Go with the flow

This morning I woke up so poisoned I swore if I could make it through the day I would sleep at least 7 hours and be clean tomorrow. By midnight I was spilling wine and learning the intro to “Back in Black” on guitar.
I’m seriously considering buying a cheap drum set for sale on a local website.

I’ve always wanted a drum set.

Thunderstruck

I had an explosive workout at the gym today while listening to AC/DC. I imagined I was Bon Scott, Brian Johnson and Angus Young all rolled into one. It got me all fired up and I started to realize the importance of drugs in the creation of rock’n’roll.
I feel a little self-conscious enjoying something that used to fuel my 14-year-old temperament, but hey, it’s like that moment when you’re thrusting into your girl savagely. You can suddenly get self-conscious and mutter an apologetic sigh, or you can swell up like an animal and roll with it.

Remembering things past

I’ve spent the past week in Japan, mostly praying and recovering from sobriety. I feel I'm back to myself again.
I like the act of prayer. The process of asking yourself what you really want to ask for, and the empowerment that comes from making deals with forces greater than yourself.

November sucked

But at least it was memorable. I don’t remember pleasant August at all.

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On the bus today I observed what seemed to be a family opposite me. Two of them had little flowers drawn on their sneakers in ball-point. I was so curious about this familial graffiti all day. How charming it was.

Cool, collected desire

Hello

Somebody shoot me

I am 37 … The Rolling Stones were right.

Hail to the chef

Last Tuesday was one of the most exciting days of my life. This was partly due, of course, to that magical moment when I knew Barack Obama had been elected and the weird kind of intimate frenzy that grew within me watching his speech. Less monumental, but more exciting, was my setting the kitchen on fire, which led to an explosion. This was my first uncontrolled explosion and it was scary as a motherfucker. Nobody got hurt, but it took me 2 days to clean and repaint the kitchen. Afterwards I felt fully awake, tingly, like nothing physical existed anymore.

Freedom is …

... being inspired and being surrounded by idiots.

Damned if you don't

I’m going back to Old Lady Manhattan on Friday. If Obama doesn’t win on November 4th I’m taking over.

Boyzone

I was browsing “Gay Attitude” the other day and happened to come across a photo of myself. Well, actually I was Googling myself as I regularly do and found the cowboy photo Baby took of me in New Mexico. It is at the bottom of the page here: http://blog.gayattitude.com/2008/06/10/. I can’t speak French. I like to think some beautiful man out there is having explosive orgasms while fantasizing about me, but it’s probably just a lucky coincidence.

Dedicated follower of fashion

I want to say thank you to whoever initiated the trend this autumn in Hong Kong of girls wearing short shorts and cowboy boots.

One man’s pain

I enjoy watching markets crashing.

The summing up

Hours of idleness

I have been 3 weeks in Hong Kong by myself. I have been drunk for 3 solid weeks, indulgent, caught up in work all day, up all night in a time-lagged endomorphine emergency all night, saturated in whisky, pornography, TV drama, and a million miles away from the beautiful filth of the gutter of my soul.
What a happy waste of time.

I’ve got the power

My best friend Splotchy (never met him) asked me (asked any of his readers) to draw up a list of 8 power pop tunes, and now we are asked to write why we picked them.
Here is my list:

“Ca Plane Pour Moi” – Plastic Bertrand
Anyone who knows me knows I rate this as one of the best audio experiences on earth. Anyone who knows me well knows, when I get really excited, I like to play this on loop via 3 or more players at the same time, and all beginning at different times. The effect, if you’re really excited, is like taking every drug at the same time and somehow staying conscious.

“The Don” - The View
Like any good pop record, this song can be played incessantly when you first hear it, and even when you’re sick of it you still have the impulse to play it again. I don’t really get the lyrics, but it does transport me to being young and bored on the streets of Scotland (which I never was).

“Crazy Taxi” – Andy Hui
I wanted to put something from ‘home’, but it was a little tricky, as pretty much all popular Asian music could be loosely referred to as power-pop. Andy Hui is a personal hero of mine. When I first came to Hong Kong I fell in love with his then-girlfriend Sammi Cheng (again, never met her), and I hated him because I thought he wasn’t good enough for her. Later I saw him in concert though and saw what an amazing voice he had. It was clear that most HK singers relied on studio effects and costumes to make their music, but Andy Hui had a reputation for giving a shit and working hard. Now I’ll buy anything he puts out, and sit in the dark with my headphones and listen to every little nuance of his voice like a quivering, star-struck schoolgirl.
I don’t know what the song is about; I assume it’s about the video game of the same name.
I once assigned my first assistant the task of learning this song in karaoke, and he did it. Work can sometimes be much too fun.

“Mr Brightside” – The Killers
I was kind of unsure about adding a song that I assumed everyone knows, but the test was to come up with the songs that fit the subject the best, and this ticks all the right boxes. This one almost got replaced by “Cookie Day” by Shonen Knife, but in the end I kind of started getting annoyed with them, and The Killers still excited me, so they won this prestigious placement. I always remember being in the gym and listening to these lyrics for the first time. I don’t know why that moment will always stand out in my mind.

“Get Over You” – The Undertones
The Undertones always struck me as one of the first power pop bands. They had the edge of punk and the confidence to make commercial music. The first mixed tape I ever received had Fergal Sharkey on it. It was almost 10 years later that I found out Fergal Sharkey was actually much more famous for his original band the Undertones. I think they are also famous for being the only band John Peel played twice in a row (with “Teenage Kicks”, which he said was the perfect pop record).

“Baby Talk” – Generation X/Billy Idol
I had a huge Billy Idol resurgence about a year ago after I discovered his recent album “Devil’s Playground”. I always felt he became just too commercially popular to keep his credentials. Having said that, though, “Whiplash Smile” is still one of the best albums ever recorded.

“Go Square Go!” – Glasvegas
Another example of a song that pushes so many of the right buttons you almost start to resent it. Everything I heard from Glasvegas is as exciting as this, and I’m a real sucker for a Scottish accent. I’d love to take Baby up there and get her to pick up some of those tones. Man, I’m dripping all over the floor just thinking about it.

“We’re All Going To Die” – Malcolm Middleton
This was a last minute entry, and I was very excited when I thought of it. It also made me realize 3 of the 8 entries are from Scotland (and only one from America). This song was being pushed by a few indie radio stations to become the English Christmas number one last year, but it didn’t make it unfortunately. Malcolm Middleton was also in the punk band Arab Strap, which I’m frantically trying to illegally download now.

“Jet Boy Jet Girl” – Elton Mortello (*extra special bonus track)
I was torn between this and the Plastic Bertrand version. I didn’t want to include them both as that would really eat away at my precious 8 slots. In the end I chose Plastic Bertrand as it’s the one I listen to more. I’ve tried to figure out which one was recorded first, but the more I read about these two songs, the more I start to believe that we, the public, are not supposed to ever know the truth. Essentially they are the same backing tracks, but the Belgian version has silly bubble-gum lyrics, and the English version is about a 15 year old boy who is introduced to sex with another guy, then gets his heart broken when he sees him playing around with girls. I’m pretty sure Plastic Bertrand was the drummer for Elton Mortello, and I also heard they used the same session musicians in two separate recordings, one after the other, to avoid any copyright infringement of the recordings.

Us and them

Looking through old photos today I said “It’s amazing how many of us are dead”, then I quickly checked myself “It’s amazing how many of THEM are dead”. A quick and shameful disassociation.

We like opiate!

Guys, guys! Baby and I have discovered something amazing! Television! That machine you use to watch DVDs and play Playstation, it can also show some kind of non-stop addictive visual entertainment called television. I’ve seen it before in hotel rooms and it’s amazing. Baby rented the first 3 episodes of “Lost” from Netflix, thinking it was a reality TV show. She’s dumb, I heard about it on the radio ages ago. Anyway, she rented it and it is really good. We rushed to rent the next episodes but couldn’t stand the excitement, so I Googled it and found all the episodes on the ABC website, so we’ve been watching them like we were Charlie and they were heroin.
We’ve just started Season II. It is like a kooky morality play, where every player has a clearly defined character, and we learn a little about ourselves and our place in mankind in every episode. Anyway, it seems it’s been on for ages on this television system. I HAVE to get one of these, and figure out how to access the television phenomenon.

Fine tuning

My parents’ conversation overheard while watching the US Open:
Mum: “Why doesn’t he wipe the sweat off?”
Dad: “How should I know?”
Mum: “You know everything.”
Dad: “I’m not telling you.”

What struck me was that this was pretty much a carbon copy of many petty arguments I have with my wife – she asks a stupid question, I reply in a dismissive manner, she retorts with a response that, though clever, indicates that she never really took the question seriously in the first place, I reply with a tender yet defiant remark.

I am 37 and I have definitely become my parents. I see it as a kind of step in evolution, where one repeats the past, in the hope that one day they can finally perfect it and move forward.

Sexy books

After a brief and torrid sojourn with the Motley Crue autobiography I have gone back to my true love, the Yukio Mishima Sea of Fertility tetralogy. This is the 2nd book, “Runaway Horses”. The way he writes about boys sets the heart racing. I can’t imagine how great it would be if he liked girls.

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This is part of a larger plate lithograph I drew from a photo of a gypsy and a dancing bear. I always loved this photo. Years later my friend showed me exactly the same photo, but I haven’t seen it since. After I finished the lithograph I decided to splash some random ink across a new plate a-la Toulouse Lautrec. It ruined it; the same way I ruined the silkscreen cat T-shirt by adding a purple box at the end, and the Danse Arts poster by deciding in the last minute to make a random pattern on each one.

Interlude

I saw a man on the street today playing electric guitar. He was wasted away, all muscle and bone, almost elderly, with a rock’n’roll hairstyle, singing Cantonese pop from the 60’s. His speakers were rigged to his bicycle, and he had a kind of shrine surrounding him of news articles and photos and a fluffy white pet resting on a stool with a sign in English and Chinese warning you not to touch the dog or it’ll bite.
Turns out it was Danny Hui, old rising star who was torn from fame by heroin abuse, now alive again and performing on a Mong Kok street, half circus act, half giant.
I gave him $10 then the rest of the crowd started dropping money into the various hats and buckets around him. It’s crowd mentality – very hard to be the first one when everyone is watching.
I can’t imagine the balls this man must have. It sounded great, amid all the empty noise and clutter on the street. Imagine, amid all those people … a human.