"Cause we are the last disease"

I was listening to The Black Parade whilst studying today. Seriously, I was. Humming the words to dead and tapping my feet to that driving rhythm in The sharpest lives all the while memorizing functional groups and teaching myself about galvanic cells. I was thinking that perhaps it is my favourite album of all time.

My Chemical romance is probably not my favourite band, even though a lot of my friends will claim otherwise. I don't think I can possibly have a favourite band, my music tastes are too widely spread for something like that.

But favourite album... Fast songs deep songs, slow songs, fun songs... Creepy songs, mama.  Gerard Way's voice, Frank Iero's guitar... The story, the tightness... It's an amazing album, it really is.

And so I decided to have a look at the band's web page and see if anything new was on its way, and it was. In a sense.

Frank had done a Disney theme tune and Mikey Way is promoting his signature Squier but it's Gerard I really want to talk about.

He has a new song out with Deadmau5 called professional Griefers and it is intense. It's classic dubstep with Gerard's voice belting over the top and dare I say that it is much much better than most of the stuff on Danger Days.

It's about lawlessness and social degration and all the horrible things that plague our modern pop culture. It's a dirty, sweaty, lapdance-joyride through hell and I love it. You have to watch the music video though. It's not the same without that. The video is based around a robotic fight between Gerard and Deadmau5 and all the chaos that ensues. It contains scenes of people watching the fight losing control and this cat that moves around like the plague. When I was watching it I wanted to go out and hit something. I think that says a lot. It's well put together, slick, professional, dirty. An MCR fan I was speaking to said she hated it but I know that's because she dislikes dubstep. Open your mind before you watch it, it's quite a ride.

Examination inspiration

My last post was me promising you guys weekly updates from here on out. That was ages ago. Sorry.

You could say I've been busy and I will: I've been busy. there was a play. I was a german doctor who enjoyed poisons. We did fantastically: three standing ovations over three nights of production, sold out our theatre, got one of the cast grounded at the raucous afterparty. It was intense, seriously. Really. I've discovered that I have a theatre jacket. It's a manky brown suede thing, manky because it's suede and drycleaners are scared. I've worn it in house plays, school plays and drama club plays. Any play I've been in since I got it has featured that jacket. in fact the jacket the painting of me is wearing in my profile button thingy is based on it. When I went to an art course I was called a hobo because of it.

Now I've been drawing a lot lately. my thick sketchbook is full now and i've resorted to carrying around a ream of paper to draw on. i'm still planning characters, plots and settings for my comic which will be entitled stranger or oddity or something like that. It stars Finn and Jeffrey and Zachary who travel from world to world in the multiverse in their portable house, number nineteen. Maybe I'll work that into the title, i don't know. There's also a raptor called steven and a greasy looking high school mind rebel and I delve into the five elements and human being's selective vision - an evolutionary trait. It'll probably be a webcomic and I'll start posting sometime next year (or perhaps december, probably december) It all depends on when I can get my hands on an A3 scanner really.

Here is a portion of the first page. (only a portion because I don't have an A3 scanner and the speech bubbles not full of speech because I just haven't inked it yet. It's just to give you an idea really

Characters: (from left) Zachary, Finn and Jeffrey.

Suppression is wonderful inspiration

Less buttons, more strings!

The last pop song I remember liking is Schitzo by Iscream and the chocolate stix. It is named after a personality disorder because it has a personality disorder: It is hip hop, pop and rock with a thumping base line (thumping; this means it was created by a guitar, not a computer). It has a dubstep breakdown and a guitar solo at the same time. I like that a lot. So I heard the song a few times before I stopped listening to the radio altogether - I live on mp3s nowadays, South African radio just doesn't tickle my fancy anymore.

So when I heard these guys were playing at my favourite club, Live, I just had to go and see, because I think they're onto something.

And they are. They have a face man called chocolate stix - brilliant stage nad offstage personality and an good rapper. They have another rapper too: Iscream (now the name makes sense). He's a fairly ratty-looking stoner who bounces off his partner quite well. I think he's the talent from the way he explained all their songs. There's also a guitarist, a bassist and a guy with a mac, because acapella just doesn't cut it in the world of pop.

So yes, they're onto something: they've discovered that the future of music lies not just in strings or in computer-generated noise but rather in the bringing together of these two things. They've discovered balance, but they're still standing two far left on the scale.

They have too much Macbook in too many of their songs. They have a fantastic guitarist and a brilliant bass player and they need to make use of them more often; they need to get schitzo. I think if they bear this in mind while completing the face of a rolling stone it could be their best song. They played an acoustic snippet of that song and it sounded amazing. It sounded amazing because when you rap over a guitar you're being different and different is how you succeed nowadays.

What I'm really saying is that they make very good dance music, very good pop, but they have the means to make so much more than that, they really do. They have the ability to bring about a change in music either by being the band that changes things or by inspiring that band, because in a world where someone has already thought of everything, the best ideas are found in the blender.

Byeee we've left you NOTHING

Today the rest of my family left to go on holiday. I decided to stay behind because I have stuff to do - a play and an art course, more about those some other post - and I don't like the surfer's paradise where they're going that much anyway.

So they left. They got in the car with all their stuff and they left. They woke me up at 6 o' clock when they did this just to make 100 hundred per cent sure I wouldn't oversleep. That was a good idea actually but as a result I had 3 hours to do nothing before I finally went down to my art thing at 9.

It was amazing, though, I showered and watched some Eddie izzard and read a bit and did some drawing and facebook and such. It was the laziest morning I have ever had, I should do it more often.

But then my stomach started snarling at me and pulled me into the kitchen for food. "I'll make some eggs," I thought, "I'll have a peanut butter sandwhich, maybe some cereal." I walked over to the fridge, flung open the door and...

It was empty! Nothing, nada, niks, qanda, a vaccuum of food! I rooted around in the vegetable tray for a bit and found a dead apple or two. There was a bit of juice, true, but no milk, no jam, no cheese, nothing edible! Eventually I toasted a bit of bread and smeared it with the thinnest layer of letover peanut butter. It wasn't much but it did seem to last.

So yes, I can understand that you may need a fair amount of food on a twelve hour drive but please leave me some next time. I have a stomach too!

Durban is boring, I'm going to hunt pirates

This was the sentiment of my uncle - looking a lot like a pirate himself - about the latest pursuit of his boating carreer. He is a freelance captain, or something like that, hired by the rich and infamous for anything between smuggling people out of Dubai to taking them on leisurely travels to the Carribean or Madagasgar, home of the famous lemur, that alcoholic, nicotene addicted "cross between a cat, a dog and a monkey with the nature of a dolphin."

He is a man with as many stories as there are hairs on his head (and there are a lot of those) and this next venture is set to be right up there with the time he got thrown in a Pakistani prison or the time a 94 year old woman warned him not to grow old. His job entails travelling to Madagasgar where he will

and proceed to lead the hunt from the beach whilst looking big and intimidating enough to make sure his recruits get the job done right. So he won't actually be shooting the scurvy bastards but he'll be behind the whole thing.

A sort of eye on the sand if you will.

Multitasking the holidays

And now the  holidays have begun.

This is a time in which most people sigh in relief, safe in the knowledge that the only writing and reading they shall be doing will be on tiny-screened communication devices, but not me. For me this is a time when I can totally immerse myself in any and all words of my choice.

The holidays are a time when I can choose my own literary intake and am not limited to set-work novels and textbooks chosen by someone I'll never meet because someone told him everyone should have a knowledge of  a Shakespearean tragedy or an allegory on Communism and that they should know how plants operate and how this came about. I'm not disputing the work of Orwell or Shakespeare and I'm  not saying that auxins and evolution do not interest me, I'm just stating that had I a choice these would not be the topics I'd look into at the moment

For the next few weeks my reading material shall consist of an old book on Living fossils, 2 Bond novels and The Sign of Four, a Sherlock Holmes tale. I shall, of course be reading them all at the same time.

In fact all four of the novels will be lying open on my bed alongside my ancient Dell laptop, a copy of popular mechanics, my 4 notebooks (Manuscript for novel, ideas for novel, non-novel stuff and pocket book), my sketchbook and probably a discarded banana peel whenever I am awake. When I am not awake my things shall be relocated to the floor, desk and bedside table in equal measures where they shall stay until I wake up  again and they can re-colonise the bed. I also have a bag big enough to fit them all for when I am away from my place of rest. Let it be said here and now that I will not spend any amount of time without a pen, a pencil, a paintbrush and a piece of paper within reach. Exams start soon after these holidays and so there shall be nothing exam themed in them at all.