaten some extremely good steak at Unico in Epping before, it struck me during today’s visit that their chef might well know if not his actual onions then at least his offal. While it certainly could have been a little rarer, it certainly wasn’t ruined, and the choice of cure on the bacon, though I don’t know what it was, complemented the strong liver flavour very nicely. In summary: not bad.

“The D.S. - the ‘Goddess’ - has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Deesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus […] There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.”

From “Citroën D.S.”, an essay in Roland Barthes’ 1957 collection Mythologies.

It’s probably been about eighteen years, since I first heard John Martyn’s “Over the Hill”, that I wanted one of these. In all that time I’ve never quite been able to justify buying one, what with not knowing how to play it and everything. I carried on wanting one, but always telling myself that it was a bizarre, atavistic desire and that it should consequently be quashed. Today, I walked past the Duke of Uke on Hanbury Street at lunchtime, went in, feeling slightly annoyed by some shit or other, just to buy some plectrums, and came out, feeling a lot brighter, with a mahogany Tanglewood mandolin. Bugger to tune, these things, and I bet it’s going to need setting up, but still, wheee!

Kulu Kulu on Brewer Street - owned by the same people who run Ten Ten Tei a few doors down. Munched through a huge pile of plates with a pal and suddenly thought "oh shit, 16 plates, bill pain" - but, including 2 beers, it came to £53 between us. In your face, recession.

There was a seriously cadaverous feel to this onglet I had from the usual place last week. Something about the texture, the sinewy, raw viscerality of it, spoke to me of torture, death and decay. Bloody tasty, though.

After an intense last 10 days’ sprint spent finishing and polishing, we launched Balloonacy on Tuesday 24th with a grand total of over 30,000 balloons and 840 sites signed up and accepted into the race. Seems to be going really well; people are playing and writing nice things about it, the system’s holding up (captain), the client’s happy and, in short, we’ve made animal-shaped balloons float across Internet. Which is nice.

We made a new version of Spot the Bull, this year with streaming live video of Winston, apparently son of Derek, in his field. Knotty did the hard stuff. Nice one, Knotty.