Today is kinda depressing. Less than 48 hours ago the Foreigner's and I were throwing ourselves around The Roxy's stage. Now I'm sitting behind my desk, doing the same thing I do every regular weekday; animate animals dancing around for children's TV. It's not a bad gig, generally i love my job, but after the sheer awesomeness of the Johnny Foreigner tour so far, being back at work is a major downer.
While lack of leave means I need to be in at work today, Jo Fo, Anja, Skat and Chris are enjoying their 2nd day off in a row. They're hanging out at Anthea's house, most likely enjoying the awesome view and the pool.
After work I head home. The gang returns from Anthea's hood an hour or so later. Anja's hooked up a whole bunch of groceries from China Town and proceeds to whip up an incredible wok full of tofuy awesomeness.
We eat, x-box, guild and for once get an early night. We've got some really important business to get down to tomorrow.
For your Friday listening pleasure I've got a little present for you;
A couple weeks back my friends at a store asked me to put together a little mix for them. It turned out to be a pretty discorrific affair which I've titled "A Rumor in Africa".
Luckily today is the first of 3 days off and we take full advantage, sleeping crazy late and not doing much at all once we wake up. We mostly hang out by the pool, listen to loads of The Sea and Cake. Some friends come hang out and Matt Suttner rocks an incredible braai for the gang.
When the sun goes down the X-Box turns on and we race around The Mushroom Kingdom shooting spinning tortoise shells at each other.
Tomorrow night at Linden's Cantina Tequila I'll be playing the 2nd Jozi installment in Griet and Hotbox's "Dogbox" series. I shouldn't need to remind you how ridiculously fun the past Dogbox parties have been and I don't think tomorrow evening will be any different!
Yup, it was yet another good weekend, this time featuring mountains of food served off swords, glitter, rocking out, 1 on 1 on 1 on 1 DJing, post rock, run-ins with the law, mentally unstable neighbors and comic books.
On Saturday morning Anja and I dragged ourselves out of bed and made some breakfast. Cam, Lindi and Karien came by, we drank ginger honey tea and then made our way to Chinamart. We were on a mission to buy sparkly decor stuff for the previously animal called about Glitter party.
A variety of exciting decor/ outfit related purchases were made - Cam dropped us back at our house and Anja and I promptly hit the road. Driving a little out of the city we made our way to Muldersdrift where we met up with my sister Tess and her boyfriend Henco. What went down next was a little bit brutal, but mostly awesome...
I am a T Rex. I'd like to be one of the cute dinosaurs that hang out eating leaves, but the truth is I'm one of the dinos with the sharp teeth and the claws. I eat the dinosaurs that eat plants all day. So for lunch on Saturday we rocked a place in Mulderdrift called Carnivore. Although there are options for fish fans and vegetarians, Carnivore is centered around feeding people meat. Loads and loads of meat. Carved onto your plate from swords.
As you can probably guess, this photo of some of Carnivore's meat technicians wasn't taken by anyone in our party, but these shots were:
We hit it back into the city. Back in The Ville I made a quick stop by the comic book store, Outer Limits. 3 weeks ago i tried to order the super awesome Phonogram from Anime Works in Randburg. The girl working there told me they'd get in touch to let me know if it was possible to get it in, but since then I've heard nothing. So on Saturday I decided I'd try again and see if I could get the 2 Phonogram books through Outer Limits. Honestly I was expecting this:
Inside I met not one, but two comic book guys. Neither of them were assholes, neither of them were overweight, one of them had actually read and loved Phonogram, only one of them was male and neither of them had beards. Dizzy and Greg where easily the two coolest people I've ever met working in a comic book store and Anja and I proceeded to hang out with them for an hour and a half! I successfully ordered both of the Phonogram collections, found out about LOADS of other titles I'm dying to read, picked up the first issue of "The Walking Dead" aaaannnnddd the first issue of The Guild!
For those of you less geeky people, The Guild is a comedy series and it's just awesome. Honestly one of my favourite shows of the past few years, really funny and one of the greatest successes of DIY art in the digital age. Written by geek queen Felicia Day, funded only by donations, the show is a free to watch series that revolves around a group of people addicted to an online role playing game. Here's episode 1:
But back to the comic; it's also written by Felicia, set before the first season of the TV show and unlike the show, depicts the characters within the gameworld. It also happens to be awesome. Anja got a few titles herself, paid for everything and finally dragged me out of the store. Back at home we got ready for Glitter and made our way to Kitcheners.
What followed were 6 hours of total awesomeness. Lindi's first ever DJ set started the night off in a pretty fantastic fashion. By 20:15 80% of the people at the party were already dancing. While I was among them, a sleep related neck injury meant I had to hold back to ensure I'd still be in top shape for our set at 11. This self imposed freak-out-ban was however broken when Col dropped Wolf Like Me and I just lost it. Rox totally destroyed it, with Friendly Fires' "Jump in the Pool" standing out as a highlight in my mind. Then it was time for Cam and I to start our 1 on 1 set, which he initially didn't seem to happy about:
But quickly warmed up to the idea and we had a ridiculously fun set.
After we finished the usually wonderful mess of 1 on 1 on 1 on 1 carnage went down with everyone jumping to mix a track, then jumping back down onto the dancefloor to rock out. By 2:30 - realizing I had band practice in 8 and a half hours we made our escape from the still shaking dancefloor.
Yesterday marked the first time we jammed at my house and practice went really well. Things are really coming together and it feels like in a few weeks we'll be ready to reveal what The Mirrors and I have been working on. I can't wait.
A broken guitar string seemed suggested we should take a break. Hanging outside we saw a strange woman outside our gate, talking on the phone and looking into our yard. I went over to speak to her and it turned out she lived a little down the street and had been deeply, deeply effected by our post rock noise. Apparently she'd been standing outside screaming at as for over an hour. "I'm an opera singer, so I can make my voice quite loud!". She'd been so deeply disturbed by hearing our music that she phoned the police. If she hadn't seemed so freaked out I'd have though she was a just being a bitch and argued with her about being un-reasonable, that it wasn't late at night and that we could make us much noise as we wanted to it. But given how she came across as a mental unstable woman that had now been brought the brink of tears by our music I just apolgised for causing her such pain.
The cops arrived and without even greeting them the neighbor starts saying "this gentleman has apologized, so it's fine, but please mark it in your records that this is a problem house". The cops don't even respond and just climb back into their bakkie. I apologise to them for wasting their time, neighbor freaks out "they didn't waste their time! They're going to mark it in their records!". I wonder what it must be like living in this fantasy world where the police have some kind of book where they write down all the noisey houses, but I just appolgise to her again and head in to tell the band we won't be able to jam again.
We still worked a little on the set - played through it on guitar, writing down the structures and making notes for each song. Packed up and the Mirror's headed home. The last bit of Sunday was made up of eating tofu, drinking sarsaparilla and watching cool stuff with Col, Pat and ADK! Good times.
Today is kinda depressing. Less than 48 hours ago the Foreigner's and I were throwing ourselves around The Roxy's stage. Now I'm sitting behind my desk, doing the same thing I do every regular weekday; animate animals dancing around for children's TV. It's not a bad gig, generally i love my job, but after the sheer awesomeness of the Johnny Foreigner tour so far, being back at work is a major downer.
After work I head home. The gang returns from Anthea's hood an hour or so later. Anja's hooked up a whole bunch of groceries from China Town and proceeds to whip up an incredible wok full of tofuy awesomeness.
