Sunny Breaks

I had a great time. From the top:

The Black Keys were awesome. A couple of guys who are naturals at what they do. I don’t know their stuff all that well but could appreciate a really well tube-driven guitar sound and drumming that was spot-on even when the guitar went bounding. They reminded me a bit of Cream minus a bassist. I think they’re going to be of that vintage of classickness.
It sounds odd, but the best thing I can say about them is that they didn’t let me down. It’s one of the hardest spots to play - really late in the day (11:30 - 12:30am) because I’ve seen a whole day of music and can tire of it — also very often I’ve dug music recorded then when seen live it hasn’t been as good. The Black Keys if anything were better live.

“…if you’ve got a website I want to be on it”

Billy Bragg was second best for me, and surprising because I wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. He was actually at a Big Day Out I went to once and I don’t think I even had a look. Anyway, maybe it was the sunstroke kicking in but I was moved so much to the point of even feelin’ a bit teary hearing a couple of the classics like ‘A New England’. Such an excellent song writer. It’s so hard to write politcal songs that don’t sound preachy or are coming out of the mouths of phonies (i.e. U2) but Billy’s always managed to do it. Same with relationshippy songs - just nicely done and not overdone. And like the Keys - gets a lot of sound out of a minimal set up = that’s two points for Fender amps.

TZU are a four-piece hip-hop outfit from Melbourne. I’d heard one of their songs on RRR and when they did it and hit the chorus we got a bit of audience participation going in everyone flipping the bird — “Fuck You! and your long list of isms”.
But the really cool part was later on I was wandering around outside looking forlawn to sit on and drink a coffee and I saw them sitting there so I went and said Hi! Good set, I’ve heard a couple of your songs on Triple R. I was talking to the guy you can see holding the mic. He asked what I thought of Xavier rudd, who was playing at the time. I looked away and said Oh yeah he’s alright. He says to me, You think he’s boring don’t you? I gasped like - someone else does too and said Yeah. I think the other 14999 punters were happy to have rudd take out his painful middle-class whiteboy angst-about-being-a-whiteboy-with-the-whole-aboriginal-thing on them.
I said a couple more stupid things then decide I should stop hassling them so split - eventhough they were just sitting there and truth be known no-one else probably didn’t even recognise them.
There was a million other thing I thought of later that I would’ve liked to ask. There’s so little decent australian hip-hop so far, but these guys are pretty good.

The New Pollutants were a lot of fun. Like the KLF meets your local cub-scout division meets that episode of ST:TOS with Spock laughing because of strange plants. Maybe you’ve been to some wild gigs (or sporting events) where people throw full cans at the performers — this was the other way around — the Pollutants were throwing their rider into the crowd after each song — a whole slab of green cans they were given and didn’t want. Amazing no one got sconed.

- De La Soul were good - I’ve only got their album …Is Dead, so didn’t know much of their stuff but they were big on the audience participation thing which made a good trade off with the black keys who came on after them and are more of a stand and watch thing.
- The Spazzys‘ pursuit of the perfect 3-chord song deserves respect. They’re living the rock n’ roll lifestyle - one of them broke her thumb so she couldn’t play bass but they got some guy to fill in. Very Melbourne.
- I was stuck at the stall when they were playing, but Butterfingers sounded impressive.
- Tim Rogers from You Am I is a wanker.
- Veruca Salt were there because they’ve got a new album coming out, but seemed a bit lethargic and very LA.
- I’m not all that much into The Cat Empire but they played good and one of those guys sounds like he’s permanently on helium.

I’m glad i didn’t have to camp and deal with the horrifying toilet situation. We headed back too the Ears’ Ranch at the end of each day. I felt a bit old there — I’d say the average age was 22yo, another year or two and it’ll be completely generation Y. A lot of them were from interstate. I spent most of the second day reading t-shirts. Almost nothing political, a lot of Volcom Stone which I’d never heard of before and still don’t exactly know what it is… a clothing line/label?
I saw this one little interaction where two girls were looking at a large tattoo on a guy’s back. It was of some chunk of Pulp Fiction dialogue and although I didn’t check, my guess is the ‘for I am truly my brother’s keeper …’. In dismissive tones one says to him That’s great mate, as if he must’ve been some whacko. You want to get something to eat? one says to the other, Yeah I could really go a fish taco, says the other.
I just thought it was funny - they really did have fish tacos there.

Hitched a lift back with the folks from the Authentic North Indian food stall. Really funny guy but not intentionally so. He takes things like unbroken double white lines as a serving suggestion only, and in a shitbox van hauling a trailer, tries overtaking a convoy of another foodstall trailer and a couple of cars. A car popped up over the rise at us - straight at us - I thought I was going to die, so he pushes back into the line on the left side of the road. A few minutes later a car gets to overtake us and honks as they go thru. He says in thick N.Indian accent, These drivers! they have no patience.
Nice guy though.

bassist from Veruca Salt

I’ve been reading a story by H P Lovecraft, titled The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I’m told that Lovecraft was a bit of a fascist in outlook. Occasionally that kind of thing stops me from bothering, but Lovey’s time seems so far back (1890-1937) that I don’t care. I’d read other bits of his stuff but found it slow going — something about long sentences with little punctuation being the order of the day.
But this one has been relatively entertaining and kinda makes me wish Australia had that extra couple hundred years of whitey history that the US does. It’s set on Rhode Island, and a fair whack of his writing draws up that north-eastern corner and Boston in particular.

What I like about his writing in general is the way these unspeakable horrors are described. The combination of the formal/older vocab and that clever mix of what’s told vs. what’s not told that pushes the imagination into overdrive in the way that most stuff today doesn’t.
This particular story has an interesting way of holding the reader’s perspective back a bit — like peering over a backyard fence.
Charles Ward, approx. 20 y.o., is steadily getting into heavier and heavier shit like chanting, digging up old graves and summoning up these demonic abominations — all in the attic of his parents’ house. They’re hearing strange incantations, yelling, unplaceable and frighteningly hollow voices, moaning and sobbing from behind the door and they’re asking, “Is everything alright in there?”
All this weird stuff starts happening around the town; people go missing, metal coffin-like boxes are hauled up to the attic in the middle of the night etc etc. — there’s this one nice sentence after all that, “Mr and Mrs Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former resolved to have a firm and serious talk with Charles that very night”.
There was one scene where young Ward got a ahold of the family newspaper first, spilled ink over one section of a page so that the article underneath couldn’t be read. The article being about suspicious activity at the graveyard.
Marsha from The Brady Bunch also pulled this trick once.

I won’t tell you how it ends because I haven’t finished it yet.
Background info on Lovecraft and Cthulhu.

Lately these one-trick ponies have been croppping up and I’m feeling a bit incensed about it all. These people somehow get themselves into position of making good money via creative pursuits but get away with reusing the same idea over.
I was just listeing to the soundtrack to Powaqqatsi by Philip Glass and I was about to say “it sounds suspiciously similar to 1000 aeroplanes on the roof” (another ‘composition’ of his but there’s no suspicion about it, it’s out and out reuse.
Same with the writer, Will Self. I read Grey Area, a collection of short stories by him — and it’s got characters, plots, ideas, even places which were then later re-set in a novel.

And here I am, literally tearing my hair out, hitting myself in the arm, whimpering and gnashing my teeth while asleep, eating vast quantities of lollies, wearing paper hats with esoteric symbols scrawled on them, in attempts to come up with new ideas.
It’s not like I haven’t been trying, that I’ve given up on it all or something.

There was the pitch to Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems. I proposed that McNealy leave Sun and star in a sitcom about him and his bogany, space-cadet, adult son.

notice the resemblance?

In the show, McNealy would balance being a single father to his hair-brained, guitar-wailin’-on, “Awesome!” son, Gavin — along with running one of the world’s major IT corporations — along with having plenty of zainy adventures in Silicon Valley … all with hilarious consequences. It’d be called, “My Two Suns” or some other play on sun/son.
Their next-door neighbour would be Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, who would often get caught up in plots. Larry is always wanting to fly his MIG jet up the coast and bomb Microsoft. Larry is nutty.
Also there’d be an episode where they’d get transported back to 1985 and Christopher Walken tries to sink Silicon Valley — with hilarious consequences.

In the real world, of course, scott mcnealy wouldn’t be able to keep his job and still act in the series, and because of this I was getting huge support for the show from other people in the IT world who wanted Mcnealy out of the way– mainly other people at Sun. Everything was green-lighted except McNealy didn’t want in.

I had a revolutionary idea I sent to several high-ranking ad agencies that would’ve changed the the children’s breakfast-cereal ad market as we know it. It’d be kids writing ads (well, not kids but me - same difference) and presenting the shill themselves on the ads that are aimed at the kids not the parents or let’s face it; mum (or “mom”). Conventional ads in this category are virtually interchangeable with ‘Dine’ catfood ads. They run along the script of: Problem -> kid won’t eat cereal. Solution -> convince kid cereal is tasty but not neccesarily nutritious. Like scientists and lab-rats.
Basically all I wanted to do was reinfranchise the kids, but sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked.

I was trynna pitch a Japanese Count Dracula Movie idea to Chairman Kaga. It still might happen.

And like many of us I’ve considered relocating to one of the state’s regional centres, Ballarat or Bendigo and throwing myself into the TankWar. Even people in Melbourne, let alone further afield, wouldn’t know it but there’s a fierce competition going on in rural Victoria for the average person’s (man’s) above or below ground water-tank dollar. There’s several brands in the race but the only one I can remember is ‘bushman tanks’.
If you were to get up on the roof and turn your arial toward one of those two towns and watch their refeed of the main TV stations - the ad breaks are nothing but tank commercials. (Which actually is a refreshing change from some mysogynist, nubian gobbo spruiking mobile-telephony all fucking night.)
I’m sure I could write a tank ad that’d blow your mind.

Ps. I don’t know how that damn smiley got there. It’s not even the right keystrokes there to make one.

You know what my idea of a good performance piece would be? An orchestra or 400 people with hands cupped to armpit. I don’t know what they’d play, I haven’t worked that bit out yet.

Curtsey of the liberry I had a listen to Sonic Youth’s ‘Sonic Nurse’ album this week. There’s a couple of tracks on there that have some interesting guitar sounds; stones and I love you golden blue. I think if I made a graph and had years on the x-axis and something moire abstract, like ’styleness’, on the y-axis, then made a dot point for each of Sonic Youth’s albums before 2004. It would be reasonable to estimate according to the curve exactly how an album made in 2004 by them would sound. Another word for this is Predictable.
Most people re sonic youth would say this isn’t such a bad thing, but I kind of got tired of what they were doing after Washing Machine.
Also there’s a new guy in the band. I don’t know who he is. Some new guy. Don’t know who he is, where he came from or what he’s doing there. Some new guy. Jim O’Rourke; never heard of him before. He wasn’t there before. In the group photo in the sleeve Ranaldo and Moore and standing near him, probably because he feels a bit insecure and confused — because he’s the new guy. Playing bass guitar for ‘em. That’s what Kim does/did. I suppose that’s what happens when you get to some point where the record companies can predict and bank on your band making a certain amount of profit from each album; you can hire some new guy to do the boring stuff like play bass guitar.
Bit of a shame because Kim Gordon was one of my hero bass guitar players as a teen/early 20s bass guy. I used to know this metal guy and once he asked me who my favourite bass players were. Before I could answer he did for me and said, ‘it’s Lemme right’ but no - I never dug that Motorhead thing at all. Lemme was/is a lead singer type. Kim Gordon and Kim Deal were my fave bass players. And now neither of them are playing bass. Is it really that reprehensible a life?

Forget yr tv Idols. Infact, kill yr idols. Drive an expressway through thr skull.
And check out the pop stylin’s of The Bell Sisters, circa 1950s. I partucularly recommend d/loading and listening to their first smash hit, ‘Bermuda’ — it’s at a really unusual pitch. All those songs are only a half a Megabyte each - because the songs are only a couple of mins long, as you’d expect with pop, but also are at only a low k/b per sec. rate, but still listenable.

It’s amazing how far music journalism hasn’t come.

Years and years ago I lost this audio tape belonging to Jimbo. It was Muppets, this one and it’s pretty hard to get or too expensive for me right now, but either way I can’t get him another. Which is a shame because it’s really good. He’s probably forgotten it but I haven’t.
Instead I’m going to make a tape of music to have car chases and adventures to. So far (not in order) it’s got:
jitterbug - angelo badalamenti — from the Mulholland Dve. soundtrack,
chase me - by Hexstatic
ninja walk -
nocturne -
juice - all by DJ Food, and from the Solid Steel sets,
8:25 -> 13:30secs of dj food & DK (which includes a snip of the Leonard Nimoy-narrated, Bradbury-penned, Marionettes Inc.) (there’s a 10Mb narrated version of that story here, unfortunately not by Nimoy).
4:35 -> 9:11secs of a Cold Cut/kid Koala Solid Steel set :: both of these chunks have some very nicely paced beats and brass, altogther post-war noirish.
toast to the boogie - and
scorpio - from the DJ Shadow complied ’schoolhouse funk’ album.
popsicle - amon tobin
fidel castro - the skatalites
goldfinger - tommy cooke & the skatalites — because Jimbo’s into the early skas. Maybe
skanky panky - kid koala

and that’s all I’ve got so far.

I’ve been veggo for nearly six years but chucked it in last night. Mainly because I won’t be, in a couple of months, for reasons that i don’t want to go into at this stage. So I thought, if I’ve made the decision I’m going to be eating meat then, then why the heck not now?
The main reason for getting on it to begin with was a conscience-based spiritual thing. As in — who’s to say that those animals aren’t on some journey toward kharmic Oneness alignment enlightenment, just like me. And if they are, then who the heck am I to participate in cutting short or chopping the paths of that journey. Also when you look at some animals like lambs or small cows it’s fucking obvious that they’re enjoying life and having fun. Again, who am I to put a stop to it?

Certainly the meat lobbies are partly responsible for the lack of thinking about the nature of eating animals (and I think it’s funny how that woman in the pork ads actually looks piggish) but also is the interepretation of the Christian tenet of ‘man having dominion over the “lower orders”’ or some such nonsense. It’s all interpretation, maybe dominion originally meant looking after them but not eating them.

I had a piece of flake (shark) with my chips last night. It actually made me cry. Or something did — maybe it was the movie Bend it like Beckham, or maybe I was just feeling emotionally piqued or maybe it was some kind of toxic-chemical reaction/readjustment.

It was an extremely unimpressive bit of food too. It’s the Ma n’ Pa fish n’ chip shop I go to. They’re a nice family, but their fare has never been A1. I think I’ll just go pragmatic and not be eating meat at home by myself but eat it if it’s served at me when I’m out. That’s pretty fucken meek huh.

- From way back when the Inspiral Carpets dragged me along on their stupid fishing trip to to take photos and all I had for dinner was a baked potato in tinfoil. Not pleasant memories.

ps. sorry for the heavy page loads lately.

Thanks to that illegal art collection I mentioned back here, I came across this musician person, Vicki Bennett, who goes by the name of People Like Us. A description of the sound: like Julie Andrews and the rest of the Sound of Music family were repalced with electronic replicants who keep glitching and segfaulting. “The H-h-h-h-Hi-hi-hi-hillzz-zzz-zz-zzzzz-z–z are-are-are-are-are…..” etc. Another description is a crazy person got hold of your 45s, your parents’ LPs and your grandparents’ 78s, smashed them all up with a hammer and glued all the bits back together higgledy-piggledy.
I really like it, I like it a lot, but listening to a more than half an hour in one go is like when you and a couple of friends decide to twirl around on the spot all lunchtime, and it goes pretty well but once you stop you feel kind of sick for the rest of the afternoon.

People Like Us’ latest album, Abridged Too Far, is completely available on the internet and only available on the internet.
I have a lot of respect for philosophies like this - (from the downloads page)
“We strongly believe in the power of profit through free distribution, and the publicity that comes along with that - so we are putting our money where our mouse is. Often people have never heard of an artist because they aren’t being distributed through as many channels as they should be, due to the very poor state of music/media distribution for non-major label music coupled with ignorance of the way that avant garde art forms infiltrate mainstream culture. Also many prints of a work are allowed to go out of circulation or are deleted for no reason other than cost effectiveness by a label/publisher. This makes perfect sense financially, but no sense whatsoever that a year’s work by an artist should also disappear for such reasons. So get all of this while you can, and we completely endorse getting one’s work out there, no matter what. If you don’t share, your profit is limited.”

An added bonoid of these clicks was running across Ubuweb, which is a large audio archive of old excellent poetry, weird stuff and they even re-anchored the 365 days project from last year, so all that stuff is easily getable again! Bingo! Ubuweb, I love you.

I think Tony might’ve had a link to this ages ago but I just came across it last night. The Demotivators Collection I think, of all the people on my link-list, Cybbis would like these the most.
Some of the lines are pretty damn sharp, in fact I’m going to pinch a couple for the random.txt here.
Defeat: for every winner, there are dozens of losers, odds are you’re one of them.
Procrastination: Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.
Stupidity: Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots.
Insanity: It’s difficult to comprehend how insane some people can be. Especially when you’re insane.

On that last one I read a Charlie Manson quote in a magazine, “You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody’s crazy”. Right on Charlie.

What a piece of work. I say favourite in the sense that it’s already become an artefact and could be seen as the exemplar of ‘Bond’. –
- 007 style sexism rampant throughout
- a level of cultural insensitivity I don’t think we’ll ever get back to.
- character names: Chu Me, High Fat and Miss Goodnight.

Kooky: Lee

- several safari suits and safari style shirts
- Roger Moore — the trashiest of all the bonds
- The main baddy, played by Christopher Lee, was more kooky than threatening or scary
- Knick-Knack -> thee GoTo midget when you need good midget acting action. (aside: why don’t more midgets become actors? Everyone would be happier if they did.)
- a really dippy attempt at a trippy ’60s ‘The Prisoner’ style set, 4 years after the ’60s had ended
- some of the lamest martial arts scenes I’ve ever seen
- Eurovison winner, Lulu, singing the theme song
- some pretty nifty bits in the score
- that cork-screw jump car stunt
- one really obnoxious Lousianian tourist

I mentioned last year how the channel ten weather guy, mike larkan, often does the roaming around bit popping up here and there to do the weather.

Well he’s still out there and I’m experiencing a new kind of anxiety because it’s cold, dark and rainy and he’s out there with hands firmly stuffed in pockets, telling us how cold its gonna get tonight. I think they rented out his office and now him, the sound and camera dudes are permanently holed up in the back of an OB van, ceaselessly rolling along the ring-road and arterials like one of those toxic ghost-ships that’s not allowed to stop in any port

Please channel ten, let him come inside! It’s raaaining! boohoo

Mal Walden is the closest thing to a real-life Kent Brockman I will ever know. I remember when i was six or something, a visit to Camperdown and spotting Mal get out of a red ferrari GTO with I think the weather lady. This was when he was on Ballarat BTV 6. There’s that 1-2 second gap where mike larkan throws back to the studio Mal and Jennifer, and the way I imagine it Mal’s only input in the whole hour is what he can say in that gap; its the only unscripted bit and generally he has some comment on whatever the heck Larkan is up to.

But sometime in this last 24 years mal’s lost a few marbles. Tonight he says, "Venus rising in Gemini", which may or may not have been in relation to Venus passing in front of the sun tomorrow. Maybe Mal’s become a hardcore astrologer. He always says wacky stuff sometimes it doesn’t come out properly at all. I bet he spends most of the afternoon in his office, (out of harm’s way say the real journalists) thinking up what he’s going to say.

I feel sympathy for news readers. It’d be a crap job reading out all the disinfo night after night, even for folks like Mary Kostakidis who get material of a relatively higher quality its still grisly and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it every night. Some, like Brian Nailor get silently, gradually very resentful and it shows on their faces, and others like Mal just go senile.

I feel bad for mal and jennifer too because they just dont gel together. Always accidentally talking over eachother in that bit and the transition to the end-feelgood story and saying goodnight. Terribly awkward. Jennifer reminds me of that scene out of Batman where personalities starting going toes-up with Joker grins on them.

All of the newsreaders on the ABC try to sound like Brian Henderson. He must take valium or something.

What I like is when someone stops me in the street and asks me for directions and I’m able to give them to them. That makes me feel good. Like I have a point. Also I like delivering things people like to get. Admittedly community newspapers isn’t top of the range here, but at least they’re free, and you’d be surprised what kind of crap people will accept if it’s free. But something quality would be really tops.
I want to get a plastic bowl, spray paint it gold and attach wings to the sides then wear it. Also wings for the heels of my shoes. I already practice the leaning bit. Rather than walk right up to someone I stop at about four feet away, stretch out an arm and counter-balance with a leg swung out in the other direction. I couldn’t find a picture of him doing that on the net, but there’s one in my bulfinch book. Wait until the scanner’s working.

You’d never know it but I updated to nucleus 3.0
Mostly this entry is just shunting so the page load isn’t so big.
My favourite song at the moment is Xcentric by Monolake - nice to get back to ‘pure’ electronic. All the voice bit sample grow tiresome, particular when I hear bits from the same sources. Xcentric sounds like there’s a whole bunch of ping-pong balls in it.
KLF played in Melbourne last night but the first I heard about it was Friday. Sigh.

The component of eurovision that I didn’t mention was the commentary. Frankly, I think all those whingers complaining that they want that wogan guy back should go back to england because they must be whinging poms.
I like Des Mangan. I think some of the things he says are funny. Thoughout the week I was thinking that, and thinking ‘it’s a realistic kind of funny. If he’s funny, then so am I’ — that’s a good thing. And then I read this and find that he’s been writing comedy for Sydney radio for eight years. Those sydney people must laugh at anything. It’s heartening for a laddy like me.

Anyway, I went in this competition for one of 25 copies of the book Des Mangan wrote, This is Sweden Calling — I’m so good at those N words or less competitions — the less the better (in this case 25) and I knew I would win and I did. Neato!

Yeah y’know I watched the preliminary final on Friday night and the estonian entry was good because the drummer guy hit the cymbal with his head, a la Animal from the Muppets.

But in the final last night I was going for Serbia n’ Montenegro. SBS really cashed in on the whole thing with a half hour each weeknight in the lead up, then the prelim plus the actual eurovision — so some songs I’d actually seen three times and in some cases that was three times too many.
But it didn’t take long to figure out that the serb n mont song was catchy. Nice chord sequence. Different things appeal to different people, choreography, costume, vocal performance - or the actual sound of the song is what makes me sit up. Plus they had those little guitars.
So I was pretty excited when it blasted into the lead early on, but then faded in the second half. Cora in germany also has a bit to say about it all, and I agree that the voting is the most exciting and interesting bit about it all. I said it last year and I’ll say it again now — it’s actually more complicated than the system we use to elect our political leaders here.

The Ukrainian song that won was kind of okay, but the costumes they had were totally hardcore and understandably would’ve earned them a few points. You could knock up a telemovie sceenplay in half an hour and still get it accepted if it included all that leather, fur and whips.

I liked Ludwig’s head from Malta:

or more specifically his hair do - a straight haired mullet parted at the side. Very No-Wave or something, couldda slapped on a black singlet and slotted into the new york punk scene.
Moving toward the tongue in cheek ‘I liked’, also I liked Deen from Bosnia n’ Hertzagovina’s ‘In the disco’. It was kind of funny that Deen had this intensely camp singing style but also had these rather racey looking women swirling around him.

my uni lecturer would call this scene ‘Patriarchal’
But at least it was distinctive. Interesting to hear that many of the national finalists were picked from ‘australian idol’ type shows, which seemed to backfire for a lot of countries — there was a glut of solo male vocalists. This also says something about those kind of shows (same with Big Brother) that the winners are mostly 20-something white males.
The cruisin’ down the road MOR-fiend in me also liked “Max” from Germany and his tune. Maybe I should grow my hair like Max .. hhehehehheheheehahaHAHAHAAHAAA!
I’m glad I wasn’t on acid when those ABBA puppets came on — that was horrific.

I think if the UK ever want to do well again they’ll have atomise into Wales, England, N.Ireland, and Scotland splitting in two; ’scotland’ proper and in the north Pictland (or Pixieland — ie. where the Picts live). This way they can vote for eachother.
Then again, the Swedish song seemed pretty lame to me, but did well. And same with Spain - that song was pretty forgetable. I can’t help but wonder how much politics and the state of a country’s foriegn policy PR plays a part in it. Was Spain getting sympathy votes? Did people ditch Israel in the Preliminaries because they are being arseholes to Palestine? Did the UK get no votes because they are US running-dogs in Iraq?
What this theory doesn’t explain is why was Italy not there again? (did they do something terrible and got banned for good?) Same with Hungary and Czech republic. And why did Tango King from Finland bomb out?

Passing on one such dramatic message to the world via Howard was evidently not enough, for the aliens repeatedly abducted him, which became rather tiresome. Later, however, he stumbled upon one of the few effective defenses against alien abduction: he discovered alcohol. When the aliens grabbed him from his college room one night he was in no mood to co-operate. Although he was happy enough to lie on the examination table, when they started fiddling about with him he got up and protested. The aliens tried to calm him down, but he would have none of it and stood unsteadily in the middle of the room making wild karate movements. The smaller aliens cowered against the wall while the tall alien tried to reason with him, but with no success because Howard was fighting drunk. The tall alien then stared deep into his eyes and the next thing that he remembered was that he was standing on the college lawn, about a mile away from his room, in his underpants.

Went to Melbourne yesterday. Picked up CD. Bought some (as Leo Johnson was fond of saying) ‘new shoes’. Apart from a pair of discount converse someone else bought for me I haven’t had any brand new shoes in over six years, so as you can imagine it was quite an event. I got these low-cut doctor martens which at present are a little stiff and need some inner soles for my mutie flat feet. But Veronica gave me a verbal guaruntee that I could wear them every day for the next two years before they wore out. Either way they are rather sturdy and will will be just what the doctor ordered for all those times when I phase out, walk, walk and walk until I end up in the wilderness.
So for good old fashioned service the spouting seal of approval goes to Veronique shoes on Smith st Collingwood near the corner of Argyle. Just up from the Converse, Adidas and Lotto factory seconds places. Oh the discount shoe district? Yes.

As far as I’m concerned JB hifi craps all over Gaslight these days for range of electronic music. I picked up Amon Tobin’s Out From Out Where album, which had a bonus NinjaTune ‘zentertainment’ compilation attached to it. For 23 bucks it’d be crazy not to buy it.

found at LifeLine,
$4.50
dead after 5 months,
ee hardly knew thee.
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Golly, the incumbent’s electioneering campaign is way more entertaining than the challenger’s. And golly I love being a regional Victorian, we know how to take direct action.

Apparently it happened in Kilmore, but the guy was from Seymour and there’s no way I’m going past a heading-opportunity like this. The still image is pretty alright but the video footage, all 2 seconds of it was positively stellar. The facial expressions of the bloke doing the butting — even if I had two hours to sit around trying to word that half-second as he swung his head-as-a-weapon back … I could not. The way he rebounded backwards just as much as the minder was thrown back by the force - O the physics! it was like those silver executive ball-toys. The facial expression of the copper behind them as he realised what was happening and swung into action grabbing the bloke doing the butting.
And that fantastic mullet!

I look at things like this and I don’t see a disturbing display of violence, I see humanity in all its confused, complex beauty. A small man desperately gropes for a solution to an insurmountable difference of opinion, and comes up with the headbutt — the unthinking self-sacrifice where mind clashes against mind and the aggressor withdraws in as much pain as the opponent.

Maybe it’s just due to deadline-induced stress, but I feel like I’m getting laughs out of more and more things lately. I’m grateful I live in an era where there’s video cameras everywhere enough to catch gems like this.

I can’t wait to see what ‘politics’ inspired antics are on the news tonight.

What I’ve been reading - as I mentioned, World’s Greatest Alien Abductions, here’s the best bit so far:
“In September 1955 the 27 year old Josef Wanderka was riding his moped down a road in Austria when he inadvertently rode straight up the ramp of a flying saucer. He apologised profusely to the occupants, who explained - in perfect German, naturally - that they were from the ‘top point of Casseopea’. Eventhough they were plainly adept at interstellar travel, they were fascinated by his moped and wanted to know how the engine worked. The aliens were of the ‘Nordic’ type: tall with blue eyes and blonde hair. Fearing that they might be harbouring totalitarian tendencies (Austria had been de-Nazified relatively recently), he launched into an anti-fascist diatribe. They evidently found this so boring that they kicked him out of their flying saucer without subjecting him to an invasive medical examination.”

Also a while back I heard a(nother) voice in my head - and this time it was Zellar saying that I should read Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. And I did. I don’t think it was written by a crazy woman. I’m sure I could get more out of it by going through it another ten times or so. Some of descriptions were pretty different, in this case, different is good. Seem to remember a bit about indoor plants at night that had the subtlest hint of evil about it - very nice. I had to borrow a uni library copy; the 2nd hand bookshop man telling me that while it had a bit of a literary rep, it had no volume. It’s rare to come across books like that, usually if publishers can stick a new cover on and churn ‘em out, they will. I suppose it was a bit hard to follow — seemed like a lot of the ‘he said’, ’she said’ tags were missing. Although I only read it in snatches late at night.

Also am reading The Consolations of Philosophy. Coming up against the word philosphy has made me cringe ever since I did my lolly, one fine afternoon in an Eastern Religions class a couple of years ago. I wrestled WolfBoy, a classmate, to the ground and bit a chunk out of his scalp. It was his fault. He was trying to start up the “But, Is this table really a table?” ‘discussion’. Of course it’s a fucking table.
DeBotton, who wrote this book is doing a fairly good job at dumbing down philosphy to an acceptable level necessary for this visually oriented, short-attention–
It’s kind of like a self-help book for snooty people. I like it. It introduces you to some of the main Playas and I suppose if you wanted to you could read more of their stuff if there was any who hit your wave-length.