Once you’ve fitted a large piece of 5mm plywood to your car the done thing is to get it painted by one of the UK’s most talented street artists. At least, that’s what I did. Now I have one of the best paintjobs in the world.
I’ll be sent some photos of it tomorrow, I hope, so that I can share it with you. For the moment you’ll have to take my word for it.
The whole thing was organised by D*Face, to whom I send out a Black Hole Thank You. That’s a literally massive thank. Not only has it attained mass, but it created a gravitational field of such power the Thank You collapsed in on itself. The density of thanks is so high that one pinhead of it weighs more than a four and a half Saturns.
A couple of pinheads of the BHTY should also go to Tom, Toby and Greg who have painted some great features on the car. (Guys, if you read this please send me your sites and anything you’re working on so I can post it).
Not only were all the guys incredibly talented, they were also a very funny bunch. I passed a great afternoon talking shit, drinking beer and generally not believing that it was actually happening to El Presidente.
Describing the car will not do it justice but the moment I get photos I’ll put them up. Thanks once more to everyone who helped paint it.
There’s going to be a party. After much toing and froing (and I hope some of you read those words to rhyme with boing) the The Kill Cancer Death Party is sorted out.
Venue : The Leonard Street Gallery
Address : 73A Leonard St, EC2A 4QS (Old St. Tube).
Time : Friday 22nd Sept, 7pm – midnight
Theme : addicted icons, death ralliers and 1980s colour-blind psychiatric outpatients.
We’ll ask for a donation on the door and then money from food and drink at the event will go to Cancer Research UK. I hope a load of you can make it to see off the Kill Cancer Death Ralliers in style.
That means we need some serious Whitney-Houston-strung-out-on-crystal-meth outfits. Or raid the ski-suits from your parent’s cupboards, then combine it with a large hunting knife and pictures of your boss’s front garden. On the Death Rallier front, well, anything goes. Please theme out to the max, and if none of those ideas grab you, just look fabulous.
Before I sign off I’d like to thank all the wonderful folks at the Leonard Street Gallery who are giving us this thing for very little. You’ve been really generous and I hope the night goes with a swang.
You’ll have seen in the post below that I said I was going to ask grafitti artists to paint some cars. Well, D*Face has only just gone and agreed. Honestly, I can’t contain my excitement about the whole thing.
I mean I found his site via the Wooster Collective and I didn’t recognise the name. The moment I got there I knew I’d seen his work before. Whether it was in Bristol or London, who knows, but that cheery little face was familiar. So all excited I pinged him a mail. Now, he’s agreed to help
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Senor D*Face’s famous flying head
And not only did he agree to help, D*Face replied with a lovely email and loads of good questions. Signing off with :
“Sorry to reply with loads of questions, but I think what your doing is amazing, I’d like to add to the whole event. I’ll happily take care of the artist side and organise things for that. It’ll be my pleasure.”
Argh! It’s enough to break my heart when folks are that kind out of the blue. My lip starts to quiver whenever Roger Federer cries after he wins Wimbledon – imagine what random charity does to me. D*Face, I’d like to say thanks three thousand times and that still wouldn’t be enough. I loved your mail, we’ll do you proud
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Me when I read the mail
So now we’ve got a load of grafitti artists willing to make the cars look out of this world beautiful. The man even said he could organise 30 painters.
“But we don’t yet have 30 cars” I hear you say.
And to that I reply: “Not yet we don’t”.
It will be the coolest paint job in the world
ps. coming soon : a post that tells everyone where we are with the parties (one in London one in Barcelona), attendance and more travel details. Keep the faith folks.
Back from the Ibiza. Relaxed as you could possibly be after landing at four in the morning and catching cattle class flu. However, that’s no longer a worry as we make the big party! Yes, you heard it right. Not only will there be a Kill Cancer Death Rally, there will now be a Kill Cancer Death Party.
Shit, a death party. Sounds like it should be in a Brasseye sketch. Chris Morris turns to the camera looking serious next to an adolescent boy with an organ on his head and a young girl looking intensely at a ballcock. ”Welcome to a modern day death party. He’s flipping a porpoise in a death lid, whilst she’s waiting for her ball spasm to backflachate.”
You know the sort of thing.
Death lids aside, this party is, in fact, being organised by the wonderful Yunes of Static London (please send me a link to your site) and Alex Sheridan. Alex will be putting the might of Protest Recordings behind it. Or at least some of the might.
It’ll be shake your coconuts time in mid-September and all the money will go to - you’ve guessed it – buying Kalashnikovs for the Lord’s Resistance Army Cancer Research. Whomsoever would like to have an invitation to le knees up send in your proper home address to me. If you have any other friends who’d be interested ask them, get their addresses and we will send them, like, an actual invitation in, like, the post.
Kalashnikov. Cancer.
Dr. Death. Innocence massacred.
(Due to some strange blog malfunction I wasn’t able to get the photos in the right order for this line ‘We’re helping him, kill this. Not buying these, for them’ under the photos. It is rather weirder now.)
Being told that your mother has died sticks in the mind. However, it is not something that I have played back especially often. There are parties and books, movies and feats of outstanding sporting endeavour that I hunt out from my cerebral cortex more regularly – if that is where you store memories.
One of the reasons for that, is because when I was told, I didn’t cry, and I could never understand this. I stood in between my sisters in my Aunt’s sitting room: brown carpet, my grandmother in a blue cardigan, all of us in Barnes.
We’d finished breakfast – you don’t want to unleash tragedies on kiddies with empty stomachs, after another night of oh-my-god-it-won’t-happen-will-it?
“I’m afraid this morning Mummy died”.
Everyone collapses in on each other, as though the air had been sucked out from between us. In a way it had been.
I’m there and I’m wondering “Why the hell am I not crying?”
Why didn’t I cry then when my throat’s choking up now on a train to Bristol, tears poking out of eyes?
Why did I not cry, and I sure as hell didn’t have an ‘I’m the man in the family now, there’s no room for tears’ moment?
Why? Why? Why?
And I think it’s because I just didn’t think Mummy could die. It was impossible. No way. Really it wouldn’t happen. When hearing “Only a miracle can save her now” it just meant that a miracle would fucking happen.
Unfortunately people do die, miracles are painfully unreliable and you can’t raise money for them.
You can, however, raise money for Cancer Research. You can come on the Kill Cancer Death Rally, celebrate life for four days and help make sure that those teary, tragic, enormous, little gatherings happen a lot less.
I’ve mentioned before (here and here) why I’m doing this but, in case you’re new to the blog (and to you I say “Welcome! Have a crumpet.”), I’ll tell you again. When I was 11 my Mum died of cancer. It first came as breast cancer. This had the impertinence to come back a second time, but she rocked so much she beat it again.
Then she was given the all clear. And then she died. Drag.
You see cancer is a tricky little bitch, it makes like a gritty north-eastern football team in a relegation dogfight, and never knows when it’s beat. It came back, manifested itself in her liver and then chilled on out through her spine and her blood.
The problem is, not only does cancer suck, but the ‘medicine’ they use to treat it is rubbish. Chemotherapy is, essentially, as much poison as your body can handle without dying. Now, not only did my beautiful mother have cancer but all her hair fell out as she slowly died.
Which is where the sexy doctors at Cancer Research UK come in. They spend all their waking lives trying to kill cancer. In April 2003 they found out more about how cancer spreads (Link). The little evil bastard puts all it’s building materials at the part of the tumour moving forward, so that it spreads faster. What a shit.
But knowledge is power and these guys are learning how to Kill Cancer. Please come on the Kill Cancer Death Rally and raise lots of cash for these wonderful guys. Go to www.justgiving.com, follow the instructions and you can start raising money now.
All Just Giving sites will be linked to from this blog so send them in the moment you get them. Mine is here, please give generously.
