1. with Michael Richards. It was kind of sad to hear the story of where he’s at now. It sounds like he doesn’t go out much. Pretty refreshing to come across something that seemed as honest as that was. The one with Larry David, the other writer of the Seinfeld TV series was similar in how it showed how neuroses-riddled the Hollywood area of LA must be.

2. with Alec Baldwin, who seemed to be one of the only interviews that really comfortable to be interviewed by Seinfeld. I like how he basically put jerry on the spot and asked him why is isn’t doing more. Baldwin is funny and came across as one of the least self-obsessed of the people on there.

3. with Karl Reiner and Mel Brooks. This one was the best, and I haven’t even seen the Dick van dyke show, and you know I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Blazing Saddles all the way through (although I will soon now). I read through both guys’ wikipedia pages after this—and you really have to respect Mel Brooks for trying so many non-mainstream things during his career. I liked the real life element to it as well—these guys are old. Both of their wives passed away in the last ten years—and now Mel comes over to Karl’s house each night and they watch DVDs together. Brooks is still funny as hell, but everyone gets old and eventually ends up talking with a bit of food stuck on their face.

If you’ve got a spare hour or so you definitely should watch at least those three—it’s way better than the shit-sandwiched between the same commercials on TV these days.

After six or seven years BOC finally released their next full-length album. It’s been a long wait. From memory, the last one, The Campfire Headphase, was one of the first things I purchased over the internet with my (then) newly-minted credit card (really just a debit card but whatever).

Bleep.com, a digital music store, sent me the link to my purchased download last Friday night—much earlier than I was expecting! And so, each day for the last week I’ve been having a listen to the album to get a feel for it. BOC’s stuff is anti-pop. Pop and successful TV jingles succeed because you can hear them once and they dig into the memory. The melodies and chord progressions in Boards of Canada’s music are much subtler and take time to come out. But this means they also have a much greater longevity and relistenability.

Tomorrow’s Harvest I would say is more of the same, in that the sound of it is similar to their stuff in the past. The last most recent, Campfire Headphase, had a fair bit of guitar used in looping ways which made it a bit different but it was still clearly BOC. “More of the same” isn’t a negative judgment at all, because for the last 6 years fans everywhere have been waiting for more of the same. It’s because of this that they become my number 1 favourite musical performer. Amon Tobin used to be it but then he went off in ambient, unmelodic directions.

This new album, if anything reminds me a bit of their 2002 album, Geogaddi because of the ‘bad trip’ overtones. BOC’s music is often generalised as psychedelic trip music but then sometimes it’s not all happy sounding.

And I think that’s what’s happening with Tomorrow’s Harvest. My take is that it’s a nuclear apocalypse concept album. The artwork: sunrise in San Francisco, but then it looks a bit like an A-bomb just about to go mushroom too. Then there’s the titles of some of the tracks: Reach For The Dead, Cold Earth, Sick Times, Collapse, New Seeds, Come To Dust. New Seeds is interesting because it’s one that really sounds like the title – it reminds me of science and robots planting things on Mars or something.

The music by itself is just music and doesn’t sound down particularly when compared to other BOC stuff, but there’s no samples of kids’ voices counting numbers or singing rhymes. There’s no samples of the original Boards of Canada Public Service Announcements—or if there are they’re so distorted that I can’t tell what they’re saying yet.

From what I’ve read in the rare, odd interview they’ve done, they’re the kind of group that only releases 10% of what they produce, and it may well be possible that this music was made years and years ago. Anyway, I’m really liking the album and I just hope it’s not another 7 years til we hear from Michael and Marcus again.

Ps. (minor congratz to bleep.com on having their shit together better than those idiots at topspin media.)

This link is already on the delicious feed (right) but I am quite inspired by this 15thC. boy and his diligence in documenting his own fashion sense. I may do the same since I got some clothes for my birthday.

Also I wanted to show and tell my piggy plate. I got it as part of a set of four at a garage sale. The others are sheep, cow and chicken. Piggy is the stand out, partly because he is wearing a napkin as if he is about to have a meal rather than be the meal as the collection would suggest. They were made in Indo-nesia.

New shoes:

There’s a New Balance clearance centre on smith street collingwood with 574s for 80bucks, so ebay sellers who advertise products they don’t have can go to oblivion. I couldn’t get the exact colour I was after but I am satisfied.

J-e got a job last week! [at cryptic clue: “to grok” (less deep)] I always knew that when we came here, her job-skills would be more marketable than mine. Her team is Team Baby. If it was me I would insist it be called Team: Baby! or at least Baby team alpha. Anyway, this is good news financially and so one thing we have been sorely lacking is a decent couch. We got a futon sofa couch from Back To The Futon in Preston. It’ll be delivered next week and is sure to do wonders for my posture and productivity.

There was actually a drivable version of this in LA Noire but it never occurred to me that it was a real car until I recently read an article about great cars that died an early death. It’s worth reading the whole wiki article about it because there’s so many amazing things about the design that I won’t rewrite them all here. In 1935 it must’ve looked like what a UFO floating past would look like to us today. I’m really surprised no one has tried to revive this design in some way.

Other stuff that’s fallen by the wayside:

1. I love stumbling across websites like this -> Drive-ins Down Under. Someone has narrowed their focus to one thing and spent a long time researching and digging up info on it. Very interesting.

2. Ford. I guess I wasn’t under any allusions that ford was anything other than an american company that made cars here but it is disappointing to see them shutting down completely here in geelong, essentially because they couldn’t give a fuck. The last innovation they came up with was the factory mass-production line back in the 1920s and since then it’s just been about keeping the status quo. Maybe if they’d started repositioning australian production 20 years ago into the smaller, more affordable/efficient car sector then maybe it’d be a different story.

I was surprised to read that the Kenner merchandising of the original Star Wars trilogy continues. This scene, from Star Wars 4: A New Hope, set in a briefing room, best remembered for Darth Vader saying, “I find you lack of faith disturbing”, and also doing the invisible choke on one of the meeting participants, is the subject of a whopping 7 figure set, costing 80-90bucks! I remember when they were $1.50 each! Apparently, someone out there out there in the sci-fi community, imaginative and with too much time on their hands, made up an 8000 word story about the guy wearing white, who in the film was completely uncredited.

Do you know this man?

So Sunny Breaks is putting it out there. PSA. Is this your grandpa? That old guy who lived next door with the great lemon tree who used to get the odd bit of work here and there as a film extra? Tangentially, doing a google image search for ‘do you know this man?’ gets a bit sketchy – but this is interesting.

In other news Flickr is finally doing something about updating itself. Unfortunately it’s not the right thing. Flickr is owned by yahoo! Yahoo! is like the GTV Channel 9 of the internet—everything they do seems to reek of crapiness.

I don’t know how but I missed this movie up til now. Maybe it didn’t too well at the box-office, but has a pretty good storyline and a big cast. I have said it before, I really don’t know what good acting is. Maybe it’s this -> ^ when Robert De Niro does his brief side-glance thing. (This can also be seen Goodfellas). Anyway, very different from the Miami Vice TV series that Michael Mann is best known for, featuring De Niro as the criminal, Al Pacino as the cop and a whole bunch of other people including Val Kilmer and Henry Rollins.

The only reason I came across this film is that one of the heists set ups gets borrowed and drafted into the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 5 which’ll be released this year.

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I’ve really been meaning to try and get around to putting a bit of individuality into this wordpress template layout but the more push-button they make them, the harder they are to modify and my html skills aren’t what they used to be.

Also, probably like most weblogs, I get the odd hand-delivered attempt at slipping some SPAM through the net (how miserable must these people’s lives be, finding weblogs to cut n’ paste spam into each day?) and most of them are lame-o nonsense but I have to note the below example as one that made me pause for a second, thinking it might’ve been a real commenter.

‘Hello there’ writes:

Hi! I understand this is kind of off-topic but I had to ask.

Does managing a well-established website like yours take
a large amount of work? I’m completely new to running a blog but I do write in my diary on a daily basis. I’d like to start a blog so I can
share my experience and feelings online. Please let me
know if you have any ideas or tips for brand new aspiring bloggers.
Thankyou!

Nice social-engineering you got going there. Close but no raisin toast.

It was initially nice to get hands on my banana-boxes full of old records, tapes and CDs that have been sitting in mum’s garage for the last 8 years. It was specially nice to have a little look at the CD cases of albums I’d listened to a lot during the different parts (places, friends, adventures) of my time in korea—soundtracks. I bought several (not a huge amount by my own standards) CDs while I was there, ripped them to computer then brought them home to mum’s place for safe keeping on holidays.

I’ve already mentioned how artwork, liner notes and that concrete sense of possession are terribly, badly lacking from music in the MP3/Internet medium. But sometimes old stuff isn’t as good as I remember it either. The CD “jewel case’ was probably designed by some coked-out ‘80s executive who obviously wasn’t thinking of longevity when they decided on brittle plastic for flimsy hinges and those little circular clippy bits that are supposed to keep the CD in place.

My re-experince of tapes was worse. I am from the cassette tape generation. The first albums I bought were on tape. I started taping the radio right after I discovered radio. I had a whole load of tapes of stuff I’d taped off 3PBS and RRR during the early-mid 90s that I’d been itching to get back to listen to. Stuff that is obscure enough that I have very little chance of ever finding on CD in 2nd hand shops. Because it was taped off the radio there were all these big FM scratchy sounds blasting through intermittently which I’d forgotten about. Plus there was this HUGE slab of white noise which was really, really noticeable and hard to ignore. I haven’t given up—I need a better tape player with clean heads.

I haven’t found a record player at all yet so I don’t know how the records will sound. I did have a hi-fi (now there’s a relative term..) here for a few days that had CD, tape players and a record player with no needle but I got rid of it again thanks to freecycle.org (the digital place where real people come together to pick over eachother’s junk) mainly because I kept noticing how much space it was taking up. I thought about the functions it could perform (tape, CD, radio etc) and the electronic components needed to make those things happen and I kept think what’s all the rest of the space in there for? I guess that’s caused by a combination of living in an age where a song now takes up the space of a few electrons (or nothing at all, in my house at least, if I was streaming the music) as well as living in shoe-boxes in korea where home-space is at a premium. It still is a bit here in the new place.

Streaming music, not even radio stations, just music services is much more common in Korea, and from what I can gather in the US too. And it makes me wonder how this younger generation (the millennials or whatever they’re called) will experience musical nostaligia if they’ve got nothing to hold onto. Very few people keep their old mobile phones when they move onto a new one and the phone is really the only physical site that I can think of that a person might be able to go back to to remember how things were. But then, these things always find a way (even if it seems in diminished form to an old fart like me). Just the other day I was surprised to find that my girl J-e, who I’d always thought was dead against computer games, used to play a game called Princess Maker when she was a kid in the  early 90s. We found some clips of it on youtube and the music from it brought back memories for her.

I don’t see radio station bumper stickers on the backs of cars like I used to.

In conclusion, Steve Jobs and Jony Ives have, and will continue to, destroy society as we know it.

edit – article on revival of tape format

edit 2 (21/05/13) – BBC article on tapes.

Apparently there was an earth tremor  around here last night. I didn’t feel anything, although I didi wake up at 3am. But it’s always like that. Something like a loud car or a yobbo yelling could wake me up but then by the time I’m awake and conscious of the fact I have no idea why I’m awake—and usually it’s just because a dream has finished and I need to go take a leak.

My favourite meal used to be fish and chips but I’ve had it a total of three times in the 2 months I’ve been back. I think I’m just a bit too old for it now—it doesn’t feel that healthy. And I’m a bit dismayed to find that the unwritten rule of potato cakes is no longer being honoured. It used to be that if you ordered two potato cakes they’d give you three—and so on. Not anymore. Two is 2.

In the war of slugs v. me, I’m winning. It’s made easier by the fact that they only seem to like beetroot and lettuce seedlings. I put coffee grounds around the beets and that stopped the slugs, but I thought it might be caffeine-blasting the seedlings. They’re looking better after a couple of days and I’m going belt and suspenders by adding crushed up egg shell around the perimeter.

I’m really enjoying having ground for gardening. You know, I may have even mentioned it before, but sure land is at a premium in S.korea, but it’s also the mentality there in that it’s normal to live in tiny places with ho garden. I have to say it was difficult being that disconnected from nature and not having your own little bit of nature to mess around with. The last place I lived at here in australia (just down the road) I did have the opportunity to do gardening but wasn’t really into it. I guess, something about it not being “mine” but here, now, eventhough we’re renting I do feel more like owning it and so am having a bit of a play at vegetable growing.

Above: the more successful of the beetroot, to date. I put some in part of the lawn area and they were looking good initially but then were attacked by slugs or something. Also the birds, though they mean well, keep scratching up that bit of ground looking for worms. I thought the soil underneath the white stones might be okay, and once we’re done the stones can be easily raked back into boring rental-position. They’re getting the most sun and so far are unbothered by predators.

Also planted some broccoli, parsley, fennel, spinach, lettuce and a half-hearted attempt at potatoes. May need to get some straw to really make potatoes work which may exceed my lazy-threshold.