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A few months ago, in an all-night café near Liverpool St. station, I ended up talking to a small group of people in interesting hats who were sitting at the next table. When they left, they gave me a flyer for their monthly cabaret, Stranger Than Paradise.

I’ve been a couple of times now and it’s among the best things I know of. Thank goodness for chance meetings in 24 hour cafés. The couple I’ve been to have featured fire-eating, harmonica beat-boxing, puppetry, burlesquery, contortionism, and a beautiful lady from the 1940s playing startling and brilliant covers of 90s rock songs, including “Creep” by Radiohead and Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box”, on the ukelele. Next Sunday it happens again, and I am already much looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, my memories of the last one were seriously marred by the fact that as we walked to get a bus in the wee small hours of Sunday morning, in the vicinity of London Bridge station, a young well-dressed, hair-gelled city type ran up to us, punched the friend I was with full-on in the face, breaking his nose, and then jogged off casually, without looking back or once uttering a single word. It was the most creepily inhuman thing I’ve ever seen a human being do, and I’m still completely at a loss when I think about it. Beware of People, is the only lesson I can draw from it.

A couple more photos here.

The other week I had a roll of film from my old Russian box camera cross-processed, which essentially means ‘deliberately processed in the wrong chemicals’ (in this case, I asked the shop to process my normal negative film in slide film chemicals). Consequently, the colours are all wrong in a strangely pleasing way. A couple of my favourites are above, and there are some more here.

Hello. I haven’t been writing anything here lately. Mainly because of the old problem that the more one is actually doing, the less time is left for diary-writing, but partly because what time I have for the internet I have been squandering on these social networks, like last.fm and facebook. Anyway, if you were to ask me to re-cap, I would tell you that the last couple of months have included:

At the beginning of May, two men came up to me in the street late at night and relieved me of the burden of my bag, wallet, and phone. I had little choice in the matter: I did start running at first, but then I almost immediately realised that my mobile phone was not something I cared enough about to risk getting knifed in the back for, so I turned around and handed it over.

Interestingly, getting mugged has been a lesson in how easily replaceable almost everything but data is: I was very glad that a couple of months ago I’d found a little piece of software to back up the phone numbers from my phone’s memory. Consequently, the mugging led to a couple of weeks of inconvenience until I managed to replace my stolen devices and pour all the numbers and music back into them, after which all was more-or-less as it was before. With a bit of luck the day will soon be here where even getting killed will just result in a couple of weeks of disembodied inconvenience until the insurance company coughs up for a new body into which your mind can be restored from a backup copy. Until then, though, I will continue to operate at a heightened level of alertness.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a guide to making a pinhole camera out of a small tin. It seemed like a nice idea, and reminded me of walking round Kyoto with Graeme and his brother and their pinhole cameras a couple of summers ago, so I was toying with the idea of trying to make one when it occurred to me that I probably already had the materials to hand to try some pinhole photography there and then. Some digital pinhole photography, in fact. A few minutes later I was ready to go, having set aside my Canon lenses in favour of a pin-pricked piece of black card attached to the camera body with masking tape. And look! It worked!

The pictures I took indoors came out quite dull and misty but they proved the general principle, so a couple of days later I took my hi-tech pinhole camera for a sunny late afternoon wander around the neighbourhood. The results are (obviously) pretty lo-fi, and I had to turn the contrast and saturation up a bit on my computer, but I quite like their grainy, dreamy feel. The speckles, incidentally, are almost certainly an indication that I need to clean the inside of my camera.

Anyway, if anyone else feels like having a go, let me know — I’d love to see the results. I think you could probably place the pinhole over another lens, but you’d have to use longer exposure times (the above were all about a couple of seconds at ISO 100 and propped on a wall and the ground respectively). Experiment is the only way really. The smaller the pinhole the sharper the image should be, but the less light you’ll get (so you’ll need a longer exposure). There’s lots of info on Wikipedia. Good luck.

Last week I finally got around to installing the electric pickup that I bought when I bought my sanshin a couple of years ago. Which means I can now plug my sanshin into a guitar amplifier and play Okinawan folk songs at unprecedented, cutting-edge volumes, should I so wish. I can also, more importantly, do things like record it more easily, put it through guitar effects pedals, and play with other, louder musicians.

It was a musical weekend, too. Having hardly played guitar in public at all in the last few years, I played twice in one weekend. On Saturday my sister’s theatre company put on a cabaret to raise money for a play they’re planning to put on in the summer. My friend and band-mate Jess lent her harmonies to an old song of mine. It was a very nice evening. I love a cabaret.

On Sunday, Jess put on an acoustic gig at her actual house to raise money for the mental health charity she works for. A bunch of people came to listen to songs, eat battenburgs, and drop money into cans. For the sake of variety, I brought along my sanshin and played the old Okinawan song “Asatoya yunta” (安里屋ユンタ) — somewhat incompetently, it has to be said, but heck, I think even an incompentently-performed Okinawan folk song is still usually better than no Okinawan folk song.

…I just found an Eisa group playing a nice version of Asatoya yunta on YouTube. (The music doesn’t actually start until about 40 seconds in but it is well worth the wait).