Damn, I thought to myself. There's one more guy I won't be fucking.

So I said I was going to have an all-ramen weekend and I damn well did. Above is the ramen that I spent about 7 hours making today. Why is that egg a funny color? Oh that's a seasoned soft-boiled egg, or ni tamago. Other toppings: spinach, green onion, toasted seaweed (nori), pickled bamboo, chasyu pork and kamaboko. Basically what I am trying to say is: in your face, humanity.

Other high point of the weekend: was in Fabric, one of the largest UK nightclubs and my vision of hell. I try to avoid at all costs, but when one of my pals from the Chicks on Speed was DJing there, I consented to grace the place with my presence. Alex clearly knew how much of an effort it was for me, because she played Spacer Woman and then says into the microphone "This is Italo disco! For Lina! She loves Italo!" Or something like that. Now Fabric isn't the sort of place where one would usually (or ever) hear dedications, so between that and the guy that followed us around trying to show us his abs, it was a pretty sweet night out.

...read the rest at Italo Hammers: 10 Bad-Boy Gems of Italian Disco on Splice Today.

Check out my interview with Speculator on Infinite State Machine.

Speculator's an interesting dude who is working on a lot of music projects that you probably haven't heard of yet. But there's no time like the present, eh?

My latest piece on Splice Today about that time when I worried I might be a lesbian but then it turned out I was just listening to too much Bikini Kill: Riot Grrrl, Then and Now

So there's this guy in Dublin. He has a moustache. If Dublin were to have a scene, he'd be a scenester. He is, to put it politely, a cunting moron. Anyway, rumor has it that he's gotten with the program and is starting an italo night.

Here's what Kenny had to say about the fact that a guy with glittery jumpers is trying to co-opt Kenny's favorite ultra-gay, ultra-cheesy, '80s Italian disco music:

"blood is going to spill over this bullshit. stay the fuck away from my music you cunts"

So it was with trepidation that I was talked into attending my first "real" festival. I'd been to a one day affair in Ireland before, but at three and a half days, Electric Picnic is a whole different kettle of fish. And by kettle of fish, I mean plastic bottles filled with Bucky. Buckfast is a tonic wine, allegedly made by monks, with medicinal qualities. Or at least, it's syrupy sickly sweet wine that has a large amount of caffeine in it, making it one of the preferred festival drinks. And Electric Picnic is a festival that involves sleeping in a tent for three nights in a muddy field in County Laois, tromping around in the filth and using port-a-loos. Over 30,000 people attend, including every single Irish person I know. Reputation has it that Electric Picnic is the best Irish festival due to its near complete lack of scumbags and less mainstream bands.

Preparing for Electric Picnic was more than half the battle. I had to buy a tent and a sleeping bag and a camping chair and hot pink Wellington boots with little white paw prints on them. I thought I should have the most cheerful boots possible to try and offset the inevitable look on my face. A few days before I found a list on the printer at work that one of my co-workers had forgotten about and started worrying about the possibility that I had missed something. I queried my pal Aoife, who sent me the following checklist in response:

Toilet roll
Baby wipes
Booze
Tent
Chair
Suncream (being optimistic)
Clothes
Sunglasses
Pink wellies with dog prints
Plastic bottles (for bringing spirits)
Bin bag (for your dignity)
Post-its to stick on your own head saying "I'm a total dickhead"

Needless to say, I found the experience exhausting. And loads of fun. Sort of like living in Ireland.

This is what it sounds like
when Dubs cries

In other news, I (randomly) bought a ticket to go to Tokyo in nine days. I'm very excited, as I'm a big fan of ramen. However, this means I won't be able to see Morrissey when he plays here at the end of the month. Sigh.

Today I was talking to a friend of mine about places that would be good to live. He ruled out a few, and then I said "But what about London?" Pause. "Giddy London?"

"Ah Jaysus. Ya fookin' Yanks." It's really a shame that more people don't appreciate my sporadic interjections of Moz lyrics.

They just released the line-up for the big Ireland festival, and of course there's always a lot of excitement and even more whining and grumbling over the choice of acts. One of my pals spit out a pearl of wisdom paraphrased:

The gigs are incidental. Mainly they just get in the way of the craic.

Check out my Valentine's Day Compilation. The theme is sort of like, reciprocal love. I'm totally into that. It's so hot.

1. I Will Follow Him - Little Peggy March
2. Obsession (Special Dub Mix) - Animotion
3. Every Breath You Take - The Police
4. Give Me Your Love - Junior Murvin
5. You'll Be Needing Me - Nino Tempo
6. Following - The Bangles
7. Climbing Up the Walls - Radiohead
8. The Stalker - Green Velvet
9. Dust (Rocque Wun Remix) - Recloose Feat. Joe Dukie
10. I'm Gonna Make You Love Me - Diana Ross & The Supremes
11. Run For Your Life - Nancy Sinatra
12. Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley
13. Infatuation - Rod Stewart
14. One Way or Another - Blondie
15. You Belong to Me - Carly Simon
16. Need Your Love (Live) - Cheap Trick
17. Private Eyes - Darly Hall & John Oates
18. I'm Your Puppet - Jimmy London
19. You Belong to Me - The Duprees
20. All Strung Out - Nino Tempo & April Stevens
21. The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get - Morrissey
22. Fate (Tynneterje Edit) - Chaka Khan

That Indefinable Nothing.zip

Tracklist:
1. Sensoria - Cabaret Voltaire
2. Russian Radio - Red Flag
3. Compulsion - Martin L. Gore
4. Lucretia My Reflection - Sisters of Mercy
5. Nightporter - Japan
6. She's in Parties - Bauhaus
7. Darkness - Human League
8. Under the Milky Way - The Church
9. Touch - Secession
10. Peek-a-Boo - Siouxsie & the Banshees
11. Dreams Never End - New Order
12. So Alive - Love and Rockets
13. The Cutter - Echo & the Bunnymen
14. Dancing With Tears in My Eyes - Ultravox
15. The Great Commandment - Camouflage
16. Revenge (You Did It Again) - Ministry
17. Warm Leatherette - The Normal
18. Cicely - The Cocteau Twins
19. Charlotte Sometimes - The Cure
20. I Started Something I Couldn't Finish - The Smiths

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.

Somehow, I've fallen into a scene. Having been a perpetual scenester since my early teens, I've seen a lot. Overambitious gradesters hustling for GPA, intravenous drug-using punk rockers, riot grrls with questionable gender politiks, sexually perverse photography involving tennis racquets, grain-eating, therapy-loving "motivation" examiners--it's endless. But I'm not sure if anything I've been a part, or on the fringe, of, could possibly be as weird as what I've gotten myself into now.

Techno.

I know. Seriously, I don't think there's anything I can say to explain this away or even make sense of it. I can only being by saying moving to a new country is a very, very lonely time in one's life, and one's decision making abilities are often clouded by the desperate longing for human companionship and free drinks. Also, I think we all know that overall, I'm a miserable person. But the times in my life when I've been happiest are when I've had a gang and been on a scene. That's my best justification.

When I moved here, my only close friend was a DJ. Before I met him, I had been told he was one of the top DJs in Dublin --"Like being the best speller in your 3rd grade class," I later quipped to him--and thoroughly unimpressed, I proceeded to give him the notorious Lina stink-eye and brush-off when we first met. The second time, though, I said "So you're a DJ, eh? Do you know this tune?" I proceeded to list some of the stupidest songs I could think of, and he not only knew them all, he knew their 12" b-sides and the Razormaid mixes that sampled them.

Now, I'm known for having the most random musical preferences on the face of the earth. And not in a cool I-listen-to-60s-French-pop tunes sort of way, but in a kind of lame I-collect-Samantha-Fox-singles sort of way. So to find someone that although didn't necessarily support it, but at least knew it, was a breath of fresh air in this strange, new country.

Little did I know that this was like when the drug dealer gives you your first hit free. Talking about my favorite 80s new wave songs slowly brought us to italo disco, one of his--and now mine--passions. Italo is a word to describe music from the late 70s and early 80s, mostly Italian in provenance, and cheesy and wonderful beyond belief. Think Baltimora's 'Tarzan Boy.' I'm not going to write more about Italo right now because I have too much to say about it to do it all now.

Anyway, as it turns out, my new best friend is known for DJing two types of music, Italo and techno. Mainly techno.

It started slowly. Invited to a show or two, meeting a few people who became friends, getting perma-guestlisted at weekly clubs, but it wasn't until I had a shocking realization that I finally got into it. The predominant fan base at techno gigs are boys. Young boys. This in combination with the free ins I get to the clubs have made me a regular on the scene, albeit a ambivalent one. Don't get me wrong, I love anything with a synthesizer; I was there for the original Electroclash, after all, but I never thought I was going to be having idle chats about 808s with Dutch techno djs. Just last week I was talking to a German techno dj who was in town to play, about dubstep. I was telling him that I had heard it had to be listened to with a ton of speakers, festival-style, to be appreciated and I wondered what he thought about it. "I think if music is good, it sounds good at any volume," he said.

"Like Chris de Burgh, 'Lady in Red,'" I squealed happily, looking up for a sign of agreement.

"Uh, yes, like that."

So clearly I haven't quite learned to fit in yet. That night, I was in the club, leaning against a wall watching said German play. I was watching the dance floor as if it were a controlled experiment and I was a sociologist trying to sort of the relationship between man and ape. I can't begin to describe what really, really, enthusiastic teenage techno-heads behave like after midnight. I was standing with one of my other dj friends--I have about a dozen now--and finally he turns to me and says, "do you even like techno?"

He's caught me. My face turns red. "I just come here for the boys," I say, abashed. "I just come here for the boys."

Anyway. I have a lot more to say about what's going on musically in Dublin, and how last night, a DJ saved my life. Promise to update more.