Danielle Speaks

Are you on Pandora

If so let me know and give me the email that you are subscribed as. I want to be your pandora friend. =)

Damn I wanna go!!!!!!

Every year I hear the line-up and every year it goes by...oh well one day! BTW- can somebody tell me what Willie Nelson is doing n the line-up????

C.M. J. Collection of Metiocre Jams

This week I had the fortune of getting a press pass for the CMJ music Marathon all over  the five boroughs. Sadly although I tried to really make use of this perk I was seriously underwhelmed at every venue. I am somewhat confused as to what CMJ is about anymore- it use to be a huge deal and getting into CMJ was great because you got to see really hot up and coming music. There was no spirit to this marathon and the audiences were incredibly rude- even during the most well known bands people were just jabbering away not caring if those voices were carrying to high to enjoy the music. I don't understand this! i mean I know its OK to talk in a bar when a band is playing and yes everyone is drunk and sometimes I arrived at places at 1pm so everyone was quite drunk but still- WHERE ARE YOUR MANNERS PEOPLE????? Now it should be stipulated that I foregoed the bigger shows for the more local venues  because I had already seen all the big name bands listed in the guide before. I really wanted to find some new music and see artists mingling with perspective A&R folks- NOPE...YAWN BOOOOOOOOORING. Oh well.

I did however enjoy seeing my friend Jeff's band Lavender Diamond- Congrats Jeff!

I can't help myself at all....

Wow- K-Fed is such a piece of sh*t but boy oh boy! Look at the way he works that system- I am speechless!  This is so different from Paris Hilton, Jennifer Love Hewitt, The Bacon Brothers or any other vanity album- K-fed is taking himself fo-real! Although I don't love the song- I am not opposed to it- maybe I am just insane today. Jeesh!

UPDATE- to this post-

I have more thoughts- this is hilarious:

• Best Lyric- It's going down like fresh pair o panties, can't look better than a couple pair o' a grammies.
  
• How funny must it be to be a musician in K-Fed's band? Just look at the bassist- you know he is thinking that he really has sunk to the bottom of the barrel- jeesh.
• K-fed is not so good a dancer- so why did Britney fall in love?
• There are all these deleted words were K-fed just pauses- I assume they are curses but they are always in the sentences about his wife I am really fascinated with this! Could K-fed be a genius?

CBGB- OMFUG R.I.P.

Last night CBGB's had its final performance. After a two year long battle with the Bowery Residential Association the club buckled- either it had to pay almost $400,000 worth of back rent or leave. I have my own suspicion that 70 yr old owner Hilly Crystal was just plain tired and decided to go to Vegas. After 5 different money raising benefits that included the remaining members of Blondie, The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Johnny Rotten from the sex Pistols, to name a few, the club still lost its shirt.

I am sad to see it go: I am not truly old enough to appreciate Cb's in its heyday, I am just a slight offspring who loved indie rock and found CB's to be one of the few places in the city that would let my friends and I in when I was teenager. CB's always had quite the democratic atmosphere. A mohawked aging punk could be buying a beer for a preppy teenager in a completely innocuous way- that was CB's it was safe.  My own personal favorite memory is of going to see the Breeders perform there in 1993. My friends and I somehow edge our way up to the front of the stage. I managed to just go ahead and prop myself to the left of the speaker and Kelly Deal who kept offering my Friend Jill and I cigarettes and sips of her mostly whiskey cocktail.  By the end of the show we were literally sitting on the stage and most of the crowd was singing along loudly and with love. Kim deal gave us her play list and told us to be good. Her face was so sweet and glowy compared to the harsh authoritative voice that she carried.

I loved CB's.  I loved that Debbie Harry had sex in the bathroom with her guitarist and was caught often by Joey Ramone. I love that people often say that stalagtites grow from the ceiling. (But it really is just grime from years of cleaning neglect) I love that the graffiti and posters are so old that the building was considered landmark status.

Along with CB's, 11 Spring Street is being sold- its another famous graffitti clad building with copious ammounts of urban myth attached to its friezes.  11 Spring street is 200 yrs old. Its facade is so famous that you can go anywhere on the globe and famous installation and graffitti artists will know it. Lou Reed performed a poem about the building on an album for the Danish Band Kashmir. You can read more about it this article.

In place of these two buildings? Condos. It's just another example of the growing prosperity of New York city that washes all the vibrant identity and artistic quirkiness that pervades our city walls. In two decades or so New York will be just another concrete jungle whose sole existence is to house the grunting workers making commodities and in turn buying commodities from giant chain stores with flashing HD screens above them.

If you need further proof read in this Saturday's times about the closing of Coliseum books. In a quote from Fran Leibowits she talks about how midtown use to be for New Yorkers and not a weigh station for Flyover state travelers. I agree. The story talks about 11 mom and pop bookstores that use to host independant books and personalities. They were places for out of work poets to crash and kibbitz. Now in their places: 8th street went from being a harbinger of future literatti to the best street in Manhatten to buy cheap trendy shoes.  There was actually a place called bookseller's row- its gone and in its place- high brow boutiques where no one but visiting princesses and actresses can afford the fetal placenta cream and single one note edelweiss perfume they are selling.

I understand the need for development and change and even the dire need to clean up the streets. I know there was a time you could not walk on 42 street without fearing for your wallet and your life but there has to be point where the changes are not always in the direction of giant commercialism.  Pretty soon pilgram territory will vanish forever and there will be nothing left but Barnes and Nobles, Starbucks, H&M and clubs like Tonic and Pianos. Everything will be clean and even the most perfectly manicured and impervious to outward human flaws person will start to itch wondering how they landed in this sterile environment that use to house romantic bathrooms like this:

I don't mean to wax so nostalgiac for its rather useless to moan about the authenticity granduer of the old days...but...between the chains, the guidos and the condos....we might as well move to LA

And Yet

Atleast there is the new Paris Hilton single to cheer my up. Not all is lost.

There may be hope for Baby Spederline after all!

Out of the clouds of grungy dust appears FRANCES BEAN COBAIN! With her mom in rehab AGAIN and a movie about her dad's last days playing across the country- little Frances Bean (but drop the "Bean" cuz I don't think she likes it anymore) is proving to us the age old theory: That which does not kill us makes us stronger.  Its not just that her photos are lovely- and this one does not even do her justice. But at the tender age of 13 Frances is already an intelligent sophisticated and precocious individual forging her own PR: