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Once again, Father Christmas(es) hit the streets of London for Santacon.

The picture above shows only a percentage of the two or three hundred Santas that turned up for Santacon this year. At the point in the day when this picture was taken we’d already attracted a small Police following. Just to make sure we were “keeping the peace”, they said. We weren’t commiting any crimes. Well, Christmas is a time of peace, so that was OK.

Santacon is an unofficial annual event organised by word of mouth and the internet. It involves lots of people dressing up as Father Christmas and going for a big wander around town. There have been similar events in other countries, going as far back as 1994 according to this article.

The official UK Santacon website is here.

Another outing for The Gig List, this time to see (and hear) The Prodigy at Brixton Academy.

I’d been looking forward to this event for a long time and had high expectations for The Prodigy. They’re one of my favourite dance acts and I hadn’t seen them perform live before. Surprising, really, as they date right back to the very early nineteen-nineties.

And, wow, did they meet my expectations …

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Meant to write this up today, although I see that Paul has beaten me to it! A group of us went to the Ozwald Boateng fashion show at the Victoria and Albert museum.

It was definitely an interesting experience. Mostly I liked the clothing on show, although I suspect some of the items won’t be hitting the high street stores any time soon. My favorite items were the long brown leather coats. I’ll be having a wander round the leather shops in Camden for something similar soon. Ozwald has a shop on Vigo Street, which I may have a look at, too. I can’t imagine that clothing will be anything other than outrageously expensive.

I have a handy price guide for designer clothing:

• Estimate what you think the item is worth.
• Double the estimate
• Go to the shop and expect to see prices around twice the doubled estimate.

Anyway, the fashion show was really cool and given that it was free, I can’t complain about the price. I met some friends for drinks later on in the evening, some of whom I hadn’t seen for over a year. Always good to catch up.

At long last, the first ever Gig List arranged event finally happened. Dave, Andy and myself made the hazardous trek to Brixton to see Icelandic band Sigur Ros.

We arranged this one months ago when tickets were first released. Just as well as the event was a sell-out with touts looking for spare tickets but not selling any.

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A chap I met at a Green Social event recommended a fascinating tool to me - Google Earth. So, fascinating in fact that I have just spent a couple of hours fiddling with it.

I did the first thing that I suspect everyone does with it, which was to find my house.

And here it is:

I also found a few other interesting spots …

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Today I went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner Prize Exhibition. The exhibition displays the work of the four final nominees for the prize. The winner has not yet been announced.

Below you can see the work of Simon Starling. And yes, it is a big shed and an electric bicycle.

This wasn’t actually my favourite of the four finalists but it was one of the only two that lent itself towards a decent picture for my site.

My favourite was …

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I saw my Rolfing practitioner, Alan, a couple of days ago and it occurred to me that I haven’t written anything here about Rolfing yet.

Your first obvious question has a detailed answer right here on Alan’s website.

So, what have my experiences with Rolfing been like?

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My printer finally ran out of ink the other day. I’d been printing out some cards to use to play Magic the Gathering with. Not even remotely tournament legal, but means I can put a few decks together to play with, without having to cough up enormous amounts of money for rare cards.

My printer is a Dell Photo Printer 720 that came free with a laptop that I bought from them a while ago. It turns out that my printer wasn’t so free, after all. The expensive part of an inkjet printer is the ink and the print head. Usually this is built into the ink cartridge, so whenever you replace the ink cartridge you are also replacing the print head. The Dell printer only comes with a Trial Size ink cartridge and so doesn’t take long to run out of ink.

When this happens, the software very helpfully points you at the Dell website to buy more ink. At an astronomical price!

I had heard that the Dell printer was the same as a Lexmark model, so I decided to see if I could find a cheaper alternative. The Dell forum claimed that only Dell cartridges would work in their printer. Although it is true that the Lexmark cartridges don’t physically fit in the cartridge slot, they further claim that the chips are electronically chipped to not work.

This turns out not to be true.

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I love going to unusual events, so I especially enjoyed last night’s Colegio Del Cuerpo performance at the Bloomsbury theatre last night. The performance was a dance event supported by the Children of the Andes charity.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect before I got there. What we got was a highly professional and modern dance/ballet performance. The first half of the programme was called “Homily” and appeared to be about some kind of religious awakening. There were some lyrics in the music but since they were in Spanish they didn’t tell me a great deal. Dance performances were very intense and expressive, rather than the simple gymnastic-type displays I have seen before.

My favourite part of the programme was the second half which featured a live performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, renamed Quartet for the End of Body for the Colegio Del Cuerpo rendition.

At the time I didn’t really understand much of the meaning of the performance - references to dates of wars, and some sort of power dynamic allegory represented by the cast taking turns to patrol the stage with an enormous set of compasses. Actually, I didn’t even get that last piece - one of Paul’s very perceptive friends explained that one to me.

I found, though, as with the first half, that giving up the attempt to make logical meaning out of the presentation made it a lot easier for me to sit back and enjoy the aesthetic aspects. The movement, the expression, the emotion and the music.

I particularly liked the music. There’s something about hearing music performed live that even the best music systems can’t reproduce. And I have heard some of the world’s best music systems - there’ll be another hi-fi show coming up soon, I’d imagine, so at some point that’ll make it into this blog.

Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is a well known piece of music with a fascinating history and meaning that you can read about here.

Special thanks to Paul who didn’t just arrange the tickets but hit a home run getting the very best seats in the house, right in the front row. Apparently it is all about who you know!

Running goes very nicely with last week’s “Skating” post. Although it is a bit of a cheat, given that it wasn’t actually me doing the Running.

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