A game of shovseys aka I am an alpha male.

I went to our office Christmas party the other night. As is the case people were getting pretty drunk. This guy came up to us and said inappropriate things to my girlfriend and then to me. Neither of us knew him although he obviously works somewhere in the building with us.
I gave him a shove. He came at me with a 'I can see I was being a cunt and I deserved that, BUT never lay a hand on me again or else..........' line like he was Jason Bourne or some shit and gave me a shove back for good measure.
I told him to fuck off seeing he had just admitted he was being a cunt and deserved the intial shove and gave him a gentle finger push in the chest just to be a patronising cunt. Eventually he fucked off after I just started ignoring him. I never did find out what the ................ threat meant unless what he was going to say was 'or else I'll stay standing here and shove you back, then you can shove me back, then I'll maybe shove you back a bit more, then we'll abuse each other, then it'll just kind of peter out and we'll both look like dicks.'
Which is pretty much what these situations turn out like seeing as neither of us a from the streets or anything.
At best if I had kept talking to him we would have ended up in a drunken, stumbling about hug and then drunk friends. At worst we would have ended up the same way. A lose, lose situation.
Just walk away.
Males are dicks.

Geddes, Damien Lazarus and Michael Mayer @ T-bar

This was on a monday night. Its all part of T-bars final 12 days before closing down....which is a shame, because I really like it there. Its refreshing to have a place with great line-ups that starts a little earlier and closes at 3am. T was also the venue for many an after party on Sundays.
Anyway, the Monday we went down was the last of the Stink parties, which were run by Mayer and Lazarus for just over a year every Monday for a while. Seeing as I had actually never made it down to any of them despite living quite close by at one stage, I thought I could at least make it down to the last one. Something about Monday night parties had always put me off. As it turned out it wasn't so bad at all.
So me and three of my mates meet up in Soho and downed a few pints before heading down. When we arrived, no massive line outside and Geddes playing the warm up on the inside. We sat down and got doen to the business of drinking and I looked around and felt bad that Tea is closing. Its quite a large space, spread across one floor and one room. The sound is a bit lacking but ok if your on the centre of the dance floor bit, but never really quite bass heavy enough. It is really nice having lots of tables speckled around the place though and if you have five or six of you sitting around a table it can feel a bit like having friends over for a letsgetpissedandlistentomusicroundthetablewhiledrinking evening which is fun. (Except with Mayer and Lazarus playing instead of my drunking fumblings on the decks)
Damien Lazaruz came on, and true to form played a wicked mix of deep house, techno, grindy stuff and plain weird electronica. I have never actually seen him before but have heard him say he is not afraid to clear a dance floor and I can believe that now. He got pretty weird in some bits, but I don't mean bad weird I mean awesome weird. It was a lot of fun, and he got me up dancing and bopping around like an idiot which was refreshing and a bit of a catharsis for me because I don't feel I have had fun dancing for ages due to all the cunts about. Speaking of which, the crowd at tea was really good. Not overtly young, and just into the music. No handsey bastards for the girls, and no idiots wearing glasses.
Michael Mayer then came on. Which was a shame. He just sort of lost the vibe and plodded out this increasingly boring house music. It really didn't have any sort of kick or swing or bop or whatever the fuck it is that makes you wanna dance....although the girls that were there seemed to be loving it so maybe he was just trying to score chicks or something. We went home after that. Still, that was a good thing being a school night.

Villalobos at Fabric.

TOO MANY CUNTS
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I may be in an aggressive mood today.

This makes me laugh.

http://www.deadact.com/
DeadAct.com is an online archive of videos found in the public domain that show electronic performers blatantly faking their "live set".

To qualify as a Dead Act, the performer must have pre set out their performance in such a way that if they were to drop dead, the set would keep playing on as normal. Bonus points for fake knob tweaking, failed attempts to play real instruments , and good orgasm faces.

Not surprisingly trancey/hard housey bollocks features a bit here. Worth a laugh.

This Owl is AWESOME!

Criminals in the 80s were easy to spot.

I have noticed, and I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, that in a large amount of movies from the 80s the criminal element all wear outlandishly punky/ cyber goth clothes and scream/laugh manically everywhere they go. There is plenty of examples of this type of behaviour lurking around the place in your local dvd store, but one of my personal favs is the Robocop attempted rape scene. But you know you can find these type of crims in any 80s action flick really. Bill Paxton in Terminator for instance. Any Troma film. Jeff Goldblum in Death Wish. I like how if you watch the credits on Death Wish, his character is labelled as 'freak 1'. Not rapist, not murderer and not even criminal. Freak.
In movie land in the 80s, most of the time you were a criminal, you screamed and shouted and generally acted up a lot. You were a freak of society that was easy to spot, and most probably easy to kill in most of the movies I am thinking about.
Anyway this got me thinking about the time frame in which these films were made and something I read about, have heard and studied.
You see in the 70s and 80s, before the Berlin wall came down, America was pretty much scared of Communism. (The early 80s was a bad time because of Russia invading Afghanistan, Americas then Allies and Regan and Thatchers hard line ideals that Communism was complete evil)
The problem with being afraid of Communism, is that you're afraid of an idea or ideal, and not something that you can touch, or taste, or blow away face to face with a machine gun.
I think, maybe not on purpose, Americans made and wanted movies where the bad guys were obvious. Where they knew who to shoot and everything was in black and white.
The most classic example of preying intentionally on this fear is Predator with Arnie. The Alien is an unseen presence for the first 40mins of the movie. An unseen enemy picking the squad off one by one. What are they fighting? Its an evil they can't quite comprehend. I know John McTiernan was essentually dealing with this on purpose, as I have heard him talk about the influence of fear of communism on this film, but I don't think he realized that in the end he turned it into another America triumphs over evil post the Vietnam war loss movie though.
This is of course, one of the main ideals behind the glut of action films about invincible characters dealing punishment to destroy all enemies in their path. The re-masculinisation of America after suffering a loss in Vietnam.
This is a well documented trend. Missing in Action, Rambo, Commando to name a few.
America had taken a knocking. Their egos were bruised and their backs were up. What better way to fix that than fictional action films where your heroes are ex US military hard asses that can't be killed. (strangely Schwarzenegger feature in a few of these and he doesn't really sound American at all)
An interesting series in this period is the American Ninja movies. This is a weird one, because, a culture Americans don't understand, they do in this film, and then make a case and point of saying they are actually better at it than the Japanese originators. A strange take for action film makers of the time, because, well who needs to use the enemies skills when you can just blow them up with guns.
My favourite of all action films in the 80s has to be Robocop.
Robocop is a funny one, because all of the things I have talked about enough are in the film, and on purpose. The trick was, when the script went around they couldn't get anyone to make it. The script fell into little known (then) art house film director Paul Verhoeven.
Verhoeven, having never been to the States before, saw all these things about America and there culture and movies and put them in his. Don't believe me? The proof is in the movie.
The adverts in Robocop? (and later Starship Troopers) The story goes Verhoeven arrived in America for pre-production meetings on the film and the Shuttle Challenger exploded in Flames. Breaking news reports were all over the television, yet instead of staying with the action, occasionally the news would go to commercials and advertise things as inappropriate as childrens toys.
Vietnam references? In shovel loads. The Robot ED-209 face is roughly a mimic of the Bell Huey gunship used for urban pacification Vietnam, which was a completely failed (and in-human) way of dealing with riots in small towns and villages by shooting them from gunships. As a further nod in this direction, Ed-209s creator, who introduces the Robot, is called Robert McNamara. Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense from 1961-1968 for the US, when their Urban pacification idea came about. Then as one final nod a bit later, they state clearly that ED-209 was built for urban pacification.
On the flip side of this, the film deals with the unseen threat, but with a much more anti-establishment swing on things. The unseen or unknown threat to our hero is coming from the company that created him. His own soil. Not an outside force at all.
Either way. The lowly crims are still loud mouth, screaming and laughing punks and in the end Robocop still shoots everyone bad all to hell. I think maybe I over thought this. This sounds like a loud of shit.
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80s action films Rulz.