Pilots hate you
Dec. 19th, 2005 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezThe seating in the first class carriages on Eurostar trains looks like it was designed by Gerry Anderson. Appropriately enough, I was travelling backwards. Though I must admit I don't remember if SHADO crawlers were equipped with cupholders for wee little champage glasses, I'll call their potential lack a disgraceful oversight on the part of the designers.
What can you say about trams? This: Relics of empire. Buses that have been shackled like dancing bears so that they can't roam freely should the whim take them. Something swept away in the white heat of technology that gave us the Allegro. We wandered through Antwerp's shoppery via the Palace of Locomotion. There was a device for the emission of vomit from small children to the insistent beat of eurotrance. There were several Greggs' pie shops. There were an awful lot of shops filled with the sort of fashions worn by women who don't want to look fashionable so much as expensive. Each one was empty of humankind, save for an over-made-up stickwoman who would gesticulate angrily should one have the temerity to glance speculatively at the interior of her domain.
All the showroom dummies looked like Covenant.
Friday started with an 'Op!' sort of a noise as the motherboard in the PatKomputer gave up the ghost. We are a BSD-only household for the time being.
Monday's noises were more along the lines of 'BropbropbropbraaaaaaaAAAAAAA! Clat! Clat! Arse! Hello? AA? Yes, westbound by J11...'
We stopped in a corner caff about the size of our front room for bowls of the onion soup that could be seen simmering quietly in the vast aluminium tub on the cooker. Its surprising not-modernity reminded me of a similar establishment in the 'old' part of St Malo. There, the frontages had been rebuilt post-war to resemble the bombed originals, but should you slip through the back you'd find institutional green stairs and doors and windows unchanged since the fifties. That which was newly built to look old had become differently old itself.
I was gripped by a strange desire to follow an outwardly nonsensical course of action. Following the new logic of trams and the spaces between buildings, I wired my MP3 player through my mobile phone and bluetoothed Kraftwerk's 'Showroom dummies' at the nearest Covenant-alike shop window display. Accordingly, they stopped looking around and changing their poses, and instead started to move and broke the glass. After walking through the city, they were supposed to go to a club and start to dance. However, a crack squad of Armani-clad Eskil-alikes stormed onto the tram we'd taken cover in, pitched the driver out into the street and took off rapidly (in tram terms) for a rough-looking area. Thankfully, we were able to make good our escape under cover of a brief snowstorm while the dummies argued amongst themselves about shoes. As luck would have it, a taxi driven by the Assemblage 23 had pulled up and we were able to make a slow getaway as all 23 wanted to drive at once. It was a large taxi with a reasonably patient gearbox.
Hof ter Lo is a utilitarian sort of a place that seemed to be on the edge of an industrial area. Inside were several hundred black-clad industrialists necking beer in a purposeful and industrial manner. Every so often they would all rush into the big room where shadowy groups of people would goad synthesizers into going skronk! over hideous primal rhythms while shouting about the evils of robots, television, ginger biscuits and monopoly capitalism,
Then Severed Heads took the stage (to shouts of 'Ou est votre batteur?') and were very good indeed. A swift run through early malarkey (The ant can see legs, Spittoon thud) via the Industrial Dance twelves (Goodbye tonsils, Hot with fleas) to New Things (Pilots hate you, Oblique firefly overlocker) and Some Hit (A different-again version of DEO). They encored with the remixed version of 'We have come to bless this house', which was just lovely.
By now, I was Quite Tired and the Hoegaarden[1] had run out. Time to call it a night. While we waited for a taxi, the strange banging and shouting from the venue seemed to mean that Mr. Suicide Commando had decided to bring along his fork-lift and demonstrate some advanced pallet-management to a strident martial backing.
(But that sounds like any other gig-review, rather than the first time one of my favourite bands has pitched up on my side of the planet for twenty years. It was Utterly Fucking Marvellous.)
On the inner sleeve of 'Trans Europe Express' by Kraftwerk, there's a stylised train logo. Belgian locomotives look a lot like that. (The other thing I was reminded of would betray a working knowledge of the Lima catalogue, and there are some things a gentleman refuses to remember...) They also have this disturbing capability of going to the places on the indicator board at a time that agrees with the schedule. It's very unlike any recent experience of rail travel here.
[1] Not in vases this time. That would have been silly.
What can you say about trams? This: Relics of empire. Buses that have been shackled like dancing bears so that they can't roam freely should the whim take them. Something swept away in the white heat of technology that gave us the Allegro. We wandered through Antwerp's shoppery via the Palace of Locomotion. There was a device for the emission of vomit from small children to the insistent beat of eurotrance. There were several Greggs' pie shops. There were an awful lot of shops filled with the sort of fashions worn by women who don't want to look fashionable so much as expensive. Each one was empty of humankind, save for an over-made-up stickwoman who would gesticulate angrily should one have the temerity to glance speculatively at the interior of her domain.
All the showroom dummies looked like Covenant.
Friday started with an 'Op!' sort of a noise as the motherboard in the PatKomputer gave up the ghost. We are a BSD-only household for the time being.
Monday's noises were more along the lines of 'BropbropbropbraaaaaaaAAAAAAA! Clat! Clat! Arse! Hello? AA? Yes, westbound by J11...'
We stopped in a corner caff about the size of our front room for bowls of the onion soup that could be seen simmering quietly in the vast aluminium tub on the cooker. Its surprising not-modernity reminded me of a similar establishment in the 'old' part of St Malo. There, the frontages had been rebuilt post-war to resemble the bombed originals, but should you slip through the back you'd find institutional green stairs and doors and windows unchanged since the fifties. That which was newly built to look old had become differently old itself.
I was gripped by a strange desire to follow an outwardly nonsensical course of action. Following the new logic of trams and the spaces between buildings, I wired my MP3 player through my mobile phone and bluetoothed Kraftwerk's 'Showroom dummies' at the nearest Covenant-alike shop window display. Accordingly, they stopped looking around and changing their poses, and instead started to move and broke the glass. After walking through the city, they were supposed to go to a club and start to dance. However, a crack squad of Armani-clad Eskil-alikes stormed onto the tram we'd taken cover in, pitched the driver out into the street and took off rapidly (in tram terms) for a rough-looking area. Thankfully, we were able to make good our escape under cover of a brief snowstorm while the dummies argued amongst themselves about shoes. As luck would have it, a taxi driven by the Assemblage 23 had pulled up and we were able to make a slow getaway as all 23 wanted to drive at once. It was a large taxi with a reasonably patient gearbox.
Hof ter Lo is a utilitarian sort of a place that seemed to be on the edge of an industrial area. Inside were several hundred black-clad industrialists necking beer in a purposeful and industrial manner. Every so often they would all rush into the big room where shadowy groups of people would goad synthesizers into going skronk! over hideous primal rhythms while shouting about the evils of robots, television, ginger biscuits and monopoly capitalism,
Then Severed Heads took the stage (to shouts of 'Ou est votre batteur?') and were very good indeed. A swift run through early malarkey (The ant can see legs, Spittoon thud) via the Industrial Dance twelves (Goodbye tonsils, Hot with fleas) to New Things (Pilots hate you, Oblique firefly overlocker) and Some Hit (A different-again version of DEO). They encored with the remixed version of 'We have come to bless this house', which was just lovely.
By now, I was Quite Tired and the Hoegaarden[1] had run out. Time to call it a night. While we waited for a taxi, the strange banging and shouting from the venue seemed to mean that Mr. Suicide Commando had decided to bring along his fork-lift and demonstrate some advanced pallet-management to a strident martial backing.
(But that sounds like any other gig-review, rather than the first time one of my favourite bands has pitched up on my side of the planet for twenty years. It was Utterly Fucking Marvellous.)
On the inner sleeve of 'Trans Europe Express' by Kraftwerk, there's a stylised train logo. Belgian locomotives look a lot like that. (The other thing I was reminded of would betray a working knowledge of the Lima catalogue, and there are some things a gentleman refuses to remember...) They also have this disturbing capability of going to the places on the indicator board at a time that agrees with the schedule. It's very unlike any recent experience of rail travel here.
[1] Not in vases this time. That would have been silly.
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your holiday snaps!
Date: 2005-12-19 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-12-20 09:45 am (UTC)Glad you had a good time!
no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 03:31 pm (UTC)Even Cheltenham had trams.
Well, they started life as a quarry railway, but even so.
special
Date: 2005-12-20 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 05:48 pm (UTC)