Posts (page 2)
Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.
On the good side, I have at least five copies of
New Dance
left, if anybody wants one signed and with the little book signing gift I spent time constructing. I'd really like to sell these in the next week, cos I need a new pair of boots.
$15 if you live in Ann Arbor or Ypslanti and i can take it to you on the bus (or you can come pick it up)
$20 elsewhere in the U$ (for shipping costs)
$25 airmail (that's only £15.37)
Signed and dedicated on request.
Originally published at Pump It Up! a Revival ModCast. You can comment here or there.
OK, yes, I know I was going to post this yesterday, but eh, shit comes up. Actually, yesterday, I spent most of the day stressing out and goofing off to try and relieve some stress, and I didn't even give the cats their wet food, cos that was just one more stressor in my life, and as much as i love doing this, so is this podcast.Why so stressed? Because I'm having a book signing for my second novel (the first in what I'm calling "The Mod Stories"), and I'm just anticipating nothing going right. Why? It so rarely does. I mean, already, I can tell I'm in for a real doozy, cos only today, did Lindsay tell me that my name has been added to the poster 9and this event has been secured since January, and was supposed to happen in July, but hey, last minute scheduling conflicts are like the Father Dougal to my Father Ted).
That said, if you're stuck in or (gods forbid) plan to be in the Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti, Michigan (U$A), area this Thursday, 27 August 2009, then come down to (or rather up to) The Heidelberg Club Above for Direct Hits, the area's only Mod / Trad Skin / Retro night — in fact, it's the only one I know of until you get to either Chicago or New York City. This month, the Big Event is "Bomb Pop Boutique" and will feature a gallery of local artists, a mini fashion show from The GetUp Vintage Clothing on State Street in Ann Arbor, and yours truly, hawking his second novel and selling his top-quality crap. All copies of the novel will come with a CD-R of next week's Modcast (most of which I consider to be "themes" for various characters), a set of buttons for the novel, and a hand-written coupon for $4 off my first novel (e-mail me for details).
[display_podcast]
2009-08-25
The Tabe-beatles - All's Right With the World
Nouvelle Vague - Come On Eileen
Brian Auger Trinity - In & Out
Mari Wilson - Beat the Beat
Prince - I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man
The Singles - The Most Beautiful Girl
B-52s - Strobe Light
Art Brut - Direct Hit
The Chesterfield Kings - Outside Chance
Revillos - Voodoo
The Love Me Nots - Dark City
Van Morrison - Ro Ro Rosey
The Jam - English Rose
Style Council - Long Hot Summer (Club Mix)
Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.
Fnord!
Music used with no permission whatsoever, but I once interviewed Rodney Anonymous for a 'zine, so that's, like, well, not really anything, really....
Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.
four times a year!
Originally published at Pump It Up! a Revival ModCast. You can comment here or there.
Well, monkeys (all three of you listening to this), I've got a new computer finally settled in, and so the Modcast is back, and to commerate this fact — and the fact that I'm now updating this on Mondays — I've made today's cast a theme! Whoo!Yes, I've thrown mood and beatmatching out the window (and I say this as if I ever gave a shit before), to play some of my favourite spooky Mod (and Mod Friendly) songs and Goth covers of Mod (and Mod-friendly) songs, and a few punk covers thrown in, (cos I don't even give a shit about the theme here) and whatever the hell Shakespeare's Sister and Strawberry Switchblade are (cos I bloody well felt like it), cos damnit, I have all this music, and you're just as bored as I am, so you're going to give it a listen now, aren't you? Aren't you?
[display_podcast]
Shakespeare's Sister - "Black Sky"
Velvet Underground - "Beginning to See the Light"
Nico - "Roses In the Snow"
The Fall - "Mod Mock Goth"
Slade - "Raven"
Strawberry Switchblade - "Ecstasy (Apple of My Eye)"
The Zombies - "Time Of the Season"
Christine Pilzer - "Dracula"
The Vampires - "My Girl"
Sisters of Mercy - "1969"
Gina X Performance - "Harley Davidson"
Siouxie & the Banshees - "This Wheel's On Fire"
Bauhaus - "Telegram Sam"
Patti Smith - "My Generation"
Jayne County - "Come On Down to My Boat Baby"
Nashville Pussy - "First I Look At the Purse"
Lydia Lunch & Rowland S Howard - "Some Velvet Morning"
The Who - "Boris the Spider"
And before the off-chance that anybody comments, YES, I realise that I don't have "Paint It Black" on there, because I only have it on vinyl, I am not wheeling my record player into my studio, slsk is not cooperating, and I'm impatient — so there you go.
Originally published at Pump It Up! a Revival ModCast. You can comment here or there.
Well, monkeys (all three of you listening to this), I've got a new computer finally settled in, and so the Modcast is back, and to commerate this fact — and the fact that I'm now updating this on Mondays — I've made today's cast a theme! Whoo!Yes, I've thrown mood and beatmatching out the window (and I say this as if I ever gave a shit before), to play some of my favourite spooky Mod (and Mod Friendly) songs and Goth covers of Mod (and Mod-friendly) songs, and a few punk covers thrown in, (cos I don't even give a shit about the theme here) and whatever the hell Shakespeare's Sister and Strawberry Switchblade are (cos I bloody well felt like it), cos damnit, I have all this music, and you're just as bored as I am, so you're going to give it a listen now, aren't you? Aren't you?
[display_podcast]
Shakespeare's Sister - "Black Sky"
Velvet Underground - "Beginning to See the Light"
Nico - "Roses In the Snow"
The Fall - "Mod Mock Goth"
Slade - "Raven"
Strawberry Switchblade - "Ecstasy (Apple of My Eye)"
The Zombies - "Time Of the Season"
Christine Pilzer - "Dracula"
The Vampires - "My Girl"
Sisters of Mercy - "1969"
Gina X Performance - "Harley Davidson"
Siouxie & the Banshees - "This Wheel's On Fire"
Bauhaus - "Telegram Sam"
Patti Smith - "My Generation"
Jayne County - "Come On Down to My Boat Baby"
Nashville Pussy - "First I Look At the Purse"
Lydia Lunch & Rowland S Howard - "Some Velvet Morning"
The Who - "Boris the Spider"
And before the off-chance that anybody comments, YES, I realise that I don't have "Paint It Black" on there, because I only have it on vinyl, I am not wheeling my record player into my studio, slsk is not cooperating, and I'm impatient — so there you go.
Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.
The room-mate and I went to Ikea today. I'm convinced that Ikea is a plot of the Swedish government for world domination.We went there cos his mother said that the meatballs in the Ikea restaurant were really good — but we were disappointed to see that the "restaurant" was actually a canteen with a few very basic items — and cos Scott read this news story where somebody at the Vatican claimed that this really innocent photo in the latest Ikea catalogue of two men on a couch in a drawing room "endorsed homosexuality" and the Ikea company head said "Yes! As a matter of fact, they are gay! People living in the modern world don't have a problem with that!"
On our way out of the canteen area — cos it's designed in a way to make you forget the way you came in — we passed through a bunch of stuff and I wound up getting a lot of crap for $20. OK, it was all crap that I kind of needed anyway, but the fact that they've designed the store in such a way that you have to pass through this all, and these supposed "shortcuts" are actually few and far-between, meant I wound up getting a bunch of crap.
On the good side of Ikea, they carry a mechanical alarm clock and their mechanical alarm clock is $7 and has all-metal gears. The only plastic in it is the face. The old mechanical I had cost $10 at K-Mart in 1999 and is full of plastic gears.
Wait? Good side? IT'S PART OF THEIR PLOT! It's all a part of their plot, I tells ya'. A pack of eight wooden hangers for $3.50, compared to Target's price of $8 for six -- Swedish government plot!
The Swedes will take over either by our willingness to succumb to the Ikean lure of low cost quality home furnishings or by entrapping us in the labyrinthine hell that is their store design.
Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.
God said, "Fuck, that Sodom is full of wickedness. I'ma blow it up.", and then Abraham (who was God's co-pilot at the time) went, "WHAT?! My cousin lives in Sodom! Would you destroy the good with the bad!?" and God say, "Uh, yeah, that's kinda my thing. But I see you're upset by this, and so I'll said a couple of my angels down to scope the place out. If I can find 50 righteous dudes in the city, I'll spare it."
And Abraham thought to himself, "Uh, shit. Lot's told me about Sodom. Ain't no way these angels are gonna find fifty.", so he said, "Uh, how about, um. One? I can send you to his place, the angels can crash out." And God said, "Dude, this sort of haggling is why your people get a reputation. Twenty." And they haggle like that, until God and Abraham agree that if the angels find five righteous dudes, Sodom won't get nuked. Oh, and the angels will take Lot up on that offer of sleeping on his couch.
So, the angels go to Sodom, and it's worse than L.A. and believe me, L.A. is pretty fucking terrible. They don't find ANYONE who isn't being a dick to someone else; they decide to stop by Lot's house and warn him to get out of town. Lot, being nice, offers them hospitality - they can stay under his roof and eat his food and watch his DVDs for, I think the tradition was, three days or so. Well, the Sodomites noticed these angels going around and taking notes and looking haughty, and a bunch of 'em, men and women, old and young, said "FUCK THAT." and they went to Lot's house.
This MOB of creepy bastards all riot in front of Lot's house, screaming "LET US GANG RAPE THOSE UPPITY BASTARDS. THIS IS OUR CITY AND NO BLUE STATE GOVERNMENT ASSHOLES ARE GOING TO TELL US WHAT TO DO!". And Lot, he went to the window and said, "Um. I offered these guys Hospitality. It would be wicked and wrong to kick 'em out for you to have your way with, and MRS. HAVERSHAM I DON'T THINK THAT IS AN APPROPRIATE GESTURE FOR A WOMAN OF YOUR AGE.", but the Sodomites weren't having it. So, Lot, being a man of the time thinks, "Well, it's not like I offered my DAUGHTERS hospitality... What if?"
So, he sticks his head back out the window and says, "Hey, what if I let you guys savage my virgin daughters. One of 'em ain't even old enough for boobies yet! Would you leave us alone then?" And at this point, Lot's daughters break every "World's Greatest Dad" mug in the house. But the Sodomites have a hair up their ass, and say, "Nah, nah. We've got on our minds on makin' some Nephalim. Send those prissy little God-Botherers out here!"
And then the Angels struck 'em all blind, and called in the air strike.
It's really a lovely story about how the folks in the Middle East have done everything in their power to piss God off at every opportunity since the dawn of time. I mean, it ain't like Old Testament God to give your city and your non-Hebrew people chances. And, of course, Lot and his family fuck up THEIR chance with God not too long after the Apocalypse - with the incest and the drunkeness and the freunleven.
Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.
At some point, I just snapped and went to hit her in the leg clutching my pencil firmly in that hand, and wound up accidentally-and-not-on-purposely stabbing her in the thigh hard enough that the pencil-tip is bobbing around as she runs downstairs, screaming to our mother (she was wearing shorts). She's screaming along the way "I've got lead poisoning!! I've got lead poisoning!!"
My mother's shouting "Calm the fuck down (yes, my mother swore like that) -- let me look at it. Anyway, pencils are filled with graphite, so you don't have lead poisoning!"
Sister: "I have GRAPHITE POISONING! Ro's a murderer! Ro's a murderer! i feel myself dying!!"
"Will you shut the hell up and let me pull the pencil out!" My mother, being an RN, would have had complete control over the situation if my sister wasn't being such a drama queen.
In the meantime, I'm walking downstairs, absolutely mortified that I managed to stab my sister. I'm nine years old and have never even hit her (slap-fights in the back of the car and similar, sure, but that's not really hitting) or any other kid. When I get to the kitchen, I sheepishly manage "I... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Molly's screaming "You'll get the electric chair for killing your own sister! You're a murderer! I... I feel myself dying!"
Mum: "We don't live in Texas, and executions are done with shots in Ohio. Anyway, you're not going to die, so Ro's not a murderer. Now will you sit still so I can pull this pencil out?"
"But I want him to DIE for what he's put me through!"
"Will you shut up! I heard you through the vent in his room and I'm surprised he hadn't done this sooner! I knocked my own sister's teeth in for less than some of the annoying shit you do to Ro."
At this point, my mother was finally able to pull the pencil out, then handed it right back to me, tip totally crusted in my sister's blood. "Here, I'm going to clean her up. If I were you, I'd keep it like this and pull it out the next time she starts bugging the hell out of you like that."
Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.
Maybe a year after I discovered Guns N' Roses, I discovered the music of Prince. I think, at first, I had found a copied tape at a yard sale for maybe 25¢ of Parade: Music from the film Under the Cherry Moon by Prince & The Revolution. The quality of the tape was pretty shitty, didn't even last me six months of regular playing, but I remember being very blown away for all sorts of reasons. "I Wonder U" was weird and minimalist; "Under the Cherry Moon" and "Do U Lie?" kind of reminded me of my grandmother's Noël Coward and Cole Porter records; the man can fucking sing, and musicially, when he writes songs he can pull from all sorts of multi-genre influences and make something both distinct and well-crafted — kind of makes up for the frequency with which he's lyrically insipid.I think my father had a bigger problem with Prince's music than with Guns N' Roses — something that I've only really understood in retrospect. In fact, I know that my father was coming after my GN'R tapes after the fuck-head had already come for my Prince collection and dragged me out of the house with him while he tossed them all on the burn pile.
Aside from the obvious accusations that Prince was a "faggot" (something that has only ever been evidenced by the man's flamboyant attire and eccentric personality — which you gotta admit, is a pair of traits that seem disproportionately higher in gay men than most other demographics), my father was convinced this man was some sort of harbinger of the anti-Christ, an accusation that always struck me as incredibly bizarre, even today &mdash though now I can sort of see it, if I suspend personal beliefs for a second and try to see it through the eyes of a Christian zealot who can see "blasphemy" in a bowl of creamed corn.
There are several glaring examples from Prince's career where he's mixed Christian imagery, from the vague to the blatant, and highly sexualised imagery in the same album — and most of his albums throughout the 1980s are frankly "concepts with the concept removed", sort of like Appetite...: There's a theme, the soundtrack albums contain tiny bits of story interspersed with songs that can very easily stand alone, but even everything that wasn't specifically made for a soundtrack (all his 1980s albums, excepting Purple Rain and Parade:... — I'd include Batman, but he's practically disowned that one). To a man who got this look like he had just shit his pants when he discovered that one of his children (id est, me) knew what masturbation was, and who specifically asked my mother to Bowdlerise the "where babies come from" talk to the point of it being essentially useless, who specifically circumvented the "puberty talk" to myself and my younger sister despite our mother's rightful pointing out that we needed to know this before something happened and we freaked out (of course, at some point during their debacle over basic sex-ed, I had learned it all by reading books at the library, and some time after that, my mother got "permission" to talk to me, I told her that I knew everything already, and proved it, and she said "OK, that's great. If you can dumb it down and tell your sister so I won't have to, then your dad won't yell at me in a year when I was to tell her all this"); it's completely understandable why the juxtaposition of The Dirty and The Divine would drive this man up a freakin wall and then some.
When i first picked up Dirty Mind, I had no idea what half of this lyrical content was. I was a very "innocent" and unsullied eleven-year-old, and all of my knowledge of sex was in the most clinical terms about how reproduction, PIV coitus, and masturbation worked. I had a scant knowledge of a few popular slang terms, largely due to the fact that the other kids in my class didn't like me, so they never told me anything. I remember, at some point, my mind just naturally came up with the concept of oral sex all by myself when I was eight (around the time that I learned that genitals were used for more than masturbation — it just made sense to me that 1. it's sort of like kissing, and thus affectionate, 2. it would be an easy way to avoid pregnancy, and 3. this is "how two boys would do It"), but aside from thinking "sucking on penis" (after all, I knew nothing about "blowjobs" or "head") was some revolutionary idea that I didn't think was ever talked about by other people, I knew nothing, at eleven, about the most of the shit I do now. It was all just catchy pop songs to me.
Despite being "forbidden" to be a fan throughout the 1990s, I still watched his career from afar and influence still continued in some ways. I initially became attracted to his character (after his music) because, again, of similarities: He's short (still taller than I am, though), flamboyant, favourite colour is purple -- things that were already identifying characteristics of myself by the age of seven, much less eleven. Hell, I'm a shitty lyricist, even.
Anybody who listens to me talk long enough will realise that The Sacred and The Obscene are two driving forces in my creativity, and Eros cultus alone even prevents me from keeping the two completely separate. Granted, since converting to Jehovah's Witness, the man can't even bring himself to swear, but he's also been shrugging off his past abilities for more Zappa-like complexities — most of his early stuff, as my friend Jeff and I have suggested, plays out like kind of a "Black Marc Bolan: you can hear this intense genius boiling under there, but instead he's been very prolific at producing very good and very catchy insipidness, as if he isn't even trying." Hell, even Jeff said "all through the 1980s, I always felt that if Prince would take even an extra year between releasing albums, yeah, he'd produce a lot less in quantity, but he could write Quadrophenia or Tommy or even Joe's Garage, and each one would be absolutely brilliant and ground-breaking."
And, like Zappa, Prince has abstained from drugs and alcohol throughout his entire career — apparently, he's always felt he's weird enough without 'em. Of course, my room-mate says that I'm the only person he knows who can be up drinking whiskey all night and get progressively less weird, my friend Ben once even said "yeah, Ro's the only person in the world who can drink a fifth of whiskey and suddenly get morals". Maybe they're all four onto something.
