Tagged: VICE

REVIEW: El Tropico @ Old Blue Last, 26/08/2011

I have to be careful when writing this post. Old Blue Last is Vice’s pub, and as you’ll see on the right my blog is part (albeit a tiny, insignificant one) of Vice’s Blogging Network. So I’m now faced with the balance of writing a post that carefully balances cynicism and apathy with the fact that I did actually have a fairly enjoyable evening.  Too far in either direction and they’ll probably get the coffee boy to write a snarky post about me on their website, where everyone will agree that I’m incredibly annoying and should pretty much never go outside again.

It’s important to note that before I went to OBL I went to Cargo (no sign of Bongo Bob this week), where I drank a lot of tequila, so everything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt. And a slice of lemon. I also went to a bar that was running a night called Cher, which turned out to be a gay night (should have guessed from the name?), and another that resembled a velvety boudoir but was full of ageing skinheads. But that’s not so relevant.

The music is pretty diverse, ranging from groovy house to Rihanna, who (if I’m to believe her lyrics) wants to be ‘taken in the night’ like a common thief snatching a handbag and  relishes the idea of being the only female survivor in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Weird. It’s all fairly danceable, but is barely audible anyway once one of the organisers hands out multi-coloured whistles to the crowd. Imagine one drunk person with a whistle. Multiply that by fifty. It was as pleasant as you imagine.

What made the night really enjoyable was the people. Take Steve the organiser, for example, who was MCing for his birthday with a naivety and sense of enthusiasm that I presume means he doesn’t have to do it so often that it’s crushed his spirit. Or the girl who didn’t hesitate to tell me that one of my classic moves, which involves shaking imaginary dice above my head, looked like I was ‘wanking off Hagrid’. There was also a couple comprised of a guy who looked like Louis Theroux and a bootylicious black girl krumping at him (not ‘with’, definitely ‘at’), but I don’t think there’s a way of putting how funny that was into words.

A downside to the night is that the staff refused to sell me the stuffed armadillo behind the bar, and were unable to direct me to an all night taxidermist where I could purchase one of my own.  I’m willing to overlook this, and might even go again.

After Hours Athletes


I hate the word ‘athlete’, not as much as I hate people who pronounce it ‘atherleet’, but still quite a bit.  It conjures up two images in my head – the first is one of those anorexic looking Kenyan runners pronouncing words wrongly (which in turns carries its own connotations of trying not to laugh at the breakfast table because your stepdad is a politically correct wanker and he’ll call you a racist) and the second is some ginger twat from public school who looks like an over inflated Prince Harry, wears deck shoes even when it’s snowing and starts most of his sentences with a laugh that sounds like a frog coughing up blood.

Enter VICE and Puma to  shatter these stereotypes and bring sports back to quote unquote normal people like me, who only go to the gym to pick up women and even then would rather sit around writing articles for zines about how much of a dickhead Russell Brand is.  The dynamic duo are throwing two parties, one in London and one in Manchester, featuring a host of events like beer pong, cardioke (trying to do karaoke while on a cross trainer…maybe some steroid fuelled chavs will gatecrash and cross train themselves into oblivion while MCing to new monkey) and something to do with eating pizza without using your hands.  Obviously that’s the one I’m most excited about.  Of course, there’ll be so much hip facial hair that everyone in attendance’s faces will smell of pizza for days.


Puma and VICE are doing a bunch of other things with bands and stuff, one of them being Is Tropical, who are currently opening for Mystery Jets. Kind of a shame that means most of the punters will be queueing for £3.95 pints of Carling while Is Tropical are playing, since they’re better than Mystery Jets.  Expect to hear them on like…series 9 of Skins, since that’s how long it takes good music to filter through over there.  I guess this where I should talk about how Is Tropical fuse the artcore aesthetic of bands like The Antlers with the raw energy and ‘foot tappability’ (vom.) of The Drums, with an edge of the Klaxons but not new Klaxons stuff, their old stuff.  Just got a phonecall from NME, I start next month.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, parties. DJs. Fun. The possibility of free pizza. Booze. Girls.  You’d be a fool to miss it, a damn fool.  The London party goes down on 10th Nov and the Manchester party is on the 30th November.  More details on how to get tickets (free…) at http://viceland.com/afterhours/index.php

UVA

Neon is cool.  But let’s be clear.  When I say that, I’m talking about stuff like crazy, glitzy, beautiful Vegas and artists like UVA and Tracey Emin, not glowsticks and nu-rave t-shirts from Burton.

Everyone, or at least everyone I know…, is bitching about how technology is killing art but pioneers like UVA show that technological advancement and art aren’t mutually exclusive.  This stuff is particularly of interest to people like me [read: freaks] – I spent some time planning a PhD about Las Vegas and how it engages and breaks with artistic traditions, blah blah blah.  Read ‘Learning From Las Vegas’ by Venturi and Izenour if you want to know more; I was pretty much just going to copy everything they wrote anyway.

Head over to http://thecreatorsproject.com/en-uk/creators/united-visual-artists to check out an interview with UVA, mixed up with a ‘best of’ for The Creators Project.  You’ve probably already seen some of their work in music videos, fashion shows etc – they’ve worked with everyone from U2 and The Chemical Brothers to Vivienne Westwood.

So what will art look like in the future?  I hope it’ll look like UVA…think what Iron Man would watch if he smoked pot and you’re probably pretty close.