Sunny Breaks

I did infact manage to get to see a little of the cycling this morning. Ten ay em, sitting on my bike on western beach road — normally a rather busy road but today completely deserted. I was looking down at my camera and before I knew it half of the pelaton had quietly zoomed by. It was like a J.G. Ballard story meets a story with a bunch of women cyclists in it.
Each lap was taking 25mins or so and eventually some other people came to watch. If you’re a guerilla film maker and needed some shots of empty streets but had no hope of getting the permits then you missed a golden opportunity.

There’s some top-notch women’s cycling here on the weekend. Whereas all the other events I’ve seen in town have been on a short circuit around the eastern Gardens, this event has a 15km lap which goes over a lot of ‘burbs in town and includes the most killa hill in the area — the approach from Fyansford.
I’d already volunteered to help out with a do the heritage society are having before I knew about the cycling, so probably won’t get to take any happy-snaps of it.

<%image(20040226-handyandy.jpg|349|367|handy andy)%>
Handy Andy of North Geelong. He’s wearing a wire basket skirt. How about that.

And to cap off a trio of pointless bandwidth sucking images,<%image(20040226-kittyonbranch.jpg|282|346|uh oh)%>
I finally got hold of a copy of this classy little poster the other day.

Ah golly, I was out having a coffee with good friend Obi wan kenobi this morning and ended up mentioning that i have this website, so consequently now feel that particular brand of self-conscousness that comes from the virtual bumping against the real. Been a while since i dealt with that.
It’s the kind of thing that can lead to self-censorship which I’ve seen a lot of webloggers bend to, which eventually leads to shutting down completely. The kind of thing that needs to be nipped in the bud straight away — which is what I’m attempting to do by mentioning all this now.

If I get the opportunity to argue against post-modernism again at school, I’ll take it. I didn’t last year, mainly because it took me 6 months to figure out what I thought about it all. But I’d disagree with the idea of multiple selves, I think the idea underplays the complexity of people — how we can have many, many facets. But when you really get to know someone you can see how they’re all linked.

At the same time, the one area where I could see the “for muliple selves” argument getting a go is with the online-self vs. the real life-self, because I know that in my case they can often be quite different. And infact I enjoy playing up to and mucking with character/identity in this online form.

For the last 12 months I’ve been using the internet service provider TPG and it’s coming up to when I fork over for another 12 months — I pay that way because it\‘s easier since I don’t have a credit card. And it’s still easily the most economical plan around.
I envisioned myself writing a little note to stick in with the money order that was gushing in nature about how they’d done such a good job at doing what they do, considering there’s so many other gigantic scuzzballs in the same bidness who can’t get it right. And also I was going to say that a good definition of success in implementing a service/technology was that the user (ME) tends to forget that they’re even using it — it’s just part of the whole …um thing. Anyone who knows me properly will know that I have serious hang-ups with 1) receiving praise, 2) giving out praise. Yet I was going to.

But then, the service in the last couple of days has been really dodgey, and dang that funny old recency effect, I just don’t want to write that little note now, despite the other 360 odd days being fine.

It only takes a couple of episodes where I’m sitting here staring into the void at 39 bits a second before I start to think about lugging all this nothing-coloured, plastic-shelled junk out to the footpath and then writing another kind of little note:
“Digital Age,       [notice I didn’t say ‘dear’]
come and get me when you’ve got those problems sorted out.
YS”

and I’d go back to writing ridiculous poetry and taking to pre-appointed public venues to read it out to people who I’ve been assured will clap quietly, quite politely — no matter how bad it is.

It’s just like 4000 years ago when sandals were just getting off the ground. They’d break down — straps would rip, soles would fall off at the most inconvenient of times. When was there a convenient time for your shoes to disitnegrate? Certainly not when you’ve got a mob of angry Essenes chasing you.
Only the intrepid wore sandals into mission-critical situations.

As a matter of fact, the whole Gnostic sect got started due to same basic sentiment mentioned above. With that wavery “I’m so close to losing it” sound in his voice, Simon proclaimed loudly to his posse, while pointing to small island yonder, “Right. We’re going over there. No. shoes. [swivels arm back to point at general population] YOU don\‘t come there with shoes.”
Then the Gnostics split.

Yet, here in the 21st century we’ve pretty much got the shoe construction thing licked and it’s rare that I think about all the trial and error that went into keeping my shoes together.

I’ve had this digital camera for 4 or something months now and still haven’t done a review of it. There’s still a lot of things I still haven’t tried with it too.

Here is my first effort as a motion pikkachure guy. I’d never bothered to try the motion-shot function at all, and even here I hadn’t either. It was an accident the dial was set to that function.
So it’s just of a big picture I saw in an op-shop, probably from some italian house — and only a couple of seconds but is 2Mb. I don’t know what the deal is there. I might have to read the manual.

One half of B(if)tek is Nicole Skeltys, aka artificial, who I’d never actually heard of in the singular, but who has several albums out, with some sample tracks available for the grabbin’ at that website there. Interesting to listen to these and get an idea (I fancy) that I can hear what kind of sounds or taste in sounds Nicole brings to the B(if)tek duo.

Somehow in the same orbit is Dark Network, who I haven’t heard of in any sense, but they have a few songs for your sampledom pleasure listening too, again of an electronic nature.

In the same neighbourhood is Clan Analogue and they have a bunch of links leading off in different directions.

One summer day among others she disturbed me from my four year long afternoon nap. Like a 5-pointed star she skittered about side-on; the lead part in a cub scout musical and still wearing the green, gold-striped cap. Rosey, trumpet-playing cheeks and Felix the cat clock eyes.

I rolled half sideways and looked. The two star points as arms jittered up and down — wrapped around the palm of one hand was a blue-tongue lizard.

“Next door’s dog was trying to eat it!”
For a short, private moment this little creature and I locked eyes. Hideous, primitive and not belonging in a bedroom was my blanket policy on reptiles. Here was an exception.

“Hi”, he said and lowered his eyes. Was it a hint of social awkwardity there? Motion sickness? No, the faint blushing and tone of voice were of embarrassment. Held as a captive of this girl.
He grasped onto her index finger with his paws and curled his tail around the outer side of her little finger as much as its flexibity allowed, but he needn’t have worried, she wasn’t going to let go.

“G’day”, I replied quietly. He looked back at me and saw that I wasn’t mocking him. We were in the same boat.

I got up. We went into the kitchen and she eventually put the lizard down into a lidless shoebox. Each time it moved slightly she would reach in and straighten it up, keeping it neatly arranged — parallel with the side of the box.
We set him loose and he crawled under the house.

If a man is weeding his garden under the midday sun, it must be the devil because only the devil can trick the sun not to burn.

The infinite blue of the sky and the bright white shapes of dry clothes flapping lazily on a clothes line. I can hear the deep, constant rumble of a jet engine a million miles away and I drop gently from the top of our back fence into a southern european backyard.
I squat down in front of a raised garden bed, rock a little and slide into a cross-legged sit. I reach under the thin black netting, pick and eat strawberries one at a time, while watching the double-storey red-brick job for movement within.

The strawberries are tangy and as warm as the day.
The lizard slowly appears beside me. I keep eating but begin to notice his head turn ever so slightly as I ferry each one from the patch to my lips.
I hold out a smaller strawberry a little way in front of him. He cautiously takes it from my fingers and swallows it.

I imagine england is like a rather small waiting room with a large bunch of people in and no one ever gets called into the consultation room. There’s no distractions, no telly on a swivel bracket, no yabber-yabber talkback radio, no magazines and the weather outside’s shit(e).

So the people end up making up their own ways to stay amused. There’s no logic in what they do, which is good because logic is the compass of the moneylove — profit – the machine.

These pokey little permutations in the cultural continuum pop up and can occasionally cause huge waves to roll up on the shore of the machine.

Someone from Resonance FM (based in London) emailed me to say that the creator of the song ‘leper in a tumbledryer’ (which was on 365 days and which I mentioned back here) now does a weekly half-hour radio show on Resonance. For the last 36 hours I\‘ve been moving through the strange world of Dan Wilson via The Hellebore shew, the hellebore shew, the helle, the helle, the hellebore shew.

He does tape drops, which is recording stuff — music, poems, and other less organised audiostuffs onto blank tapes and then leaves them in public places. The radio shows are similar, and document some of these tape drops, as well as play a little music/audio from other weirdos.
All the radio shows are archived on the site and available for streaming or download, in either .mp3 or .ogg format. Good to see it set up as both Open Source friendly, and low-bandwidth friendly.

This is one thing he says about tape-dropping:
“I know tape-dropping sounds like such an unprofitable, losery thing to do but just be thankful that I’m not doing something really anti-social like making colages from cut up Argos catalogues and porno magazines and super-gluing them to telephone boxes.
Tape-dropping is a nice exciting method of music distribution that has its roots in the historic medieval pastime of twig-dropping; leaving oddly shaped twigs around the courtyard to freak out the superstitious. Whether they be gentry or serf, it mattered not.”

As good an example as any of what goes on is the Dec. 16 episode. The 48kbs per second quality version is quite acceptable, it’s about a ten megabyte download and I really think you should listen to it.

Due to financial woes the pakington street multicultural festival was scaled back from 2 days to one this year. It was still pretty good but felt like it slipped by pretty quickly. The weather was mirky, so the fotos didn’t turn out all that great.
<%image(20040221-dropouts.jpg|483|305|absent friends)%>
Who didn’t make it this year? These were the left overs at the parade’s startline; Vietnam, Portugul, Slovenia, Finland and Holland.’, ‘I must have some unrealistic memory that I compare each parade to because it never looks all that fantastic. Like what might happen with RSS feeds, the organisers slipped a couple of ads into the parade, and thought I wouldn’t notice. The local undertakers had a couple of big, antiquated hearses in it which were gurgling fumes over the primary school kids contingent walking behind them.
<%image(20040221-highland.jpg|307|230|bag on)%>
If you compare this foto to that of last year’s, you’ll notice that the pipers don’t keep the same postions in the formation.
The chinese-australian society people took out my noisecore award due to their whopping big drum and smashing symbols.

There were several furries and clowns in attendance, so the day obviously wouldn’t have been for everyone.
<%image(20040221-furry.jpg|259|161|redcross furry)%>

One of the casualties of the scale-back was the battle of the bands, which is a bit of a shame.

I thought it might feel a bit weird getting back down to the beach at anglesea after living there for two years and then not having visited there at all in this last 14 months, but it wasn’t.

I hung out around the wave-break and got sent into an underwater backwards somersault three times — it was great. Nothing like getting biffed around by the forces of nature.

There’s a good square 500metres of beach, edgewise, for every child, woman and man in this country so i kind of feel obligated to get down to the beach at least once each summer. I was walking along an otherwise deserted section and came across this seagull. Through staring at it, creeping toward it and taking lots of fotos, I managed to give it a serious case of the heeby-geebies.

And here’s me giving you the evil eye.

I almost got side-swiped by some frikkin jim’s mowing type of dealy this morning while out riding. It was overtaking and the trailer just missed.

I accept that my push-biking days are numbered. I just wish I knew where they were keeping the number so I could go see it. I’d buy some colouring books at the appropriate time for when I’m in hospital.

Y’know (and I’m touching wood like a mad bugger right now) apart from when I came out of me mum, I’ve never had to go to hospital for anything. Never broken a bone, never got sick.

Ooo! More subversive arty shit.

The other of the two things I learnt last year was that the north american hollywood juggernaut isn’t as all dominating as I’d previously thought. I started to get an appreciation for the amount of clout (culturally at least) that the UK still had. There’s a bit of a divide between it and europe simply because of the language thing but europe similarly makes advances in wherever it is all this is going, and the US follows. Probably not very clear, but what I mean is that the see-saw’s more balanced than I thought.

There’s another whole big issue of the English-speaking world’s prudish 50s-ish ‘keep a foot on the floor’ attitude to sexuality and the human body, our human bodies — when compared to europe, but I’ll leave that for another time.

In this case advance don’t necessarily mean on the up — just further along. You could bet your pants that this thing that happened in the swedish Big Brother house will eventually be replicated here. Although they’re not even allowed alcohol in the version here yet.

This was the book I was reading and am now finished. It’s by self-styled English bad-boy writer, Will Self and is about how a guy wakes up one day and chimpanzees and humans have switched places.

All except for the main character, simon dykes, who is a painter. When he looks at himself he sees human, but when the rest of society look at him (they’re all chimps and completely take the role of humanity — eg. the pope is a chimp) they see a chimp who has is having a psychotic episode. And of course, he is a bit freaked out with all these monkeys everywhere, trying to touch him.
And all the behavioural traits of chimps are part of this society so if a lesser chimp is dissing you even just a bit, it’s completely normal to give them a good belting. So they’re always smacking simon around and he’s a bit traumatised by it.

The change doesn’t happen until about a quarter of the way through, and without giving away the ending, it seems balanced really well between, ‘This poor guy has been thrown into some crazy monkey universe’ and ‘hmm, maybe he really did have some kind of psychosis’.

Here is an article with bad-boy Will Self with a little about the book. It says it’s in a Jonathan Swift vein of satire and I suppose it is. There were a few things about humanity brought out by it.

What I liked about it was how it blended what we know of how chimp ‘society’ works (like grooming, drumming on things) and everyday human stuff that we know, like hierarchy in the workplace.

Sex is a big part of it. Chimps and humans go about it in very different ways. They’re fucking all the time.

I found this little bit following particularly funny. The context is: Sarah, (simon’s girlfriend) distraught with his breakdown, visited her family group for a few days and is about to catch a train back to London. In the chimp world there\‘s no such thing as incest and it’s actually considered abuse if you’re not fucking your kids.

“No, Peter, if I can’t have you, or Simon, I don’t think I’ll be mating anyone else for the rest of this oestrus. And certainly not a chimp whose courtship display consists of beating himself around the head with a copy of PC User.”

&&&&&&&&&&&

Today’s Ace Mate! all-australian link for the day is this fotographic collection of letterboxes.

Here’s what I would’ve writ yesterday if two things didn’t happen: first, the thingo I write in vanished right before my eyes, taking with it several paras of carefully worded, effulgent effluvia. Then the whole server goes down for half a day. But you don’t need to know this.

I’ve heard of people eatiing straight out of the pot — that’s something I can’t come at, but it appears I’m a sinkie (via DVZ). From the website:

“ Late one afternoon in 1991, Norm Hankoff was standing at his kitchen sink, scarfing down tuna salad, using extra-strength, corrugated potato chips as utensils.

Inexplicably, something compelled him to raise his eyes in mid-chew. There, just like in every comic book, above his head he saw a light bulb burning brightly. As he stood there puzzled, directly above the bulb appeared not the traditional word IDEA, but the letters SINKIE. At that instant, what he saw finally made sense. Hankoff, and millions of others around the world, had, for hundreds of years, been ”SINKIES“ without realizing it. ”

I’ve quite a thing for toast at lunch. Toast with promite or with hummus and mushroom — falls into this anomalous category where it’s gone too quickly to bother with a plate but too crumby to sprawl tummy-down on the carpet with, plateless. Other toast, like tomato, has more potential for catastrophe but if I’m not going to bother with a plate for the other kind of fucken toast then why would I with this?
^^^^^^^^^^

What are these old people singing?

A) The Cars, ‘Let the good times roll’
B) Roll over Beethoven
C) satanic summoning chants
D) The Cars, ‘Drive’

E) none of the above

^^^^^
Photos with semi-celebrities added to this entry back here.

I came across clean surface, based in melbourne, it has collections of grafitti and posters and stuff. Pretty neat but I wish there was a way to hide the comments since it seems that a site focussing on this subject matter attracts a high level of idiocy. Also sometimes it’s better to let the image speak for itself.

Senor Collis calls for photos of terse signs in the kitchens of public or private communal spaces. Definitely a widely existing phenomena and worthy of amassing. If memory serves me correctly, they got some doozies in the local (rotten) community radio station… something about how society breaks down when cups left unwashed… a former submarine officer runs the kitchen.

I’ve always wanted to do a collection or project on red shoes — where people send in a picture of their red shoes or them wearing their red shoes etc. It was about a year ago in communication with dr.crisp that she mentioned that she had a pair of red converse (as do I). For some reason it’d never occurred to me that other people also had them.
Red shoes are more special than other shoes. Because they’re red. Then there’s the whole folklore angle.

Another project that’d possibly go is fishnchips.com.au where someone travels around australia doing reviews of fish and chip shops. No good for me, for while I’m a great connoisseur of the chip, I don’t eat the fish.

Had a four hour long flashback this morning listening to the Breakfasters then Danger Low Brow which were part of RRR‘s ‘I lost my heart to RRR‘ weekend.
I started listening to the Breakfasters in ’89 or maybe ’88 so it was this huge parade of voices that I hadn’t heard for ages including TV Eye, Stephen Downes, Stuart Round (although sadly only on the phone) and then through to Kate Langbroek and Dave O’Neil — nice to hear them too, but in a different way because they’re still in the public eye (or ear). And then through it all, the amazing Chris Hatzis, who sounded to me almost like a long lost sibling because he’d been the anchor of the show for so long, and because of how early morning radio people earn themselves a special place in the listener’s psyche because they’re there when that radio-clock drags you through from one world to the next.

Danger Low Brow is and was pretty damn funny also. If you have a look at that list of names on the ‘I lost my… ‘ page it’s phenomenal how much talent (and fun) has passed through the station. I hope they hit their money-target.

Update – 18/2/04 – Dr.Stephen Downes sent me these photos and captions of the Breakfasters’ gathering that morning. Thanks Downesy!

Update 2: 29/3/04 — I just noticed that the whole three hours of the “I lost my heart” weekend Breakfasters show is archived on ther RRR website here.

Yes I was out at Not Quite Right supermarket again today and right now I’m drinking ‘Oatly’ organic oat drink. It’s ingredients are water, organic oats, organic rapeseed oil, sea salt. I think the reaon why it washed up at NQR is the plain old cause of it tastes terrible. It’s claim is that it’s the thing for people who are alergic to cow or soy milk — they’re they only people who are gonna choose it. It’s made in Sweden.

<%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|It's)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|Iron)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|chef)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|French)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|sakai)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|Hiroyuki)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|in)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|floating)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|disembodied)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|head)%><%image(20041206-sakai.jpg|36|77|form!)%>

Floating Disembodied Heads! — the iron chef ones are particularly handy because I read that despite it not having aired for all that long here, it’s finished up in Japan. So now you can grab those heads and write your own Iron Chef episodes. Well I will be anyway. I like it when that roving guy yells out “Scuzzah!” and interrupts.

Thanks to this post at d/blog I found out about this artist called charlie white and these fotoconstructions he does. There’s a bunch of links to the images at the above link. Like this. Very interesting.
(And then in the comments, more weirdness here – yikes.)

This chappy has a rather unusual angle to come at webloggen from – BDSM. Unusual in that it’s not trying to sell junk, get your email address or ram prawn at you — infact seems pretty thoughtful toward the nature of what he’s doing. Bit of an eye-opener for a simple country boy like me.

The Leonard Nimoy Should Eat More Salsa Foundation homepage.

One anonymous hopeful comes to the site here with the search request, “ocean’s eleven – is it possible?”.

“And everybody kept trying to ask me, ‘what’s your style?’ and I said, ‘Gee I don’t know I guess y’know my style is that I don’t have one.’ Ha Ha Ha.” — Kevin Costner

I’d constantly go to the cinema and rent movies but only ever watch the coming attractions. ‘Coming Atratractions’, now there’s a phraseload of presumption.
I got to thinking 98% of movies are better that way, compressed into 120 seconds, sharp clever crux-like snatches of dialog
“A man we thought had died 17 years ago.”
and expostion from the cloned, over-achieving, over-emphasizing voice over guy.
“He’s inside with us! He will never get away!”

Despite the advent of digital media and spontaneous mutation/reaction from writers, directors, actors in places like Eastern Europe or Cuba or wherever, Hollywood began to throttle cinema. Eight gigantic corporations, each producing 12 multimilliondollarblockbusters a year was never going to be enough to keep me distracted from thinking about ________.

“I think if you say something you shouldn’t say it lightly.” — Kevin Costner.

I’ve read in history books that was once a time when Fox didn’t mean Murdoch. Collarboration between Hollywood and the UK went into decline in the mid-60s. From then on there were less and less projects jointly produced and the exchange of actors decreased.
Monocropping kept the villagers thin but somewhow just out of the reach of disease.

The relationship between signifier and signified isn’t as abitrary as you might think. A cheap looking, off-white facade with no depth and nothing behind it but the barren land it stands atop of. If you stand straight to look at it it appears to be crooked. All its components are easily replaceable in the event that one should malfunction.

“You have to remind somebody what it’s like to breath, what it’s like to be out of air.” — Kevin Costner

The Australian actors assimilated themselves rather neatly and quietly into the machine; a kind of sign post to their nation’s eventual ‘friendly’ self-performed annexation.

**Richard Gere. Julia Roberts. A Kevin Costner production, Not Until I’ve Had My Coffee
Roberts: You’re not a morning person are you?
Gere: I’m not an anything person. I’m a person from 5pm to 9pm and most of that is primetime! [Cut to]
Roberts: Eeeehhheehheee hehh hheehh eehhee! **

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the movie sometimes, it has to do with, er, um what you’re about”. — Kevin Costner

Alright, alright. After receiving nearly ten irate emails from various members of the Hot Chocolate Appreciation Society, the previous entry is now properly credited.

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

Can’t stand it, can’t stand it baby
when I’m close to you, I want to touch you
there are people everywhere
people who like to stare
can’t take it baby, let’s get out of here

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

Let’s do it, let’s do it baby
let’s go for a ride
out in the countryside
just me and you, far from the city lights
that’s much too bright for this kind of lovin’

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you ther
yeah yeah

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

Makin’ love makin’ love with you
is such a beautiful thing to do
makin’ love makin’ love with you
is such a wonderful thing beneath the moonlight

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

Let’s do it, let’s do it baby
let’s go for a ride
out in the countryside
there are people everywhere
people who like to stare
can’t take it baby, let’s get out of here
makin’ love makin’ love with you
is such a beautiful thing to do
makin’ love makin’ love with you
is such a wonderful thing beneath the moonlight
aaawwww-aaaawwwwaawww
Heaven’s in the back seat of my cadillac
let me take you there
yeah yeah

— Errol Brown & Tony Wilson

I’m reading this book at the moment which I’ll mention more when I’ve finished it, but there was this couple of sentences about ideas, inspiration and new ways of thinking. It went along the lines of: the challenge isn’t in attempting to come up with new ideas, but to dispense with those that are already crowding the mind — sweep out those corners. Then new ideas will naturally come flooding in.
I wish I could quote it exactly but I couldn’t find it — I spent 2 hours almost reading the whole thing again looking for that para but no bueno.
I could relate to it. There’s no grand plan or ambition pushing out these little things anymore, but I still have to get rid of them because they drive me nuts otherwise. This is a dumping ground.

Endangered Asian Elephants In Psychedelic Red Thai Curry Freakout

Not. As the kids say, not. Another dose of revisionism I’m afraid.
1. At some point last year while reading Fiske semiotics of pop culture (maybe it was when I found there was a whole chapter on freudian analysis of The A Team, I thought ‘yeah I coulld do that. This is something ridiculous enough that I could apsire to continuing.’

The problem is the meat and potatoes of today is so called ‘reality’ or if you will, ‘event tv’. There’s a little man in the back of my head who wants me to try but I cannot cannot cannot stomach that shit. I recently read through a run down in AdNews of what ‘reality’ was bringing this year and they made is sound interesting, like the whole concept had evolved beyond the basic gladiatorial popularity elimination thang.

Since then I’ve been thumped with the commercials promoting the things and I’m always left wanting to make sick.
It’s making me feel old. The problem is I was a little kid when Knight Rider and The A Team were on, I liked those shows then so of course spending hours pulling them apart would sound like fun. They’re kitchy and inoffensive when compared to today’s fare.
But if I don’t like what’s being created today, when why should I in 20 years? From my point of view it’s just one endless stream of crap in both senses of – one episode to the next, and one series to the next. What discernable difference is there between ‘Big Brother 1’ and ‘Big Brother 3’? None. Whereas there was a qualitative difference between the first and last season of Miami Vice.
(The same scenario exists with pop music. Today’s offerings sound bare and souless … but I’ve spoken of this before.)

2. Lately I’ve seen a return trend of words or statements on t-shirts, and fuck me if it’s not horribly disappointing. Seen a kid with the nowhere-nothing-fuck mumble of, “I think you smell” in fairly small lettering, all on one line. In a shop I saw another with the word, “paradox” along with some scratchy shit — the intention being to make it look graffittious.
There have been many other equally pointless non-statements pass in front of me that I can’t recall.

A whole philosophy and way of living could be eeked out of the simple, almost zen-like three words on the t-shirts of 1983/84; “RELAX” and “CHOOSE LIFE”. These two say so much that there\‘s nothing else for me to say apart from, they were on to a good thing with the all-caps.

3. Ten years ago an exgirlfriend tried to clue me into how good the band Hot Chocolate was. I only just got it figured last month. ‘Heaven’s in the back seat of my Cadillac’ is such a solid track. It’s got an understated heaviness about it and is one of about two songs in existence that’ll get me playing air-violin.
And they do a song about a UFO encounter. They deal with the issue of racism in ‘Brother Louie’. ‘Every 1’s a winner’ is also great, as is ‘Disco Queen’.

It’s an odd day where I have to get out of bed a half hour early to shuffle over to the computer to sign up for this year’s research methods tutorial. For once their screwy network was running smoothly, and the fact that sox starts with an a helps me get the tute I want (an alphabetical order thing) … but it all feels so Matrixy. I’m 75% off campus this semester A couple extra bucks a week to tip a supermarket delivery boy and I wouldn’t have to leave this dwelling at all.
To balance out the hard, flat statistical nature of that subject I chose “Personality” as the other psychology subject. It was the most zany, trivial and POP subject they had on offer. The only thing I learnt out of 4 units of psychol last year was that it’s a very fine line that seperates ‘social psychology field experiment’ and ‘hidden camera show skit’. In fact I’ll be looking in that latter area for jobs in the future.

I added this map to the general exposition because I like how it’s got its priorities.

Via ms.buhlert — comes probably the most comprehensive collection of paperback book covers from that racy part of the 50s —that I’ve seen at least. ‘Naked on Roller Skates’, ‘Satan was a Lesbian’, what more can I say?