I'LL TAKE POTPOURRI FOR 200, ALEX... ... u p d a t e d !
11:29 a.m.
*NEWS FLASH!*
i ordered 2 coffee mugs and 2 t-shirts from my little gift shop last week, and they came today...that was pretty fast! they look really good, i was expecting the worst. so, i'm announcing a little contest here...the 1000th visitor to my diary wins a free kstyle coffee mug...hopefully, i will be able to determine who it is. if i am unable to figure out the winner, whoever i can identify closest to #1000 (without going over) will be the winner...simple, no? we're getting pretty close, should be in about a week. good luck!
yo, niggaz be all up in that spinal tap shit...
(the following is an excerpt from today's s.f. chronicle)
"Sometimes looks, money, talent and fame just aren't enough -- unless one happens to be playing in the World Series. Ask rap superstar Nelly. His "Nellyville" album is one of the year's biggest hits, selling more than 4 million copies since its summer release, but you wouldn't have known it from the turnout at his Sunday concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre.
The venue's lawn was sparsely peppered with fans, and reserved seating sections were marred by empty rows that sprawled like ellipses between masses of dancing bodies. The concert season has been slow, to be sure, but the real culprit was bad timing: The afternoon show played in direct competition with the Giants' second match-up with the Angels.
"It's like Coney Island the day after 9/11," marveled one concert-goer passing a line of closed souvenir stands.
Perhaps not that bad. In the end, Nelly and the St. Lunatics gave a 90- minute performance that justified their hard-core fans' love in spite of the World Series and aftershocks from a pair of stabbings (one fatal) at the tour's Friday concert in Chula Vista (San Diego County).
A rocky and slightly ludicrous start didn't help matters, as a giant metallic sign reading "STLMO314" (Nelly's hometown of St. Louis, Mo., and its area code) stalled while being lowered from the rafters.
For a tense minute it hung there, suspended like a giant, broken bird's wing, before finally plopping to the ground to enable a black-jumpsuited Nelly and his four-member crew to emerge from its hidden doors for the popular numbers "E.I." and "Oh Nelly."
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"plopping"...oooh, i LOVE that.
wow, i mean, ya gotta do SOMETHING with all that money...
didn't u2 get stuck in their giant lemon during the "pop mart" tour?...god, that was a low point for them...maybe it was some kind of conceptual art piece, where they were pretending to suck...ya think? oh, but what if they had perished, suspended above the stage, trapped in a citrus fruit the size of buick, quickly running out of air? ...what do say to each other? maybe they'd get into a fight..." y'know, bono, your lyrics have always sucked!" "oh, yeah, well fuck you, BALDY! you think you're fooling anyone with that doo-rag on your head?" meanwhile, all the crowd sees is a giant lemon, thrashing violently from side to side. and when it finally descends to the stage, the lemon opens...and...oh, my god! they're all dead! i smell a screenplay here...gadfly, you wanna run with this one? it's all yours if ya want it...
back in a bit...day off today, and i think this is gonna be a big one...
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8:45 p.m.
got a shitload of magazines in the mail today, so i've logged some major couchtime this evening...will try to come back (again) soon. feeling a bit lazy. nice and drizzly outside, mmmmm...
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11:30 p.m.
ok, so i got my u2 scenario a little bit wrong...the lemon rolled out from the side of the stage to a small stage in the center of the crowd, opened up, and there they were! but i'm sure i heard they got stuck in it once...
but that reminds me of the story bowie told in that "history of rock 'n roll" series on pbs. it was during his highly theatrical diamond dogs tour. (HE had a giant mirrored cube that rolled out on stage, which opened up to reveal a giant hand with bowie sitting in the palm...whatever.) well, the backdrop was this big set of skyscrapers, and at one point in the show bowie was seen in a window way up at the top. the wall opened up, and bowie was sitting in a chair, singing "space oddity" into a telephone receiver. the chair was attached to a big cherry-picker arm. (the first one used in rock, but not the last, as bowie pointed out.) the chair slowly floated out over the audience, and because of the lighting, all you saw was bowie hovering in the air. but, one night it got stuck, and bowie was stranded up there for the next couple of songs! now THAT'S rock 'n roll! this was 1974, right in the middle of probably his most creative period. when the big tour took a break for a month or so, bowie went to philly and recorded the white-soul classic "young americans", and promptly went back on the road with AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SHOW featuring his new songs and a bunch of black backup singers. talk about switching gears! bowie was heavily into the ol' nose candy in those days...i guess he had the energy to do anything... i found a great bowie site today which focuses on '74-'76. it's called GOLDEN YEARS, and it's practically a day-by-day diary of those times. (lots of magazine articles that i remember fondly) course, after living in l.a. and getting really messed up, bowie escaped to berlin with iggy pop to clean up his act in "the heroin capitol of europe" as he called it. some of these people really DO create their best work when they're young and on drugs. by 1980, bowie was clean, but he was pretty boring after that. oh, he's had some great moments since then, but what he accomplished between '72 and '80...well, you can't repeat that kind of thing, it just doesn't happen.
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i had a dream last night that i was sitting around a big table in some kind of office with all my diaryland pals...i was starting to read aloud from a knitting magazine (?) as a joke, to break the ice or something...then i was looking at pictures from k.maria, of her and her sweetie...he was in the foreground and she was kind of hiding in the back with sunglasses on, or her hair sort of covering her face...whatup, k.? oh, and she changed her comment about me in her faves list. i'm now known as her "virtual sidekick"! i hope we get to hang out someday...
strange phone message that woke me up this morning: "good morning, this is (unintelligible), i did the doll repair...and i was just wondering if i ,uh, missed you again today..so give me a call. thanks." i used to get calls from different doctor's offices, confirming appointments for people who, uh, not be here. and don't even get me started on telemarketers...god, that must be a sucky job...
this was in someone's notes: "Don't get me wrong, Kstyle is great, I love Kstyle to death...but... Hasn't Kystle ever heard of e-mail? Stop posting here *smack* LOL@harassing other note leavers" oh, matty, i feel bad i haven't been to your diary in a while...that just means i have a lot of good stuff to catch up on...i guess that *smack* was a slap and not a kiss...
got a visitor tonight who lives in the "russian federation zone 3" time zone...hope they don't win the coffee mug.
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tech talk (zzzzzzzzz)
ok, i played around with some stuff today...changed the font up top, (made it a bit bigger, too.) and put up a cool painting. you can read about it if you do a mouseover...it's one of my favorite paintings ever, why didn't i think of that sooner? the combination of that new title font and the painting gives the place a kind of retro look. me likee! (that still doesn't explain the monkey...someone give him a name, please!) i also increased the line-height so there's more space between the lines of text, it's not so cramped looking. i also found a review site NOT run by high-school girls. it's called marked accordingly, and it's run by two very clever sounding guys. they rate mainly on content, and the reviews i read were really great, even the bad ones! so i put in a request for a review... i have no idea what to expect. that's their link under my last five entries.
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heard the "new" nirvava song last night, and i just saw the video on mtv. yawn. i don't think it's so great, and the vid is just a bunch of old live footage (of course it's OLD, duh!) it sounds really out of place in today's climate, quaint, almost...gimmee "in utero" any day. "i've seen it all, i was here first." INDEED.