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-------------------- You never see a motorcycle parked outside a psychiatrist office
Texas is humongus compared to France
Our Gair, who art in Texas,
Paw Paw be thy Name..
-------------------- You never see a motorcycle parked outside a psychiatrist office
Texas is humongus compared to France
Our Gair, who art in Texas,
Paw Paw be thy Name..
In equally shocking news, Denzel Washington is black, and fire is hot.
-------------------- niteowl said: See, that term pedo gets thrown around a lot.
Is a 16 year old guy having sex w/a 16 year old girl a pedophile?
If not, then how is a 30 year old considered a pedophile for doing the same thing?
I think y'all need to look up the definition for pedophile.
I guess I'm the only fan of hers on this forum. I love her music. I never a gave fuck if she had a drug problem.
As a fan, I'm sorry she died
-------------------- Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for A.A. membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. A.A. is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy; neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
I am sure anyone that follows the news as closely as I do has now heard about Russell Brand's much heralded blogged essay on his website about Amy Winehouse's death. It has caused so much traffic to his site that its crashed several times over the past 24 hours. It is just now that I have had a chance to finally read it myself, and I couldn't help but be struck with the memory of all of OUR friends who have passed on due to this horrible affliction themselves.
Just this year alone, I have attended 7 funerals, and there were another 4 on top of that of my friends that have passed whose funerals I couldn't make. Not because I didn't want to be there, but because I just simply could not get away from work. That is 11 people that have passed, who I was friends with, just this year. That is almost two people a month. When you expand that figure out to the past 5 years, the total is above 30. If you expand it over the course of my career in he music industry, almost 18 years now, the total is in the hundreds. Of course not all of these deaths were due to overdose or addiction, but over 90% of them were. These are heartbreaking numbers! These are not just statistics or nameless faces. These were close friends, and confidants that I will never see again. Of course sometimes it may just be the death of somebody who was nothing more to me than a smiling face in the crowd, but the pain hurts just as much when I learn of their passing. It hits close to home. Too close.
Over the past few days I have heard jaded assholes who sit in judgement of everyone, while doing nothing with their own lives, make jokes about Amy's death. Or I have heard them say "How can you care about her dying? You must have forgot about Oslo" (referencing a deranged Christian Zealot's terrorist attack in Norway a few days ago which killed 93 people). My answer is what does one concern have to do with another? Of course we can be saddened by both at the same time. But if you do not see how Amy's death hits a little bit closer to home to us, than some random ideologue killing random people in the name of a religion, something most of us are never going to have to deal with on a day to day basis, then you are blind. Amy was ONE OF US. And just like the hundreds of people who I have known that have passed before her, it is a tragedy.
Whether it's Gimpmode, or Stuart Allen, or Kurt Cobain, or Jimi, or Janis, or Amy herself, it is a sad sad day when we learn of thier passing. Because each one of them touched our souls and forever changed them. In my experience the easiest way to touch another's soul in this realm is through music. And this is why I have been involved with music for my entire life. But with that choice comes the knowledge that this is a medium full of heartbreak and tragedy, just as much as it is full of elation and wonderment. It just feels like lately one of those is winning out over the other one, more often than not.
There is NOTHING romantic about death.
There is NOTHING romantic about passing at the age of 27.
There is NOTHING cool or romantic about being a junkie.
It is NOT better to live fast and die with a pretty corpse.
It is NOT better to burn out than to fade away.
You know why? Because it fucking hurts. It hurts the people that are still here and that cared about you. And it hurts bad. I have been party to one too many of these "phone calls" Russell Brand speaks about.
Something has gotta give. There is too much senseless death in our industry, and in our world, these days. I implore you that if you one of the ones reading this and are fighting a demon right now to please go and get help. It IS out there. It is NOT cool to continue down this path. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. I have been around long enough to tell you that it never ends well. Nobody ever winds up buying a house on the hill with that monkey on your back. And I for one am tired of guessing which one of my friends will be the next to fall, or having to live in the constant defense of experiencing the pain all over again.
With all that said, here is Russell Brand's blog in its entirety (which I feel may convey my sentiment just a bit more eloquently than I did):
When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.
Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.
I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.
I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.
From time to time I’d bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was “a character” but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn’t especially register.
Then she became massively famous and I was pleased to see her acknowledged but mostly baffled because I’d not experienced her work and this not being the 1950’s I wondered how a “jazz singer” had achieved such cultural prominence. I wasn’t curious enough to do anything so extreme as listen to her music or go to one of her gigs, I was becoming famous myself at the time and that was an all consuming experience. It was only by chance that I attended a Paul Weller gig at the Roundhouse that I ever saw her live.
I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I’d only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound. So now I knew. She wasn’t just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a fucking genius.
Shallow fool that I am I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that youtube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12 I found recovery, through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive.
Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.
-------------------- niteowl said: See, that term pedo gets thrown around a lot.
Is a 16 year old guy having sex w/a 16 year old girl a pedophile?
If not, then how is a 30 year old considered a pedophile for doing the same thing?
I think y'all need to look up the definition for pedophile.
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