Carlin Quote of the Day 1.5

"In Los Angeles there's a hotline for people in denial. So far, no one has called."

from Napalm & Silly Putty (2001)

How to be a Finnish audience member

If you're sober:

• Sit as far away from the stage as possible and avoid all eye contact with the artists. If you absolutely must sit near the stage, always sit with your back to them.
• Never be the first one to applaud. If nobody applauds after 5 seconds of silence, you may go ahead, but very very softly, looking really embarrassed.
  

If you're drunk:

• As soon as the artists begins playing, grab your beer and start dancing right in front of them. If both your hands are free, proceed to air-guitar, always making eye contact with the artists looking for some approval. Bring your friends.
  
• Request 'Paranoid' repeatedly, even after the artists have told you that they don't know it. Anything by Hurriganes is also an option.
• If you have a harmonica, kazoo, or anything that makes some sort of percussive noise, by all means, take it out and jam with the artists from your seat. And no, it doesn't matter if you don't know the songs, or if you don't how to play the thing.
• When the artists are having their much needed 15 min. break, this would be a good time to tell them the story of how you used to play guitar 20 years ago/were captain of a ship/were a founding member of Hanoi Rocks, etc.
• Request one of your favourite songs. Then, when the artist starts playing it, go take a piss/talk to your friends/go outside for a smoke.
• If the artist does not know the song that you requested, he probably needs you to refresh his memory. Sing him the first few minutes of the song while everybody waits.

Let me know if I missed any important points. :)

Duke

Bill Maher on the Swine Flu

"You know how many people have died this year already from the regular normal flu flu? Let's call it the flu flu. 13,000. 13,000 people died from that. The swine flu? One. What does the flu flu have to do to get some attention, fuck a goat?"

- Bill Maher's monologue on Real Time 5.5.2009

Cruising with the stars

NORTHERN BALTIC SEA.- Greetings from the M/S Isabella! he regularly scheduled troubadour got sick, so they called me up to fill in at the last minute. Now, every now and then on these ferries they'll book local celebrities to perform. In the past I may have mentioned Dingo, one of the biggest Finnish bands of the 80's, now mostly living off of the memories, but still able to sell out the entire ship.

Anyway, this week I was not scheduled to play on the Isabella, but the regularly scheduled troubadour was ill and I got called in at the last minute. I wasn't thrilled about it, but I just moved into a place with no furniture and I could really use the money. This week the celebrity performer was Koop Arponen, winner of the 2008 Idols competition. I'd never heard of the guy, but I knew that he would pretty much be stealing my whole crowd, since I play at the same time as the bands do.

My few run-ins with Finnish celebrities have been a bit dissapointing, so my default thought is that they'll be stuck-up assholes (Veeti Kallio comes to mind), but this time I was wrong. Koop and his band showed up to my gig while they were waiting to perform, and were a great audience, singing along to most of the songs. I only managed to catch part of their soundcheck, and unfortunately I missed the gig, but I looked up some YouTube videos of Koop, and he's a pretty good singer. I may even pick up his album. :)

I brought my camera along, and as usual, did not take any pictures of anything. I gotta hire myself a photographer.

Duke.

PS. Oh yeah, Miss Finland was on the cruise as well. A bit weird-looking up close. Meh.

Stolen mobiles, playing pantless and moving out (and in)

HELSINKI, FINLAND.- AAAAHHHHH! What a busy month! In less than a year I went from never using a calendar for anything, to 'can't make a fuckin' decision without looking at my calendar'. I finally found time to write an entry while on a train to Turku (sweeeeet!). Here we go:

• Let's start with the shitty news; my new super cool mobile phone was stolen. I didn't even have time to blog about getting a new mobile, when it was just taken from under my nose in some tram. The perp never answered the phone, of course, and I was stupid enough to not lock it, so it was an easy steal, and he'll be enjoying that mobile until I found out who he is and strangle him in front of his children.
• Have you ever been in a bar watching two sexy musicians play an enconre with their pants down? Not lately, you say?? Well, then you missed the Rock Delusion gig at Porvoonkadun Baari, where we promptly dropped our pants (that's trousers for you limeys) at the kind request of Tiia and Anna, who promised to drop their pants first; and when two cute girls say they'll drop their pants, we'll pretty much do anything. I bet you're hoping there's a picture of that, and yeah, maybe one or two will surface on some sensationalist magazine sometime.
• Vappu, Vappu Vappu! Ok, for my non-Finnish readers, Vappu is the big Spring party in Finland. If you thought Finns couldn't get any drunker, then you should experience Vappu at least once. It was my first time this year and I wouldn't mind going through it again. The Rock Delusion played a full-band gig at a pub called Henrik, which got really full despite being far away from the center. Always a blast to play with the whole band. RAWK!
• On the same day I was enjoying Vappu, I had to move out of my flat, which Heidi and I shared for 6 months. She'll now have a new flatmate, who I'm sure will be a lot cleaner than I am, which will make her a happy cocktail-nazi. My friend Scott told me about a flat for rent that was announced on the Jolly Dragon forum, so I called the guy up, looked at the place, and signed the contract a day later. I have a new flat! I'll have more details on the next post.

Phew! Well, that covers most interesting things from April and a bit of May. Maybe now I'll be able to get back up to date, I know you worry about me if I'm not blogging ALL the time.....not!


Duke

P.S. Porcupine Tree is coming to Helsinki in October! Whoohoo!

P.P.S Oh, yeah, and I got a new mobile.

Carlin Quote of the Day 1.4

"One nationwide chain that owns over a thousand radio stations conducts weekly telephone polls asking listeners their opinions on 25 to 30 song hooks they play over the phone. Hooks that the radio people have already selected. Hooks are the short, repeated parts of pop songs that people remember easily. Depending on these polls, the radio chain decides which songs to place on their station's playlists. Weeks later, they record the hooks of all the songs they're currently playing on their stations across the country, label them by title and artist, and sell that information to record companies to help create more of the same bad music. They also sell the information to competing radio stations that want to play what the big chain is playing. All of this is done to prevent the possibility of original thinking somehow creeping into the system.

Let me tell you something. In the first place, listening to music someone else has picked out is not my idea of a good time. Second, and more important, the fact that a lot of people in America actually like the music automatically means it sucks; especially since the people who like it have been told in advance, by businessmen, what it is they're supposed to like.

Please, save me from people who have been told what to like, and then like it. In my opinion, if you're over 6 years of age, and you're still getting your music from the radio, something is desperately wrong with you. I can only hope that, somehow, MP3 players and file-sharing will destroy FM radio they way they're destroying record companies. Then, even though the air will probably never be safe to breathe again, maybe it will be safer to listen to."

from 'When Will jesus Bring the Pork Chops?'

Why can't it always be Tuesday?

HELSINKI, FINLAND.- Renewing a visa is not my idea of fun. The paperwork is not that difficult but the queuing is more boring than watching golf in slow motion. Fortunately, not this time. I ran into Eliso, a lovely Latvian girl that I met almost 2 years ago on my first Jolly Dragon meeting. We had our queue numbers, so we went down to the bar, where time seems to go a lot faster than in a room full of immigrants with 5 screaming children each.
Eliso organizes music showcases and as we were having a beer she asked if I would be interested in playing in one the shows in Cafe Mascot, a place where young people with good musical taste hang out.
I sat there picturing the usual places where José and I play - middle of nowhere, dodgy bars with aging, unemployed, alcoholics who just wander around like zombies, and get in your face to ask for Deep Purple or Hurriganes songs.

"We'll do it." Took me about half a second.

To give things an even more familiar feeling, one of the other performers was Mad Ice, who's not only a great and popular performer in Finland, but a very warm and friendly human being. I met him while playing on the streets when I first arrived in Helsinki, and have been in touch ever since.
The Rock Delusion had the honor of opening the evening with our upbeat crazy shit we like to pull, and had a fantastic response from the audience.

Some cool pictures were taken, and you can see them here.

Over and out.

Carlin Quote of the Day 1.3

"You know sometimes, at a busy cocktail party, when you're telling a group of people a story, a few of them may become distracted, and you lose their attention? So you concentrate a little harder on the ones who are still listening? You know that feeling? And then, because it's a lively party, a few of them drift away? And as your audience slowly peels off one by one, after a while you wind up addressing any person you can find who's willing to look at you. Even the busboy. And then you realize the busboy doesn't understand English. Isn't that awful?
Sometimes, a person some distance away from you will say something you can't quite understand, so you ask them to repeat it, and you still can't make it out. You try two or three times without any luck, and by then you're getting embarrassed, so you pretend to understand, and just say, "Yeah!" so you can be done with it. Later, it turns out they said, "We're coming over tonight to remove your wife's ovaries. Will that be alright?"

Brain Droppings, 1997, p.45

Carlin Quote of the Day 1.2

"I don't like porno movies. They piss me off. First they show a great-looking naked woman who starts playing with herself. And while I'm watching, she sort of becomes my girlfriend. And then, suddenly, in walks a guy with a big dick, and he starts fucking my girlfriend. It pisses me off."

- Napalm & Silly Putty (2003) p.8

Carlin Quote of the Day 1.1

Last week when I was in Amsterdam I made the best purchase I've made in years - A 890-page George Carlin compilation. 3 books in one, a must for Carlin fans. Never has a book made me laugha s much as this has and I have barely read 10 percent of it.
So, if I may, I'd like to start what I hope will be a tradition in my blog: to share my favourite quotations from teh great George Carlin's book as I read them.

Here we go! Quote #1:

"People say, "I'm going to sleep now," as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. "For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life."
If you didn't know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you'd seen.
"They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the 'mind adventures' got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren't unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee."
So, next time you see somone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, "The creature is regenerating itself."

- from 'Brain Droppings' (1997) p.56