December 23, 2007

• LA @ Christmastime, Juno & Happy Christmas You Ass, I Pray God it’s Our Last!

   

  

  Sometimes it’s hard to get in the Christmas spirit when it’s so warm and sunny outside.  But today really felt like Christmas, because everyone was so friendly and cheery.  It was such a beautiful day.  So clear in fact that I could actually see the snow on the mountains surrounding my house (and I rarely even see the mountains surrounding my house, let alone the snow). I took advantage of the 76° (25° C) weather and walked all around town to get my errands run and deliver some Christmas presents.  Later, Tyson and I went to see Juno.  We both really liked the movie, but neither one of us could articulate why.  What starts out as a sharp, albeit superficial comedy, becomes a poignant coming of age film with Oscar caliber performances.  And the soundtrack is just delicious!  (Listen here.)  I need to think about why it was such a feel good movie, as the the subject matter wasn’t exactly tidy.  Somehow it worked though.

  

  After the movie, we went for sushi at this great local spot in Santa Monica.  Tyson knew the chef and he took good care of us.  We ate $50 worth of food for $20.  On the way home I stopped to take some photos of the Christmas lights at the Mormon temple.  I still didn’t get all my Christmas shopping done.  Oh well…there’s still 2 days!    Here are my pics from today:

  
  Roscoe is growing into such a handsome dog!

  
  Arielle enjoying Emo Elmo on my iTouch

  

  

  

  
  This is from the top of my street, across from the House of Blues and the Mondrian

  
  Homeless Santa in Beverly Hills. I gave him a couple of bucks and asked if I could take his photo

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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  If you’re a fan of British music, you’re probably familiar with an Irish band called The Pogues.   Perhaps their biggest hit is a “Christmas” song called “Fairytale of New York“  The song is consistently voted the #1 Christmas song in England.  This year however, there was a problem.

  It’s two days from the 50th birthday he thought he’d never see and Shane MacGowan is even more bemused and befuddled than ever. How, after a life of such famously bacchanalian excess that he was told 25 years ago that he had six weeks to live, has it come to this? It’s one thing to be best known for a sentimental Christmas ballad, no matter how esoteric, but it’s quite another to have Middle Britain rise as one to prevent Radio 1 censoring ‘Fairytale Of New York’.

  If the Pogues’ larger-than-life frontman and chief songwriter has become something of an unlikely national treasure, it is mainly thanks to his bittersweet duet with the late Kirsty MacColl, which returns with Slade-like inevitability each Yuletide. But it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always thus. Nineteen years ago, the BBC banned another of his songs, ‘Birmingham Six’. “They’re still doing time/ for being Irish in the wrong place/ And at the wrong time” sang MacGowan as Patrick Hill and five innocent men served time at Her Majesty’s displeasure. They’re out now but the song is still off the playlist.

  The same is not true of MacGowan: he’s back in vogue in a way he hasn’t been since the critical acclaim that greeted the revolutionary, high-octane albums Rum, Sodomy And The Lash and If I Should Fall From Grace With God made the Pogues one of the hottest bands in the world. Just yesterday, his toothless coupon leered from the pages of the tabloids as he stumbled out of actress Davinia Taylor’s Christmas party with fellow good timers Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Sadie Frost.

  Make no mistake, his consumption of alcohol and narcotics has been dizzying. MacGowan says he was fed Guinness from the age of four by the collection of aunts and uncles who raised him in Tipperary in an attempt to put him off alcohol in later life. It didn’t work: at eight he drank his first bottle of Powers whiskey, and he soon added drugs, smoking joints at 13 and taking acid at 14. By 17, he was hanging out with rent boys and junkies (he says he was once the former, although that seems unlikely given his trademark jug-eared plug-ugliness), and so strung out that his doctor threatened to have him sectioned unless he submitted to six months in the notorious Bethlem detox clinic, the first of four stints trying to dry out.

  At one stage he claimed he was polishing off 50 LSD tablets and three bottles of whiskey a day and, as he came apart at the seams, his antics became increasingly bizarre. In New Zealand he painted himself blue, claiming he’d been ordered to do it by Maori spirits; back in London, the night before the Pogues were due to fly out to tour with Bob Dylan, he took so much LSD that his girlfriend came home to find him covered in blood after eating a Beach Boys album. He told her he was about to host a summit of world leaders to avert the Third World War. He missed the plane and never toured with Dylan.

  At one stage in 1999, his friend Sinead O’Connor found him snorting heroin and called the police, leading to another spell in rehab which ended abruptly when he was thrown out for bad behaviour. But not all of MacGowan’s celebrity friends – they include Bono, Nick Cave and Pete Doherty – believe that he is totally out of control. Bono argued that his self-destructive behaviour is “a mask, his way of ignoring people he doesn’t want to deal with. Shane is more together than people imagine”.

  Not that those people will necessarily include the other members of the Pogues, who fired their garrulous talisman after he disintegrated on tour in Japan in 1991. After falling out of a train door at a station and knocking out the few blackened teeth which hadn’t been removed in drunken fights, he then performed an unscheduled exit from a van at 50mph on the way back to the hotel. When they got there, the other members of the band sacked him, replacing him with Joe Strummer. All he had to say was “Thank you, you’ve been very patient with me”.

  Bombastic yet with a deeply sensitive streak, MacGowan perceives himself as a latter day Brendan Behan; as a romantic Irish iconoclast with a ready wit, a free-thinking republican writer who suffered for his art, his convictions, his unwillingness to be shackled. Perhaps that is why he allowed himself to be typecast as a drunken minstrel in the Johnny Depp film The Libertine, or why he called his caustic memoirs A Drink With Shane MacGowan.

  He has a razor sharp mind, even when addled with drink, and is incredibly well-read. MacGowan says he was reading Marx and Trotsky as an 11-year-old, and he references William Burroughs and James Clarence Mangan regularly, even if he doesn’t have a lot of time for Samuel Beckett (“a miserable fat old bastard”), WB Yeats (“an old fairy”) or even Plato (“basically just some Greek c***”).

  An avid reader as a child, the moment MacGowan decided to channel his vast energies into music came when he left detox aged 17. “It was like fate,” he says. “The first thing I saw when I came out of the madhouse was the Sex Pistols, a bunch of people who looked like they ought to be in a loony bin.” He became Shane O’Hooligan, living the punk dream and fronting first The Nipple Erectors and then the Millwall Chainsaw.  Read more…

  And so I present to you, a true Christmas classic

  It was Christmas Eve babe
  In the drunk tank
  An old man said to me, won’t see another one
  And then he sang a song
  The Rare Old Mountain Dew
  I turned my face away
  And dreamed about you

  Got on a lucky one
  Came in eighteen to one
  I’ve got a feeling
  This year’s for me and you
  So happy Christmas
  I love you baby
  I can see a better time
  When all our dreams come true

  They’ve got cars big as bars
  They’ve got rivers of gold
  But the wind goes right through you
  It’s no place for the old
  When you first took my hand
  On a cold Christmas Eve
  You promised me
  Broadway was waiting for me

  You were handsome
  You were pretty
  Queen of New York City
  When the band finished playing
  They howled out for more
  Sinatra was swinging,
  All the drunks they were singing
  We kissed on a corner
  Then danced through the night

  The boys of the NYPD choir
  Were singing “Galway Bay”
  And the bells were ringing out
  For Christmas day

  You’re a bum
  You’re a punk
  You’re an old slut on junk
  Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
  You scumbag, you maggot
  You cheap lousy faggot
  Happy Christmas your arse
  I pray God it’s our last

  I could have been someone
  Well so could anyone
  You took my dreams from me
  When I first found you
  I kept them with me babe
  I put them with my own
  Can’t make it all alone
  I’ve built my dreams around you.

  
  

  • 3:36 am
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