Anarking

Past I Present You The Future

So looking over the conversations I’ve had, I realize that although I own half a house here and have lived here for 4 years I have never accepted this windy red headed step child of mine. I look back fondly on NYC and hope for the shores of southern California like a boy at the junior prom looks forward to unsnapping his dance partners bra. Chicago is different, I can only think of it with the same fondness truckers have for pit stops. A toilet, a place to rest my head, and maybe a gloryhole in the bathroom. Maybe I was like this in New York. Maybe I’m destined to never be satisfied. If so than this maybe the blog equivalent of doves crying.

The Past

Interpol was my exit song. It played as I drove the moving van west toward Philadelphia. It played as I gave the last of my middle fingered gestures to the last new york cabbie I would feel a connection to as a New Yorker. It bounced around in the cabin of that rickety van while I tried to hold back a few stray tears that were welling up from my wife as she mentioned how beautiful the sky like was in the late afternoon. “Fuck this city” was all I could say, New York knows I didn’t mean it but that’s what she trained me to say. I like to think I made her proud that day. Anyways this song is special to me on many levels some of which I won’t bore you with the others you could never understand unless you lived here for a while. I mean really lived here, not went to school here then off you go. The city is a dirty whore when you live it, try to pay rent knowing you can’t afford it, knowing you shouldn’t pay it. My friend Lucas the one with the blog on the side says he doesn’t miss it a bit, I think he’s making New York proud as well. To truly love this city you have to be willing to tell her to fuck off because when you go back it’s like that angry awkward sex between two ex’s who know what the other likes.

The Strokes remind me of one of the many things I hated about the City but in a way I love to this day. Kind of like a spoon full of heroin helping the medicine go down.

The Present

Chicago is like the girlfriend you have but are not that into. The only reason you stick around is in the hopes of getting with one of her friends and because she is polite to your mom. You know it’s not going to last. Perhaps she will go to college out of state and you can go on with your life. You try to distance yourself from her but she just wants you to love her as much as you did the girl before her. She just wants you to be happy even though you secretly miss the abuse and head games you ex provided. So she agrees to an “open relationship” in the vain hopes that this act of selfless apeasment will win your affections but all you do is whore around and look toward the day you leave her to cry over you and call you up in the middle of the night asking if under different circumstances you would have married her. Of course you are polite but you know better don’t you? I’m sorry Chicago (but not really). I know I’m a bastard for using you like this but the harder you try, the less I love you.

Lawrence Arms (one of my favorite Chicago punk bands second to The Vindictives) explains my life accurately…

Rise Against croons…

The Future

Ahh California the goal. Ponce D’Leon was wrong about where the fountain of youth was, wasn’t he? You know why I love you, you remember the first time we played “I’ll-show-you-mine-you-show-me-your’s” under the orange tree in your father’s backyard. You were my first kiss, the innocence of childhood before all the uglyness and hair pulling during sex. You didn’t care that I had an accent or that I came from a coutry that was dominated by a country you were mad at. How could you, how could we, we were young. I never stopped thinking about you. Nothing sexual, just your warm smile and sunkissed hair that smelled like coconuts even in the late evenings.

The Ramones teach many lessons and should be an auditory requirement for all teenagers but alas our youth is doomed to listen to the likes of Soulja Boy and other such poisons. I think of the The Ramones as my safety blanket, they reassure me that, “hey three chords is all you need to be happy so fuck Mozart and the Midwest, eyes on the prize bucko, eyes on the prize”.

NoFX will be played very loudly when I finally pack up and leave.

I swear coconuts.

I partied with - Pink

What an unwashed strumpet. I swear, I can’t think of a more dick thing to be than a bouncer for a celebrity, ok I can but not for this post. So I somehow got an invite to a private party hosted by Blender or some other rag of a magazine. This party was in a huge loft somewhere in the meat packing district, which made it very hip and very exclusive. To me the meat packing district still smells like pork vagina and death. No matter how much glass, concrete and sex & the city spin offs you throw at it it’s still the Auschwitz of barnyard animals.

So here I am hanging out with my then girlfriend and some friends who just finished playing a fantastic set to a bunch of self absorbed celebritarts and their bored assistants. The few of us who where there and never had a spread in any magazine loved the set. Unfortunately the band no longer exists and the world will never know what they missed.

So okay we are all sitting on this couch, the band is sweating all over it and coming off their performance high, like unknown bands get when they think they are around the corner from that big break. We are just getting into the deepest crevices of the chill groove, melting into the couch, alcohol is being awesome to me, when this huge gorilla of a man insists we have to leave as quickly as possible because the couch has been reserved.

How the fuck is that possible? How you reserve a couch at a loft party? This is what I thought but “bleeeeeeeh” is what i said. Inability for intelligent conversation is one of the flaws of alcohol the the positives worked out in my favor in this situation. I just sat there unrelenting in my chillax mode unimpressed with the body mass of the furrow browed man in front of me, knowing full well that my pal alcohol will deaden the pain of any punches that find my face. At most the man will get some puke and blood on his cliche suit. The man seemed to be aware of this and turned his attention at the couch in front of us with a more desired reaction.

Now I was interested, what douche tells bodyguards to clear couches for their entourage. To my amusement this was not a douche but a douchess. A pixie body with the face of a meth addict standing before me was the color of poser. Pink with black hair superlow cut jeans that covered her abused naughty parts by either sheer will or some sort of dark magic. She began to, or continued to, act like a complete trollop by screaming loudly and telling her friends not to sit down because she and her fuckstick wanted to make out while jumping on the couch. I get it you are the rebel, you are the bad/tough girl, you can do what you want and no one is going to tell you otherwise not even Maury Povich. Except you’re not. You opened up for N’Sync and more recently Justin Timberlake, you sold your soul to Sony BMG, and you hire bodyguards so you can sit on a couch. Yeah a real bad ass.

So with Pink’s next single, “So What”, going for radio adds August 18th and her new album ready for purchase October 28th and pirating shortly before that, I wish miss that-couch-is-mine continued success at her mediocrity and exploitation of all things Hot Topic.

Meet Jamie T

When I find some music that strikes a particular chord on my internal flying v I tend to obsess about it. Jamie T is my newest and a pretty long lasting one. It’s rap but not, it’s ska but not, it’s rock but not. Whatever it is it makes me want to dance around with my dog like a thirty something year old woman in a payless shoes commercial.

If You Got The Money:

Acoustic Version:

Now I’ll admit I’m a bit of a Britophile when it comes to music but British music just sounds better. It’s like this: America invented rock, England made it not so cheesy and in return the US took Ska and ruined it. I know I know ska is from Jamaica but I’m taking second wave here, the ska that the US was introduce to first. As far as Punk goes there are two ways of looking at it:
1. Punk is the message in the music, see Clash, Jam, Sex Pistols. If you agree with that then Punk is of British origin.
2. Punk is the music alone, just sped up and dumbed down rock, see Ramones. If you agree with that then you’re probably American and also wrong.

Panama Recap Video

I couldn’t help it I had this song running through my head the entire time I was there. Many of you will ask why I video taped a teenage girl taking money from an old man. Panama can be a dirty city and that is definitely a dirty old man. She’s his girlfriend and 16 and he’s in his late 40’s and an Swedish ex-patriot and he owns half of the restaurants on Contadora, Panama.

Sorry for the shotty vid quality but you tube has upload limitations if you want the better version you need to come to my house.

Hotwire

I love when crap bands get flushed away it’s quite a cleansing feeling and the world gets just a little shinier. I saw this band around 2003 and thought holy fuck why would you name yourself Hotwire, like that won’t be taken by ten thousand other thing, might as well call your band the Tigers or Coldcuts.

Here’s what I thought of them back then:

This pretty unoriginal rap-rock band from L.A. sounds like Rage Against the Machine with a bad case of laryngitis. Unlike Rage, the mediocre songs carry little more of a message than “teen angst is cool.” These four chaps produce music that sounds too lame to be rap and too repetitive to catch my interest. True, the lead singer can scream, but so could the guy in Carcass, and do you know where he is now? Probably pumping gas for a Citgo in Wyoming. The screechy Korn guitars try to emphasize just how unoriginal this band is, but even that is overpowered by the lame-osity of Hotwire.

Now I don’t I am not referring to Hotwire.com: Discount flights and cheap airfare nor Hotwire Blues, Rock, And Country Delivered With Heart & Soul (which I’m sure is also fan-fucken-horrible), nor do I mean to tarnish the musical prowess of this Hotwire: with these douchecabibbles:

Here’s the band’s website: good luck and god speed with it.

I partied with - The Strokes

So my life has calmed down quite a bit since my New York days and as I lay in my bed about to welcome Saturday with open arms my thoughts drift to those dirty Delancy nights when I was working as an LD in a medium sized venue that featured bands on their way up (Death Cab for Cutie, Interpol ,the Strokes) and bands on there way down (Soul Asylum, Midnight Oil, the Spin Doctors, the Strokes). So I’m thinking back and I realize, holy balls, I’ve partied with some pretty well known people as a result of wasting my 20’s in the City. And so I present you the first in my name dropping series entitled “I partied with - “.

The Strokes

So I was at my friends house for some roof top party, I was already halfway plastered since on the way there I picked up a 40 oz. of old E. I had a thing for fourties back then, they were cheap and got you prepped for a party pretty well also there was some sort of statement made when you roll up to a party for the urban hip acting all gutter punk, it’s kind of a reminder to the hipster bourgeois that there were still some of use anarchist proletariat around event though that was so not in. I wasn’t really into making any sort of statements that night I just wanted to get sloppy and sloppy I did get even before I started the 5 story walk up climb but it was cool since my friend was well aware that I would be wasted sooner or later and I was a dirty punker and so no party faux pas was committed. I get there and people are doing lines of coke like it was Scarface auditions. I never touched that Michael J. Foxx yuppie wanna be shit and probably never will but I love watching those fuckers do it and their pupils going all crazy and them getting all Speedy Gonzales on each other.

Anyways here I am melting into a stinky couch trying not to worry too much about the room spinning and the floor being slanted when some long haired hippie looking jackass wearing uber tight white jeans and bear chested except for a vest some banker would only wear comes crashing out of the bathroom and starts screaming about his coke being gone. The stupid dildo left it on the toilet and a dog got a hold of it.

Dogs eat anything.

This was an Australian shepherd who lived in an apartment too small for a chihuahua and was already suffering from cabin fever, except now he was suffering from cabin fever, the excitement of tons of people being around him and about a small sandwich baggie worth of coke coursing through his veins. It was as if someone threw a super bouncy ball into a rubber room then told the dog to fetch. The dog was running all over the place only stopping to puke on some poor bastard or a one of those chicks who never got the memo about the 80’s sucking ass. I was laughing so hard that a pee’d myself a tad.

The next day I asked my friend if the dog was still alive and sure enough that resilient cock sucker was just peachy. Then I asked him who were those hippie looking bear chested assholes taking up all the good chairs, talking about their band and feeding dogs cocaine. He told me and I wasn’t impressed until a few months later when all of New York hailed them as saviors of rock. I guess they were but more then that they are funny fuckers when high on coke.

The Datsuns

Harder than your 13 year old cousin at next to the lesbian float at the gay pride parade! Rock like this can only come out of New Zealand. Ah, New Zealand, where the dingoes steal your babies and the koalas take your boyhood and make you a bitter old man. An enchanted land of Hobbits and man/sheep offspring. Anyways, I got really into this band. The songs were going at a breakneck pace and the amps were going into the red. All this chaos was masterfully crafted and controlled to bring out one hell of a show.

With a song like “Motherfucker from Hell” it’s next to impossible to be a shitty band. I recommend checking this band out but then again, I also recommend not brushing your teeth, so what the fuck do I know. Go fuck yourself.

Top 10 Rock Videos Featuring Zombies (That Aren’t Thriller)

Michael Jackson may have had that cheesy-ass thriller video but that’s for the weak, so I present my Top 10 Rock Videos Featuring Zombies (That Aren’t Thriller). I feel like a VJ for the undead.

Before that thake this, a gift to get this countdown rolling I present the Bollywood version of Thriller

10. My Chemical Romance - Helana

Okay so it most likely is less of a zombie portrayal and more of a ghostly one but who am I to decide, only the effeminate lead singer can tell us and he’s not here right now, he’s probably teasing his hair or applying some eye shadow or something. I like the song and she could be a zombie so I threw this vid into the countdown stew plus it rounded it off nicely to a 10.

9. Rob Zombie - Living Dead Girl

Again I raise the question is she a zombie or some sort of a Franken-trollop. We need to go to a none present source and that won’t happen. I will assume zombie but will accept your arguments for vampire, ghoul and apparition then proceed to ignore them.

8. Zombie Bazooka Patrol - Zombie Shake

Oh you. It’s good, no really, keep trying kids, you’ll get better one day you’ll move out of your parents basement and create a really kick ass video. Better have zombies in it, I’m investing a lot of street cred. into you.

7. Gob - I Hear You Calling

Well done Gobbers very zombie filled, it’s too bad you sound like Blink 182’s prison bitches though. Points off for faux punk rock.

6. The Horrors - She Is The New Thing

Ok, so you don’t get the whole zombie payoff until the end, but hey little fella don’t look so glum, the music is good and it’s quite artistic. So shut your gapping cockhole and look at the pretty colors.

5. Wednesday 13 - I Walked With A Zombie

Well, well, well, what a clever bunch of monkeys. Looks like some band found out that Night of the Living Dead was never copyrighted and has used it in their very own rock video. Well done lads, well done indeed. I can’t fault a band with lyrics as clever as, “I’m damned if I voodoo and I’m damned if I don’t”. Or can I?

4. White Zombie - I’m Your Boogie man

Surprisingly there is little zombie content out there for a band with zombie in their goddamn name. Rob Zombie is it the guy that makes all those fun slashers flicks, the man who dresses up like something the Crypt Keeper would rape. Why so little zombie love in your videos? For shame good sir, for shame!

3. Phantom Planet - Big Brat

Go here to watch it since the greedy motard won’t let me embed it and I can’t be bothered to look for it elsewhere or violate some sort of copyright, reappropriate it and place it on this site.

2. ANJ - Gorbachov

I know, I know I’ve used this before in a previous post but I can’t help it if these guys rock my argyle socks can I? So stop yelling at me and just enjoy the zombieness.

1. The Misfits - Scream

This is how you make a video folks. This is how you also make a zombie flick. This is how the Misfits make such wonderful contributions to this ungrateful world.

Super Happy Bonus Time

Here’s some youtube fan vids that made me giggle.

The Cranberries - Zombie

As my much smarter than I girl keeps telling me, this song is not really about zombies but pissed of protestants and uppity catholics who got tired of eating haggis and started blowing the shit out of each other (is it the Irish or the Scottish that eat haggis one of those clover wearing Scrooge McDuck motherfuckers eats it). I tend to disagree and here is the video to prove it. “Eyh eyh eyh eyh oah oah oah oah”, I mean who sings like that if not a zombie size queen.

Marylin Manson - Minute Of Decay

Manson and zombies make sense to me but apparently never did to the emaciated one. So this is not an official video but damn good one and should have been official.

Les Sans Culottes

Remember Shaggy, Scooby-Doo and the rest of those who rode in the Mystery Machine? Ok, now try to remember those cheesy go-go songs that played while the gang was running after or away from the monsters. Well, just picture yourself watching this in France and those songs are replace with the same versions but in French and you have the sound Les Sans Coulettes put forth. Two girls and one guy who fakes a French accent pretty well make up the Maginot Line of vocals (mostly sung in French). The vocalists, one of whom was a really hot Japanese girl is now replace with some other chick not as hot but still easy on the old yeux, are accompanied by guitar, tambourine (what go-go rock band would be complete without one), a high-pitched bass, a guy that looks nothing like Raiden from Mortal Kombat with on keyboards, and a drummer. The sparse crowd (200 or so) didn’t really get into the L.S.C until they did a cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” in French. I really couldn’t get into them. Maybe it’s because I failed French in both high school and college, or maybe it’s just that I find go-go music silly, no matter how well you play “Wipeout.” ‚a va mal. It’s not that I don’t aime Les Sans Coulettes it’s just not my bag of freedom fries, too much “hon hon” “Oui oui” and “Sacre Bleu” for me.

Brand New Immortals

This band is pretty lame. It’s your average alternative rock band with little to prove and even less to say. A standard 4-guy rock band that will inevitably one day end up like Hootie and the Blowfish or Matchbox 20 if they’re really, really lucky. There’s nothing new about the Brand New Immortals and Atlanta has never been so humiliated. Even though the rhythm guitarist sports a pretty punk rock mohawk and even a Billy Idol-like snare that’s where the punk rock stops and the common denominator music begins. I pray that they are very mortal and will die one day.

Note: So I wrote this about 4 years ago and as it turns out the Immortals were in fact not. They stained the world with a 6 track E.P. the faded into oblivion like one of those hypercolor shirts but leaving less of an impact than the hyper color shirts did. They blamed their record label for lack of listeners but I tend to think they needed to look inwards. So where are they now?

The guy who formed this unsavory concocktion pursued his music career and formed the Brand Name Importables with John “I love monkey balls” Mayer, and Steve “Buy My iCrap” Jobs.

The bassist is now in Train, a band that makes middle age Italian woman weak in the knees and me weak in the bowels. That shitty band with that shitty song about “drops of Jupiter” which I swear is a veiled reference to the lead singer witnessing his mother get her face spooged on by some dude named Jupiter. If that wasn’t proof enough that a career in the music biz isn’t as rewarding as many a tragically dressed teenager would have you believe, this douche is also a temp. in the reality T.V. band Rock Star Supernova, a temp for christ sakes.

As for the other two, one dude (mohawk guy) was a temp and is never again mentioned as for the drummer he’s probably some drum tech for some band he wishes he could drum for but will never be allowed to since his little brand new immortal fiasco.