Nikki Sixx writes:
One night, after waking up and drinking all day, Vince and I arrived early for a show at the Whisky A Go-Go. When I walked in, a jock with feathered hair sneered, “Who do you think you are? Keith Richards or Johnny Thunders?”
I didn’t say a word. I grabbed his face and started smashing it into the side of the bar, shattering glasses and covering the counter with blood. The bouncer walked up to me, and, instead of kicking me out, smiled. “Cool, dude,” he said. “We’ll get you some free drinks for that. Do you mind if I call you Muhammad Ali, Sixx?”
He walked Vince and me upstairs, and we continued swigging Jack Daniel’s. But while I was getting a hand job from a girl at the bar, Vince slipped away. … It wasn’t until later that night, when I was leaving the club, that I found him passed out underneath a blue Ford Malibu, with his feet sticking out the side like a car mechanic. I dragged Vince home, where we found a girl handcuffed to his bed. Though Tommy was nowhere to be seen, she was one of his victims, the daughter of a famous athlete. I saw her recently, working on the pirate ship at Disneyland. It was good to see that she was still around handcuffs.
From The Dirt, the Motley Crue autobio, which is clearly the Word’s Greatest Book.
I’m only a hair-metal fan in the ironic sense, but nonetheless this glorious tale of four tight-pantsed heroes who wrestle with a cruel world could very well make me a Crüehead. To me the interesting one is Nikki Sixx, and in fact he’s now writing on the web: Rock n’ Roll Diary, part of the band’s official site. (he talks about Red Bull and Bukowski, the creative process, and vibrators). But it’s also cool to hear Tommy Lee say things like, “one of these days I’m going to have a fucking leopard. I want one on my couch just chilling when I get home from a tour.”
Oh, and stories about Ozzy Osbourne snorting ants and lapping up his own urine are always welcome. Always.
I don’t understand why this page is showing up unstyled on my work computer (Win2000/IE6). I can’t see any problems with the source code – what am I missing? Something stupid no doubt. Or is it just this machine? Does this page show up unstyled for you now?
…his shit is heavvvvvy. (800k QuickTime clip)
– from Friday Foster. And yes, that’s goddamned Isaac as superpimp Fancy Dexter!
Eminem vs. Scott Joplin. (via blogfucker)
For a long time I’ve been trying to crystallize some vague ideas about a philosophy of flow, and finally it’s coming together.
Basically, we begin with the old-school problem of free will versus predetermination. If you believe in a god, a higher power/organizing principle, or time travel, you are often faced with the idea of a predetermined universe. Much of this has to do with the construct of linear time, and obviously it’s a whole can o’ worms. But the key point here is how predetermination butts heads with free will, which is (to put it lightly) central to western thought, and a difficult belief to shake off.
I’ve always found this opposition awkward. That’s the beauty of My New Belief, Flow™.
Flow is central to the I Ching, a text both simple and complex (and about the only ‘religious’ text I can get behind). Let’s put it like this: there is a predefined pattern to all situations in life. You can go with the flow, which means you have perceived the pattern and you act in concert with it, or you can go against it, in which case bad things tend to happen. Although this may sound like a more or less impotent form of free will, to me it places the onus of agency/personal choice on perception instead of action. Life becomes an act of interpretation, and since in this world view the overall pattern is multifaceted and difficult to perceive, since there is no master plan or authoritative guidebook, going with the flow is in fact incredibly difficult, contrary to the usual meaning.
One could argue that the I Ching is the guidebook. If you take a look at it you’ll find at the base a bunch of deceptively simple math. The rest of it is commentary (i.e. interpretation), and it is presented as such – the Duke of Chou said this or that about a particular hexagram, for example. It’s not: this is the meaning of the hexagram.
Seeing as it comes out of the world’s oldest book, flow is not a new concept. (Although, it’s interesting to think about it in a hiphop context, and in a traffic analysis context (but not in a menstrual context…).) It’s Taoist at heart. Interestingly, that page notes that similar ideas about binary oppositions were coming out of Greece at the time, from Heraclitus, aka the Obscure Presocratic who Baffled Plato, aka the Greek Dude with Clit in his Name. And beautifully, he said “everything flows.” Beautifully, again, hosted friend blogger extraordinaire King mentioned Clit-boy in his first post: “change alone is unchanging.” So with that in mind, I’d like to announce Heraclitus as the new patron philosopher of this site, because of his obscurity, because of his mad freaky flow, and yes, because he’s the thinker with ‘clit’ in the middle.
Thanks For All the Vomit
To Con a Vampire
Pants of a Pirate: the Cap’n McMessy Story
Rear Window 2: Extreme Peeping
Shakeup on Bile Street: The Human Digestive System
And why not even more colons:
The Lion King: The Musical: The Movie
The Lion King: The Musical: The Movie: the Board Game: The Zombie Musical
“tweak.” Adjust, as in, I’ve been tweaking the stylesheets. Also to twist or pinch – I was coming along the boards and Domi checked me, and I just tweaked my knee a little, and now I’m out for the season. Also, fucked: the club was waaaay hot and when the uppers kicked in it tweaked me right up.
Obsolete meanings: trouble, prostitute.
Watch your mouth since you possibly over expressed which would cause others unhappy.. Hello Kitty analyzes your stress levels, on a Sanrio official site. This is an online quiz I can get behind. (Via MeFi)
MetaFilter has enabled the new Movable Type gizmo, TrackBack, which is a means to backlink. I.e., it’s a way to list people who are linking to you and therefore track difficult-to-follow decentered conversations that tend to crop up in the Magical Land of Weblogs™. I’m trying to wrap my mind, and feeble techie skills, around it & get it working on this site.
Exciting adventure game that makes challenger burn with combativeness. (via cardhouse)
Lists for the 100 highest-grossing films at the North American box office, both adjusted for inflation and unadjusted. Remember, the unadjusted one is the one that gets used all the time, and it’s basically gibberish when you think about how much people used to pay to see a film…. arg! suppresses long-winded rant (thanks, kafkaesque)
What do ya know, Coolio’s hottest fan page hasn’t been updated since September 2000. But I wanted to know what Coolio was up to, RIGHT NOW.
The 5k winners will be announced soon. There’s some cool-beans stuff over there, including minigames like Wolfenstein 5k and Pixel Ninja; I also love the scale model of the solar system, the mad animation box and city blossom. All under 5k!
Whoa. Just realized that I totally missed d/blog’s first birthday on the third of this month. Boy, am I sorry, little buddy… there’ll be cake, lots of cake… I’ll make it up to you somehow.
What do you get for the blog who has everything? A celebrity roast, natch. I have calls out to Dino, Rickles, Milton Berle and Barry Goldwater.
This Destroyer shit is dope. Here’s two tracks off the latest album, courtesy misra records:
The Sublimation Hour (2.8 MB), & Virgin With a Memory (1.8 MB). Destroyer is the less-accessible, crypto-Bowie obscure genius side project of New Pornographers dude Daniel Bejar. Here’s an awed interview from pitchfork. Thanks to AM for the loan of the albums (and if you want to weigh in with more about the music, please do, sir).
Also, in a bizarre toungy-cheeky retread of the infamous Spike Jones Buddy Holly video, the latest Weezer video features the Muppets.
I’m hoping to assemble a portal-ish thing, that would mix my favourite news sources with my favourite blogs, and I’m looking for advice and/or resources that may tell me more about RSS, XML and all that jazz. – Anyone know of anything, and I mean for Absolute Fucking RSS Morons? Drop me a line!
Duchamp was the original DJ. The whole readymade thing strikes me as a precursor to the sampling & quoting of music. Interesting also that a) Duchamp signed the fountain with a fictional name, and signed other readymades with “from M. Duchamp” rather than “by”; b) he did not consider the works to be art; that c) there were no “originals”:
Duchamp states that, “another aspect of the “readymade” is its lack of uniqueness… the replica of a “readymade” delivering the same message; in fact nearly everyone of the “readymades” existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.” This statement was made late in Duchamp’s life, showing that he was not upset that his originals had been lost, in fact it is believed that he disposed of many of them himself.
and d) there were no issues at the time related to patent, trademark or copyright. The urinal manufacturer does not seem to have gotten upset. Which is clearly not the case today, or efforts like this or that would not be needed. Free the Mouse!
“I want to be so rich my limo driver has a limo driver.”
– Brooks
“I know a narcoleptic named michelle, but everyone calls her Nappy.”
– Adina
“Out of all the men whove claimed to be my father, I think I like Mitch the second best.”
– fireland
My local professional ice sport franchise has lost their attack-dog goaltender.
Lou Reed, Underneath the Bottle:
oooh-ooh-ee
Son of a B.
Here’s a raise of the glass to the replacement of swears with their first letters. Stub your toe? “F.” Walk through plate glass window? “F. A. I’m very badly cut.” Surrounded by irritable brain-hungry zombies? “F. C-S. D. C. F. My delicious brains are yours to eat, gentlemen.”
The day Frank Sinatra died, I was working as an office P.A. on a Disney film about crime-solving pets. The job involved a lot of driving around picking up packages in a rental car – and so there I was, bombing around town at absurd speeds, listening to Wally D’s Jazz World on CKLN, tearing up. That’s the first time I heard Watertown.
Watertown is Sinatra against the grain – Sinatra with electric guitar, Sinatra doing a rock-pop concept album, Sinatra playing the part of the broken small-town man whose wife has left him for the big city. Written and produced in part by Bob Gaudio, of Four Seasons fame and incidentally the composer of “Short Shorts,” all of the songs excel as songs, but also form like Voltron into a perfect tale of unrequited love – they come to the same plate from different angles, each chewing off a different chunk. (Here’s a few quotes from Gaudio and co-composer Jake Holmes about the album.)
The eponymous first song sets the stage. “Goodbye” deals with the non-drama of the wife’s departure:
There is no great big ending
no sunset in the sky
there is no string ensemle
and she doesn’t even cry
In “For a while” the husband tries to get back to his life:
people say to me, you need company
when you have some time to spend
drop around and meet a friend
they forget that I’m not over you
for a while
they forget that I’m not over you
for a while
There’s something perfect about that song, and if you’ve ever had that almost self-righteous feeling after a breakup – “you peons don’t know what I’ve been through” – you’ll feel it too. Then, possibly the best song on the album, “Michael & Peter,” which is framed as a letter to the wife, ostensibly about their two children:
Michael is you, he has your face
he still has your eyes, remember
It contains lots of casual updating, and works as a letter:
I think the house could use some paint
you know your mother’s such a saint
Yet since Sinatra sings to the subtext and not to the surface meaning, it captures that feeling, so fabulous in life, where the words said have little to no meaning, yet something powerful is being communicated – the sort of feeling that leads someone to break down crying while talking about the score of the baseball game. After that song comes “I would be in love (anyway)”, a song of the no regrets variety, which of course is the only way to go.
if I knew then
what I know now
I don’t believe I’d ever change
somehow
And thus ends only the first part of Watertown. I’ve just revisited it, clearly; I understand it a little more now than the last time I heard it. It’s one of those albums. Maybe in 20 years I’ll know it even better.
“If something is so real that it can’t be distinguished from the reality, then it’s no longer art,” Worth1000’s Muchnick said.
Ninja please. This Wired article about montage and computers, that could have been written at any time over the last 10 years, is so full of misguided punditry that I don’t know where to begin. It’s too bad Lev Manovich is so wrong, as he’s the only one I know of who has at least tried to define the language of “new media”. But to say compositing is about seamlessness and continuity: have you watched MuchMusic lately? Their graphics are intended to rattle the brain, much more so than traditional continuity editing, so to set up such an opposition (traditional montage=dischord; computer montage=harmony) is so simplistic and outdated as to make me discount anything he tries to say in his book.
I’d go on at further length, but I can actually hear my readers falling asleep.
A Cnet interview with the brother of Lord British about online gaming in Korea, broadband penetration (should be a porn film), game rooms, and the future of online gameplay. 95% of home connections in Korea are highspeed! Lord love a duck!
Busride to the fringe of the city. Winery – ceremony outside. Sweltering heat. Heat-magnifying suit. Liquid refreshment.
The friends of a friend this good are friends of mine. Discuss: Ellroy, “intelligent techno,” Meyer, and marriage, or course. Bike rides. Big Lebowski. Canada as China. Indie rock. & what have you been doing for the last eight years?
Non-religious ceremony, under a tree. Groom making wisecracks throughout. Never seen him happier, and it was so right: it was their day, they were in their element. Bride and groom, glowing. Palpable energy goes right to my sap-zone. Misting up like an old maid. This phenomenon reaches its apotheosis during the ceremonial bride/groom dance, played out to Weezer, under the stars.
Congratulations, Mark & Ange.