Thursday 30 October 2008

wearing away the rug...

My wife has seen me do many strange things,the fact that she still is my wife after many
of these peculiar events is the main reason i love her so much...
But on Saturday she witnessed the full range of ticks and twitches that come hand in hand with
listening to my second love Everton football club.The mighty toffeemen where playing Manchester United at the glorious Goodison Park(scatter me there).Goodison has already been earmarked as my first born's middle name!
Anyway for 90 long minutes i paced our tiny north London flat,the full theater of the game filling every square inch of our heavily mortgaged haven.my hands clutching and grasping thin air,my
brain full of the commentators words and descriptions of my beloved teams apparent failings in mid-field.
Then BANG we go 1nil down.
My heart sinks my hands miss the once sweet refuge of the cigarette,and i put the kettle on.
Half time comes and goes and Everton push forward finally looking like the team of last season,
and just when the muscles of my body where at full spasm,we SCORE....................................
And this is why we become so enthralled this moment,this elation, this relief.
A new Gwladys Street hero is born and hes 15 million quids worth of implausibly curly haired
Belgian!
Marouane Fellaini
I LOVE YOU!!!

Tuesday 21 October 2008

32 and all is well

So the 18th of October pasted with great joy n such merryment.....
Another birthday has been and gone,and unlike the troublesome times of last year this weekend was a time of food,drink and laughter.A great meal was had at Hix oyster and chop house on Friday complete with the Price clan.A full belly was the order for the day as myself and close friends sat down at Ciao Bella on Saturday(not even the debacle at the Emershits could dampen my mood),and a rudely named pie was the nosh De jour down south London way on the sabbath.
All in all Monday rolled around without a tear being shed so Happy Days!!!!
As if the weekend wasn't packed to the gills with top fun,my bo-ed up skin and blister bought me
a 1970's Everton shirt as worn by the legend Bob Latchford father of the 30 goal haul and Lee from Steps....
Our move to Amsterdamage has been put on hold due to the cliche that is the economy...
but to be honest both myself and my good lady are pretty chuffed,as the good doctor once said
tired of Loondoon tired of life...
Damn right too!

Wednesday 15 October 2008

The art of shoe

Bass Weejuns,desert boots,brothel creepers,Trickers,biker boots,deck shoes......
These are all design classics the clutter up my wardrobe like a homage to Imelda Marcos.
I love shoes.
I'm from the school of thought that jackets,coats and shoes maketh the man.A standard t-shirt and a decent pair of selvage jeans can be automatically and stylistically transformed by for example a Crombie and a pair of tan trickers,or a Harrington and a talc dusted pair of desert boots,shoes are the full stop the statement of intent they say so much about where you are at and where you are going.A biker boot with a pin rolled turn up and a vintage MA-1 bomber jacket has a menace a rock n roll edge of classic rebellion,but in my case with my bald noggin and handlebar tash it gives me all the menace of a Compton Street cruiser.Still we all have a cross to bare.On the other side we have the summer gentrification of the Daks linen jacket Levis double x's and a deck shoe,all these looks are a tad cliche i admit but they are all looks i "rock" along with the aging mod,country gent,and 40's bin man.Why this chameleon personality crisis?
Probably because I have some sort of commitment issues or a inability to be original or maybe just maybe its because I love shoes!

Tuesday 14 October 2008

a potential move?

So as the credit crunch rumbles on like a un-manned golf cart full of shit, me and the present Mrs Vane are facing the prospect of a possible life changing moment....
My wife has been offered a job in Amsterdam.Now I've got no real problem in doing anything for such a brave and forgiving human being,but the land of the ham and cheese toastie,dear god!
It's taken so long to feel secure and safe nestled up in the north london cheese,and now I'm going to have to pack up my taxidermy and live near british people binging on hash cakes and blowys.
At least I've got a tash made for the lowlands,maybe this will help the transition?
Who knows?
If all this does happen and I end up cycling moustached and covered in edam along a canal,my heart will reside in the Wit and Cat in Archway along with a webcam,well after all I'm going to need a portal to blighty,and I can't think of a more warming sight than that hostelry.So pop in every now and then and order a light and lager for me.The webcam is in the mummyfied cat!

A review?

I was sitting round the dinner table of a good friend the other night, and as always
the conversation got round to music, two aging men one balding the other bald what else is there to discuss certainly not recent women we’ve disappointed sexually, so I plugged my iphone(other mp3’s are available)into his cd player a trawled through the album list, past the E.L.O and M.I.A,both of which upset my wife no end. These days through headphones is the only way I get to listen to Mars Volta due to the famous in house prog embargo of 2007.Anyway I chose to give this an airing and straight away the muso bashing started. This record combined with large quantities of vino rouge nearly drove me and a very dear friend to blows, due to the large amount of obvious references this eponymous debut is cluttered with, im of the opinion that all music has to doff its cap to someone or something, he on the other hand has an in inherent problem with the plagiarist or what he sees to be plagiarism.
This is something will no doubt rumble on mostly because I continue to listen to new music and he continues to deny all existence of anything beyond 1979….meow
Anyway the review,
Lets get all the comparison and cliché stuff out of the way, yes Glasvegas is an awful name and yes they have a standy upy bird drummer like the velvets, and yes they do the odd girl group produced by My Bloody Valentine wotnot,and last of all they have a Scottish marychain bleakness…
All of this is true in the eyes of those that want to spend all there energy on trying to uncomplicated Glasvegas. All the actions of the paint by numbers reviewer.
But the facts are this is a 40minute goose bump fest, James Allen’s vocals combined with
the huge reverb, the thumping bass and drums rumbling under the chiming guitars,
a clean Marr-like sound that has a lovelorn romance to it, all of this produces a skin altering caucoughphany, and the only duff track is the Stabbed, a substandard poetry to classical music self indulgence moment, a classic debut fauxpas much like the Stone Roses Guernica,but it’s a mere 2 minutes long so its gone in a jiffy, the singles shine like petrol on tarmac, Geraldine starts with a crystalline guitar and opens widescreen into a windy alley way,with its lyrics about a social worker and the need, hope and desperation, it feels as if they could only be sung in Allen’s Glaswegian brogue, the soaring single segways into It’s my own cheating heart…..and swaying, ranting anthem. More icy chords and percussive tambourines are enveloped in massive scenery, drums pound and the bass continues to hold the widening aural canvas tight all the time the vision of a drizzly boom shot of the tenements flood your brain.
You get the picture it’s a one idea record, but that’s its great strength.Confidence and power in a sound that has proved so effective in the past, yes it’s not Genghis Tron or
Neo-mod break beat, but it does the job and does it well, Passionate, loud, ambitious and
not a mockney twang or stateside bastardization in sight. What happens next who knows
maybe a jazz concept triple album?

Daniel Vane

the eye of the norm

Tight trousers, great hair, and a metabolism able to cope with constant alcoholic and narcotic nutrition.
All the things I’ve started to long for, craving them like Pete Doherty craves star fuckers and crack stained titfers.No longer am I secure in the thirties life, the duvet like cosiness of the quiet night in with a loved one good food and The Wire. All I want is my youth back....
When I was young I had cheekbones that could shave a nicely matured pecorino, legs like Twiglits
and a constitution like a Camden tramp, but for some reason as you dawdle down the alleyway of your late twenties you seem to loose all ability to do anything to excess.Drinking becomes a dangerous pastime fraught with all manner of pitfalls, the weekday handful of pints that only a couple of years ago would have been a mere aperitif for a night of wanton debauchery now can leave you nursing a headache that feels like someone crept into your bedroom opened your eyelids poured bleach in your eyes then asked several hob nail booted champion shin kickers to stove your swede in.All this pain for just a few bevys,god forbid you should go out on a proper lary one then it really does get messy, myself and a old college mate got a free pass recently when both our better halves were out of town, so out we went, only til two in the morning but we both paid for it for days, and don’t even think about drugs...in my youth I shovelled shit up my hooter,smoked anything flammable and expanded my mind to point of zappa esque proportions, but now seeing my peers crouched over a cistern hoovering up an exotic cocktail of cleaning products glucose and low grade cocaine fills me with melancholy.
I guess that’s one of the upsides of my current lifestyle at least I’m not trying to cling to my youth I’ve let it go, there’s something about the home snorters and over groomed that feels desperate.
So maybe that’s my answer I can’t regain my youth because I’d end up clutching at it, drooling after it,
Always inches from my grasp always a night bus and vomit away, maybe I’m better off in my nostalgic haze, maybe it wasn’t as great as I remember.....
Who am I kidding it was brilliant and I want my hair back!