Indian Summer

It’s cold these days, It’s depressing to think that winter’s beginning is still like 10 days away. How will I survive winter? It’s already too painful to get up in the morning. I miss summer I think, but I’m not sure.

I don’t remember last summer that well, I was away for the best of it. I remember Doug fell in the river. For some reason when I think of last summer I think of wearing black skinny jeans and 30 plus temperatures. Wearing black jeans in Hanoi, dusty black jeans in Cambodia, Sweaty black jeans in Bangkok, sleeping in my jean’s at Hannah, sleeping on Katie’s couch in my jeans. Every time I crash at a mates place I always become acutely aware of what I’m going to sleep in, is that weird? Maybe I just wear black jeans too much. It’s strange to think where clothing has been. This shirt has been to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, it’s been to Hannah’s and it’s been to Sydney and Country Victoria.

I think it would just be nicest if life was 100% an Indian summer, it feels the most romantic to me, the most scenic and enjoyable, not as pushy as summer proper is. Does everybody else remember summer better then me? I think I tend to think of summer as a low budget indie music film clip where everyone is having fun, pretty girls are smiling, lots of bright colors and people are being creative and zany. I don’t think it was really like that at all.

I don’t remember new years at all, I think maybe I was on drugs…

Sideshow by the Seashore

One of the novel things about music is the way it effects (affects?) language and the way people interpret it’s meaning as well as it’s aural and emotional/meaningful/intellectual value. ‘Sideshow by the Seashore’ by Luna is a favorite song of mine not just because it has a savvy guitar riff and a neat chorus but because I feel it has really clever and emotionally valuable lyrics, you know like slightly abstract (clever) but with a really emotional yearning or something.

then i painted your face
on a twenty dollar bill
but it isn’t legal tender
and i think about you still
and all the comfort in words
provide no comfort

On paper however the lyrics seem a little well, crappy. Why do I like them so much then? I think it comes down to how they are sung, the pacing, the way a singer holds onto certain syllables and letters that sort of thing. I think this is the power of music/singing, even not so mentally pleasing language can take on power of it’s own once you allow direct human expression.

One aspect of lyrics I find fascinating is that I find them very difficult to read on paper, almost pointless really, they really lack flow or the ‘musicality’ of poetry, the way a singer will sing lyrics is often not reflected in lyrics, where pauses and stops are, accents or vibrato. I find that Poetry (and creative writing) on the other hand is intentionally written in such a way that a reader can read the piece and have a strongly difined idea of the pacing of the piece as well as its flow and it’s ‘musicallity’.

An exception to this I feel is singers who are poets or are writing poetry as lyrics/their lyrics are poetry, you know what I mean. People like Bob Dylan or Patti Smith or Mark E. Smith, Poet’s in the music buisness (Bono doesn’t count). Let’s have a quick look at Dylan’s ‘Gates Of Eden’

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when ‘neath the trees of Eden

Does this strike anyone else as a lot easier to get a feel for as opposed to ‘Sideshow’? If you disagree with me I’d like to know (why even) because I’m pretty much making up this post as I go along.

Oh Gee! American Poet

I don’t think I’ve been this excited about old music in a while (Well that’s not super true) but I just discovered that Lou Reed released an album in 2001 of a 1972 concert and it’s pretty super. It’s called ‘American Poet’. I don’t maybe thats a bit of an overstatement.
It’s pretty much Lou’s gayest period and he performs most of his best songs from VU as well as the Transformer period and Lou’s voice is in great shape and the band is pretty decent too. I forgot how good ‘Vicious’s lyrics, “You hit me with a Flower”? What does that even mean? silly Andy Warhol you need to stay of the drugs and away from radical feminsts they don’t agree with you.

The interview that pops up in the middle of a album is fairly insightful and rather amusing for those in the know, I also rather liked Lou’s banter between songs “this next song is about a person watching television, it’s a nice thing to write a song about”. The album has a really high fidelity and it’s good to be able to hear Lou during one of his best periods in this sort of manner Lo-fi is fun and all but sometimes it’s just a little annoying. I don’t know this album is just some good rock and roll but isn’t as tacky as the later Rock & Roll animal which is way too glam rock (bordering on Glam Metal really). I like it.

Download ‘Vicious’ – Lou Reeds

Miss you? I love you!

There has a been a lot of things recently, here are some of them I will miss or liked or things like that.

- Miss u home & away lesbian story line, I never actually watched you but it funny when people got angry. For way better cover see Defamer!

- <3 u Hipster Grifter

Full story!
I’m not really sure what a grifter is but it ryhmes with Hipster, I assume it is like a con-man/lady/juvinile? This is hipster was certainly devious and liked beards (good ploy to steal from those folk-punk types). The story is kind of engaging in it’s amazing amounts of hersay and explosion on the BLOGSPHERES, I think this will be the alt meme of the year. I think really though it’s rather facinating how an honestly not super interesting story got pretty big, well at least on the internet, It’s probably because the blogsphere and that sort of thing is run by hipster and she was stealing from dopey 24 year old beard sporting hipsters (bloggers?).

- adventure of little boris

Pretty much the worst film ever! Having watched about 20 seconds of this film I think it’s really important that classes involving proper narative structure and characterisation are taught at AFL football clubs. I also felt that the metaphor of comparing a chicken to a woman was unimaginative and poorly executed. D-

- <3 Channel 7′s 10:30 – 12:00am Tv programing.

The current seasons of 30 rock and boston legal have been really good, I am enjoying them immensely. so far i have seen

1. liz’s boobies
2. liz on toilet
3. Jack date sexy mexican lady
4. tracy jordan wearing gold shoes, too proud to recieve help
5. Denny get more crazy/forgetful, sad!
6. Dude ranch episode, what exactly makes a ranch a dude ranch? It sounds a bit like a ranch equivalent of a gay bath house.
7. Generalissimo.

Does these mean anything to anybody but maybe nick or maybe erin? Is it weird that I am sad that Tina Fey is married ?

There’s a whole bunch of other things I liked but I don’t want to prattle on/remember them.

Time warp.

The 80′s was a pretty good decade, Alternative music really took of and there was a whole bunch of wacky new technologies and ideas.

Be right back guys, just gotta lay down some beats for this crazy new acid house track i've thought up!

Heavy Reverbed Drums – shit yea.
Drum Machines (See above for authentic roland 909)
Yamaha DX7 set to ‘electric piano’
Day-glo/fluro
post-david bowie Mullet revival
Digital + Midi + Synths!
‘good’ digital technology e.g. compy 486′s
Nintendos
No internets – gotta call people on chord phone – chord must be min 10 metre.
mix/vidya-tapes
Reagan/Thatcher/Berlin Walls/USSR
Metal still cool, o.k to own Ultra pink super strat (not gay)
DeLorean – time travelling to the future e.g. 2001!
Dot Matrix printah
Old style (good style) tracksuits

This is what young people think of the 80′s. Is it wrong to associate peoples childhoods/growing up times/worried adulthood/mature period/dieing period with products and musical trends?

Fender Jaguar: Music and things I buy

I recently bought a Fender Jaguar. It is black and it is modified with a tune-o-matic bridge. Do modifications make a guitar more or less authentic? I didn’t make the modifications so I think probably less. It cost a lot of money regardless, I think that bothered me a little bit, spending a lot of money on wood and metal seems a a bit decedent really.

Fender Jaguar

I am really liking the guitar, I really enjoy it’s sound and the way it plays. Today I finally got a chance to play it loud through my cheap amp. Sounds good, I think a lot of people who don’t play music don’t realise how rewarding it can be, when people go to clubs or a concert I think they sort of get it, when you can literally feel the music. This is kind of a poor substitute though, you’re feeling the music but you’re just kind of a dumb vessel.  Actually making the music, even if it’s just playing straight E, D, A chords (Gloria, Louie Louie, a few Bob Dylan songs, every punk song) I feel is a lot more rewarding then just standing there being impressed out of ignorance. When you’re playing, making music, those vibrations are an extension of yourself the melody, the beat, the groove you can all change, they’re all yours for the moment even if you’re playing somebody else’s song.

I think playing music is perhaps a bit different to other creative mediums. Things like writing or painting or photography seem to be more considered mediums, I think this is because these are all recorded mediums. At the end of creative enterprise you have a canvas or a bunch of jpegs/35mm exporsures. With music people really don’t record what they’re playing unless they’re actively trying to create a product. Music seems to be more of an immediate thing. You play the keys, fret the chords for a while and then it’s gone. You might remember a good progression or riff but there’s nothing tangilble left behind.

I suppose there are always exceptions though, writing has that stream of consciousness business and I’m sure painting and the same sort of thing. Do people “take” photographs without using film? just for kicks?

I think now I can start a proper shoegaze band now. Nick?

Serious fortune does adore you.

Victory Garden by Galaxie 500

Band’s don’t do enough covers these days I think, more bands need to be formed around the premise of playing ‘Sister Ray’. Dean Wareham has never been shy of performing covers and thats why I’ve always loved him.

Victory Garden is originally a Red Crayola song which isn’t particularly surprising considering the lyrics, which while nice, don’t really seem to mean much. Victory Garden is more a song you enjoy for the clever melody and the way the lyrics are sung rather then the actual lyrical content. While Victory Garden isn’t Galaxie 500′s strongest performance (or indeed cover) Wareham’s efforts in this song are still strong in my opinion, his voice has an honest and innocent quality too it and combined with Galaxie 500′s signature reverbed mellow sound makes this song a strangly hyponotic and relaxing track.

I wish more bands sounded like Galaxie 500, pity the 80′s ended 19 years ago.

Punk rock 1977

Punk rock is a bit of a weird thing and to lot of opinionated people it’s a lot of different things.

Telstra is currently running a series of advertisments on Melbourne’s public transports for their mp3 download service. They show a succession of photos (in the same style as that ape to man evolution diagram in all those science text books) showing an opera singer transforming into a “punk” rocker although I don’t really think it’s meant to imply that punk evolved out of opera or anything like that. What make me wonder rather is the dull gentrified and simplistic depiction of the “punk” rocker in the advertisement, are people unable to fathom punk outside of  it’s 1977 historical roots image? Why can’t we get more advertising of rock music involving mullets, spandex or puffy shoulder pads then? I tend to feel that ‘mainstream’ types have this idea of what punk rock or alternative music or what have you should be and how it should be.

In the same sense though when talking to people I know, as in people I grew up with, people I agree with. Punk, as in good punk music, is a fairly erratic but also strict definition.

Stooges - Funhous

Proto-Punk: Awesome

Johnny Thunders

New York 77′ scene punk: Awesome

Clash

English punk: Embarrassing political drivel

black flag

80′s Hardcore: worse.

The Fall (Mark E. Smith and revolving door of people really)

Post-punk: pretty dang swell.

I really like the idea of making broad generalisations quickly about a whole host of genres and therefore bands, it’s easy to do and I feel knowledgible. Like talking about entry level Jazz at parties. I wonder in that sense am I just really just as bad as those Telstra advertising goons?

80′s Hardcore is all the same: Terrible.