November 2007 Archives

The above is a picture I took yesterday. For my non-sighted readers, it is a single bag of Double Stuf Oreos, priced at 8.95 Euro. For those of you not hip to the exchange rate, that's about $13, or about $0.75 for a single Double Stuf Oreo. Don't get me wrong, they are well worth it (and severely undervalued in the States), but it was still sort of a heart-stopping surprise. Then I got kicked out of the store for taking the picture.

Yesterday's chat:
Lina: Can we talk about my favorite subject? (wanting to discuss an upcoming Amazon order)

Max: Which? Feelings, or boys that aren't interested in you?

Okay, so I flew over to Glasgow yesterday and went straight over to the show. I know in saying what I am about to say, I'm going to stray into the territory of ugly, fat girls (as I so often do), because those tend to be the types that have creepy long-standing relationships with bands. One time, in the mid-nineties, I went to an Afghan Whigs show in San Francisco. This was probably around the time that Honky's Ladder hit, ie. when they were finally making it "big." We were bopping along, and then this fat, ugly girl hisses in my ear "You don't even know this song." I did, indeed, know the song, and I specifically remember it because the song's title is "Retarded." She assumed I didn't know the song because it was on one of their older albums, and of course all cute fans show up once the bands go mainstream. Anyway, I went home that night with a wad of gum in my hair (seriously), but content that I was I not only had a wide breadth of pre-emo musical knowledge, but also that I was cuter than that fat girl.

Anyway, my point is, that everyone at the Verve show was completely unaware that they had a back catalog. Urban Hymns was it. Now, I don't really feel like going into all of the brutal details, but I could have given a shit by the time that album came out. I mean, I had it, don't get me wrong. And I sold my food stamps to see them on that tour, but like, it was not A Northern Soul. It didn't even have a Gravity Grave. Slide Away. Christ. So the girl next to me would just go mute during the few times they played a tune off of anything other than UH and then do these really annoying finger-extended wrist twirls throughout the other songs. Frankly, I want to sleep with one of these types of girls because for the life of me, I can't find anything else redeeming about them, and there must be some reason that you people keep them around.

I kind of got the feeling that Richard Ashcroft et al cared more about being a big rock star and having people scream at them and all that than actually making great music and making their fat, ugly fans happy. And that made me sad. Like, I understand that they want to play their newer stuff, but at this point it's all old. Do they really not think that History is a better song than some shit about catching butterflies? Because unless butterflies is code for AIDS, I'm just not interested.

I'm not 15 anymore. I've met guys a lot taller, skinnier, and more strung out than him. And even though this band meant a whole lot to me back then, I'm not sure if I'm willing to fly around the world to prove it again. Like, they represented something to me, and I'm not even sure what it was, but probably something loosely correlating to depression and drug use. And like, what can't I loosely correlate with those two things? That said, A Northern Soul was a fucking deadly album, right?

Anyway, the show was still really good, despite my gripes. Afterwards I went to the Art School to see Modeselektor and hear some dirty disco, made some new friends in Glasgow, came back to Dublin and am now gearing up to go hear Mr. Pauli, the man who is going to bring the vocoder back. Can't complain.