I just watched the movie The Wild Angels (1966). There is a small sample of audio taken from it and used in a couple of songs I like – one by mudhoney and the other Primal Scream. Pretty lame movie though. The whole long-haired, motorbike-ridin’ neo-nazi movement obviously didn’t take off. And if they were so anti “The Man” why did they insist on burying Bruce Dern in the traditional way, even going to the length of having the funeral service in a church?

Actually re that scene, the film is spoken about being a fore-runner to Easy Rider, but no one ever mentions the impact it must’ve had on the writers of Weekend At Bernie’s.

At the other end of the ladder, I saw the Austin Powers trilogy a couple of weeks back. I’d seen 1 and 2 before. They were good to see again. Mike Myers’ style of humour is right up my alley. I think he’s a frikkin’ genius. Visual comedy has got to be the purest form there is—and I don’t mean as in innocent – just high-grade. Heather Graham can’t act for shit though, poor girl. I hadn’t seen the 3rd one, and despite Hollywood thrusting its dick into the mashed potatoes, it was still really really funny. The interplay between Mike Myers and Seth Green (in both 2 and 3) is classic. I had a sore gut from laughing and it’s been a long time since that’s happened.

dedicating this entire blog to The Pig.

It’s been a strange year, innit? This worldwide pandemic, epidemic cough thing came on and for a moment everyone was freaking, and then everyone said ah nah it’s alright, and then well, we’re not sure. And as with any of these kind of things, occasionally they can hit close to home.

Tonight I was watching the news and they sez the first The Pig death in victoria happened—a man from small country town, where I incidentally used to live. And then I rang mum, and fuck me if it wasn’t someone I knew. Indeed, someone from my school, year level, and to tell the truth, from my peer group. That is to say, one of the people who was a peer. I, we, a good 10 or 12 of us were the genuinely unpopular. Not good at (ball)sports, not good with girls.  Except downball. A few of us were good at that (not me) – we’d play it against the library wall. Not that downball ever had much prestige. Although I hear that “handball” is now an Olympic sport, so go figure.

Anyway, the deceased, I won’t mention his name, had always been overweight, and that was what got him entry into our loosely gathered group of misfits. He copped a lot of shit for being fat, and I’m sure it didn’t help. It was genetic to a point, but also the vicious cycle of eating because of not feeling good, and so on. Like Fat Bastard in Austin Powers.

He liked old Western ‘dime paperback’ novelettes and the original Albert Broccoli James Bond paperbacks. I remember once we had a sleepover at a friend’s house, and he was there – and I saw him just with his jocks on—and they were like normal jocks except there’d been separate elastic band sewn around the waist so they’d fit.  I guess never did all that well at school. Mum said he’d been driving taxis for a living in aforementioned small country town, but then stopped a few years ago. Rest in peace big guy.

I seem to remember that when I was a kid the feeling of moving from one year to the next had real definition. It was a snap sudden thing that happened when I woke up. BuDdding! I’m 10!
I’ve been sliding gradually into 35 for the last 6 months.
All I got was:
an automated email from the sonic youth forum stating happy birthday
a txt msg from the g/f, also stating happy birthday
the news that I may have to refund 51 bucks on an ebay package that has not yet reached its destination
and a reminder of something terrible I did last year.

I don’t drop by the ubuweb site often enough but when I do there’s always treats a-plenty.

They’ve got a whole shitload of films here.

I just watched the one that’s under J.G. Ballard. There’s a few recognisible names like captain beefheart, brian eno and laurie anderson as well as folks like jean baudrillard .
The one on Ballard was actually a doco on his growing up in Shanghai.
I wish I had more time and brain power for reading. I read a couple of his collections of short stories years ago and they were memorable. I’d like to check out his other stuff.

The first season of any tv series is always the most interesting because there’s always that unsure feel to it like, ‘what? they bought the pilot? We got to make this thing now?’

It’s interesting to watch the readjustments taking place after three or four shows.

More of this. Less of that. You know what I mean.

C.H.i.P.s (California Highway Patrol) was no exception. It was 1977. I guess you could say they started off with some very run of the mill eps. Establishing characters. Back story.

One of the standout characteristics of what I’ve seen of the first season (14eps) is the soundtrack/scoring. There’s a jazzy brass and funky bass theme running through the whole thing with a myriad of variations on the main theme.

At times they keep the music up high and the dialogue down at low volume. I like it. At about ep10 they got stuck into some full blown small stone phaser use too.

The early part of the series swung between light comedy and serious stuff.

Unfortunately neither of the leads are comedy actors. They brought in lots of cameos. Obviously, it was easy for the producers to find plenty of old actors ready to do bit parts. And in a strange way art was probably imitating life, given that this was L.A.

Baker delivers some bad news to a wife and son: “Your dad’s dead”. (ep4)

H.R. Puffnstuf; postmodern intertextuality, you saw it first on CHiPs.

Marjorie Bennett as Mrs.Downey was a recurring character. A grand old English dame in her 56 Cadillac.

For me, CHiPs stands somewhere between the predictable sparseness of Thunderbirds and something more exciting like battlestar galactica. That might sound harsh, but I do really like watching CHiPs. And it is over 30 years old. There’s something about the landscape of Los Angeles and environs at that time. It can also be seen in The Omega Man starring Charleton Heston.

Mrs.Downey giving Bear the run around.

Apparently the first two seasons are available on iTunes but there are other wasy too. I hope they release the other four.

More on distraction – from that article linked in the last post:
“When the jackhammers fire up outside my window, in other words, I rarely ignore them—I throw the window open, watch for a while, bring the crew sandwiches on their lunch break, talk with them about the ins and outs of jackhammering, and then spend an hour or two trying to break up a little of the sidewalk myself.”

It’s funny because right now I feel like a good chunk of my brain is ready to hack into the studies I must do, but there is literally all sorts of jackhammers going on outside my window. Not metaphorical, REAL. I can’t fucking concentrate for the life of me. I am imagining me going over there convincing the ajashi to hand over the jackhammer so I could do it for a while.

I guess I musta been busy or sumpn because I just started to get a bit of rhythm going here then lost it for a week or so.

Just read an interesting article on attention, distraction etc. here. Interesting. I sure as hell don’t feel like I have the little bit of centeredness I once did. Life is a dizzy blur these days. I haven’t meditated for over a year. (Well okay – that article motivated me to sit down for five minutes and try.) And you know sometimes I can see how the harshness of life and how I am approaching these days is literally biting me – I can see it in the way I hold my face.

I have been selling some stuff on ebay. Stuff that’s in Australia. Guitar foot pedals I left there at christmas. So far 6 out of nine done with no major hassles.

About you would you prefer that people were saying, “Oh him? I didn’t realise he was still alive?” or “Oh him? I didn’t realise he’d died?”

Well, that whole thing of changing the name of swine flu over to 1a81i111 flu was a scorching fucking success, eh? Well done. It didn’t work. Every news service I’ve seen is still calling it Swine Flu.

It’s interesting I think. Naming stuff. I find it ironic that it was the pig-eating industry that was losing money bigtime, and were the ones pushing to have the name changed, when essentially it was their doing that got the virus crossed over from pigs to people in the first place.

I’m too far gone to change the theme of my english studies master’s thesis for next year now. It’s going to be on the grunge scene, but what would’ve been far more original is doing it on the nature of naming things. It’s one of my hidden talents—naming things. Maybe I can do my PHD on that. Then I will found a thinktank that can be hired out for vast sums of money when someone like a govt or a gigantic corporation needs help thinking up a name. Because the Tank will be independent of any nation we’ll probably take up residence on a secret island somewhere to the west of Japan, like on Thunderbirds.

For example, if Obama had come to me to ask what a good new name for the swine flu is, I would’ve said like the title; the Pig.

“I was going to go for a bike ride today but I’m feeling a bit under the weather. In fact, I think I’ve got the Pig.”

Well I’m glad that whole swine flu thing sorted itself out. Although I think part of me was disappointed it didn’t end up like this:

But when the world, in all it’s supreme idiocy decided that we can’t call it swine flu any more because it was hurting pork sales, they should’ve come to me, me Jerry to think up a new name. I saw a bit of news that was showing how ground zero was an industrial pig farm down in old Mexico—reminded me of the chaco chicken episode of The X Files. And so, it should’ve been renamed, “You Greedy Pig! flu” after the greedy capos who are responsible for it. I’ll bet it was a result of them making pigs eat pigs.

As part of my grungy researchen I’m reading the book, Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. Real good. Definite pattern of -band rises—band peaks – band declines. Of course I’d always known of sonic youth and a few of the others, but the best chapter I’ve read so far has been on The Minutemen. They seemed really cool. Been listening to ‘Double Nickels on the Dime” – very different in some ways.

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The last WW2 submarine movie I watched was a gooden – ‘We dive at dawn’ – this was in part the reason why I have been trawling through this odd little subgenre. I had this faint fragment of a memory of watching some old b&w film one night in Geelong where there was a sub at dock that was being refuelled. This was that movie. It’s English. The English are so quaint.

The next era is cold war. Watched two already – The Bedford Incident, which sounds English, but is actually american, or maybe—it has some american actors and an english guy pretending to be german. It was filmed in england.  There was a touch of Dr.Strangelove style humour in there, but mostly it was pretty serious, and it was about how accidentally nuking the planet is a serious issue.

The other was right out the other end. It was cold war/UFO fusionfood. As much as I like UFOs I had to turn it off halfway through because I was tired and there was no real submarines in it. It was just people in a studio. Plus it was pretending that spaceage gigantic submarines existed, which they don’t.

I went to watch some live music last night. Korean rockabilly bands. It was pretty okay. Missed the first group, but the other three I did see got progressively better as the night went on, finishing up with the main act, the Rock Tigers. They seemed pretty well drilled and I would guess, have probably toured OS. The two guitarists had these gorgeous Gretsch guitars but I kept thinking that it’s kind of a loss because they’d sound pretty much the same.The lead singing woman was really cool and had a lot of charisma.

I was kind of hoping I would see some Teddyboys there but the only people who were dressed in theme were the people in the bands. There was a few yahoos in the audience who wanted to mosh but the music really wasn’t up to that speed, nor was there the audience capacity, so all they managed to do was get some other people rather pissed off. A scuffle almost broke out. I kind of wished it had because while the music was nice, it wasn’t totally doing it for me. Nobody did, Brand New Cadillac, which is what I would have done had I been playing.

Hello friends,

Just taking a few minutes out of my busy schedule to tell you about a few things I’ve observed lately.

On the internet, it’s all about getting things done quickly. No one has time to write full words anymore. And so, we get this netspeak. For example, there’s the abbreviation, “tl;dr” I guess I first saw this five or six years ago on one of the more advanced (that is to say, nerdy) internet discussion forums. It means, “too long; didn’t read”. That is to say, “What you wrote was very long, and I, the other person, for whatever reason, laziness, being in a hurry—did in fact not read it. And while I did, as I say, not in fact have time to read it, I did have the time to let you know that I didn’t”.

This is all well and good. However, what I have observed recently is a rather disturbing trend among either the younger teens, or the very stupid (I can’t tell because it’s on the internet and I can’t see these people) whereby these people are actually misusing ‘tl;dr’. It’s being used in places where a more literate or diligent person would use a phrase like, “to cut a long story short”, or “suffice to say”. All I can say is idiots get a brain.

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I continue to watch submarine movies. If any of them that I had watched was truly good, I would have mentioned it.

I’m usually against the mixing of comedy and the submarine genre, but last night I watched, Operation Petticoat starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Run of the mill for the most part except for the fact that the story included a plot point where their sub was painted pink. What I could say about a pink submarine plumbing the watery depths is best left out of a family accessible publication like Sunny Breaks.

I don’t usually bother dabbling in polotics these days but this is interesting. I was a little puzzled the other days when I couldn’t leave a biting comment on you-tube about an effects pedal the other day. Firefox throws down a little box saying comments have been disabled because of blahblah real name policy. I thought this would mean that I’d have to go to some dumb korean website to sign up with my name just so I could troll youtoob.

But after reading this article on the hankoryeah I see that google central has shut down comments and uplaods to you-tube from within S.Korea, because fascist government policy here goes against their belief that people should be able to be anonymous on the internet. Right on. About time google did something I agree with. The article finished with this:

Jeon Eung-whi, a standing member of Green Consumers Network in Korea, said, “This affair has given an impression to the world that ‘South Korea is an advanced nation in terms of technology, however, is a backwards nation in terms of freedom.

I can’t believe what I’m hearing and reading. I thought I was some kind of beach boys fan but I just realised they have a song called Little Honda. I didn’t even think Hondas were invented back then.

Moreover, in one song I know really well, thought I knew well, All Summer Long, there’s a line that I thought was “Miniature golf and hotdogs in the heat”, but as it turns out, it’s actually “Miniature golf and Hondas in the hills”. Were they getting paid off by Honda or something? I didn’t know Honda was even invented then.

Things come around again. New shoes for the summer. I love lime green. They’re not actually Cons – everlast instead. Cons are having crappy colours the last season or two.

Four years ago, resampled from this here trundling bundle of logwords:

at Lotteria: in-house canned music? From the album Combat Rock, The Clash’s Straight To Hell. It was an MOR cover version.

(1957)

It’s easy to start to think that all submarine films will be about the same with the odd one cropping up that is truly terrible. Like the other night, watching Crash Dive (1997), not to be confused with Crash Dive (1943) which was an absolute shocker.

It’s been interesting going through this list of submarine films without checking out info on them beforehand. Last night I watched The Enemy Below. Great film. 4 cement mixers out of five. Goes into the category of great war movies, not just submarine movies. I know you’re probably thinking ‘war movies..???’ but hey – this one actually had a kind of a pacifism thing going in it.

I could see elements had been borrowed in later years – in Star Wars – the helmets looked like something off the Death Star, and even the scoring sounded a little John Williamsish. Similarly, the whole storyline was basically borrowed about ten years later and made into a Star Trek Original series episode, Balance of Terror.

The enemy Below was also notable in that it didn’t have any of the usual sailor sexism—pictures of Betty Davis tacked up on the walls kind of thing. In fact I think if you were a homo-sex-ual you’d probably like this movie because there was barely a mention of women and there was also plenty of glistening-muscled aryan boys on the german sub.

The natural enemy of any sub is depth charges dropped from boats about. In every other movie I’ve seen, what this amounted to was the visual of 44-gallon drum falling into the water, as seen from below. In The Enemy… half of the action was taking place on board the yankee patrol ship—they were the ones doing the depth charges, and so showed how they actually launch them. Interesting.

I don’t why, but if a good film is going to lose it, 8 times out of 10, it’ll happen in the ending, and unfortunately this was the case here. It was otherwise a really well measured portrayal of the germans, but as mentioned, there was this vibe from both sides that ‘hey we don’t really want to fight this war but we’ve been ordered to’. As the cat and mouse continued the two captains gained respect for eachother, and then—at the end the american saves the german captain, and the german accepted help.

In reality, that guy would have gone down with his uboat or faced terrible humiliation on returning to the Fatherland, not to mention a firing squad.

I finally got around to putting the SD antiquity IIs in the Jag. To be honest I don’t hear a lot of difference. Of course I haven’t been in a hi-gain, hi amplification situation yet – those times when the CIJ pickups would squeal.
I forgot to age the pickup covers. Rather than putting them in coffee, I was going to smear vegemite on them and see how that went down.
Went back to round-wounds as well. The flat wounds lasted a good six months. Most people would probably change them before then but I’m a bit peculiar with string habits. Nevertheless, they were getting pretty dull and feeling too unweildy.
The round wounds feel rather thin in comparison.

My gear isn’t on the move regularly these days, so no need for the pedal box. And I’m a lazy, lazy man—keeping them on the floor makes the knobs too hard to reach.
A little bit of everything in there; boss, maxon, EH, dunlop, proco, 1 bootick, 1 double-evil dano, and more boss.

It’s pleasantly surprising to see the area outside my window being transformed in a positive way. I was half expecting they’d put more buildings there but instead it looks like it’s going to be a soccer pitch. They trucked in a whole bunch of large trees. I don’t know how the trees feel about being moved around like that. I guess for some it’d be a good thing, if they didn’t like the trees that they used to be situated next to.

Also they laid down a load of real live grass! It will be alive once it warms up a bit and rains. Grass. On the embankment. If you look carefully there’s old terraforming women anchoring it down there behind the trees.

Well okay maybe that foto is too small but click on to see bigger on flickr.

Je had some sort of clandestine fridge research project to complete so we headed off to the LG Best store to look at white goods. Or at least they used to be white. I was assured I’d be very bored by it all and that I could wander off after a few minutes but as often happens it was much the opposite.

I don’t know if it’s that I haven’t looked at new fridges in many years or if these were especially asian/quirky.

Flowery patterns on the doors with sparkly crystals embedded into them. Very advanced looking temperature controls. Some of them had a little door in the door so you could get your bottle of drink out without messing about with the whole door. These things were huge but there was still no freezer in it. Or at least I don’t think there was. They’re very plasticky inside. Can’t they make the fixtures out of something other than plastic? I guess all up it was mildly interesting, but eh, they still just keep food cold. I mean, it’s not going to write my thesis for me is it? Damn fridge.