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Alex Magnussen – lost last blog posting

Hey.  Sorry haven’t written in a while.  Have been writing songs. Planning a new website for the band. It’s summer and we usually take a break from each other.  I don’t even want to be writing right now but I found something crazy in this blog system.  I can’t sleep these days and so I […]

JC Penny (me) introducing ourselves at Dirty Penny's first ever kids rock show

Hey.  Sorry haven’t written in a while.  Have been writing songs. Planning a new website for the band. It’s summer and we usually take a break from each other.  I don’t even want to be writing right now but I found something crazy in this blog system.  I can’t sleep these days and so I thought I’d check on the blog if there was any more hate mail.  I really liked the last one.

Anyways, I found something crazy: remember our disturbed biographer/journalist Alex Magnusson?  The dude that got arrested at our kids show last year because he was caught dressed in women’s clothing hiding at the back of the gym?  There were kids screaming and 3 big fathers sitting on him til the cops came.  Boy.  I wonder how he’s doing…  Read  Goodbye, Alex for the original post about this incident.  Also any post on this, our band blog, before that post was all Alex’s. 

The great thing about WordPress (the software of this blog thingy) is that it automatically saves a draft every few minutes.  And I guess Alex had wireless internet because I found an unfinished draft of his last blog.   It must have saved it to the server before he was mauled by families (“mauled by families” would be a good band name).  I know he didn’t finish it a later time after the incident because I saw his smashed laptop all over the gym floor.

Anyways, the guy is fucked (probably literally) now and seeing that he did a decent job while he was a free man at documenting our band activities, in his honour I’m publishing the fragment of his last post.  Plus he was a pretty hard core fan of ours.  That alone…

BEGIN
Dirty Penny School Benefit Concert – wed oct 22

It’s autumn all over the place. The bike racks of Hawthorne II elementary school are dead leaf magnets. There are construction paper pumpkins and witches in the class windows. The sun has already disappeared behind the working class homes here in Toronto west and it’s only 6:30. What happened? Was it a good summer?  The parents that have gathered at the school entrance this evening would probably say “I don’t know. I gotta get the kids to school then I gotta go to work for 10 million hours and somehow fit in taking my mother to the doctor oh then there’s hoping my goddam car doesn’t die before friday..”

Tonight is a soirée of baked goods, raffle tickets, committee signups, sing-a-longs, face painting, 200 parents and kids in a school gym and Dirty Penny. Yours truly is very curious to see this. Half of their songs cannot be played to children or the lyrics have to be changed. However, the other half is very child friendly. “Tada!” 2007 was a surprise hit with the kids. “Bubble Juice” and “Noah” are always requested by my nephews. My informal interviews with fans at club shows have concurred the kids appeal. “Hip Hoperation” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain” are the other big faves.

I have to be very careful tonight. I am still banned from attending the shows since the Nidhan (aka Grimlock) interview (see 3 posts down) however I cannot just hang around disguised in drag as I usually do for shows at dark night clubs. I would so get my ass thrown in a police car here. To be a suspected pervert caught at a kids school in the back of a cop car doesn’t necessarily mean they’re taking you back to the station.  I once read an article about the Toronto homeless where one interviewed referred to it as “when they take you to Cherry Beach”.  That’s when you know your officer got beat by his father, he in turn beat whomever he could all the way to high school.  Now he does coke and no one tells him what to do and fucking up a person holds many vintage emotions for him.  And they come in pairs.

That is a legitimate nightmare come true. So I have managed to sneak in, in drag, but I’ve found a hiding spot behind a row of stacked chairs at the back of the gym. I am laying on my stomach in a little forest  of chair legs.  It’s dark and there’s no chance anybody’s gonna look here.  I have my laptop and I am doing my job. I am a graduate of the Ryerson University school of journalism! It’s only a matter of time before DP are recognized internationally and I will have the definitive Dirty Penny book ready for the shelves, then I can go back to grad school in style.

I can see the stage but just barely.  Luckily it’s raised so I can see Dirty Penny are getting ready over the crowd of families and teachers.  JC Penny has taken the mic. He and each member have all donned little propeller head beanie hats! It’s an awesome idea and I think I can suss the intention: they are no longer a group of strange men playing loud rock music, they are little boys. What an incredibly simple and effective device for this context.

They have chosen “If I Wuz a Cat” as their first song. Ha! Penny has changed the words. I’m going to try and transcribe them..

Took my toys
And lined them up
And smashed them with a car
Made a lego monster with lasers
Boom!Ah!
Blew up my sister’s dolls
Play my games the way I want to

The way I play with that
is scaring the cat
The way I play with that
(not sure)…

Now it’s Godzilla time
And all my

END

And that’s all there is.  Alex’s last post.  What a weird, weird guy.  I have to say: he was insanely good at hearing me sing words.  I’ll always respect him for that…

The end of that story is apparently some kids had begun to play hide and seek around the chairs where he was hiding.  We were still playing our set.  A little girl screamed, Alex panicked I guess and tried to get out of the chairs too fast because the next thing that happend was that hundreds of pounds of chairs started crashing down everywhere.  Everything and everyone just stopped.  Alex slowly emerged from under the chair mountain (“chair mountain” is good).  His clothes, dress and blouse, we’re torn up and you could see his briefs and thighs.  His face was all red and smeared.   Luckily none of the children were hurt.

I haven’t heard any news in a year so I guess he’s still alive in prison.  I hope they have a place for the transvestite pedophiles away from the killers there.  I’m sure they do.  This is Canada for fuck’s sake.  He’s prolly fine.

Oh yeah: the other good band names I’ve thought of lately are

1. Brown Rainbow
2. I love you, poo
3. Wendy Barbara