a free form jazz odyssey in front of a festival crowd

I recently went on an Amazon binge in order to get the book “Gary Benchley: Rock Star” by Paul Ford, which is required reading for any anti-hipster, or anti-anti-hipster currently living in New York, or the surrounding hipster hangouts. While fueling my online shopping addiction, I decided to fill in my collection, and got “The Dirt” by Motley Crue. Lets just say, my life is changed a bit. Mitch Hedberg once discussed this book on his web site, and said “Read this book, if you think you’re fucking up your life, you’re not.” That’s pretty much right on. But in opposition to the late great Mitch, I would like to say; Don’t read this book if…:

1. You are planning to clean your apartment, room, bathroom, house or self

2. You are trying to cut down on drinking or doing drugs

3. You are trying to get a girlfriend or improve your current relationship

I was eating some hummus with a pita while sitting on my couch. I dropped a few crumbs and went to pick them up as I was reading the chapter on the first Motley House, a small house on Sunset Blvd in LA. The walls became charred black, because of their roach infestation. Let me explain. When a roach (which were a plenty) would climb their walls from all the garbage left around, they would hold a lighter up to some hairspray, and fry it. They never brought out their trash, they just piled it on their back porch. Eventually the department of health had to serve them a summons because the neighbors were complaining about the stench and the amount of rats. They owned 2 dishes that would build up enough food to scrape a meal off of. They never bought toilet paper. They never washed their sheets after sleeping with hundreds of girls, the front door was off its hinges from being kicked in so often by the cops. Sooo, you can imagine that I would not freak out about a few bread crumbs after reading this.

Also, if you think you have a drug problem, don’t read this book to look for inspiration on getting sober (which Tommy lee still is not, and the rest probably lie about) You wont feel so bad about drinking a bit once you read that Nikki Six shot up so much, until he got to the point where the only vein left to shoot was…..well, just imagine it, it didn’t stop him though. Mick Mars drank 5 shots of Vodka before each show, an entire glass which he tried to convince the band was filled with water, then the rest of a bottle on the plane or bus after the gig.

But seriously, you can’t put this book down. I finished it in 3 days
Now I’m onto Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” a very interesting read so far. But I’m afraid I’m rushing through it just to get to the Gary Benchley book. Whuteva.

I have been speaking to the girl, who is in New Zealand over Ichat- its like a phone but for free, although the quality is eh, its better than paying a lot of money. Technology still boggles my mind- its freaking amazing that I can talk to someone literally on the other side of the world over a crappy internet connection. Anyway, he roomate’s 9yr old niece was in the room, so I asked to talk to her- Kids are usually fun to talk to, they seem not to hate me and usually have something interesting to say. But i couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that she had an accent. Its like Billy Crystal once said “I was in France, and I’m very impressed that these little children can speak French”. We didn’t talk much, I asked her what time it was, because there is like a 17 hr difference, figuring it might be cool for a young kid who doesn’t necessarily know about time zones and whatnot. Wellll, she tells me its 5:00, i say “wow, its midnight here” and she just goes “ok, see ya Steve”. This only adds to my long list of being slightly humiliated by children under the age of 10.

The weekend is upon us….its that AES convention thingy, Billy Martin is at tonic, me and T Bone are going on a specifically Jewish Odyssey, so who knows what sort of mayhem shall occur