It's getting cold outside. The leaves are changing colour, and after a week-end of partying, so am I.
On Friday, I went to the Stockholm Beer & Whisky Festival with Zak plus his dad and brother, and were joined by Sebastian later on. It was a lot of fun walking about, especially with Zak immortalising the entire festival by using his new super-duper 3.2-megapixel mobile phone appx. 90% of the time! We came quite early, appx. 16:15, so there weren't a lot of people about as we roamed the hall. In the middle there was a stage for a band and two places where food was served. Well, every place that served alcohol at the venue had to serve food as that's the law. Thing was, most staff at the places we visited laughed about the whole thing and said that there was a battle going on where every place battled about who would offer food at the highest prices, and yep, the price was most definitely high and apparently rose during the evening. We walked about and had a nice time tasting a buckload of the different beers and whiskies on display, and became merrier and louder by the minute. As time went on more and more people poured into the place. As Zak is no doubt in the middle of writing about the different ales (of course accompanying the writing with pictures) on his blog, you should go there and keep your head up for some of the action.
If I have to pick a favourite from the entire evening, it'll have to be Old Rasputin, the very first beer I've had that truly tastes of dark chocolate. It also contained a great deal of coffee. Darkness! Lovely. After we had a bit of Bowmore whisky we strolled around and broke off for town, just as the festival was growing unbearably thick with people. Debaser was extremely empty and as nothing else seemed nice enough, we all went home.
Oh, I almost forgot. During the festival we stood around a place that served souvas, a sort of Swedish touch on kebab. While we stood around a rather huge man, appx. 50 years old, went up to one of the youths who were serving:
Man: You should know that that note is misspelled, you know. Do you know? It looks very bad.
He now pointed at a hand-written note that was pushed down a plastic mug; it read "driks", which is misspelled Swedish for "tips".
Girl: Oh, sorry, yeah, it's misspelled. M: Well, that's quite unprofessional, you know. And you have another spelling-error in your menu. And there's another word that's written wrong.
I started wondering whether he had Asperger's Syndrome or not, but then again, he said all of this in a mean way. So I asked him:
I: Sorry, but can you tell me, is the word "idiot" spelled as one word, or two? M: What? I: I said, is "fat old man" three separate words, or can you write them as one? I mean, can you use hyphens? Or something? M: What? I: Thank you.
The girl at the counter got that, but he didn't. Oh, it must be such a lovely way to live, I mean, pushing down other people to feel good about yourself. I just hope somebody tells me if I ever venture down that nasty path! A horrible thing, that, like hoping somebody tells you if you start smelling like old cheese rather than people just shying away like you're the plague.
The day after was a nice old rest at the home. Mikaela gratinated broccoli, cauliflower and carrots with a bechamel sauce, with a cut-up Falun sausage. Today she made a brilliant dish where she grilled salmon, added a tzatsiki and a bean-salad. Anyway, back to yesterday.
I left home like a thief in the night (well, I was actually driven by Mikaela) to meet Anders, whom I joined to meet Anna at Francis, a very sad place. So why'd we arranged to meet there? Simple: they were to have a troubadour. Anyway, said player didn't turn up, so we hurried from there to Dront, which used to be Tidsfördrif; now, I have nothing against renovations, but this place was a shambles. Fuck that; we concentrated on each-other, had a very nice time and downed flatliners (courtesy of Anna), beer and went to O-baren, where Magnus and other people from Nitty Gritty DJ'ed. Upon entering the place, I heard The Smiths' "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish" which marked a cultural year zero for the evening, and the guys actually continued licking shots, for instance playing Northside's "L.S.D." and Sex Pistols' "Holidays In The Sun". Anders and Anna had actually left at the time the Pistols-track started playing and I pogoed away with a couple of other people. Mind you, a lot of people started going haywire to the music as it was so good. I'm actually thinking of either DJ'ing again or starting a club of my own as I'm way too discontent - as if you didn't know, hrmph. Bitching about the poor musical climate is one thing, doing something about it is something different, but I know I'd love to do it, love to set a club up from scratch and make sure the music was first class - especially if I'd be DJ'ing, of course, of course.
Now it's time to visit Mikaela's mom, where Alex has cooked dinner. Mmm. I'm becoming more and more stuffed...must be the alcohol levels from the week-end.
By no way, "Deliver Us From Evil" seems like a brilliant documentary on how the Catholic church is spending billions (valid in almost any currency, I guess) to avoid court-cases where priests have raped children. Very interesting indeed, and that trailer is very good.
Another thing: I didn't know that Coil had covered "Tainted Love" as well, but check their video out. Marc Almond as the Angel Of Death? There you go. What a cover, even better than Soft Cell's cover.