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dude restoring an old stool in H.K.

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Tokyo kitty

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Tokyo club doorway

‘dreaming is free’ so ‘lost in translation’ is a a nice film, as a matter of fact Bill Murray’s drunken karaoke of ‘More Than This’ is where i got the idea for us to cover the song from in the first pace… but for us in Japan very little was lost except for sleep… i found it as easy to interface with the culture as anyplace else, maybe even more so… maybe the rich alienated characters portrayed in the movie had a hard time there but i fucking loved it… besides in Tokyo there are almost as many gaijin western types wandering about as there are Japanese and Asians in NYC coming back to California, sitting in the lobby of a hotel that resembles a minimum security cell block, comparing notes with the crew and band i found that i wasnt the only one in the throes of deep culture shock… Hong Kong was a really great experience… we played at an annual fund raiser for kids and thirty four little 7-8 year old girls and boys sang their version of ‘dreaming’ with us… i’m gonna get a version of it up here sooner than later i hope… it was really sweet its just a tragedy that America has become so isolated from all the worlds other cultures, there’s so much more going on out there than what we think is ‘number one’ here… its sad, maybe someday we’ll learn one more thing… to paraphrase my pal Glenn O’Brien: “TERRORISM ONLY WORKS ON PEOPLE WHO ARE AFRAID”

i was looking at some old stuff and thought i’d again put up a post i wrote right after 9-11 (heavy culture shock now, coming back after being in Asia for almost a month… more later) so this was originally posted on 9-15-01: i just read all the letters i got from you all, a lot of you express your inabilities to know how you feel about whats going on which is pretty much how i am as well one kid called me out about saying i didnt think any good could come out of this, writing that they thought all the pulling together of people was a positive thing… of course i think that too and what i meant was more that the people responsible for this are misguided to think it would solve anything for them… yeah its great to see everybody being more human towards each other just a shame what it took to get that result… like christmas or burning man for that matter sad that people can only be nice to each other one day, one week a year, this is an old story most of you guys weren’t around in the sixties, the failure of the ideals of that period is still with me… in a way its hard to describe, all the young people now are used to factions and divisions between them, what if everyone was on the same page so to speak, everywhere one went there was a positive feeling that things were really going to change, that society was going to transform itself totally, in a way the connection between people was very similar to whats going on now in the face of the attack, only the motivation wasn’t fear and nationalism, on the contrary there was a great desire to get rid of borders and differences between individuals… i really thought that people would fall into tribal ways of living and stop feeding the mechanized warlike aspects of life… i was a teenager and in retrospect was as naive as many others, as we all know now not much changed and sadder still much of the change that did happen was only temporary what happened? is it just that everyone stopped trying and decided they’d rather have the comforts of middle class life, what happened to the half million people who were at woodstock how many followed dreams and how many are lawyers and used car salesmen? theres no more “counter culture” its all been absorbed, we see the car commercial with born to be wild playing in the background how wild is it to have to deal with a job you cant stand so you can keep up your car payments on some dull looking vehicle? what contradiction… people used to always be talking about a topic that doesn’t exist now: conformity being “a conformist” was bad now we’ve got the gap, uniforms for everyone, certainly the hippies used to wear their uniforms but they’d make them themselves the romans absorbed all that resisted them, i think this is sort of what happened here everything that once had an edge has become a part of the great machine theres the complete blurring of the lines that divide entertainment and news in the media, we’ve all been seeing things like the trade center bombing in films for the last twenty years, “reality” tv isn’t reality its tv and it always pisses me off when some so called news show has a background of sentimental music to play with peoples emotions this all may sound “negative” and i dont mean it to be even though it sounds that way to me too in the light of last tuesdays events perhaps discussions like this become all the more irrelevant, its easy for me to become all the more filled with feelings of frustration but theres still this, no matter what, everyone still has a chance to control their own personal history, that great line from gladiator: ‘what we do today echoes in eternity’… i really think that this is a pivotal point… these events may have been formed billions of years ago in cosmic gasses but still we all have our free wills its time for all of us to be stronger than ever things and the way we’ve all lived up till now may change a lot or not at all but still we all have a choice to be afraid or to stand up to our fears and overcome them really we’ve all got the exact same thing to lose which is just the dust of our bodies while what there is to gain, the freedom in our spirits is a real reward, certainly worth putting up with a little discomfort now and then follow dreams, you dont have to do what you dont want to

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in the mysterious east, well somewhat mysterious, in Kuala Lumpur, very nice but not the point, i got a copy of the wicker man for three bucks at the night market…and… pretty much exactly what i expected but somehow all the more miserable for having actually seen the thing… the main question is ‘why?’ do the producers, nick cage etc actually believe they are delivering a good piece of unfound art to the unknowing public? is it for mere profit motive? lack of ideas? its just uncanny how dumb the whole thing is… i was afraid that the end might be changed and that some dramatic dynamic force would come to the protagonists rescue, maybe a last minute shoot out with the villagers, but somehow unlike some other remakes the whole was retained… well almost; the originals Sergeant Howie is morphed into Edward Malus, maybe theres an indication in the name as howie is much more confident, not wracked with inner demons and psychological malfunctions as is poor malus (is it some inane reference to the Malleus Maleficarum, the ‘hammer of the witches’ that this name change derives from?, if so poor edward is a lousy hammer indeed) we have the new plot element of willow having a ‘connection’ to the sacrificial victim, drawing him to Summerisle after years of careful setup which may or may not involve their conceiving of a child together… there are annoying little differences all throughout while simultaneously there is an attention to recreating some of the old shots… but for me the biggest fuck up is the chickening out when it comes to tackling the religious aspect that and the miserable cliche hollywood soundtrack… the original wicker man is almost a musical film, it contains a wonderful soundtrack, just the opening is one of my favorite celtic ballads that i used to play over an over again and all throughout the film are great folk pieces that weave a great mood around the whole… i cant really convey how shitty the soundtrack is in the new version, its supposed to sound dark i guess but thats the whole problem of the fucking thing… i dont think the wicker man was originally conceived as a dumbass horror movie but thats another whole line of questioning… here we have an evil matriarchy with implications of infanticide really dumb… the christian versus pagan theme is tossed out likely out of fear… the sympathies of the original were quite different, the pagans were clearly the good guys in spite of their fire bug tendencies… you get the idea i could go on, maybe its even more insidious, the fact that the film twists the role of the villagers into that of the badguys, worshipping the goddess is portrayed as a ‘bad thing’ maybe it could be put forth that the new wicker man is some sort of dumb answer to the equally lousy da vinci code, i thought that sucked too, just for different reasons maybe there’s a secret anti Hillary Clinton message buried in the anti-matriarchal theme of the film, maybe its all tied together, blaming Bill Clinton for 9-11 it was his fault after all, all of that bullshit, that he had a pagan affair and was sooo distracted that he couldnt find osama when he was hanging out on the white house lawn that day… any how we have to do a show here in few hours, i will give up the paranoid theories for a while…

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(pic from Singapore the last time) in Narita airport tween flights on way to Osaka… a whole day off tmrow, i liked Osaka a lot, older stuff more funk, i’m told that a lot of Japanese comedians hail from there… of late i have been staying in the lower east side of NYC with the troops, that is kids… a very odd circle thirty years later… quite the change hmmm? what used to be the center of mayhem, chaos, and drug induced tension is now a peaceful upbeat very quaint place, these late summer days shadows and sunlight filter through the big shady trees, all the little pocket parks… so weird, i recall that traveling east of first avenue was equivalent to taking ones life in ones hands… now cute coffee shops and retro stores dot the landscape Akira and i went to CBGB’s the other day, she was the only three year old there for ‘social disorder’ (not ‘social distortion’)… after i explained that we couldnt take the stroller inside she kept wanting to go deeper into the club anyway… it was the first time she saw a mosh pit even though it wasnt a very enthusiastic one… but i couldnt believe what the surroundings of CB’s look like now… its all so cleaned up and chic that i kept getting some sort of space time warp thinking i was somewhere else altogether… whats gonna happen? i made the mistake of seeing davinci code instead of nacho libre at the hotel in Seattle, what a load of crap, just a really crappy movie no matter what the fuck its about, yuk! so once again we enter into Asia, if even for a brief time, i’ll report back shortly

WHAT IF TV PARTY COULD COME BACK? WHO WOULD WATCH?…click here for now

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we are in the midst of the heat wave that of course has nothing to do with global positioning or warming (sic)… in my opinion the real ‘inconvenient truth’ is in fact that the last time a lot of people were able to get together on a single cause in the western world was probably for world war two, i cant think of much like mindedness after that, just a lot of conflict and division… today i saw in my favorite magazine; the new york times that athletes who tried to get their red blood cell counts up by lying in oxygen tents etc, situations replicating mountain climbing and the like would be penalized by the doping committee… i think they are missing the point here: athletes should be penalized for exercising! why not just go all the way, exercise creates unfair advantages, raises hormone and blood levels, should be banned like dope! one of my myspace associates, Jerry, sent me finally a copy of Takashi Miike’s IMPRINT, this is the ‘Masters of Horror’ episode that HBO deemed to horrifyingly horrible to be seen by even the grittiest of american Horror fans (apparently it ran in the UK however)… IMPRINT is pretty damn rough i have to admit, i’m tempted to say it make AUDITION look like an episode of friends by comparison but i wont… sadly i am leaning in the direction that says that IMPRINT is indeed to heavy duty for our delicate american sensibilities, as long as we stick to REAL murder torture and mayhem its ok here… Miike in presenting this stuff in an elegant and sensual context makes it all the more horrendous, i loved it but its the kind of thing that does imprint itself so be warned… im starting to get feedback on the BBC docu, thus far most of the comments have been very positive… hopefully it’ll air in the states soon, its filled with points that i might take time to address at some time later on… one thing i may have mentioned is that when one is stuck in the midst of media it becomes all consuming, i frequently am sleepless with racing thoughts about who said what and how that statement might be misconstrued on and on… there is a cut off point however as i realize one could spend their life retracting and adjusting statements they made… this stuff is endless thats it, stuff in the works for soon

so we have the demise of a latter day Achilles and one of the weirdest events that i can recall all in one… the vilified Christian Renaldo was able to suck it up with twenty thousand people booing him whenever he touched the ball so what happened to Zidane, today i heard that Materazzi called him a “terrorist” which makes little sense… i am reminded of Tysons ear incident and Frankie at the Hall Of Fame induction but those events pale in the face of the grandeur and scope of the Zindane headbutt… just like everyone else i was really thrown by the thing it just seems so crazy and off…

a couple of things… first barbara just found this thing on youtube that is great its at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=PIblEAMxrjY or put ‘RAMONES WARHOL STEIN’ into the youtube search or go to my myspace page which is: http://www.myspace.com/esxp it brings back a lot of memories… contrary to things i’ve heard over the years the Ramones and i were very close up until the end… there was a period when i was the only one who had Johnny’s phone number and Joey or one of the others would call me and say “tell John to call so and so…” this went on for maybe four or five months… its grimly ironic but somehow appropriate for the topic of our discussion in this clip to be the decline of rock i miss all those guys a great deal i wish they were still around… “Andy Warhols Fifteen Minutes” was a short lived show produced by the Warhol gang that ran on MTV… i dont recall how many episodes were aired but not too many… i also did a piece of music that became the shows theme… i must have been on it various times, i really only remember this and an interview with Bill Burroughs i did… this was shot in the last very deluxe Warhol factory in midtown, Andy wasnt around and word was he was out with a cold or flu… the next day we all heard that he had died (for me that puts the date of this taping at Feb.21 1987)… as a result this thing is sort of steeped in sadness… for you UK fans The Blondie BBC doc airs on Friday, July 21 at 10:35 pm on BBC 1 in the UK…i really like this thing, everyone worked hard on it… it still presents a ton of issues for all of you maniacal super fans, myself included, theres a lot of unresolved stuff in it and i’m sort of looking forward to fielding questions about it… BUT its by far the best docu done about BLONDIE in a long time if ever… i’m sure it will air in the states soon beyond that FRANCE-ITALY!!!! hey i said the Germans too what the fuck do i know… lets hope that like some of the heavier preceeding games it doesnt go into penalty kicks

due to general weirdness i just got the last 185 or so e-mails at once… so i see that a lot of you want more info about the tour being shut down… the problem with doing make up dates immediately is that all the shows that were booked by regional promoters were for the ‘road rage’ blondie/cars show… simply none of these guys are gonna take just us without the cars without a bunch of re-negotiation, its not just a matter of plugging us back into shows, theres a lot of considerations about size of venues etc… i’m sorry about all of this i somehow thought that most everyone would realize some of it but i still got complaints about my ignoring the situation… believe me i think ticket prices us and other acts are way over the top these days but there is not much i can do about the expenses of touring… there are other elements that added to the high ticket price of roadrage but you are gonna have to figure them out, theres just stuff it wouldn’t be right for me to go into here im sorry that any of you are disappointed, hopefully not as disappointed as british or german cup fans cause we will still be around whereas the 2006 world cup is a one shot… i really thought the germans had a good shot, i didnt think enough about the german-italian soccer jinx speaking of that im also feeling bad about some of you who were coming long distances (like from overseas) who couldn’t cancel flights, hotel stuff etc… at this point i dont know how to make it up maybe we can do something in the future… i can only personally apologize to fans who were disappointed and hassled by all this situation

my space with its viral aspect… t-shirts; “myspace ruined my relationship”… is this happening? in twenty years will we have mental myspace whereby we can trot about all day deaking with what songs we want to force on our peers and sending instant messages… all without any unnecessary hardware… steven colbert mentioned a chip to tax sex acts, implanted in the necessary area, when two come in contact, proximity: an upload to the IRS… doesnt bush get that the japanese prime minister is a hippie?