Gorillaz in our midst.



So tonight we kick off Sweet Alice Tuesdays in our new home…InnJoy. The room is bigger, cleaner and nicer. The board is brand spankin’ new and the sound system kicks ass. We’ll miss the dirty grimy environs of Ten56 but, as they say, onward and upward.

To kick things off we’re teaming up with Virgin/EMI to do a Gorillaz release party for the excellent new Demon Days album. There will be free stuff involved. Awesome cool free stuff. Gorillaz comics, stickers and decals for everyone. At least until we run out.

I couldn’t be much more excited since Gorillaz is the brain-child of Damon Albarn (Blur!) and Jamie Hewlett (look at my nickname for one reason I might be stoked about him.) But there’s more!

There will also be a hosted bar and free pizza from 9-10 to make sure everyone kicks the evening off in style. It should be obvious now just how much we adore our rabid fans, no? We DO have rabid fans, right? Right.

So, to sum up:


Tonight, May 24
kick off
Sweet Alice Tuesdays
at
InnJoy
with DJs Tankboy and Rudy Tuesday

9pm – 2am
Hosted bar and free pizza from 9pm - 10pm
Gorillaz giveaways all night long!

__________
The problem with beautiful hippies.

So I was working at a coffeehouse as a cook in the early ‘90s and had a tendency to flirt with the female staff when they were comely enough to meet my standards. In other words, as long as you weren’t a lesbian that could bench press me I’d hit on you. And there was a chance that even if you were a bench-pressing lesbian I’d still hit on you.

Well, one girl and I used to have quite the chemistry and we’d toss zingers back and forth and generally have a smashing good time. Until this one time when her friend named Elena came in to visit. She was stunning. Long hair. Beautiful features. A lilting voice. I was totally willing to overlook the fact that she was a hippy and when you take into account just how famous I was for hating hippies you have some idea just how beautiful she was.

So after I met her she’s all I would talk about to my coffeehouse compatriot. She told me she’d set me up with Elena if she could and I proceeded to obsess and moon like a fourteen year old boy that hasn’t learned the definition of “overbearing” yet. Eventually a meeting was set up and we got along well enough even if conversation was a bit stilted. It was obvious she thought I was cute, I thought she was hot, and neither of us would let something as simple as a lack of immediate chemistry set us off.

Each week I threw a party at my apartment – this was a habit I had picked up my sophomore year and seemed to follow me wherever I lived – and Elena came to my next one. I decided to pry a bit more and try to engage “intimacy” through the sharing of “intimate” details. I opened with what I thought to be the very innocent, “When did you last have a boyfriend?”

She asked what my definition of a boyfriend was.

I said, “I dunno. The last guy you slept with on a regular basis.”

The blood drained from her face. I began to have visions that the last guy she dated was killed by a runaway moose or something and I had just unearthed a particularly painful subject. The room started to go dark and I was having trouble breathing.

“I’ve never slept with anyone.” She said.

“What?” I was flabbergasted. Now I was really having trouble breathing.

“I’VE NEVER SLEPT WITH ANYONE. I’M A VIRGIN.” she said more loudly since she obviously was mistaking the onset of shock with me being hard of hearing.

Things fell apart quickly after that. After a few beers we were able to pretend that scene had never happened but then when we tried to kiss it was…well, it was the worst kiss ever. And it wasn’t her fault OR my fault. We had each just happened to meet the one person in the world we were never meant to kiss. At first I took it as a blow to my skills but after a subsequent kiss proved that neither of us clicked in even the remotest fashion we agreed to give it up.

The irony in this situation surfaced a few years later when I was at a party and ran into the girl from the coffeehouse that had introduced me to Elena in the first place. She drunkenly spilled that she had actually had a huge crush on me and it had broken her heart when I went so aggressively after Elena when she knew the hippy and I would never click. She said she and I would have made the best team…and she was right. My mouth fell agape and I asked why she had never told me of this since I too had always had a massive crush on her that I didn’t think would be reciprocated.

“I was going to tell you. The day that Elena came to visit me, and you met her, was the day I was going to tell you.”