Twenty Third & Seventh

george michael is in trouble again. couldn't happen to a more deserving ponce! After all the shit he has given Boy George for being 'too gay' over the years I'd be happy to see his career destroyed.  There is, IMO, absolutely no excuse for public sex of this kind in this day and age.  As Boy so wisely observed-- 'can't he use a computer'?

why do banks take 48 hours to process a payment TO a credit card while they can deduct money instantaneously?

can anybody explain the difference between an incursion and an invasion? if a tank rolled into my neighborhood i think the semantics would become secondary.

we hear reports that visitor rooms at the Chelsea have gone up in price.  a correspondent writes:

they have now gone from $250.00 to $275.00  Man oh man.  They are pricing out all the people
who made that hotel what it was!  Pretty soon the only people staying there will be rich boring tourists or Britney Spears.

and we're inclined to agree.  Negotiate like a New Yorker is my advice, it worked in knocking the price down for us.  Just be prepared for a stark room!

Liza Minnelli playing a whacked-out masturbation therapist is a freaky thought

I am My Own Wife is headed my way in the original production.  This review from the .au press has a major spoiler- be careful.

Still depressed at the idea that CBGBs will be gone forever.  An example of what happens when one becomes a parody of one's self.

Second Life is an overwhelmingly expansive and conceptually dense virtual world allegedly taking the world by storm.  It's worth a look.  I suspect that I'm a bit too old to grasp the paradigm.

Of the 147 million Americans on the Internet, 12 million have blogs.

All the Good Reading

All the good reaading is over at Legends today.

They have a feature profile of our own, cherished Randi Marx and a bit of yaddah from your never humble editor.

Max's Website

Our attention was drawn to this marvellous Max's Kansas City website.

If you're feeling benevolent, or even just like throwing away some of that massive disposeable income, you might consider the various ways that you can help out the fund to look after musos who have fallen on hardtimes.  There's some great merch available. I have NEVER owned a CBGBs t-shirt because they could be bought in fashion shops here before I'd even seen the place.

Interestingly, my favourite original Go-Between has recently established a similar orgaisation here.

A Max's shirt would much more effectively communicate "I'm too cool for you- do not approach".

Dee Dee Would be Horrified!

Admittedly dodgy snapshots, I had to find a gap in traffic on a busy road to get this image.  Something about this shop makes me feel a strong urge to vomit, it's so symbolic of the yuppie infestation of my neighbourhood.  I try to imagine the real Dee Dee confronted by a shop selling ugly handbags and twee paste jewelery that cost more than the average person's weekly income.  I think he'd have the same impulse that I do. Throw a molotov through the window!

 

   

Since when were over-priced handbags innovative, anyway?

Dee Dee at the Chelsea

Animal boy (Seattle Weekly).

We found this old picture of Dee Dee Ramone on the Hotel Chelsea balconies and an ancient write-up from when things were better and Dee Dee still lived at the Chelsea.

Animal boy

In the wake of his former bandmate's death, Dee Dee Ramone embarks on a difficult tour.

By Chris Nelson    May 16, 2001

FRIENDS, WE'VE COME to that part of the paper where I offer you, verbatim, a slice of conversation I had last month with one Dee Dee Ramone—ex-Ramones bassist, author of the new novel Chelsea Horror Hotel, and Saturday's rock 'n' roll entertainment at the Ballard Firehouse.

Dee Dee: "So what date is this date in Seattle?"

Me: "I think it's May 19."

Dee Dee: "Oh nooo. And today's like the 26th [of April]."

Me: "I think your tour starts on the 16th of May."

Dee Dee: "Oh my god. Where?"

Such is the haphazard life of the former Douglas Colvin, a 48-year-old New Yorker living in Santa Monica, Calif., a man whose craggy voices warbles slowly with the dips and peaks of a warped record. He was also a key songwriter in one of the most important bands in rock 'n' roll history.

The Ramones—who in 1974 invented themselves a new surname, a tough guy look, and then invented (yeah, invented) punk rock—last month lost their adored public face when singer Joey died at 49 from lymphatic cancer.

"I don't even know if it's in good taste that I'm playing now," Dee Dee says just over a week after Joey's passing. "It's just like I can't get out of it. . . . [I] just feel like hiding. But when I play, I don't expect it to be like a memorial concert or anything. I'm just gonna go ahead and play the way I play, but I won't really say anything. I'm kinda like drawing a blank—I got the energy, but my mind is like, I regret it, you know? It feels like the Ramones are really over."

Although the Ramones did the Cretin Hop all the way up until 1996, Dee Dee quit hollering "One-two-three-four!" back in '89. He tried for awhile to rock the mike as rapper Dee Dee King, then played with backing bands the Chinese Dragons and the ICLC, and finally released some punk-rock solo discs that were mined for last year's Greatest and Latest album. All the while, Dee Dee—who wrote such Ramones favorites as "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue," "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World," "Chinese Rock," and "Pet Sematary"—continued to pen tracks for the brudders through their final days as a band.

Of course, the Ramones haven't been brudderly with one another in years, and Dee Dee says he hadn't spoken to Joey in quite some time before his death.

NOT TOO LONG AGO, Dee Dee went back into the studio to record the rave-up "Bad Little Go-Go Girl" with MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, which was released as a download through Musicblitz.com. At the Firehouse—where fans can expect a mix of solo cuts, Ramones tunes, and maybe even an oldie or two—his band will include Chase Manhattan on drums and Chris the Creep on bass (or on guitar if Dee Dee's wife, Barbara Zampini, a.k.a. Barbara Ramone, joins the tour on bass).

But Dee Dee's chief creative outlet of late has been literary work. In 1997 he wrote Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones with Veronica Kofman, republished as Lobotomy last year, and he's now working on a new novel called Legend of a Rock Star.

Chelsea Horror Hotel stirs real life and fantasy into a clumsy tale about Dee Dee's stress-filled days at the midtown Manhattan lodge that's famed as the building where late Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978.

Fact: Dee Dee lived at the hotel from 1974 to 1978, and then again from 1990 to 1997. Fiction: A Satanic cult named the S.K.U.L.L.S. used piranhas in the basement to help cook up a cannibal stew.

Fact: Dee Dee owns a dog named Banfield. Fiction: The dog speaks to him telepathically.

Fact or Fiction?: Dee Dee spent the bulk of his days in the mid-'90s trying to cop dope to make the world-weary life of an ex-Ramone a little more livable.

"I just have to deny everything and then say yes also," Dee Dee says. "If I say yes, I'll incriminate myself, and if I say no, I'll incriminate myself, so I can't give you an answer. I just leave it up to everyone's discrepancies. No one really has a very good opinion of me anyway. No matter how nice I've been. I don't expect to worry about it—but I don't wanna make it worse."

Unquestionably fiction is the book's climactic basement jam with Vicious, departed Dead Boy Stiv Bators, and late Heartbreakers Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan. Basements have long been a fixation for Dee Dee, whose songwriting credits include "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement" on The Ramones (1976) and "I Don't Wanna Die in the Basement" from the solo Hop Around (2000). He traces the allure to his childhood in post-War Berlin.

"My friends and I used to play in basements in bombed-out buildings and bunkers," he says. "Go there and look for junk, old war relics, just goofing around, exploring. 'Cause it's scary and insane when you're, like, 7 years old to be crawling around in those old buildings. It was still some of the most pleasant memories I have. I enjoyed those days—it was like my pre-drug-taking days, but I was totally lost in an escape fantasy, running wild and not going to school. I was having a good time then, before I had the weight of the world on my shoulders."