Sunny Breaks

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.

When I was in year seven there was a kid who brought 2 minute noodles in a thermos for lunch on the first day. He got nick-named Noodle because of that and the name stuck for the rest of the year, and maybe for the rest of high school, I don’t know – I moved away. Maybe he’s an accountant now and was happily punching those numbers away today at a desk with a name plate that said, “Noodle”.
Sometimes they would call him ‘Nooder’, or ‘noodleman’. his real name was david and he looked a bit like Macaulay Culkin, not that anyone would’ve made the comparison at the time since no one had heard of macaulay culkin back then.
It wasn’t a meanly intended nick-name. It was more of a situation of, ‘there’s nothing remarkable that we can see about this guy so let’s name him after his food’.

The arse-end of jokes was reserved for Jon (no relation to the spork’s Jon!) who got into trouble often. Once he came into class after lunch and some big kids had got a hold of him and had drawn big, round harry potter style spectacles on his face with black texta. Harry Potter hadn’t been heard of back then either.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to some compilation CD set of blues, soul and R n’B stuff from da library. There was a track by a guy called Pigmeat Markham.
Three guesses what he brought for lunch.

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.

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.

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.

“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 sifting through Creative misuse and abuse of musical tools. The About page is about the nature of listening to music and so far I’ve had a listen to what’s on the ‘turntablism’ page, which has helped put sounds to names I’d only heard of, like Invizibl Skratch Piklz and DJ Qbert. There’s some Kid Koala there too. It’s an excellent little primer in concrete form.

It hooks into one of the things I really like doing — tracing creative influence back through different movements and swells. I suppose it’s like geneology of culture.
___
Speaking of defectives, I want to return the summer and get a new one. This one’s malfunctioning.

For the last few months channel seven has irritated me even more than usual, but then I had an epiphany and now I see that channel 7 can be happily set into the box that Douglas Adams labelled, “Mostly Harmless”.

Over the last year on commercial TV there developed something akin to ‘pacific time’ which apparently runs the small islands out there in said ocean, where 1pm means sometime that afternoon.
On TV, 8:30pm now meant somewhere between 8:30 and 8:45pm. Thanks very much reality-tv and other assorted bullshit.

But around the christmas/new year break channel 9 and 10 reset themselves and started to get back to punctuality. Despite their schedule being as dead as a doornail, Channel 7 was still coming in “fashionably late” and so adding more evidence to the argument that they just don’t cut the mustard compared to the other two commercial stations.

Sensationalising the mundane is something every commercial media factory is expected to do, and 7 do too, but not very well. Things are hammed up to the point where I’m laughing instead of going, “Oh, gosh that’s serious!”.

Take the weather – 7 does a little ad for their news weather man where the angle they use is that the weather is unpredictable and devilishly-scary, but with [insert weatherman’s name]’s expert advice, your short-term prospects of living through it are greatly enhanced.

The only thing 7 has got going for it is Roy & H.G. and they really should leave. And the tennis, but that’s for such a short amount of the year.

Whereas watching cricket is like watching two spit-gobbers sliding down a wall (aesthetically and result-wise) watching tennis is like watching tennis. I mean – the process of cricket is infinitely boring, but watch it for a couple of minutes and a demented desire to see how it’ll end takes over. Thankfully I’ve not been taken in such a way this summer.

What I’m liking about the tennis: that box of flowers in the background of shot. Nice, understated colours – the orange and dark yellow, green, very dark red. – Australian cult-figure and smalltime tennis ledge Wayne Arthurs. Go Wayno go Wayno!

Britian shoud’ve known that’s what’d happen if they named their probe after Snoopy. The only thing the Brits have got going for them is Prof Pillinger, seen here sporting some magnificent mutton chops. He must be in training to one day do battle royale with Asimov, undisputed muttonchopmaster of science.

Who will win this showdown??? To quote from this page (featuring asimov-chops), “This was the question that we have placed our readers.”

Also I heard that the pictures that the yankee rover sent back, ‘just didn’t have enough pazowee’ so they’ve handed the job of feeding the television over to NASA’s billion dollar computer-generated imaging unit.

==

I can’t read bob’s site but I look at the pictures and click on the links. A link I saw there: these japanese drummers flash thing. pretty neat.

I just read the first book in a series by this guy harry turtledove (if that is his real name). A friend, GG the expert Marxist, has this quirk where he’ll attempt to lend out his set of these novels to everyone at some point, because he likes them a lot.

So I said yeah sure why not.

I’d pigeon-hole it as speculative fiction. The idea is that it’s set a couple of years into WWII and then this race of space-lizards invades, intending to take over the planet. The Axis and Allies go from fighting eachother to working together against the lizards, whose technology is a bit more advanced but they miscalculated how advanced humanity was and they only have a limited amount of resources.

But there’s repetition of key points that was head-crushingly frustrating, example:

Lizard subcommander: Sire, the earthlings are fighting back harder than we ever imagined. Perhaps we should abort the mission.

Lizard fleetcommander: But the colony ships are on their way. We must continue.

Lizard subcomander: Oh yes. The colony ships.

This same conversation came up about 4 times. The same kind of thing happened with the human characters too. In any other situation this would usually encourage me to close the book and propel it into the wall on the other side of the room.

But I’ve been trying really hard not to mess the thing up and the cover got bent once as it is.

In short, harry turtledove’s “world war” series: forgetaboutit.

planned obsolescence

This is one of the things that drives me up the wall about capitalism. A few years ago I got this mosquito zapper thing which plugs into a power point and produces an un-noticable (to humans) odour that mozzies don’t like. The odourous stuff comes from these inserts, of which I needed to purchase more. And do you think I could find any? Well, yes — but let me complain a little more first.

The inserts for this thing last for ages. For instance, I don’t think I had to buy any at all during the last two summers. The insecticide companies must’ve got wise to this because now I see there’s a whole bunch of similar products in the supermarket, but their refills last one night thus making the whole process ridiculously expensive to the consumer.

It doesn’t matter if it was the company, Baygon = Bayer, that stopped producing the things, or if it was the supermarkets that decided to stop stocking them — either way it’s illogical. Or at least Marx would say it is.

Anyway, I got lucky the other day at a local supermarket and found a cache of the inserts with a ‘discontinued line’ thing on them. They’d been knocked down to 50cents each so I got them all which will last me til 2015, if Earth and its people aren’t enslaved by space-mozzies before then.

I watched the David Lynch film Mulholland Drive last night. For those who have seen it, or don’t mind reading all about it before seeing it, there’s one analysis here done by some smartypants at Flakmag, and another interpretation here which is way more impressive because it’s got lots of pictures.

However, first interpretations are often the best, so I’ll just stick to the one I came up with last night — that being that the whole thing is about giraffes.

***

Update – 6/1/04 – I watched it again last night before sending it back to the vid shop. And I kind of wish I hadn’t read those interpretations because they took some of the fun out of it — there’s no where much left to go with it because that second one – at innergrail – is really quite astute.

I suppose one small things that I noticed about the whole thing that wasn’t mentioned there is that a lot of the characters had a kind of ‘blotchy’ or pinkish look to them. Kind of like they weren’t wearing the standard smothering of make-up that HOLLYWOOD demands. It’d have to be deliberate but I don’t know what it’s saying.

Also, I should say that I really like the film. David Lynch is a rare genius.

During this last year my audiophonic appreciation for the truly oddball has grown equally with my lack of understanding of how other people cannot dig this stuff. People like my sibs, who I gave each a CD to, containing a fine selection of these songs. I don’t think they got it though.

I refer to the fantastic 365 days project. Every day of 2003 a new piece of weirdment was posted for all to sample and marvel at. The folder I stuck these in is now 1.5 gigabytes big.

Almost all of these files have continued to mingle in my general random-playing playlist. There was a couple (like that Pat Boone thing) that I ditched — but considering the volume of the whole thing, it’s surprisingly listenable.

I’ve been meaning to do this entry for all this last month, since when it was announced that the MP3 files would be taken offline soon after the end of the year. So you now have roughly two days to grab what you want. They say the files will remain available via other methods, but it doesn’t sound as straight forward as things are right now.

In no particular order, here’s my Top Ten Plus:

(for now I’ll just direct you to the archives page and suggest using the Find function in your browser. This is because the pages that contain the story behind each music file will be changing after Jan 5).

- The Humbards – I’ve Found a Hiding Place.

Actually this is my no.1 fave at the moment, so there’s a little order. This is of the old-timey, blue-grassy, jesus-themey ilk. There’s huge wads of jesus-stuff in 365 days and most of it’s really wacky or funny. Infact, to me, the whole ‘jesus concept’ thing has started to take on a different meaning because of this stuff. It’s like: make and think of it what you will = create your own meaning. It’s similar to fanfic how little people who adore these things like the X-Files (or whatever) but who will never have any bearing on what happens, so in a very small way, they hijack the characters and take the creative process into their own hands.

Jesus-fans must’ve been doing that for the last hundred years or more.

The Humbards no doubt would’ve been using big old valve amps and those chunky silver microphones and there’s just a little reverb and some nice organ too. Plus I’m a real sucker for kids singing.

- Dr. Michael Dean The Singing Hypnotist – All Of Me

The project has introduced me to a number of very catchy old classics such as ‘all of me’ and now my life-long dream is to become a cabaret singer. The idea of “attaining a happier, more successful me” through singing also appeals.

Ashfordaisyak – Leper In A Tumbledryer

Where else in the universe are you going to obtain a song called ‘leper in a tumbledryer’ except on the internet?

Someone’s tried to fill the tumble dryer with porridge.

Paul Vickers – Stars and Stripes Forever

I used to think this tune was called, ‘Ere we go, ere we go, ere we go … Ere we go, ere we go, ere we go’. And eventhough the old boy in this is singing something, I’ll never know what. All up it gave me a strong vision in tarnished dim yellow and brown of this crazy old eccentric sitting at a piano, banging away and flailing about. Maybe it something to do with the recording, but the piano almost sounds like an organ it’s being played so hard.

- Sharda – disco music and stories

More kids singing and a bit of yelling. This must come from somewhere in Europe. There’s some solid disco pee-yow sounds in there.

Sam The Drummer – Little Red Rhumbahood

Entertaining and Informative. I never knew there was a rhythm called Pachunga before.

The Hellers – Creative Freakout

This sparked off me getting interested in advertising as a form of creativity. It’s a ten minute story containing a bunch of radio comercials from sometime in the 50s? They just don’t make ads like they used to.

The Central High School Cafeteria Band – First Rhapsody For Knives, Forks & Spoons parts 1 & 2

My first choice of listening material when washing the dishes.

Jada with the Vise Squad – Jada’s Christmas Song

The only one in this list that actually has really bad singing. But is fun too.

- bonnie prudden – la cienega

This is the most energetic old-school aerobic workouts I ever heard.

And honourable mentions go to: Gen Orange – thunderstorm

Troy Hess – Christmas on the Moon

But really there so much good stuff there that this isn’t much of a time to get started on grabbing it.

Thanks to Otis Fodder for putting in the time and effort thoughout the year.

“Far and away the single most popular crime ‘yellow-back’ was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, a novel originally published in Melbourne, Australia, by the author, Fergus Hume (1859-1932), at his own expense. There is, in fact, probably no more unlikely success story in the history of crime fiction publishing than this tale of a brutal crime in which the identity of the killer is actually given away in the preface! Hume had been born in England, but emigrated with his family to New Zealand and then moved to Australia to practise as a lawyer. In an attempt to augment his income, he asked a local bookseller what kind of book sold best. Hume wrote later, ‘He replied that the detective sales of Emile Gaboriau had a large sale; and as, at this time, I had never heard of this author, I bought all his works and determined to write a book of the same class containing a mystery, a murder, and a description of the low life of Melbourne.’”

“Unable to find a publisher for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Hume decided to publish the book himself and just about covered his costs on the first printing. One purchaser of the book, however, was an Englishman who evidently had an eye for a commercial prospect. He promptly bought the rights from the author, set up the Hansom Cab Publishing Company in London, and launched the book onto the nation’s railway bookstalls. With its simple yellow cover and an illustration of a hansom cab, it rapidly sold 350,000 copies, a figure which was doubled when the story was reprinted in America. By the end of the century, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab had been translated into 12 foriegn languages.”

“Hume, who was still in Australia while all this was happening, scraped together enough money for a fare to England and arrived in London to find his name on everyone’s lips. It should have made him wealthy, but having sold the copyright he was not entitled to a penny. Disappointed but not downhearted, Hume settled in Essex and in the years that followed tried desperately to repeat his success, writing over 100 more crime novels — including Madame Midas (1888), For the Defense (1898) and the optomistically entitled The Mystery of a Motor Cab (1908) — but none achieved anything like the popularity of the first book. Today, in most histories of crime fiction, Hume is dismissed as a hack whose books are unreadable and whose most famous story was ‘tedious from start to finish’. Yet it outsold the works of Poe, Collins and even Conan Doyle for years, and more copies were bought in its ‘yellow-back’ format than any other title. Furthermore, the original Melbourne edition has the distinction today of being one of the rarest books in the world – only two copies are known to exist.”

: I lifted this out of The Classic Era of Crime Fiction by Peter Haining, published by the good folks at Chicago Review Press. It’s a large hardback book with heaps of pictures of book covers and goes through to about 1960. Very nice.

Of course i refer to channel 10 Melbourne’s roving weatherman extraodinaire. I couldn’t care less for the rest of the news hour, but i always switch the telly on at 5 to 6 to find out what the future holds. The weather segment is the only part that ever talks about the domestic scene, and does it in an upbeat way.

Mike goes out and does ‘on the spot’ style weather reports form all over the joint. At first it was just when there was some event or something happening, like a special exhibit at scienceworks. (In fact, these days he’s out at scienceworks so much that they gave him his own office.) But lately it’s been any excuse to be somewhere — anywhere; the other week Mike was on the ‘Time Wounds All Heels’ hill in Northcote near where i used to live. Not that there was anything special happening there, he was just there. I’ve thought of writing him an invite to do a gig from the backyard here, why not ay?

When he says Geelong, he says Geeeeelong, and when he says Malacoota he says Maaaaalacoota — and I think this is great. I like it when in the current temperatures bit Geelong is slightly warmer than Frankston, because frankston sucks and we kick their arses. My only minor quibble with mr.Larkan is that when he is actually in the studio, he stands right in front of the numbers for the forcast for the week ahead and generally I only get to see them for half a second, which at that stage of the day isn’t long enough for them to soak into my usually frazzled out brain.

I got a sense of Mike’s talent for the O.B. (outside broadcast) a while back when he was on hols and the stand in person did the gig from a pub in Williamstown. It was a disaster, all I could hear was a mumbly background din of patrons talking. I don’t know how Mike would’ve overcome this, but believe me, he would’ve found a way.
But last night the inevitable irony took place, and heavy rain leaked into the OB truck, and mike wasn’t able to transmit from wherever he was.

Courtesy of The Unkie George Show, here’s a brief interview with Mike. Maybe I need to get more oxygen, or that it’s in transcript format, but it reads pretty abstract.

Two beverages i picked up at Not Quite Right:
<%image(20040113-whey.jpg|134|288|whey)%>
At first I thought maybe they got this idea from some distant land; maybe somewhere else thinks putting whey and citrus juice together is a fine idea. The kind of taste that at very first impression is gross, but becomes oddly compelling. Why did this end up at NQR? I’ll get to that later. On the box it says whey is a wonder product. What the hell is whey anyway? I don’t know, but while it lasts I’ve got my daily reccomended intake of it licked. Just got to work on the curds.
<%image(20040113-chug.jpg|141|281|chug a lug!)%>
This was really yum – I kept sipping and sipping until it was all gone in one go. It tops farmer’s union iced coffee easy, and that’s saying something. It also contains whey.
On it, it says, “Drink Chugalug straight from the pack, or by the glass”. That’s a funny expression isn’t it, ‘by the glass’. It’s like, ‘I’m sitting here, by the glass, drinking something’. Maybe it should be, “...straight from the pack, or in the glass”, but then that sounds like it’s a giant glass and your climbing into the glass.

Both of these are made by the folks on King Island. They have a website, but there’s nothing there.
So my guess is the whole project suffered from drastically bad financial management — that’s why I found this stuff at NQR. And now they’ve go a crapload of whey sitting around down there that they don’t know what to do with. Or maybe the purple monkey had something to do with it, shifty lookin’ little bugger.

The Bank – A delightful little flick depicting rural Australia’s dizzy affection for the corporate banking sector.

Ghost Dog – directed by Jim Jarmusch. Bits of samurai literature spilced with footage of an african-american man walking around shooting people. A must for any pigeon lover!

Fight Club – Thinly disguised promotional piece for Ikea furniture. My rating: Yawnsville!

comments:
Jon
the spork
date: 2003-11-18-23-41
I kinda liked fight club – agree on the well placed ikea advertisement though =). Never watched Ghost Dog or the bank.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-11-19-09-23
Ah, it’s all a bit toungue in cheek. For me Fight Club suffered a little bit from everyone telling me it was so fantastic.