REPORT: Aimlessly skipping past David Hasselhoff and some rather casual strippers


yesterday. a day glorified by artists as far apart as the beatles and guns’n’roses. a day celebrated by historians for providing them with a raison d’etre. a day universally excised from the memory by those who are rudely excreted into the present through the crusty detritus of eyeballs that refuse to open due to the fact that they are sandfilled ballast for a ship that is ploughing on through the dead calm of the eye of a hurricane.

tongue is swollen to about four times its size and cracked down the sides. water is not a luxury. it is an absolute necessity for survival. stupid beeping noise in the background becomes silence after some wild flailing of workable limb. aaaaarrrrgggh!

damn i hate hangovers. although to be honest, i haven’t had one in ages. in fact to be dead honest, i have a little penchant for essentiales or proheps (whichever one’s handy), which have become “Michael’s Little Helpers” (apologies to Mick Jagger). yes siree, these little liver boosters have helped me avoid many an alcoholic aftermath. so this morning’s little surpise was quite a shock to my normally pleasant frame of mind.

but where did it all begin.. well quite innocently as all these things do.. with the best of david hasselhoff, a bachelor’s party and some jolly roger half price pizza. i finished work early and in the vicinity of some shops last night, so i headed for the venerable cd wherehouse in rosebank (so called because most employees just say things like “dude, i dunno where you heard of that.. but it doesn’t exist” when confronted with *slightly* alternative artists like mirwais). joy. so i knew i was in for a special treat when i saw that cd wherehouse was having a back catalogue deletion sale. the marketing people must be running out of steam, they’ve resorted to honesty.

cd sales are glorious affairs, which educate the browser about a huge number of things including: really horrible fashion trends which lived about as long as a mayfly’s puberty, wild overestimations of the success of latoya jackson and similarly myopic sales forecasts of “superstar” musical attempts. bruce willis, david hasselhoff and the entire cast of new jack city’s solo albums belong in the last category.

the obstacles are significant; slogging through the molasses of years of obscure greek singers, equally obscure but more recent popular english language crap, the occasional opera conducted by a blind chinaman and misconceived box sets (“Jazz, blues, funk and rhythm” or “Jazzy Moods”) which usually contain all the songs that the artist in question tried to prevent from seeing the light of day during their lifetime.

but the rewards… aah.. the sweet satisfaction of locating a gem among the dark piles of forgotten rockstardom. the joy of finding an obscure indie band which weren’t quite cool enough to make the jump from UK to anywhere. the utterly orgasmic bliss of “discovering” a copy of daft punk’s homework for R20.

well… sadly that didn’t happen. i picked up liquido (one good song – narcotic), the charlatans tellin’ stories (not bad) and the beastie boys licence to ill (which wasn’t on sale). not a bad haul, but not quite the motherload of hidden loot which i was expecting.

so i trundled off home, playing my new charlatans cd in the car as i was driving, when i had this intense flashback. well not really a flashback, more like a strong feeling that i had to go and pick up the disc of my ex-band’s first album from my ex-drummer’s house (stop me if this ex-ercise gets too punful. ouch! that was bad. alright i’ll stop). so, got the disc, got back home, ripped myself onto MP3 (i can’t tell you how satisfying it is to pirate your own music) and kicked back and had a good laugh.. wow… we were so idealistic. so young. so naively unaware of musical conventions like dynamics, tempo, rhythm, pace, harmony etc etc.

listening to the sound of my own nearly forgotten rockstardom made me wonder if we had ever managed to release it, would i later in life be reduced to skipping through thousands of copies of our seminal concept album “what is the world when all you hear is distortion?”. hmm.. who knows..

this nostalgic melancholy vanished the instant i hit the lounge. el sleaze-o pit-o-naked wenches. well. semi naked wenches. money hungry wenches. greg’s bachelor’s party was off to a great start. the man himself was wedged into the corner, his hand plastered to a beer mug with various substances floating therein..

the problem with stripping is that it turns into flesh overkill. along the same lines as keanu reeves acting in johnny mnemonic, or any dolph lundgren film or some of jean-claude’s more memorable routines. its an assault on the senses. and the worst part of it is that strippers don’t accept plastic. damn. i continually find that i am underwhelmed in strip clubs. after the first hour of appreciating some ex-guinnnes entrants glorious assets, i am just plain bored. i sit around, order loads of drinks, try tempt the waitress into stripping and generally lack stimulation. er.. something like that.

that’s all for this instalment. turn your browsers herewards next week for more enthralling sagas. i promise. they’re guaranteed to leave you breathless with something.