Ginglik is a small venue near my house, in Shepherd's Bush, West London. It's run by Tammi and Colin, two good friends of mine. They took over the old public toilets on the Green from the old snooker halls that used to be there about 7 years ago. I helped paint the place when they first moved in there, and I saw them turn the place from a dingy snooker hall where everything but snooker took place, to a vibrant local music, comedy and community venue, unique in this area of London. We don't have many good independent venues round here, and Ginglik became the best place in the west of London to see up-and-coming acts and hear good independent music.
In 2009, Hammersmith and Fulham council are planning a vast redevelopment of the Shepherd's Bush Green area to coincide with the launch of the massive £1.6bn Westfield Shopping Centre that is currently being finished off behind the shop fronts on the North side of the Green. The mall will almost certainly ring the death knell for the shopping areas in Hammersmith and most of the small shops and local businesses in Shepherd's Bush. As part of this, Hammersmith & Fulham Council want to close Ginglik, and fill the venue with concrete. They claim that the roof of Ginglik is unsafe (which is possibly true), and that the damp problem and frequent flooding mean that the total cost of making the club fit for purpose could reach upwards of £300,000. Whether or not this price is correct, the loss of a venue like Ginglik would be tragic for the local area, meaning a lack of good independent venues from Ealing to Notting Hill. The council claim that the good of the local residents is their primary objective, and that too much money would need to be spent to save Ginglik. Of course, the council have known of the problems of the building for years and their decision to dispute the terms of occupancy now is more to do with their development of the area than any perceived advantage to the local area. Perhaps the development company should have spent some of the money they wasted on the terrible logo design for the £1.6bn Westfield Shopping Centre on saving a vital local resource.
This weekend, Tammi and Colin organized a "Save Ginglik" protest on the Green, above the venue itself. It was a show of strength for the community and proved to the council the depth of feeling of local residents. Cars hooted their support as they passed and numerous people came and joined the protest, the police walked past smiling and nodding their support.
It would be awful if the club was closed and there is a chance that if enough people sign the petition then the short-sighted, money orientated council may rethink their idiotic policy. I hope they do.
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I found out a while ago about the Skydeck on the 54th floor roof of the Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills, and have been wanting to go up there ever since. Eri and I actually went there a few weeks back, but the threat of lightening was enough for it to be closed to the public. Yesterday though, it was open and we finally managed to get up there. Having carried around my tripod all day, I was intensely annoyed to find out that tripods were not allowed up there, along with bags, hats, and various other "dangerous" items. I actually saw one girl with her Vuitton bag in one of the Roppongi Hills clear plastic safety bags (obviously it was too valuable to be stashed in a locked), but the sight of someone being allowed to carry a bag only when safely encased in another bag amused me & Eri no end. The view from the top was pretty stunning, although it was a little shocking to see how much more of the pollution you can see from that high up - from below it all just looks like high clouds. The lack of a tripod did make some of the photos a little less clean than they should have been, but they were alright in the end. The sky-aquariuuum (to quote the security guard), was also fun, but not as fun as the girl I was standing next to at the top of the tower, with her (no doubt, long suffering) boyfriend. Seeing a dark black area on the ground between Roppongi and Shinjuku (it was Yoyogi Park), she asked her boyfriend if it was an ocean or just a sea. Her boyfriend sighed and replied that it was a park...a forest. She laughed and called him a liar, and asked again. Then she said what must be the stoopidest thing I have ever heard - pointing to Shinjuku (less than 10km away, across the "sea"), she asked how far it was to "America". The boy sighed again, looked down as if yet again weighing up the merits of a quick leap to suicidial peace, shrugged and led her off, presumably for a geography lesson (or a bit of domestic violence). Young love.
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Nice to see that the Japanese police are living up to their reputations as the most incompetent police in the 1st (ish) world. In what has to be the funniest piece of happy-news this year, Japanese police officers at Narita Airport planted half a bar of weed on some poor bastard at the airport, in the hope that the airport's sniffer dogs would find it. They didn't and the officer apparently forgot which bag he put it in, allowing the passenger to walk off with the dope. Brilliant. Serves the fuckers right. It's interesting, in all the reports I have read about it, the officers said how sorry they were that the mistake was made, but none of them seem at all guilty about planting weed on some poor passenger in the first place. I can't imagine anything much worse than a bunch of sniffer dogs attacking and then police actually finding drugs on you, particularly somewhere like this with the laws here. Imagine the trouble they would have been in if they had planted it on someone with a heart condition or something...Unforgiveable behaviour. Shocking...but time for some lucky so-and-so to get high!
