Pub/Baby ratio

It's been a while since I've had time to post. Babies tend to have a negative effect on your idle time and even when the wee yin is sleeping you are trying to catch up on other crap like laundry and washing the dishes.

My first visitor since the birth of the wee yin arrived in from the UK last week and for the first time I was really tested on the pub/baby time ratio. I think I managed to keep a fairly even split (though my wife might not agree), but still ended a weeks worth of craziness feeling like, in the words of Bob Dylan, "One too many mornings and a thousand miles behind".

My friend was in town for Alice Donut's 20th Anniversary show. Alice Donut are an East Village, NYC, psycedelic punk band from the late-80's. They have also been my favorite band since I was about 18 and it was a bit of a shock to realise that they had been together for 20 years.

It was a fantastic show - great tunes, strange instruments (trombone, banjo) and transvestites. What more do you want?

It was also a great example of how the internet can be used to break down the barrier between the band and the audience. A few rabid fans like myself had arranged to meet in a bar before the show only to have the two guitarists from the band themselves show up. It was a very cool thing to do considering some fans had come from as far away as Holland and England. The other band members also made themselves very available to the audience, hanging out and chatting after the show.

For a band who once sang:

I've got a jackson pollack tatoo on my ass.
Video priest screaming out high mass.
Sick little schoolgirls rolling round on my floor.
Jehovah's witness knocking at my door.
Rednecks sucking life from a can.
Naked women magazines making me a man.
Big blond bush, schizophrenic tits.
I come prematurely and I dont give a shit.

They are all lovely folks and hell, normal too!!!! Thanks Donut folks for a great time.

Get Connected

I look at all the people wearing IPOD's on the train on the way into work and feel disconnected. I am wearing one myself and, if I wanted to, I could probably go through the whole day wearing a pair of headphones on and never speak to anyone.

It might just be the change of seasons and city-living getting to me but I increasingly find myself disconnected like this. The days of having a conversation with a stranger on the train or bus are well and truly over. If you can even find a person without headphones in their ears, the chances are that if you open your mouth and say "Hello!", they will look at you like you just crapped in their coffee.

It makes me sad and I have been making more of an effort to open my mouth and talk. Pleasantness never killed anyone and if you find me annoying then I hope that somehow, somewhere in the back of your mind, you will find it quite refreshing that someone said "Nice day isn't it?" to you this morning without making you wonder "What the fuck does this person want?".

On a related note, the claim to fame of the new Microsoft mp3 player "Zune", is that you can share music wirelessly with another user sitting close by. This is an interesting concept as it allows you to communicate without actually communicating. A modern day version of tribes using drum beats to communicate.

It's killing one of the things I love because I think A wonder of music is that once you find the scene/genre that you like, it will connect you with others like you. Your own tribe if you like. You can dance with them, you can talk to them, you can drink with them, you can have sex with them, you can marry them, you can have babies with them, you can build a lasting and meaningful relationship.

You can't do any of these things with a wireless mp3 player.

Staying on the connected note: we recently upgraded the phone line in our house and put in a phone system with additional wireless handsets, however, in case of a power cut we have kept one physically connected corded phone.

I find myself being drawn to this phone more as it forces me to stand in one place and actually listen to what the other person is saying as opposed to wandering around the house doing other things while talking wirelessly. I also feel that by holding onto this old receiver I am somehow connected to the person at the other end of it, like a soup can with a giant bit of string connecting it to another soup can thousands of miles away. Whatever happened to the old soup can phones??? Do kids still make those or do we all have "Playskool" electronic communications systems?

Listen to me, I sound like an old fogey... well in my day..........

Politics of Perversion

So it took a bunch of dirty emails by Mark Foley, the co-chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus to a bunch of 17-year old boys, to destabilze the Republican Party in this country. Not a war that is costing an estimated $100,000 every 20 minutes, not an estimated 50,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, not to mention military deaths on all sides. Not the useless Democratic Party.

Nope, not in America... what we really needed was "Maf54" asking "how my favorite young stud doing?".

I find myself wondering, of course Mark Foley is a big hypocrite, but I find myself asking, if he was sending dirty text messages to 17-year old GIRLS, would the country be as up in arms as it is? Who is the hypocrite then?

In the eyes of the media, sending dirty emails to girls will make you a dirty old man, sending them to boys makes you a perv. I say sending 17 year old kids off to die in an illegal war makes you a perv. I saw an ad on the side of a bus the other day that had a picture of a Marine on the battlefield and the caption "Just think of it as a school uniform". Now that's perverted. "Dying to Learn" would be my caption.

Oh well I guess I should just be glad the the Dumbya boat is finally sinking....

Irish aye.......

Last night I dragged my tired arse out to see Irish singer Damien Dempsey playing at the Knitting Factory bar. I really, really wanted to like this guy, and granted, I did like HIM, he's a good laugh and a great songwriter, but his voice... oh god, it's like a a man with three noses singing underwater! Sometimes, you really want to like someone's music and sometimes it just doesn't happen.

I've been through this a few times over the years - with music and books. I must have started the book "Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance" about 5 times, I really want to like and understand this book but the only zen-like state I get into after about 3 chapters is sleep. I could fall asleep standing on hot coals with a burning rolled-up newspaper stuck up my bum while reading this book!!

Same goes for "On The Road" by Kerouac, "The Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs and the follow up to "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller(probably one of my all time favorite books), which was so boring I can't even remember what it was called now!!!

All of these books have either been recommended to me by people with impeccable taste, or the authors have written other things I loved, and all of these books sit on my shelf taunting me year after year to pick them up and fail once again at chapter 5.

Musically it's the same story - Damien Dempsey is highly recommended by one of my musical heroes Christy Moore, and is also a mate of Shane McGowan from The Pogues, who, in my opinion, is the best songwriter since Bob Dylan. Damiem Dempsey plays Irish folk music with a social conscious, and usually I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff.

The crowd was filled with young, working class Irish New Yorkers, spilling into Manhattan from Yonkers, Riverdale, Bayridge and Woodside. All the Irish enclaves in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.

They were my kind of crowd - drunk and rowdy - so much so that the bar badly "misunderestimated" (to borrow a word from Dumbya) the amount of people who would be at this show and only had one barmaid working. Dempsey sells out 2000 seat venues in Ireland, yet here he was in a pub that held 200 tops. Needless to say those 200 seemed to be ordering pint upon pint of Guinness and all at the same time from the poor barmaid.

I stayed for about an hour of his set, got in my four pints, and headed home by 11. God, what a different life you lead after you have a baby! I've worked out that four pints is my "pint of no return". I can still go home and deal with crying Wee Yin reasonably well at that stage, anymore than four pints and I might as well stay out and get hammered (something I haven't done in months).

I think I am learning to reprogram myself and that's a good thing. Last week I went to see the great Canadian punk band "Nomeansno", a bunch of old farts who can still really kick up a helluva noise. Again I managed to limit myself to 4 pints then off home to bed.

This is all the more amazing for the fact that I ran into the two guitarists and the drummer from my all time favorite band Alice Donut at the show and we got talking about all sorts of shite but mainly babies. It was the day the punks rockers stopped taking acid and started talking about babies. Quite weird.