merch bitch blog (deceased)

a tale of tragic love gone wrong from mono.net

Just do it, you only live once... Don't make the mistizake of neva torkin' to a special girl of intruige... A girl who worked in a chicken shop had me so blizown away I couldn't ever talk to her, and neva did. She had glizasses.

There was this other girl tho, I knew her from retail shops for years, like, 4 years, through school n stuff and we used 2 chat and flirt and she ruled, and she thort I ruled n shiz & one dizay I asked her out, she couldn't coz she had a boy, then nizeckst time after more munfs she didn't have a boy and we went out and...
I had her put up on such a pedistal that I could barely speak 2 her. She proved herself to be as orsum in tha real werld as just retail meatingz but, it was too much pressure... We didn't secks party. I saw her the other day, she is a cop. Her dog smelt my balls.

The end.

from Popbitch this week

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Sharon Osbourne hosted blow-job classes for girls
backstage at Ozzfest this summer.
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"Sub Sub, who later became the Doves, went to my school, Wilmslow High School in Cheshire. Their first album features a credit saying "Fat Barry fuck off and shove your recorder up your arse."

"Fat Barry was Barry Hodgson, the music master, a supremely talented band leader, but a terrible teacher and complete nazi.

He'd regularly bully children with insults so ridiculous, most ended up laughing rather than scared like, "When I call out your name tell me on whom you wrote your essay, or if you didn't do it, just say 'Mr Hodgson may I have roses at my funeral'. He was eventually 'retired' after calling our suburban school's token black girl a slut."

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Popbitch's favourite politician Richard "Dick" Face,
the Minister for Racing and Gaming in NSW, Australia,
is under investigation for corruption.
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Gerald Schtten, one of the worlds top fertility experts says "Masturbating a horseshoe crab takes a special technique, but its worth learning. The sperm are amazing."

get more every week from Popbitch

Extraordinary Wanks 3

So, it looks like it actually gets better from here. More Moore talking, a 1971 fanzine illo, lots more amusing photos with even more amusing captions. Khoury spells “oik” with an “e” on page 19, though. And keeps writing “Burroughs.”

The chapter wraps up with a Rick Veitch two-pager – in back-of-Greyshirt mode, providing old Britcom evidence for a made-up rumour that “Alan Moore” was an elaborate hoax by Dave Gibbons and Eddie Campbell (‘oo?) – and a prose short by the young Moore. Uh-oh: “This prose selection was written by Moore when he was only seventeen.” Don’t shit your pants, it reads exactly like it was written by a 17-year-old boy, and a drug-addled one at that, being an adjective-crazed pile of sword’n’sorcery bollocks filled with names like “Thunderbludgeon” and “Toziah Firebowels” and “Temple of Bokrug”. It is terrible.

from this week's Rocking Vicar

ROCK STARS MOONLIGHTING
Parishioner Geoff Nicholson: "There's a men's outfitters on Sunset Strip called James Tailoring - though of course this is surely a very knowing reference."

In last week's issue, which I didn't pinch any of for your entertainment, the Vicar noted Mrs Ritchie's televised pashing of Ms Spears and Ms Aguilera, and asked for other examples of past-it popstrels attempting to reboot their careers with a bit of lesbian lasciviousness. The first entry probably wasn't what he had in mind:

GONE SAPPHIC
Parishioner Tim Hall: "Seeing Madonna and Britney snog at the MTV awards inexplicably got me thinking of Mick Talbot (double-breasted sailor suit, red socks white espadrilles) and Paul Weller's (topless, hair slicked back, cut-off Levis, no socks and natural espadrilles) ear-fondling routine in the Style Council's Long Hot Summer video. Sun setting, laid back on a blanket, dancing on their picnic! Punting down the Cam, Steve White dressed as a comedy French beatnik in stripy top and beret. All very Another Country! I remember seeing it I think on Get Set For Summer with Timmy Mallett early one 1983 summers Saturday morning. What was all THAT about?!"

Yes, that Andy Partridge:

STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN
Andy Partridge of the Swindon parish offers this Led Zeppelin OAP Top Ten:-
1) Stairlift To Heaven
2) Four Walking Sticks
3) Black Guide Dog
4) Stumble On
5) The Lemsip Song
6) The Sprain Song
7) Housey Housey Of The Holy
8) Constipation Breakdown
9) Dozed And Confused
10) Trampled Michael Foot

For no particular reason (oh alright, because of genre revival or something), last week's newsletter also included an entreaty to know the current whereabouts of early-'80s punk-funkers like Rip Rig & Panic and The Pop Group. Two birds with one stone:

WHITHER RIP RIG AND PANIC?
Parishioner Simon Greenwood: "What ho, Rev. Mark Springer has migrated to the world of classical music - four titles on Amazon - Capture, Nature Music Food The Stars And The Planets/Vertikal, Eye and Metoni'. He also did the music for Moll Flanders and for London Kills Me, Hanif Kureshi's 1991 crash and burn. Whatever happened to Mark Stewart, forever doomed to be tagged as "a former member of The Pop Group" but an early adopter of Adrian Sherwood's production talents and accomplished tinfoil hat wearer whose predictions are coming all too true these days. I assume he's in Bristol, probably rocking backwards and forwards in a chair and cackling 'I told you so!' Can anyone say otherwise?"

add your name to the parish register at rock vic dot com

papa smurf runs for us senate

Billy Bragg, Metro 12/9/03

It's an unusual artist who gets the biggest singalong of the night, on a two-hour-plus show promoting a greatest hits, for a song called There Is Power In A Union.

I don't even like the R

but Rage is showing the new Timbaland video, and I blurted out in surprise and delight when Rakim leant forward and mime-doubled on the "pump up the volume".

And now they're showing something which appears to have Humpty Hump as the voice of a rapping panda. What the fuck?

Extraordinary Wanks 4

Chapter II starts well, lots of uninterrupted Moore talking about his first exposure to American comics, and putting together an understanding of geopolitics (Khruschev, Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, Madison Avenue) from MAD Magazine’s parodies. I had exactly the same experience, except that the references were several decades out of date by the time I was reading the paperbacks… A great photo of teenage art student Alan with hair straining to reach his jawline, and reproductions of fanzine contributions: a poem with illustration (“My reflection drowns upside down in a tear-deep puddle…” – thankfully Moore ridicules this stuff himself in the interview), what a caption claims as complete but appears to be the first page only of an essay on the Shadow (reprinted too small to read) and definitely the first page only of a comic that not only has a Swamp Thing-esque image, but includes aliens called the Qys. If you’ve done the research and dredged this stuff up – why not show off and print the whole artefacts at legible size? It’s called The Extraordinary Works Of Alan Moore after all, not Pay Fifty Bucks For A Big Interview.

On the next page, Khoury interrupts to ask what the dole is. You know, you can make yourself look sharper and the interview flow better if you leave out dopey questions, George. This spread also boasts really gorgeous repro on two Roscoe Moscow strips – I’d have preferred to not see the previously-reprinted first episode again, but they look great. Moore’s stippling survives aged newsprint and shrinking amazingly well, and the comics are just as fun as Ace Hole. MORE! SHOW US ALL OF THEM! Especially when a whole page in the next spread is given to Maxwell strips. of which the whole run has been reprinted.

Oh god, I’m really looking a gift horse in the mouth, but turn the page and it’s the first episode of Nutter’s Ruin again, on the same page as a St. Pancras’ Panda, which I’ve never seen – but here so fucking small it hurts to squint at it. Across the page - HA HA HA HA HA HA! Under a Roscoe Moscow pin-up that pays homage to S. Clay Wilson, Moore talks about how the poetry magazine he edited as a teenager got banned in his school for printing the word “motherfuckers” in one issue, and making a public apology in the next that again used the word “motherfuckers” in reference to the incident. TwoMorrows, of course, print this as “motherf*ckers.” What a pack of cunts.

From laughter to tears, as the next page shows the first page only of Ten Little Liggers, a rock-themed comic from Sounds’ 1980 Christmas issue. Reproduced too small to read, from a badly-printed copy. Why, god, why? Features Lemmy drawn to look amusingly like Moore, and apparently co-written by Gary Bushell (drawn to look like a right-wing bully and prick! Who would have thought? Oi!)! Meanwhile, the accompanying text has Moore going on about poetry readings in 1973, and Khoury doesn’t ask how this brainache of an intellectual summit operated. He does, however, transcribe David J’s name as David Jay. For fuck’s sake. And then leaves the capital letter off the Coronation of Lizzie 2, which would be fine if he were making some kind of republican point, but not when referring to the event for which British families bought telly sets in 1953…

An instalment of The Stars My Degradation on the next page. Gosh, Moore’s cartooning could be pretty. You can always tell he had to work hard to make his drawings do what he wanted, but the results did pay off.

The chronology of the interview is becoming a mess. Did Moore ramble and repeat himself a lot, or are these several sessions not so much mashed together in a completely haphazard fashion as just run one after the other without any coherent editing?

I’m not wanting to pick on innocent typos here, so much as tear apart grammatical incompetence, but I have to note the felicitous slip of the fingers on page 47 that gives us the phrase “pathological lair.” What a splendid concept. Also around here, the famous first printed work, a sci-fi bookshop ad, a really tight Elvis Costello illo from NME and the first Avenging Hunchback strip. I’ve never seen it before, and it’s printed large enough to read (just), but is that going to stop me whinging that we should be getting more of them? Is it balls. The chapter rounds off with a one-off strip and the entire eight-page adaptation of Old Gangsters Never Die from the Sinister Ducks 7” – crammed into one page, with repros of both sides of the single. That’s not the labels, but the whole record. Fools. Maybe Avatar are going to run this at a readable size in an issue of Alan Moore’s Napkin Scribblings, not that I’ll see that either.

Finally, a spec script for Judge Dredd, which is great – the black humour and milieu of early Dredd are all there, and Moore’s visual thinking is well-displayed, without the descriptive bloat of his slightly later work. But Khoury’s intro… he observes that the script got Moore invited to pitch other work to Tooth, but “[i]ronically, Alan never got the chance to write another story for “Dredd”…” WHERE’S THE IRONY, GEORGE? Dredd had a regular writer, who’d created the strip, so the job wasn’t open. HOW IRONIC! It’s like rain on your wedding day, or something.

Ben Lee, Metro 16/9/2003

Pros:
A solo version of Bruised, performed sitting on the foldback with a kid from the front holding the mic
An acoustic version of Beautiful (you know, the Linda Perry song)
When two obvious straight girls shouted out in response to the question "is anybody here on a date?", they were made to come up and slow dance for the length of the next song
Naked - not only the second time he's ever played it here, the last being at a secret gig at the cat & Fiddle in 2001, and it still being unreleased... but he unplugged the aco.guit. and did the song micless, singing to the whole Metro (although his voice isn't as good as it was in 1997, when he'd fill the Valhalla with it, and it would have worked better if one girl in front of me hadn't kept laughing very loudly, and the floor hadn't been littered with plastic beer cups...)
Freediving played with a full band
A fantastic duet between Ben and Kikisun on some lunatic Cole Porter-sounding thing (later learned: apparently a Moldy Peaches song?)
POP QUEEN!
All the songs off the latest album sounded much better with a full band

Cons:
Waikiki had already done Here Comes September and Complicated without him
NOTHING off the first five records except for Pop Queen
He played a lot of songs off the last album

Extraordinary Wanks 5

A pin-up by David Lloyd is nerdishly reverent enough to have been done for the Italian/Millidge book, with Moore drawn as a pencil-soft cuddly bear who physically embodies the essence of sequential art. Buy one for your toddler!

How about I try and lay off bitching about incomplete or inadequate reproductions from here? It’ll do wonders for my blood pressure (not really, I’m slim and beautiful), and probably be less tedious to read. Luckily, here’s the all-in-one transcriber, fact-checker, proof-reader and research assistant to George Khoury, Mr George Khoury! In noting that Moore’s review columns in Daredevils gave him his first exposure to Eddie Campbell, he prompts Moore to muse that “…some of his early… Fast Fiction books really impressed me.” Except that George, again at a loss to identify proper nouns, neglects to capitalise Fast Fiction. It’s not as if How To Be An Artist was typeset by Comicraft or anything, you know – would he not have read the bloody thing in preparation for the interview and seen Eddie’s mixed-case handlettering?

Then again, it’s not like he only has troubles transcribing other people’s words. “But was it about “D.R. & Quinch Have Fun on Earth” that struck a cord…?” Don’t they have work experience kids in America? Surely a high-school English student with a desire for editorial experience could not only spot a dropped word (actually, I didn’t even notice it until I typed the sentence out here), but tell someone that a cluster of musical notes is not the same thing as a piece of rope?

The kid could also take time out from squeezing zits in the office bathroom to advise George on embarrassing himself on the next page. Moore is talking about how Titan Books was making its nut on cheap licences from Tooth, from which the creators received only a handful of shrapnel. The incisive mind of the interviewer leaps in with ”And then they exploited you when Watchmen came out, wasn’t it? They collected your work for them?” Now, it’s easy to get confused, or stumble over your words in a casual interview situation. But you don’t have to write it down and look like a tit forever. No, it wasn’t, George. You appear to have a vague memory of seeing only one of many British editions of Moore’s work from one publisher, an incomplete knowledge of a dispute with a different publisher, and the connective skills of a low-grade Dr Watson. Who collected Moore’s work for what? How did they exploit him by having an ongoing (to this day!) licensing arrangement with a third party?

Khoury professes to not “getting” the Bojeffries strips. Sigh. Moore avers that they’re one of his favourite and most personal works. Hurrah!

Caption: ”For Scream Moore and the artist known only as Heinzl gave us the horrific “Monster” tale. There never was a sequel in this case.” What?

Moore also thinks that “The Reversible Man” is “[p]robably still one of the best stories that I’ve ever done.” Double hurrah! This was the first thing I ever read by him, and it knocked my little nine-year-old’s socks off. It only becomes more poignant the older one gets, too. Eddie once told me that he didn’t rate it, as the standard English adventure-comic illustration of the Future Shocks and Time Twisters always put him off, but it’s the first instance of a trope that rears its head every five years or so in Moore’s work, through Swamp Thing and A Small Killing to (the actual very best thing he’s ever done) The Birth Caul.

Caption: ”Before the film A.I., Moore and artist Redondo presented Timmy, the boy robot, within the story “One Christmas During Eternity!” You know what else came before the film A.I.? The story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss, you dunce.

Another caption announces that “musical collaboration between Alan and David Jay gave us the V For Vendetta-inspired track, “This Vicious Cabaret.” Okay, again – it’s David J, not David Jay. You might not have any Bauhaus records (or Love & Rockets, or whatever else), but it’s not like it’s misprinted on the Alan Moore CDs. And since you’re referring to it as a track, it’s also not misprinted on either the V For Vendetta EP (okay, I'm guessing) or the David J On Glass compilation (indeed, the title might be a clue). Also, can it really be called “V For Vendetta-inspired” when the lyrics and sheet music actually comprised an entire chapter of V For Vendetta?

Absalom Daak, not Absalom Dark. What, doesn’t everyone know the name of the Dalek-Killer from Marvel's Doctor Who comics? Uh, okay, but you could ask someone if you’ve guessed right. The chapter ends so abruptly I wonder if a page got dropped by mistake, possibly to accommodate the two-page spread by John Totleben of characters they’ve worked on together.

it wasn't me, I'm just a maakie

"...not an actual photograph..."

ding dong the witch is dead

Replacing Ruddock with Vanstone, though? "If you thought we were treating refugees badly before..."

nicked from the Vic

PEOPLE ABOUT WHOM WE ONLY KNOW ONE INTERESTING FACT
Parishioner Paul Gorman: "Do any other parishioners share with me that dread feeling of prescience whenever they read press coverage of certain artists? I ask this following the media response to Tim Burgess's new album which followed the entirely predictable path of consistently mentioning that he is a resident of Los Angeles. From the Evening Standard to Mojo, the fact is consistently recycled and represented, just as it has been since he moved there five years ago. If the little blighter isn't dropping it in a self-congratulatory fashion himself hacks to a man and woman do the job for him. Having gathered together all manner of media, Straight Talking Jo From Bow and I set up a competition to see how quickly the LA habitation appeared. She won - apparently the Marie Claire review got there within five words. Surely there is a strand in such reportage of the wholly expected? Poor old Ben Thingy from Everything But The Girl can't escape even the most distaff coverage - say, the opening of his new club - without reference to the wasting condition he suffered from a few years back. There must be many more out there. Over to you..."

THE HONOURABLE MEMBERS
Parishioner Barrie Cree: "Whilst attending the Brits in Ally Pally many moons ago I was queuing for space at the urinals & a smartly be-suited young chap stepped back & I took his place. I took up the usual position of staring straight ahead without looking to either left or right & was most disconcerted when two other young chaps started to lean over me & chat away as if I wasn't there. I glanced down & noticed that they were not only wearing matching suits but also the same shiny Doc Martens with almost matching splashes. It was of course Take That at their peak. The one who'd stood back was Gary Barlow & if my memory serves me well the two having the conversation were Jason & Howard. My teenage daughters were very impressed & most upset that I didn't take the time out to check their "tackle".

"1-2-3-DOH!"
Parishioner Derek Gray: "On the subject of famed musical gaffes, can I suggest New Order's Blue Monday. Hooky goes for an ill-advised bass chord during a percussion break - misses painfully. This on the 'biggest selling 12-inch of all time'(still?). Don't get me started on their live performances..."

Parishioner Joe Saunders: "The ultimate for me is the horrible bass mistake at two minutes twenty seconds on 'Cocaine' from JJ Cale's 'Troubadour' album."

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