The Price Of Green

Billy Bird by Jared Mees And The Grown Children

2011-06-07T13:42:00.002+10:00

Jared Mees And The Grown Children skirt very closely to the All Their Songs Sound The Same Abyss. It's a sort of canyon in the realm of creativity which lots of really exciting musicians fall into. Orba Squara fell into it. Sigur Rós dove headlong into it.

The Abyss is where indie labels go when they need new releases by British India and The Rakes and The Futureheads and The New Pornographers and Kaiser Chiefs. Et cetera.

The musical world is full of geographical locations, all named after common critiques.

Jared Mees And The Grown Children look down into this Abyss when they write music. They write music from near the top of Too Long Songs Mountain. This is a dangerous place from which to compose pop-inflected folk-rock ditties. Your trumpet might fall off the edge.

But that's OK. Jared Mees And The Grown Children are intrepid journeymen. They have left behind their trepidity and cruised down Boppin' Along Highway. They've been to Variedinstrumentationville.

They've climbed deep down into the Meaningful Lyric Caves, drank of the mineral waters in its depths.

Then they wrote this song.

MP3: Jared Mees And The Grown Children - Billy Bird

Bring It On music video by The Gaslight Anthem.

2011-06-03T09:00:00.000+10:00

Don't say stage freeze just do it.

Waterworld.

2011-05-31T17:06:00.007+10:00

It flooded very mildly in Kingsford yesterday. I needed to be on the other side of that street there. I ended up getting a cab three hundred metres up to my home. Apparently a couple of blocks from here someone had to get the SES to come get them out of their car. Waist high water and all that. Fifteen minutes after I took this I went around to Anzac Parade and water was coming up into businesses. Fun times.

So here's some flood music. The Strums used to be in a punk band. Now they play sweet sweet folk because that's where all the cred is.

The singer Jai (what a guy) Sparks had his riverside Brisbane home flooded in January during the Queensland inundation and put out a song about it. The video was filmed in the house after all the water was politely asked to leave.

Also single's the B-side is a pretty killer song.

MP3: The Strums - Gimme Some Hope

My Chemical Bromance.

2011-05-28T09:00:00.004+10:00

M4A: My Chemical Romance - #SINGItForJapan

That's the actual name of the song, hash symbol and all. It wasn't a bad song to begin with and I don't think they've ruined it with their vaguely insulting cultural imperialism any more then did by licensing it that cash cow Glee.

Speaking of being a white douchebag interacting with Japanese culture, I just finished watching the first season of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. 2 1/2 stars. Too much dialogue written by eleventh graders, too confusing a plot for my puny Western brain to comprehend.

Anime producers would do well to sit down and watch a few shows on HBO and AMC. Hour long novelistic episodes and a 'Previously on...' introduction would really suit the medium. Just um just saying.

Also The Lonely Island has a new album.

MP3: The Lonely Island - Japan

Mac and cheese and cut up hot dogs by mc chris.

2011-05-25T09:00:00.002+10:00

This is adorable. For anyone who doesn't know, this guy has done some voices and music for shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab 2021. This is from an EP of children's songs called marshmallow playground.

MP3: mc chris - mac and cheese and cut up hot dogs

A Sixth Part Of The World, part 5 by Michael Nyman.

2011-05-03T22:34:00.003+10:00

3 May - 10:30pm, Kingsford

MP3: Michael Nyman - A Sixth Part Of The World, part 5

Michael Nyman. My God. Why isn't this man living the life of a rock star, right now? Strippers and cocaine, he deserves it all.

Notes from Melbourne, Day 4.

2011-04-28T09:00:00.004+10:00

18 April - Melbourne.

0700: Six hours sleep. Oww.

0845, Coburg: Before b/f try Syd Rd, too early for anything to be open. Seems like the shit parts of Parramatta Rd.

Indignant bogan conversation on tram, along the lines of "Cab drivers can't refuse to take drunks: it's your fucking job." Talk about how also refusing to drive-though @ Hungry Jacks. Cabbie: "No I don't do that."

Bogans joke about "Oh can I get a scotch and coke? 'No I don't do that. I can give you a beer though.' " Variations on the joke go for 3 blocks.

A block in Melbourne is a fucking eternity. Welcome to Coburg.

0930, Hardware Lane, Melbourne: B'fast @ Jeremy's. Toast & ginger-fig jam. Coffee I can barely taste anymore. I'm going through a pack of tissues/hour. Three stars, for service and cheapness. The Age's story about survivors of Port Arthur getting on w/ their lives is touching also.

I've been asked directions at least once a day since I've been here.

A runny nose means my immune system is defeating the bacterial invasion, right?

1100, Sydney Rd, Brunswick: Oh good. The hipsters have come out. I no longer feel threatened. I forgot how early I awoke & how late they did. Must've been a good Friday night Melbourne.

At OKOK, nice trousers but probably too small. When ask where similar stores are, owner ums & ahs & sends me to SAVERS.

Savers: where hipsters and the desperately poor come for clothes. Most of the stuff seems to have been on the racks of in Target in the mid 90s.

1300: Schnitty @ Retreat Hotel. No rating because how can you rate a pub schnitzel. Schnitzel is God's lunch.

Pages of poetry plastered on the cubicle walls of the unisex toilet (this is a pub w/ a family beer garden, odd).

I'm about to go ask who the poet is when I see one titled 'Desolation Row'. Would've looked a right fool.

MP3: My Chemical Romance - Desolation Row

Dylan playing over the stereo also. Barmaids playing handball.

1615: Pretty sure I just saw Wil Anderson crossing Bourke St wearing track pants with triple speed strips down each leg. Listening to iPod. Hid my recognition. As a famous comedian I know what a bore it is for people to keep recognising me in the street.

1700, Tullamarine Airport: 45 minutes in two queues for check-in. So glad the woman about to complain to Tiger about her miscomprehension of the check-in fees is behind me.

Twenty minutes of solid bitching. Lady. Your children are listening to you complain. You're raising complainers.

I want to ask the check-in lady not to seat these people near me. I don't.

1800: Lovely chat w/ the Irish lady doing the random explosives test. Good to know government employees still have heart.

1830: Just because I'm wearing a flashy jacket and reading a book people seem to think that I have all the info on the boarding times. I don't. I just happen not to look like a stupid tourist.

1835: That's three people who think I have the answers.

Maybe people confuse me with someone who has information b/c I don't have that indignant look of someone left in the dark about their fate. Just I'm not curious about why the plane is half an hour late. My knowing won't make it come quicker.

1845: Angry lady is complaining to the lady scanning boarding passes. She has also pushed in front of me with her mother, aunt, and four children. They are not sitting together. This worries her.

How hard is it to lose your child on a plane. Jodie Foster did it but that plane was enormous. Settle down. Complaining makes the process take longer.

Complaining on the plane.

God damn it they're sitting near me.

2030, Sydney airspace: This lady is a walking crisis. Return to your seat, they're trying to put the plane onto the ground and once again you're holding everything up.

I slept through the flight.

I bet your flight was awful. I hope it was. I hope your children grow up awful.

A small child behind me is crying as a result of the effects of turbulence and decompression on his eardrums.

He needn't. Like an animal, he is spooked easily by unusual, unexplainable phenomena.

2040, Sydney arrivals terminal: I like to dress well when I travel. Travelling is filthy, communal, and lowering. Dressing well is the only way to add dignitas to the process. There is little to distinguish air travel from the transportation of livestock.

Cranky woman's bag is 1st off the carousel. I hope the last is also hers.

MP3: Orba Squara - The Trouble With Flying

Notes from Melbourne, Day 3.

2011-04-25T09:00:00.002+10:00

15 April - Melbourne.

1030: Sleep in, but not as late as my layabout roomie.

Sick sick sick.

Crack youtube to listen to 'Kingdom of Spain' to get the running medley of Turner songs out of my head. Not that they're bad, just I'm going insane.

1130, Victoria Markets, North Melbourne: Open air cafe attached to market. Pumpkin & corn soup for breakfast. Hot hot hot. Bread minimal. I came to this city expecting huge wonderful chunks of delicious crunchy bread to go with my soup. Butter overflowing. Where's the Europeanness? Functional meal. 2 stars.

Petulant tween girl, eldest of four girls accompanied by two women (mother/s unidentifiable). Wants a cappuccino. She pouts and sulks is annoying.

First someone selling chocolates, now someone has come in here and is just openly begging. Beggar avoids me, hits up everyone else. Scorrre.

Tween complaining about "lack of lifelines." Rubbing furiously at her palm. This soup can't finish quickly enough.

1245, Bourke St Mall: Stroll through the city. Nothing worth my money. Bespoke suits and Sportsgirl.

George Kamikawa is busking in the mall. Jeeesus. Play them blues, baby. Play 'em.

MP3: George Kamikawa - Cross Roads

He thanks everybody for money or for buying a CD.

1430, Fitzroy: Have ended up on Brunswick St again. V. nearly spent a whole lot of money on factory clearance Revival and Dangerfield stuff, but Ghazi calls and saves the day.

Cartlon Gardens are lovely. Wonderful to see citizens actually using their parks, instead of just jogging through them.

1530, Carlton: COFFEE #4: Blend of the week or something at Seven Seeds. Little warehouse deal in a back lane run by bona fide hipsters. Don't see what the deal is with the special blend, but that could be the illness. Nice place though. 3 stars.

3 1/2 for having an indoor bike rack near the back entrance.

1600, Ormond College: Scotch o'clock.

2030, Lygon St, Carlton: Steak pepper (or Mexican) at Café Cavallino. This place is huge. Quick service, or else somebody messed up the order. 4 1/2 stars. Did a number on the wallet, though, but you simply can't let these things distract you.

Ghazi and I discuss making undergraduate degrees more exclusive.

A flashing sign is telling people about road closures. SEEK ALT ROUTE. Sure, Melbourne. Sure.

2130, Errol St, North Melbourne: The kid selling cigarettes to this drained out pleb is barely 17, certainly. He's making eye contact w/ me b/c he knows I know when he tells the prole unsolicited what the cheapest brand of smokes is there's an undertone of classism there.

Things Vic has NSW doesn't:

Children selling tobacco, from all the registers.
No requirement to put single takeaway bottles in paper bags.
Credit withdrawal @ pub ATMs despite the RCG issue.
Oh that's right, no pokies. So no worries.

2200: Ice cream & beer & reading Vonnegut on the roof of the YHA is as good a way to spend a sick Friday night in Melb as any other.

2300: How do sad/pregnant chicks in romantic comedies possibly go through a whole pint of ice cream? This is ridiculous.

Notes from Melbourne, Day 2.

2011-04-22T09:00:00.004+10:00

14 April - Melbourne. Cycling Adventure Day.

0930: Hangovers in strange cities.

Complimentary continental breakfast @ YHA not worth the money I didn't pay for it. 1 star.

(Later: Ghazi: What exactly wasn't continental about it?
Daniel: Probably the Rice Bubbles. Or the single slice of cold toast. Or the coffee, instant, which came in a packet. The dude just poured boiling water in a mug and passed me a bottle of milk and said go for it.)

1145, Parkville: Unimelb where is your Quad? Did you demolish it when you demolished your undergrad degrees?

Oh, there it is. Classics & Philosophy noticeboard in the Quad. Way to go, useless knowledges. Keeping Asians out of the sandstone since for over a century.

Wha... is that a CAR PARK? How can you people be so nonchalant about that? If I used that car park I'd be all high fives all round, every day.

1330, Fitzroy: Back to Brunswick St. Cycling, throat sore as all hell. No more coffees for me I think.

1550, Carlton: Bloke standing outside ANZ on Lygon St with a sign: Warning. This business discriminates against the poor. Glad I don't need to get money out.

Steak Sandwich @ University Hotel. Oh my GOD the cravings. 3 1/2.

Cycling between suburbs. Amazed how easy it is to get around in this town. It's so small.

Shopping alone, ill, is awful. I'm even more disoriented than normal.

Sick new shirt @ American Vintage, Brunswick St. Guy tells me about new shipments, new shop location. I tell him I'm from Syd. He doesn't relent on the email collection.

2100, Errol St, North Melbourne: Late dinner after illness nap. Fettucine Marinara @ Errol's Italian place. Top notch pasta. Shit rosé. 3 stars.

Notes from Melbourne, Day 1.

2011-04-19T09:00:00.009+10:00

[This is transcribed more or less completely and without editing from my notebook, in which I took sporadic notes during my trip. I had wanted to drink a lot more coffee and alcohol and to review/judge more places, but illness got the better of me.]

13 April - Melbourne

1030hrs, Tullamarine: No idea Tullamarine was like in the country. This is ridiculous. Also big props to the old man who kept me from reading my book during the flight.

Here are some things I learned about him. He:

flies twin engine planes. Why he isn't flying one today is a mystery.
also buys and sells trucks, the purpose of his journey to Melbourne today, because I asked.
has like a nephew or something studying in Melbourne. Law. Rents a three-bedroom with two mates, share a car from the commute. They have a written contract to not bring anybody into the house, women et cetera. They sound like the most obnoxious wankers. Suited to one another.
is a massive gambler, as is his wife. He resolves never to spend the principle when he makes a win, he is something like four grand down over a couple of decades of roulette.
takes only ninety minutes to warm up to a person before he breaks out the racisms and begins talking about how They have all the jobs at airport security and the post office.
interprets people looking down at their books after lengthy silences as cues to resume speaking.

The Tiger Airways arrivals lounge is a big shed with a baggage carousel and a toilets that are just a step up from portaloos on the transience scale.

1045: To Southern Cross Station, this place looks just like Sydney. They still have MX and they still have Creamfields. Cultural capital my arse.

COFFEE #1: "Reg." FW. Grinders @ Fresh Connections Cafe. Hot, bland. Regular is HUGE.

Kinfolk - non-profit hippy cafe cnr. Bourke/Spencer. Communal tables. Ladders as bookshelves. Pumpkin soup, kumara, ginger & dill yoghurt. 3 1/2 stars. When you leave they ask you to put a coffee bean in one of four jars. Each jar represents a Cause. They divvy up the profits according to the weight of the jars. I went for Palm Island indigenous education.

COFFEE #2: Reg FW takeaway from Kinfolk. Not too bad. 3 1/2.

Lt. Collins St: I mean this city is European in the sense that there's no room to walk.

1300, Elizabeth St, CBD: Thanks to the kindly hipster who showed me how to use the ticket machines on the tram. Apparently they are exactly like Sydney buses machines except with inexplicable teeth at the hole.

1330, North Melbourne: 'I love people in glasses who have just come out of the rain. It's funny.' Check-in at the YHA. Chicken snags. BBQ sauce abandoned in YHA kitchen with rubbed off best before date.

My bearings are fucked. There's no sun to tell the compass by. The problem stems from I have no idea where the airport is in relation to the city, so from this everything's off. Maps take forever to read.

1650: Something about standing in the middle of a road about the size of Anzac Pde just seems intrinsically foolish. Tram stop.

Convinced the grizzled blue collar type just gave evil eyes to the Indian who got on at the back & evaded fare.

1715: I think my confusion using the Metcard the 1st time stems from the misguided assumption that the ticketing system in this city is somehow more advanced that Sydney's.

The wide empty streets & the verandah post architecture make this seem like a massive country town.

1800, Brunswick St, Fitzroy: Intersections have cars stop 2m before pedestrian crossing lane to allow for bikes to skitch up the inside lane & get 1st go in the line. NICE. The future, ladies & gentlemen.

1830, Collins St, CBD: Overheard on a tram:
"I want to go see Dr Zhivago."
"What's that?"
"It's a new musical. I don't know what it's about."
"Oh, I thought it was an actual doctor."
"I saw it on a commercial."

Two observations about the tram system:

It depersonalises the provision of public transport services: it is difficult to thank a tram driver.
It is easier for smug douchebags to get away w/ not paying the fare, and feel good about beating The Man.

1940, North Melbourne: Those fucking sausages are repeating on me. Gross gross gross gross. Isaac what have you done to me.

2000: COFFEE #3: Gelato Shop, N. Melbourne, Elizabeth St nr Queensbury St. Far too sweet for anyone's taste + the fact that he joked w/ me in directions to the Arthouse: 2 1/2.

Daniel: Also do you know how to get to the Arthouse from here?
Old Italian man: Arthouse?
D: Yeah, it's a music venue? Apparently close to here.
I: Ohh, that's three or four kilometres that way.
D: What? Really? I was told it was...
I comes out from behind counter, leads D to door.
I: Yeah, I'll show you where to go, you head down this way here about forty five minutes, and it's just over there.
Points across intersection at the Arthouse.

N. Melbourne along Eliz St etc has the sense of the dilapidated forlorn about it. This is one of the last Arthouse shows. It feels a lot like the Annandale, inside & around.

Interesting not only that parallel areas in 2 cities have similar origins, but that they have such similar timelines of development/decline - here & Annandale.

The queue stretches around the corner. Handsome moustachio'd indie boy and pretty indie girl stand on the corner. I wonder why.

The group of girls in front me me are causing a hold up at the entrance. Apparently they have a bundle of tickets, and one person less than the number of tickets. They step outside. "Anyone want a ticket?"

Cries of "Yes" from the back.
"My girlfriend left her ticket in Tasmania!" That seals it.

1815: There is no easy way to say "I'm on the list" w/o sounding like a knob or being overly friendly/apologetic for being on the list. Either way you're a knob.

House music is a combination of hardcore punk and the Weakerthans.

It must be difficult to tailor music to a show if you don't really know the artist or their scene.

Indie couple sit on sofa across from me. If I were a taxidermist I would kill them and stuff them and I'd have to poison them so their clothes don't get ruined.

2010: First line of 'Heat Exhaustion' = 5 people in the crowd ahead of me drink. Weirdly synchronised.

Chalkboard @ The Arthouse reads:

Frank Turner
(UK)
Isaac Graham
(Sold Out)

The pot/pint difference (as opposed to the lesser middy/schooner difference) encourages more women to drink beer, I'm thinking.

2145: 'You can't play a wrong note on a harmonica.' Fuck off Frank Turner. I've done it loads of times.

2220: If Mel. is the exciting culture city where is the boring city?

People are never drunk enough to enjoy opening acts properly.

2230: Converses doused in some girl's spilt beer. She's apologetic. I had dodged the afternoon rain but was no match for the Arthouse.

Night time Mel has the same colour as Syd. Bare, neutral yellow streetlights, neon blue lights identifying establishments to avoid.

I fear that when I sing along my growl alienates nearby fans. (To the east, rawr).

2330: Oh my God I just stood up and realised how intoxicated I am.

The amount of times I've said "You're 'right" to people tonight. Melbournians are so apologetic.

If Isaac comes to Tas. Lachlan Hayes owes a drink. Pint.

Lachlan Hayes lowest airfares guaranteed.

Indie couple = Lachlan + Jedda. Jedda did not leave her ticket in Tasmania, she never bought one. A deception has been played.

Lachlan plays me in pool. Lachlan wins. I show them Pie Face.

Melb is fucked on a week night.

Arriving drunk @ 3am @ the hostel I think I interrupted a midnight rendezvous outside.

The King Is Dead by The Decemberists

2011-03-25T20:30:00.001+11:00

25 March - 4:30pm, Kingsford
In 2006 The Decemberists released The Crane Wife, a concept album based around a series of parallel narratives drawn from Japanese myth and Shakespeare, among other places. It was great. In 2009 they released The Hazards of Love, a concept album-cum-rock opera that told the story of shapeshifting rapists, river gods and heroics set in a pagan British mythic landscape.

It was god-awful. The story itself isn't that bad; Colin Meloy studied creative writing, and is obviously enchanted in the common themes and motifs that pop up again and again in pre-literate and classical myth. Critically, Hazards was ravaged for its over-reliance on the concept, the confusion of it's delivery (Meloy sang most of the eight or so parts), and the sacrifice of lyrical depth and musical variation for the sake of the narrative.

This year they have released The King Is Dead. The opening comments of most reviews I've been reading of it have been along the lines of Thank God there's no concept, thank God this isn't Hazards. It's simple roots-rock-folk-American. It's simple and enjoyable. Then the comments from people who enjoyed Hazards: this is just bubblegum country-pop. It's boring. It's commercial.

Now let me tell you about rebirth and the wintertime.

This album is pure James Frazer. The hint is in the title. And in the two "hymns" in the track list, 'January Hymn' and 'June Hymn'. One winter, the other summer, hymn as in religious song. The concept in The King Is Dead is seasonal change, winter to summer and back to winter again. There's no grand connected narrative here, but there are hints and associations in the lyrics.

Put simply, the common thread of most ancient religions comes from the problem winter faced to early agricultural communities. Winter caused the land to die, and nobody knew why winter happened. On the understanding that Hey, couldn't hurt, right? people began giving gifts to deities whom they suspected had the power to return the land to life.

People began to figure that whenever it went cold and dark in the world, they could sacrifice a child or a lamb or whatever to a god, and later on it would become spring again, and the land would become fecund and fertile. They began telling stories that explained the turning of the seasons.

These stories became more and more complex, riddled with new symbols and motifs as societies changed and developed. One of these is the Fisher King in Arthurian legend. The wounded impotence (literally, he's suffered a stab to the junk) of the King flows into his kingdom: the land turns to rot. Colin Meloy knows all this; it's from the same mythic world that he drew from for Hazards and The Tain. The King is dead? The Fisher King had to have at least crossed his mind coming up with that. There's also the more metaphorical association with new beginnings that The king is dead, long live the king expresses.

There are only two references to monarchical government in the lyrics. One is in 'Down By The Water', in which "the lash-flashing Leda of pier nineteen" is named "Queen of the water and queen of the old main drag". 'June Hymn' is a stripped-down, folksy pastoral that celebrates the coming of summer, and includes the lines "A barony of ivy in the trees / Expanding out its empire by degrees / And all the branches burst to bloom". For now I'm more interested in the latter reference, since I don't know what to make of the allusion to Leda.

The floral lyrics in 'June Hymn' refer back to the opening track 'Don't Carry It All', which describes "A monument to build beneath the arbors". Come June, the fertile season, "Training Jasmine how to vine / Up the arbor to your door / And more". That Jasmine is a plant and a girl's name is a nice touch. That she is sneaking around up pergolas, suggesting youthful trysting to go with the newness of the plant life, is another nice touch. That "And more" is a glib little euphemism positioned against imagery of a fertile land is an amazing touch that convinces me that Colin Meloy knows exactly what he is doing with this album.

I mean I could talk about seasonal and plant imagery some more. There's plenty. 'Rise To Me' promises that "To cold climes comes springtime". 'January Hymn' describes clearing "away the snow / And the green ground below", as well as "Pale the winter days after dark / Wandering the grey memorial park". By track six, 'Down By The Water', we have the first stirrings of change: "The season rubs me wrong / The summer swells anon". And look at the album art.

But even once we hit summer it's not all rosy. The human condition can't be cured by longer sunny days. There's an undercurrent of conflict that runs through the lyrics, beginning with "You and me in the war" that opens the second track, 'Calamity Song'. That song is about surviving the Apocalypse, and for its lyrical content the music is enjoyably upbeat. On 'Rox in the Box' Meloy sings how can only "endure our fellow man", while 'June Hymn has a throwaway line about "the thrushes bleating battle with the wrens". The memorial park in 'January Hymn' suggests that conflict is as regular part of the seasonal cycle as the flowers blooming. Track ten is "This Is Why We Fight", as amazing a love-in-wartime ballad as Her Majesty's "The Soldiering Life". My point is that there's something poignant about how community arises in the wintertime out of survival necessity, only to turn to war again come the summer.

Anyone who didn't see a concept in this album isn't listening to it. I mean even if some of my reading isn't anything close to what Meloy was thinking when he wrote it, there are enough lyrical associations between the songs for a strong and obvious theme to emerge. Oh, it's just pastoral imagery. They've done a country album, of course they're going to talk about natural and trees and seasons. Give Colin Meloy some credit. He knows what he's doing. This is more than just a collection of songs.

I'm not even going to bother talking about the music. The review scene has decided that they sound like R.E.M. and The Smiths and Springsteen and other bullshit 80s/90s rock I never listened to. It sounds like early Decemberists. Although with more slide guitar and well-perfomed harmonica.

Five stars. I mean Jesus.

MP3: The Decemberists - June Hymn
MP3: The Decemberists - This Is Why We Fight

You're still a hipster.

2011-03-18T09:00:00.000+11:00

17 March - 3:30pm, Kingsford

Shit like this makes me wish I lived in the Sydney electorate.

Gramahawk by Modern Skirts

2011-03-17T03:28:00.001+11:00

17 March - 2:45am, Kingsford
I've always felt that the phrase je ne sais quoi smacked of intellectual surrender. As if to say "It has a certain... je ne sais quoi" was to give up trying to explain something, but not without buttressing your intellectual cred by speaking in French. A je ne sais quoi (I'm just going to use it until it loses meaning) is something innate, not apparent, inexplicable, but important and crucial beyond anyone's ability to comprehend it.

Horse shit. Anyone who uses je ne sais quoi to describe anything simply lacks the analytical skills to figure out what they feel, and the vocabulary to express why.

So anyway that's how I feel about this record.

It's enjoyable. It's all good fun. But the drum machine beats and the way the synths are used create a tension in the mood that pulls it up short of being a pop-fun indie rock album. But it's not dark and brooding, either. It's bi-polar.

I've got no beef with the actual music. There are a lot more good songs on here than mediocre. The opener 'Jane Child' is an offbeat love dedication to the eponymous 1980s R&B performer, carried by the falsetto harmonies. Jane Child Jane Child Jane Jane Child Child.

Past that, though, I don't know what any of the songs are about. This is due in equal measure the muffled, sometimes undecipherable vocals and the abstract imagery of the lyrics. At one point I heard the line "playing rugby with the Thanksgiving Day parade". One verse down there's an inexplicable reference to Nancy Reagan. And I mean look at the album art. What the hell is that even about.

The album is built on the fact that none of the songs sound like any of the other songs. The instrumentation is similar, though, which is the only thing giving it coherence. The drums have that stadium rock feel to it that feels as if it's some deadpan joke that we're not supposed to be in on. The synths have been run over sandpaper. The bass is bottomless. You'll get the occasional acoustic guitar arpeggios to shake it up, like on 'Glass of Water'. It's all very enjoyable.

But I'll be damned if I know what it's about. I mean. It feels as though there should be something there. It's just so god damned moody. It's like The Faint with the synths turned down, and with fewer songs about conception. With titles like 'To Be A Branch Davidian' and 'American Gothic', you'd expect there to be some exploration of the darker sides of American culture here. As far as I can tell they're just glib references, with no follow up. The titles of many of these songs seem to have no logical association with their lyrics.

There aren't any stand-out tracks on this album. They're all "pretty good", which is more than good enough, because at the end of the day this is a collection of ten pretty good songs. Maybe it's just because the music's grown on me that I want there to be something to it than just catchy beats. I don't know. This album takes some getting used to, sure. But once you give it a few listens, there's really something to enjoy on here. Even if I don't know what it is.

Three and a half stars.

MP3: Modern Skirts - Jane Child
MP3: Modern Skirts - DUI

The Hold Steady at The Metro Theatre

2011-03-17T01:26:00.005+11:00

8 March - 8:00, Sydney CBD

Pity The Hold Steady. The only reason I was even there is because the day before The Metro had ten double passes to give away over Facebook to people who could explain why they should be let in for free. I figured it was one of those competitions where you won if you put a little more thought into your answer than Because I freakin LOVE THS!

Because, I mean. If you loved them, you would've bought a ticket weeks ago. My response went

Because that one song they do, it reminds me of the time I rolled with the wrong sort of crowd, made out with the wrong sort of boys. Boys who liked to ride in my car. Boys with knives. Boys who knew what it takes to be a man.

That was a very dark time in my life. That song is totally me. If I get these tickets and they play that song, I will destroy your fine theatre from floor to high ceiling with my bare hands.

I needn't have bothered. Eight people entered. I won by default. For anyone playing at home, the song was this song.

MP3: The Hold Steady - One For The Cutters

They didn't play it.

Even with all this extra room meat in the venue, they still had to close off the back area of the theatre, drive people to the front, make the place seem more packed than it was. The show was woefully under-attended. It would have suited the Annandale Hotel, made a better show even, what with the intimacy.

The Gun Street Girls were the sole openers. None of them were girls. I get jokes. They played straight-down-the-line rock & roll from a high stage to an almost empty room. They dressed like they were The Living End, and they were from Melbourne. Lots of energy, but nobody knew who they were.

Toward the end of their last song the bassist picked up a harmonica and played some. He stopped playing bass. When they finished, he forcefully threw the harmonica onto the ground. It was then that I knew I was in the presence of a Rock Star.

When The Hold Steady came on, balding dweeby frontman Craig Finn stepped up to the microphone and said "We're gonna have a good time tonight." Then they launched into 'Constructive Summer'. Those in the predominantly male crowd made up for their low numbers. They had a good time.

As was to be expected, the show was all about Finn, in a good way. He carried the whole thing on his narrow office worker shoulders. Leaving most of the instrument work to the two other guitarists, he poured himself into his vocal duties. Gesticulating like a raving Mediterranean. Offering up commentaries on his songs' stories in between lines, with shakes of the head or lip-read words spoken away from the mic.

Photo ripped off Daniel Munns of Virgin Mobile Photography

Between songs he would tell stories. I was compelled to compare him to John Darnielle. He came off the lesser, but still. (I mean who doesn't?) He tells us he is 39 years old. He has been doing The Hold Steady for ten years. Before that, he wore a tie to work. This story had become a part of stage presence. He seems so constantly surprised that he's made it, as if at any moment They might come and take his guitar away and send him back to his day job, some awful mistake finally rectified.

My difficultly with the show was that I'm only familiar with their two most recent albums, numbers four and five. Apparently number three is a motherfucking cracker. Everyone else there seemed to know it. So did the band. I knew perhaps 30% of the set list, and had to pretend with the rest.

Noticeably absent, and perhaps accounting for the set choices, was a keyboardist. At one point some crowd members called out Where's Franz?, referring to keyboardist Franz Nicolay, who left the band after five years in 2010. Certainly the show could have benefited from a touring keys player, especially considering how central they are to the studio recordings of some of their better songs.

During 'Most People Are DJs', near the end of the set, Finn instructed the audience in how to clap double-time. It was a fast and tiring rhythm to keep, for the committed only. "That sounds like real people," Finn said, smashing his hands together gleefully, "That sounds like real love."

Three stars.

No Witch by The Cave Singers

2011-03-06T11:38:00.000+11:00

3 March - 3:15am, Kingsford

I'd never heard of The Cave Singers before listening to this album. This is a First Album For Me. Two songs in I was sure they were a folk band. And then boom, 'Black Leaf'. Blues rock. Say what you will, but soft bucolic folk and riff-driven rock and roll with distorted vocals just happens to go really well together. Cheese and onion, if you will. Apparently this is all a part of the Seattle music scene at the moment. Basically I don't give a shit about any of that because Fleet Foxes are supposed to be the epicentre of this roots-folk revival there and I don't care for Fleet Foxes. What I care for is the range of instrumentation that The Cave Singers employ here to do their thing.

'Gifts and the Raft' with some sweet vocal harmonies set off to a violin and a building drum part. 'Swim Club' does the summery nostalgic finger picking that we're going to see on a car commercial sometime soon I'm sure, and I'll be god damned if that isn't a washboard in there too. On 'Falls' they've got a trumpet and an organ playing off the electric guitar's rhythm-making. In 'Haller Lake' there's a solo that belongs to what I'm pretty sure is a melodica. 'Haystacks' has a harmonica.

Not that these guys are all virtuosi at all these instruments: they're not. By and large the 'extra' instruments have only very simple, basic melodic functions in the song. But that's all that's needed to make a song stand out from every other blues-roots-folk-indie-country-rock band that's apparently out there making ordinary Americana music. The fact that the rhythm and percussion sections are solidly built, and the guitarists definitely know their business, makes a solid foundation for this album. Everything else is delicious icing.

Oh, and vocals. The harmonies are really well done in places. Definitely check out 'Haystacks', with its gospel chorus contrasting up against the raspy smoke-too-much verse vocals. The only real problem here is that because of lead singer Pete Quirk's vocals and the bluesy distortion they get put through, I can barely understand what's being said a lot of the time, which really does take away from my enjoyment of this album. There are some slow points in this album, like 'Distant Sures', but the songs are different and varied enough that you're very rarely bored by it. There's always going to be some new variation on the folking and the bluesing up next to keep you listening.

Four stars.

MP3: The Cave Singers - Swim Club
MP3: The Cave Singers - No Prosecution If We Bail

Showroom of Compassion by CAKE.

2011-03-03T09:00:00.003+11:00

3 March - 1:15am, Kingsford

It has been seven years since CAKE released an album. When a band takes this long a break between major releases it typically means one of two things. The first possibility is that they have rethought their entire sound and aesthetic and have through many long desert nights painstakingly wrought The New Sound, and have returned to share it with the world. Green Day did this when they made American Idiot. The second possibility is that they have lost their musical mojo, and that the album will be a disappointing travesty, a weak and hollow shadow of a band's previous excellence. Tool did this with 10,000 Days.

CAKE have done neither of these things. In the last seven years, the only thing CAKE have done is write more CAKE songs. The sounds has not changed. It has just become better.

How Showroom of Compassion differs from earlier CAKE albums really is inexplicable. Certainly the tough love trumpet solos are still there, as are the woahs and the heys in the background. The country twang hasn't disappeared. There are still references to motoring in the lyrics (even a reference to 'The Distance' in 'Mustache Man (Wasted)': "He is racing, he is pacing..."). The meaning of the lyrics is still unintelligible, but I can still read the underlying sarcasm. This is still music that envisions the white man's non-LA, non-SF Californialand.

But it's been modernised. 'Federal Funding' is a smarmy tirade against the extravagance of federal government bailouts. The sound is reminiscent of 'Comfort Eagle', and the slow head-banging rhythm is a veritable ton 'o fun. This album opener showcases CAKE's newfound respect for the synthesiser, which is getting much more of a run here than on previous releases. Actually, it's one of the most appropriate album openers I've seen in a while. It's representative.

There are a lot more songs that feature piano/synth more prominently than on previous albums. Again, not that CAKE have toned down the rock 'n roll any. On songs like 'Easy To Crash' and 'The Winter' the synth shares melodic duties with the guitar, sometimes alone, sometimes at the same time. It's a great mix.

As for new-but-the-same sound, see also 'Teenage Pregnancy'. A piano-driven instrumental in triple time, the piece is carried in turn by piano, trumpet, synth and guitar. Compare it to 'Arco Arena', an instrumental from 2001's Comfort Eagle, where the song rides along entirely on guitar. 'Teenage Pregnancy' has a lot to play around with, and that makes it listenable. It's not as if the band are doing anything particularly different in the sort of noise they're making. It's just that they're exploring better ways of making it.

Basically what it feels like CAKE has done is spend seven years writing and rewriting a whole bunch of songs, crafting them to perfection, and then finding the best possible selection of songs to make an album with. They aren't trying to do anything more with Showroom of Compassion than to record a whole bunch of amazing CAKE songs. Nothing much too far from what we know, no concept albums or any of that. The album starts to slow down in the last few tracks, but this in no way detracts from the releases' quality: these are all really enjoyable, tightly performed songs. Eminently listenable, either as a whole or shuffled into a playlist.

Four and a half stars.

MP3: CAKE - Federal Funding
MP3: CAKE - Easy To Crash

The fashion world, it's full of idiots.

2011-03-03T00:32:00.006+11:00

3 March - 12:30am, Kingsford

"Fashion world stunned by Galliano's sacking", reads the ABC headline. [Get at it here.] The story is that John Galliano, the head designer from Dior said some racist things in France and The Sun (sneaky buggers) filmed it. The sacking came after the video came out. The video showed Galliano saying "I love Hitler ... People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed." Why is it now 'stunning' that he's been sacked because of this? More stunning would be if he kept his job.

Also. He was asked, "Don't you want peace in the world?" His response was, "Not with people like, not with ugly people in the world."

Two things.

Thing One. I this address to John Galliano, and I use potentially offensive language because John Galliano, you deserve it. John, you work (well, worked) in the fashion industry. You design clothing for a living. You also have sex with men. That's two things that make you a bit of a faggot. Just quietly, being gay was one of those Undesirable Things that the Nazis would send you to the gas chamber for. On top of that, contempt of gays was one of the very, very few things that the Nazis and their Jewish/Gypsy/Communist prisoners had in common. Your typical concentration camp Gay could expect the hardest of hard labours and to be treated with violence from both prison guard and inmate alike. Courtesy of Herr Hitler.

But oh my God, didn't those SS uniforms just look fab?

Thing Two. What a half-arsed attempt at denunciation from the fashion world followed this. Jessica Stam, model: "I love the Jews and what he said is awful, but also sad to watch him leave Dior" (Twitter). Chanel Iman, model: "I love John Galliano. ... He is one of the most creative, genius designers that I've worked with and he's so open to all types of people. He's loving and he's caring and I wish him all the best." Unless it's toward people who aren't Aryan. I mean come on Chanel. That's the sort of thing you say when someone retires because they want to move on with their career. It's not what you say when someone loses their job because they've exposed themselves as a Nazi-loving bigot. The general response is a bit underwhelming: "Yeah, I mean of course it's bad, but it's so sad that Dior is losing such a talent."

Or: "If only there were some way that we could ignore this guy's admiration for Nazis and just let him continue to make amazing clothes for us to wear."

The moral: the loss of a talented individual is an acceptable situation for any society or organisation if it also means putting a Nazi sympathiser out of a job.

Predictions for the Winners of the 83rd Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) Awards

2011-02-25T09:00:00.001+11:00

25 February - 8:00am, Kingsford

Best Picture: Inception – Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas
Best Director: David O. Russell – The Fighter
Best Actor: Colin Firth – The King's Speech as Prince Albert/King George VI
Best Actress: Natalie Portman – Black Swan as Nina Sayers
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale – The Fighter as Dicky Eklund
Best Supporting Actress: Amy Adams – The Fighter as Charlene Fleming
Best Writing – Original Screenplay: Inception – Christopher Nolan
Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network – Aaron Sorkin from The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3 – Lee Unkrich
Best Foreign Language Film: Biutiful (Mexico) in Spanish and English – Alejandro González Iñárritu
Best Documentary – Feature: Gasland – Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic
Best Documentary – Short Subject: (Um.) The Warriors of Qiugang – Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon
Best Live Action Short Film: (Um.) The Crush – Michael Creagh
Best Animated Short Film: The Lost Thing – Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan
Best Original Score: Inception – Hans Zimmer
Best Original Song (Um.): "We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3 – Randy Newman
Best Sound Editing: Tron: Legacy – Gwendolyn Yates Whittle and Addison Teague
Best Sound Mixing: Inception – Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo, and Ed Novick
Best Art Direction: Alice in Wonderland – Art Direction: Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Karen O'Hara
Best Cinematography: Inception – Wally Pfister
Best Makeup: (Um.) The Wolfman – Rick Baker and Dave Elsey
Best Costume Design: Alice in Wonderland – Colleen Atwood
Best Film Editing: Black Swan – Andrew Weisblum
Best Visual Effects: Alice in Wonderland – Ken Ralston, David Schaub, Carey Villegas, and Sean Phillips

I've got no idea what I'm talking about. True Grit doesn't get any predictions because I haven't seen it yet. I know the Coen Brothers' cinematographer Roger Deakins keeps getting nominated and losing, but I haven't heard enough hype about him this time round to say that this might be the year. I haven't seen The Fighter either, but a silly little detail like 'I haven't seen it yet' would never stop me from sending an Oscar Christian Bale and Amy Adams' way.

The Best Original Score category is hardest for me to pick. The Inception score was amazing. But there's a lot of buzz about Reznor and Ross' The Social Network score. I'd love to give it to Desplat for The King's Speech, because the music actually worked for the emotional content of the film. Problem is, a lot of it wasn't original, more like Mozart and Beethoven, and I worry that the Academy wouldn't be willing to give the award to that.

[Edit: 50% hit rate, not too shabby.]

Wagon Wheel by Mumford & Sons

2011-02-22T09:00:00.002+11:00

10 February - 4:30am, Kingsford

Speaking of Wagon Wheel. This is from a live radio session they did last year for the BBC.

MP3: Mumford & Sons - Wagon Wheel

A recent history of folk punk, part 3.

2011-02-19T09:00:00.008+11:00

10 February - 12:45am, Kingsford

< Part 2.

Chuck Ragan, as a solo artist and in Rumbleseat, was never as politically vocal as the Florida folk-punk acts. Chuck was always more about the music, and when he was playing country and folk he never let the music get overshadowed by political gripes. While still a punk rock leftist, Chuck is more of a storyteller than anything. He uses the genre more as a medium than as a political statement, which is the opposite of what I think the folk-punks in 2003 were doing: quality but rough DIY recordings to shove in the face of Tom DeLonge and Deryck Whibley's corporate masters. Chuck Ragan walks the middle path between Johnny Cash Americana and Defiance, Ohio protest songs.

MP3: Chuck Ragan - California Burritos

Around 2008 Chuck started up the Revival Tour, a tour of punk musicians playing acoustic folk and country music. He didn't have to look far for participants. When the Revival Tour came to Australia in 2008, Chuck brought with him three other performers. Tim Barry and Ben Nichols come to folk-punk from opposite ends of the spectrum: Tim is from the hardcore punk band Avail, and Ben Nichols from alt.country band Lucero. It works well for both. The sole Briton on the tour, Frank Turner, is formerly of Million Dead, and had started doing the folk-punk solo thing as a main project after that band finished. Tom Gabel has also been on the Revival Tour.

MP3: Tim Barry - '222'
MP3: Frank Turner - I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous

The Revival Tour provides performative exposure for artists that might not necessarily have the greatest amount of exposure on their own to pull a big crowd. Sure their bands might fill a venue, but solo, playing country and folk songs, it might be a struggle. A Lucero fan might no know Avail, and not know to see Tim Barry, even if they like his music. And vice versa. These musicians' solo music is often markedly different from their bands' output.

MP3: Ben Nichols - Chambers

Solo acoustic and folk side projects for established punk rock artists are becoming a Thing. The Revival Tour is making these releases more well known. In 2008 Tom Gabel released Heart Burns. In 2009 Ben Nichols released The Last Pale Light in the West. Chuck Ragan has been releasing solo albums since 2006. In 2010 Brian Fallon of The Gaslight Anthem did a split 7" with Chuck. This is a whole incestuous music scene that runs parallel to the mainstream punk action of which all these musicians are all a significant part. Frank Turner is the odd one out, since he isn't in any other bands, yet he still gets support slots for The Offspring and Green Day.

MP3: Brian Fallon - Tin Pan Alley

So back to Fat Wreck Chords, and they seem to be getting right into the folk-punk scene. Old Man Markley, whose music [Get at it here.] gave me the idea for this essay, are definitely more country than they are punk, which is an odd gamble for Fat Wreck. Against Me! paid off for them, and they've been watching the increasing popularity of the the Revival Tour solo acts with interest. I'm guessing they're banking on their customers nowadays being somewhat sophisticated and broadminded in the genres of music that they listen to.

Lucero have always been something of a bridge between the punk scene and the country world, and if Hank Williams III would stop being such a fucking spoiled wannabe redneck brat he could probably make something of himself in punk. It seems weird that the two genres have become so closely related now, especially considering that punk began as a radical offshoot of rock & roll, which in turn was a radical offshoot of country. I'm interested to see how the hardcore punks take to this intrusion of country and folk into their genre and scenes. Hopefully it'll spell the end of hardcore punk, but maybe that's just because I don't like bad music. For the now though, I'm just waiting for Sydney City Trash to fully take off in Australia. They're um. They're country/folk-punk, right?

MP3: Sydney City Trash - Cuntry

A recent history of folk punk, part 2.

2011-02-16T09:00:00.006+11:00

10 February - 12:45am, Kingsford

> Part 1.

These were exactly the sort of bands that punks wanted to listen to when 2004 rolled around, and Fat Mike put the Punk Voter campaign into action. Remember 2004? A year into the Iraq War, no WMDs in sight, the first recession of Bush's presidency, also Bush was a dick. In 2004 Green Day released American Idiot. I call 2004 the Summer of Fear. There was an election in November. There might be a Democrat in the White House in 2005.

MP3: The Heroic Livers - Will You Still Dance With Me

I have a suspicion that from 2003 Fat Mike was looking for especially political acts to poach to the Fat Wreck fold. There must have been some understanding that as the election drew closer, political punk would become more popular. I won't say that he cashed in on this sentiment, but he certainly fed the market with the two 2004 Rock Against Bush compilations, as well as NOFX's 2003 War On Errorism. Then there was the Punk Voter campaign Fat Mike organised to try to get young people out to vote.

MP3: NOFX - The Idiots Are Taking Over
MP3: RX Bandits - Overcome (The Recapitulation)
MP3: Against Me! – Sink, Florida, Sink

The effect of this exposure of the American punk market to the hard left folk-punk sound was to popularise the country and folk noise among punk listeners. Hence Rumbleseat releasing Rumbleseat Is Dead in 2005 through No Idea, a compilation of their 7"s. It wasn't as if Hot Water Music wasn't doing well.

MP3: Rumbleseat - Cursing Concrete

After the election though, folk-punk was sort of left to simmer. In 2005 Against Me!/Tom Gable contributed 'Wagon Wheel' to Protect: A Benefit for the National Association to Protect Children. This is a cover of song by the bluegrass band Old Crow Medicine Show, who in turn recycled the chorus from an unused Bob Dylan recording.

MP3: Against Me! – Wagon Wheel

Nothing much happened in 2006. Defiance, Ohio released The Great Depression and then in 2007 did The Fear, The Fear, The Fear (both on No Idea) but neither had the punch or the immediacy of Share What Ya Got. With the absolute certainty of a Democratic victory in 2008, even without Obama yet on the scene, the politics had faded out of independent punk acts. Of late-noughties punk bands, The Gaslight Anthem is the pre-eminent example of this softening of the political message.

In 2007 Against Me! sold out again and released New Wave on Sire (a subsidiary of Warner). In 2007 Juno came out and as far as I'm concerned if you were a folk-punker then after this film you became either an indie folker or you went back to the fold and reverted to punk. The lesson people learned from Juno, if you didn't already know it, was that you didn’t have to be a smelly punk to make good DIY folk music.

MP3: Kimya Dawson - Loose Lips

Five other films came out in 2007. They were No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and 3:10 to Yuma. They repopularised a Western aesthetic in American culture which I suspect was also appropriated by their musicians. In 2009, for example, Ben Nichols released The Last Pale Light in the West, an album based on Blood Meridan, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, who also wrote No Country For Old Men. The fifth film is In The Valley Of Elah, which to my mind is the epitome of 21st century Americana on film. It's important to note that these are all Depictions Of America And Her Culture.

Also in 2007: Chuck Ragan released his first solo album Feast or Famine through SideOneDummy, which do such world-folk punk acts as Flogging Molly and Gogol Bordello, as well as indie rock acts like Dusty Rhodes and the River Band and (Florida) punk acts like Fake Problems and electropop acts like The Sounds. My point is SideOneDummy isn't a punk label. It's not Plan-It-X and it's not No Idea. It's a broad church label. It goes where the music's good. And it's where soft-political folk-punk ended up after the 2004 election.

MP3: Chuck Ragan - For Broken Ears

> Part 3.

A recent history of folk punk, part 1.

2011-02-13T09:00:00.008+11:00

10 February - 12:45am, Kingsford

There's something odd going on in the punk music industry, and I'm going to be a dick fanboy and attribute 90% of the credit to Against Me! and Tom Gabel. There are other people involved of course - Fat Wreck Chords' A&R people would have had a hand in it as well, and Chuck Ragan hooked onto the market and just ran with it as fast as he could - but ever since Fat Mike took a chance and released As The Eternal Cowboy in 2003 the American punk rock scene has been slowly but surely coming out of the closet as to its folksy, country Americana roots. Which is weird. Here's how it happened.

Chuck Ragan and Chris Wollard from the punk/hardcore Hot Water Music had been doing their folk-punk side project Rumbleseat since 1998, releasing a few 7"s here and there. It took until 2005 for them to compile their songs into a CD LP. Meanwhile, labels like Plan-It-X and No Idea were putting out more-or-less DIY releases by essentially local musicians: in 2002 This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb released Front Seat Solidarity on Plan-It-X and Against Me! released Reinventing Axl Rose on No Idea. In 2003 Defiance, Ohio released Share What Ya Got. Both labels were at this time based in Gainesville, Florida, and Against Me!, Hot Water Music, and This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb are all from the same area.

MP3: Defiance, Ohio - Sweet Dudes & Sweet Ladies
MP3: This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb - This Is What I Want

A curious quality of these folk-punk acts was that they were also very politically motivated. A lot of them were anarchists. Also curious was the context: they were emerging at a time when pop punk was reaching its apex as a viable product in the broader musical marketplace. Blink-182 had released Take Off Your Pants And Jacket in 2001, and Sum 41 brought out Does This Look Infected? the next year. This isn't to say that these bands hadn't become successful after years of the sort of hard work that most bands put in. But by this point "punk" reached its height as a commercial vehicle: 2002 was the year Avril Lavigne released 'Sk8r Boi'.

In 2003 Against Me! sold out and signed to Fat Wreck Chords. A lot of anarchopunks whinged and bitched about it but the fact was this exposed the Gainesville folk-punk noise to many, many more people than would otherwise have heard it. Enter the internet. Personally, I used SoulSeek (God bless) to download the Against Me! back catalogue. In 2001 Plan-It-X had released an acoustic EP of some Against Me! songs that had mostly appeared in rock from on Reinventing Axl Rose. Wowsa. From there it was an easy task to find out about Defiance, Ohio and the rest of the politically attuned folk-punk scene.

MP3: Against Me! - Those Anarcho Punx Are Mysterious

> Part 2.

For Better For Worse by Old Man Markley

2011-02-10T09:00:00.001+11:00

10 February - 12:45am, Kingsford

MP3: Old Man Markley - For Better For Worse

This band are bringing out their first album on Fat Wreck Chords this year. What an odd band for Fat Wreck, is all I can say. Can't say I don't really enjoy it, though. They hit the gang vocals in just the right way, and that banjo is foot-stompin' hooter-holler. As is the fiddle solo. The song is about being in love with a girl, but because you're such a pleb and she's such a lady, she doesn't want anything to do with you.

So you kill her.

Top 10 Albums of 2010.

2011-01-07T23:34:00.002+11:00

7 January - 9:30pm, Kingsford

In case this doesn't come apparent through the reading, 2010 was a pretty average year for music. A lot of artists whose previous work I have admired released new records, which without being bad, were just plain lacklustre. Eels should never have decided to release three albums six months apart. I had moderate to high expectations of Klaxons, Gogol Bordello, Kele, Born Ruffians, and Against Me!, and was more or less let down. Likewise Belle & Sebastian, Kele, Brandon Flowers and Jónsi, although they've all been going downhill of late.

10: Hans Zimmer - Inception
This album wins points not by having particularly good standout tracks, but by being eminently listenable as a whole. The emotional structure of the album follows that of the film (despite of course being only a collection of pieces from the film score).

If the point of soundtracks is to make the listener feel like they did while watching the film than it succeeds. Again, it's not an amazing album as far as albums go, but it's one of the best film soundtracks I've heard in a long while, and even one of the best instrumental arrangements I've encountered. I'll be very disappointed if this Hans doesn't at least get an Academy nomination.

Stand-outs: 'Waiting For A Train', 'Mombasa', 'Time'.

9: Eels - End Times
I gave this album ten listens since I got it in early February, which is what bumps it up to four stars. The best I can probably say about is that it's not a bad album. There are certainly some good songs on there, the title track included. And I'm a big fan of the association of losing a loved one with the actual factual end of the world. I just feel as if there was a lot more that could have been done with the material, and with the apocalypse imagery. Even the hope at the end of the album, leading into the lesser also-2010 sequel Tomorrow Morning, isn't really powerful enough to warrant much more than a So what?

Stand-outs: 'Gone Man', 'End Times', 'On My Feet'.

8: The Cat Empire - Cinema
I probably listened to Cinema more than it deserved because, as with Eels, I have an established brand loyalty to The Cat Empire. Unfortunately, there are no five-star tracks on this one. There's a whole bunch of four-stars, but that's never enough to carry an album. Because, like End Times, Cinema just doesn't punch through. There's no musical/lyrical hook in this for me to have that Ohhh moment, and ya'know, get an album. All good songs, some of them classic Cat Empire hits, but with no narrative and no hook, it's far from their best release.

Stand-outs: 'Falling', 'Shoulders', 'On My Way'.

7: Vampire Weekend - Contra
I was sceptical of Contra when it came out. I had played 'Horchata' to death when it was released in October '09, and I was convinced that, while Vampire Weekend was a very good debut, the band would be sophomore failures. They weren't. (Incidentally in 2010, a band I associated closely with Vampire Weekend, Born Ruffians, were.) The songs are all thoroughly enjoyable, musically and lyrically. Ezra's vocals are dreamy, and the stories of educated, moneyed idleness that he sings about are exactly all that I've come to expect from this band. It's great. I love rich people.

This album is what I mean when I say I want something with narrative. It doesn't have to be a Pink Floyd narrative, with a story and whatnot. There just has to be lyrical and thematic connections between songs, just to stop it from being a collection of tracks. That was the problem with their first album, which was just a collection of very good songs, no thinking required. But there's the album title, which is a bit of a riddle (contra from the Latin 'against'). Is it a protest album? 'I Think UR a Contra'? Why the leetspeak? "Contra- contra- contra- contradict what I say" in 'California English'? Shit's going on everywhere here. Meanings are all over the place. Codes and symbols off the fucking wall. I love it.

Stand-outs: 'White Sky', 'California English', 'Holiday'.

6: Electric Six - Zodiac
Speaking of symbols: there are twelve tracks on Zodiac. None of them have anything to do with the zodiac. The album title came from the song 'Typical Sagittarius', which eventually got cut from the track list. Haaaa. Basically this album is a collection of very good songs with no overarching theme (except Party), but with a title that suggests that maybe, just maybe, each of the 12 songs correlates with the 12 signs of the zodiac. Hilarious.

To me there are two type of Electric Six songs: regular songs and Amazing Songs. On a great album there will be maybe five Amazing Songs. On an average album there might be three. I'm gonna say there are two such songs here, although the rest are very good. In terms of quality the album the album sits between Fire and Flashy: the former is a great great record, the latter is mediocre. Zodiac is above mediocre but fails to get into the pantheon. But is is filled with Electric Six songs.

Stand-outs: 'It Ain't Punk Rock', 'Talking Turkey', 'Clusterfuck!'.

[The top five albums all took a second round of listens to get into. I had actually written off The Suburbs, High Violet and Odd Blood, only to come back to them and be blown away. It's indicative of what a shitty year it was for music that three or my top five had to gnaw away at me like this.]

5: Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
I was unimpressed with Neon Bible. Like Robbers & Cowards by Cold War Kids, I basically couldn't get past the fact that the story was about some thirtysomething people with responsibilities and kids. No relating there. Especially after Funeral was about young people, and it came out when I was a young person. Now I'm a slightly less young young person, and The Suburbs is out. It is just as well timed for me to appreciate it as Funeral was in 2006. Basically what I'm saying is that they should've just skipped Neon Bible.

Anyway so I was apprehensive after Neon Bible, but this album has the right about of vitriolic nostalgia for me to, ya'know, get it. It's about urban geography and man's relationship to it and others in the same urban geography. I love that shit. Sometimes I worry that I just put my own meanings onto others' art so that I can enjoy it. This is what an album should be. Cohesive themes and narrative, with a large selection of singularly great tracks.

Stand-outs:'Month of May', 'We Used To Wait', 'Ready to Start', 'Half Light II (No Celebration)', 'Deep Blue', 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)'.
ALSO: this! Makes the album. You gotta use Google Chrome and have a decent internet connection.

4: The National - High Violet
I read reviews of this album that it was considerably darker and more depressive than previous releases by The National. I think it's pretty much on par. I can't really say much about this album other than that it's a collection of very very good songs (ie not a good album, and that this is where songs being good on their own increases the album's overall score).

The problem with this album is that it's not Boxer. It would have been the problem The National would have faced with whatever they released as a full-length they released after Boxer, and to their credit they did pretty well with it. Hopefully it'll be like Warning was for Green Day: coming after Nimrod, being only a good album, but preceding an amazing revolution in sound and fortune for the band.

Stand-outs: 'Runaway', 'Afraid Of Everyone', 'Terrible Love'.

3: Perry Keyes - Johnny Ray's Downtown
I've already written everything I really need to say about this amazing album. The only thing keeping this album down from the top is that at 74 minutes it's a little bit long and a couple of the tracks probably needn't have been there. Actually, 14 of the 16 tracks are five-star songs.

Stand-outs: 'Boxing Day', 'Johnny Ray's Downtown', 'Bobby The Burning Dog', 'Queen Of Everyone's Heart', 'Things That A Boy Would Do', '1982', 'Ray's Dashboard Light'.

2: The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang
I have this theory that all American art from Walt Whitman to Kanye West is actually about trying to figure out what America is. The country has always been something of an experiment, its art is a constant commentary on that experiment. When an artist uses the name of the country in a title, that makes it so much easier for me.

American Slang, then, is the language (and through in that language, the stories) of the poor and uneducated young of the New York suburban metropolis. In the same way that Contra does the same thing with the east coast rich. The symbols are all there, but they are references to working class Americana, Chevrolets and nights in Brooklyn. 'Old Haunts' contains a reference in the lyrics to 'The Navesink Banks': "God help a man who says 'If you'da known me when'."

What this does for me, at least, is help me understand American Slang (great on its own) as part of a wider narrative of Gaslight Anthem storytelling. Basically this is what Eels failed to do in their trilogy of love albums over 2009/10; The Gaslight Anthem have down it outstandingly. All five-star songs, too.

Stand-outs: 'We Did It When We Were Young', 'Bring It On', 'Old Haunts', 'Stay Lucky'.

1: Yeasayer - Odd Blood
As far as I'm concerned this is the perfect album. Music: amazing and dancey while still being complex and enjoyable Vocals: top-notch, especially the falsetto. Lyrics: confusing but enthralling. Thematic content: interesting and dark enough to keep me coming back for more. The synths touch me in a way that synthetic music never has. Not to say that I've never, ya'know, got electronic music, but this is different and new and I like it.

Often the music jars with the emotion of the lyrics: 'Madder Red' is a song about being evicted by a lover, but the music itself is quite upbeat. 'Love Me Girl' is about turning sexy banging into love? Or something? In any case the music is pretty dark. Especially the bird calls after the chorus. They freak my shit right up. Nothing is wrong, what are you scared of.

Stand-outs: 'Mondegreen', 'Rome', 'Madder Red', 'Love Me Girl', 'O.N.E.', 'I Remember', 'Ambling Alp'.

I give 2010 in music two and a half stars.

Special mention should go to Gilbert Whyte's Jilliby, which came 11th, and Little Yosemite's …Through the Winter, which as an EP I didn't include in the list. Albums I got into in 2010 that aren't from 2010 that deserve mention are Up From Below by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Kensington Heights by Constantines, We Shall All Be Healed by The Mountain Goats (I don't know why I took so long to get around to this one), Charge!! by The Aquabats!, Everything/Everything by Simon Bookish, I Am The Messiah by MC Honky!, and Hospice by the Antlers.

Top 20 Tracks of 2010.

2011-01-01T09:00:00.002+11:00

31 December - Kingsford, 1:30am

Refer back to my 2009 list, where I came up with a mathematical system of determining how much I have valued a song over the course of my having it in my collection. I've tweaked the formula a bit, but it's still basically the same system.

Again, I've taken only the highest scoring song per artist per album. If I hadn't the top 15 hitters would encompass the entirety of Odd Blood by Yeasayer in it, and the rest would be made up of Perry Keyes and The Gaslight Anthem. Coincidentally, there are no female singers on the list.

20: Hans Zimmer - Waiting For A Train
The reason this track made the points cut over any other from the amazing soundtrack from Inception is probably its length. Each track from the album is perfectly suited to its use in the film. Tense, edgy, et cetera. I've always been a big fan of Zimmer's use of brass, and in the climax to this track it's there in all his virtuosity. The Édith Piaf sampling is a nice touch as well.

19: The Cat Empire - Falling
Cinema, ihis year's Cat Empire release I wasn't able to get into as much as I have before. I mean, they're a great band, but it didn't seem like they were doing much they haven't done before. ("But Daniel, they're a jazz band, all jazz sounds the same." Fuck you.) Harry's trumpet solo over the closing of this track is probably what makes it a standout song, as well as the catchy chorus, but you know, it's no 'Manifesto'.

18: Jónsi - Go Do
Go was another album that couldn't surpass expectations. I've always liked the way Jónsi uses his voice as an instrument, as he does here with the melody that he's singing with the Do-do do-di-etc? Fun. No idea what it's about, lyrics-wise. That used to be enough, when it was Sigur Rós. Now Jónsi's decided to sing pop songs, I don't know if I can really be bothered keeping up.

17: Pendulum - ABC News Theme
This is one fun song. The first twenty seconds are the best, for their build-up value, just before the trumpet kicks in. Gets a bit wearisome toward the end, when it's just the same drum and bass rhythm just plonked over the melody. But still, if you're a fan of ABC news, this is a winner.

16: Against Me! - Suffocation
I have to say, I listened to White Crosses more out of a long-standing brand loyalty to Against Me! than anything. This, 'Rapid Decompression' and 'Bamboo Bones' were really the only good songs out of the whole 14 tracks. From Tom Gabel's dummy-spit in early December I can only guess that he wasn't too impressed with the album (or its production) either. I don't know. It's a pretty good song? Give it a listen. Another example of Not Their Best, though.

15: CRUDBUMP - Subprime Lenders
This song is hilarious, but also good listenin' hiphop? A rare and desirably marriage of qualities. CRUDBUMP is Drew from Toothpaste For Dinner. Read his comics, they are funny comics to read. Artistically, he's one of my biggest inspirations. He can do amazing things with synthesisers. The song is about unscrupulous mortgage lenders preying on the financially vulnerable and then also drinking a lot of whiskey. Come with me put the kids in the trunk.

14: Gogol Bordello - Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher)
So this is the point where we get to a band whose new album wasn't completely mediocre against their last couple of offerings. Just kidding, that doesn't happen till much further up the list. This is an excellent track, though. I mean it's typical Gogol Bordello gypsy punkness, but it's just so gosh darn danceable?

13: Vanaprasta - Color of Sin
This one sort of sneaked up on me. It's from Forming The Shapes, a three-track release by this unsigned band from California that I just downloaded for the sake of downloading something random. Turns out they're this really chilled out six-piece folk rock band. Think Edward Sharp & The Magnetic Zeros but stripped of the brass and the chick singer. Very enjoyable.

12: Eels - Gone Man
I love E's blues rock tracks. I was a particular fan of 'Prizefighter', from 2009's Hombre Lobo. Now the problem I have here is that Hombre Lobo is the first of a "trilogy" of albums, of which End Times is the second. That means I can't listen to them in isolation, even if I could. I have to compare 'Gone Man' less favourably to 'Prizefighter', even if I think 'Gone Man' is a perfectly good song. It's still not as good. God dammit. Still a good song.

11: Vampire Weekend - White Sky
I can't say anything bad about Contra. 'White Sky' is a highly enjoyable track. I'm sure you've heard it. If you haven't them god dammit, what have you been listening to this year? Kanye? Um. My favourite part is the falsetto? I don't know. It sticks in my throat.

10: Electric Six - It Ain't Punk Rock
I've written at length about how Dick Valentine is actually our generation's eminent poet. To me, this song is the centrepiece of Zodiac, an album named after a song that was eventually dropped from it. I say this because the lyrical climax of the song references the four traditional elements. It's subtle, it incorporates a joke, and that's what makes it greaaaat. And what does Number 88 mean? I love you Dick Valentine.

9: The National - Runaway
It actually took me a second attempt at trying to get into High Violet before I actually started to enjoy it. It was all a bit samesy. Three things this song has, Berninger's vocals notwithstanding: subtle but effective drums, brass in background, and beautifully played guitars all coming in and out of crescendo as the poetry of the lyrics dictate. What makes you think I'm enjoying being led to the flood? Wonderful.

8: Arcade Fire - Month of May
This reminds me of an indie rock version of Queens of the Stone Age's 'Go With The Flow'. In a good way. In a great way. Even the stop-start at 2:30: 'with my arms folded tight!'... Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nahetc. Delicious.

7: Ryan Bingham - The Weary Kind (Theme From Crazy Heart)
I'm actually a little bit embarrassed about this song making the list, let alone being so high up it. I'd attempt to explain it away by claiming a lack of any decent competition from bands I would have expected to perform better than they did this year, but the fact of the matter is that it's actually a pretty good song? I mean, it pushes all the right emotional buttons at the right time. It's got the right chord progressions, it's got the fingerpicking guitar, it's got the double bass and the bass drum rumbling on in the background. Ryan Bingham's voice is about to break into weeping, and the lyrics are suitably sentimental.

6: Chumbawamba - Singing Out The Days
I am waiting desperately for Chumbawamba to dust of their mechanical instruments and get back in the synthpunk game. Until that day we're stuck with oddly enchanting folk offerings. This is a cappella, a chorus piece from the perspective of soldiers in WWI. It isn't synth, but if it's any consolation they sure know how to harmonise. Apart from the war we're doing fine.

5: Little Yosemite - To Home From School
I got Little Yosemite's EP … Through the Winter at the same time as Vanaprasta's, and I'm desperately waiting for him (one-man band, I think) to come out with something new. I'd even pay for it? This is beautiful folk music, lush acoustic guitars and banjo and a bass drum that just won't quit. The nostalgia of the lyrics fit amazingly well with the vocalist's singing and the field recordings from a school playground overlaid through the song. Come now brother, don't leave me here. Deep as all shit.

4: Gilbert Whyte - Blind Willie Johnson
Gilbert Whyte is a Scottish-Australian folk singer whose album Jilliby is not only one of the best releases of the year, he is one of the best live performers I have ever seen. I can't recommend him enough. His voice is a joy to listen to, and this song is the epitome of his storytelling lyricism. His fingerpicking is second to nobody I've seen. This song tells the story of "Blind" Willie Johnson, the revered bluesman. It inspired me to go looking for some of Willie Johnson's recordings. This is much better than anything Willie Johnson ever did. He sang if I had my own way, I'd tear this building down.

3: The Gaslight Anthem - We Did It When We Were Young
I probably would have guessed something like 'Stay Lucky' would come out ahead for The Gaslight Anthem, but apparently I'm a sucker for the slow, tragic/triumphant album closers. (It's true; the next two tracks are the same.) Fallon's humming at the beginning of this track makes me all tingly in the spinal chord. Hits all the right chords, builds crescendo in the right places. Those boys will go far one day. When we were lions, lovers in combat, faded like those jeans that I burned.

2: Perry Keyes - Boxing Day
I've already written about this song. It's Sydney made into a mythical landscape. A ballad dirge for the shiny shiny town. I can't really add anything more other than to say that this man is an Australian hero, and you should give him all of your money to see him perform. In the shiny, shiny town tonight the Hitman’s fallin’ down. Then bring it home with the clarinet.

1: Yeasayer - Mondegreen [Not posting this track, because They got angry with me last time.]
Oh, Yeasayer. Youse guys are gods. This is easily the perfect song from the perfect album. Emminently boppable, with paranoid lyrics of persecution, suspicion and paranoia. Then the Blade Runner sirens over the coda, creepy creepy. Production values through the roof. Everybody everybody everybody everybody everybody everybody everybody.

Forgetting about a biscuit in the dark.

2010-05-31T22:35:00.003+10:00

31 May - Kingsford, 10:30pm

Daniel is drinking a coffee in the dark. He has eaten the biscuits he got to have with the coffee. Coffee soaked biscuits. Snack of the kings. He laments that he has no more biscuits, and feels that the two biscuits went by too fast for comfort. He puts the cup down on what should have been a desk but is instead the rough and uneven contours of a biscuit. The second, uneaten biscuit. The cup tips, coffee spills. Surprise biscuit. Tragedy biscuit.

A Hard Day's Night by The Beatles

2010-04-29T09:00:00.002+10:00

17 March - 9:30pm, Kingsford

This album has the awkward characteristic of being a film soundtrack rather than a studio album in the sense I understand it. On the one hand, it could contain a more structured narrative, musically and in terms of a story. Think the soundtrack from I Heart Huckabees (or dare I say it, Gladiator), which can be easily listened to on its own. On the other hand, it could just be a random collection of songs that were used in the film. I haven’t seen the film, which puts me at a disadvantage, because it would almost certainly have been purchased and the songs listened to with their film context in mind.

Although: I’m more inclined to believe that the film was worked around the songs, rather than the songs being specifically written for the film (or if they were, then certainly not with the same depth of intelligence as I Heart Huckabees). Also, considering that The Beatles’ two previous LPs were more or less just collection of songs that were cobbled together, I’m not really expecting any sort of cohesion here either.

The title track was I think the first Beatles song I ever heard, or at least remembered. The film must have been playing on TV; I saw the sequence where hundreds of lusty young girls are chasing the band through London. What struck me was that the song title makes no sense. It’s pretty alright, though. Another cracker to kick of an album.

The next three songs are good, in a not-great sort of way. Listenable. But. I’m increasingly becoming a fan of Lennon’s harmonica skills. ‘I Should Have Known Better’ is a prime example of what I like about it. It’s simple, but it brings the whole the whole song together in a really enjoyable way. The vocals on ‘If I Fell’ are quite enjoyable, especially the slow-beat staccato type thing they have going on in the verse. Then it goes off the rails and they throw in a sharp or whatnot ruin it all. Also the melody is a bit weak. ‘I'm Happy Just To Dance With You’ is just agreeable pop. Nothing much to it, really.

‘And I Love Her’ is a horribly sentimental low point. It is slow, boring and trite. I can just imagine the corresponding scene in the film. The one where people leave the cinema to go to the toilet. ‘Tell Me Why’ is a rare rock & roll song that doesn’t do it for me. And, and I… can’t tell you why? Maybe it’s the awkward falsetto about two-thirds through. Or maybe it’s the why-y-y-y, li-i-i-ie sounds that get on my nerves.

‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ has a sweet, sweet foot-tappin’ rhythm. Very enjoyable. I’d bop all god damned night to that. Then, then, ‘Any Time At All’ is the album’s peak. It’s the combination of the snare beat and Lennon’s tortured singing of the title line wins it for me. I ummed and ahhed over whether the verses dragged the song down, but I fell down on the side of giving the song five stars, which is, I think, the first five star Beatles song I have?

‘I'll Cry Instead’ is a weird song. The first time I heard it I was cycling through Bondi Junction on a Sunday night over the summer. I’d finished work and was on the way to a thing. I stopped off at the Tea Gardens to pick up alcohol. The junction was still pumping. Jerks and drunk whores were everywhere. The uncultured laddishness was infectious. The image of a grown man crying over a girl filled me with contempt. For that reason alone I dislike this song. The melody isn’t actually that poor.

There are a few songs by the Beatles that inexplicably remind me of the American desert. ‘Things We Said Today’ is one of those songs. I like it but I’m confused about my mental associations here. There last three songs are a bit crap. ‘When I Get Home’ and ‘I’ll Be Back’ are forgettable. ‘You Can’t Do That’ is about a relationship from the domineering boyfriend’s point of view. Going out with friends? Speaking to males who aren’t you? Yes mate, she can do that.

Turns out there wasn’t any cohesion. There were a collection of agreeable pop songs tempered with some slick rock & roll numbers. They have obviously been written to accord as closely as possible with the band’s two previous records. There is little musical development here, again, but after eighteen months or something what can you expect. Frankly I’m interested to know just how they got a movie deal so so soon after their first record was released.

Anyway, three stars, again.

MP3: The Beatles – Any Time At All

Post-script. I know I’m only reviewing LPs for this challenge, but I should add that the Long Tall Sally EP is the best release I have heard yet by this band. ‘Long Tall Sally’ is my favourite song so far out of any of this. And they didn’t even write it!

Johnny Ray's Downtown by Perry Keyes

2010-04-26T09:00:00.005+10:00

22 March - 2:30am, Kingsford

Myth in music has been around since the beginning. Homer’s poems were originally sun in performance. Arthurian ballads recreated a magical British history and the übermenschen who populated it. The people conjured up by the bards would have existed in the same geographies as their listeners: Odysseus travelled through the world of the Greeks. There was no distance of space, only of time.

Johnny Ray’s Downtown is a delightfully despondent romp through a mythical and historical country populated with villains and damaged heroes. It is a myth cycle that creates a place as much as it paints its characters. I choose to read the ‘s in the title as a possessive, not a contraction of Ray Is, which would make Downtown, a location, the dominant noun of the title. This is important.

The mythlogi…cising of geographies in story is something that interests me. I wrote about the American South once in the context of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridan/Ben Nichol’s Last Pale Light In The West [get at it here]. My problem is that I’ve always been removed from the real places, so the true effect of these myth countries can only really be approximated. (Unless, of course, I wanted to watch Looking For Alibrandi or Underbelly). Which is why I love that the ‘shiny shiny town’ of Johnny Ray’s Downtown is inner and eastern Sydney.

The cover shows you exactly what you’re going to get. The back and inside cover feature a panorama view of Coogee Beach. There’s a picture of a beaten up Holden Commodore, a model a few years earlier than one my dad drove when I was very young. It is parked outside one of the old red brick low-rise apartment buildings that crowd the east, like the one I’m writing this in. The cover over the lyrics booklet is a photo of a yellow Cleveland St. sign screwed onto a cinderblock wall.

It’s not nostalgia by any stretch. The late twentieth century was a particularly rubbish time to be young in inner Sydney. This is a young man’s album. Many of the songs, like ‘Will You Shine?’ and ‘Things That A Boy Would Do’, are about a boy’s potential, with the sad hindsight that many of the people Keyes ran with back in the day are dead from the drug or incarcerated. ‘He Scores He Shoots’ is about a junkie on Christmas Eve. ‘Bobby The Burning Dog’ is about “cold boys who can’t keep still / On paper beds beneath sandstone window sills.”

References to particular locations, like the photos, help create the myth. All it takes from ‘Coogee Boy’ is a mention of Wedding Cake Island and the scene’s made for me. “The Botany road would melt and buckle / Beneath the weight of the industrial muscle” recreates an Alexandria long before urban renewal. ‘Boxing Day’ tells the stories of the old Sydney Stadium, where White City now is in Rushcutters Bay. Keyes imagines the stadium now, "full of ghosts" that sit drinking shandies on “the rafters that sat half way up to the sky / Where the empty tunnels now slope away”. What I love about this is that the Cross City Tunnel is a symbol of turn-of-the-21st-century Sydney. To sing about it in such an oblique yet melancholy way is to attack it, to criticise it for being built gracelessly over so many stories, and for even being a bookend between the past and the now.

What makes this album so effective in its storytelling is that is about personal histories and urban histories. ‘Bobby The Burning Dog’ imagines a homeless drug addict living on the street where he was baptised as a child. ‘Will You Shine?’ is the song that opens the album, a mother’s question to her boy. Asking among other things “How many times will you see the street lights change in the middle of the night?” sets up a preoccupation with lights and shining that Keyes applies to metaphors of success to cars to drugs to the Sydney itself. There’s a shining crucifix in there too. Ray’s Dashboard Light “shines on the street”, and "we can live in the light of the city now". And in ‘Boxing Day’, we’re told that “In the shiny, shiny town tonight the Hitman’s fallin’ down.”

Also the music is fucking amazing. Mostly it’s Springsteen-esque Jersey rock with bit of surf rock and deep piano balladry thrown in, but it’s classic from start to finish. Climax after triumph after climax.

Four and a half stars.

MP3: Perry Keyes – Johnny Ray's Downtown

MP3: Perry Keyes – Boxing Day

Mondegreen by Yeasayer

2010-04-23T09:00:00.009+10:00

22 March - 5:15am, Kingsford

MP3: Yeasayer - Mondegreen [removed, comment with an email for the link]

There's something futuristic and paranoid about this song. Futuristic like in the bleak and appalling 1980s sense of the word. Think Blade Runner. It's the horrible siren-type noises in the interlude and especially over the end. As well as the goose-stepping drum beat. Brilliant. Also the song is a nice little bop.

With The Beatles by The Beatles

2010-04-14T09:00:00.002+10:00

26 January - 4:15pm, Kingsford

Early thoughts on With The Beatles: released only a few months after Please Please Me, I get the impression that this LP was rushed through in order to capitalise on the band's immediate popularity in Britain. This comes across in the sound: there is no noticeable development between the two albums' sound. With The Beatles perhaps has more of a rock & roll feel to more of its songs, which maybe reflects a growing acceptance of the genre by the record company than it does more creative control being given to the Beatles.

'It Won't Be Long' is a great track to start the album. Fast-paced with catchy vocals and guitar riffs, although I'm not too sure about Lennon's obsession with equating relationships with possession/capture: 'It won't be long / Till I belong to you.' Then there's the B-side from She Loves You, 'I'll Get You'. This one's a slow, lazy rock & roll song. The laidback cadence evokes stalking. The harmonica evokes the south. The refrain 'Oh yeah, oh yeah' evokes stalking. I digress.

'All I've Got To Do' is a middle-of-the-road ballad-type song about getting over one's fears about talking to a crush, or something. 'All My Loving' and 'Don't Bother Me' are still-mediocre but more rock & rolling love songs. Little new from The Beatles. 'Little Me' is one of Lennon's 'woe is me, what the fuck' songs that are basically emo songs in pop rock melodies. I actually like that combination. Lennon's harmonica on this track is particularly impressive.

'Till There Was You' is musical tripe.

The drums and vocals introduction to 'Please Mister Postman' gave me hope that it would be an impressive little rock & roll number. Then they started out with the woohs and the woahs. God damn it. 'Roll Over Beethoven' is more like it, even if the beginning sounds like it's about to go into Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B Goode'. (That's a good thing.)

There's something not quite right with the beginning of 'Hold Me Tight'. The half-line "It feels so right" just feels so god damn wrong. The rest of the song itself is alright, one their more average rock & roll tracks. 'You Really Got A Hold On Me' and 'I Wanna Be Your Man' keep up the run of pretty alright songs, especially the latter.

'Devil In Her Heart' sounds like it belongs on country and western radio. Musical tripe.

'Not A Second Time' is another piano and drums based song that holds out alright. Actually also Lennon's vocals are particularly enjoyable on this track. 'Money (That's What I Want)' is so entrenched in my cultural consciousness already that I already hate it. Or love it, I can't tell. It's pretty good, I guess. But yeah.

Musically, there isn't much on this album that couldn't just as easily have been on Please Please Me. This is a disappointment, because Please Please Me wasn't great. They've improved in some ways, with tighter rock & roll arrangements and fewer saccharine moments, although there are some shitty exceptions to this. What distinguishes this album from the previous for me is that of the songs I put on regular rotation (anything I said was 'alright' or better), I didn't get too sick of after maybe two weeks.

For that I'm giving it three stars.

MP3: The Beatles - It Won't Be Long

The Man Without A Bag by The Justin Walshe Folk Machine

2010-04-11T09:00:00.005+10:00

10 April - 8:00pm, Kingsford

MP3: The Justin Walshe Folk Machine - The Man Without A Bag

This song is delightful. I saw these guys at The Harp maybe a month ago. There were about 25 people watching them. Most of them were probably friends of the support acts (I was). They're from Western Australia. Their songs swap between haunting Decemberists-esque songs about forlorn lighthouse keepers to songs titled 'Love Machine'. 'Love Machine is about the Intergalactic Love Machine, and the lyrics are all pretty much about where he's going to do it with you (everywhere). 'The Man Without A Bag' is about a man with a bag who puts the bag down and leaves it. Enjoy.

Gogol Bordello & Rumpunch, at the Metro Theatre, 31 March.

2010-04-08T09:00:00.003+10:00

7 April - Kingsford, 1:00am

In 2007 Gogol Bordello pulled out at the last minute from a shared Australian tour with Flogging Molly. I was devastated. It took three years and one of the best albums ever released for them to plan another tour to Sydney. So.

The big killer of the evening was the added delay between the end of the support act at nine and Gogol Bordello taking the stage at ten, half an hour after the times advertised at the bar. It seemed the delay was because the band didn’t want to start the show before the queue outside had a chance to get in. Apparently due to new rules and regulations imposed by the big bad City of Sydney and/or NSW government/s it took a bit longer to get all the punters in. I waited maybe fifteen minutes, twenty at a stretch. By no means the longest I’ve waited at a Metro show. But then, I was there at eight o’clock, the advertised doors open time.

The show was held up by people who had decided to skip out on watching the support act, and rock up at nine. I was there at the advertised time, I got in on time. I saw no new regulations. I had my ID checked, my wrist stamped and my ticket torn. Same process as always. They came late, and the show suffered for it because they had to be catered for. A similar situation would be if a cinema stopped the projector after the trailers because some people arrived at the box office fifteen minutes after the time in the newspaper.

The Drum Media review also whinged about the separation of over 18s and all ages sections and the difficulty with getting to the bar, or something. I’ve long since given up on drinking at venues like the Metro, and especially with the Metro’s pitiful choice in drinks. Punters in the know would be aware that there are at least two venues that sell spirits for less than $4 on the same block as the Metro. And if you’re at an all ages gig, don’t bitch that you aren’t allowed to take your beer up to the stage.

Another option would have been to give the support more than thirty minutes on stage, although I can’t say that would have been the most pleasing solution, as Rumpunch’s noise is on the wrong side of shit as far as I’m concerned. I would have chosen a band like Juke Baritone to open for Gogol, instead of this group of porkpie hats. Inexplicably though, they got the crowd moving, which probably speaks more to the attraction of generic Dropkick Murphys-esque Celtpunk in the Sydney punk scene than it does any particular quality of the band. They had a couple of reggae-themed songs reminiscent of The Clash, but they were nothing special. I saw a mandolin and an accordion on stage, but I’ll be damned if I could hear them half the time over the play-everything-at-once philosophy Rumpunch brings to their shows. One highlight was a passing rendition of an old Irish jig 'Whiskey You're the Devil' (pronounced Divvil). Here’s a version to an old school folk setting.

MP3: The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem - Whiskey You're the Devil [removed, comment with an email for the link]

When Gogol Bordello finally did take the stage, it was with more an about time than celebration, not that the crowd let on. By now the venue had well and truly filled up though, and Ultimate was definitely a pleasing opener. What followed was a litany of crowd favourites, mostly from their previous two albums (Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike and Super Taranta!), accompanied by Eugene Hütz famed energetic stage presence.

He was supported by an equally eccentric and enthralling cast of band members, including the 50-plus year old Siberian violinist Sergey Ryabtsev, who goes totally nuts, and Elizabeth Sun, whose roles, as far as I could tell, consisted of shouting backing vocals, banging cymbals where appropriate, and gallivanting ceaselessly around the stage. She performed all with skill and aplomb.

I’m still undecided about Pedro Erazo, the Ecuadorean MC. Pedro is a recent addition to the band, and hasn’t appeared on any recordings yet (the album out next month will be his first studio outing with the band). As such I was a bit wary of him, particularly as he interspersed Tribal Connection with rap intervals about "This is your town", et cetera. I’m guessing he’ll be an acquired taste, but I’m not necessarily sold on him yet.

After a lengthy set, Eugene encored with an acoustic rendition of 'Alcohol', followed by a (let’s call it) fifteen-minute medley of mostly older songs, centred around 'Undestructible' and 'Mishto!' and including a bit of the melody from 'Forces of Victory'. The encore was a delight, considering that some of their forays earlier in the night into reworking songs had not necessarily improved on the originals. Missing from the set were the greats 'Immigrant Punk' and 'Your Country', but one could hardly complain. An energetic and lengthy set beset by logistical problems, a slack and ill-chosen support act and less-than-excellent reworkings of already perfect songs.

Three and a half stars.

MP3: Gogol Bordello - Stivali E Colbacco [removed, comment with an email for the link]

MP3: Gogol Bordello - Wonderlust King [Live] [removed, comment with an email for the link]

Update: It turns out Pedro features on live recordings on the 2009 Live From Axis Mundi, most prominently I think on '60 Revolutions'. I like. Czech it out.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Niels Arden Oplev.

2010-04-05T09:00:00.002+10:00

5 April - Kingsford, 2:00am

I successfully avoided hearing anything about this film except that it received positive reviews. Until the opening credits, I had no idea that it was even a foreign film. (It’s Swedish). Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) is an investigative journalist at a leftist paper who is successfully prosecuted for libel and sentenced to a prison term, to be begun (for some reason) three months hence. In the meantime, he is approached by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), a member of a large and bickering business dynasty, of whom some members have suspect Nazi pasts. He is brought on to investigate the disappearance of Henrick’s neice, who was presumably murdered by a family member in 1966.

I don’t get why Vanger still thinks there’s any point. I don’t get why Vanger goes to Blomqvist. I don’t get why Blomqvist takes on the case, since he’s pretty well off by the looks of it. I don’t get why Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) (the titular emotionally broken psychologically-distubred lesbian-punk-goth-hacker cliché with the chip on her shoulder for humanity but really a heart of gold who does secret checks on Blomqvist for Vanger before he’s hired) keeps tracking Blomqvist’s computer after she’s been paid already. But that sets up the pieces, anyway.

Oh and also the missing girl babysat for Blomqvist when his father worked for the Vanger's many years ago, but that, like so much of what's thrown into the film, is irrelevant.

The first act is slow. It is awkward and disjointed. The fact of Blomqvist's prosecution and impending incarceration add nothing to the story. Once he takes the case, Oplev doesn't even bother to make any sense of urgency out of the clock that's counting down the days. Added to this, the two protagonists don't even meet up until about half way through the whole thing. You sit there waiting for their respective storylines to meet up so they can get on with it.

There is a brutal rape scene in the first forty minutes of the film. It's confronting. It establishes the whole running theme of entrapment, be it physical caging or in relationships with power imbalances. Still, a brutal rape scene was not something I was all that keen on seeing, particularly considering that at that point in the film its raison d'être was a bit non-evident. My big problem isn't that I'm squeamish (I liked Funny Games; tick the box of violent film enjoyment cred), more that it was a tad unnecessary. Anyway, Lisbeth gets her revenge and all is well. Does it ever come back into the story? You better believe it doesn't.

The second act pulls itself up a bit, which is no mean feat. Second acts are usually where the action drops off. This is where the detective work takes place, on the isolated rural island of Hedeby where the Vanger's all have their properties (despite being millionaires all and hating one another). The plot suffers from a Miss Marple Complex. It's all so god damned cosy. There is even a scene where the family puts aside their differences and tries to bully Blomqvist off the case (this takes place in a drawing room). Oplev does his best to make scenes of Salander going through box upon box of decades old corporate receipts look exciting and fast-paced.

When they aren't working on the case, Salander and Blomqvist are doing it. I'm about as confused by their sexual relationship as Mikael is the first time. Lisbeth ambushes him in his bed, climbs on, gets off, then gets off and returns to her own bed. Coming about half an hour or so after the brutal rape scene, the girl-on-top formation of the coitus is Lisbeth's way of re-empowering herself. I get that. What I don't get is how that immediately succumbs to a by-the-books heteronormative relationship. I especially don't get it, considering that the audience's first introduction to her consensual sex life is when we see her wake up in bed with a woman. I understand fluid sexualities and all, but the way this reads to me is: once she's got a taste of a proper man (ie, Our Hero Blomqvist), she's hooked, she has no real need to go back to her Sapphic floozy back in Stockholm.

The third act drops the ball again, and fumbles for a reasonable denouement. In the search for whats-her-name, they uncover a deeper family conspiracy misogyny, rape and religious murders. Both cases are crudely wrapped up as the film reaches the 120 minute mark. (It's 150 minutes long.)

There is little here that is compellingly new, except for the brutal rape scene which raises the bar in making me feel uneasy. The landscapes are well shot, I'll give Oplev points for that. The storytelling and acting aren't the greatest though, although for the look Noomi Rapace is well cast. The film looks like a crime thriller I would find myself watching on the ABC between 8 and 11 on a Friday or Saturday night. Preferably as a miniseries over three or four weeks, with more critical plot points put in to steady the haphazard shonkiness of the film's story. Actually, I was kind of hoping that the film would end about twenty minutes earlier, with the baddie getting away and Blomqvist strung up like a pig. Watch Funny Games instead.

Three stars.

10 Amazing Songs Over Three Hundred & Sixty Seconds Long

2010-04-02T09:00:00.000+11:00

28 March - Centennial Park, 3:00 pm

The tenuous back-story to this post goes thus:

We're sitting in the park. I can't remember who says it, or in what context of conversation it is, or even whether they say four or five or six or seven minutes. Let's say that they say 'There aren't any good songs over five minutes.' Five is a good round number. Since I genuinely can't remember who it was who said it I'll assume it was someone uncultured and just say it was Nic. I decided that, yes, there were songs over five minutes that were good. In fact, Nic, I'll do you one better and come up with 10 Songs That Are Amazing And Over Six Minutes In Length.

I didn't include post-rock compositions (Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the many many Sigur Rós songs that could have been on here) because I was looking specifically for songs. For the same reason only one electronic piece is on here. Apologies for the shitty bit rate on the downloads, but I lowered them from my usual less shitty 160kb/s to accommodate the length.

CAKE - Jolene (8:25)

Specifically, the live version from 'The Distance' single. I know live versions of songs can drag on significantly from album recordings. (The live recording of 'In My Pocket' by The Cat Empire more than doubles the 5-minute length of original cut, czech it out.) But not only does this version immeasurably improve on the original by including the audience in the song, it's performed with more energy and vim than the original.

Muse - Knights of Cydonia (6:03)

Clocking in just over the line, this is one of Muse's best and well-known songs. It also sounds like music from the Sega Mega Drive classic Road Rash, which is just all the more props to Matt Bellamy, as far as I'm concerned.

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead - Will You Smile Again? (6:50)

One of the longer tracks in the Trail of Dead corpus, and one of their best. As far as I can tell, it's about a writer who's struggling to write, because, fuck it. It's the most rockin' out song I've ever heard about writer's block.

Fire On Fire - Toknight (6:14)

Another cavalry-related song. I know I rubbished on Fire on Fire a few months ago, but this was one of the songs that stood out. It's standard verse-and-chorus fare, but it gets away with going on for so long with the variety of folk-type instruments they have at their disposal (which includes some sweet sweet vocal harmonies).

The Decemberists - The Island: Come and See / The Landlord's Daughter / You'll Not Feel the Drowning (12:26)

This song is a recreation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, from the point of view of Caliban, the ugly little mutant rapist who, apparently, tried to hook up with Miranda at some point before the play starts. This is that part of the story, except changed so that Caliban succeeds against Miranda's protestations and attempts at bribery ('I'll take no gold, miss / I'll take no silver / I'll take those sweet lips / And thou wilt deliver'). Then he kills her in the ocean so she doesn't rat on him to her magician father. This is Hammond organ virtuosity at its peak.

The Dodos - Jodi (6:14)

A quality song by a quality band. High energy maintained through the whole piece by all performers, on top of compelling if indecipherable lyrics. Enough said.

Dan Deacon - Wham City (12:12)

In the vein of all good Dan Deacon songs, this song is built around a long-gathering crescendo of electropop triumph. Pity the triumph is about the whole of humanity dying out to leave planet to the bees and beasts and fish and trees to have superfun hipster parties in some sort of tripped out electronic state of nature. 'I love my friends and everyone / But we've had our chance, let's move aside / Let time wash us out with the tide.' Fun times, though.

Okkervil River - For the Enemy (6:10)

Beginning as a soft folksy waltz, just the guitar and Will Sheff's voice, the song builds almost imperceptibly. The Hammond comes is at about 1:30, and remains in the background for a good portion of the track. Then at the five minute mark it takes over, and brings the whole thing home. The organ solo from roughly 5:25 ranks up among the strongest possible finishes to a song I have ever heard.

Modest Mouse - Spitting Venom (8:27)

The key to this song is that it's deceptively simple, for a Modest Mouse. Five simple chords repeated for the most part, alternating between calm and sedate Isaac Brooks acoustic guitar parts and Jimmy Marr rocking the fuck out parts. Tying it all together is Brooks' incredibly tight lyrics. The man picks a rhythm and sticks to it, to quality effect. 'What a rotten thing to say / Such an awful thing to say / No I didn't mean to bite you, sorry'. No stumbling here.

The Cat Empire - Miserere (6:39)

'Long live living / If living can be this.' Miserere is the saddest song I have ever heard that wasn't written by John Darnielle or E. The boy singing tenor (or the one above? - I'm no chorister) over the chorus makes this song for me, and the haunting trumpet solo carries it home. Also, there's something that's particular appealing about an epicurean homage to anarchist miracles ('Because a miracle’s a whim / It’s a flash of glory, it’s an empty tin').

Unmitigated virility.

2010-03-15T02:55:00.002+11:00

15 March - Kingsford, 2:00am

This is the start of a story I wrote for a USyd Writers' Society experiment I'm playing with. It's an 'exquisite cadaver' story. The idea is that a person gets a week to add 200-1000 words to a story and carry it on in whatever fashion they please.

Milk, 1L, reduced but not no-fat.

Raw sugar, 1kg.

Apples, onions, tomatoes, 4 of each. All as close to the same colour of red as possible.

Apology to Rachel.

Suitable gift of contrition, not equal in value to damage caused. (A good general principle that accidents require gift equiv. only to cost of 1/6 property ruined? Consider.)

GET HEROIN!

Toilet paper, six roll pack, try recycled if at reasonable cost but in that case trial run of four roll pack.

It was Adam who had added the penultimate item to the list. While Felix had been on the can thinking about whether recycled TP was actually of environmental benefit and wondering about the best way to call out for some tissue paper while minimising the mockery that would ensue. The joke lay in the hideous, desperate scrawl with which Adam had reminded Felix to get the heroin, and how it contrasted so neatly with not only the more mundane items populating the list, but also Adam’s own usual script, which was the slow and studied calligraphy of the illiterate. Adam could get his own heroin.

At some point in the previous twenty-four hours Felix had said the following words:

‘My name is actually a Latin word meaning lucky, felicitous. But it also means happy, or blessed, and the Romans used to apply it to territories that were particularly famous for their fertility. I have a theory that the word felix has a common etymological ancestor to our word fecund, another Latin derivative.’ He then went on to suggest a connection between his name and what he could assure was his unmitigated virility. Looking back on the event, Felix was surprised that he had been kicked out before he even had a chance to request coitus.

What was the price of hurt feelings, anyway? Further to that, what was one-sixth of that sum?

In the end he found greeting cards featuring puppies and flowers and whatnot rather too distasteful for a gentleman of his class (straight down the middle) and so he decided instead to get her a bat mitzvah celebration card to go with whatever parcelled up trinket he ended up getting. At the counter he had to resist the urge to kill two birds with one stone by getting the milk, 1L, reduced but not no-fat at the newsagency. In the long run it would be as equally convenient to go to the supermarket to get with the raw sugar, 1kg, as to pay an extra seventy cents at this overpriced small-time, hackneyed grocer-on-the-side and lug a bottle around with him all day, not to mention the awkwardness of diving around for a receipt at the registers when he finally did go to pick up the raw sugar, 1kg and try to prove to the kid at the till that he didn’t steal it. Just the card, then.

The newsagency owned a slave which was made to toil behind a counter all day chewing nicotine gum and listening to local public radio and selling lottery tickets. This was how Felix liked to imagine it but she was probably just a the wife of the old man who seemed to do nothing but carry in stacks of newspapers and boxes of chips from the storeroom. Whenever the old man deposited a burden in some clear space near the tabloids, the look in the his eyes communicated to Felix, for one brief passing fancy of a moment, that not even death would be enough. Then he cheered right up, and with an ‘Alright Alice’ to the slave bounced back out to the storeroom.

Felix spread his card and list out on the counter and asked the slave how much hurt feelings were worth. He figured that matriarchs were either jolly and wise or heartless and manipulative, and that anyone who was able to sell the lottery to thousands of punters a week without scorning any of them must be of the jolly and wise variety. He was also aware that slaves sometimes possessed wisdom above their station. To his dismay he was told that hurt feelings were beyond monetary value.

‘So I’m looking at spending maybe more than seventy bucks on this girl?’

Someone behind him was agitated so Felix gathered up his bat mitzvah card and his list and strolled back out into the shopping centre. He was joined on the escalator by the scraggly insomniac wearing the Donald Duck hat who had been behind in the queue just a moment before. Felix tried to avoid eye contact. He tried to avoid it in everyday encounters with even close friends, but now he was especially driven to avoid it. It didn’t help that even Donald Duck’s eyes looked just as bloodshot as the two on the face below. But there, on the upward lurching human conveyer belt, he was drawn, obsessed, compelled to recognise that gaunt unshaven face and to acknowledge its owner. This was the moment the gaunt unshaven man had been waiting for. At this point the situation took on something of a drug deal quality.

‘Hey man, you want some stuff?’

‘You’re going to have to be a bit more exact there, friend.’

‘What? Hey, you know? On your sheet there. You’re not a cop, are you?’

‘No?’

‘Cause you gotta tell me if you’re a cop.’

‘Are you sure? I think undercover officers would have a much harder time of it if they had to tell whoever asked them that they were with law enforcement.’

‘Yeah but come on.

Felix thought about his options. The escalator was ending soon and he would be given the opportunity to make a break for it. He had no reason to deal with this man except that he had mistakenly interpreted GET HEROIN!, and wanted to sell him some heroin. But it was, after all, on the list.

‘How much,’ he turned and asked slowly, ‘will you sell, for eighty whole dollars?’

Up In The Air by Jason Reitman

2010-01-26T09:00:00.002+11:00

26 January - Kingsford, 12:30am

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a travelling professional whose job it is to fire people when bosses are too puss to do it themselves. Ryan is an old hand, he has everything about his job down pat, including his travel arrangements and his brand loyalties. He has a girl in every port, and in every port that girl happens to be Alex Goran (Vera Farminga), who is basically a female version of Ryan: cold, brand loyal and nomadic. When young graduate Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) joins Ryan’s firm, she attempts to institute a new system whereby the firm conducts layoffs via a video link. This threatens Ryan’s lifestyle, including his dream of becoming the seventh person ever to reach 10 million flight miles. It also undermines his old school approach to the job, where firing in person is somehow more humane, blah blah blah. Ryan is philosophically opposed to commitment (an entertaining paradox considering his brand loyalties), and when the inexplicably romantic Natalie tells him to settle with Alex, he begins to consider his options. Emotional entanglement ensues and Ryan has to consider whether shutting people out of his life is really the best option.

Anna Kendrick has done the right thing here and got out into the real world of acting before the Twilight Saga dug itself in to her reputation like a cancer. And she plays the role of the up-and-coming technocrat really well. I hope she at least gets nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.* Natalie is introduced as a heartless bitch, a completely unsympathetic corporate whore who attempts to introduce efficiency into Ryan’s job by firing people via video link. She does two things for the film. She makes Clooney’s character, an equally heartless (and smug to boot) prostitute, seem sympathetic because he at least goes to the effort of firing people face-to-face. Ryan Bingham is the ghost of human kindness of the downsizing industry. She also serves as the threat to Ryan’s cosy little world, threatening to take him off the road with her innovations.

Theirs is a typical generation gap story, with Clooney representing the Good Old Way of doing business, and Kendrick the Cold Hard Boot of corporate efficiency and technological dehumanising. If anything, I found Natalie’s emotional arc more believably played than Clooney’s. Possibly because Ryan, as an older man, seemed set in his ways and his character development is less believable than that of a younger characters. (Not that Clooney’s character even changes that much in the end.) Possibly it’s because Natalie’s development is more whole. The film is, in a way, about finding your home. Ryan’s home is nowhere/everywhere, and that’s established fairly early on. The film is about solidifying his position and rebuffing threats in the form of Natalie and her Come In And Change Everything attitude. Natalie’s story is a bildungsroman, and I guess I just respond more positively to them.

The plot then veers off to a weird Family Angle. Ryan and takes Alex to the Bingham family home for sister Julie’s (Melanie Lynskey) marriage to blue-collar Jim (Danny McBride). Older sister Kara (Amy Morton) is there are the anti-Ryan, the matriarch who holds the family together. The whole thing is a boring and tacky detour from the otherwise entertaining jet-setter story. Much of the attraction of the narrative is the fantasy of having no permanent ties. So when the wedding subplot rears its head, people who enjoy the travelling aspect of the film will be as resistant to the whole affair as Ryan himself is. In fact, the whole episode occupies the place in a story where the protagonist would normally be challenged or tempted with another way of living his life (Vader offering Luke to join the Dark Side, for example). The protagonist has to resist the temptation. This is what’s happening here. Ryan is being tempted to leave evil and settle into boring familial domesticity. A fun reversal, but a boring detour. It’s a pusillanimous distraction from the business at hand.

As is the love interest, and I’m glad it ends the way it does. At least the scenes with Clooney and Farminga are well acted. They aren’t the best-written parts of the film. Why do they break into Ryan’s old high school? Why doesn’t anyone tell the two middle-aged strangers to leave the gymnasium when the basketball team comes in to train? There are many unanswered questions. Without giving anything away about how this ends, there are questions to be asked about why Alex is so similar to Ryan in every little detail, and yet has such a markedly different approach to life back home. That doesn’t add up.

I had an interesting conversation with Tim about Jason Bateman’s character. Craig Gregory is Ryan’s boss, presumably an upper level manager in charge of a team of about 20 people like Ryan. I don’t really know what else the company does apart from send guys around the country conducting layoffs. Anyway, Tim thought that Bateman was too charming and likable in his role. It doesn’t make sense for this character, who represents the industry, to be so nice and familiar. Tim wanted someone more like J. K. Simmons in Thank You For Smoking (who, incidentally, has a cameo as a downsizee). I think Bateman was perfectly cast. As an ancillary character, he personifies Ryan’s job. A friendly boss means a friendly job, even if it is firing people. Not hating on Craig means that the audience is more accepting of Ryan’s line of work, which makes them more receptive to Ryan himself, the self-centred egotistical ass. It’s really very good plotting on screenwriters Reitman and Sheldon Turner’s part.

The film is well written and well shot. Clooney is charming as always and Kendrick deserves an award or two. The rest of the female characters are fairly forgettable. Layoff cameos are fun, and the rest of the people Ryan fires are real-life redundancy victims who were told they were being filmed for a documentary, which adds a poignancy to the whole affair. I like that the ending isn’t a typical resolution, but nor is it the back-where-we-started nothingness of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. However, some of the plotting is a bit thin and the second act lags a little bit. I can see what they’re trying to do, but it doesn’t necessarily work. Otherwise it’s an excellent film.

Four stars.

*Until Penelope Cruz robs her of it like she did Amy Adams last year.

Tony Abbot tries to jump on the environmental bandwagon.

2010-01-16T09:00:00.003+11:00

15 January - 3:45am, Kingsford

A report in which Tony Abbot announces part of his environmental policy. His focus is domestic, and aims to move the concern about global climate change to an interest in preserving the Australian environment, partly by employing a full-time workforce of land carers. Get at it here.

Picture this scene. Coalition members and senators are sitting around the party room, all deep in thought, but it's the sort of deep thought that renders no solutions.

'How,' says Tony, 'How can we convince people who are concerned about the environment to vote for us?'

'Why don't we come up with our own plan to combat global warming?' suggests Ian Macfarlane.

'Because we don't believe in it!' sneers Nick Minchin. 'And we hate people who believe in global warming.'

'But what do we love?' somebody asks.

'We don't hate Australia!'

'Straya!'

'And you know what all this fight against global warming farrago is forgetting all about?' Tony asks. 'Australia! That's what!'

'So what do we do?'

'We say Fuck caring about global warming! It's time to get serious about the environment.'

'But aren't those two statements entirely contradictory?'

'Not at all! We all know there's something wrong with the environment. There's not enough water or something.'

'But in northern NSW they're experiencing floods at the mo-'

'Not enough water or something! Or too much, I can't really follow. The Murray River's all screwed up and stuff. And why is that?'

'Prolonged drought which is a symptom of global climate change?'

'Can't we just dump a whole bunch of sea water into it?'

'The reason is mismanagement! We all know Labor can't run anything. Give three state governments a river and they'll fuck it up. Now the Liberals, we're all about management. We won three or something elections on the back of our economic management credentials.'

'And fearmongering.'

'It's the Liberal Approach.'

'And a river is pretty much an economy. All we need to do is take the focus off this global warming thing and everything Labor seems to be doing to help stop it. And bring the focus back home. Show everyone how much Labor's fucked up the Murray. Then we'll put our hand up, and show everyone how good we were at managing economy rivers or something, and we'll take over.'

'How are we going to fix it then?'

'With an ARMY. Blast the bitch out of that sediment build-up.'

'It's the Liberal Approach.'

'Takes everyone's mind off emissions. Nobody likes news stories with smokestacks in them. Show 'em a river, every time.'

'So you mean we... Wait a minute, just let me make sure I've got this right. We approach the problem in an entirely ad hoc, reactionary way, without thought to the possible origins of the problem or how to stop the problem arising again?'

'Don't forget parochial!'

'That's right, but I prefer it if you called it the Liberal Approach. Your way makes it sound bad.'

And in the corner, hidden away next to the fern and underneath his own portrait, Malcolm Turnbull sighs another sigh and slaps his palm into his face.

Top 20 tracks of 2009.

2009-12-19T02:27:00.009+11:00

So rather than hang out and pick out songs from 2009 that I like today, I decided to let the cold heartlessness of mathematics determine what my 20 favourite tracks from this year were. It's based on an analysis of play counts, length of time the song's been in the library, and each tracks particular ranking for both, and at the end it gives each track a score between 0 and 100.

I won't get into the details, but in short I've given every song in my library a UAI. I'm pretty impressed with what numbers it churned out. And so. This isn't the Top 20. The Top 20 is pretty much all Isaac and Evil Cowards. This is the top-scoring songs of the first 20 artists on the list. So #20 is really #118, et cetera. So it goes.

20: Bedouin Soundclash - Stand Alone (72.7)

This year’s Bedouin release, Where Have All The Songs Played Gone To?, wasn’t their greatest. It was only an EP, so that’s understandable. But I hope it’s the sort of EP that falls into the B-sides category, instead of the Shape Of Things To Come category, because if it’s the latter then their next LP’s going to be bland. I mean this is a good song, as is ‘Radio Palais’ from the same EP, but it’s nothing like Sounding A Mosaic or Street Gospels, and they’ve had 2 years to get this down.

19: Bill Callahan - Eid Ma Clack Shaw (75.8)

I got Callahan’s album Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle on the basis of a positive NME review, the album design, and the name. I only ever go to the NME when I’m absolutely craving new music, and I download whatever looks good and give it a try. ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’ was the only song I could really stand to listen to. It’s a nice, piano driven something-pop song. From what I can tell it’s about a guy who hallucinates something. Pleasant enough sounding, if only I could figure out what the hell it was about.

18: Dusty Rhodes and the River Band - W.W.M.D.? (76.0)

So yeah. I can’t tell if the M in this acronymic title refers to Mahomet or MacGyver. It’s a good song, with fine guitar hook. Again, the lyrics are fine but there’s not much oomph to them. ‘There’s a fire beneath the world, and we are just about to fall’ is about as good as it gets. Also organs! This band is sort of a mix between Okkervil River and Lucero, and I can’t necessarily say that’s a bad thing, but it won’t be enough to get the album, Palace and Stage, into my Top 10.

17: Orba Squara - Treasure Map (82.1)

Apparently this band’s first album has the highest percentage of licensed songs of any album since Moby’s 1999 Play. Movies, TV, ads, and it’s not difficult to see why affable, inoffensive bouncy pop tunes like this wouldn’t appeal to marketing managers trying to sell compact cars to 20-somethings wearing skinny jeans and drinking cider in small bars and oh they’re in Melbourne too. Glockenspiels and mandolins and songs about searching, whatever for and whatever that means. It’s not contrived but at the same time it is.

16: Philip Glass - Dance III (84.0)

Composed in 1986, a full recording of the score to Twyla Tharp’s ballet In The Upper Room was only released this year. The guy on the cover looks like the most obnoxious twat you could find, but we’re starting to get into the 5-star tracks by this point. This is classic Glass: unwavering bombast and constant brass paranoia. Listen to it on a bus while people-watching, you’ll forget that people are supposed to be dancing to it, and you’ll start to think that They are following you. Because They are.

15: Modest Mouse - Satellite Skin (84.7)

Unlike Where Have All The Songs Played Gone To?, I know that No One's First, And You're Next is a B-sides/rarities collection. Which I guess makes disappointment about the release more palpable. Anything that came after We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank was bound to be a disappointment, so I guess that was well played, Brooks, well played. ‘Satellite Skin’ is a lazy rock song, not a whole lot happens, it just flows along and is punctuated by the occasional shout from Isaac Brooks and a guitar solo from maybe it’s Johnny Marr, maybe it’s not. It’s good for nodding to.

14: The Decemberists - Annan Water (88.0)

I think the reason this track isn’t higher is because I didn’t listen to The Hazards of Love much, and so most of the play counts were from deliberate listens to this one song. It’s a stellar track on a lacklustre release. The song is a desperate plea to a callous river god, a promise from the hero of the album-story that he will sacrifice himself to the river if it will let him cross now to rescue his maiden fair. It evokes a bardic Britain in the same way that The Tain does, and even though I prefer Colin Meloy’s Renaissance/Industrial Revolution-era stories, this one is precious.

13: …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Isis Unveiled (88.2)

‘Isis Unveiled’ is a return to the form Trail of Dead exhibited in 2006’s Worlds Apart. The title itself is taken from the title of some 1877 idiotic occult text that made money. The song itself covers the Old and New Testaments from the perspective of God. It reminds me of those 27 minute heavy metal epics, except it’s only six minutes and is enjoyable alternative rock.

12: Love in October - Hey!!! (89.6)

From a song about the Bible to a song where the only lyric is the word ‘hey’. Love In October is a new indie rock band who will make it moderately big, I think. At the very least a shorter cut of this song will be the theme song to a TV show. At 1:14 it’s quick and enjoyable. There’s clapping and about three or four chords, just repeated through the whole thing with different instruments at the front of the sound.

11: Mumford & Sons - Little Lion Man (91.5)

Mumford & Sons are the sort of band where their second album will disappoint and they won’t get any near to selling out even one show in Sydney next time they come, never mind two consecutive nights. That said, I was a fan with one listen. Every song is about sadness and loneliness, which are institutions that I can support. ‘Little Lion Man’ is a wonderful example of what they do: acoustic guitar and piano and improvised drums and vocal harmonies and the hardest of hardcore banjo plucking over the crescendo. It’s a song that has multiple emotional peaks, and that’s an institution I can subscribe to as well.

10: Beautiful Small Machines - Counting Back To One (91.7)

Beautiful Small Machines are an electronic band that sing about robots in love. In fact, their EP is called The Robots In Love EP and it tells the science fiction story about what’s on the tin. Only because they’re robots they don’t have the capacity for love, so the feelings that the two artificial intelligences apparently had for one another turn out to be science-related fictions as well. WOW. Burned out love and robots! The coda where they come back and unexpectedly start singing about Blitzkriegs is a nice touch. It’s cute and I like it.

9: My Chemical Romance - Desolation Row (93.8)

There are three reasons why I probably should be embarrassed about having this song on here (and with a score in the 90s), and in case you missed some I’ll list them. One: it’s My Chemical Romance. Two: it’s a cover of a Bob Dylan song by My Chemical Romance. Three: it’s a My Chemical Romance cover that appeared on a film soundtrack (Watchmen) and was recorded solely with the intent to make money. But I like it? I have to say I’m probably a bigger fan of MCR than Dylan, on the basis that I can’t sit through a Dylan album. Here MCR have condensed an 11 minute borefest into a rollickin’ high-tempo capsule of musical enjoyment. I actually think I could’ve stood for them to include all the verses in there. And I appreciate that the producers chose this song for its relevant lyrical content, with ‘superhuman crew’, et cetera. That sort of stuff cracks me right up.

8: Plushgun - Just Impolite (94.1)

‘I walk the line like Johnny Cash / I made the bus in seconds flat / I called your line too many times / I'm not obsessed, just impolite.’ Ahhh, what a creepy genius I am I mean Dan Ingala is. All of Plushgun’s songs speak to/for me in some way, which is a nice thing to have. It’s like The Postal Service but a bit more synthpop. It’s really, really enjoyable, and genuinely ‘indie’ in the same way that Orba Squara is not. Fun and depressed. You know what I mean, hipsters.

7: Franz Ferdinand - Ulysses (94.8)

Unfortunately this song has been overtaken in my heart by other tracks from Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, but I must have thoroughly appreciated it at the time because the computer is telling me this is The One. Again, this is classic Franz, and it incorporates well the synth type stuff they’re doing now. It’s a really good song to walk along to with headphones, especially if you’re in a hurry. It’s a tight song; these chaps certainly know their song structure. Sweet head nodding action.

6: The Polyamorous Affair - The Interrogation (Intro) (95.0)

The reason this song ranks so well probably has something to do with the fact that when I write, I often include music in some scenes, and in my head it plays through like a movie. ‘The Interrogation (Intro)’ fit well with a story I was writing for my Great American Novel, so it got a lot of plays. That’s not to say it’s a bad song. It’s not. It’s a cut above your standard electro trash. It’s enjoyable because the very simple melody is a cross between a pop song and a march. Then the explosions and laser guns and the toneless telescreen voice threatening the listener that ‘You will party: all… night… long.’ Classic.

5: Muse - Resistance (96.0)

This is another song that influenced my writing, although in a more direct way. I think it’s simply grand. In the same way that the robots are in love, I like the idea that genuine and considered emotion can be a sort of cultural resistance. I don’t think the resistance here refers only to symbolic resistance against totalitarianism (because symbolic resistance is stupid unless it’s against symbolic threats). To me it’s a fight against the drive toward drab and bland unification, consumption and sexualisation of popular culture. I’m thinking specifically of Lady Gaga here.

4: The Mountain Goats - Psalms 40:2 (97.6)

Like with ‘Ulysses’, I would have chosen another one, but I remember really getting into this song when I first picked up The Life of the World to Come. This is one of the most explicitly religiously inspired songs on the album, and with ‘He has raised from the pit and he will set me high’ Darnielle directly references the title passage. It’s one of the few songs on the album that is a rock song, instead of the tragic piano ballads that I came to love it for, and by jolly does it rock the fuck out? (The answer’s yes.) It’s very reminiscent of something like ‘Lovecraft In Brooklyn’ or ‘See America Right’ from earlier LPs. By God does John Darnielle have some range.

3: Electric Six - The Newark Airport Boogie (98.3)

This song is about bringing the funk to places where the funk doesn’t naturally flourish. This has been a goal of Electric Six since the beginning of their career. Things I love about this song. the electronic drum beat. The synth licks that remind me of Hawaii. The autotune that turns Dick Valentine’s voice into another instrument. The gang vocals on the chorus. This song is the best party you’ve ever been to. Fifteen million screaming Chinamen just can’t be wrong.

2: Isaac Graham - Columbus (99.7)

I don’t mean to be a prick. But with this song Isaac achieves exactly what Orba Squara tries and sort of fails to do with ‘Treasure Map’. In my Great American Novel there is a scene where a yacht crashes against rocks because a character goes crazy and makes a yacht crash against the rocks I was talking about. Then he steals a lifeboat and rows off looking for the exit door on the side of the dome at the end of the ocean, because he completely misread The Truman Show.

At the same time in a park nearby to the rocks another character falls in love with a girl (he is a boy, this is how it happens in my story) but he thinks her name is someone else’s name and they never meet again. Whenever he thinks about her, in his mind a ukulele or a Hammond organ is playing. This is how it works. There is a ukulele in this song. When you read my Great American Novel, when it gets to the bit where these things happen, the song ‘Columbus’ by Isaac Graham will play. I don’t know where you are from, but fucking hell: I’d like to know.

1: Evil Cowards - You Really Like Me (100.0)

The best thing about two releases in one year written by Dick Valentine is two songs on my Top 20 written by Dick Valentine. According to the same equation I used to develop this list, this song is also my favourite song of all time. I don’t disagree. This and Red Bull were my main sources of energy and adrenalin during the election campaign. Conveniently, the song has roughly equal the number of beats as steps it takes to get from my front door to the bus stop at Anzac Parade.

I can’t say enough good things about this song. Every line is Shakespeare. It is bluster and arrogance, and the music carries that on where the lyrics leave off. It is travesty, failure and defeat in a three minutes and forty three seconds of synth punk genius. Hey baby. I used to have a TV show. I used to be somebody that you’d really like to get to know.

A hero from the future.

2009-12-15T09:00:00.001+11:00

13 December - Sydney, 12:45am

Walking down Elizabeth St to a bus stop. The streets are busy, people going home or stumbling around to get in some greasy fast food before the lockout. People are enjoying themselves. All is well. Dickheads are at a minimum. Across the road someone shouts something incomprehensible. Upon asking, Isaac tells me he said "Show us your tits," to some unfortunate female in a car or something. But I don't think he said that.

I prefer to think he said "I shouldn't exist!" Distraught. Agonising and confused.

Surrounded by everyone's happy Saturday night all round good times is a time-travelling knight errant, sent back through the treacherous vortex of time to prevent some cataclysmic future from befalling us all. His plan has just been carried out to all predictions of success. And with the exception of my overheard snippet, everyone is unaware of his struggle, going about their banalities, ignorant this titan of time itself.

The causal chain between this time and the horror time from which he hails has been broken. All that's left for him is to cease to be, there being no reason for him to go back in the first place. No reason at all.

Except failure.

People who fall in love with sovereign nation-states.

2009-12-12T09:00:00.004+11:00

11 December - Kingsford, 10:45pm

Here's a thing I don't understand. Nationalism is a thing I don't understand. Particularly the exclusionist nationalism. The sort where they say if you don't give a shit about the country you're coming to then you should just go back to the country you came from.

Facebook groups on this topic tend to be good for a laugh. The ones that give weird unsatisfied little people a place to vent their frustrations about the rate of immigration. Or about the free ride that asylum seekers are getting. Don't they knew there are proper channels they need to go through? Sheesh.

And for every twenty-odd posts of 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie' or some banal slogan you get one creepy old guy posting some sinister message along the lines of "I am a proud Aussie, I think a lot of people need to become nationalised before they knock us. Too many taking us for granted." The guy that posted this reminded me of Stacy Keach's character in American History X. The one who takes the vague proclamations of pride by the young kids and carefully fashions them into skinheads.

So they get up the immigrants for not having an emotional attachment to their country. Emotional attachment here refers to having the back tattoos of the Southern Cross (a constellation visible from other such Anglo-Saxon countries as Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Brazil) and also shouting.

They want the immigrants who don't live Australian to leave. It seems like a fairly cut-and-dry response. But what about the white Australian's who don't really care for the country? I'm not proud to be Australian. I'm not necessarily ashamed; there are worse places of which to call yourself a citizen. I just don't care about it? I certainly wouldn't try to defend Australia in a war. And I don't really care if some people in western Sydney speak a different language and worship a different God to the one I don't worship. Australia just happens to be the place where I was born and where I live and do things and I'm allowed to vote so that's fine I guess.

Advance Australia Yawn.

I suspect that this is a sentiement that a lot of people share, and I don't just mean the people who don't get into the whole national pride thing. Why do people binge drink and gamble on Australia Day and ANZAC Day? Why do the celebrations look remarkably similar to those on New Year's Eve? Could it be because there's nothing actually there to celebrate? Is shouting 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie' all a facade to hide the fact from all the non-Whites that we haven't actually done all that well at developing a culture on our own? And why hasn't anyone included me in the secret yet.

What are the nationalists' plans for me? I probably appreciate Australia less then the immigrants who come here from varying degrees of totalitarianism and as a result cherish the freedoms they find here. But the nationalists' definition I'm every bit as 'Australian' as they are, so their old arguments don't work. 'Go back to where you came from if you don't like it mate.' You see my predicament?

I can sympathise with immigrants who don't jump for joy for being in Australia. It's not a great place. I mean, it's alright, but yeah. As a country, it's a bit underwhelming. And it doesn't live up to the hype, I don't think.

But I don't understand the suggestion that if you don't like Australia, go back to your original country. The country you left because, presumably, you liked that one less than you like Australia, even if on a sliding scale you don't even like Australia that much. What if you don't like any country?

Please, if you're an ignorant bogan racist, let me know what your lot's policy is in dealing with people like me.

Here's some non-racist Australian punk. I feel bad that I have to even qualify that.

MP3: The Disables - The Girls Dont Like Us Cause We Dont Play Football

Audience robot breaks down mid-applause.

2009-12-11T15:00:00.005+11:00

11 December - Kingsford, 3:00pm

Missed an update. Don't have anything to write about. Here's a video.

King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 3 by The Apples in Stereo

2009-12-06T09:00:00.000+11:00

5 December - Kingsford, 6:00pm

MP3: The Apples in Stereo - King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 3

This is a cover of half a Neutral Milk Hotel song. The other half is part 2, the lyrics of which consist mostly of the words 'I love you Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ I love you' sung over and over again and a trumpet. Part 3 is much more fun. The original song is a folk-rock-lofi classic. This cover is a dance-punk synthpop funfest.

Please Please Me by The Beatles

2009-12-04T00:19:00.007+11:00

4 December - Kingsford, 12:30am

Here is testament to my total ignorance of the Beatles' music: in 2007 when I worked in the sort of store that had a PA system which played affable pop and children's music through it in order to make the customers feel welcome, I would often hear "I Saw Her Standing There" play over the said PA system. I had no idea who it was, but it was enjoyable, even if compared to the other saccharine pop that got played the rest of the time. Best of a bad bunch, if you will.

So I was, I guess, pleasantly surprised when it happened to be the first track of Please Please Me. I'd been expecting to have to slog through three or four horrible pieces of juvenilia before I even struck across anything worth hearing. This was the impression Gottlieb gave me anyway. So it was off to a good start.

I came to this album with an open mind. I really did. I listened to it diligently. I put the individual songs on rotation. But I simply can't understand how this - this! - could possibly have been the beginning of Beatlemania. Tame beginning, if you ask me.

"Misery", "Anna" and "Chains" are all repetitive, slow, and derivative. "Boys" is a fun rock & roll tune, and I actually kind of like Ringo's singing? I get the impression that they miss the obvious point of the chorus "Don't ya know I mean boys / Well, I talk about boys, now / Aaahhh, boys / Well, I talk about boys, now / What a bundle of joy" but the gender thing going on there adds to the fun.

"Ask Me Why" and the title track bring us back to the tame. At least "Please Please Me" does some good things with the harmonica and the harmonies and the call-and-response, but it doesn't stand the scrutiny of repeated listening.

"Love Me Do", I think, I only like because it's part of my cultural consciousness. Also Lennon's harmonica on this track is pretty good. It's the simple little techniques that make it, like the well-placed wah-wahs and the bent note at the end of the main riff. It adds a bluesy dirtiness to an otherwise meaningless pop song. "Love me do"? What does that even mean.

"P.S. I Love You" is purely template song-writing. Put the words "I" and "you" in and join them up somehow with the word "love" and you've got a winner, or in this case, a piece of unlistenable garbage. I can't help but listen to these sort of songs - "I'll always / be in love with you" - with a sort of irony. One for the acrimonious break-up of the band itself. Two for the fact that when they grew up, the generation of kids who listened to the Beatles went on to gloriously break records when it came to divorce rates.

"Baby It's You" is the worst track on the album. No contest. "Do You Want To Know A Secret" starts off with a tantalising spaghetti western feel then descends back into boring pop trash. "A Taste Of Honey" is exactly what I would have liked, but by this point in the album I know there's no chance of getting anything but saccharine from them.

"There's A Place" is an enjoyable combination of bouncy rhythms and melancholy loneliness and longing. I quite like it, but unfortunately it's the sort of song that can be over-listened to. The album ends, as it begins, on a high note, with "Twist and Shout" and Lennon's enjoyably abrasive vocals.

The album clocks in at 32 minutes 26; averaging a measly 2 minutes 16 per song. With tracks getting in and out of the way that quickly, it's actually fairly disappointing that I can't stand to sit through most of them. This isn't an album that travels well. I'm sure if I'd been around in 1963 I'd hate the endless radio rotation of this music as much as I hate Rihanna.

This album gets 3 star, up from 2 1/2 because of the album's thankful brevity.

MP3: The Beatles - Boys

The President of Fuck You.

2009-11-30T09:00:00.001+11:00

27 November - Kingsford, 10:30pm

I have a policy on this thing not to review anything that I wouldn't consider rating more than 4 stars. When I reviewed The Orchard, the album by Fire on Fire, I considered bumping its rating half a star up just so I could post it. In the end I admitted that I'd thought about giving it four, but settled on the 3 1/2 and called it a day.

The reason for this is that, on The Price of Green at least, I will only ever review anything when I want to share a piece of art with people. There's no point in tearing something apart for the sake of tearing it apart and giving it one star. At least not on a personal blog.

That's why when it comes to the movie 2012 (2009, dir. Roland Emmerich), there's no way that I'm even going to bother considering the thing as a whole. Instead, I'm going to just focus on the character of the US President, played by Danny Glover.

Somebody get this man a Golden Globe.

The premise of the film is that the earth's core has heated to such an extent that the mantle destabilises the crust and causes entire continents to shift up, down and around the globe. Soft-core death-porn ensues. The governments of the G8 find out what's going to happen a few years in advance, and prepare a few massive arks to save a select few. The select few at those who can afford like 40 billion euros or some preposterous sum, thus ensuring a society of Huxleyan Alphas will survive.

The highest-bidder option was taken up by the American government as well, despite being the protectors of democracy. Mid-way through the obscenely long building, as Washington is being evacuated, the 60-plus year-old president decides that he's not going to get on Air Force One. He laments that he didn't organise some sort of lottery to give the common citizens a chance for survival. Lament away, Barack, you've doomed them all.

Danny Glover decides to help the doomed people. The White House lawns become a makeshift hospital/refugee camp. Danny tries to find a lost kid's parents. A paramedic doesn't recognise him at first, telling him he's too busy. When the medic realises who it is, he jumps to, but Danny says he's doing important work at the ambulance. Then thousand-foot tsunami dumps the USS John Kennedy aircraft carrier on them all.

The president dies a hero. The president could have saved some of the people who died under the USS John Kennedy, but instead decided that the best option was to put salvation up on the liberal free market. I don't mind that.

But it's laughable that the president who acted entirely without regard for the wellbeing of 99.9% of his constituents gets to die a noble and sympathetic death, just because he's the president. Helping a little kid look for his dad (knowing full well you won't find him) doesn't redeem you. But apparently being the President of the US entitled you to a glorious death in Roland Emmerich's eyes.

MP3: The Skulls - Murder The Government

The Orchard by Fire On Fire

2009-11-27T20:35:00.005+11:00

27 November - Kingsford, 8:30pm

MP3: Fire on Fire - Heavy D

Just look at that cover. That's a cover that lets you know what's going to be inside. It's a rough design. It's organic. It's a collage. It's got an historical sort of aesthetic with the house in the background and the boy's clothing. It makes me feel like we're going to go hang out on a farm and play music. This is an album with no electric instruments on it. This is an album where all five musicians contribute vocals. This is an album where the instruments include harmonium, guitar, accordion, banjo, dobro, oud, nay, tamboritza, jembe, tamborine, upright bass, and doumbek. Isn't that fun.

My biggest problem with this album is that I have nothing to say about it. It's a problem that a lot of other reviews on the internet have as well. Inevitably a review will start off by saying how a lot of Fire on Fire is made up of people who used to be in a band called Cerberus Shoal. I don't know any of Cerberus Shoal's music, but from the label's description of an "art-punk-prog-chaos collective" I get the impression that Fire on Fire is a distinct project from Ceberus Shoal. So all I know is that this isn't a band that isn't like another band that I don't know about.

The songs all follow the same-with-variation template. It's a good thing that the 'same' part of it is damned enjoyable, but I get the impression that in six months time I'll be sick of them. Say I listen to each song fifteen times in my initial period of attempted appreciation. If I have trouble telling one song from the other eleven on the album, I might as well have just listened to one song 180 times. Listen to one song 180 times, you'll never want to hear it again. And clocking in at 62 minutes, this a lot of same-but-different to handle.

There are some quality parts to the album. The harmonies in the chorus to 'Toknight' are particularly compelling, as is the pun of the title: "Bishop to queen / and queen to knight. / Who's to blame? / You suspected Jesus Christ." I suspected they were another Christian band that had sneaked into my heart but I soon figured that wasn't the case. And you have to appreciate a band that has the lyrical adroitness to incorporate humoral medicine into a song, as in the title track: "May we rise / without vain glory / and may we rise / without spleen."

These quotes are all from choruses, in which all the members sing harmonies. I can't follow what they're singing in any of the verses. As clear and symphonious the instruments may be, and as good as the harmonies and solo singing is, I can't understand half the words. This wouldn't be a problem if it were something like The Decemberists where all the songs are stories and I can piece it all together later if I want, but as far as I can tell there is no narrative to these songs. If the vocalists bothered to enunciate a bit more clearly maybe I'd be able to understand more than every third line.

In sum, it sounds good, but I don't know what it is I'm listening to. What are they trying to say? Couldn't tell you.

3 1/2 stars, down from 4 at the start of writing.

A Serious Man by The Coen Brothers

2009-11-23T17:34:00.009+11:00

23 November - Kingsford, 5:30pm

The Book of Job is a biblical story about a man named Job. Job is a pretty good bloke within the context of 1st millenium BC Palestine. He's good to his wife and kids, he's got a lot of dosh and he is respectful to God. Then one day the devil says to God, 'Hey guy, I bet you I can't make this Job guy curse you.' And God, because like any omnipotent and omniscient being is bored beyond comprehension, takes the devil up on his bet, but says 'Only you can't kill Job.'

So the devil goes and destroys Job's property, kills his family, gives Job plague, and Job's all 'Come on God, what's the fucking deal?' And Job's friends are all 'Hey Job, what did you do to piss God off so much?' and Job is all 'I didn't do shit. God's being a dick.' But he doesn't curse God.

At some point, as Job is slouching in the smoky rubble of his house amid the potsherds and dead livestock, covered in sores, his friend expresses what I think is the point of the story: "Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." (5:6-7, KJV). Or, human suffering has a cause, but at the same time to suffer is as central and natural a part of being a human as flying up out of a fire is for an ember. I think that's a wonderful sentiment for a religious text. It's a fucking shite state of affairs Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world isn't going to make any fucking difference.

A Serious Man (2009) is the story of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics lecturer whose wife is leaving him for another man, whose kids don't respect him, whose all-American goy neighbour is mowing the lawn two feet over the property line. Faced with these crises, Larry is encouraged to go see the rabbi. In the end he tries to see three: the rambling baby-faced junior rabbi, the unhelpful Rabbi Nachtner, and the reclusive Rabbi Marshak. None of the traditional sources of spiritual advice help him; in fact they upset him more for the rabbis' inability or unwillingness to see the problem.

This is the sort of film where every line has some symbolic significance. Early in the film, a failing Korean student attempts to bribe Larry into giving him a pass mark. Or, we think he bribes him. Larry finds an envelope on his desk after the student leaves. But maybe the money came from Larry's brother Arthur (Richard Kind) who does well in illegal gambling. Maybe. When the student's father approaches Larry, threatening to sue either for accepting the money or for defamation in accusing his son of bribery, he encourages Larry to "accept the mystery". This is the best film I have ever seen.

The best acting has to come from Richard Kind. Arthur lives in Larry's family home, spends all his time with draining a cyst in his neck, going to singles nights, getting arrested and scribbling down his . When Larry is forced into a motel so is Arthur. Late one night Larry wakes up to hear his brother blubbing. When he asks what's wrong, the fat boxers-clad man bolts/trundles from the hotel room and down to the empty pool. Larry follows, and Arthur complains "Look at everything Hashem has given you! And what do I get! I get fucking shit!" Who does Larry think he is? He has a family and a job, even though each might be threatened, he's still been given them. Arthur doesn't even have anything to take away. Quit your bitching, Job. Richard Kind's got some real problems here.

A Serious Man isn't so much a dark comedy as an anti-comedy. You find yourself laughing at things you know you shouldn't. In the cinema, where a couple hundred people are laughing with you, it feels a bit like Gran Torino, except instead of racism you're laughing at tragedy. There's an ambiguity in this film: how is it OK for Hashem to inflict apparent cruelty on a man who, as the film so often points out, "hasn't done anything"?

The film ends in a parking lot. All I'll say is that it's not necessarily the happiest ending, but then again it is a Coen Brothers film so that isn't giving away too much. The junior rabbi, the first one Larry sees, tries to frame his questions as a matter of perspective, of how to see Hashem in the world. "Just look at that parking lot," he marvels. To you it's just a parking lot. But to someone with a fresh perspective, who doesn't know about cars and so forth, with the capacity for wonder. To them, Hashem is in the parking lot. Hashem is in the ending.

This is a film that will be in the schools. I'm giving it 5 stars.

MP3: A Silver Mt. Zion - Built Then Burn (Hurrah! Hurrah!)

Emergency Buy This Book!

2009-11-21T14:18:00.007+11:00

21 November - Kingsford, 2:15pm

So I wrote a novella! I think it's alright, and I definitely think you people are impressionable enough to want to pay a small amount of money for the privilege of reading it. Actually no; I'm pretty damned proud of it. I think I did alright on this one.

It's about a guy who wakes up one day and realises that his skeleton has been replaced with a gold skeleton so he hires this private detective called Albert Spry to help figure out what happened to him. There's also a story about a Russian czarist who can't deal with change, and a British secret agent who's trying to find out what the deal is with Ireland. It's a comedy, I think. I think I'm a comedy writer.

'Why don't you take it to a publisher, Daniel?' Mostly because it's only about 23500 words long (90 pages in book size), and very very few publishers are willing to print and sell such a short work. The novella occupies an awkward place in the marketplace. People, who are idiots, want to get a good word per dollar deal when they buy a book, so they feel ripped off when they pay 15 bucks for 50000 words, when a 200000 word novel is only ten dollars more. Et cetera. That's why publishers won't do novellas. It's not because I don't think it's good enough.

So rather than hang onto it and glibly tell people that I've written a novella, 'Hey if you want to read it I'll like print it off for you' and then never do, I've decided to just sell it. Yay!

The novella is called ROMP. and is subtitled The Adventures of Albert Spry, Gentleman & Other Tales. It's set in the eighteen-nineties. Here's a cover. I designed it myself, using a picture I stole from The Gutenberg Project. In a way I did none of the work. It's black and white because I'm not going to spring for colour printing. Also there's some more pictures inside the book! It's an illustrated story.

You can buy ROMP. in two formats: ebook or hard copy. The ebook is a PDF that I'll email you after you pay me $5. You can order it at this link using PayPal or a credit card. The hard copy is going to be an A5 ring bound copy that I will post to you after you pay me $12, as well as $2.50 postage. You can order it at this link. I haven't got any of the hard copies made yet, so everything but the price is purely hypothetical, but that's what I'll be asking for at the printers.

The webstore I'm selling them through is the same I sell t-shirts through. If you buy a shirt with a hard copy I'll give you free postage.

I require maximalism in music.

2009-11-18T09:00:00.001+11:00

17 November - Kingsford, 8:45pm

So my taste in music isn't as sophisticated as I once thought! I had a think about my prejudices when it comes to music, and it turns out one of my fundamental beliefs is

"Any rock song is immediately improved by the presence of a synthesiser."

Three years ago this would have been anathema to me. Heresy. Two years ago I would've said that yes, a synthy rock song caaaaan be good, but pride of place still has to go to bands who use the Capitoline guitar-bass-drums triad and use those or other instruments (brass, harmonica, or other strings like violin or banjo or mandolin) to add flavour to a song. Why rely on the laziness of the synth when you have such quality instruments at hand?

Today I'm willing to listen to either. Actually. Today my tastes have radicalised in either direction. Now I can't listen to just a band. They need to have that extra something something. They need Matt Bellamy's keys over Muse, or the nine or twelve Gogol Bordello musicians on top of Eugene Hutz's acoustic guitar. My favourite Bloc Party song is Flux. Vocals are definitely something consider; I would probably think The Gaslight Anthem were too similar to other shitty punk bands if Brian Fallon didn't use his voice as an instrument, rather than just a medium for the lyrics.

I can't enjoy Band of Horses, for example. British India's songs all sound the same. Likewise The New Pornographers, even with the keys. I can't deal with TV On The Radio. And don't get me started on Radiohead. [edit: Likewise Regina Spektor and Josh Pyke. I'm bored by both of them.] There's nothing that grabs me about most of those band's songs. I find the songs sound the same as all the other songs, and there's nothing particularly outstanding about the singer's voice.

"But Daniel, at least one or more of those bands use synths/keys!" OK, sure, but that just goes to expose another of my core beliefs about a good song. And this really shits me, because it's the reason why I'll never truly be able to like Eels or Mountain Goats in the same way that I love Electric Six or Jackson Jackson, even though all the lyricists are brilliant.

"I usually only have time for songs that have good, strong melodies."

To me, that's the most banal, trite, unappreciative ideology to bring to music listening. It's the Top 40 mindset. It holds the jig up above the lament. It's the musical equivalent of saying comedy is superior to tragedy. It's been the way stupid people have thought about music for centuries. Why, for example, is Beethoven's Ninth consistently rated among peoples' favourite classical pieces? Because it rocks the fuck out.

I love Beethoven's Ninth. I love it because it goes somewhere. This isn't to say that I don't enjoy folk music, or more subdued organic stuff, nein. There's a French (I think?) band called Revolver that do cello, violin, piano and vocal harmonies to haunting effect. Next week or so I'll review an album by Fire on Fire, The Orchard. They do amazing things sans electricity.

That said, I still think it's a bit disgusting that I need a bouncing melody in order to appreciate a song. You could be singing the most beautiful poem in the world, but if you put it to a simple band set-up, and your voice sounds like everyone else's voice, you've lost me. Pitiful, Daniel. Pitiful.

Here's a song about nuclear annihilation.

MP3: The Epoxies - We're So Small

And here's a Mountain Goats cover.

MP3: You Make Engine - Jaipur

"50 million screaming Chinamen just can't be wrong."

2009-11-15T09:00:00.010+11:00

14 November - Kingsford, 12:30 am

MP3: Electric Six - The Newark Airport Boogie

This is the ultimate "something good just happened" music.

Not unlike this Hall & Oates song, although I doubt I'd be able to stomach it without the context of this scene from (500) Days of Summer (2009, dir. Marc Webb). This is Joseph Gordon Levitt, who played the lead in Brick, directed by Rian Johnson, who also directed two Mountain Goats video clips. In this scene Joseph Gordon Levitt has just slept with Zooey Deschanel.

The Life of the World to Come by The Mountain Goats

2009-11-13T03:25:00.012+11:00

13 November - Kingsford, 3:30am

Rarely is is that I will actually find out about the new album of a band I like while perusing the shelves of a CD store. I'm not normally hung up on getting new releases as soon as they come out, I'm the sort of person who isn't entirely disappointed to find that one of my favourite bands brought out a new album six months ago, and I've been spending all this time forgetting to get into it. That happened with Muse this year. Every year I miss Electric Six's newest albums by about a month, and I'm only just starting to catch wise to the pattern. I only just found out Eels released new record a while back.

Which is why I wasn't incredibly surprised to find a new album by the Mountain Goats just chilling on the shelves of JB HiFi one day. What I was surprised about, when I got home to download the album illegally, was that the album had been released that day. Providence? Who the fuck knows.

And I did some research. Every track on the record is based on (and named from) a passage in the Bible that John Darnielle, lyricist extraordinaire, finds particularly poignant. In culling imagery from the Bible Darnielle doesn't just take the beautiful bits; the ugliness that is often washed over is prominent here as well. While the "God is love" of 1 John 4:16 is there, so too is the vitriolic prophesy of Ezekiel.

This isn't all the retelling of biblical stories. Many of the songs don't mention God, not even in that suspiciously oblique way that Christian Rock bands like to do. If anything, it seems as if he's critiquing the view of the merciful God: 'A kind and loving God won't let my small ship run aground,' he sings in 'Romans 10:9', but two tracks down the line at 'Matthew 25:21' we get a song about a long-postponed visit to a loved one, dying pointlessly of cancer.

Darnielle's songs create a world in which the good things that happen, happen in spite of the bad. A God that can create beauty and love in the world is just as liable for the unhappy childhoods and the painful and lingering terminal diseases.

The biggest problem I have with the album is that some of the songs aren't the best the Mountain Goats have ever written. 'Genesis 3:23' tells an odd story about a man who breaks into a family home he no longer lives in, and compares the assumed life of its current occupants with his own more or less failed existence. But it's a story told over such a drab pop melody that my finger jumps for the skip button every time it comes on. Other songs lack pizzazz, and are slow, melancholic dirges that just don't go anywhere musically. That's maybe four out of twelve songs.

The Life of the World to Come and any Mountain Goats album released after 2005 exists by the crippling fact that it isn't The Sunset Tree. It wouldn't be much of a problem if The Sunset Tree was far and away their best album, but it's not. It's their best, and all the rest come frustratingly close to equalling it, in a way that I'm forced to compare them, and compare them unfavourably.

A couple of weeks ago I posted the video to my favourite track, 'Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace', so I won't repost the MP3. Instead I'll give you another of my favourites, 'Genesis 30:3'. It's the scene where Rachel says to Jacob, trying to bear a child in old age, "Go get my slave-girl, Bilhah, have your way with her instead, she'll do it for me." I think this song is Darnielle's attempt to get into Bilhah's head, and comprehend how she could justify to herself that sort of service.

"I will do what you ask me to do / Because of how I feel about you." The song could be directed to God, who has sanctioned Jacob's rape of Bilhah, thus making a model of devotion out of Bilhah, devotion to a God who doesn't deserve it. Otherwise it could be sung toward Jacob: she does as he order because she is his slave, she has nothing else, and how she feels about him is that he is the person by whose grace she is kept alive. Either way, it's an indictment of a morally ambivalent God who allows this to happen. Enjoy.

In thinking that through I just talked this album up an extra half to a total of 4 stars.

MP3: The Mountain Goats - Genesis 3:30

A refugee analogy, followed by a solution.

2009-11-09T09:00:00.001+11:00

8 November - 2:45pm, Kingsford

Say I have two friends. One of them lives in the inner west and has this book she wants to lend me. We'll call her Antares, because Antares lives in the inner west and has this book she wants to lend me. Now say I've got another friend, who's driving around in the Inner West. I don't know anyone with a car so we'll call him Suetonius Moode. Now Suetonius lives near me, in the eastern suburbs. So I call him and ask him to pick up whatever the book is Antares wants to lend me. So he does, he's cool about it. Suetonius is just that sort of guy.

Now. If Suetonius does that for me, and brings the book around, only the book turns out to be, say, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and I tell Suetonius I don't want that filthy book in my house, and so force him to keep it in his car, which we'll call the Oceanic Viking, even after he went to the trouble of collecting it from the inner west then that wouldn't be cool.

Primitive leaky boat full of malnourished homeless men gets picked up by a ship named for a society of malnourished homeless men who went about in primitive leaky boats.

So here is an enumeration of facts that I understand about this whole Oceanic Viking situation.

The refugees were picked up in international waters but in Indonesia's search and rescue zone, by an Australian vessel, at the request of the Indonesians. Essentially the Oceanic Viking was acting as an agent of Indonesia at the time.
The refugees come from Sri Lanka. They are Tamils..
It's been suggested that a number of the Sri Lankans were living in Indonesia for some years prior to their failed voyage. I can't speak for the truth of that. It only matters a little bit I think.
The word refugee ultimately comes from the Latin word 'fugere', 'to flee'. So they'd fled from something. Another term is asylum seeker. I'll examine both of these in a bit.

So how to end this? The regional government in of the port where Oceanic Viking is doesn't want to take the 'undesirables'. Tough shit, they broke down in Indonesian search and rescue waters, your country is obligated to take them. Take them, then moan to your national government about it afterwards and get them moved.

But what about getting them off the boat? I'm a pacifist, and don't believe in using violence to coerce the refugees off the boat. That doesn't mean we can't starve them out. Australian duty of care for these people ended the minute the Oceanic Viking sailed into the Indonesian harbour. If you want them to leave then set up a great big buffet on the harbourside and put down the gangplank. If they decide to hunger strike, then we'll see who lasts longer: the refugees or the well-fed crew. It's not violence if they're too weak to resist, especially if the reason they're taking them on land is for medical treatment.

So they're refugees? From what? The Tamil war? When did they leave?If they'd been living in Indonesia since 2008, then there'd be cause for them to be asylum seekers. Maybe they were displaced during the escalation of the war earlier this year. Maybe not. But the war's finished. The Sri Lankan government's in there cleaning up and rebuilding. Oh, they don't have a home to go back to? Well, neither do the hundred thousand still-displaced Tamils living in camps on Sri Lanka. They're not trying to get to another country. Presumably because they have no possessions.

So why not send the Tamils on the Oceanic Viking to these displaced persons camps in Sri Lanka? Presumably the end-goal for dealing with these people is to resettle them in their homelands. Presumably the end-goal for any individual refugee is to go back to his or her homeland. If they don't have a home to go back to, then put them on the waiting list for one and show them the camps where the rest of the people in their situation are living. I don't think there's any good reason why these people should get Christmas Island while the rest of their countrymen get Sri Lanka. There just doesn't seem to be any reason for there to continue to be Tamil refugees. They have nothing to flee from. Unless of course they were militants in which case what they have to flee from is justice.

The refugees wanted to seek asylum from the war. The war is over, they have nothing to seek asylum from, and so should be on their way home. They fled. They implies a lack of free will in the movement. If there wasn't a war, they wouldn't have fled. They would have remained static. That want to return to that static status. If they don't, then they aren't refugees, they are illegal immigrants and need to be prosecuted for breaking Australian laws regarding immigration.

I give this diplomatic crisis two stars.

The Odyssey in less than 100 words.

2009-11-06T09:00:00.001+11:00

3 November - 4:15am, Kingsford

Odysseus leads a thousand of his countrymen to their deaths in long but otherwise profitable war, sinks another thousand in the Mediterranean along with war spoils. Returns home and demands that the ad hoc oligarchy which filled the power vacuum during his decade-long abscondence be abolished and replaced by the status quo ante bellum: an authoritarian government consisting of himself. Stages a violent coup d'etat to bring this about, killing the aforementioned dead men's sons, effectively annihilating his country's landowning class. Armed insurrection follows.

My favourite passage from the Iliad.

2009-11-03T01:43:00.004+11:00

3 November - 1:45am, Kingsford

So they fought to the death around that benched beak ship
as Patroclus reached Achilles, his great commander,
and wept warm tears like a dark spring running down
some desolate rock face, its shaded currents flowing.
And the brilliant runner Achilles saw him coming,
filled with pity and spoke out winging words:
"Why in tears, Patroclus?
Like a girl, a baby running after her mother,
begging to be picked up, and she tugs her skirts,
holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears,
fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms…
That's how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears."
The Iliad 16.1-11. trans. R. Fagles. Penguin: London, 1990.

Or.

"You god damn puss, Patroclus. Anyone would think you're a little girl."

1376-word sentence.

2009-10-31T11:27:00.007+11:00

31 October - 5:30am, Kingsford

According to most places on the internet, Guinness World Records holds that the longest published sentence in English literature is a 1287 word sentence in a novel I recommend to everyone: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, the racist. Ostensibly James Joyce topped that in Ulysses, where Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end caps off the novel with a 12931 word, sentence, immediately after a 11281 word one. I don't put much stock in these as sentences, though. They are ungrammatical rants, stream-of-conscious type stuff. I prefer order, structure, and William Faulkner, the racist, provides this. Neither does Guinness, it seems. Apparently in 2001 Jonathan Coe ended The Rotter's Club with a 13955-word sentence, although I'm yet to verify whether it holds up to my standards of sentence structure. Here's a 1376-word sentence from my Great American Novel.

Teddy was upset by the distraction, busy as he was imagining that Irving, the bastard, was down at the Village having a morning coffee with Veronica, the traitor, like he frequently imagined they frequently did, lounging in the converted terrace house’s low lying chairs upstairs on the balcony, maybe Veronica would be smoking, but Irving never did and more often than not she would light up and be gripped by the awkwardness felt by the person who smokes only for the image of grown-up sophistication associated with it – of the claim to a label, ‘I’m a smoker,’ spoken just so, then implied ‘you’d better all accommodate me: I don’t care if it’s windy, we’re sitting outside, I’m a smoker,’ – suddenly made aware of her own smallness, of the fact that her smoking habit was based in something more psychological than a straightforward addiction to nicotine, of her need for the smoker label itself, or any label she might attach to herself as one would with string a flimsy cardboard price tag or a brand name, of – and this was the critical part – Irving’s apparent lack of want when it came to these things, as if he were immune to the disease of the generic, needing no cure even if the cure was a cigarette and the occasional obnoxiousness, as if it were enough that he could be found sitting there in his black College blazer and the knuckle of his left forefinger in his mouth when he was not sipping at his drink or talking, and never making eye contact, always looking out the door at people walking past or the café staff carrying dishes and interacting with the other customers, as if the conversations which were usually vitriolic but more frequently nowadays of a melancholic character – or meeting at some chaotically neutral middle ground one could even say they were bipolar or at the very least symmetrical – were simply a ruse, a socially acceptable camouflage permitting him the leisure of staring and analysing the movements of people in the street, in their natural element, perhaps occasionally judging the vanity of the woman in the too-much make-up or frowning in disdain at the showboating acceleration of the Maserati exiting the turn into Head Road, even though it was still only a fifty zone, often dropping eaves on the conversations of the customers at the tables around them, thinking their booths afforded them soundproofing, Irving checking that they perhaps were not playing at the same game he was, and if they were smiling to himself and sometimes if he was feeling it leaning in conspiratorially to interrupt Veronica and inform her that the young couple opposite were dropping their own eaves and speaking ill of the same passers-by, and in interrupting telling Veronica – although he never realised it himself – that he was not listening to her, or at least that was how she read his abrupt truncations of the topic, not realising herself that Irving’s mind was capable of paying the requisite quantity of attention to Veronica’s talking while simultaneously preparing consuming her words, preparing his response, and scattering his vision round about in a manner that was almost suspicious, nervous in the way that spies in the stories were always able to carry on a conversation with an asset but keep that little corner of their eye on the reflective vase in the corner with the lilacs in it, for the enemies who were coming through one door and at the revolver under the table that the treacherous snitch was cocking, and that he was in this way schizophrenic in his actions, or rather his inactions, because Irving shunned action, hated it constantly and unshiftingly with a fervour that he only irregularly welled himself up to in the derogatory conversations about their mutual friends, such was his distaste for action, or rather his admiration of a sitting back contemplation and ordered – discussion was not the word, because it was too often that Irving found himself dismayed at the contempt in which he held the opinions of others – deconstruction, that was a word he had learned and disagreed with the usage of, because if anything one was given a situation in pieces, and what he enjoyed was taking the multifarious components up, investigating each and assigning a relative position to the others, and this was not something that he could do with another, and so perhaps the coffees and conversations with Veronica where a nominal deconstruction of their friendships took place was also a ruse, the best of ruses, because they were information gathering exercises, because God knew Granger would never tell him anything, and if he tried to talk to Paris about anything he would shove him out of the way and go look for some stairs to throw Rat down or sneer at him and demand Teddy, the imposter, a gathering up of the debris, and if Veronica maybe thought he was not listening, then so much the better, let her sit there with her biro in her mouth longing for a cigarette or maybe she was longing for something other than tobacco which she was unable to get because of Irving – and at this Teddy smiled to himself, every time, but never pursued the matter any further, because that would just complicate what was already a fairly perfect equilibrium – or occasionally her fingernails, because Veronica was never one to paint her nails and go through what she called the ridiculous plasticine modelling process young girls submitted themselves to in some cases, or at least as far as she knew, hourly, because even though she smoked Veronica still kept a healthy appetite for things sweet, balancing out what Wiggles and Teddy had concluded as an agreeable acerbic bite to her personality, dizzying like that first sober hit of Teacher’s whiskey, the sort of bitterness that made boys fall in love with her, two in the last week it seemed, or at least if Veronica were to be believed – and believing Veronica at face value was not a policy that Irving subscribed to, even if Teddy swooned and did – even if it was for some of her admirers an undisclosed affection, since they had reputations to maintain and after Marilyn Munroe was assassinated it became passé to say one found the plumpish girl attractive or at least on a par with the skinny girls – and if she was never going to go with them then what point of making their thoughts public, was the question – because even though she smoked Veronica still kept a healthy appetite for things sweet, and at one point as the carrot cake was brought with the second cappuccino – Irving drank hazelnut latte, Teddy drank flat white and scoffed at anything more – coming with that superfluous bit of ice cream sitting on the tiny plate right next to it, incongruous as a dessert but there nonetheless, camouflaged white against white porcelain, Irving caught the slight and rare twig of a genuine smile – too infrequent to be described except against the common masque expression Irving had recently found himself emulating in his own life – on Veronica as she eyed first the waiter – who she may have simply found attractive, the smug bastard with his three days of stubble and he was probably in a band as well – and the plate as it came down, and it was plausible, as at that quick moment Irving happened to think about the half-charade that were these coffee rendezvous, these research excursions for him at least, and catching that smile, gone as quickly as it had come, flitting back off into the ether, deniable if it came to that, and he wondered in his black College blazer and the knuckle in his mouth whether the smile belied a knowledge, a secret understanding, a little bit of ‘I know you’re not just here because you enjoy my company, Irving, although that’s some of it and I feel the same,’ and he wondered whether it was worse that he used his friendship with her to spy on the social comings and goings of his friends, or that she used her friendship with him and exploited his susceptibility to the mysterious allure of coffeeshops because she liked to eat cake.

I'm fairly sure it's grammatical. I've eschewed semi-colons in this one, which is not usually something I do, and the parenthetical hyphens get more of a showing that I would normally give them. If you find an error, let me know. Thanks for reading it if you got this far down and didn't skip any of the words.

Update. 2 Movember - 3:15pm, Kingsford

Above post edited, once I found some syntax errors and the like. Surprisingly, the word count balanced out even after the corrections.

Meat factory stationary.

2009-10-28T16:04:00.005+11:00

28 October - 5:30am, Kingsford

I'm thinking about something while falling asleep. I can't really remember what it is. Uni, employment, writing, whatever, it don't matter, none of this don't matter. The point is, it's the sort of thought process that doesn't require any sort of mental image. Say I'm thinking about cycling, I'll be thinking about locations and pathways and visualising places. This isn't necessary here.

So my mind substitutes. Like a default mental image, or a screensaver or something. It's not really important, because I'm consciously focussing on whatever the hell subject I'm thinking about, and this mental image is just running along in in the background there. The white noise version of the visual imagination. After a while I take note of what my third eye's actually looking at.

A conveyor belt, with metal claws hanging underneath. Attached to each claw is a single cooked chicken wing. As the claws pass a certain point, they release their chicken wings, which fall into a small blue plastic pencil case. There are a number of these small blue plastic pencil cases. Each of them is stuffed with chicken wings, so much that the zip can't close. Stuffed right in there.

Dick Valentine is a poetic genius.

2009-10-25T23:49:00.006+11:00

26 October - 3:30pm, Kingsford

MP3: Evil Cowards - You Really Like Me

I've based exactly three stories on lyrics written by Dick Valentine. Valentine is best known as the front man of Electric Six, and also his side project Evil Cowards. Electric Six is actually one of the best bands of all time. Some of you might remember them for their 2003 hit 'Gay Bar'. Now. I know this information might go against my stated thesis, as the first four lines of 'Gar Bar' are:

You! I wanna take you to a gay bar,
I wanna take you to a gay bar,
I wanna take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.

In November of 2005 I was getting curious about one-hit wonders. I had recently explored Chumbawamba (of 'Tubthumper' fame) and found them to be an educated and entertaining electro-folk anarchist wonderband. So I thought. Surely this band is more than just gay club jokes. And I hit up their MySpace. They had just released their second album, Señor Smoke. The first song I heard was 'Jimmy Carter'. The first verse went:

Like Jimmy Carter, like electric underwear
Like any idea that never had a chance to go anywhere
This is who you are
Hey, celebrity who drives off a bridge in a car
Your beautiful body filling up with water.

The song is positively apocalyptic. On my Last.fm charts, it is unbeaten for play counts by any other song, and the ones that come close are a combination of multiple versions. Valentine makes the most mundane, plastic things into evidence for the collapse of civilisation. The rest of the verses he caps of with 'Backstreet's back, alright', sung in a way that I can only call sinister. Just listen to it I guess?

MP3: Electric Six - Jimmy Carter

There is a philosophy to Dick Valentine. A great many of his songs are about partying and doing it and disco dancefloors and general goodtimes. But they're tinged with a sense of almost-despair: there's no point to anything, so fuck it, let's dance, let's rut, let's turn sex into a dining metaphor. It's wonderfully epicurean, and without Valentine's lyrics they'd just be like The Bravery or some shit. 'There's Something Very Wrong With Us, So Let's Go Out Tonight' is the name of a song which more or less sums this up.

MP3: Electric Six - There's Something Very Wrong With Us, So Let's Go Out Tonight

Recently I've been really getting into Evil Coward's debut album, Covered in Gas. In a way Evil Cowards is a lot like Jackson Jackson, the electropop side project of that one guy out of The Cat Empire, but side project, synthesisers and the apocalypse is where the similarities end. It's still Dick Valentine's lyrics, although now it's a less band-y effort, he's able to channel his lyrics away from the dance-party-sex-fire motifs that people more or less expect from Electric Six. This is bleaker. The music and lyrics feed off one another. Without the words it's just electronic music, without the music and Valentine's lyrics it's just absurd poetry.

Some lyrics.

We were all in this together, it was just like Vietnam
Except with a whole lot more leather
And a whole lot less napalm.
Sex Wars

Now you claim that you can't count that high
And you're running out of time to buy
But if I had a dime from every dime
I'd have five hundred dollars worth of time.
500 Ways

There's a madness to my method and a machine in my gun.
My mind is rotting and it's only just begun.
My Mind is Rotting

And there's a billion stars in the galaxy
But there should only be one for you and me
And if that's not how it's meant to be
May we meet again someday on Vega System 3.
I'm Not Scared Of Flying Saucers

Hey baby, I used to have a TV show
I used to be somebody that you'd really like to get to know.
You Really Like Me

Look! What's in the sky above?
Hot flying teenage girls... in love.
Zora and Nora

What I love about the songs on this album is that they don't seem to be about anything, but that at the same time I can't shake the sense that there's something to the words. It's got the same endtimes vibe, and I guess the message to it is that the future's here, but it's not the saving grace that everyone said it would. It's just more wankers.

Free Cherry Ripe makes the difference.

2009-10-25T09:00:00.000+11:00

21 October - Sydney CBD, 8:45pm

I walk out of the 7Eleven and look at the other 7Eleven about 100m down the road on the same block. I put my TravelTen in my wallet and unwrap my Cherry Ripe and think about how long I'll have to wait for a bus, and then there's a 10, literally in my face, didn't even look to see it coming. The 10 is empty. It's so good that even the fact that my wrapper doesn't win me a free Cherry Ripe doesn't faze me. Surprise 10 buses are fewer than 1-in-6, especially at this time.

The northbound lights at the George/Park intersection are red, with the left turn into George having the green. Two women decide to waltz out halfway, wait for a free break and dash across the rest after the turn light goes red and before the next set of lights turn green. The turn lights go red and they power walk, not quick a run, but obviously fast enough that I'm a bit embarrassed for them when the pedestrians on the footpath opposite start coming at them, regular pace. Their crossing light has gone green. Good job, you renegades. Way to wait that extra fifteen seconds.

My next novella is set in the 1980s, a decade I have nothing by contempt for. Here's a song from the 80s. People laugh at me when I tell them The Final Cut is actually the best album by Pink Floyd. We'll see whose laughing when They drop the bomb.

MP3: Pink Floyd - The Final Cut

Deep excavation.

2009-10-24T09:00:00.003+11:00

22 October - Camperdown, 5:00pm

MP3: Jackson Jackson - A Hole in the Garden

Empty Vessels by Isaac Graham, and conflicts of interest.

2009-10-23T09:00:00.004+11:00

There are three issues involved with me reviewing this album. One, it's my brother's album. Two, in the last couple of months I've listened to some of these songs almost as incessantly as someone recording and mixing them, which means I'm tired of a couple of them? Three, I perform on one of the tracks.

Empty Vessels is a story about Sydney, framed as a story about a (failed) relationship, framed as a story about Sydney. The vessels of the title refers just as easily to veins, ships or the streets of the town. This is album that combines Australian history and geography, hip indie love, and as wide an array of nautical motifs as I've seen on any release since Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank. And there's nothing I like better than a nautical motif. Don't get me started on the god damn ocean, man.

My biggest complaint with it is that Graham could have album narrative more cohesive with more lyrical connections between the songs. I can put this down to the fact that the songs were written over three or so years, and not with this album in mind. What we get from it is that Sydney and the ocean and his relationships are common topics of interest for Graham. That the streets of Sydney and the Pacific Ocean gets mentioned in many of the songs is a good start, but I wanted to look for a conspiracy of imagery. Why is 'gold' in the title of two songs? What is the importance of Christmas, which gets mentioned in 'Columbus' and then again in 'Hurricane'? This album is more than just a collection of disparate songs, but a unifying quality in the lyrics is just tantalisingly out of reach.

Before I get into a blow by blow account of the album, let me say that it's been recorded and mixed to a professional level (or at least it sounds professional, which is the kicker). All the instrumentalists and vocalists on the album give stunning performances, with the exception of the harmonicist, who's a fucking douche.

'Photographs and Histories' opens the album on a strong note, especially the build up of the piano/bass drum duo. Every line rhymes with '-ies'. It's about memory as the only remaining residue from an experience/relationship, and attempts to hold onto that even after everything else has fallen away.

'Gold and Steel' throws us into the narrative, in media res. From what I can gather the story covers the whole of a relationship in a disjointed sort of way, from the nervousness of first encounters, to the finality 'I wonder why she never came home to me.' The Pacific makes an appearance here. I'm not sure what the title means.

When I first heard 'Karl Marx And The Reds' I assumed it was a cover, that's how good it was. It's a damned fine rockabilly track about a bunch of kids whose skiffle band is going to make it. (Incidentally, the percussion on most of the album is from Tupperware and leather upholstery.) The song reminds me of the 80s. 'And if they drop that bomb tonight, well you know that it will, it's gonna be alright.

There's a beeping noise in this 'This Old Town', very dim, but which drives me insane and makes me think my phone's ringing. Otherwise the song is fine. The piano solo midway carries this song, which is about Sydney in the early 20th century, and the soldiers who went off to fight in whatever foolishness their government decreed, and came back to find their girlfriends and wives unfaithful, and many of the comrades finding solace in drink and prostitutes.

Most of Graham's songs have some sort of backstory to them, or at least have a discernable narrative to them. Fuck, I have no idea what 'Empty Vessels' is about. It's odd, because you'd think the eponymous song would bear some strong resemblance to the overarching narrative of the album. And it does, I think, but I can't figure out where it fits. The music sounds good, and that's where the talent lies I guess, but the lyrics are just meaningless to me. They're too vague, and he uses too many pronouns for me to figure this out. 'We paid for this but you will never own it.' Who is we? What is it?

Without this song I'd never have said that 'Karl Marx' fits into the story anywhere. But with 'Superglue' I'd say that both songs go together at the start. 'Superglue' is about young people in love who don't give a shit, and play music, and don't want to grow up. It's probably one of the weaker songs on the album, but that's only because I don't really enjoy the country music vibe it's got going. But at least it's explicit. Big U-turn from the previous track.

'Columbus' does it for me. Ocean and exploration as metaphors for living over chord progressions I'm describing as triumphant before I call them anything else. Hints of Okkervil River and Arcade fire, with strong vibrant tannins that make you want to crank it as the piano comes in over the guitar/ukulele combo. If not my favourite song on the album (which gets taken by 'Karl Marx') then it is at least the most indie.

'Heat Exhaustion' is a fancy pseudo-electro number that sounds like it would be more at home on the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. It's one of the best tracks I think, but it sits a bit uncomfortably around so much organic folk-rock. From what I hear it's a about an a night out on the town and partying to the point of embarrassment, which I guess is a good lead-in to the next track.

I played harmonica on 'Hurricane'. The song itself isn't my favourite, because the lyrics are a bit kitschy compared to songs like 'Columbus' or 'Karl Marx and the Reds', but I like to think I did a pretty good job on the ol' 'blues harp'. It's a song about breaking up, getting drunk and the realisation that you no longer need to worry about the other person thinks about your embarrassing inebriation. The hurricane of the title is supposed to be the backdraft of a train passing through a station (instead of stopping, like it used to). Wind metaphor within train metaphor, me oh my.

'When I Find Gold' is a fine way to cap of the album. Reminds me of 'Far Away Boys' at the end of Flogging Molly's Swagger. Very stripped back instrumentally, guitar and tambourine and some percussive effect supposed to be a pickaxe scraping rock. 'When I find gold, I'm gonna be a better man.' Metaphor? Who can tell. Haunting? Yes.

Individually, every song gets 4 1/2 or 5 stars. As an album, it gets 4.

You can buy this album for $5, which includes potsage. That's only $1.25 a star. Get at it here.

MP3: Isaac Graham - Columbus
MP3: Isaac Graham - Hurricane

An idea I had while falling asleep.

2009-10-22T12:46:00.003+11:00

20 October - Kingsford, 2:00am

A vlog/video commentary series which always opens with a varied rendition of the following: the host, facing away from the camera, gazing into a small framed photo. The photo changes between episodes. A voiceover always says the same thing, but in a different way each time. The voiceover reads the last lines of The Great Gatsby.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

As if the voiceover is in the host's head. And then the host turns and continues with the show. Some ideas I had for how the reading could go.

Sleazy old man.
Nuremberg rally.

WIR SCHLAGEN AUF, BOOTE GEGEN DEN STROM, GETRAGEN UNAUFHÖRLICH ZURÜCK IN DIE VERGANGENHEIT!

Turns, unfazed. "Oh, hi there friends."

The condemnation of Roman Polanski.

2009-10-21T09:00:00.001+11:00

21 October - Kingsford, 1:30am

So in the 70s Roman Polanski apparently had sex with a thirteen year old girl. Allegedly he drugged and penetrated her against her protestations. He pleaded guilty to the sex with minor charge, but the rape and the drug charges were dropped. Then he busted over to France, where he is a citizen and thus protected from extradition, before the sentencing. Apparently he fled because the judge was going to recant on his deal to give Polanski probation, but instead gaol and deport him. In 1993 the woman accepted something like half a million dollars compensation from Polanski.

Because he skipped bail before sentencing (when, I believe, all the other charges against him would have been formally dropped), all six original charges are reapplied. I think that's pretty funny. Anyway, he was picked up in Switzerland a few weeks ago, at the request of the California courts system. He's being held in the country pending an extradition application from America.

But what gets me is this public outcry against the man since his arrest. Rah rah rah, what a monster. Wikipedia directed me to an LA Times article about how Hollywood's response to the arrest is out of touch with 'middle America's' response. [Get at it here.]

If you believe that putting Polanski in prison is the only way for justice to be done, then where the fuck have you been for the past thirty years? Why haven't you been protesting for his extradition? Why wasn't he appearing regularly in letters and editorials? It's not as if he's been hiding. Hell, he owns a house in Switzerland, which he visited regularly! Surely a vigilante group could have hung out there and informed the authorities when he turned up. The only people who have actually been committed to this premise all along have been the Los Angeles DA office.

Why weren't people doing more to stop Roman Polanski?

I wonder how many people who support him going to prison went and saw The Pianist. The big furore over 'Why has he been at liberty for so long?' is because nobody really gave a shit about putting him in gaol. Hell, the victim was fine with her five hundred grand.

People jumped on the send-him-to-prison bandwagon because the default reaction to hearing about anybody convicted of a crime worthy of prison time is 'Well they should go to prison.' They don't consider why he should be in gaol. 'Well because he broke the law, it's there for people to see, why should he get the same as honest men like me?'

Is that why we send people to prison? Because they break laws? Somebody commits a crime - any crime - so we move them somewhere for a certain length of time, depending on how bad we think the crime is. Seems a bit irrational. Eye for an eye made more sense.

I'm not saying that Polanski is innocent. Clearly he broke the law. But does that necessarily call for prison? Now? No. And I'm not saying that because he's a good film-maker, or because he's a celebrity, or even because 'he's had a fucked up life, surely that's punishment enough'. I'm saying that because prison serves a specific purpose, and simple incarceration is not it.

If Polanski goes to gaol, the logic behind it will be 'You did something wrong, now go sit in a room there for a bit. Oh, and the room's a bit shit.' There will be no rehabilitation because he is rehabilitated. Gaol, in this instance, is the equivalent of the naughty corner. I think a 76-year-old man is a bit above the naughty corner.

The prison system is not a retributive instrument. We don't put people there for revenge. We put them there for rehabilitation. Polanski only did it to the one child; and by that I mean he only committed the one crime, and he knows that he fucked up. If he'd been a serial child rapist (although whether she consented is another story) then maybe people would be a bit happier to hunt him across Europe to drag his arse back to America. Those sorts of people - repeat, unrepentant offenders - need to be taken out of society and fixed. I don't think Polanski needs to be fixed.

Pop the genderless toddler.

2009-10-20T09:00:00.002+11:00

17 October - Kingsford, 12:15am

An article about a Swedish couple have decided that they will not tell people the sex of their two year old child. Get at it here. Also read the discussion in the comments section at the bottom.

Whatever. I mean, it can't hurt. I'm curious about some of the responses to the thing. Some people seem to be upset that the kid is tacitly encouraged to dress in gender-specific clothing that doesn't conform to their sex. Among other things. It's not just clothing. But they've got the kid's closet filled with trousers and skirts, and that's what gets up people's grills.

But girls can wear trousers? I mean, that's acceptable? A bloke in a dress is still a head-turner, but women in trousers isn't a thing anymore. Presumably, then, neither is allowing your toddling daughter to wear pants.

So when people get upset that this kid is being encouraged to wear dresses and trousers, they're assuming Pop is going to be seen as some sort of sexless cross-dressing freak. A freak in the way that a girl in jeans is not a freak. They're assuming that Pop is a boy, in other words.

No point. Old men like me don't make points. There's no point.

There is a fast lane on the escalator.

2009-10-19T09:00:00.001+11:00

16 October - Kingsford, 11:30pm

An Addendum to the last post. The only place where you don't walk on the left is escalators. On escalators, you stand to the left. This is because people want to walk on the right. It isn't hard.

On the escalator with somebody else? Are you standing still on the escalator with somebody else. Want to carry on a conversation with the other person while your standing on the escalator? Well do it from a stair each. If you have to be standing at roughly shoulder level to talk to someone then you're in trouble.

While we're on about escalators, here's some things.

If there are stairs next to the escalators, and you want to go down up to three storeys, take the stairs. Don't be a sloth.

If you have an option between the escalator and the elevator for anything more than a one-storey movement, the elevator is never the lazy choice. There is no lazy choice here. Take the escalator, you won't be able to get in people's way.

If you are a parent, and you are on the escalator with your child or children, move them to the left. Just because they're little doesn't mean they get to break the rules. Protecting your children in public does not have to involve keeping them attached to you. They'll be fine on the next step; move 'em over, keep 'em still. Indoctrinate them in this early, and they'll grow to be better citizens.

Negotiating pedestrianism.

2009-10-18T09:00:00.006+11:00

16 October - Kingsford, 10:45pm

Indulge me in a bit of academia for a bit. The word 'negotiate' comes from the Latin word negotio, meaning 'business'. So, it means 'to conduct oneself in business'. Since entering the English language, negotiate has taken on a more figurative sense. And I guess this is alright. It adds to the richness of Queen Elizabeth's astounding language.

My name is Prokopy Prokopovich Popov. I refuse to recognise the regime of the new Queen Elizabeth.

You can now, for example, negotiate the high seas. This means to carefully sail through a rough patch of ocean and weather. To interpret negotiate according to its etymology in this instance would be foolish. You simply cannot conduct business with the wide and endless ocean, unless your name is Captain Ahab and your business is revenge.

That is why the title of this post is 'Negotiating pedestrianism'. It is because walking is important business.

It happens to all of us. You're walking along. The birds are shining, the sun is singing. These facts in concert are distracting you. It might be on a street, in any of the many libraries or other buildings that exist, in the men's john, on a railway platform or on the way to one. You're doing your thing. Left foot, right, repeat. It feels good. It feels right. And then.

And then you're dancing! All of the sudden you've careered straight into the path of an oncoming individual, the jerk, and you're both trying to figure out which way to dodge around one another. And you both go to the one side, and then whoops! Back we go to the other. This back-and-forth can happen up to three or four times before each party stops and enters discourse about which way to go. Appalling. People are laughing to themselves. Morons. Can't even walk properly.

Did you know that there are ways to avoid situations like this? You could, of course, never leave your home, and this is a perfectly legitimate way to live. But there is a way to nip situations like this in the bud, before they embarrass everyone.

Go to the left. Step, dive, whatever verb you need, proceed to the left with urgent haste and hasty urgency.
Stop.
Stay on the left, even if the other person goes to their right (your left).

Should the person dodge to the right (your left) and you get stuck in this ridiculous tango, don't - never - give into the temptation to give way to them. You're on the left. You're on the left and you're in the British Commonwealth. You have right of way!

Dive to the left and seize the moral high ground. Just step left, and wave them through to the right. Let them know which way to go. If you're feeling particularly glib, you can accompany this gesture with a smug expression and tell them

"We walk on the left in this country."

They don't even need to be a foreigner. That gives it extra zing.

The Beatles appreciation challenge.

2009-10-17T09:00:00.005+11:00

15 October - Kingsford, 5:45pm

So I don't like The Beatles! There. I said it. I never really liked them.

Mostly because I've grown up with music that's so influenced by them, but which built on what they started, that the originals sound limited and derivative by comparison. That's why listening to them, even after all this brilliant music has come after them, is a bit like dealing with an historical document.

There's an old, pointless and uselessly gendered adage that goes "You're either a Beatles man or an Elvis man." Personally I'm more of a Pink Floyd fan, which I think you can legitimately be without liking either the Beatles or the King. Likewise, I think there's room for Bob Dylan in there as well. I think the point was that the Beatles and Elvis were so disparate, culturally, musically, and politically, that they were artificially put on these pedestals at polar ends of the spectrum. That said, I can really only get into Pink Floyd out of those four supposed greats I just mentioned.

But! I've always thought that I was missing out on something with the Beatles; not getting some key point. So! I've decided that I'm going to get into the Beatles. I'm going to listen to each of the 12 British LPs that Wikipedia assures me are the 'canon', and the US LP version of Magical Mystery Tour.

Where there were singles not released on albums, I will stagger the addition of them to my music library as they were released during album cycles. For example, say 3 non-album singles were released between Please Please Me and With The Beatles. If I add Please Please Me to iTunes on Day 1, I'll add 'From Me to You' on Day 12, 'She Loves You' on Day 25, and 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' on Day 37. They'll stay on rotation for 50 days as well, but I won't review the singles.

I'm going to listen to each in the order they were released in Britain. I'm listening to the 2009 stereo remastering versions of each, to give myself the biggest possible handicap; fuck mono.

I'm going to give each album fifty days to impress me. There will be no overlap. At the end of each fifty day period, I'm going to review the album. This challenge will take until the beginning of August, 2011.

Readysetgo!

If I directed 'Speed'.

2009-10-16T09:00:00.002+11:00

Somewhere in the bus portion of the film, there's a scene of comic relief. The bomb on the steps blows and the woman falls to her death. Oh no. Oh me oh my, how can we drag the film back from this massive downer?

Somebody presses the stop button. It's that idiot tourist. Everyone looks at him. His expression is what can only be called sheepish, hand-in-the-cookie-jar.

'If this bus goes less than 50 miles per hour, it'll explode,' Johnny Utah reminds him.

Tourist turns his palms up, tilts his head, frowns, raises his eyebrows. 'Whappoooooh!' Everybody laughs.

Then back to the bomb and the fast driving.

What to do if you accidentally press the stop button on the bus early.

2009-10-15T09:00:00.002+11:00

3 October - Marrickville, 7:30pm

Say you're on a bus. You aren't really sure of where you're going, and you press the button one or two stops early. Here's an itemised list of what to do if that ever happens. The list is numbered in order of appropriateness, from most appropriate, to the minimally acceptable appropriate action. Nowhere in the list are there any options where are inappropriate, and other that that, the list is comprehensive.

Get off the bus at the next stop.

There is only one course of action open to you. There is no room for fucking around here. You've pressed the button, you must disembark. Sure, you could shout out to the driver 'Sorry, wrong stop mate.' You could even go up to the driver and quietly but profusely apologise, making it a moment of penitent intimacy between you and the driver.

But that won't do any good. The driver still has to pull over. Because! What if, what if, you pressed the stop button on accident before somebody had the opportunity to do it deliberately. You say sorry driver, the driver skips the next stop, poor passenger misses out on sweet disembarkment action.

So the driver has to pull over regardless. Your only way out is to hope, hope against skeletal grinning hope, that somebody actually has to get off. Otherwise you're walking, or waiting.

Of course, you could pretend that it wasn't you. Stare out the window. Pretend to read. Look around for the wanker who pressed the button and then didn't get off. Willing somebody else to get off out of embarrassment. Sitting there in those awkward ten or fifteen seconds until the driver realises that nobody's going to own up to it. Selfish. Fucking selfish. Worse than staying on the bus even after admitting that you pressed the thing by mistake. Scum.

On a crowded bus, this is rarely a problem. The chances are good that someone will want to get off, or there's somebody waiting at the stop. The problem arises when you find yourself on a quiet bus, only a few people, they want to get home, the driver wants to finish his shift, you press the button, Jesus Christ you're holding everybody up. Suddenly eyes are on you, you're swimming in their contempt. And there's nothing you can do.

Get the fuck off. There's a bomb on the bus, and the bomb is you.

The Mountain Goats and Rian Johnson.

2009-10-14T11:51:00.012+11:00

14 October - Kingsford, 11:45am

I like the fact that Rian Johnson directs videos for The Mountain Goats. I like the fact that he's not past directing music videos, having two incredibly impressive feature films under his belt (Brick and The Brothers Bloom, to be released in Australia on 12 November, if iMDB is anything to go by) .

I like even more the fact that two of my favourite artists in two different areas are friends. Somehow, I think, this reinforces my appreciation of both Rian Johnson's filmmaking and John Darnielle's songwriting. Anyway, here's two videos that Rian has directed. The first is amazing, the second is of The Mountain Goats' latest album, The Life of the World to Come, in which all the lyrics and song titles are based in some way on a biblical verse. This one is Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace. Ezekiel 7 is fucked up, but this song is not.

The Mountain Goats - Woke Up New (dir. Rian Johnson)

The Mountain Goats - Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace (dir. Rian Johnson)