Fell in love with A Mann

Went to London last night. The Aimee Mann concert was freakin' awesome.

I got to the O2 with time to spare, so I went looking for some food. I was jonesing for a pizza but there was a queue so I went to one of those sushi conveyor belt restaurants. The way it works is that you take what you want off the belt, and at the end you get charged for the plates you've taken. The colour of the plate dictates how much it costs, so basic items on a green plate are 1.80, while fancy stuff on a gold plate is 4 quid or something.

I've got to be honest: If I'm going to be fed by a conveyor belt, I want it to be because that's the most effficient way to shovel huge quantities of food into my face. I can't think of a food stuff less suited to a conveyor belt system than small portions of overpriced sushi. If the food is minute, and you want a gimicky delivery system, why not have monkeys on rollerskates take it to customers? I just see different coloured pound signs circling past me.

The opening act were the Submarines. Cute. They reminded me a bit of the Spiderbait songs sung by Janet English. A light, folky verse followed by a sudden heavier, guitar-driven chorus.

Aimee Mann started with a couple of songs and was quite static. I thought that maybe she wouldn't have much of a stage presence, but after that she began interacting with the audience and she was brilliant. She said that she was drunk, but I don't believe that for a second - her control was too good. In the middle of the show, someone called out for an old song of hers about a mixed-age relationship called "Mr Harris", and she had a go even though she hasn't performed it for 10 years. She would stop after each line to explain the psychology of what she had been thinking when she wrote it, and to discuss how she didn't agree with any of it any more. It was really amusing, and she seemed to enjoy it too because she kept breaking down laughing. She played a lot of her classics, but not Ghost World, so my squealling was minimal. I've been to concerts before where the performer does not sound the same live as they do on produced records. Aimee Mann sounds exactly the same. Great stuff.

Overall, the trip reinforced my feeling that I'm glad I'm not living in London. The Tube is a piece of crap. I can't believe how rough it is, given the vast volume of people being overcharged to use it. The metro in Bangkok absolutely humbles the London one.

The guy standing next to me at the concert also works with microchips. It's a small world.

For Better or Worse

I was bored at home. It got to the point where I decided I would rather have a bad time somewhere that was challenging/interesting/scary than keep being bored. Bad > bored.

The trip to Southeast Asia set the bar pretty high - there weren't any bad times. Even when the Loatian houses were collapsing around me, that was a surreal sort of fun. England, by contrast, has so far been a pretty even mix of good and bad. There've been days when I wonder if I've made a colossal mistake.

When things seem a bit tough, how do you combat it? I went online and found that one of my favourite singers is performing in a couple of weeks. I suspect that neither of my readers will know who I'm talking about when I say that I've got tickets to see Aimee Mann in concert in London. That's the kind of pretty awesome opportunity that would be unlikely in NZ. If she plays "Ghost World" or "Lost in Space", I may squeal.

In the meantime, I'm off to London tomorrow for a BBC TV taping. Should be good. Or bad. But not boring. More soon.