Johnny is the shit. Although I live in Delaware, not far from where he used to train, I never tried to stalk him out. I did drag my sister to see him skate live in “Champions on Ice,” Easter Sunday… oh, it must have been three or four years ago now. He did “My Way”! Good times.

He made the 2010 Olympic Team. Go Johnny!

As you may or may not know, this blog is an evolution of a now-defunct site I ran for several years called dontstopthenoise.com (you can find the web archive here, thanks to Andrew W.K. Music.com). The original site was devoted to Andrew W.K. and the AWK fandom exclusively. DSTN occasionally touched on some of the things that are currently causing a stir among music bloggers (including a huge MetaFilter thread), but most of that went on behind the curtain. Not that I had any special insight on Steev Mike or anything else, but there was a lot of digging deep done beneath the fandom, going back to the I Get Wet era and beyond. There were many secrets – but the secrets were such partly because at the bottom of it, we were still in the dark and couldn’t explain what we did think we knew if we tried, at least without looking batshit crazy. These were good times.

I knew the Andrew W.K. of that era, to the extent that a fan could know him (and all fans could – if a fan was able to get to a show, that fan was able to meet and become friends with him). I was lucky in that I had opportunities to sit and talk to him away from the crowd; I got to discuss things like music and party planning with him. I never discussed anything terribly personal with him, and never really wanted to. He’s someone you can know, without knowing at all – and that’s why the theories that have swirled for years continue to take hold.

One thing I did learn about Andrew W.K. in about 2004 is that he wrote a life script that included everyone around him. One night I was invited to sit in on an interview with a small magazine I don’t recall. Being heavily involved with the fandom, Andrew included a friend and me as he talked to the interviewer. I remember him informing the interviewer that I had been there since the very beginning – something that was a wild exaggeration at best. I came to the fandom months after the release of I Get Wet. I realized at that moment that it was something that was now part of my own AWK mythos. He asked me how many of his shows I’d seen, and, not being the type to keep a running tally to flaunt in other fans’ faces, I shrugged and said I wasn’t sure, to his clear disappointment. It was a while before I realized that I could have said I’d been to 80 shows (the real number was closer to 15 at the time), and he probably would have happily backed it up. Reality depended on how you wrote it.

Is Andrew W.K. real? Who Knows.

PDF can be downloaded here.

Anyway, for $1.99 you can get MAYHEM #1 with an exclusive audiofeature (featuring Tyrese as Mayhem of course), plus two more (non Tyrese) comics, THE ENFORCER, and X MARKS THE SPOT, plus Special Features, including a 45 minute Making of MAYHEM video, a Gallery of concept art, wallpapers, plus the addictive Logan de Gaulle remix of “Mayhem (Take Me Away).” Only on itunes.

Photo by Karl Lagerfeld for VOGUE

Bill Kaulitz has finally hit Vogue.

German Vogue is going all out for its 30th Anniversary, with three massive issues in black, red, and gold, co-edited by Karl Lagerfeld, Paul Lindbergh, and Bruce Weber. Lagerfeld photographed Bill in his distinct no-background black-and-white style, wearing a fantastic feathered crown. The issues come out September 10.