miraculous revelation on pizza box lid

Update July 07: Warrnambool revelation

panel of judges

...at the New Estate album launch last night, as seen by someone who died on the dance floor and was ascending when they took this picture

saturday afternoon walk in the reserve: a photographic essay

genius finds its own level

Here is my playlist for two to the valley last Sunday. The selection for the evening was compiled from records I had played on or otherwise had some input into

Broken bottles - The Cannanes
Treacle - Crabstick
Far away look - Andrew Withycombe
Tim Finn pts 1 and 2 - Blairmailer
Sad End - Huon
Stay Ready - The Go Team
Lullabye - Fog and Ocean
Highest Point - Huon
Middle Eastern Potentate - The Cannanes
Sit and think - Driving Past
Wyona - Blairmailer
Chia pet - The Cannanes
Getrappel - Huon
King of Hobart - The Legend!
Let's Go - Huon
White Ant - Grey Tapes
Singing to Satellites - The Cannanes
Bad Reception - Mia Schoen
Fax - Blairmailer
Complex - Huon
Eno Trap - Huon
Sunday - The Cannanes
Killer Pies - Huon
Travel - Driving Past

It was pretty Huon-heavy but that's just how I feel on Sunday night. It felt reallly weird playing all that stuff I'm not sure why I did it.

someone left a tape [player] out in the rain

You think I don't know that is an incredibly lame title for a post? Well anyway it's fair because it actually happened. It was standing at the bus stop when I got there, in the rain, all useless now I assume, as it would have been entirely soaked by some of the most amazing rain... amazing in the sense I had forgotten what rain was like... that I had seen for a lo-o-ng time.



Update: when I went past in the evening it was gone.

treasure trove

At first I thought I had stumbled on a cache of wandering jellyfish, then I realised.



Some amazing person had stashed hundreds of takeaway plastic drink lids there on the ground behind the bus stop at Glenroy. All glinting and glorious in the street lights and the rain, and looking almost nothing like this picture which I took with my phone.

any more brilliance anyone?

This is the amazing video Mia made which Rage rejected on numerous pathetic grounds, since when I have only watched about 30% of every instalment of Rage just to ensure myself that they are still losers. It is one of my favourites of Mia's songs. It really is incredible and I am so proud of her for being so talented, not that I believe one should be proud of someone else's achievements, really. But it feels like pride so I'll call it that.

this, too is also brilliance

Boy. I am going to overload my blog entirely with brilliance, it will collapse under its own weight like a black dwarf (a really fat one). What a truly superb video (and song). I felt bad putting up a Marcless Dragon, since he is unassailable, so here is a Marcful Dragon. In 1979 he called this song ‘Another piece of slop’. He's obviously completely out of it, even with the very skilled editing. Warning: don't watch a bunch of Kenneth Williams clips on YouTube and then watch this.

this is also brilliance

So I am going to do a chapter on Small World Experience in my rock book. I have no regrets - mind you I haven't done it yet. But I mean christ, they weren't even mentioned in Pig City!!! And they are/were (whatever) one of the best bands ever.

this is brilliance

Now, I love(d) Marc Hunter more than probably everyone who ever reads this put together, so no dissing MH, but this is a totally amazing classic and I particularly like the Billy 'n' Richard sync thing about 2/3 of the way through. Todd's bassline should have been a hit on its own, never mind the rest of it. Absolutely perfect pop record from 1979, their first without Marc. Everyone looks stunning in it. And is.

you know what I hate!?

Rodney Rude for one, but that's another story. What I hate is the following:

'At the end of the day'

Back in the old times, a pause consisted of a drag on a fag, or hawking up a big gob of phlegm, to damp down the roads - a kind of community service. These activities were great conversation punctuations, so you could think of what to say next. These days people seem unable to adhere to those good honest activities so instead they say 'at the end of the day'. It's kind of like turning off the photocopier when it's bogged down in something you never asked it to do in the first place, and turning it back on: 'reset'. 'At the end of the day' is the carriage return of our time.

'Funnyman'

I have no strong feelings about Steve Vizard one way or the other - for instance - but when he was in trouble over Telstra etc and then burgled by Nice Pete he was in the news a lot and I developed very strong feelings about the members of the fourth estate who described him as a 'funnyman' or a 'tv funnyman'. They were not feelings of warmth.

'Telco'

As far as I'm concerned, the only Telco worth talking about is the one that sang 'Rock me Amadeus'. I have no time for that ridiculous fabrication, the 'telco', which is to say, 'a telephone company'. When these people come home and the lights don't work, do they say to their partner, 'did you pay that bill from the elco?' no, they don't, because they don't have a 'partner', because no-one can bear to be in theirco for any period of time.

And while I'm being a little grim ball of grey - grumpy! Can I just say:

I cannot for the life of me imagine how Ukraine did not win Eurovision.

saturday night doo doo doo doo doo doodoo

Saturday night, as Elton John or the Rolling Stones or someone once said, is alright for babysittin', and that's what I'm presently up to, babysittin' Laurie, who is asleep, so there should be another name for it, because really (so far touch wood) it's just creeping around an empty house and, er, using the internet. Maybe making a cup of tea, you know. It's not like when I babysat my niece Olivia a few years ago, an experience I would choose never to repeat (though she's probably less scared of me now so maybe I would). The tears! Hers. Although apparently the next day she told her mother that she'd had a good time.

Later I will go to a party for Dion and Luke's birthdays, and not stay long, I'm guessing. For last night there was considerable partying afoot in honour of Olivia's 30th, and I drank brandy, which appears to have become de facto my new tipple, except I drink so rarely these days I probably am not allowed to claim a tipple. In fact the hotelier associations of Australia surely spit on my tipple.

Nothing much else happening around. Getting close to the end of the semester, Mia and I very busy, her band has scored a support on the tour of a seriously cool international act so that's grouse, and I'm planning various interstate trips, and tomorrow I'm even going to Kew, so that's a thrill. Might see you there.

me

I am Pat in this scenario



Except unlike Pat I only think it, don't say it.

By the way, you have to click on it to read it properly.

art tuesday 1

So we had an art Tuesday, I took a lot of pictures as you can see but all the notes I made were only in my head and none of it really got written. Probably for the best. This is VCA including a Paul Williams.

art tuesday part 2

This was in Gertrude St and there were two rooms, one had a victorian sitting room entirely brocaded, I think that 's the word, the other was a bunch of photographs and ephemera I think from a deserted institution. It was very similar in style to an exhibition Danny Butt once did.

art tuesday part 3

So this is where we ended up, at Flinders Lane gallery where all this stuff was. I have lost the brochure. The final couple of pics are Alizon Gray's, the animal-y one is particuarly impressive and apparently some intelligent, tasteful person bought it.

jacana - a touch of class

speaking of kate bush

Charlie does her best Heathcliff it's me Cathy I've come home I'm so cold let me in your window while I am TRYING TO WRITE DAMN IT

something I may have already said before

This isn't it: what a wonderful moment it is when you see light at the end of the tunnel of a journal article you've been fretting over for aeons - I am actually going to get a kind of admittedly largely empirical in content draft finished tonight, and I am going to send it to my co-author, and it'll be their turn to hum and hah over the damn thing for a while. And I will feel like progress is occuring while I do nothing.

What I wanted to say, and writing about Ray Burgess reminded me, I may already have said it, but I just wanted to say, as a cautionary tale, and those of my generation will likely mainly agree with me, that there is a central flaw to a lot of writing about culture's recent past, and when people talk about the 70s or 80s it is so easy to generalise, because really, I always thought Gary Numan was shit, even in 1980 when the Kiss fans suddenly became Gary Numan fans (I hadn't been a Kiss fan either). And when I watched Countdown in the 70s with my brother (4 years younger) and sister (5 years younger), we didn't suck it up like vacuum cleaners, we ridiculed a lot of it. I specifically recall ridiculing the following:

Daryl Cotton's 'Same old girl'
Kim Wilde 'Kids in America' (this is a little problematic as my sister ridiculed the set, and my brother and I ridiculed the way she phrased her ridicule, but whatever)
M-maybe Mi-Sex's 'Space Race'?

We-e-ll I can't remember any others but when I do I'll add them in and take this sentence out, and put some in, or I'll just make a phew up.

ray burgess' album not so pretty

I really like Ray Burgess' album Not so Pretty. That in itself is fine except I am starting to worry that perhaps I like everything except Meatloaf, and what happens when one day I start liking Meatloaf? But the Burgess album has a cracker of a Vanda/Young song on it, 'Love Fever' which is kind of glam rock which, had it been kept in a dark room a few more days, would have turned into Suicide, and the song 'Sad Rock 'n' Roll' which I remember at the time being absurdly hilariously bad, now sounds pretty great. Sure, his reading of 'Little Boy Sad' is just OK, but the rest of the tracks - most of them written by Gunther Gorman, I guess just after he had his little tenure in Sherbet, are fab. I hope that, if you're not familiar with it, that one day you get to hear Ray Burgess' album Not so Pretty.

sweet buns arrived

Yep, the korean dvd series i bought on Ebay (with help from Steve - thanks Steve) showed up in the mail yesterday. And it's a doozy, well, I've only watched one episode but I have enjoyed it greatly and even managed to translate one word (the word for 'bread') via my Korean-English dictionary, which incidentally is a pain in the arse because it transliterates all the Korean words into the roman alphabet, which is one alphabet I could really do without, but on the other hand I suppose in the immediate present that's a good thing because it forces me to learn the hangul letters.

And anyway it has rough English subtitles on it, which I knew it did, I really only wanted it so I could hear Korean being used and maybe figure out some street signs or whatever, I actually know absolutely NO Korean and of course it's virtually impossible for someone in their forties to learn another language particularly a notoriously difficult one like this but gee, live for the pain I say.

The DVD is not hassle free and in fact the second episode for some reason not only repeats a scene from the first but it seems compulsory to watch this episode with a dubbed chinese soundtrack, which wasn't my preference, and I can't seem to change it back to Korean.

The original Korean title is not, as it happens, Sweet Buns but Ring Shaped Bread. It seems to be a love triangle story so far, or a hate triangle perhaps, as it is two girls and a guy who went to school together, and the girls lovehate the guy, who they call Ring Shaped Bread, for reasons I am not going to go into here, or anywhere, ever.

1983 i was there

So was Jack Bruce, making his extremely obscure album Automatic. Jack was going through something of a fallow period commercially I suppose, as this record was only issued in Germany, not that I am saying that's a bad thing in itself, if I was releasing a record, I'd like it to happen in Germany probably more than anywhere other than Korea, or Australia. I have listened to two tracks so far and let me tell you it's much better than Jet Set Jewel, the album that was supposedly too magnificent to be released after the dismal performance of the How's Tricks album. GREAT cover too. The song 'The Swarm' - a pretty full on bit of grim electro blues - is definitely going to be part of DJ Getshaneoffthedancefloor's plan of attack at Olivia's 30th. Oh, I see the song 'Encore' is a song off Jet Set Jewel too, but with more electronic booming drums on it, it actually sounds quite good now, a bit Kate Bushy. Now I have turned it over and am playing side one. I guess when it comes down to it, it's one of those records that would have sounded incomprehensively dated five years ago, but now sounds unbelievably contemporary, because it is all drum machines, synths and vocoders.

Jack is one of those people who presumably made all the money he ever needed to make in the late 1960s with various hits Cream had which get played on the radio, or covered, or whatever, all the time, so the fact that he replaced John Entwhistle in Todd Rundgren's Beatles tribute band (I am so glad I know nothing more of that than that it exists, even that knowledge is a little much) was presumably not out of financial necessity but because who wouldn't want to play in a band with Todd Rundgren, even if it was something that weird. I mean, I read on Wikipedia that Jack once owned an island off the coast of Scotland... how does one own an island? I'll have to look into that. Not for myself, but out of interest.

Funnily, the second track on side two sounds like Todd Rundgren, crossed a little with, um, Billy Joel or someone. And there is a cool solo on a keyboard version of something that's probably supposed to sound like a real instrument but sounds so much unlike it that you can't tell what it's a bad imitation of.

By the way DJ Getshaneoffthedancefloor is not going to emerge at Olivia's party, it would be too cruel. A 30th birthday is supposed to be a happy time, and young people aren't that into irony. Although they are probably more into it than me, these days.

great train art

I'd like to see this again and examine it in more detail.