Streadier Footing

Four days in London is four more days in any place other than my home. That is all. When I got on the flight (the first of two to get to the UK) the accents started cropping up around me, and I knew right away that it was trouble. Oh there's a group of Scousers in row 34, across the aisle is a nice Yorkshire couple and the guy behind me is Welsh because I can't understand a thing he's saying. I am still adjusting to traveling from the west coast. After many years in NY, and short (ish) flight to London was no big deal, and I could sleep off the time change in a night (following a few pints of high octane cider or something on par), but this time It was rough, awful and terrible all rolled into one, big sleepless bastard of a jet-lag burrito. My first morning, after sleeping in two or three hour fits I woke up to see this outside the window. I figured that it was maybe 7 or 8 AM, which was respectful.

It turned out to be 4:30 AM. Brutal. After fighting with myself for a bit, I resigned to being awake, got some coffee and proceeded to wrap up all of the work that I had ahead of me for the next two months in a matter of hours. I designed six different backdrops, two lighting plots and then started haggling over the costs of all three with various companies in the states. Just when I felt like I had conquered the world I collapsed into a ball on the bed and sobbed until the early evening.

I spent the rest of the day in a carefully balanced state between slightly over-caffinated and comatose.

We had a production day (which often implies the use of 'production') in a small club. There was very little being produced in that magical little place other than about 27 years of beer puke, sweat and something that smelled not unlike an open sewer (most likely an open sewer).
















There wasn't much for me to do, so I sat around, slept in a few corners, and then went out for a walk around Camden. It's a hip part of town, I suppose. It's like St. Marks where all of the squatter punks hang out all day sneering and handing out flyers for tattoo parlors, and then go back to Kensington (or New Jersey) to their nice condos at the end of the day, open a bottle of Malbec and discuss politics. It's usually where you see Amy Winehouse stumbling around resembling a survivor from Pompeii at two in the morning looking for smokes. The shopping in the market area was a lot more intriguing when a pair of Dr. Martens cost $10 as opposed to about $400, what with the dollar being spare change these days. I did manage to find an Alternative Tentacles Records shirt in my size (which kind of blew my mind since I can't get one in SF where they are actually from). Fopp, the discount record shop, where the majority of my per diems had gone over the last few years is no longer, as is about half of the locks markets that burned down earlier this year.

All the same, I got some thai food, coffee, a few t-shirts, a fake Louis Vuitton wallet, more coffee and then went back to work to harass the locals.

And the non-locals.

There was a hell of a line out front for the show in no time.
















And somehow the club managed to squeeze every last one of those sweaty little freaks into that room.