ugh modern life

Here is an appropriated image of someone touching on, or perhaps touching off, with their Myki Card.

As I may have indicated prior, I am very antipathetic to this system, and am considering Writing A Letter To The Paper about this, although I am well aware of the horror, trauma and distress such rash actions will cause amongst the good burghers of Melbourne.

The other day (Monday) I was on the tram and two helpful Myki people were wandering the tram making sure everyone knew how to use Myki. 'You know you don't need to touch off if your journey is in zone 1', exciting innovations like that, which had all present abuzz. A goggle-eyed Myki person came up to me and asked if I had any questions about Myki. Of course, I have a billion. The main one currently is, if I keep complaining about problems I have with Myki through the official complaints site will my complaints (all legitimate, by the way) be taken more, or less, seriously? i.e. is there a 'serial nuisance' list? I suspect that in fact there are no particular tallies made of kinds of complaints and probably not even any systematic approach to addressing the problems, since it's the whole system that's a problem, and little bandaids on the gaping maw of Myki isn't going to 'myki' a whole lot of difference. Anyway I said:

I know everything there is to know about Myki thank you.

To which goggles got in a huff, saying:

Good. 

Well. 

Alright. 

That's sorted then.

Have a nice day.

One thing I know about Myki, which is the last thing I am going to write about here even though I have a list of complaints as long as a long arm, is that when I pay an inflated price to use a ticketing system that doesn't work, one of the things I'm paying for is the people in light blue who go around asking passengers if they have any questions about Myki. I am reminded of the fare evasion campaign (against fare evasion, not for it) run by Connex which suggested that if you were a fare evader you should offer to mow other passengers' lawns. If I don't have any questions about Myki, could I ask the blue Myki people to mow our back yard? After all, I'm paying them even more than fare evaders are paid for by paying passengers.  

moke

The first car I remember my parents having was a Mini Moke. I saw this parked in the park yesterday (actually it's been there a few days now) and I thought it was a toy. But is this really the size Mini Mokes have always been? It's tiny.

comments

So I started moderating comments on my blog and I am now fending off about ten advertising comments a day, most of them completely nonsensical. What I don't understand is that changing to 'moderating' comments seems to attract a lot more of these kinds of comments. Doesn't make sense, unless the advertisers are keen for one person (me) to read the comments. Anyway, I just delete them on a regular basis.

Charlie and Barry and I went on an 11 km walk (maybe more) today - is that a long way? I'm not sure. It was more or less the first day of spring, you know, in real terms. It was pretty decent.

I got back from Swan Hill yesterday, which was also extraordinary in lots of ways, but I'll hold off on writing about that for the moment, or in fact probably for ever.

(Later: the comments are flooding my email for moderation, it is dreadful, I don't know who these idiots are). 

the mighty (temporarily) fallen

So yesterday Barry and Charlie were under the house barking because there was a cat in there (doing the worst thing a cat can do as far as they're concerned: it was out of their reach and seemingly didn't give a loose root about their presence). After I got them out for a second time, I noticed Barry had quite a bit of blood on his foot. I called the vet and the vet nurse said well if it's stopped bleeding and it's not obviously deep just wash it in salty water and it should be fine. There was a lot of blood around, but Barry wasn't bleeding, so I washed his leg and went to work.

Still, I am pernickety about Barry so I called the vet and made an appointment for later in the afternoon. When I got back, both Barry and Charlie were up the back of the garden barking at the dogs over the fence (this happens about 10 times a day, they're so creative). There was blood everywhere, including in their bed. It finally dawned on me - it wasn't Barry that had been bleeding at all, just Charlie. And copiously enough that it looked like Barry was bleeding because he was just happily trotting through Charlie's blood.

So Charlie and I went to the vet and it was nowhere near as bad as it looked. She had spent all day with it (the cut is somewhere in the paw, but not on the pads) so she had blood all over her face, she looked like she'd been in some kind of traumatic horror crash or something, but she was fine. There she is above with her tail wrapped as tightly as possible round her arse (of course for all she knows she'll have a thermometer stuck up there a second time, though she didn't seem to mind the first) and looking determinedly towards freedom.

She's comfortable now, though panting a bit. I just forced a pill into her mouth, something I never thought was possible.

Oh yeah and my sister Nicola had a baby (Jemima) and my friend and colleague at work, Anna, did too (Evelyne). But Charlie cut her foot! 

day 17,308

Today I took Mia to the train at Glenroy and figured dropping in at the Glenroy op shops might be fruitful and yes and no. I picked up a couple of nice vinyls at the Vinnies. One was Hans Poulsen's Natural High, which I remember seeing in Tecoma for $20 ten years ago - got it today for $2, so, glad I waited. In nice condition too though it might be a reissue (don't care about those things unless I missed out on a gatefold or something). It's still on the Fable label, however. Also, The Best of the Original Strangers, which has some really cool stuff on it and some very nice playing/arrangements, it's almost all covers (since John Farrar went on to write some huge hits in the 70s, I am not sure when his songwriting blossomed, but whatever, it wasn't blossoming here but other stuff was). I looked them up on the computer and was surprised to discover that all but one of the 'original' (not sure if that includes Farrar) Strangers were from Glenroy...! But the record I was most stoked to find was from the Salvos, the Happyland album, which I had been hoping to come across for years (I'd even looked for that one on eBay periodically). Once again, only $2. And, since it was actually a compact disc, I could enjoy it all the way home - 2 1/2 songs of it anyway.


This was not the limit of my purchasing. Yesterday I observed to Mia that I had seen many many ladies in the last few weeks reading 50 Shades of Grey on the train, and how weird I found it that people were happy to read porn in public. And she said what do you know about it. And I said I've heard a lot about it, it's S&M porn. And she said I was not in a position to judge, considering I actually hadn't read it. She was right.

Also, over the last few days I have been griping about the new Bob Dylan album, reviewed in this morning's paper, a bit played on the radio yesterday, and I griped to Mia about how dreadful it sounded, and she pointed out... I'm not sure, maybe that I should shut up. Before I picked up the Happyland CD I had RRR on (for about two mins) and they played this song off the new BD album about the Titanic. I thought, this is the most tragic shit I have ever heard. If some dunderhead from... Belgrave wrote this song and tried to sing it somewhere they'd be shitcanned (whatever that literally means) offstage before they got to the crap about... well, all of it's crap about something. So I thought I just have to buy this record and face it.

So I went to Broady Plaza and I bought 50 Shades of Grey and the Bob Dylan album whatever it's called. Tempest, Pestilence. A review will follow.

Also, I baked some bread, put out some washing, hung some pictures, that's all that springs to mind.

porn asha

Like a lot of individuals with hangups when Asha cuts loose she really cuts loose. This is a cat who spends most of her days hiding in enclosed spaces, be it under the blankets, in the sock drawer, under the spare bed or in some other place actually unknown. Then every so often she shows this other side of her personality, as happened recently when it was sunny outside and she found a spot on the spare bed with the sun coming through the window. She thought this picture was tasteful. 

* Five months later (Dec 2012): a big huzzah for the hundreds of dickheads who have come to this blog post looking, I assume, for porn. Hope you enjoyed the cat porn. If you were a cat looking for porn I imagine the pose here probably doesn't have the visceral thrill cats want in cat cheesecake, though a few toms might have tastes that way. Asha says hi. 

100 reviews, #3: Claire Burchall's PP

Claire Birchall’s album PP – her second, and the first in eleven years (there was another by her presumably former band Paper Planes inbetween) is a serious contender for the best of 2012.

The strength of Birchall’s extraordinarily adept and captivating songs are demonstrated by the fact that the two covers on the record – Prince’s song for the Bangles, ‘Manic Monday’ and Will Oldham’s ‘Riding’ – are two of the four weak tracks on the album (the other duds are the nonsense ‘Texas’, about which the less said the better, and an untitled joke hypnotic-synth hidden track at the end). It would have been better if these errors of judgment had remained in the hypothetical stage; but happily they are at least at the beginning and end, leaving a seamless core of truly great originals as the other 2/3 of the album.

Birchall made a sound and style for this album which cocks numerous snooks at the hi-fi possibilities of home recording, and shows up the dumb lie of the MP3 as some kind of approximation of crystal clarity (with standard ambient noise, your iPod appears to give you a sound with depth; Birchall’s take on 2012 listening preferences takes the whole back to its origins in musical birthday card tinniness). Most tracks feature distorted drum machine, synthesizer and feedback guitar; you could say it’s the Cramps meet the early Human League. Birchall is a singer-songwriter; she’s not making spattery soundscapes or exploring the artistic potential of distortion. The sound is a (wry?) background to a series of near-perfect compositions.

The first of the seven great songs is ‘Loser’, a carnivalesque ballad which might hypothetically go on forever (it fades out with Birchall still singing). ‘It’s all about the music’, is part of the (sarcastic or at very least sardonic) lyric; the central figure is probably part-hero, part dick, but this listener is consistently distracted by the siren-like hook of the chorus and the evocative chugging of the plodding rhythm – evocative of the music machine, whoever he or it may be. 

The second is ‘Same Old Mess’, an epic power-glam disco track which packs a definite punch in the intro to its chorus; the verses are increasingly overlaid with plaintive, sinuous and writhing guitars. Birchall sounds hungover, restive and agitated. It’s followed by ‘Move On’ (ostensibly the ‘single’) which owes nothing to Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’ but initially hits the listener that way. As it transpires, the song is more of chugging and Stooges-y than anything anything any tired goth could muster. Here’s where the drum patterns, keyboards and guitar finally merge: it’s virtually impossible to tell where one of those three instruments ends and another begins.

‘Leaving this Town’ could be a Scott Walker tune from the late 60s, had it been written and sung by Scott Walker. Birchall intones against a keyboard figure of dynamic simplicity, folky in the chorus and bluesy in the verse. A persistent, irritating (but infectious) faux cymbal or tambourine beats throughout. If ‘Move On’ reminds me of ‘Isolation’, I have to say that – unfair as it feels to mention it – ‘It’s a Monster’ reminds me of ‘Zombie’, by The Cranberries. That might just be because it’s metaphorically ‘about’ something very unacceptable, personified (well, in truth, it’s fairly difficult to know what it is ‘about’).

‘Really Got Me Down’ is another classic plodder (on the wavelength, musically, of the cover of ‘Riding’); this and ‘Got the Blues’ are as bombastic and caustic as anything Neil Young and Crazy Horse mustered in the early 70s, and indeed the latter could almost be some great lost track off Everybody Knows This is Nowhere but Neil held it over for another album because it was too good (and then got distracted). Weirdly, the multitracked vocal gives it the feel of an time earlier than 1969 and at the same time, of ‘Long May You Run’ (!).

Ultimately, then, in the world of rips and downloads, a success story is born: the mildly entertaining covers and jokey songs can be enjoyed briefly then dispensed with, and they disguise the delectable kernel of a great album hidden within. Alongside the exceptional Paper Planes CD and singles of a few years ago Claire Burchall is revealed ultimately as a genuinely brilliant songwriter who should be lauded more frequently and play live more than once a year. I hope this happens, though in the meantime selfishly I’m just happy I have a copy.

Buy and/or hear it here.