Yesterday I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the first book, in a compilation of 5, that I am planning to read over the summer. I really enjoyed the book. I liked Phillip K. Dick's bleak vision of the future. The overheated and overcrowded New York environment was presient, given how the book was written in 1965. The sandy Martian colony, where unfortunate people are sent to live out their lives, is a bleak world where people have nothing to do except "chewing" hallucinagenic drugs Can-D and Chew-Z. I especially liked the scenes where the characters have fantastical Can-D and Chew-Z induced trips. But by far my favourite, was the scene in the Strangelove-esque Dr. Denkmal's E(volution)-therapy clinic, where one of the characters is given a treatment which allows him to evolve and experience "Broad, all-inclusive preoccupations?" Brilliant. Toward the end, though, I got a little bit confsed. The book got all philosophical, saying that Palmer Eldritch was god, or wasn't god, and the ending was too ambiguous for my liking.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yFLX9ruBEgI

Bloc part deux

Five-o came and told us the festival was over, due to overcrowding. This made sense, since one of the security had told us that they had sold over 24,000 tickets for an event which was supposedly for 15,000 people. To be honest, I think 10,000 people, even if the venue had been organised properly, would have been more than enough.

By the time I filtered outside the festival site, it was too late for me to get the last train home, but too early to wait for the first morning train. And I still hadn't seen any of my friends!!! I thought it would be too awkward to leave without having even seen them, so I sat on the other side of the street watching the chaos unfold...

Eventually my mates stumbled out, still buzzin', but the night was far from over. 20,000+ people were now piling out and trying to get transport home, meaning there was massive queues for the few transport buses taking us back to Liverpool Street. We got on one eventually, and headed back to one of my friends' houses which is closer than mine (I live on the very outskirts of London, outside the M25). In the end though, as what had just happened sunk in, and realising that my weekend was going to be washout, I decided to nightbus it back home. I got home around 6ish, showered, and went to sleep, disappointed.

I woke up late on Saturday. I jumped on the internet to see what was being said. Pretty much everyone was in agreement: Bloc was the biggest flop of 2012. And now, I had to find a way to avaoid spending my Saturday evening with the rents. Looking through twitter, I saw that a handful of events were being put on in lieu of Bloc. One, hosted by Jacques Green, with Actress and Martyn as special guests, looked good. But it was in South London. Fuck South London. But there was a silver lining: A Hyperdub party, with Flying Lotus as a special guest, around the corner from Liverpool St. It looked like my weekend might just be redeemed. I washed, ate, dressed, and ran to the train station. On the way there, my friends were saying enough was enough; they weren't coming. I didn't mind going alone - I'm such a massive FlyLo fan!

But, by the time I got there, the queue was backing around the street. The Bloc curse!!! I queued for a while, but then I talked to some guy who had been inside, and it was apparently one-in-one-out already. Damn. I walked over to XOYO to see if I could get in there, since by this point I didn't mind paying for entry, I just wanted to listen to some motherfuckin' music. I managed to get in despite the fact it being packed out. The show was pretty good as a consolation prize for a shocking weekend.

Bloc 2013? I don't think so.

Bloc pt. 1

I'm finally done sulking that I can actually rationally explain what was without a doubt the worst weekend of my life.

Bloc 2012 was supposed to start on friday night. My friends and I were super excited. They were being so super-keen that they turned up at 5pm... I couldn't be fucked with that (and I also wanted to eat some food before I went on an all-night music extravaganza) so I got there around 8pm, having had Subway in Stratford. It was weird being in a part of London that I had never been to before, on the DLR, which was also a first for me. The train was packed full of london hipsters.

Pontoon Dock was my stop. The festival was literally a few feet away, down a walkway. The sun was setting and it looked pretty damn good. By this point I was starting to get caught up in all the excitement. The security stopped us at the end of the walkway, which I assumed would lead staright into the festival. Except it didn't. We were threaded back around, to the back of another short queue. And then another, enormous queue of over 1000 people, which backed up around the Bloc. Realising that the back of the queue would mean standing by myself for over an hour, I jumped in near the front and got in under 20 mins. We were led inside where there was... another, even longer, queue...

To the annoyance of those who had presumably qo pueued the whole way, me and a group of other festival-goers I had been talking to in the queue were like FUCK this, and threw down/jumped over the barriers that would have made us snake around. Swimming through a sea of people, we got there in 'bout half an hour. I had skipped most of the queueing and still needed a drink. I opened the Rum and Ginger Ale I had mixed for myself and shared it with some chick I was trying not tress my dick up against... she was cute, but I just wanted to get in!

The ticketting was a joke. I had only printed the bar code part of the "ticket" (which was just an email, printout) so the security were saying I couldn't go in even though the barcode had scanned correctly. Luckily, because of the chaos we had caused by knocking some of the barriers over, the crowd was surging forward, and the security had to give me my wristband to deal with the mass of people. Finally, after over an hour of stressful crowd-pushing, I was in!

My phone's signal was fucking up, but from what I gathered my friends were in the Stubnitz; a Soviet-era boat acting as one of Bloc's stages. I had missed Nicolas Jaar because of the queues, and I didn't want to miss another act I had earmarked to see, so I made my way over to the Main Arena, where Amon Tobin, DOOM, and Snoop Dogg had already started playing. I caught the second half of Amon Tobin's set. It was pretty good, although I prefer his earlier jazz-infused stuff. The visuals of the ISAM were really cool. They made me wish I had taken some illicits. Although, with all the crowding, I'm glad I didn't. After a short wait, DOOM was on. I'm a huge fan, but the show was really disappointing. The sound guys clearly hadn't made any changes after Amon Tobin, because the bass was turned way up. Add to that the fact that he rhymes with a lisp so the lyrics got really muffled. So much so that I could barely recognise some of the songs. What was cool was that this guy next to me was rapping ALL the lyrics perfect. Chill guy.

I waited a while for Snoop to come on, but it was getting really crowded inside and I had no liquor left, so I decided to go meet everyone else on the boat. On the way out, I saw loads more people queueing for Snoop. I was like fuck that noise, I don't even like Snoop Dogg (apart from this song). But when I got to the boat, it was closed because of health n' safety. I tried to ring my friends inside to see what was up, but my phone was still fucking up. Then more people started to arrive. Apparently, Snoop Dogg had cancelled. Then apparently one of the tents was also closed, and the Millenium Mills half of the site was closed off. By now there were hundreds of people trying to get on the boat, which was closed. I waited for about half an hour with some french dudes, who were saying they had spent over 200 pounds in travel and accomodation to see HudMo play on a motherfucking Soviet boat, which they told us we couldn't go on, even though that was one of the Festival's selling points. At that point, I would have abandoned my friends and gone elsewhere, but apparently there was nowhere else to go! And that's when the police came (tbc)

What's up? Nothin' much

Been chillin' at home for 2 weeks now. Been watching lots of daytime TV. My routine has pretty much been: get up at 12, eat some food, do a few pushups, watch the Tour de France, eat some food, finish watching the Tour, listen to some music/play games/watch TV, get some food, then go sleep. I'm still sleeping 12+ hours a night. I should really do something about that.

I also haven't been able to search for a summer job. My Dad's been fuckin' me around, because he wanted me to help renovate the house, but he keeps changing the date and hasn't told me when we're going to do it. Same with Uni. I will be resitting the exam I missed in August, but they don't know when yet. It's annoying, but there's nothing much I can do... I done a little reading for next year, still

This weekend though I'm off to Bloc, a festival. Amon Tobin, Steve Reich, Flylo, Battles,DOOM, Nicolas Jaar, Four tet, James Blake, Hudson Mohawke, Martyn, Actress, and loads loads more cool shit. I'm Well looking forward to it!!