Godspeed you Wearisome Wayfarers!

Just made good my return from a brief visit to the Smokey Big Black where the StonedHolyRollers performed their heinous & blasphemous musical outpourings before tens of thousands..... or, to explain more fully, we rocked the pavements of Notting Hill as part of  our ongoing Street Outreach Programme! Enough generous people with impeccable taste dropped enough in the hat to finance a trip to the Land of the Late Night Haircut (aka: Stoke Newington!) for the finest Turkish Culinary Delights our meagre coppers could buy. Having just mentioned tens of thousands of yir Human Peoples, we must remember, my dear cyperperusers, that that figure is a small number within the context of the thronging multitudes of London.

London IS big, after all....and stuffed fulla peoples. Big Ones - Little Ones; Skinny Ones...& ones who give the bathroom scales just a little more trouble! All sorts of folks of varying shades from peely-wally Hombres, like yir StOnEdHOlybLogGer here to the blackest of shiny black folks, whose veins must course with the undiluted blood of Ham!

And all of these people, it seems, are on the move. Paddin' the Hoof North to South. Takin' Shanks' Pony East to West. Perhaps Time lapse photography shows us best the Disorganized Buzzing of Human Drones Hithering & Thithering; the Turbid Seething of Human Waters; the Chaotic Crash of Ambulatory Humanity.
In our haste to get where it is we're going to, the cold lens of the camera sees us not as individuals but a Formless & Shapeless, Unthinking & Blundering mass!

Cut to Tottenham Court Road Tube Station at 5pm and the Riotous Rampage of Rail-Users is in full swing. A Senseless Concretion of Commuters en route from Points A to B. Here you exist for a split second before morphing back into the anonymity of the Hurrying Hordes. An endless gallery of faces flits before your eyes which instinctively follow the constant stream & strain the retina. Bits of bodies desired & hungered for in an instant are quickly forgotten as another surge of visual stimuli is discharged from off the next Northern Line train bound for High Barnet. Wave after wave they flit by as the brain struggles to make sense of the experiential overload of Colour, Shape & Form.

In the confined space of the underground carriage we entertain ourselves, unknowingly almost, with the ceaseless floodtide of human faces; detached & seperated from their unimaginable lives for the seconds they take up in our own. Down here we are all voyeurs. Seemingly bored & uninterested eyes dance from place to place furtively. We steal a glance but quickly look away if our eyes collide with someone else's. We observe but exist also as observed as a thousand sightlines criss-cross one another in an intricate optical lattice. We are cardboard cut-outs against a flat, dull backdrop to be stared at, regarded, scrutinized. We sit in suspended animation waiting for our stop to arrive so that we can once more spring into some kinda life movement.

We spill out onto Archway and busy ourselves with the To-ings & the Fro-ings, the Comings & the Goings on the Avenues we've drifted onto in life.....& there are so many ways to get there : Motorways, Roadways, Byways, Highways, Pathways, Headways, This Ways, That A-Ways, By-the Ways, Sea Ways, Sky Ways, Cycleways, Throughways, Giveways, Gettaways, My Ways, Your Ways..........Bon Voyage & Godspeed, you Wearisome Wayfarers!

Dwarf Sized Sin City - London's Own Miniature World of Vice!!

In his classic cautionary tale from 1961, the Immortal Jimmy Reed warned us clealy, in his own inimitably lazy n laconic manner, that the 'BRIGHT LIGHTS' & the 'BIG CITY'  Would Go To Your Baby's Head!....but here I am, loping like a chimpanzee up on two legs round Soho, London's own MiniatureWorld of Vice!!!

Adrift in Soho by day, Costermongers shout the price of apples from behind their barrows in Berwick Street and office drones scurry to order over-sized cups of coffee during lunch breaks. The huge fireglow of the Sun swamps the Puny Neon Doodles and renders their message ineffective.....but sooner or later the Sun disappears from view and it's Diminutive Celestial Sibling, The Moon, takes over the task of throwing light upon one half of the World. And it's when night falls the Dwarf-Sized-Sin-City comes fully to life and starts to Glow!

To All Night Drug Prowlin' Wolves, like yir very own SToNEdholYBLoggeR, creepin along the Kerbsides n Alleyways lookin for some Midnight To Six, Man kinda Stimulation, the Moon has been made redundant by a Vast, Obedient Army of yellow street lights but for most of the Human Being Species it's still all they've got between them and impenetrable darkness, so it's just as well the Moon still insists on clockin' on for its night shift!   There was a time, long ago, that when darkness came, our ancestors would huddle close to one another and wait for the light to return. Strange Days Indeed! Half formed & naked, not knowing truly if the Sun would be back, staring into the unknowable immensity of Space and (if their Proto-Lingual skills had developed sufficiently to allow them to do so!!) wondering, open mouthed, at a million Studs of Fire twinkling above their frail little Simian skulls with their foreheads criminally low & their prognathic jawlines jutting out most ungracefully...& there, all the while, the mystery of mysteries, crawling across the Dark Mansion of the Sky; a Big, Silent, Silver Orb!....And then it came to pass that fire was bridled!... and in an evolutionary blink of an eye it wasn't long at all before there were light bulbs & the multidazzle of Soho was shining out and selling sexual gratification!! So to the shuffling human shapes of Soho the Moon goes unnoticed; its pallid, ethereal light lost in the importuning glare of Neon. Even if you were to throw your gaze heavenwards, your eyes would, as Evolution has taught them to do,  ignore the Moon's flimsy, ashen light and settle instead upon the Gaudy & Urgent Buzz of Coloured Neon!

Unlike Fireworks which bomb their Shimmering Splendour in an instant, Neon will glow for as long as you pass an electrical charge through it. Unlike Fireworks and their Ephemeral Moment of Brilliance, Neon shines on....So Neon has been Captured; Neon has been Tamed; Neon has been set to work! It can be bottled and moulded into phosphorescent symbols which burn through human retinas to send you a promise of satisfaction! In the crowded Scintilla of Soho we are in a place where the neon lights assure us SEX can be viewed; SEX can be spied upon; SEX can be consumed, SEX can be perused, SEX can be bought.....

It is also, in the words of the All-Time-Master-of-Honky-Tonk, Ray Price, a place where lights can say "forget her name in a glass of sherry wine" or where lights can "offer other girls to empty hearts like mine." Verily it remains thus, Brother Ray! "The Cabarets & Honky Tonks, their flashing signs invite a broken heart to lose itself in the glow of city lights!! They paint a purty picture of a world that's gay & bright....but it's just a mask for loneliness behind those city lights!!!"

Time, methinks, to leave these illuminated postcodes behind me!!
Ahm Outta Here-Vroom Vroom!!!....

here's the link to Ray in all his honky tonk Glory! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr79fOfP0dY

and another one for Jimmy Reed sounding half-cut as usual!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giGGK3Fk9co