tl, don't r

I actually expected more from the 1920s press when it came to predicting 2025 but it seems no-one in (for instance) late 1924 saw it as particularly notable or interesting, either to cast some light on the first quarter of the 20th century or imagining more generally what the world a hundred years hence might look like... that said, oodles of newspaper.com users have been selecting and keeping the below features, no doubt for their own nefarious blogging purposes. 

I note that none of the below predictors, even wireless-world professor, imagined that when you typed in 2025 you would be bedevilled by incredibly irritating predictive text which would distract you with attempts to guess/suggest what you were going to type next. 

Sydney's World's News 21 March 1925 p. 48:

Tampa Daily Times 3 September 1925 p. 39:

Santa Barbara Morning Press 30 march 1929 p. 1. This item was syndicated all over the US so was clearly seen as a matter of importance? Good conversation starter? Good column filler? Who knows:

Lassen (California) Advocate 30 Jan 1925 p. 5:

 Winston-Salem Journal 13 December 1925 p. 29:

Happy new year, in any case, to all my loyal readers and also the bots in Hong Kong, who are in some ways the loyalest of all. 

fb is fucked up

I am so sick of these 60s rock band page suggestions which keep getting inserted into my feed. This morning it was Pink Floyd (a band I genuinely hate) and now it's the GD, a band i am essentially indifferent to. It bugs me particularly because I'm pretty sure these articles are made by AI as well, and also of course that I'm being singled out as man of a certain age (whether all men of a certain age get these or just ones with an interest in pop music, I dunno). 

Whatever, fb doesn't care if I keep deleting these, it just throws more up. Case in point below, wt actual fuck?!!

(To be entirely clear, I have so little interest in lost football grounds of anywhere I found it hard to even articulate how deep and personal my lack of interest is). 

first thing I'd do if I had a time machine

... I'd go back to mid-October 1971 and r-a-c-e race into the ABA to complain about the appalling (lack of) continuity in this episode of Division 4, where Judy Jack is outside a shop in a completely different outfit to the one she is wearing once in the shop. 

(She is playing Isobel Hughes, who has a scam going with a man variously called Allen Lee, Lee Allen, Allen Scott etc, where in this case she pretends to be an unconnected customer in this shop.)

Now, outside, she's wearing the 'outside clothes' again. 

I guess I could rail against the continuity person, but I suppose also the actor herself should (??? it was probably months later) have remembered what she was wearing between the two elements of the sequence. 

But what is perhaps most important is that, in my opinion, the outside scenes aren't necessary and could have been snipped out without any particular damage to the story. They could have fitted another ad in! 

I am reminded of a time when I worked in magazines and a designer (she put her hand up to it) put the wrong date on one of the crummy mags and it was covered with a sticker saying 'find the deliberate mistake on this cover and win $50' (or something equally pathetic) but anyway there does not seem to have been any outcry or excuses made by Crawfords for this shitty egregious error. 

Oh by the way, great episode. It's one where no-one ends up in jail, it's a rare example of a comedy D4 which is actually well-done (note I didn't say funny). The guest stars are the real magic here. 

What an extraordinarily awful line-up for Channel 9 that night. Well, I guess I liked Nanny and the Professor then so I can't be too judgy. 

division 4 'they walk the night'

This is from an episode of Division 4 called 'They Walk the Night' (not sure why it's called that) which deals with pack rape - of a woman in her late 50s including a few choice mentions of how you'd have to be particularly sick to assault an old woman (the implication about what's 'natural' being fairly obvious). Old fashioned attitudes. This one ends, atypically, with a court scene (if you haven't seen much of this stuff, usually there is a voice-over announcement of the jail terms criminals received). So obviously the enactment of a courtroom scene (very minimalist) is acknowledgment that there's a 'public education' aspect to this, rather than 'shoot-'em-up bad guys' entertainment. 

One other less important but still interesting element of this episode is that three grand dames of Crawfords etc appear - Vivean Gray, Sheila Florance and Anne Charleston.* Charleston's scene is perhaps the strangest because her voice is so unlike her own (could she have been dubbed? Not entirely impossible I suppose). Sheila Florance on the other hand is still (to me anyway) so much Prisoner's Lizzie to me that the posh middle-class voice she puts on here, while not preposterous, still seems like a bit of a put-on. Well, acting is. 

The main reason (!) I wanted to mention this episode is the scene above where Banner and Vickers are discussing the place where the incident happened. This crime is way out of the way of 'Yarra Central', which is the beat that the D4 people control. 

You can see better in this image which part of the map they're talking about. 

It's way up in the corner, far beyond the boundaries of 'Yarra Central'. It's definitely not in their patch.

Hey, I'm not that bothered, because it's not really that important to the story which is more interesting for its own reasons, and I am aware that this is a story set in a fictional Melbourne suburb overlaid on real Melbourne. That's interesting too though. 

In early eps of Division 4 they actually went out of their way to create 'Yarra Central'. This is from the opening credits of episode 1. 'Yarra Central' sits between Melbourne and St Kilda and South Melbourne (so it's not South Melbourne)

It looks to me like what they've done is swapped South Melbourne with Port Melbourne, then made Yarra Central South Melbourne. Quite a complicated fabrication here considering they didn't use this in the opening credits for long at all. 

Neither of the maps below are incredibly clear (the first is from 'They Walk the Night', the second from episode 1 which I think is called 'The Soldiers') but what they do show is that the scene of the crime is very, very far from Melbourne, let alone 'Yarra Central'. 

Which is all fine. I assume that when Chuck Faulkner and Gerard Kennedy were going to go to the map for this scene the director of the camera person or whoever said 'no, get way up in the corner, it's the only way we can get you lit properly/ in focus/ etc'. 

By the way Yarra Central is an interesting choice for the name of a suburb, and I think while it does very clearly locate Division 4 in Melbourne, it's surely done for national viewer purposes. There is of course no such place as Yarra Central (how could there be, but then there is Yarraville, and South Yarra). The Melbourne maps in use are also interesting. You don't need to know where you are in a Crawford's police drama - I mean, in real terms - but it doesn't hurt.** 

 *And Queenie Ashton 

** In an episode from roughly the same time, 'Live Bait', (8 September 1971) the suburb of Yarra North is also mentioned. 

hot morning of hotter day

Pery and I had to get out of the house this morning (8am-ish) so we did some errands and had a walk in Reservoir and the Darebin Parklands. It was already in the low thirties and it was (is) likely to get to the high thirties. This house caught our eye. 

Not sure what this guy was doing but he was there for a while. 

Just good solid honest decent valid housing commission homes

Whereas this is a renovated version. I think. 

Darebin parklands one of the lakes this morning. 

The rest of the day we will be cowering inside. 

 

ryan 'pipeline' (part 1)

I'm going to come back to this ep of Ryan because it has an amazing North Melbourne car chase, but first I want to honour Margaret Cruickshank in this episode and also ask: do you think she was ever denied a part because of her super long name? (And did Joe James get that part?) Also, do you think that characters had their names changed so they could fit on a line with 'Margaret Cruickshank'? I think there's basically 29 characters available on the Ryan credits screen. 'Mrs. Hall' just makes it in against MC. 

Anyway, here's Mrs. Hall who is a sympathetic character, ordinary really, nothing much to discuss. She just wonders what happened to her husband, who has disappeared. 

Could Pamela Stephenson feel less like wallpaper or a human version of a filing cabinet in this scene (really, this show)? 

I wish that when I had known James Cruickshank, which I sort of did in the late 1980s, I had asked him more about Margaret and her career. But you don't know what you don't know (iydkydk). 

That's the sort of profundity that would keep Ryan himself going for a week. Oh, by the way, here's some total madness:

Now Street? WTAF!!! Alright, I admit I looked it up, I mean I didn't think there was a Now Street in Kew (I guess Crawfords had someone to check those kinds of things in the Melways to make sure people didn't show up at real addresses looking for pretend people) but I thought maybe somewhere someone had the bright idea of a Now Street (for now people, of course). Well, no, there isn't. But I guess in a city with a Y street, anything is possible. 

Anyway that's a Y for yes I am going to get back to you* on that car chase business. 

*Y is also for you
 

gobs anthology 3

So possibly to my shame I did fork out the megabux (slightly less mega of bux than was originally mooted) on the GoBs Anthology vol 3. Did I do the right thing, or did I do a thing purely because I already have #1 and #2? Now, those two are unquestionably worthwhile and good. They have all the crucial material. What does #3 have?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

I haven't listened to the three reformation LPs lately: my memory is the first one was so-so, the second was pretty great, the third was excellent - in sound and style. But so far I've only listened to the CDs of 'rarities' (don't know why I put that in inverted commas, because that's definitely what they are) and I am not entranced. It strikes me that this version of the GoBs is not hungry, or seeking to prove anything, or anything like that. It is two men who realised that they're taken more seriously and enjoyed more and (I'm sure this was less of a consideration for them than it would be for many, but still...) could command a higher fee under the old band name, and yet, there's no grand myth making here. This GoBs could never do a 'Twin Layers of Lightning' or an 'Old Way Out', those kinds of songs that just shock everyone (or even really a 'Streets of Your Town' or 'Clouds', much less a 'Cattle and Cane' or 'Your Turn My Turn'). It was different times, for sure. 

Robert and even more so Grant were awkward and provocative songwriters in the early 80s who did the things they did not because they didn't know what they were doing, but because they wanted to provoke and delight. By the early 21st century, Grant in particular was occasionally coming up with great material but more often coming up with lazy silly rhymes and songs like 'Ham off the bone' or whatever it's called that, to be honest, I had to get up and turn off. Perversely this collection gives us the wrong impression of the GoBs dynamic (if we're not paying attention) because Grant is overrepresented - he had a huge output compared to Robert's and of course that would mean that, in the process of recording a new album, he'd choose five out of his 50, and Robert would have five out of his five. Well, here Grant has his fifty and not many of them are honed. 

OK so I am not writing a review, I haven't listened to the whole of this and there must be at least six or seven hours of it, I've probably listened to about 15-20%. Some of it is really good but most of it from my current perspective is a bit legacy-tarnishing. But I think we'll all live whether I like this box or not, ha ha. Indeed this is just my preliminary feel and I am likely to change my attitude at some point.  

ryan and more hilda scurr

The last episodes of Crawfords shows are particularly good because they get a bit ramshackle when (I assume) everyone's thinking about their next show and how to keep it going for more than a year, etc. This is episode 33 of Ryan, a ridiculously convoluted plot I only understand enough to know it's dependent on a host of crazy conspiracies. It does have Vince Martin in it as a threatening heavy.

It also has more unconvincing tension between Ryan and Julie where she seems to pine for him in some way and he is unwilling to, I don't know, marry her? It's not subtle, it's just weird. 

But the best thing is it has Hilda Scurr! As a matron who unknowingly keeps a man in a coma at the direction of a doctor who has created a conspiracy whereby a racing car driver has been 'set up' with a fake will leaving his money to a woman who doesn't exist and etc etc etc etc 

 

that teeth and tongue etc review

The most astonishing thing about that T&T review to me (I can't remember how long ago I set it to publish, on the 10th anniversary of the actual event) is that I absolutely do not, in any way, remember, at all, that event. I don't remember the venue, and to be absolutely candid if you'd asked me if I'd ever seen Teeth and Tongue live, I would have with great certainty said unfortunately no. 

For a little minute I wondered whether I did in fact write that review. But there are various aspects (i.e. annoying writerly quirks) to it that make me think well on balance yes it's almost certain I did. 

So ultimately am I pleased that writing was invented, because it means that I could write down things that happened and casually forget them until my writing reminded me of them, or am I displeased, because I don't like being reminded of how bad my memory can be of things that only happened 10 years ago? 

I don't fucking know! 

unpublished teeth & tongue review from November 2014

TEETH & TONGUE AT SHADOW ELECTRIC WITH KANGAROO SKULL, THE ANCIENTS + TIME FOR DREAMS + KEITH DEVERELL (projections) and FULL UGLY DJs

With an unprecedented rain presentation ongoing in the world outside there were clearly concerns amongst the Teeth and Tongue contingent particularly that no-one was going to show up however great the lineup at the Shadow Electric, a remarkable but in the scheme of things pretty out-of-the-way venue right on the edge of Abbotsford. After all, it was not a launch or a ‘special’ event, other than the exceptional fact than we were all alive at that moment and wished to commune in a listenable environment. Irregardless the place was already impressively populated when Time for Dreams took the stage early in the evening.

This two-piece spearhead the shoegaze renewal with that very 21^st century innovation of a looped and ‘generated’ backing (not sure what was bringing the rhythm but Tom Carlyon had at least ten pedals of various descriptions on offer). Of course this kind of set up means all songs have to have extended intros which are actually just getting the loops and shit in order. Amanda Roff was barefoot and her bass was at times booming and at others muddy but given the weather you couldn’t call that inappropriate. Things progressed well until the end of the set, with what Roff described as ‘our final thing’, and then it took off, and while it was uncertain whether she was singing about being ‘high on religion’, or a ‘high population’, or perhaps ‘hi, I’m an engine’ the main thrust came from a soaring 80s glam stadium rock exercise which managed to marry firstly a Neil Young ‘Everyone Knows…’ vibe with that weird ‘chinesey’ sound you used to get in keyboard-based bands of thirty years ago. That was a triumph.

The Ancients’ Jonathan Michell’s banter sprinkled throughout their set on this remarkable evening was possibly some of the least inspirational ever uttered aside from nothing, on the other hand, if you go looking for inspiration in band banter you were probably in trouble long beforehand. The group – one of the finest, hands down – presented a thick pastiche of subtly re-rendered takes on previously released songs and material presently being worked up for a new album. Two instrumentals emerged thus, one a pounding, esoteric and double-barrelled supercharged ‘Ride of the Valkyries’-styled sturm und drang powderkeg played as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry might conduct an orchestra comprised of members of Can and Black Sabbath… until its second part, which comes closer to seventies Lou Reed’s full sonic potential as only dreamt by Tony Visconti after a surfeit of pina coladas with Amanda Lear. An extraordinarily glamorous band brimming with sex appeal, The Ancients have no problem uniting the sounds of the traditional church organ (very appropriate at that place of pain and shame that is the Abbotsford Convent) with a jig in the style of Big Country. They cannot be underestimated and their 2015 album is already one of next year’s best.

A moment to mention the Full Ugly DJs this evening. It is always advisable when DJing to play as much Prefab Sprout as one can. The lilting, wry observations of singer-songwriter Paddy MacAloon, facilitated into the near-mainstream as they were by a distinguished cohort such as Everything But the Girl and Aztec Camera, do not get enough dancefloor action in this day and age and should, in fact, be compulsory particularly the song ‘Appetite’, which was not played this evening but fuckin’ should have been. Nonetheless, excellent selections.

Kangaroo Skull evoked a woodpecker in a rifle range. No-one knew how to dance to this but thought they could anyway.

Teeth and Tongue owe nothing to anybody. The argument continues whether Jess Cornelius has a right to continually promote the group as a solo project that just happens to feature four other hard-working and talented musicians who have consolidated into a stunningly fine and fluid collective; it’s a solo project the same way you and I are solo projects, but we still need other people and even Margaret (‘there is no such thing as society’) Thatcher played with a team. Marc Reguiero-McKelvie, one of the world’s most inventive and eloquent guitar players, is an integral part not just of the T&T sound but also the dynamic core of each song; when he enters the fray it’s like taking your shades off in the art gallery. Listen to his work with his solo project Popolice and his other band New Estate if you haven’t. And if JC is going to continue to insist she is Teeth and Tongue, she should consider that (a) even if she is, Teeth and Tongue wouldn’t be half as good without the other players, Marc in particular and (b) giving Marc half the front cover of the Tambourine album suggests she knows this whether she knew it or not. None of this is germane to Teeth and Tongue’s show at Abbotsford, except it’s germane to Teeth and Tongue altogether. So T&T will close the set with a cover of ‘Total Control’, which JC will sing with deft passion alongside the utterly complimentary and beguiling second vocalist Jade McInally, and you know she has in no way lost that control, except then Marc comes in half way through and gives a whole new reading to the song’s possibilities.

The jungle vibe to so many of the Teeth and Tongue set at the moment is visceral and hard-leaning. There is a My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sense to the whole, with a kind of throbbing jitteriness that counters the goth sensibility of the layered, searing set (nods to the foul ‘Kokomo’ aside). Only last week the amazing Pauline Murray was doing a very, very, very, low, low key tour, and it’s Murray’s work with Martin Hannett as the Invisible Girls thirty years ago that provides one great touchstone for the current T&T sounds. I mean they probably haven’t heard it. Except it’s everywhere in the culture now.

In sum at the end of the day, a brilliant night of realised potential. Thank you all for coming. It worked. 

* note from late 2024: I have absolutely, utterly, no recollection whatsoever of this show - none. 

brisbane last week

We went to Brisbane last week, and it was hot. There was also a lot of crap going down about the hire car and I guess a kind of extortion.  Don't get me wrong I don't dislike Brisbane. The 50c public transport is quite something as well. But it was hot. The wifi at the hotel didn't work. It was also pretty hot overall, if I didn't mention that earlier. I may have more to say about it or perhaps just some pics. 

Below is the cafe where we got a takeaway coffee every morning, It is an early C20 house with what looks like a slightly newer shop building tacked on the front (but might be the same age). Interested me.