NINE INCH NAILS: Night 2 - Wolverhampton.

Wolverhampton rolls up, and gig wise, it's not as exciting as Birmingham Academy was, although the band did have their huge LCD screen and played The Great Destroyer, incorporating the noise element of Happiness in Slavery into the mix, which was a set highlight. I had a bloke behind me who's girlfriend was just over five foot, so being a corteuos kind of man, I stood in-front of the bloke, even though it was 'tight'. After a few tracks the bloke started moaning at me, so I had to tell him i was trying to do his girlfriend a favour and that if he was slightly more corteous to his partner, she's understand this. He just grunted and realised I was getting angry. I hate it when you try to be polite to people and they just take it for granted. So I ranted at him, he backed away and I went to the balcony to get these crappy pics!

(above pic from www.nin.com)

Set-List:

HYPERPOWER!

The Beginning Of The End

Heresy

Survivalism

Terrible Lie

Burn

March Of The Pigs

Gave Up

The Good Soldier

Closer

Wish

Me, I'm Not

The Great Destroyer

Eraser

Only

La Mer

Into The Void

No, You Don't

The Day The World Went Away

Down In It

The Hand That Feeds

Head Like A Hole

Hurt

NIN - Brum

Birmingham Academy - 28/08/07. Joint best gig i've seen NIN play, the other being the self-destruct tour at Wolves back in 94.

Setlist: (as memory serves correct)

Hyperpower!

The Beginning Of The End

Sin

March of the Pigs

Burn

Last

The Frail

The Wretched

Survivalism

Closer

Help Me I Am In Hell

Eraser

Reptile

Piggy

Ruiner


The DayWorld Went Away

The Good Solider

No You Don't

Suck

Dead Souls

Hand That Feeds

Head Like A Hole


One day breather, next up, Wolves!!
Can't wait.

The Link to the Kink.

Another classic Hair Piece (!) from Grand Royal Magazine. Click the pages to read!

Mulling over the Mullet

My friend Nick came and visited the other day, and at one point our conversation turned to my old copies of Grand Royal Magazine, the magazine the Beastie Boys ran over a space of around three years, issuing a whopping five editions!
I told Nick how I’d sold my copies, and how I regretted selling them.
Imagine my surprise the VERY NEXT DAY, when I found all my copies lurking under the bed (I was looking for an audio jack plug in case you wonder why I was under the bed!).

So, this one’s for Nick! (Keep watching for ‘the link to the kink’)
Click the Page Pics to Enlarge!!

Tiny Masters of Today

On Friday, Lisa, Kirsty, Elizabeth, Lucy, Dave, Danny, Evan, Roy, Colin, and I went to see ‘Tiny Master of Today’ live at Walsall Library.

Their debut album has contributions from the Yeah Yah Yeah’s, Fred Schneider, and Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. The album is produced, and all the drumming is done by Russell Simmins of the Blues Explosion. The two main band members are 12 and 10 years old respectively. This was one odd gig. Whereas the vocals are distorted heavily on the album, live, they sound exactly for what they are, children’s voices. The tunes are very catchy, and there was something really great about watching kids that age playing good garage music, and seeing the honest excitement on their faces.

They finished with a cover of House of Pain’s Jump Around, which was in the charts before they were even conceived I’m guessing! Kirsty enjoyed the gig but was scared to meet the band afterwards. As a huge Blues Explosion fan, I met Russell Simmins for a chat, but although he was rather distant, albeit pleasantly. Confusing I know. Incidentally, Russell Simmins looked somewhat alarmingly similar to prize arse Chris Moyles, with a kinky fro’!

Two E's in the garden.

Elizabeth and Evan - Last Week.

The future's bright?

Just when I'm getting an MRI scan to see if my injury is Neck or Shoulder, thus allowing for a more detailed recovery programme to get me back to work, my company is bought out a second time. Would Crown decorator centres want to take in, or dispose of it's rival Dulux decorating centres?

UPDATE::::: Trapped in the closet chapters 12-23

Me, Lisa, Lucy and Dave watched the new R.Kelly DVD 'Trapped in the Closet chapters 12-23' last night, with high expectiations after the unintentional laugh-fest of chapters 1-12.

It is with great sadness to report that the new chapters aren't a patch on the first 12. R. Kelly has obviously realized that people found the first one funny (remember, it wasn't meant to be comedy but drama), and has played on it. Badly. So we now get characters in ludicrous wigs, and a plot-line that is just dull.

I'm not going to buy the next dvd, well, I probably can't. R. Kelly's trial is due soon!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4387692.stm

Thus Ate Zarathustra

I am currently reading about five books, and have just finished 'Mere Anarchy' by Woody Allen, his first book in 25 years. Like Woody Allen's other books, 'Mere Anarchy' is a collection of short stories, collated from various publications. Below, is one of my favourite of the short stories, Thus Ate Zarathustra.

















There’s nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century duelling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure. Who would have thought that “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book” existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin. Selections follow.



Fat itself is a substance or essence of a substance or mode of that essence. The big problem sets in when it accumulates on your hips. Among the pre-Socratics, it was Zeno who held that weight was an illusion and that no matter how much a man ate he would always be only half as fat as the man who never does push-ups. The quest for an ideal body obsessed the Athenians, and in a lost play by Aeschylus Clytemnestra breaks her vow never to snack between meals and tears out her eyes when she realizes she no longer fits into her bathing suit.
It took the mind of Aristotle to put the weight problem in scientific terms, and in an early fragment of the Ethics he states that the circumference of any man is equal to his girth multiplied by pi. This sufficed until the Middle Ages, when Aquinas translated a number of menus into Latin and the first really good oyster bars opened. Dining out was still frowned upon by the Church, and valet parking was a venal sin.


As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only reopened after the Reformation. Fourteenth-century religious paintings first depicted scenes of damnation in which the overweight wandered Hell, condemned to salads and yogurt. The Spaniards were particularly cruel, and during the Inquisition a man could be put to death for stuffing an avocado with crabmeat.


No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares, it’s not me. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup? It was Leibniz who first said that fat consisted of monads. Leibniz dieted and exercised but never did get rid of his monads—at least, not the ones that adhered to his thighs. Spinoza, on the other hand, dined sparingly because he believed that God existed in everything and it’s intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you’re ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.


Is there a relationship between a healthy regimen and creative genius? We need only look at the composer Richard Wagner and see what he puts away. French fries, grilled cheese, nachos—Christ, there’s no limit to the man’s appetite, and yet his music is sublime. Cosima, his wife, goes pretty good, too, but at least she runs every day. In a scene cut from the “Ring” cycle, Siegfried decides to dine out with the Rhine maidens and in heroic fashion consumes an ox, two dozen fowl, several wheels of cheese, and fifteen kegs of beer. Then the check comes and he’s short. The point here is that in life one is entitled to a side dish of either coleslaw or potato salad, and the choice must be made in terror, with the knowledge that not only is our time on earth limited but most kitchens close at ten.


The existential catastrophe for Schopenhauer was not so much eating as munching. Schopenhauer railed against the aimless nibbling of peanuts and potato chips while one engaged in other activities. Once munching has begun, Schopenhauer held, the human will cannot resist further munching, and the result is a universe with crumbs over everything. No less misguided was Kant, who proposed that we order lunch in such a manner that if everybody ordered the same thing the world would function in a moral way. The problem Kant didn’t foresee is that if everyone orders the same dish there will be squabbling in the kitchen over who gets the last branzino. “Order like you are ordering for every human being on earth,” Kant advises, but what if the man next to you doesn’t eat guacamole? In the end, of course, there are no moral foods—unless we count soft-boiled eggs.


To sum up: apart from my own Beyond Good and Evil Flapjacks and Will to Power Salad Dressing, of the truly great recipes that have changed Western ideas Hegel’s Chicken Pot Pie was the first to employ leftovers with meaningful political implications. Spinoza’s Stir-Fried Shrimp and Vegetables can be enjoyed by atheists and agnostics alike, while a little-known recipe of Hobbes’s for Barbecued Baby-Back Ribs remains an intellectual conundrum. The great thing about the Nietzsche Diet is that once the pounds are shed they stay off—which is not the case with Kant’s “Tractatus on Starches.”


Breakfast:

Orange juice 2 strips of bacon Profiteroles Baked clams Toast, herbal tea.
The juice of the orange is the very being of the orange made manifest, and by this I mean its true nature, and that which gives it its “orangeness” and keeps it from tasting like, say, a poached salmon or grits. To the devout, the notion of anything but cereal for breakfast produces anxiety and dread, but with the death of God anything is permitted, and profiteroles and clams may be eaten at will, and even buffalo wings.


1 bowl of spaghetti, with tomato and basil White bread Mashed potatoes Sacher Torte.
The powerful will always lunch on rich foods, well seasoned with heavy sauces, while the weak peck away at wheat germ and tofu, convinced that their suffering will earn them a reward in an afterlife where grilled lamb chops are all the rage. But if the afterlife is, as I assert, an eternal recurrence of this life, then the meek must dine in perpetuity on low carbs and broiled chicken with the skin removed.


Dinner:

Steak or sausages Hash-brown potatoes Lobster thermidor Ice cream with whipped cream or layer cake.
This is a meal for the Superman. Let those who are riddled with angst over high triglycerides and trans fats eat to please their pastor or nutritionist, but the Superman knows that marbleized meat and creamy cheeses with rich desserts and, oh, yes, lots of fried stuff is what Dionysus would eat—if it weren’t for his reflux problem.Aphorisms Epistemology renders dieting moot. If nothing exists except in my mind, not only can I order anything; the service will be impeccable. Man is the only creature who ever stiffs a waiter.

Guitar Hero Rocks the 80's.

Both Kirsty and I love Guitar Hero for the PS2. We’ve loved it ever since Lisa won a promo copy of GH1 with a guitar controller, and it took over our days for weeks on end. Once completed, we had to wait and wait in the hope that there would be a sequel. Eventually Guitar Hero II showed up, bigger, badder, more songs, brilliant. Many more days and nights were filled whilst Kirsty and I pretended to be Tony Iommi. Once GHII was completed the wait was on, and alas, we find out there are TWO new Guitar Hero games in the pipeline, Guitar Hero Rock the 80’s, and Guitar Hero III.

Whilst shopping on Tuesday, I noticed GH: Rock the 80’s on the shelf, bang, Lisa picked it up and it was in the trolley. This was two days ago. I’ve already completed it on expert level, and I feel cheated.

There are only 30 tracks this time round, and when you complete it, you can’t use the cash you’ve earned to unlock further songs. Granted it would be difficult to unearth 80’s metal tracks from bands ‘new’ bands, but the makers should’ve at least put more titles on the initial game to make up for this.
Hopefully business will be back to usual for GHIII.