i’ve been on an excitement fest this past week. well, by my standards, anyways. on thursday i met up with marceline in london to go see trail of dead. i also met david for the first time. surprisingly, pie was eaten. trail of dead were fantastic. i’d not seen them since Reading 2000. damn, that seems so long ago. lesson learned that day: don’t trust rock stars to pass messages on for you. i’m sure marceline will have more elaborate tales of rock on the TOD front, so i’ll not go on about it.

last night i saw ghostworld, and you know, it’s as good as everyone else said it was. the reason i’m seeing it so late is because my local odeon only show non-blockbuster types on special screening events. it’s been southend projection month or something these last few weeks. ghostworld, unfortunately, is the last in the series, but i did see the pledge with jack nicholson the other week, which was equally good – a touching story with a surprising ending. jack was on top form.

i’ve also been making a skateboarding video on a digital camera which has been fun.

and today is my birthday. so yay. i’m Getting Old too. i give up.

heh

I played at that gig mentioned below (on 020202) so I’ll continue the self-obsessed and nepotistic theme by mentioning it here. For us (that is, Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element (or Sunnyville…, Sunnyvale Noise Experiment, etc)) part of the fun of the night, nay the whole weekend, was travelling up for 10 hours in our little van, and picking the Starries up along the way, thinking we were on some kind of rock voyage, like if Summer Holiday was set in 2002 and featured a bunch of Shellac and Ninja Tune fans.

Anyway, setting aside the wonderful diskant hospitality and the general feeling of warmth and happiness to be experienced in Glasgow (my new choice of place to live – as these feelings quickly wore off as we returned to the miserable south), the gig was a success. And not just ‘cos we thought we played well – we thought we played quite well, incidentally – but because the place was pretty packed, the people were good, the pie was tasty and the Irn Bru was flowing. The Starries played more confidently and raucously than I remember them playing before, and with a top Husker Du / melodic hardcore blah blah edge, and were good and LOUD. Fighting Red Adair were an incredibly pleasant surprise, the description of them on the flyers as some kind of Shellac / Oxes fight hybrid being spot on, as they cranked it up and let rip with their sharply-honed vicious barrage of structured noise.

There will be more of these diskant gigs, i hear. And that news is A GOOD THING.

I did go to London and I did see Part Chimp, Reynolds and Fixit Kid in the company of 10 diskant-related persons. I’d forgotten how tall Ollie is. Fixit Kid were enjoyably noisy but I didn’t hear enough of them to find that over-exciting. Reynolds, however, pulled out some old songs and were quite fantastically brilliant. I’d not heard ‘Stopper’ live before and it was awesome. Disappointing that ex-vocalist Matt Tagney didn’t get onstage though. Some people might say going to London for a day to see Reynolds was insane but those people obviously aren’t suffering from a 15 month Reynolds withdrawal situation. Anyway, Part Chimp were also in the house and almost worth the trip themselves. In case you haven’t seen them yet, Part Chimp are ex-Ligament and have lots of deafeningly great riffs. Tunes as well. Including one they stole off ‘Little Drummer Boy’. I truly had a trouser flapping rock moment while standing in front of the speakers. Only downside to this is that after three songs you’ve gone deaf and can’t hear the rest of the set. But, words don’t do Part Chimp justice so go to Vitaminic and get their MP3 and then email them and demand they release a record. I assume the reason this hasn’t happened yet is because they’re picking out the heaviest vinyl known to man and inventing something that prevents you listening to the record if the volume is set any lower than max power.

Kitten Towers is a most hospitable place. I recommend it. Greg omits to point out below that we actually had a pie eating contest which he lost spectacularly. I’d also like to recommend apple pie as a good breakfast food.

last night i went along with marceline and kat to see reynolds, part chimp and fixit kid (but not in that order) upstairs at the garage. we met up with ollie there and tried to convince him to throw the tv out of his hotel room window. as of yet i’ve not heard that he hasn’t, so i’ve got my fingers crossed.

i’d never heard them before but i was really impressed with part chimp, they were great and their drummer was really funny, they were really fun to watch, i totally recommend them. fixit kid didn’t make much of an impression on me, just a bit too shellacy rock with shouting. i hadn’t seen reynolds for ages, so i was totally glad to see them again, they were great and i enjoyed their set, and was particularly pleased to see them do ‘stopper’.

and this morning we ate pie. woohoo!

i’m greg kitten and they’re not showing ghost world anywhere near me.

i’ve been sulking for 12 hours and i’m certainly not stopping now. i went to THREE seperate cinemas – i think they were a warner bros, a uci and an odeon – i dunno for sure and frankly i don’t much care – they were all wack. none of them were showing it. so all i did was end up driving about 20 miles to eat shepherd’s pie. don’t get me wrong, i like shepherd’s pie, but BAH.