The Jesus and Mary Chain Suck (Live)

One of my favorite bands ever is The Jesus and Mary Chain.  Their style, lyrics, innovative primitiveness, and energy made we want to play music all over again after the first 15 years.  We went to see them last night at a club one tube stop from our neighborhood.  It was great to see a band that I've idolized for so long.  It was also great to see them with Reba, because she and I used to listen to "Automatic" a lot when we were first dating. 

However, they sucked live.  Even though a second year guitarist could probably play their unbelievably simple guitar parts, their lead guitarist William Reid was obviously too stoned to remember or execute his own parts that he wrote and has been playing for 20 years.  Maybe it would have been easier if he wasn't wearing sunglasses in a dark club, or if there wasn't such a powerful smoke machine onstage, or if he did something radical like actually practice the guitar parts he wrote.  Who knows, but he managed to miss guitar lines, play the wrong chords, and prematurely stop songs... all while trying to play material with a complexity level akin to Kum-bye-ya.  I suppose in a way it's ok since they are one of those sloppy arty noise lo fi pop type of acts, the kind that are fun to watch fall apart on stage. 

We left early anyway.

Voted

The whole world is hanging on the the US electorate's next move.  People here will act like the fact that they know about McCain, Palin, Obama, Biden, Powell's endorsement, "I can see Russia from my house" and all the rest is because they are so well educated in world politics, but it's BS.  The truth is, the next US president will have a tremendous effect on the rest of the globe, and everyone everywhere knows it.  They also all have an opinion.  Not always a well researched opinion, but then again sometimes it's better than what I hear from my fellow Americans.  This president is going to have a major hand in the next steps toward global financial stability, set the stage for Russian, Chinese and European world postures, and decide the outcome of two very long wars.  This president will have the tax base and industrial power of the world's largest single GDP at his fingertips.  This president will have the world's most powerful expeditionary force at his disposal.  This president will say something at the next state of the union address, and the whole world will shiver, bristle, or relax depending on what it is.  This isn't true of Sarkozy, Medvedev, Jintao, Brown, Merkel, Aso, Rudd, Abdulla Aziz, Ahmadinejad (or Khamenei), etc.  These leaders are all varying degrees of important with varying degrees of influence, but the real deal is: the transfer of American power evokes a level of global interest to which other countries (except perhaps Russia?) only engender a distant second.  This much is evident from the media, colleagues, friends, cab drivers, floor to ceiling tube advertisements (seriously) and a million other indicators I run into over here.  I don't know, but I bet that there's a lot more people in the world who wish they could cast a vote in the US election than would ever want to visit the US, let alone become citizens.

The part of the US that I come from has a host of other names up for election on a long list of very unimportant positions... Washington state governor, King county council members, judges, assesors, etc.  No one in the world outside the tiny and insignificant corner of forest I hail from gives 2 shits about these people, or whether or not Seattlites get mass transit, build highways at the expense of their eastern agricultural neighbors, let sick people suicide legally, improve firefighting, etc.  Frankly, I don't care too much about this stuff either.  So, American elections in the broad sense are just as unimportant as those taking place anywhere else in the world: if you don't live right there, it really doesn't effect you and you're more worried about whether it's going to rain today on the way down to the pub. 

But, there is one set of names on my ballot that really does have a ton of impact on everyone back home, all the ex-pats out here in the UK, the English themselves, the folks that fly in and out of London every day from all over the world, and everybody else: Obama/Biden and  McCain/Palin.  Ralph Nader doesn't mean shit because he'll never get elected, and neither do the SWP or the Greens.  They are just silly distractions which serve more to remind Americans of the inclusiveness of their political process than anything else.

So, it was my great pleasure to vote with my wife today, in several ways.

1) Knowing that I had agonized over and considered deeply issues of policy, character, judgement and stance. 

2) Knowing I was taking advantage of a right that many of my forebears struggled and even died to reserve.

3) Knowing I am so privileged as to have the power to cast my judgement on men who will affect the entire world.

This last is clearer to me than ever now that I'm surrounded by intelligent, concerned, informed people who wish they could have a say in this decision, not out of any leisurely obsession with the politics of some random foreign power, but simply because it will touch their lives in the 4 years to come.

 

 

serious work to be done

ok, so we're not SO serious :)

The Oxford And Cambridge Club

From the late 18th century to the early 20th century, Gentlemen's Clubs were a big deal in London.  Apparently they are on the rise again, but I think in general they are way down from where they were.  Imagine lots of ritzy dudes puffing pipes and reading the paper while sitting around in red leather chairs planning their next circumnavigation or whatever.  This is totally classic London stuff.  Of course Oxford, jointly with Cambridge, have one of these clubs, but it's not just men anymore.  You can only join if you went to Oxford or Cambridge, but if you did you're basically in as long as you can pay the hefty membership fee.  I haven't joined yet.  Juergen however, is a member and took me, Brandon, and some dudes from their work (Macquarie) for an evening. 

 

the club

The evening was a trip.  When we got there Juergen told us we had to keep our jackets on (jacket and tie required at all times) and our cell phones off.  Ok, whatever, it's England and it's Oxfordy so somebody is telling you what to wear again, no big surprise.  Then, we went in to have some pre dinner drinks at the bar.  The bar is a huge room about 5 times the size of my apartment which was totally empty except for the bartender and two old guys reading books (at separate tables) and nursing drinks.  We ordered beers and sat down, adding about infinity % more conversation to the room.

After we finished our drinks, we went into the dining room for our 7:00 dinner reservation.  This room is pretty fancy, with lots of giant gilt portraits of severe looking guys staring down, tables of varying size, nice place settings, long white candles burning, and whatever else to make a pretty classy environment.  Coming in was a bit strange though, because the only other people in this room four times the size of the bar were just three people in their 80s, each eating alone at a single table.  One lady looked up, squinted and stared at us as we walked past.  I actually wanted to stop and talk to her, but it seemed like the wrong thing to do.  WEIRDSVILLE.  We sat down and started going over the menus.  The food was very typical Brit, but the kind you find in nicer places.  The waiters wouldn't take our orders though... we had to write them down on a form.  MORE WEIRDSVILLE.  After the waiter took the form away, they came back and asked us what we were having, so they could change out to the right cutlery!  WECLOME TO DOWNTOWN WEIRDSVILLE, CORNER OF WEIRD AND S'VILLE.  We just complied, as any good Oxonian would do: strange dining rituals are hammered into you at Oxford.  The dinner itself and the wine were all good, if unadventurous.  By the end of dinner, the room was filling up a bit more, maybe there were 40 people in there with us.  Ok, not soooo totally weird.  Splitting from the dining room, Juergen gave us the tour.  The main lobby has a total "gone with the wind" staircase, this thing is wider than my living room.  At the top, there is the library.

cool!

can you see the "silence" sign?

Honestly, this is the coolest part of the whole club: this place is stuffed with something like 30,000 books, lots of which are very old.  I love love love old books.  There are floor to ceiling bookshelves crammed into every corner of this part of the club, and they even have those rolling ladders you see in movies with scenes in places like this.  The red leather chairs, newspapers, woodwork, etc. are all there, this place is totally London Clubby.  Of course, there was no one actually in the place other than us... not exactly WEIRDSVILLE, but still a bit odd.  We hung around in here for a while, going through the various rooms and flipping through old books, I think I could really enjoy some quiet afternoons doing that. 

Next, we went downstairs into the basement to play snooker.  More on this in a moment, but first a bit about the route to the basement.  Underneath the big stairs, there are little stairs, which seem to go down into a warren of little passages and rooms.  Along the way is a hallway of locked red doors, one of which has a red light next to it.  I have no idea what any of these are for, but would like to imagine something very sketchy.  They're probably storage closets though.  Off of one hallway, there was a small little room with another old guy watching TV by himself.  RETURN TO WEIRDSVILLE?  Having made it to the snooker room (which is also full of books), we settled down to figure out how to play.  If Brandon hadn't been so devoted to figuring it out from the rules on the wall, we would have all lost interest pretty quickly.  In short, this game is like pool, with a bigger table, smaller balls, longer sticks, different amounts of points for different balls, and a whole bunch of balls you have to hit first before hitting the points balls.  Also, those little balls totally don't behave like regular pool balls, so as you can imagine, the game took for freaking ever.  At one point, we all got quadruple Jamesons, which are basically the same as nice liberal Hattie's Hat single pours, and sipped away at those for hours.  By the time we finished our 2?, 3? hour game, it was midnight and the club was closing. 

Leaving, I was trying to figure out if I would shell out the membership fee to join... it would be pretty cool to be in a club, but it seemed pretty darn quiet, but then again I'd like that in some ways, and I would get a kick out of chilling with all those books.  Plus, it would be a cool place to take out of town guests, etc.  It would be tons better if more people I know from the MBA actually went there, but most of the MBAs I talk to aren't too impressed.  Plus there's the issue of having to wear a frigging tie and jacket to anther part of my life, as if work wasn't bad enough in that respect.

Hmmm.  I'm going to have to think about this.

The Cup Runs Over

I haven't written in the blog for quite some time now.  And the truth is, lots of interesting stuff has been happening.

girls girls girls

At first, I wanted to make a clean break with blogging about school for future mba students, thought I might be being a bit narcissistic in writing endlessly about myself, and also felt that a lot of what I am experiencing is the private business of my employer... so why keep blogging at all?  My mom wanted me to print up a book of the mba year blog stuff like you can with lulu.com, and I figured that with this, I could end the whole thing nicely with a final entry showing how I got a job in London, a new apartment, and everything worked out in the end after all.

Still, I'm experiencing a ton of stuff over here that makes me think "wow that was pretty cool" and to tell the truth, tends to fade right out of my mind!  Memories are sort of hazy for me like that... there's lots of people, places, experiences, funny stories etc. that I don't remember at all from the sicko band touring days, and now I feel like I'm letting these experiences slip away again.  Stuff I've done since the last post in October but can't remember too many details about includes:

• staying at the Hotel Wellington in Madrid for a weekend, dressing up in a suit every day and walking down to the bull fights to meet Angel
• catching the train from Euston Station (1 tube stop away) to the Gare du Nord in the 10th Arrondissement of Paris to visit Kent, and spend the weekend playing with weird guitar effects and throwing stuff off the balcony
• taking mom to the Yorkshire Dales (and eating Wensleydale Cheese!) and Santorini
• seeing original lineups of Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine, and trying to figure out which was louder
• traveling to Knutsford and living in a rural hotel room one night a week every week all year (double Jameson with lots of ice to the room, please)
• and last night, seeing Dragonforce, the video game music obsessed English power metal band with Reba

 

operation ground and pound by Dragonforce

...and these are just the ones I remember.  These are even a bit hazy!  So obviously I need to get back down to it. 

 

We've been busy(ish) with the radio show, check out the latest episode here: Episode 24, I think we're going to have guest DJ Sallywebb in the next couple of weeks.

 

love,

 

e