Wednesday 12 April 2006

More Shit About Buildings and Food

Hi everyone,

I've put some pictures up from years ago, which you might like to see. Or you might not. I'm going to allow you the choice. I found a lot of photos of haircuts i really miss.

I think i'm gonna put photos of the olden days up and take them down about once a week, so keep checking every now and again if you'd like to see some photos of me and 'the guys' in year 8, or alexis' shiny trousers. No pressure though

My leeds ticket cost 185 on ebay, which someone, somewhere, will probably see as too much. I think this is easily enough for what is essentially a three day sleepover in the style of old with tom and joe, interspersed with adventures in electric music with michael and louise.

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Why is it that whenever jodie marsh or tara palmer tompkinson are mentioned on tv theres always someone, usually themselves, saying how they're 'actually quite intelligent really and dont deserve the bad press they get.'

What? You're still doing a worthless job, whether you got a few a levels or not, love. Any comments on how you're intellectually valid can instantly be dismissed with the reminder that your only job is fucking about in adverts and sometimes narrating 'The Planets Funniest Animals'.

Its like when peoples only defence of the queen is that 'shes a really nice person'.

If it looks like an idiot, and it talks like an idiot, and has a job of an idiot, then its fucking jodie marsh.

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I love the phrase 'Sangfroyd debating society'. Whoever coined this is brilliant. Was it sam?

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Iain Pyes summary of my effect on music:

"WELL, YOURS is the wholesale decontruction of music into a new art form, erasing the last 200 years of musical development with progressive movements and amps with holes in"

I've typed and retyped my response to this so many times. But basically, hes wrong. This all comes from the time i told iain it wasnt a good idea to try to bring hair metal back onto the charts with his new band, and he wouldnt succeed, and as such he now believes that i'm all for ignoring all musical developments that have occured in the past.

However, he strangely still regards me as 'old school' when it comes to music, as many people do. In fact on friday he boasted that he was more old school than me because he'd bought two vinyl KISS albums.

I never really understood where this opinion of me as a regressionist music fan that only likes one thing came from, it seems to be only Joe that doesnt hold this opinion.

I think its a combination of the fact that i sometimes say I dont like the kaiser chiefs, which makes people believe i'm a closed minded hermit in my fortress of punk rock, and also the fact that i never defend my music taste when its criticised, because i cant be bothered, and i never boast about it either, because i cant be bothered.

In an environment where you have a wide musical taste if you like both rock music and hip hop, i guess i dont really stand a chance..

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I was recently talking to someone who had ripped jeans, and i asked him if he'd ripped them himself.

He said 'No, the factory does it much better.'

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I love it when bands miss out the least important members of their groups in photo shoots. Oasis have started doing it recently, i think its the bassist they miss out. Or anyone in supergrass that isnt Gaz Coombes.

The rolling stones have been doing it for a while now with their bassist. You won't know who i'm talking about of course, thats my point, so here is. He's been in the band for fifteen years now since Bill Wyman left due to an addiction to breasts:



How much the stones mistreat him has always amazed me. In their recent live dvds, he isnt onstage with them, hes made to play backstage so the audience can focus on the people they came to see without any distractions at all.

What a depressing existence he must have. Hes in the "greatest rock n roll band in the world" and as such plays with them live, hangs out with them (probably) and writes parts for their multi-million selling albums. But who knows it? No one but his possibly fat and dead mother. It must be really depressing meeting new people.

'So what do you do?'

'Oh, i play bass. I'm actually the bassist for the rolling stones'

'Haha, no but really. What do you do? Marketing?'

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Mike Longster started talking to me:

AHHHHH lLOST MA PHONE - hayley plz ring my house 01928 740629 Gypos in Manley!!!!! says:

gypos about too, keep your trailers locked up

James says:

i dont have any trailers

AHHHHH lLOST MA PHONE - hayley plz ring my house 01928 740629 Gypos in Manley!!!!! says:

oh, ur alrite then - jerry cans and scrap too, they're bastards and irish

James says:

right, i see

AHHHHH lLOST MA PHONE - hayley plz ring my house 01928 740629 Gypos in Manley!!!!! says:

just so u know

James says:

thanks i'll try to take care

AHHHHH lLOST MA PHONE - hayley plz ring my house 01928 740629 Gypos in Manley!!!!! says:

do u know wher they r parked up cos i hav a m8 got his car knicked and we wanna fnd it

James says:

how would i know where they're parked, you just told me about them...

AHHHHH lLOST MA PHONE - hayley plz ring my house 01928 740629 Gypos in Manley!!!!! says:

a lot of ppl normally know

James says:

right well i dont know what you're talking about really

James says:

at all

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I'm getting my hair cut short tomorrow. Mikes response to this was saying 'shit' a lot.

When i searched into google 'haircut' for this picture the first web result is a site "
Offering video tapes of women having their heads shaved bald.
"

I was afraid to go on it, in case it was one of them sites, but god it looks likely and worrying.

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Putting 'I'm bored' in titles of bulletins doesnt make them any less sad, kids.

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I've been working for quite a while now on this blog (accidentally deleted it) and biology coursework and i've inadvertantly left the honeyshop screamers album 'live at fezfest' running on repeat for ages because i've been too distracted to change it. I must've heard it about four times today.

Paul, if you still read this blog, you get a really weird feeling when you listen to this album for ages. Its kind of like travel sickness mixed with the feeling you get climbing trees as a child. Was this intended in the production of the album?

I remember the time in year ten when someone sent me 'Gay bar' by electric six and i forgot to stop playing it, and it just went round and round for about 90 minutes. By the end of it i kept dropping the word 'gay' into conversation without realising it for the rest of the day.

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I was in tescos the other day and i was trying to get a passport photo for my provisional driving licence, and the machine wouldnt take five ps so i went to a til and asked for them to change it.

The woman became really irate and defensive and said i had to go to customer services to get 20p, saying she didnt have the authority to give me 20p. So i bastarding well went.

I was actually 4p short anyway, and so i had to go round helsby trying to raise 4p in whatever way i could. The story of how i got it in the end is very very funny, but its for another day.

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Worst album covers of all time:


AC/DC-Powerage

Yngwie Malmsteen-Trilogy

Aerosmith-Aerosmith

Dee Dee Ramone-Standing in the Spotlight (The hip hop one, if anyone ever sees this for sale buy it for me, i'll pay you later, I need this)

Ronnie Spector-She talks to rainbows (Wicked record though, theres a ramones song and a thunders song on there, done by my favourite postar ever)

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It says so much about the state of our nations health that we are now having defribilators installed in public buildings to reduce deaths from heart attacks.

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Got my ribena cutting today!

It cheered me up quite a bit. It came with a booklet on how to grow it that was full of lame jokes about calling the plant ben and EVERYTHING.

It said 'we are trying to raise awareness of the health benefits of blackcurrants'. However, it also said that it would be two years before i saw any blackcurrants from this plant, by which time i could very well be dead (as, i imagine, would the plant), and i'd have never got any health benefits from these blackcurrants. So perhaps its not gonna have a great effect on peoples opinion of blackcurrants is it, IS IT? HEY?

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Brilliant!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJ1_Df9Awc&search=talking heads

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There is so much bullshit in adverts that no one takes time to notice. Like 'intel centrino technology', what the hell is that? Nobody knows, nobody ever will.

I once saw an advert for sure which said 'Now contains Clearex' and then tried to pass clearex off as a real chemical that stopped white marks on clothes. I'll bet anything it was water.

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In a recent conversation with someone about the lipstick killers, they kept referring to us continually as 'true punk', and then he went into a big rant about local bands that werent true punk but were pretending to be yadayadayada, and i just had to nod along, pretending to know who he was talking about...but who WAS he talking about? Mum says no?

'True punk' is a term i've disliked for quite a long time now. It always reminds me of the teenage sex pistols fans you overhear wasting their time bitching about Good Charlotte in the metal section of HMV. 'True punk' is an overused term, and it gives people the idea that the sex pistols are a standard that everyone must strain to reach when making their own music.

From my earliest experiences of punk music, i noticed the hipocracies of punk, through the simplistic eyes of an 11 year old. I assumed that the core principles of punk were:

-Unity/Comradery
-Making things simple
-Celebrating the bad things in your life
-People being allowed to do what they want

So I used to get pretty confused about a lot of things, such as why punks wore these expensive leather jackets when surely the best option would be the cheapest clothes possible (ie faded yellow polo shirts from oxfam...just like david byrne wears in the video above...perhaps this is slightly subconciously biased), or why so many punk bands seemed like such snobs, like the way johnny rotten seemed to hate all music ever made yet was in a band, a band that was just making people more violent and stupid.

As david byrne said (sorry), "Here comes that rock n roll image of bad boys in leather jackets again. Its a fantasy people like to have-that the guy on the street knows more than the businessman in his office."

Getting a bit off point. 'True punk' cant exist. According to the punk ethos, it should be the musical genre where anything goes, there is no hierachy, no superiority, no limits. But it wasnt like that at all, it just spawned a trend of people who dressed the same and hated almost everything.

So yeah....what was i talking about?

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On the subject of the lipstick killers, i've put a new band together, because i'm tired of this fuzz guitar rock n roll thing with the lipstick killers being so limited, in that its only me that can do what i want, the rest have to keep a pretty steady rhythm. So this new ones all about clean guitars, 3 singers, noises, and a really playful approach. Some people snigger when i tell them our keyboardist is a guy two years younger than us, but he's still the best local musician i've ever heard.

Writing material for it has actually proved easier than writing for the lipstick killers, in that i can play anything that sounds catchy at any pitch, scale etc, as opposed to constantly having to think about whether it sounds enough like something the stooges would write so it'll fit in with our other songs.

However, i am once again at the stage where i need to think of a band name. I hate this part, i always get the impression that if i make a mistake naming the band, people will get the wrong impression and never like us, ever. I get pretty worried about it really. Could change the way the band is received by an audience entirely.

This is why i want the band to be called 'James the one fitty and all his little titties'

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"It is going to be a true generation of swine, a decade run by cops with no humor, with dead heroes, and diminished expectations, a decade that will go down in history as the Gray Area. At the end of the decade, no one will be sure of anything except that you must obey the rules, sex will kill you, politicians lie, rain is posion, and the world is run by whores. These are terrible things to have to know in your life, even if you're rich."
-Hunter S. Thompson, on the dawn of the 21st century.

I always liked Thompson's work, but it was always so clear that he was just the biggest penis you could ever meet, a typical american warped his countrys' paranoid and arrogant mindset. Johnny Depp nails him in 'Fear and loathing in Las Vegas', you intensely dislike him but you cant stop watching because you're fascinated with him.

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My current profile song is todays song of the day. I really love Richard Hell.

Richard Hell always impresses me with the twists he'll put on things. Like on this one where the title and first few lines lead you into thinking that this is gonna be a standard, unrealistic love song about endless dedication from a man to a woman, but then this line 'its so good that you get it from my hand' comes in and it reveals itself to be a song about a man being overly possessive of his lover, which is far more realistic and a lot less lame.



Then, loads of times when the song seems to be climaxing to some kind of 'i love you' type lyric, he pauses and just sighs 'ohhhhhhh noooooooo', afraid to give any real compliment, again, giving a more realistic view of men. The lyrics where he asks the girl if they can just talk about him, too. Or the lyric 'what you say to me proves, i'm more romantic than you', which i thinks about all the knitpicking, point-scoring arguments you have in a close relationship, where you go over everything each other has ever said.

Its stuff we're all familiar with, and i get a lot more from this than the standard you're-right-i'm-wrong here-i-am-forever love song you often get from men. If this even is a love song-i hope its not, but i think he did actually write it for someone, which is a pretty gutsy thing to do in itself.



Also, Robert Quine plays lead guitar on it, and hes one of my favourite guitarists ever. His playing sounds so luxurious and slippery.


Three cheersRichard Hell and the Voidoids 01 for Richard.












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When are my blogs gonna stop getting longer? When you shove it, thats when.

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Bye everyone,

james h x