i broke down...

and bought an MP3 player. It's an iriver with 1 gig of meg and the booty of a ram. As I write this (I am reminded of that Private Eye joke about John Lennon, 'I've made piles just stitting here') I am downloading old David McComb/Triffids songs from the appropriate official quarter.

This evening we went and called on James and Miranda and collected our t-shirts thank you. I am most impressed with my red one and Mia's is red too but a different red. Oh, she says mine is rust and hers is siren red. Painters! Anyway they look amazing and may I suggest if you buy only one Flywheel t-shirt this year this ought to be the one.

I probably had too much coffee (three) today as I became freaking paranoid this evening that I was meant to fly to Wellington tonight or perhaps tomorrow morning. I've checked it up though and it seems all present and correct. If I missed my flight to Wellington I could see Calvin Johnson in Melbourne, which is something I'd also like to do, so... I win either way.

The car is still being dodgy but it seems like it was dirty fuel.

t-shirt raunch

Miranda sent me a pic of the Flywheel t-shirts which I designed (that sounds too fancy - OK - I drew the picture) so I have elected to put the photo here. I suppose James and Miranda wear nothing but this t-shirt now and this is washing day. The shirt depicts a horned stud riding a more passive but yet still mildly aroused beast of burden. I see it as a political sex banditry shirt, of a type not seen since the halcyon days of Bow Wow Wow, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and other three-word-name bands in which two of the words are the same. I imagine if you want one you can enquire via www.spill-label.org/flywheel

hi jinx

The Brisbane Courier (I recently discovered that the Brisbane Courier became the Brisbane Courier Mail in the early 1960s, but it's a hard habit to stop calling it the Courier Mail, as was clear from an interview I heard on Radio National yesterday in which an interviewee talking about the paper in the 1920s said 'The Brisbane Courier Mail as it was then called') ran a terribly unfunny (but rather beautifully drawn - look at that bentwood chair) comic strip in the early 1930s about the Caper College Boys, a small group of private schoolboys led by one called Freckles and always potentially in conflict with a headmaster called Canemall. Canemall's name would have to be one of the least appropriate you could imagine, as he never seems to cane anyone, just look on indulgently. I would say this strip is a good example of the Britishness of Australia in the pre-WW2 years, and it intersects nicely with David Malouf's musings in his recent Made in England, though Malouf is talking about a slightly later period. What I don't know is whether this strip was English and sold to the Courier, or Australian. It certainly doesn't have overt britishisms in it, so perhaps it might even be meant to be taking place in Australia, although it doesn't have any overt Australianisms either of course.

Most of the other comic strips I've come across during my research have been similar, nicely drawn but not particularly funny and very clearly oriented towards young children. The Argus ran a very nice series about a dog, whose name escapes me, most sequences of which ended in someone being splattered with mud or cake or horseshit.

b-b-breakdown

Yes, in times of stress of course Buzzcocks songs come to be as titles for postings. I just had a white-knuckle ride when the Honda broke down about three times after leaving Randall and Carla's house. It stalled once last night (I was obviously so traumatised by that I didn't even mention it in the previous posting) and we even called the RACV but the guy could find nothing wrong. This time I called the RACV and they said they'd be there in an hour and a half which wasn't much fun but in fact they were there in about 15 minutes which was. The problem is the carburettor was flooding. So funnily enough whereas I thought I could just about handle a slow drive through the backstreets home, in fact I had to get on the accelerator full-on and drive on a fast road. That's stressful. Remember (or regardez) I did not get my license till I was 35. My attitude to driving is a cross between a very old person's, and a very stupid person's.

I finished my presentation for the conference on Thursday today and I am impressed with myself that I seem likely to not be working on the damn thing the night before, like I usually do. The paper itself isn't bad I suppose either. It's so different from the published version it's, well, almost completely different. I'm looking forward to the conference and I've never been to Wellington and everything I've heard about it makes it sound really cool.

pop shop

New Estate's latest record is called Rock Shop but last night they played at the Pop Shop, a speedily- arranged show with Plus Minus playing support. The Pop Shop is a pretty classy venue, with incredibly loud dance music downstairs and bands playing upstairs with the distractingly entrancing bonus of a huge video screen behind them. We saw Bewitched (you really appreciate Dick York as a comedy actor with the sound turned down), the first twenty minutes or so of Return of the Pink Panther (the scene with Clouseau and Kato fighting in the apartment before it is blown up was magic behind a very tempestuous song of Brad's) and a lot of Monsters Inc which I've seen but was surprised to discover I have absolutely no memory of. But the monsters look great. Plus Minus were excellent particularly for a first show (they're playing again next weekend but I won't get to see them). NE were their usual splendid selves, though it wasn't till I went up the back (I was trying to take photos nearer the front but the compositions were all wrong) that I realised just how tremendous they sounded last night. The picture is of Mia playing drums for one apparently quite improvised song with Plus Minus, to a backdrop of Darren in bed with Mr. Tate.

ghastly

Last night as I was trying to sleep (having fallen asleep already during The Family Guy, but it's OK, I got it on tape) I felt like I was tripping, a little, because I kept seeing all these crazy cartoon images before my eyes which were closed. Mia and I discussed what I had eaten during the day (not that much) but could settle on nothing in particular that might have been responsible for my hallucination. Anyway I am surprised that this thing, located in the Brisbane Courier yesterday, didn't give me nightmares. I captured it like one might a toxic demon in a bottle so I control it and it doesn't control me. I have tried to get Picasa to work so I could put it on the profile as a picture of me, tee hee, but it's one of those many hundreds of programs I quite frankly can't get to work.

his newest yell

It's not surprising that in 1930 everyone was crazy about Mickey Mouse, but it is odd to see some of the inter- pretations of the character that were presumably drawn from memory in advertising by the advertiser's unartistic brother-in-law, etc. This Mickey has a cane a la Charlie Chaplin, those tiny ears etc, and is not at all recognisable as the execrable monstrosity we know and love and never think about today. I like the description of the cartoon as a 'yell', I suppose that means you enjoy it so much you yell with excitement or pleasure. This is from the Brisbane Courier of December 1930. I also read in the Courier from the same year of a court case in Britain in which the company who had the license to manufacture Mickey Mouse products was sueing another company which had made a Mickey Mouse doll but which the manufacturer was claiming had original attributes that stopped it being an outright copy i.e. it had teeth and whiskers. I'd love to see that.