is music hard?

I periodically order things through bandcamp, and one thing that happens when you do that is every time the record label and/or artist you bought something from releases something new, you get a notification. Labels are, you know, kind of stupid and they reflect someone else's taste or their belief in what people will buy, so often I don't care much about the other stuff, but I almost always give it some kind of low-key, quick listen. Usually I listen to the first track of an album (though often, irritatingly for me, bandcamp world decrees a single 3-minute song as an 'album' - that is, everything is an album) just to see whether it grabs my attention. Generally speaking no it doesn't. Sometimes it totally does. I instantly fell for an album by Oiro Pena, which is in the jazz rap genre I don't really fall for much. But it is really great.* In many cases I will say that I just don't have the attention span to latch on to new things, though I try hard and try to be open to anything, really. Of course by 'new' I don't mean only new, old can also be new if it's new to me (to state the ridiculously obvious). 

But the reason I ask why music is hard last couple of nights I have been trying to compose some music for a documentary film project I am involved in, mainly because while I have a massive amount of incredibly talented friends who could do it 50 times better than me, I don't want the guilt or emotional hassle of saying 'thanks we didn't use it because...' I figure I can handle rejecting myself. What I've come up with in basic GarageBand with musical typing (and a $10 download of royalty-free Clyde Stubblefield loops - let's be fair, I didn't really come up with it, he carries it) is nothing to march through the streets with joy over but nor is it the most horrible thing I've ever heard. It makes me wonder, is music hard? I know I have no specific talent at it, at very best I aim to reference other things I like, at worst I flail. Of course, the other option is that what I have come up with is actually gruesome but I can't tell. Who knows?! 

By the way the image above is from a notification I just got from Humu Records. The tracks are pretty good. I may purchase it but it's a digital-only release and I am not particularly into digital-only releases, that's how I am. 

*It just occurred to me to find out anything about them. I was further intrigued by this skerrick of a tiny interview here:  'Did you start Oiro Pena?  Antti Vauhkonen: I didn’t start Oiro Pena. Pentti Oironen started it a long time ago. I don’t know the exact year, but Pentti contacted me around 2016. Oiro Pena, myself, and the current band members solely channel Pentti Oironen’s universal vision.' By the way, it seems like Antti Vauhkonen is actually Pentti Oironen, but this is probably something created to confuse me and you. 

five out of the box

Laura and I enjoy watching The Box, it is a very good show, much better than most people would think. It is in many ways quite modern and quite 'meta'. The Box is as you know a show about a television station, and it circulates a lot of the stories and rumours about various tv stars of the period (up to the mid-1970s) with a generous dose of romantic/sexual drama. Some of the characters are clearly, winking-at-the-camera, modelled on actual people. Sir Henry is an amalgam of Reg Ansett and Frank Packer, two television magnates of the period (probably more Ansett as Sir Henry is an industrialist with a rather blunt appreciation of television, rather than a mogul with media consciousness). Gary Bourke is, yes, Irish (like Dave Allen, I suppose, whose tv career started in Australia) but he's more like Graham Kennedy (certainly when it comes to payola scandals etc and over-riffing on products to the delight of particular sponsors, not when it comes to being secretly gay which so far he doesn't appear to be). There are probably others lost in the mists of time, I am sure Vicki Stafford is modelled on someone.  

I have to say that the article below is super confusing (possibly a relic of a time when press announcements weren't very coordinated) because from our perspective as viewers there are weeks and weeks, more than a month I'm sure, between the departure of Graeme Blundell and Lynda Keane, for instance, and any of the others mentioned. Where we are up to in the program, none of the other three have left yet. But I'm not even sure that Susie and Don were in the program at the same time.*

The first half of 1974 was a mindfuck for Blundell I'm sure as he was a megastar with Alvin Purple then appearing most nights of the week on The Box as Don Cook. I think the Don Cook character is incredible, very nuanced, he's a complete charlatan, messing two women around and becoming engaged to both and it's only happenstance that they don't come into contact with each other, the anxiety is palpable. In his memoir Blundell has apparently forgotten entirely the kind of character DC was, as he just says he was a womaniser, which is barely true or at least, he probably was a young man about town (that's how he got Barbie knocked up) but we don't then see him bedding any babes thereafter aside from Cathy who he is pretty reluctant to sleep with but does because he's so weak. 

So for us, 51 years later, Don and Barbie have gone (to Sydney) but Judy, Kaye and Susie are all still in the show. Susie is not such a prominent character that she can't leave without too much fanfare, but Judy and Kaye are pretty important and will make a splash when they go. Interested to see what happens next. 

* I don't know how this pans out but according to IMDB I'm right that Don leaves the show a couple of episodes before Susie shows up, but he does come back later, like, 36 episodes later. Since Susie is in 63  episodes they must overlap at some point. Also, perhaps I'm wrong about Blundell's typification of the character, since he has another 161-220 to be even more of an Alvin Purplesque cad in. 

block near gardiner reserve

I didn't really capture this building last night, or at least, I didn't really capture what it 'means' to me, not that it means much, don't get me wrong. I do like these brightly lit rooms looking out onto the park after dark. They generally seem to be empty lol. Of people. Or people are lying on the floor. 
 

recent things

Me, Sally and Stuart at Sally's graduation. 

The only thing that interested me about this is that there was a small moment when Queen were referred to as The Queen. 

I like to collect images of times when people have still got their Yes placards up. 

 

what is the word for...

old things that have been round forever, but which you now look at and think 'that looks like AI'? 

More generally I would love to know what thinking lies behind this madness, which is on the campus where I work. I must get in to the building sometime and look at the other side of this doorway. 
 

rack off edith

 

This is a photograph of the last time I touched this book (I put it in the Kensington street library, if you hurry it might still be there). I read about two-thirds of it and decided Edith Piaf was such an immensely irritating person that once the context of her origins (interwar Paris) was gone, she herself was not worth reading about. That Simone Berteaut is so incredibly besotted with her does not make it an easier read, in fact, it makes it a less comprehensible one. So rack off Edith. 

Now an Edith Bliss book... that's something I could really take on. 

recent canberra

So I am writing to you from a restaurant in Manuka called Bambusa, it is quite loud but I was basically pleased to find somewhere that was open, because looking around (online, before going outside) it seemed like heaps of things took Sunday and Monday off. As I said (were you paying attention it is quite loud i.e. there are tons of people here, all talking, not eating loudly fortunately, in fact I can't see too many people eating at all as it happens, but yes talking, about Canberran things I suppose. 

I have been here since Thursday night - I joined Laura and Lenny who had been here for a couple of days already - Laura came to Canberra to get an honour for her book, a triumph of a project that she picked up by its neck's scruff and took to its logical conclusion and made a magnificent success. Which I guess was capped by getting an award at a lo-o-ong but not horrible ceremony at the National Library, truly one of the great places of this nation. Proud doesn't cover it. Aside from that, we have done some sight seeing and wandering, and also went to the Liam Neeson Naked Gun, a project inspired (from my perspective at least) by hearing some goofs on the bus discussing it, in the case of one goof, dissing it thoroughly for no good reason. I'd heard it was good and I thought while clearly it is the kind of film one could not too horrendously see on tv or probably even on your phone without feeling you'd missed too much... ok quick switch it is now the next day and I am on the terrace at the National Library, one of my favourite places in the world (the library not the terrace though the terrace is not awful). I have been looking through a wide range of bizarre things (one of the librarians asked me what I was working on and I said everything which she might have interpreted as me saying 'shut up/mind your own business' or 'I'm just this amazing chameleon', depending on what kind of person she is, though also, she might just have not been that concerned either way and not really cared, and that is also pretty fine by me, though I will say I am usually (not always but usually) interested in what people are working on. 

 

It is a tepid day and sunny, not awful at all. When I went out this morning for a coffee to a fuck-off-bourgeois cafe a block away from the hotel, it was 0 degrees and I was definitely thinking, this is what I want more of. To be honest I am still thinking I may have to disappear to Finland this coming summer, partly because I just need to go there frequently and also, because, summer. I mean if there was somewhere closer that was cold where I could go in summer, yes I would but I don't think there really is. Perhaps NZ is at least more sensible, temperature-wise. Perhaps a NZ south island week might be in order. But knowing my luck it would end up in a heatwave. From where I sit I just saw a huge rabbit run across the manicured lawn and a big magpie just scrambled up onto the top of the glass barrier disturbing a little round tit or something similar, I am not good with bird names, I can hear people at other tables (quite a way off) talking about house prices or telling their children not to climb on things. You got to love Canberra. Canberra has everything and a little bit more. Off in the distance there are people cycling on the lakeside and pushing prams etc. It's all so nice. 

 

I am dead keen to get back to my research, I have a lot of good things ordered. Some of them are just silly bits and pieces perhaps to aid my wikipedia projects (like my aim to give Henry Clive a proper entry, he was the Melbourne magician who went to the USA and became a portrait artist and/or creator of pictures of possibly hypothetical beautiful women; he was also cast as the millionaire by Charlie Chaplin in City Lights then refused to jump in the water (as per the script) so was sacked - he had also been the art director on the film, I don't know if he was sacked from that job as well at the same time - ? Maybe there's a way to find out. I don't know if anyone's actually written a book about the making of CL that goes that far into the weeds. Anyway, the wikipedia entry said something idiotic like that Clive played the bad guy or something that ridiculous, and mentioned nothing about him being sacked. But if we're talking ridiculousness I do have to admit I got confused and instead of ordering press cuttings on Henry Clive I ordered press cuttings on Clive Henry - who was or is a sculptor of much later period, so that was dumb. 

 

I've been looking at other things too but now I'm 60 I've stopped trusting the internet because AI and I don't want to have my ideas (or rather my research) fed into the melange. To be clear, it's not that I don't trust you, it's bots I don't trust, and perhaps bots read blogs, I don't know. 

 

Here's something a bot won't care about. Since I have to read a whole lot of shizzle trying to sift out things I want from things I don't, I listen to music, and in this case I decided it was time to check my opinion previously expressed of The Twenty-Seven Points. I remembered absolutely none of it, and it's actually lamer than I thought it would be - just bad versions of lesser songs, in the main.* Then for some reason there's this stuff where MES is telling someone (he's reading this off a page!) to go back to Ireland. I really can't imagine what this is about, or who it's about, or why we should care at all. Did people have fewer things to worry about in the mid-90s? 

 

The one thing I will admit may have affected my re-appreciation of this album is the fact I had to listen to it quite quietly, because I was in a library (though there was no-one else really nearby). Perhaps if I blasted it that joke about the man with the spade in his head being called Doug would really cut through. 

 

Speaking of English music I had a hankering yesterday for hearing some song or other by the Experimental Pop Band, from the Discgrotesque album, but I was suprised (perhaps in some way pleased) to find I couldn't access it online. But I could access another of their albums which I'd never heard (or seen) and it's pretty good. If you're nice I'll tell you what it's called sometime. 

 

Now I'm going back to the trenches. Can you believe idiots like Elon Musk or Donald Trump or, I don't know, Vladimir Putin, who can afford to not work and could just spend their days looking through stuff in the National Library in Canberra but instead they just spend their days burrowing into big mounds of shit to the degree that no-one can tell where the big mounds of shit end and they begin. That does no-one any good. 

 

LATER: So in the afternoon I did listen to This Nation's Saving Grace as I had threatened to some weeks ago to everyone's amazement. It's not a terrible record although that 'I Am Damo Suzuki' is, like, a sort of lazy racial stereotype. I'm not imagining that. 

 

The version on spotify has a whole extra album's worth of versions and outtakes, some of them are pretty interesting. There are neat extra flourishes on some songs that were inexplicably taken off. What I assume is the 'proper' version of 'Paintwork' sounds pretty great without the fuckups. Anyway in the main I can live without it.

 

Got a lot of worthwhile stuff in the NLA, will take a while to process it. Both personally and IRL. 

* 'Free Range' is not a terrible song.