Time: 19:45 – 22:00
Location: Opposite the Band Stand/ Public loos on Serpentine Rod
Hyde Park!

Route

“We are Londoners, embrace the Londoness!
We want you to come dressed as a visual interpretation of a tube station – a blacksmith with a large hammer for Hammersmith, a manchester clown for Piccadilly Circus or James Bond for Bond Street etc.
You get the idea, so be as creative as you can, with one exception. NO ANGEL COSTUMES, Angel Islington is off limits as it’s closed for engineering works! Seriously, angel costumes would be super-lame.
It’s the end of January, you’ve had enough time to detox and break those resolutions. Kick those blues and come and get trollied with us whilst dressed as an impeccable vision of a tube station, oh yes there will be dancing in the basement of the bar too if you’re hardcore enough.
Prizes for best costume in ludicrous categories and a few games to be played too if you can find them!

Sat 31st January, 7:30pm-2.00am
Zebranos at the Establishment (not the one off carnaby street)
18 Greek Street, Soho, London, W1D 4DS

Free before 10pm, £9 after. Mention Bring Stuff at the door to queue jump.
Come find us at the back of the bar, don’t forget your oyster cards.”

I already know what I’m going as… its going to be Absolutely Fabulous…(hint hint) and for those of you who dont know them all off by heart, here is a list of all the Stations currently open (Not sure if DLR is allowed).

Last Thursday I was lucky enough to go to the press launch of the new “super club” in London’s O2. Matter really is a hell of a place. It has a huge amount going for it as it can be and will be a club that will play an eclectic amount of music having dance and indie nights as well as having live acts as well.

With its location in the dome the best way to get there is pretty much the best way to travel around London and that is by boat which will take take you a to a 2 minute walk from getting into the club. The boat trips on London are superb and really get your anticipating a good night ahead. Not only that but boats will be running all night on club nights so you can get back into town with ease.

The club itself has a huge amount of cool stuff, the decor is basic (all concrete) but the dance floor in the main auditorium vibrates with the bass of the music and turns your body into a speaker itself. In the vip the is a walkway which goes over the main dance floor which is some 30 foot below.

Check out the Matter website for all their events which are upcoming i will definitely be going again as they have some huge names which will be entertaining.

Of all my favourite things to do, dressing up as a pirate has to be to be top on my favourites list. Pirates are simply the best, striped tights and pantaloons or wench blouses with buckled boots you cannot fail to look super cool and dangerous when you are a pirate.

Even better is doing so whilst having access to a boat – and best has to be while you are partying on a boat, no? You cannot imaging my joy when I learnt that Bring Stuff are having a Pirate Party on a PUB BOAT!

The best thing about this is that it’s free (before 10pm)… OK the second best thing. The best thing has to be the fact that you get to be a part of the Biggest Bestest Pirate take-over on the River Thames this (pitiful) summer!

Bring Pirates is being held on the Tattershall Castle on the 20th September. Full details can be found on the Bring Stuff Website, or the Facebook event page. There’s going to be games like Yarr’ing at the police boats and prizes for Best Pirate and Best Pirate Jig – you know what you are even encouraged to be rude and piratey!! this is my kind of party!

If you needed anymore reasons to be there, I’d tell you to take a look at last years photos. But I think we all know this is not an event to be missed – I’ll see you all there me Heartys!!

Learn to make the big bucks!

Ok i admit it I have a gambling problem…the problem is that I love it way too much. My poison is No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker, and everything about it. For example it is 12.34am and i am writing this post while playing online and watching a tournament on the telly. You catch my drift?

Well I am very excited that this Friday evening and Saturday daytime London is holding a Poker festival with a difference. And most importantly it is free to go along to!

Poker in the Park is taking place in Leicester Square in the small park area right in the middle of the square. It will have all kinds of top pros giving great advice and you can buy merchandise and helpful books etc.

One of the pros is fellow Englishman Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott…what a legend this guy is check him out here.

If you are interested in getting into the game then I reckon it would be a great place to go along and mix with other amateurs. There are even free tournaments to enter which you can win prizes.

Now being a lucky devil I will be living it up on the balcony of the Empire casino flashing my press pass and having some free booze with some showgirls (apparently) so there is even the chance to catch a peek at my ugly mug..if you’re lucky. (I am the one with the haircut similar to that of a German dictator)

These kind of free events are often round London but you never find out about them until it is too late. So I am spreading the word.

So come and become an addict like me….well no, don’t do that, but do come and have a great time with loads of fellow Londoners…and the odd hundred tourists.

london night bus

How did this happen, well quite obvious really, I got on and fell asleep.

Now most people who live in London will know that a London night can be particularly chilly at the best of times so the comfort and the warmth of a bus came as a huge relief and surprise when I first awoke from my slumber. The emptiness of the bus was also appealing to my inebriated self, so instead of getting off and hailing the nearest black cab and going home as any sober person would have done, I simply went back to my ZZZs.

Now buses do come to the end of their line eventually so when I was turfed off I can recall simply hoping on the next one that came along, oyster card in hand and finding a new corner to snooze in. Where the bus was going or where I picked it up from I do not recall or indeed do I care, but the warmth and cosiness of that seat once more led to me having a good hours snooze or so.

Soon after I was given orders by the driver to leave my seat with a depot fast approaching and once more a new bus was quickly located. Tactics began to be formed, as I headed back towards central London from where I think was the Finchely area.

I managed to time my journey on the final bus of the night as it arrived in Trafalgar Square at 5.30am and as the pigeons looked on in slight confusion and suspicion of this man still wearing a tuxedo from the night before I hopped on my first train back to my non moving home. Just in time for a few more hours sleep before jaunting back in to work as fresh as a daisy (that might be a slight fib).

So the next time you find yourself stranded with the final tube gone and no money for a cab, look for the nearest double-decker and get yourself the comfortable cheap alternative to a dodgy B&B.

This may shine a certain light on my person, as someone who A. enjoys a good hearty drink and B. doesn’t really care about what other people think.
Indeed I may easily offend or disgust you with the above revelations, but I say there are loads more people like me out there in the city and aren’t we the most interesting…I’ll let you decide that!

It’s Mack, the captain wrangler for Metblogs.

I’m on loan here from Los Angeles for a few weeks (all right, I’m on holiday with my wife and kids, and rudely crashing your party) but I had to share: On our first weekend in town, we stumbled into the sort of exhibit that smacks you smartly across the chops and reminds you that Modern Art Needn’t Suck:

If you haven’t already seen it, check out the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward at Southbank Centre …
Ten artists were give the run of a gallery room/space each to commit architecture. Most impressive is Do Ho Suh’s Korean-American culture-clash expressed as a head-on collision between enormous house models. But my personal favorite is Mike Nelson’s “To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft” – which looks like he managed to invoke Cthulu, who then spent an afternoon chewing enormous ragged holes in the scenery.

Excellent stuff – check it out before it closes August 25.

Diagrams stolen straight from greenlaunches:

The Duke of Cambridge

Dark corridors lead to storage rooms in a warehouse filled with freaks and ghouls forgotten by the post-industrial sprawl of modern society and left to brood in rhythmic euphoria. The music catches your heart with a malleable claw and drags you into primal bliss. Each beat is like listening to your insides being amplified by a thousand decibels. You can feel it take hold and exorcise the demons that lie deep within. They come out with a fierceness that remains forever more. One’s sub-conscious, in full fury, begins to understand why humanity partakes in rituals at all anymore. This is better than religion. The Slimelight comes from a deep, dark cavern from within that melts away the plasticity of the human soul and allows you to take on any form you choose.

Upon entering, one feels as if they had entered a tomb. The air is cold yet soothing and gives you the feeling that whatever may lie ahead will give you an appreciation for London’s damp, frigid froth of an atmosphere. Up another set of stone stairs covered with an unexplainable splatter of a substance that ‘looks’ like red paint and turn in your garments which you might not see again until daylight. Find your way to two forgotten rooms that are now remembered by black lights and are covered with phantasmagoric images displayed on the walls from flickering projectors overhead. And while the sounds of manufacturing from the warehouse’s former owner is now absent, it has been replaced with the gripping mortification of industrial synthesizers mixed with records of electronic darkness. But the vibrations that emit from this salem’s lot is not depressing by any means, but instead pulls you into a lost world of anomalous souls who take pleasure in creating a vortex of human flesh. The lighting transforms instantaneously from blue-red to black-green and dances with the motion of bodies in an orgy of life.

The floor is black as tar and little imagination is required to see one’s self in a cauldron of deranged personalities who need not rub up against you for their presence to be felt from close by. They are all part of a dance that will wipe the mess of humanity and rip a void in space-time wide open — a doorway for imagination. Follow the eyes: watching you, watching others, watching your ideas, fantasies and ego slip into oblivion. Their is no identity, no hollow echoes from the norms of society, no weak cries from government or god. Only the body remains and the mind was discovered to be a barrier in understanding the fullness of being empty. Nothing is what it appears to be. Seating is not seating, but places of rest for the tired and weary who dare to stay at the slime light past 4 am. The walls are not walls, but post-modern impressions of the morbid and manic.

If you look close enough one can find all sorts of strange aberrations in mere concrete, because art is not only created by human hands ,but simply seen. Chaos is what gives an environment depth and it is the black swirl of chaos channeled through the slime light that will make losing yourself in the dark the most ecstatic moment of your withered life. The bar isn’t much, but drinking alcohol isn’t even close to the reasons behind the Slimelight’s existence. This is where the lost children gather to partake in an energetic cycle of life, death and retribution. This is where viewing people in cages is not disturbing, but a metaphor for the times we are living in. Why not have one last dance? A dance of wicked splendor and depravity, but a dance none the less. Desire exists for a reason and the Slimelight is self-psychotherapy for the restless gothic spirit to receive a little peace in a world where it rarely exists.

http://www.slimelight.net