3 posts tagged “holiday”
Best of 2006
Well, here I am at my parent's house in Basingstoke for Christmas. With not much else to distract me I thought I'd take this opportunity to have a proper play with Vox, and catch up on some of the stuff I'd have like to have documented better before I forget it all completely.
2006 has been full of surprises, not all of them nice - but there's no doubt it's been fantastic in terms of travel. So I'm going to write a bit about that, starting with the definite highlight of the year: visiting my friend Gareth in New York.
New York City - Welcome to Mirrorworld
I remember laughing out loud the first time I heard the driver make an announcement. Why? Because the gruff Brooklyn accent sounded exactly like a stereotype from a film. That happened to me a couple of times, again when I walked past some hobos who were speaking in the hoarse yell I know from so many movies.
And I was obsessed with pavements and street furniture. The uniform nature of the surfaces - always these untarmacked slabs of concrete - came as a surprise to someone used to such varied textures underfoot. As for the street signs, well, there was plenty to entertain me there. Especially when I happened to pass what appeared to be the sign for Murray Street, as featured on the back of the Sonic Youth album of the same name.
Visiting Brooklyn, I could see why it's an increasingly appealing place to live. Not having much of a frame of reference, I likened it to the trendy parts of East London - both are formerly industrial and working class areas that have been occupied by 'creative' types with a love of street art.
It was in Brooklyn that I had the pleasure of attending a free open-air Les Savy Fav show in a huge disused swimming pool.
Gareth and I attended quite a few other gigs on a semi-random basis, only with occasional success. I knew Lightning Bolt at Webster Hall would be great, but we tried going to not one but two 'world music' peformances in a tiny, unairconditioned box of a venue, both of which sounded a laugh in the Time Out writeups, but were mostly excruciatingly terrible.
Back down on street level, I took plenty of time to just wander around and try to get an idea of what it must be like to live in the city. I know I barely scraped the surface. It was hot - very hot - when I visited, and I know it got hotter the next month. So now when I think of New York I imagine it being baking hot, humid and thundery.
Central Park was also hot, but there was shade in the mysterious woods in the middle. And it was hot in Greenwich Village, which I thought was beautiful. If you happen to know of a cheap apartment going in the area, do let me know...
In fact I wouldn't rule out living in New York for a bit. Though probably not in the Village (unless I become incredibly affluent, which I suppose is always an option). It's definitely got under my skin, and I can't wait to go back to visit at least. So watch out, NYC: you haven't seen the last of me.
My New York set on Flickr
I've been using my time off to attend London Games Fringe events. The London Games Fringe is a great idea: it complements the po-faced and gratingly commercial industry and consumer offerings with an opportunity for us to enjoy a more theoretical - and playful - approach to gaming. I probably shouldn't have said "theoretical" there as that doesn't make it sound any less dull.
It really isn't dull though. On Monday night NTK's Dave Green hosted the Games You Should Have Played event, the idea being that he and the other panelists explain... oh, you already guessed it. It was great to see the maraca-based rhythm-action game Samba De Amigo being demonstrated, even if a few of my favourite games were omitted from the list completely. Though it would have been a difficult task to please everyone like me, I got the feeling the event was particularly geared to non-gamers, who would definitely have benefited from the range of stuff that was covered, and been a lot less sniffy. But glancing around, I seriously doubt that there were any non-gamers in the audience - with the possible exception of a girl who turned up late and then spent most of the time outside, doing what appeared to be some form of vigorous yoga whilst wearing a very short skirt.
But moving on...
Today's day-long event was called Play Time, and was all about play. Considering it was free (with lunch included) it was very good value. It was hosted by Tim Wright (above) who I think is some sort of academic. Either that or an eloquent loon who wandered in off the Soho street - he's developing a 30-year plan to play golf on the moon, you see. With David Bowie.
I learnt a lot of interesting stuff about play - and much of it from people who aren't directly involved with videogames. The speakers included a poet, a blogger, a magician and a er... man from a theator, who pretended to rush off to the toilet and then rang his own mobile phone to see what we'd do. It was that kind of day.
It was also the kind of day in which we got to play with Lego - which is of course the best kind of day there is. I haven't played properly with Lego for years, but as an only child, it's one of the toys that was guaranteed to keep me completely engrossed by my solitary self when I was a youngun. Here's the model I built when we were prompted to make a "four-legged thing with a face":
The head spins round and everything. There was a serious point to the second part of the 'serious play' session, in which we were supposed to build a metaphorical journey from our life out of the model we'd started with. But as I had made some kind of semi-terrifying arachnid, I wasn't sure where to go with it and ended up on a tangent, pointlessly adding wheels. It's got four legs! It didn't need any wheels.
The magician (who also ran the Lego session) said that when most creative folk are brainstorming and they come up with an idea that's impossible to implement, they dismiss it. But for magicians and illusionists, the difficulty is actually coming up with new impossibilities that they haven't already mastered. Isn't that Interesting? It's all done with mirrors, of course.
Taking time off work is great. Today not only did I watch Neighbours - which was just as preposterous and infuriating as ever - but when wandering around Warren St and Tottenham Court Road I visited an occult bookshop and passed two independent boardgame emporiums. Truly the possibilities are endless.
Then on the way home during rush hour a youngish businessman in suit and tie sat down beside me on the tube and whipped out a red Game Boy Advance SP. "Aha, he's probably using it to watch a badly compressed South Park video" I thought, and peered into his lap to see what he was up to. No - he was playing the original Game Boy edition of Pokemon.
A business man. In a suit-and-tie. Playing first edition Pokemon. On the tube. Brilliant.
