Hi All -  The Nothing will be playing the support slot for The Mountain Goats on April 8 at the Kings Arms. I haven't seen the Goats live before but I hear wonderous things. Chris saw them several times & abused me roundly once for missing them.

I was at a wine tasting once with John Darnielle, when such things were all the rage. Xan Hamilton (of Mystery Girl reknown) would put on a tasting & we would show up with our plonk & write ridiculous odes to said booze in our hack & illwinerate ways to describe what our poor bedraggled taste buds were being exposed too. The evening would start relatively sanely but after a few rounds the purple prose would emerge & things would degenerate into .... well, a large section of my life really.  I vaguely recall I described one wine to John as the taste 'of kitten's drowning' (or was that a Trans Am person I was talking too??).

Which, for some unclear reason, leads me to one of my favourite Chris stories - Barbara had finished a sculpture at Auckland Girls Grammar school and Chris & I (and some other shameless lushes) showed up to celebrate with bubbly in our our mitts. After much cavorting we ended up going to see Bonnie 'Prince' Billy at Hopetoun Alpha later that evening where a very drunk Chris & I heckled from the back. Finally Chris wound up on stage accompanying Mr Oldham by blowing into a beer bottle in a cheerily inept fashion. And there the evening did end ...... for me at least. The next day a very dishevelled, bruised and indignant Chris told me how he had decided at about 2am that merely walking over Hopetoun bridge to get home to Grey Lynn (virtually a straight line for you out of towners) didn't seem at all the right way to proceed & had instead climbed a fence to 'cut across the motorway'. He spent several  hours wandering up & down the otherside of the motorway trying to find a way off & eventually fell onto his tailbone climbing down a fence to escape. Ahh it's a story that always makes me happy - schadenfreude, I guess.

Roy