dekstop: weblog

I thought I should start documenting some of the places I found in London. I'm mainly moving around in the north-east, in Hackney, Islington and sometimes Camden, but I've also been to Notting Hill for the carnival (tourist fest) and of course seen the center. To me it currently seems like London shares a similar east-west divide with Berlin, in that the West is the more established, richer London, but the East is where it's at, where the interesting stuff happens. Haven't been to Brixton yet though, so there still much to explore. And while I'm exploring I'd like to share with you a random selection of the memorable places I found.

(Views from the office roof.)

Once Upon a Time in Hoxton

First of all, Hoxton Square -- it's not a very exciting place per se, more of a hangout of the borderline mainstream young-professionals-and-older crowd. But it used to look quite different just a couple of years ago, when Shoreditch (I'm told) wasn't the horrible mating place of the international hipster crowd it is now.

In one of the corner buildings of Hoxton Square you'll find a café-slash-bar, "Bluu", which used to be the setting of a quite famous club called Blue Note. They hosted, among others, the monthly Metalheadz label night in the mid-90ies. I've been there once, around 1996 (?), with a couple of friends. One friend got the tip by a shoe salesgirl who showed us how to get there with a tube map, and walking the then-deserted roads of Shoreditch/Hoxton was quite a different experience than it is now. And yet it turned out to become one of the most memorable nights ever... Amazing mixture of music (I distinctly remember a sped-up mix of some "3 Feet"-era De La Soul track), and a really great crowd.

Sadly this was pre-omniscient Internet, so it may be impossible to find out who was playing that particular night. But I found an informative reminiscence of a long-gone more racially mixed pre-hipster Hackney on the Samar Magazine website, with a few sentences about Blue Note in the first paragraph: Once Upon a Time in Hoxton.

Oblig Pop

Last.fm tag of the day: officially shit. Great bird's eye view on the current state of major label pop. See also razo9's indignant commentary on hater tags: "I have to say, the officially shit radio is some of the best listening in last.fm."

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