New location for the Mythicaldude Blog: http://mythicaldude.net

New location for Mythicaldude Blog is http://mythicaldude.net
The address for the Mythicaldude Blog is changing.

The NEW location is: http://mythicaldude.net

You may as well change your bookmarks and favorites and if you link to me you should change the link to http://mythicaldude.net.

The Mythicaldude Blog's content at this location will remain in place here until late July of 2010, but there will be no new posts made here, or any other content changes at all starting today - January 19, 2010.

All new Mythicaldude Blog posts and other content will be at the new site and new location.

Please visit the new site (still under construction, but fundementally sound (we think).

Thank you for visiting, but you are in the wrong place as of this moment

It is ALL happening at

http://mythicaldude.net

Please go NOW. Thank you very much!


A L S O


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We're The Hellhounds... God damn it!

Happy New Year!

Can you believe that its 2010 already?

Looking ahead... Despite my lack of new year resolutions and even after taking into account my generally grim prospects for the future...

I have reason to believe that 2010 will be a great year!

Certainly it started out with a BANG... and also with lots of beer and "silly string", but that was all before today's extraordinarily regretable, challenging and absolutely massive hangover.

 

 

Wheee!

A good time was had by all at Sharky Bar in Phnom Penh last night as the Sharks hosted "Penhstock", Cambodia's first rock festival.

Lots of fun and a compelling trigger for asking those pesky and profound big-picture questions...

 

 

"Why didn't I just quit while I was ahead?

 

What was I thinking?

 

You mean she wasn't joking?

 

Who the hell knows.

 

 

Five (5) bands took and shook the Sharky stage during the course of the beery and boisterous evening and the house was jam-packed with enthusiastic revelers, making things rather steamy.

However, despite the provocative body-heat, the eagerly excited crowd was animated, friendly and decidedly out to have a good time (Fucking-A) and bring in the New Year with excpetionally high-spirits, much merriment and ecstatic inebriation (not to mention well-intentioned yet nonetheless irrational exuberance)!

 

The mythicaldude (dapperly dressed in black) arrived fashionably late at 11:30 PM and missed all the bands except for Lost Highway,

 

They were really great and his dudeliness particularly enjoyed a bunch of Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes ... and really dug the BIG phat sound of the drums. Right on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Without a doubt, ( God damn it ^TM ), the band I play guitar with, had a rolicking good time playing our special brand of raw, nasty sounding and downright unsanitary blues.

 

 

By all accounts, and as best I can remember, we were effusively loud, if not downright thrillingly rowdy. definitely there was nothing about us or our performance that was even remotely delicate, subtle or nuanced. That's a good thing, right?

I'm reasonably sure that we had most everyone in attendance completely snookered and fooled into thinking that we actually knew what the hell we were doing! For sure it could have been worse!

 

 

 

 

After a somewhat abbreviated and only slightly inebriated set we actually jammed a bit with some of the cats from Lost Highway who we found - despite their reputation (just kidding) and ours (no joke) - to be nice friendly guys as well seriously good fun players who like to rock.

 

 

In all likelihood we were sloppy, loud and disorganized, but no one seemed to care (or notice) since to varying degrees everyone in the joint was thoroughly drunk, happy and oblivious. Woo hoo!

Harmonica Ken was great, as always.

Ditto to the max for ace-accordianist & slide-guitarist-extraordinaire Jimmy.,, that's him in black and white part of the picture on the left)!

Scoddy was nattily attired yet subdued in his sartorial splendor until he began to pound on the industrial-strength big-ass drum-kit with aplomb (or was he just using regular old drumsticks?)

As always, it is mandatory that you check out his Following The Applause Blog for his lounge-lizardly take on what went down.

 

That's me playing guitar on the right (in living color) ... hunkered down as usual... desperately concentrating on maintaining some semblance of a functional real time connection between my ears, eyes, brain and fingers.

[ It's no picnic being me... I don't like it one little bit, but I've been at this game for so long now that I'm used to it. ]

 

 

The Swedish Ambassador is wintering in Europe this holiday season so our good buddy Bass Player Dave from Canada did a great job filling-in on short notice. Dave plays these days with a classy jazzy-wazzy group called Mispent Yooth.

 

 

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed conversing and commiserating with Bass Player Dave from Canada after the gig and long after all the guests and other band members were long gone.

Dave and I sat together at the empty bar methodically and fastidiously milking the FREE BEER (his favorite brand) for all it was worth - no sense in letting go to waste, or in letting Al drink it,

Somehow we managed to operate under the radar and went virtually undetected until about 3:00 AM when finally the bar staff got the message across. They had been anxiously killing us softly with their disdainful looks in a mostly feeble attempt to let us know that they wanted to get the hell out of there and that it was time for us to leave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Until then we were undetered from our clandestine and intoxicating mission, and remained unabasheldy commited to our iron-clad indifference, which was bolstered considerably by the ludicrously drunken conviction that we knew where all the bodies were buried. In retrosepct it seems abundantly clear that I don't (and never did) have the slightest idea what that even means. Clueless? You bet!

 

 

 

 

Despite our regressive nonsensical gibberish, the Sharky crew outdid themselves with a boisterous well-planned and well-managed party... including a cool private (well maybe semi-private) and only slightly dilapidated backstage area for all the musicians with an icy keg of FREE BEER (my favorite brand too!).

So a great big big tip-O-the-hat is in order to the Sharky dudes for a job well done indeed.

By all means, please check out the Sharky Blog for some of Cali 2 Jim's photos (you've go to love those ladies!) and an illuminating and informative recap of the night's festivities.

.

Grudgingly, El Mythicos Dudicus, has disclosed his frank admission that he "now knows better", and is frighteningly quick to add "but at the time it all seemed like a good idea".

It is understandable after all the glitz, giddy exhileration and profusion of perspiration at the gig... that he was steadfastly unwilling to compromise his enthusiastic neglect of good judegment....
 

 

 

 

so the mythicaldude set out with outlandish abandon and utter disreagard for any any and all possible consequences... and "did himself in" good and proper. Ouch!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since the dude started out on the late side and was genuinely and appropriately inspired by the rambunctious party and excellent vibes..

he wound-up staying out literally all night (an increasingly rare occurance at his advanced age).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At roughly 4 AM, I ran into Cali 2 Jim at the

Walkabout* where I think we had the exact same conversation that we had hours earlier at Sharky's.

I enjoyed it both times... that's my story and Í'm sticking to it.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that was all my fault.

 

 

 

 

 

{   *  }

[  The Walkabout is a Phnom Penh landmark every bit as legendary as the Sharky Bar... a cathedral of decadence.

It is almost universally revered as a local bastion of culture and generally regarded as the pinnacle of late-night elegance, refinement and sophistication. Tee-hee-hee.   ]

 

 

 

 

 

Not long after that the MythMan bumped into none other than The Lost Highway Drummer Guy upstairs there at the Walkabout, where we sat for awhile slurring our words and chewing the fat over yet another beer as we watched to bartender do her homework...

Just what the doctor ordered.

 

 

 

 

 

The mythical one also saw many other twisted and familiar faces... all of whom:

• 
  
  
  

  definitely ought to be old enough to know better
• 
  
  shall sadly remain forgotten and nameless since...
• 
  
  Mythicaldude's current status is decidedly:
• 
  
  [   Ultra-Deluxe-Hyper-Fuzzy & Spacey   ]

Consequently he fails to recall many of the gory details of last night's epically shameful, abberently debilitating, decadent and self-indulgent debauchery. Alas!

Man it was some kind of big fun... while it lasted

So it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyhow... it turns out that The Lost Highway Drummer Guy used to live in San Francisco, just like me... and in one of those pleasantly inexplicable turns of conversation we fondly (and rather bizarrely) reminisced about a great guitar player from The City by the Bay named Carlos Guitarlos, who evidently (I found out after diligent investigation on Google) is still out there and going strong.

Here is the Carlos Guitarlos MySpace page.

 

 

 

 

 

But I digress...

I imagine that I must be distracted by the strangely enthralling and wonderfully perverse and misguided thought of heading back to Sharky Bar tonight to jam with Lost Highway and enjoy a toke a few drinks in a typically pathetic and humiliating attempt to adjust the arc of my life's trajectory in order to get back on-track and confidently seize the plethora of opportunities that await me in the coming New Year.

Naturally I accoomplish this feat by creatively causing life to disintegrate in a spectacularly despicable smoky haze of unabashedly flagrant self-abuse and degradation while I wallow in my embrace of the incredible delusion that someday soon I'll somehow rise to the occassion and, as they say in the song...

"someday everything's gonna be different... when I paint my masterpiece".

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a crock of crap... what a stinking steamy heap of stinky dung you say?

 

 

Hey mister... don't burst my bubble, OK?

Don't you have to "go see a guy about a thing"?

For your information I became so engrossed with writing this blog post that I spent too much time and now, sadly, it is much too late for Sharky's.

Rest assured though, dear reader, that I take no small amount of solace and comfort in the certain knowledge that... I can always go back to the Walkabout. Hoo-hah!

It truly is a blessing to live in Phnom Penh.

At any rate the whole crew here at mythicaldude.com wishes you a very happy new year.

We're hoping for the best... and that's a fact!

 

 

Please stand by for 2010... that's right, there aren't any seatbelts so you'll just have to deal with it.