Venus Loon / Word Association Football

The first girl I ever loved I don’t recognise
Her nose is smashed, her frame is bent,
She’s covered in flies.
Everyone I ever loved, I’ll love ‘til I die.

I was just listening to T.Rex and the song Venus Loon came on, reminding me that the third verse has some of my favorite lyrics ever. Marc Bolan could be one silly bastard, but sometimes it all came together in a great blend of non sequitur wordplay and actual emotion.

I found it at http://www.imeem.com/tag/venus%20loon/

but I’ll bet you can find it wherever you listen to music online.

Okay, I have to run. What are you still standing there for? Go on! Shoo!

Shoe! Horn! Rhino! Records! Vinyl! Pants! Shirt! Tie! bondage! buttplug! Jo Ann Pflug! M.A.S.H.! potatoes! eyes! blind! double! trouble! bubble! Mister! mustard!

Miley Cyrus cleaning cum, I’m just sayin’, New Q Lurr

“Next, another interview with Miley Cyrus, coming clean about her boyfriend” is what the newscaster-person just said to tease us into sticking around through the commercials.  What would have made it more interesting is if she’d said “Next, another interview with Miley Cyrus, cleaning come about her boyfriend.”

I’m just sayin’.

It always makes everything you say okay if you follow it with “I’m just sayin’.”

“That pantsuit makes your ass look a little gigantic.  I’m just sayin’.”

See, adding “I’m just sayin’”, or “IJS” as we’ll say from now on, turns everything you say into something that you don’t actually mean, because, you see, you’re just sayin’ it.  You’re not meanin’ it.  Y’see?

Well, even if you don’t see, try it the next time you stumble verbally, or put your foot in your mouth.  (Also verbally). Or maybe try it the next time you stumble vertically, or put your foot in your mouth anally.

REASONS TO LOVE JAY LENO’S MONOLOGUES:

1) When he tells a “joke”, he generally repeats the punchline, sometimes saying it three times or more.

2) After saying the “punchline”, he sometimes explains the “joke” with hand movements or a few words.

3) If he’s telling a story that involves anyone of color, he usually prefaces it by saying “Hey Kevin, this will interest you”, or something similar, as if his African-American bandleader will be interested in all stories involving anyone close to his own skin shade.

4) The odd high pitch of his voice and the strange bobbing of his head can lull one into a near dream state.

5) He stole the “Headlines” feature that regularly airs on Monday nights from National Lampoon magazine.  Then, it was called True Facts.  And it was funny.

6) He always wears that cute inverted coonskin cap.

7) Oh wait… what?… that’s his hair?  Okay, forget number 6.

8) You can use him as a measuring device.  If he says that he doesn’t like it, that usually means I’ll be interested in it, i.e. sushi.  It also works with music, art and literature.

9) He’s dyslexic, and sometimes mispronounces things, although I think that someone’s been giving him lessons after school because he sometimes actually says “nuclear” instead of “nucular”.

And on that subject, HOW DOES ANYONE IN THE FUCKING WORLD END UP MISPRONOUNCING THE WORLD “Nuclear”?  I mean, just look at it. It’s not hard. You basically have the words “new” and “clear” stacked right together to make things easy for you.  No one gets stumped by the first part.  No one says anything but “new” for the “nu” part.  But they tend to get thrown by that tricky last part.  Let’s look at it now, shall we?

CLEAR.  Hmm… I’m going to stare at that for a little bit and try to figure out why anyone says that part wrong.  It’s pretty simple, as English goes.  It’s easy.  It’s not hard.  Not cloudy.  It’s pretty clear.

See? Were you reading that? When you got to the last word, did you say CUE-Lurr? Like the letter Q followed by the first syllable of the word learning?  Are you sure?  Try the whole word yourself.  Nuclear.

Did you say “New” “Clear” or did you hear yourself saying “New” “Q” “Lurr”?

If, for some fucking unexplainable reason, you’re among the people who say “nucular” (and I know folks who got straight A’s in school and folks who hold down jobs that definitely require a huge brain who still say the word wrong), try figuring out why.  And practice saying the word “clear” over and over.  I’ll bet there’s no way on Earth if you break it into parts you’ll ever say the last bit incorrectly.  Really, if I walk up to someone with two words written on index cards and ask him to pronounce them, and those words are “cloudy” and “clear”, I’ll bet NOONE EVER says “cloudy” and “cue-lurr”.

I’m just sayin’.

Inkpen?

Oh, Long Johnson.  Oh Don Piano.

I’m trying to decompress from a soul-draining kind of day.  You know, the kind of day where you don’t really do a lot, so if someone asked you to write down what you did it wouldn’t look like much on paper, but it’s draining nonetheless?

Or, as Paul Westerberg of The Replacements said: “a person can work up a mean, mean thirst after a hard day of nothin’ much at all.”

Or something like that.  I tend to remember things incorrectly, so I probably paraphrased him, but I don’t care enough about perfection to look it up on the interwebs.

If I had access to my storage space as I typed this, I’d take a picture of my original Westerberg art.  I was hanging out on his tour bus on one of his solo tours looking through a big pile of paper objects.  There were a few paper plates, all of them covered with words and drawings.  He was using them as sketch pads!  I took my favorite, an inkpen drawing of a cat sitting in a window, and asked him to sign it.  So now I have a signed, original Paul Westerberg sketch of a puddytat on a papew pwate.  Sorry about that.

I think I’m putting together, without realizing it, a collection of rock star paper plates.  (Nice sentence construction, by the way, he said to himself).  I have a setlist that Kurt Cobain wrote on a paper plate from the time that my band opened for Nirvana at the 9:30 Club on the Bleach tour.  It has songtitles that ended up changing by the time they were on Nevermind.  Like “Imodium”(sic).

The other day, while walking to the car on the way to work, a leaf was released from the confines of its limb, pushing itself free, like a fingernail twisting its way off of your finger, and it started floating towards Earth.  Hoping to land in the dirt, to more quickly break down into a loamy peatpile of fluffy wormfood, but instead it drifted back and forth on the breeze, left, right, left, right, down…and I caught it.

I don’t remember many instances where I caught an Autumn leaf as it fell.  It’s like Fall’s garbage.  But the leaves are beautiful.  And to catch one means good luck.  Or so I imagined.  So far, it’s not working.

For the story above, I couldn’t think of the medicine that helps slow down your runny bowels.  I asked someone “what’s the name of that stuff, it starts with an “O”, and it stops you from pooping?”  Once supplied with the answer, I laughed and said “yeah, it starts with an O”.

She pointed out something that is SO true.  And I quote: Every time anyone says “it starts with a (blank)”, it NEVER starts with a (blank).

I’m sorry I decided to blog today. Quite obviously, I have absolutely nothing to say.  I am sitting in a leather easy chair with my dog Spider at my side, furiously trimming her toenails with her face.  I’m wearing a pair of jeans given to me for free by my pal Squint.  My feet are resting, not on the floor, but atop a pair of weird orthopedic-looking maroon shoes that I bought in Paris.  They’re like wearing shoeboxes on your feet.  You put your foot in the oversized oversoft monster and wrap the velcro flap around the ball of your foot.  (Well, the top of the ball.)

Then you fasten the strap over your ankle, feed the plastic doohickey into the slot until it clicks, and you’re ready to rumble!  They’re cushiony, and very thick.

I have things to do.  I can’t keep wasting your time and mine.  I’m not getting anything done because I’m writing this, but I’m not writing anything worth reading.

I can only say I’m sorry.  If I could take this entry back, I would.  And yet for some reason, I’m still typing.  I’m making it longer.  What’s wrong with me?  Why am I doing this to you?

I need to eat something and go to bed.  Or bed something, and go to eat.  But the only living thing here with me is my dog, and I’m not going to have sex with her, no matter how much you want me to.

I like imeem.com because it has songs on it that I don’t expect I’m going to find.  I can get on there while I’m working and whip up a batch of songs to listen to like these.  Sometimes I’m surprised that someone has taken the time to put particular songs online.  Because a few years back, it was hard to find much of anything weird unless you went to Kazaa and got loads of viruses along with them.  Now, there are fairly uncommon songs within easy reach.

1) Cheap Time - People Talk

2) Mick Ronson - The Empty Bed

3) Elliott Smith / Heatmiser - Not Half Right

4) T.Rex - Rip Off

5) Amon Duul II - Archangels Thunderbird

“When the everywhere-eye
Asks you who is the emperor of the sky
Take the archangel’s thunderbird,
Rent a destroyer and sail to Cape Cod
There lives a lion, they call him God
There is no elevator to Eden, but a hole in the sky”

Wow! I’m a party animal!!!!!

Sometimes when I’m in a group of people, I like to sit with my laptop and look up words in the online Merriam Webster dictionary. They’ll be sipping their mint juleps, speaking in tongues about what stocks they’re losing money on, and I push the button to make it speak out loud and say silly words.

It surprises me how many times I’ll make the computer say something goofy or something goofier before someone will notice. I mean, one night I sat at a small get-together, pressing the “enter” button about 50 times while a loud voice said something-or-other before someone said “did I just hear the computer mention a disturbance?”

It’s fun! Look up the weirdest words you can think of, and have someone say them to you in a pleasant voice.  I’m gonna cwm.

It’s A Small World. Jerry Seinfeld’s castmate has a tiny one.

It’s 3:13 a.m. and I’m trying to go to sleep. I felt a little teapot all day long. No no, that’s not it. I felt a little queasy all day long. I went to a place called Rocket To Venus last night to bid Happy Birthday to a friend, and ended up drinking some rather strongly-mixed Kamikazes. I haven’t had more than 2 drinks in months.

Also, I’ve been staying healthy for a long time now, but the cravings for the thing I’ve been staying away from have been intense, so I’ve been smoking (tobacco, thank you) for the last week or so. Today I smoked 5 or 6 fags in a row (god I love saying that) and it made me feel grumbly in the tumbly.

On the way home from work, I both asked and axed my friend Chris X to pull the car over post haste. I then stood on a sidewalk in Baltimore and vomited into the grass.

Am I turning you on?

Now I’m lying in bed, drinking Extra Sweet Tea, made by Tradewinds. (a company, not a weather condition.) I’m listening to a commentary track of an episode from Season 2 of NCIS, and the foxy Pauley Perrette & the very funny Michael Weatherly are lulling me into a dreamstate.

A few days ago I was exiting the closest Starbucks to my house, & a guy sitting outside at a table drinking a coffee connected eyes with my girlfriend Sky. (She was with me, by the way. I don’t mean to imply that he’d murdered her, & at the moment I passed he was pulling her eyeballs out of his pocket and clacking them together.)

She stopped walking and said “I think I know you”, to which he replied “yeah, we’ve definitely met somewhere”. They eventually figured out that they’d met in the green room at a comedy club, either in Washington D.C. or Baltimore. The guy at Starbucks was comedian Mike DeStefano. The reason they’d met was because she used to go out with a comedian who I’m sure she’d rather I not name here, although if you’ve seen the Jerry Seinfeld documentary Comedian, you’ll know him as the humble, up-and-coming comic that balances out Jerry’s seasoned pro. (And also, if you’ve seen the film already, you’ll know the amount of sarcasm that I just liberally ladled into the adjectives describing her ex.)

He invited us to sit at his table and chew the fat (yes, for some reason there was a large punchbowl full of fat) while he waited for his lovely Irish girlfriend to return. It turns out that my girlfriend had long ago told me a story which involved our newfound friend, but she’d never named the subject of her story. When they met at the comedy club, wherever the fuck it was, both Mike and her ex were performing. She was apparently laughing harder than she should have at Mr. DeStefano’s eloquent ramblings, and was scolded for it.

I don’t think it’s going to come as a surprise to anyone who realizes that the comedian I’m speaking of, who I still have very kindly not named, is a childish, immature, insecure, abusive pussy.

On the other side of the coin, we have my new best friend, Mike DeStefano. (Okay fine, we’re not best friends, but we’ve emailed.) He’s a man’s man, (but he likes women), a straight-shooter, and someone I feel I have quite a bit in common with. (And Mike, if you’re reading this and still want some help with your website, ask Sky. It’s what she does for a living.)

Our photo is above all of this text, but you can also click this link:

TWO DEAD GUYS

This whole story was basically to tell the “It’s A Small World” story one more time.

Let’s go back over it all, shall we?

1) My girlfriend Sky had previously told me a story that involved her laughing at a comedian, and having her “comedian” “boyfriend” get angry at her for it.

2) We (I’m included in that pronoun, along with my girlfriend, who lives in the richest county in the state) ran into him, a comic who lives in NYC in the Bronx, while the two of them were visiting the city of Baltimore, a town which neither calls “home”.

3) He had performed the night before at the Improv in D.C., and was in the hell we call Baltimore to film some comedy segments for the website www.superdeluxe.com

4) They recognized each other after only having met one time, and they only connected eyes by happenstance.

5) We started realizing that there were friends in common, like Tom Ryan.

6) Mike’s girlfriend is from Ireland, and I had been there with Sky! We spoke about our trip with her, and she knew some of the places we had gone! In her own hometown! And the whole time she was speaking, it was with an Irish accent!

7) I understand that my “it’s a small world” coincidences are getting weaker with each number, but I’m trying to type until I fall asleep.

8) His girlfriend had been shopping, and came out of the same store where we had purchased Honeycrisp apples earlier in the day!!!!!!

9) The other comedian we were speaking of earlier in this entry has micropenis.

In other news: Today, Scott “Wino” Weinrich, stoner rock legend, guitar god, etc., stopped by Reptilian Records Headquarters, and my little buddy Chris convinced him to sign some stuff, which may or may not be up for auction.

Asterisk (FLOWER DANGER)

Another day. I wake up in my friend’s home, where I’m now living. I walk downstairs, trying to avoid eye contact with my dog so I won’t have to take her outside until I’m ready, and get a Wallaby Organic Yogurt (flavor: Dulce De Leche) to eat with a disposable plastic spoon (brand: Safeway).

I eat it in bed, flip on the laptop (Dell), and see an ad on the top of myspace for a company called “degrees.info”. Apparently, in a race to create a cute ad campaign, they spent a lot of time on the cute drawings of all of the cute professionals you could turn out to be if you take their cute online courses and didn’t pay close attention to spelling. Well, unless BOUTY HUNTER is actually one of the things you can pay them to be.

Yesterday in a conversation with a freakishly attractive human woman (variety: German Scottish Italian) I said the words “why are you looking at me when my lights are out?”, which was supposed to mean “why are you looking at me when my eyes are closed?”.

Other quotes from the day include “your eyes are like human eyes”, from the aforementioned beauty.

And “you can’t copy Flash unless you have a floppy cache”, from me to no one.

Also, “I still can’t breathe, but I feel okay” from the Papas Fritas song “Holiday”. I took some Polaroids of Tony Goddess and the Papas Fritas kids which will go in the book when it comes out. I think I had one of them online in an older diary and my good buddy Kitty Bukkake said she went to ivyleaguecollegeschool with Tony. They’re a great superpoppy band who past girlfriends and friends have accused of sounding like “an indie rock band doing versions of Sesame Street songs”.
(see Kids Don’t Mind)

Someone I know told me that someone we know “says ASTERICK”. Jesus. Really? How hard is it, people, to work just a little bit to pronounce words properly?
And this one’s not so hard. Say it, asterisk. Let’s try it together.
Can you say the word RISK? It’s pretty easy. It refers to the potential for danger or harm. I’ve never heard it mispronounced. Hence my alarm.
Now, how about the flower “ASTER”? A yellow center, maybe white or pink rays sprouting up around it. If you can say BASTARD and DISC, you should be able to properly pronounce that fucking little star sign on your phone or keyboard.
ASTER RISK.
Asterisk, ya idjit.

I should make this blog all about pronunciation (“oh, you will”, she says) and then we’ll point all of the idiots around us toward it.

I have to poop. Probably my dog does too. I’m going to enjoy some fine macrobiotic noodle objects, drink some Gatorade, and decorate the world with stink!

Love,
Johnny

Rubber Bubbly Baby Bunkers OR Come See Virtual Me Hover

For a short period of time today, I bummed a laptop off of my friend Chris. I thought, instead of sending a text or email, that I’d sign on to Second Life and see if my honey was playing in the alternate universe.

(In case you’ve never played, it’s an online game where you create your own character and walk around doing whatever the hell you want to. We both discovered it after it was featured on an episode of The Office. We actually look like ourselves.)

Anywho, I signed on, searched for her, discovered she wasn’t there, and decided to take a snapshot of myself before I signed off. (You can take online “pictures” of yourself in the game. Jesus God. A pretend world where you create an online version of yourself and then take photographs of yourself hanging out there.)

I noticed a podium on a small stage and decided I’d sit on it. I pressed the “sit here” button. Instead of sitting on the podium I’d pointed at, the game had me sitting about 5 virtual feet up in the air. For about 5 minutes I sat there. Someone else in the real world, from who knows where, walked onto the stage and walked around me the whole time. Probably wondering “why and how is this guy hovering in mid-air”?

He floated and flew a couple of times, maybe trying to emulate me, but couldn’t get the hang of simply sitting on nothing.

After I signed off I sent my significant other a letter containing the snapshot of my character floating around. Then we started laughing at the ridiculousness of what I’d done.

I spent about 10 minutes of my evening, not washing dishes or picking up dirty clothes, but walking around in a virtual world, looking basically like I do in the real world and acting like I do in the real world. When people tried to talk to me I ignored them, and when given a minute to do something I:

a) sat down

b) took a picture

Has the world really gotten so abstract that now instead of walking outside and strolling in the park with my dog I’m going to spend my time manually controlling a virtual image of myself walking around in an online seaside resort?

Apparently yes.

In other news, I haven’t taken a shower in days, I’ve lost my sense of smell & taste, and I like the song “This One’s For Randy” by the band Hot Rod Circuit.

Homo Slomo Disco

Click on pic!

There’s a place that has a few locations in and around Chicago called the
Illinois Bone and Joint Institute.
My girlfriend found it on the interweb. She pointed out that it’s a fantastic
tongue twister. It’s hard to say correctly one time, much less three. Try it. You’ll at least end up saying the word “boin” a few times.

Then, when it becomes an obsession, and you can’t stop saying “Illinois Bone and
Joint Institute,” start calling the number (on evenings and weekends, of course. They do important work there, anus. They’re busy fixing people’s bones and joints). So you can hear a recorded voice say it.

Also, go to Japan and ask someone there to pronounce the name of Thee Michelle Gun
Elephant’s album Gear Blues. I’m betting they’ll say “Gill Bruise,” which has killed many of my fish over the years.

I’m writing a new play. Here are the first few lines…
GIRL: You read my mind.
BOY: I blue your mind.
GIRL: Wait… you red my mind?
BOY: No, no, no… I blew your mind!
(A minute of silence passes. Eggs fall from the sky above. Offstage, a loon cries.)
GIRL: I blew a mime.

That’s it so far. It’s like a Pier Paolo Pasolini film and a really terrible abstract expressionist painting, only in play form. For the leads, I see Kevin Spacey and… I don’t know. I haven’t thought about who will play the boy yet.

In case you can’t remember all of the months and how many days they have, I developed my own little rhyme. It goes like this:

30, 30, 30 one
All the rest have thirty one
All the rest do not have none
It’s the one that does not have it… February.

I may have remembered the original version incorrectly, but I’ve always been able to remember which month is the shortest.

I saw Jack Nicholson recently on some crappy E! kinda show, and he was talking to the photogs as he walked by, saying:
“If you ever flash those lights at my kid again I’m going to push your face thru the back of your head.”

We’re listening to some minimalist micro house from a few years ago. One of those Chain Reaction metal can CDs. I said to my gf (who’s my bff! 4e! tlaf! LOL! fart!)
“Do you mind that I’m making you listen to slow-motion gay dance music?” and she said
“No, I like “homo slomo disco.”

YOGA POSITION #314: The Shambling Monk

When I check into hotels, because I used to be fairly well-known around town and had a stalker at a couple of points, I do it under an assumed name. That name is
Porky-Cheeks McFiddleFuddy.

At the top of the page, there’s a picture of me and my identical quintuplets hanging out at Patterson Park. I swear to the gods, as the picture was being taken someone on the futbol field yelled “ondelay!” Or however it’s spelled.

I want to have some kind of cool sign off line, like a Dan Rather, or a Walter Cronkite, or one of those people who have cool sign-off lines.

IT’S A WRAP!!!!

or maybe

SUCK IT!!!!

or

SLAM DUNK!!!!

sleeeeeeeeeeeeep… sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

Take ahold of my hand if you want to live… with diabeetus.

I’m carless (not “careless,” he means without car) for a few days, and also without internet (sans connection). Well, except for today, because a beautiful woman with a computer came to service all of my needs. Lucky you!

So I had a little time to try to entertain myself, and I did it by watching TV
(man, did you see any of the Oprah/Tom Cruise thing? I didn’t listen to it, but I watched the two of them sitting on his sofa and all I could think was, “Jesus Christ that woman sure takes up a lot of couch!”) and listening to oodles of 7” rekkids. Things I love that I haven’t been able to listen to, things I bought that I haven’t been able to listen to, and things sitting around my roommate’s stereo that I haven’t listened to because I don’t own them.

DIRTBOMBS - play Sparks (In The Red)
I finally got to listen to the 45 I bought at the Dirtbombs show. The one where they cover songs by U.S. glamrock fey/twee brother combo Sparks. I like it a lot, but it doesn’t have the expensive production and fucking brutal Jeff Salen Tuff Darts 70’s Les Paul guitar sound of the original. And I hate to repeat myself, but the recent Baltimore show was goddamned amazing.

The TEST PATTERNS- s/t (Shit Sandwich)
This has been sitting around for about a month without me ever having a chance (read: turntable) to play it on. Tony P. (who used to work at Reptilian where I work and now has his own store) recommended this, knowing my tastes, and mother fucking fuck was he completely right on. I figured I’d favor the boy songs over the girl songs, but I love them equally. It rocks, it’s noisy, it’s fun, it’s rare. If I were getting paid to write a review I’d find someone to compare it to, but you’re only reading this because you know me. You didn’t buy this for the reviews.

DEEP SLEEP - “You’re Screwed” (Grave Mistake)
Not to get too far up the aforementioned Tony’s ass, but this is his band. I missed them at Ottobar recently, thinking they hadn’t started yet, then deciding to make the walk over to see them, and finally entering the club with Noel to find that they’d just gone off the stage. Now I’m even angrier.
This bastard rocks in a way I wasn’t expecting. Tony and I agree on lots of music, and like different things in the same basic niches, but I put this on expecting it to be 1) Descendents-esque 2) maybe straightedge-ish 3) hardcore in a way that I wouldn’t be able to get into.
Wrong on every count. It has a pulverizing hint of Black Flag musically, but the vocals give it something way more melodic than Rollins/Cadena. Or rather, the vocals are informed by a love for/knowledge of punk-pop, and have the construction of power pop vocals (including the doubling of vocals and background vox) but have a straight hardcore delivery.
I was expecting a powerpunk Descendents Chemical People thing, praying it wouldn’t be jokerock like NOFX or something, and it’s neither. It rocks way harder than the former bands, and is never ha-ha rock like the latter. Blistering yumminess akin to the few good songs I like by someone like Suicide Machines, but with melodies and cool touches (like fucking power pop background vocals. Great call, guys.)
Absolutely my favorite record of recent times. I’ve now listened to it 411 times. Go to
the DEEPSLEEP myspace page.

The LILLINGTONS - Lillington High E.P. (Clearview)
I know, this is over a decade old. But I haven’t listened to it in ages, and I forgot how much I liked it. Maybe too close to feeling like noveltyrock (which we now know I’m not a fan of… sorry Screeching Weasel, The Queers, Riverdales, NOFX, etc., etc., etc., blah blah blah)(look — comedyrock, like a comedy album, is funny the first time, but loses its luster on every repeat play) but just enough on this side of it to stay clear of the things I hate about it. It has a whiff of Vindictives-ness, or something in that vein, but poppy and sissy enough to make a power pop fan happy whilst retaining their indie rock shamble.

The APE-SHITS - Ape Shits/Gash split E.P. (Big Action Records)
While I have absolutely nothing against The Gash, the magic for me is on the Ape-Shits side. They can generally do no wrong, even at their silliest, and here’s the key: when you barrel through every song at breakneck speed, it’s sometimes hard to understand the lyrics, which pays off when they get silly. Not that the lyrics are silly. I’m just sayin’… if they were… y’know.
Anywho, if you’ve listened to Deep Sleep or Test Patterns and enjoyed them by the time you’ve gotten down to this review, you may go for this one as well. Speedy, fun and buzzy, but pissy in a way that gives it an edge over happyrock. So, while I love bands like The Briefs, I like their angry songs the best, and this band sounds like The Briefs doing a side project featuring a cathartic draining of venom.
Two songs. Decadent Pig and Fuck the Pigs. Notice a theme? Yeah, me neither. Two killer songs, screeching out of your speakers in a wonderful angry blur.

The STITCHES - Le Shok split E.P. (Gold Standard Laboratories)
And since I’m on the subject of bands that sort of have the same speedy adrenaline-rush and dirty little punkrock attitude as some of the above combos, there’s this single that’s so cool it’ll freeze your gross little brownish nipples off. The song Telephone Disasters is a loss for me because I fucking hate keyboards.
Luckily for me and my 80’s-hating ways (I hated keyboards in the 70’s too. I steered away from prog rock and in the direction of Clash, Sex Pistols, Damned, etc.) there is a flipside with a whole ‘nother band!
Cars of Today, despite lyrics that could be novelty if they just put another few toes over the line, it’s a quick lesson in attitude and aural spite. Sneering vocals, a delightfully tinny guitar buzz and enough attitude to fill up a year’s worth of special “single’s club” 45’s. Speed, guitars, piss and brevity. All I require in a great 7”. I DO HEREBY SINCERELY LOVE THE FUCKING STITCHES.

TO SUM UP: What I think I’m saying is this: If you want some burning hot punk rock that’s not faceless, straight edge, or dour, choose any of the above singles and thrust them blindly onto your turntable. You’ll get a healthful dollop of noise, sexy downstroke punkrock guitars, and vocals with gristle. The fun stops shy of noveltyrock, so you don’t have to worry about only listening to it one time, like Dead Milkmen, Mojo Nixon, [insert annoying musical comedy artist here].

Also, go listen to my band and be our friend.
CINNAMON TOAST, bitch!