Apr 10, 2006
‘It’s spring again, and so I sing again, with these two lips, from Amsterdam.’
9pm, Stephen Patrick Morrissey kicks off his first ever solo gig in Amsterdam. He’s just a red blotch with a quiff seen from my vantage point behind the mixing desk, but I tap my feet to the tunes from his latest and murmur along to the ones from his greatest.
9.30pm and Mozzer takes off his shirt. He’s just perfect from this far away, square and padded in all the right places. Couldn’t stand him when he was a little whiny fucker, but he and his weltschmerz have grown on me.
10.15pm, he says ‘ciao’ for the last time, having played a single song encore.
He comes and he goes, just a little too ironic, maybe just a tad too British. Irish blood, S.P., embrace it.
Ah, it was worth it, if only for the deep purple hues and mini opera of Life is a pigsty, and the bestest ever retort: ‘I’m not as skinny as I once was… but neither are you.’
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May 27, 2005
Last year my uncle featured in a TV show about ‘miracles’. He told the story of how he found a photograph of himself in a book he picked up from an antique shop, while on holiday in England. It’s a true story. This month the show is letting viewers decide which stories should be repeated in a clip show to introduce the new series.
Do me and my kin a favour and vote for ‘De foto’ on the ‘Wonderen bestaan’ website. You’ll find the poll on the right hand side and ‘De foto’ is the last option in the poll (which doesn’t give it much of a chance of winning!).
It’s a great story and my uncle, who is an author and lyricist, does a great job of telling it (well, duh, he does readings and theater shows for a living). In short: About 20 years ago he was on holiday with his girlfriend L. and another couple. It was a miserable day and he hadn’t even wanted to go to England anyway. When they stopped for lunch, they came across an antique shop.
My uncle had a thing about ‘a book without a title’. He had been talking about this obsession during the trip, of wanting to find this ‘book without a title’. His friends had said books without titles didn’t exist.
Looking through the books on the shelves in the antique shop, he didn’t find anything he wanted. But there was one more book, sitting on a table. Picking it up he saw the book’s cover didn’t have any marking or lettering. It was a book without a title! And when he opened it, he found a picture of himself taken when he was a young man.
Cue theme of the Twilight Zone. Vote now. Vote often.
