Happy

This is where the rambling part comes in. The Celts made a god out of the guy who invented beer, so it's only right and proper to drink a few and blither on about shit, isn't it?

I've just been to see Shadow Play at Happy. The music was good, but the rest was pretty dreadful. It was like they put every idea they had into it, no matter how unconnected to the rest it was. It just didn't work.

After that, we stuck around for a couple of drinks and checked out the electronica that was on next, which turned out to be a couple of guys on Casiotones. They fucking rocked. Not as much as Matt Hunt's band Cortina last Friday night at Bodega though (whose support gig for Peaches is reviewed here). That was a blistering gig. The best Cortina gig I've ever seen (and that's saying something!). And to think I almost didn't go because a whole lot of friends of mine were staying at the Workingmen's Club instead. The fools. We'd gone there after an opening at Photospace.

It was a particularly drunken evening. I'd gone into town for a couple of beers before the opening (the benefits of working for yourself), downed a few wines at the opening, then went off for whiskies and more beer at the old Workingmen's Club (brilliant place, like it a lot - where else is the music provided by a Maori transvestite playing the piano?) before hitting the Bodge. We'd meant to go out for dinner, but didn't quite manage it.

I woke up the next morning with an excruciating hangover. Damnit, I thought, we've expensive tickets to David Bowie and I've got a goddamn hangover. It all worked out okay though. Rose's brother and his wife and a friend of their's had come up for it. Rose's brother works on a vineyard so had a few bottles of particularly nice wine. That saw me right - good old hair of the dog and all. The big storm was the night after Bowie, but it pissed down that night too. Rose's brother et al. had to make do with hastily purchased rubbish bags and a tarp, but we had coats. Unfortunately, I'd foolishly neglected to change the shoes with holes in them I was wearing. If you get the chance to see David Bowie, take it. It was brilliant. I was a bit worried that it was ten or twenty years too late, but bollocks. He was great. The only song from his new album I really got into was 'I'm afraid of Americans' (which went kind of well with Cortina's 'I'm not an American' from the previous night in a funny kind of way), but, man, he's done some good songs in his time.

Unlike the thing we went to tonight, this post has had a coherent theme (well, as coherent as you can be after a few beers). Another thing I've been happy about (and which, unlike the rest, is totally non-alcohol-related) is that I've received a couple of the books I ordered from Amazon. At the end of last year, I ordered a book on Piero della Francesca (in mid-October). It finally showed up, after I'd pretty much given up on it, in mid-December. Because the NZ dollar has been so good against the US dollar recently, I thought I should take the opportunity to get some other books I've been hanging out for. I ordered the Philip Guston and the Max Beckmann catalogues from the recent retrospectives they've had (which would've been something to go to - damn being stuck on the asshole of the world, as the Rolling Stones memorably called us after being pelted with beer and mince pies during their Invercargill gig back in the 60s sometime), plus another Piero book, on 10 February. The Guston and Beckmann books arrived today, less than two weeks after I'd ordered them - a damn sight better than two months! These ones came from Germany rather than the States. I wonder whether that's the difference. Maybe the proximity to Christmas for the previous one had something to do with it as well.

P.S. Good to see such luminaries as Spiro Agnew Jr. and Gray Bartlett adding their drunken comments. Keep 'em coming, guys.