Christmas in Ibiza

This year has been my the first Christmas I've spent in my adopted homeland of Ibiza, and I doubt it will be the last ;) Being a spiritual, but not a religious person (at least in the Christian sense), Christmas holds a lot of contradictions for me. I love the idea of Christmas in principle, I think it's important to have a time of year when you can get together with family, put your problems and stresses with yourself and others aside, if only for one day, and enjoy your life and family for what and who they are.

Unfortunately, this base idea of Christmas has been transformed in many people's minds by corporations and capitalism into a time of stress, greed, and competition. Every Christmas I spend in England seems to make me feel further and further away from this idea of unconditional love and acceptance that I want to be able to feel from others and give in return. Christmas these days apparently isn't Christmas without a tree hung to the rafters with chintzy decorations, trying to outdo everyone with the best present, the best Christmas dinner, family members getting drunk and arguing about inconsequential nonsense, the order, the tradition, the planning, the excess. We're brought up to feel that without these things, it's not really Christmas. We stress about creating the 'perfect' Christmas, as if it's something that's attainable only by throwing more and more cash and planning at it.

Because of this, I was a little worried about spending Christmas here in Ibiza, away from my family in England. I love my Mum and my Sisters with all my heart, and being away from them for only the second Christmas in my 29 years wasn't really by choice, but through a lack of money and deadlines for work which need to be completed by the new year. It turns out, I shouldn't have been worried though. Like all the best days in Ibiza, Christmas here came together with the minimum of fuss, drama and planning and I couldn't have been happier about it. Because nobody in my Ibiza family has any money right now (it's the middle of the Winter, and with Ibiza being such a seasonal place, most people just work for the 4 months of the Summer, and those that stay for the Winter just 'get by'), there was no exchanging of gifts. There wasn't a tree. There wasn't any snow (I've only ever seen it snow in Ibiza once, and that lasted about 10 minutes). There wasn't any carols. There wasn't any crappy Christmas movies that everyone had seen a million times before. There wasn't a bad word spoken about anyone or anything. But there was love, in abundance.

Because of this, strangely, it ended up being the most Christmassy Christmas I think I've ever had, and I'd like to take this opportunity to bestow a million thanks on my Ibiza family in general, with special mentions going to Sarah for her amazing hospitality and cooking (with help from Joleen). Without these people, I wouldn't still be here on the island. I love you all, and every day that I live here, I'm thankful that I have each and every one of you in my life and in my family. You're my family not through bloodlines, but through choice, and the fact that you could just as easily choose not to include me in your daily lives is reason enough to give thanks. :)

You can see all the photos I took in my Picasa Album.

I'm seldom dead (yet).

Ok, well, I had my eye test. The good news is that my eyes are still the same withered stumps at the end of my ocular nerves they were two years ago, they haven't got any worse. 

The better news is that despite not speaking any english (perhaps for the better), the optemetrist wasn't a wrinkled pervy old hag-man, neither was she so hot that I nearly had her eye out (see previous post). In fact, she was just the right amount of cuteness for an optometrist. Cute enough that I felt comfortable telling her random letters from a board at the other end of the galaxy, but not so hot that I felt the need to rearrange the letters into haiku's about how shaggable she was. Not that it would have made any difference, what with the no hablar ingles situation that was going on. Even the chair was more Sloggi than Anne Summers. Every little bit helps. 

I think she was actually quite into me - she said she was going to call me, and we had some great eye-contact going on. 

Game on for cute Spanish Sloggi optometrists.

If I don't make it out alive, I'm probably dead.

I'm scared. Well, I'm always scared. But today, I'm more scared. Today I have an eye test. In Ibiza. 

For those fortunate enough to have perfect vision, I envy you. You'll never have had to endure the terror that is the eye test. An eye test is bad enough in english. There's 2 ways an eye test can go in England:

• Some reeking old giffer will drag you into a broom closet, where he'll stick needles in your eyes and affront you physically and nasally. He'll deluge you with a million pictures, and then bring one single image to crystal clarity... and beyond. Usually, the perverted old fart will try and take advantage of the fact that you can't see anything, and are bewildered and confused in a darkened room by asking you to identify objects from across the room: 
  "Can you see what this is?"
  "No."
  "HAHAHAHAHAHA! And what's this?"
  "An.... egg?"
  "I'll give you a clue, it's either a spoon, or the Gobi Desert."
  "A spoon?"
  "FOOL! I tricked you! It's a double-decker bus! Ok, this next one is either my penis, or a Cornish Pasty, which is it?"
  
  You get the idea. This guy will end up suggesting a pair of gold-rimmed specs twice the size of your head look great on you. 
• On the other hand, you'll get some mega-hot-and-knows-it optomotrist. She'll lead you into a room that's hotter than the Sun, and sit you in a bondage chair. You have two choices: Leave your jacket on, and burn to death, or take it off and risk exposing the massive boner you're carrying around. She dims the lights to something more romantic. The conditions are perfect...
  
  Just so you know, from my experience, these things never work out like porn, which is a shame, cos I could think of some great positions with that freaky chair. You leave with blue balls and the means to see them clearly.

Either way, you're going to end up pretty scarred for life. On top of this, the optometrist literally holds the keys to your life in their hand: On their whim, they can make you a social outcast for the next year by suggesting a pair of glasses that will make you look like Salman Rushdie having an allergic reaction to getting stung in the eye by a jellyfish. Or they can suggest something nicer, that pushes you to the outskirts of social acceptability. "But it's your choice, surely??" I hear you say. Oh no, these guys are totally skilled in mind manipulation techniques. They'll use phrases like "These ones make your nose look smaller" and "Have you ever thought about plastic surgery?" to make you choose the glasses they want you to wear. Trust me, don't get on the bad side of an optemetrist. You'll be broke and looking like an aged hooker going for the pity vote within a week. As you can see, somehow, I've managed to get on the bad side of several optometrists in my lifetime. 

So as if that wasn't bad enough, I'll be having my eye test here in Spain. I booked an appointment at one of the Dr. Mari opticians in Ibiza town. There's over a billion Dr. Mari's in Ibiza town, and I'm not sure which one it is I booked myself in at now. All the glasses in there look a bit mental, and it looks like I'm going to have to revive my Dame Edna Everedge look in order to make it through the next year alive. But the biggest kick in the balls is going to be that the eye test is going to be in Spanish. I can see this being a bit hard, so I've swatted up on some key questions they might ask me, just so I can try and get through this ordeal in one piece:

• ¿Qué es más clara, un presente, un presente o?
  
• ¿Que es un astigmatismo en el bolsillo, o se acaba el placer de verme?
  
• Esta es una de Pasty de Cornualles, o mi pene, lo que es?
  

Everywhere you go... there you are.

How does something that on paper seems so right, simultaneously feel so wrong? Having said that, how, given 2 choices, do I always end up choosing the wrong one? Is it just me, or is the whole of mankind fatally doomed to make these same mistakes? Will there ever come a time when I can confidently delete David Gray from my music collection, knowing that I'll never need his services again?

Let me back up a bit. Last week, things seemed to be working out for me. I was finally back home in Ibiza, my flat is in the process of being plastered so it no longer looks like a backdrop for Armageddon, I've got a few gigs leading up to the start of the season, and there's design work flooding in thick and fast. The whole mess with Dad back home has finally been sorted out, with him now legally not allowed back in the house. In fact, the only thing that's not perfect in the world of Fus is that Marisa is 6000 miles away back in LA.

Having a long distance relationship is not easy at the best of times, and when you factor in 9 time zones worth of difference, and the fact that you've seen each other 24/7 for virtually the whole of the previous year, things start to get really hard.

Under these circumstances, I become crap. I mean really crap. Whereas when Marisa was with me, I could have a conversation and keep it up for a bit (I'll not profess to be the best conversationalist in the first place), when faced with astronomical distances, and an unknown time span before we'll next meet, I just seize up. All I can think is "I love you" and "I miss you", and before you know it, I'm avoiding her instant messaging conversations for fear of boring the tits off her.

So.. eventually it came. I had a feeling it would. And yet I did nothing to stop it. WHY??

The email saying that I've been crap at communicating, and that Marisa has no intention of coming back to Ibiza, and where is this relationship going? Is it a relationship if neither of us are prepared to live where the other does? She's right, of course, I have been crap at communicating, and we have barely spoken since she's been back home. For that, I'm sorry.

I end up staring at the email on screen for about 5 hours. I knew it was coming, and yet nothing could have prepared me for each and every word slicing through my heart like a dagger. Practically everything that was in that email, I agreed with, and yet my instinctive reaction was to fight it. Here in front of me, ASCII text was ending a chapter of my life, and all I can do is dumbly hit reply and seal my fate.

So is this it? Over a years relationship over just like that? A million conversations, a thousand "I Love You's", a billion thoughts of the other person culminated and encapsulated by 2Kb of text? And even though I still love her totally and without question, there's not a single thing I can say against it. If she doesn't want to live here in Ibiza, and I can't live there in LA, what are we going to do? What can you do other than the fair thing and let each other get on with their lives? Am I ready to get on with my life?

It's easy, retrospectively, to look back and think how stupid you'd been. I had this dream in my head that I'd get the flat ready before Marisa came back over, and we'd live happily with our wee cat round the corner from the beach. But really, thinking about it realistically, what is there for Marisa here? There's no Marisa music, no Marisa bars, no Marisa people, no Marisa food. No wonder she hated it.

So given the current situation, the only right thing seems to let it go. We helped each other through a lot of shit. We had a lot of good times, and not many bad. Seemingly, the only things stopping us having a perfect relationship are 6,000 miles and my inability to say anything of any remote interest to her ridiculously clever brain.

I can only hope that one day this island releases it's grip on me, and I'm able to function as a normal human being somewhere where she is too. Until then, everything I see and hear seems to continue to remind me of her... fragments of Tegan and Sara songs, every time one of her millions of pictures appears on my desktop, a memory of how I used to look into her eyes and feel her crazily brilliant mind ripping my soul bare... and thinking that's all I ever wanted.

On paper, the list of things in my life I always imagined would make me happy are nearly complete... House by the beach, an island full of free and easy people, house music, our cat, and Marisa. Now none of it means anything because I'm crap and she hates this place. How can you possibly have some kind of resolution from this situation? I never stopped loving her. She's not dead. She wasn't a bitch to me. Suddenly... she's just not there any more, except in a sepia memory of our relationship constantly looping in my head.. taking MDMA at Ben's house... a diagram showing the relationship of hot chocolate and.... something... a mattress on the floor of Moby's. Watching House... Walking to Bora Bora... A 90km taxi ride out of Granada. Chipping paint off the walls... Did I just make all that up? Where did it come from? Where did it go? I can only take heart from the fact that I don't regret a single moment of it, and I loved her for every single second we were together, and that I tried to be the best boyfriend I could be. I'm sorry that turned out to be not enough. I love you Marisa Prietto, x.

Happy New... oh... wait... umm..

So it's been a while since I posted last, and I'm feeling a little guilty about it, because I've been doing so much, but just not had chance to write. I thought I'd start the new year with a quick run-down of some stuff I've been up to since my last post, after that I'll just ad-lib until I get bored. You'll be bored way before that, so by that point it won't matter. I'll litter this post with pictures to help those who can't read good (and maybe want to do other stuff good, too).

In my last post, I was back in Ibiza, and continuing to be an international menace to ugly dogs everywhere. Don't ask me why, these things are important to me. The sad thing was, for the whole 2 and a half months that me and Marisa were there, it pretty much pelted it down, and most of the time the weather was worse than if we'd have stayed in England.

Luckily the rain cleared up a bit while my Mum and Sister visited, which gave us and excuse to rent a car for the week, and get around the island a bit more than what I normally do.

Harriet (Chesty La Spew), Alice (Wee in Wonderland), Marisa (Yellow Pages), and the Mother Fus on Sant. Salinas Beach.


Es Vedra


The Church/Library at Sant. Miguel


The caves at Sant. Miguel

After they went home, it went back to pretty much business as usual, although of course things picked up for Krystle's birthday, which in Ibicencan circles is well known as a poor excuse to go to Ancient People (possibly one of the best curry houses on the face of the Earth, and that's coming from someone who was born in Bradistan) followed by a long bout of getting well and truly fucked up at Sid's new bar, Blu. It's not everyone who get's to have their own private party at an Ibiza club DJ'd by 3 internationally renowned DJ's. And me.

My story is that they warmed up for me, and I'm sticking to it.

"I've got the Key, I've got the Secret, I've got the key to some seriously cheesy old-skool anthems


Professional Argentinian bubble-blower.


Sharon encouraged us all to party responsibly. Presumably so there would be more for her.


Anton cooks up the old-skool, while Jimmy does something involving Glee, Scottishness and Shiftiness (some may argue that those two are much the same thing).


DJ Toga - one half of the Girls Skool dream team.


DJ B Fly. Reeeeeeewind selectah! Bo Bo Bo! And all that Jazz.

After playing at Krystle's party, Sid asked me to play at Blu every week, which has been really fun, and following this, the owner is trying to get me a regular slot on Spanish radio station, Sonica. Hopefully I won't have to speak too much Spanish, as this could make things a little tricky :s.

I also attended my first lesbian wedding reception. Angie and Jo from the Queen Vic (next door to our flat in Ibiza) finally tied the knot, and had a fantastic party near Sant. Antonio. Luckily they chose not to have a DJ (or I think I would have killed someone - I've done far too many wedding receptions in my time), choosing instead to have an amazing singer while everyone got stoned on the roof of the villa.

Cutting the cake.


Scottish people and weed go together like Welsh people and sheep.


Krystle let the rooftop dancing all night, long after all the rest of us had caught pneumonia in the crazy-cold.

For Marisa's birthday at the end of November, Marisa's Dad was nice enough to send us to Granada for some much-needed R+R. He never mentioned that the place he was sending us to was halfway up a mountain 90 miles from anywhere though. Strangely, getting an internet connection halfway up a mountain is no problem compared to trying to get one in Ibiza, go figure. Casa Anna in Pituses (where we were staying) turned out to be absolutely beautiful though, and it was definitely nice to get out of the Moby's flat ;)

A double-decker bus. Just kidding, they're really mountains.


The view outside our window at Casa Ana.


Ana herself. She seemed strangely impressed by our culinary skills. Because of her remote location, little is known as to whether she survived my Chicken Curry.


Pituses. Population: 18.


There were cat-types everywhere, all with nothing better to do than pose for photos.


- See above.


Huge Carpenter Bee-types - I don't know if they stung, but I didn't really feel like sticking around to find out.


The scenery around Granada airport.


The scenery around Manchester airport. Welcome back to the UK.

So... back in Blighty. The only reason for coming back to the UK was really to do some gigs that I'd promised I would over December (all cheesy corporate stuff) - not what I'd really wanted to do, but I'd said I would before I knew any better. Besides, the money was good, and I was good for the money. I finally got my grubby mitts on a Kaoss Pad 3 (I've been working on a website for Maureen, and She wanted to pay me in Kaoss Pad... I tried not to argue too much in case she changed her mind), the only problem was that the power block was rated for US voltage of course, not UK, so as soon as I plugged the KP in, it fried. I nearly stabbed myself with it I was so annoyed with myself. Grrrr. I'm still working out how I can get it replaced without having to shell out too much money (customs already took £50 off me for the privilege of receiving it as a 'gift', bless their hearts, and Korg UK refuse to even let me send it to them, it being a US model).

To console myself, I bought myself a Wacom Bamboo tablet to replace my old Graphire, which lost its stylus many moons ago. The new one feels much nicer, and is twice the size, so I'm very happy about that :)

So... we're into 2008, what's next? Well, tomorrow my Dad will learn of the plot to have him forcibly removed from the family home. Everyone has asked him nicely to leave (for those not in the know, my dad is an alcoholic psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder - seriously, he's a psychiatrist's wet dream), so now Mum's asking for a restraining order from the courts. It's a shame it's come to this, but he won't listen to reason and he's making everyone's life a nightmare, so there's not really any other option any more. When he finds out about it we're predicting temper tantrums, so we're all going to stay with friends for the weekend, until the court hearing on Monday, when he will have to leave the house. We'll be having a huge party on Friday night to celebrate.

Then Saturday will be another weird one for me - I'm going to Scotland for the first time in my life (it's an old school-friend's wedding). The whole weekend is going to be a bit touch-and-go, as on Sunday I fly back home to Ibiza. Of course the wedding had to be not just in Scotland, but pretty much as far North in the UK as you can go without dying of hypothermia in the North Sea (not really my ideal way to die, and yes, I do have one).

Rinse, and repeat ;)

Tour Glamour

After agreeing down at Ancient People to play at a new night in Ibiza town, I also said I would do the flyers for the night so that I could get my name around the island a little more. After much to-and-froing of proofs, it's starting to get to a point where everyone is happy with it... have a look... I'll post the final version if it changes much from this....

In case you're wondering, those are Marisa's legs lol :)

The rain in Spain falls mainly on us.

We've been without power in our flat for 3 days now. As an extra insult, it rained like a bastard today. It's been pretty rainy for as long as we've been without electricity (which has made it pretty pointless to bum showers and laptop recharges off friends for the most part), but today the sky caved in and it sheeted from the heavens for most of the day. While I was out buying Coca-cola from the bodega, I had a conversation with the tranny behind the counter in Spanglish about the 'fatal' weather problems. Apparently in Alicante cars are being washed down the street. He/She didn't tell me this in so many words, but he/she/it was being so vocal about what was going on I can only imagine that must be the case.

We were supposed to be taking charge of Krystle's dwarf-hamsters, Eenie and Meenie today, because She doesn't love them any more, but instead we ended up looking after her dog, Dougal for the afternoon. Dougal is possibly the ugliest dog in the history of the world. He looks like an uglier version of the space alien in Lilo and Stitch. In between torrential torrents of rain, we took him for a walk on the beach, where he terrorized all the old men. I want a dog. If you live in Ibiza, you're not cool unless you own a small, stupid, ugly dog. The smaller, uglier, and more stupid your dog, the more standing in elite coke-nose circles you have. You'll see a large contingient of the Pacha VIP crowd on the beach every morning walking their insults to the canine beauty world, and sniffing coke out of a wine bottle. True story.

Anyway, back to the important parts of this post: for the moment, we have power, after running an extension cord down to the bar, we are now stealing power from Moby's, which means we have one (1) power outlet.

The other thing is, we need to name the hamsters, preferably before they arrive and we have time to work out their hamster personalities (if they happen to have them. The choices at the moment are:

• Pancakes and Syrup
• Bebop and Rocksteady
• Emmie and Gorgia
• Dave and Malaria

We don't know if they're girls or boys yet, and perhaps this information will never come to light, as I for one am not really 'au fait' with sexing small rodents.

Home is where the heart is

So I've been back in Ibiza for nearly 2 weeks now, and barely had any time (or connection) to sit down and sort out all my internet stuff. As always in this place, there's a million and one things goign on all at once, and I'm just so happy to be back home. Already the madness of the island has set in, and within 10 minutes of being on the island and getting down to Moby's, we were being fed pills by people we didn't even know.

I feel like even in these 2 weeks of being back I've done so much that I could only dream about while being back home - I've been to set up the DJ booth in Pacha for Erick Morillo, and at the same time got a glimpse of the backstage areas of the club (I never knew anything about the huge workshops that they have attached to the club - pretty much everything that they use is made on site!), I've also been to Chris Leibing's villa party at 8am and auditioned for DJing at Penelope's that's opening in Barcelona.

We're currently in the process of finding a definite place to live - a couple of days ago we saw a perfect one-bedroom flat in the port in Ibiza town, it was a little out of our price range, but if we can make it work it will be much nicer than staying in the crappy Moby's apartment!

As soon as we're all sorted and have a proper internet connection, I'll write a longer post, I also have the Penelope's Demo CD which I'll put on the podcast, but for now, click the pictures above to see a couple of albums of what we've been up to since we've been here!

No man is an island...

Well, it was going to happen sooner or later - I'm finally going back to the island! I really can't wait - I'm getting so homesick right now, and I'm missing everyone out there so much! There's a huge part of me that's so relieved that I have a date to go back home - I arrive back in Ibiza at midnight on the 18th of August. I just want to run round and use exclamation marks at the end of every sentence! Nothing is getting in my way of that small pleasure! Nothing!

Of course, I've just had the normal run-down from my Dad about the whole thing - until now he was forcing me out of the house into a cardboard box on the streets of Leeds. Suddenly he's all "What's wrong with living here?" and "Are you sure you're going to be ok in Ibiza??" - errm. I think I've lived out there long enough already to be able to be ok, thanks Dad. Everybody seems to be acting really surprised about the whole thing, like they expected that I'd got Ibiza out of my system already, and now I'd settle down, get a mortgage and have 24 kids or something. Sorry to disappoint you everyone, but I can't do that right now. England is doing nothing for my happiness right now, and I'm sorry to say, but Ibiza was my home (and will be for as far into the future as I can see right now), and has been since the day I got there.

I'm not entirely sure how things are going to work out on the island just yet - I know it's the off-season, but I've got enough web design work to be getting on with, so hopefully that will keep me going for a little while at least. I hope so anyway, because I've just bought myself a brand spanking new laptop. My old one is falling to pieces, and I really want to be able to mess around on Ableton again, and be able to have more than 2 plugins going at the same time, it's kinda limiting me right now. That and the fact that my laptop's power supply feels like it's going to blow up at any moment, and I've normally got a pretty good feeling about these things.

I actually really like the island off-season. There's no tourists for a start, which means you can pretty much have the beach to yourself. Also, a lot of the locals don't work through the Winter, which means that everyone ends up at each other's houses watching House, and anything else English on the FX network.

Things I'm missing about the island:

• All the usual suspects (in no particular order) - Jimmy, Krystle, Ben, Donald, Milena, Linda, Janey Pie, Tamara, Lucky, Andy, Havier, and all the rest of them.
• Never knowing where you're going to be at 6am.
  
• Hash
• Sun rises
• The beach
• Staying in to keep cool, not to keep warm
• Cheesy Spanish Telly
• Shops that are just a front for selling drugs
• Walking everywhere
• Seeing everyone you know even if you just pop out to the shops for a croissant (a 2 minute walk generally ends up taking about half an hour)
• Pacha (there's so much I miss about this place - the funky room, Subliminal Sessions, Vaugn, the anticipation of getting dropped off in the taxi outside, coming out and finding it's light outside, the walk home, the woman selling chupachups in the toilets...)
• Bar Sin

I could go on and on and on, but I'm going back there in 2 weeks! Yayayayayayyyyyyy!!!!!

Scare the Children

As well as working on a new Ruforia mix over the last couple of days, I've been working on a new track called "Scare the Children". I started out with an idea that I wanted to create a "main room at Space" (Ibiza) track: ugly, nasty, and dark - in short, just a little bit eeevil. The only problem is, it's getting to the point where it's actually starting to scare me! The breakdown consists of a load of hellish sounds and evil chanting. It's actually sounding more like a techno track than a house track, but I'm not going to get in the way of how it's sounding right now lol!

Back to the island...

Agh! It seems like every day I spend here I get more frustrated with this country. All I want to do is live in Ibiza with Marisa and DJ. Is that too much to ask? Instead, I'm stuck here, working a crappy job once a week, and having to put up with my Dad being a complete fucktard in between. He still seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that somebody wants him to be in this house, and that he can go have an affair, blame us for it, then just force himself back into the house and that everyone will respect him for it. He went to counselling for six weeks, then stopped because he thought he was a shiny new touchy feely person. No, Dad, all it did was give you new manipulative avenues to explore, it put a glossy sheen on the same old narcissistic control freak.

The other day I just completely lost it with him. I started shouting and screaming and this whole torrent of swear words came out of my mouth because he'd put me down about the same thing every single day for a week. After I phoned mum to speak to her so I could calm down a bit, he had the cheek to ask me "Do you want Your Mum and me to get back together? Do you really think it was the most considerate thing to tell her about this?". Believe me Dad, I don't think that incident could lower her opinion of you any further, and being considerate to you wasn't exactly my most pressing issue at that moment in time.

The fact of the matter is that no, I think them getting back together would quite possibly be the worst idea in history, and that the only person who could possibly benefit from it would be.... yep, you guessed it, Dad. And not even for any good reasons. Not because he loves Mum, or his kids, but simply so that he can regain his manipulative stranglehold. Not exactly a great basis for a relationship with anyone.

He tried to complain today about the fact that me and Marisa lead very nocturnal lives, and tried to force us to take up a "more responsible" lifestyle by being awake during the day. The sad thing is that the reason we stay up as much as possible at night is so that we have to speak to him as little as possible.