thegoldblog

Shake them 'bazbozeks'!!

2010-10-01T21:43:00.003+10:00

..I have received a shipment of ghetto-tech from the 3rd world that is blowing
such chunks out of my sonic brain of a type I haven't experienced for at least a decade! Deep, deep lo-tech fractal rhythms and sounds from Jamaica, South African, Niger and Syria. A whole untapped UNIVERSE, sheeeit, I feel like I'm working for British Petroleum of Exxon or some shit!

Notes will soon follow, but until then, shake yer bazbozeks!! NOTE: The word 'bazbozek' probably means the profanity you think it does!)

THE VOIDOID

2010-08-06T01:39:00.005+10:00

ENTER THE VOID - Gaspar Noe, 2010

Returning from Gaspar Noe's latest mindfuck, I am sitting here, abuzz and 'a buzzed'. Starting off with opening titles that rock more than the whole 'Speed Racer' movie, Noe sets the audience up for his latest state-of-the-art ART movie ENTER THE VOID. A neon lit night-time panorama arcs to the sky where a 747 can be seen flying over the Tokyo skyline. As Linda (Paz De La Huerta) warns her brother Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) that he's becoming a junkie. Seen POV from here-on, said stoner lights up a pipe of DMT, and pretty soon the fun and games begin, with some of the most stunning 'Expanded Cinema' type 'visuals' seen in a recent movie. Part fairy-tale, part primal scream therapy, Noe delivers a trip that can at times get real bumpy. Great soundtrack by Daft-Punk's Bangalter and once again lensed by Benoit Debie, ENTER THE VOID is business as usual for Mr.Noe. Evoking Kubrick's '2001' and 'Eyes Wide Shut', as well as all the sleaze and crazy visual sexual tricks that litter Shu Lea Cheang rarely seen Jap sci-fi-art-porno IKU , ENTER THE VOID does nothing to dispel the hype that he is quickly becoming today's 'new Kubrick' albiet of more, how-you-say-it - (bodily) fluid variety? ENTER THE VOID puts Noe right up on the top of today's genre/grindhouse pile with say, David Fincher - it's a technological and artistic achievement that is certain to add to Noe's growing, respected and totally geniune 'cult'.

Hey! Ho! Lets Balano

2010-05-18T23:15:00.004+10:00

2666 - Roberto Bolano

I started reading Bolano's first opus 'the savage detectives' around Hannukah time (fuck Xmas) 2008 and finished it around Purim time. I started 2666 around the same time and didn't finish it until Shavoo-us (May) 2010. I found out about Bolano just after I arrived home from a 2 month trek in Europe and America, being totally oblivious of his presence in Barcelona and New York, surviving the Global Financial Crisis, to discover the hype about him on the Internet via a New York Times article writing by a rapturous Jonathan Lethem. I am now a victim of the GFC, being 6 months and counting unemployed, so I had time to slog through Bolano's magnum opus, and what most critics on the planet seem to agree is the first literary masterpiece on this new century. While I don't think it's a masterpiece, it will be hard to beat in wake of the death of literature as we know it as fucking Internet retardedness takes over fucking everything and I throw this fucking computer down the toilet.

What appealed to me initially about 2666 is it's title. it sounds like the title of a crazy sci-fi novel discussing a future world that is more than likely taken over by Satan. It presents itself as apocalyptic and modern. And to my depressive, dysthemic mind, sounds like a good time. Bolano himself is a fascinating character. Defintely a South American Kerouac, his nomadic, outsider life and tragic shortened lifespan, coupled with his apparent 'radical' Dadaist attitude of course puts him the the line of literary 'legend'. But we may never know because he's dead. And like all the legend he apparently created a 'movement' of writers called the 'visceral realists'. I'm not sure if it was a real movement as it kicks off the 'On the road' x10 that is 'the savage detectives'. The 'visceral realists' concept is interesting as to me it evokes a South American version of the 'grunge' literature that became trendy in the 90s brought in by the likes of Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby Jnr, Irvine Welsh, and while Bolano's literature isn't unlike those writers, his sheer density of storytelling nous takes that style into a totally different realm.

So back to 2666. It's a massive book told in 5 parts that all intersect into a giant pan European-South American-American epic.

1.Part about the critics – talks about four fuckhead critics/academics who are brought together in search of an obscure 'Italian' poet called Archimboldi and end up into a love quadrangle before leading into..
2.The Part about Amalfitano – who is some some Chilean guy that had a baby daughter Rosa with a crazy woman called Lola who went off to screw some schizo gay poets, then Amalfitano goes crazy himself.
3.The part about Fate concerns an afro-American journo Oscr fate who interviews a legendary black boxer, then goes to the Mexico border to report on a boxing fight and learn about some murder in town called Santa Teresa, where things go really dark..
4.The part about the crimes – well someone had to out CormacMcCarthy Cormac McCarthy
5.The part about Archimboldi – goes to Germany where we learn about the mysterious poet who started the whole journey off..

So what can I say about all this? Well it took me a slow 5 months to read, and it's definitely an ambitious work, and I guess it's a masterpiece of some sort, simply because of the nerve Bolano had to write such a sprawling piece. It rebinds me of Sonic Youth's 'Daydream Nation', Beatles 'white album' or the Velvet Undergrounds' 'sister ray', an intricate, fractal work that has to be absorbed in its entirety to at least get some idea of what it's trying to do, which is ultimately tell this big saga that seems to invert back to a town called Santa Teresa in Mexico, that could quite simply be the true portal of hell. (NOTE: It's too literal and large to be compared to Burroughs, and also too intellectual, as it doesn't have the canny pulp coolness of Burroughs or Boris Vian, and I guess thats why I didn't perceive it to be as such a masterpiece as some thought it to be)

One of the the sad things about reading a book like 2666 is the awareness that literature is dying a slow death, that there will be no renaissance, that the bogans are going to take over fucking everything while Rupert Murdoch, Exxon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook fuck everybody into infinity. Shit I'm contributing by posting this on this here blog. Bolano was totally into the pretentious, elitist nature of literature, and his books teems with an academic/critics knowledge of cultural minutiae, not unlike British author Stuart Home. It's like an awareness that the only people that read this shit are intellectuals that know and are learned in the art/literature movements in history, and I guess this is part of the challenge that Bolano tried to confront in order to keep literature alive. He must have been aware that readers of 'Twilight' and 'Lord of the Rings' would never read 2666, but then again, there's no reason they shouldn't. I really like how it's too massive to be a 'trendy' book, and I still only know one person who's read it, and I suggested it to her!

2666 was ultimately a book written by a guy knowing his time is running out, knowing that our time is running out, knowing that this is the sort of book that should be read when you are doing time, whatever that may be.

Time wounds all heels

2010-02-25T21:23:00.002+11:00

Zodiac - scary shit

Since my last post, my personal life has been in a strange stasis. Having just hit 'middle age', I recently voluteered for a redundancy package to plan for my future and clear my mortgage debt. I knew full well the risk, but needed to take one, and despite having 4 job interviews while I was still working, now find myself unemployed for the last 6 weeks. OK it hasn't all been doom-an-gloom, I turned down two offers as I refuse to drivew, but the fact that I haven't been 'clocking in and clocking out automatically' for the first time in nearly 14 years has been liberating, but also brought me this sense of vague emptiness.

In my last post I did the boring nerd thing and listed my favorite stuff of the passing decade. One of the movies I forgot to mention that I really loved was David Fincher's ZODIAC, which I saw in the cinema. While I like it at the time, it seems to have fit into my current state of mind/anxiety, for ZODIAC is a brilliant existential horror film about he passing of time, and the reality that closure often doesn't happen. Like the brilliant Junior Kimbrough album of the same name. There's little doubt that Fincher is one of the most influential film-makers of this era, his deft use of modern digital technologies, electronic image filtering has created a trademark style emulated to death the world over. Personally I was never a big fan. I found Se7en to be a lame copy-cat of Silence of the Lambs, and another log in the fire of the crummy 90s and 00s 'torture-porn' genre dedicated to the suburban boogie man, the 'serial killer'. FIGHT CLUB is a film I love more in theory rather than practice, it reminds me of a typical Dario Argento film where 'the good bits' far outweight the film as a whole. I never saw THE GAME, PANIC ROOM was just camera tricks and tech, and BENJAMIN BUTTON was trying to be some sort of MIRIMAX movies, while sad and romantic, wasn't really memorable.

But for me ZODIAC is Finchers finest moment so far. The first 30 minutes of this film are the most terrifying in recent memory. Fincher films murder scenes in a cold, clinical and hyper-real manner, immediately reminding me of Kubrick's THE SHINING and mosdef FULL METAL JACKET. People die in clinical and painful ways, numbing us. and then the film turns, we are introduced to the triumvirate of major characters - an obsessed cartoonist, a substance abusing post-hippie journo and a cops who doesn't need another murder case. ZODIAC then becomes a heavy, European style art movie about character locking into an obsession of catching the killer, following cryptic patterns, faulty bureaucracies, but mostly, the basic trudgery of life going on, relationships falling apart, age wearying passions and obsessions, but always chasing that final clue...death? Failure? Who-dunnit? No-one knows. As the world crumbles slowly, via corporate dogma, middle-class denialism, global warming, the killers get away, like in Bolano's 2666 or as Jnr Kimbrough wisely said "Most Things Haven't Worked Out". Not just 'scary' - terrifying.

2010: The Year We Make Contact

2010-01-07T21:34:00.018+11:00

Sunn 0))) - Arrrggghhh!!

And so it is, my first blog for the year after a longish hiatus since I didn't really have much to write about since I wasted a hell of a lot of time cucking around on that Facebook thing trying to improve my popularity and fame and contribution to the world of aesthetics and other ephermamamia.

So in the past few days of this new year, I have been filling my void with much music of a droney/satanic/spacious variety, mainly due to the fact that I have been driving around in my car listening to long passages of noise and drone to fill the blanks. Starting off with SUNN 0))). Now this curiosity in this psychedelic metal stuff was piqued earlier in 2009 after witnessing the legendary Seattle grungers the MELVINS - a glorious cacophony of expertly wielded and intensely heavy, PUNK informed metal, as most of the best metal is. I never really got into the Melvins, I found them too bogan and one-dimensional for my sensitive tastes, but then I essentially go for the psychedelic/subtle movements in music, often revelations in art come to me unexpectedly rather than furiously mining for the new and fresh. So I downloaded some of the Melvins records and realised why I never got into them in the first place, the records all sound pretty one-dimensional and obvious, much like 98.999999789% of heavy-metal-grunge-punk stuff. Earlier this year, and as reported on this blog, I was blown away by Jim Jarmusch's latest Zen mind-bender movie THE LIMITS OF CONTROL. In that film, as in most of Jarmusch's work, his cinematic experience is informed by left-filed and experimental musics. Jarmusch often mines a classic hipster 70s stylee music field, concentrating on exotic and transcendental rock stylings, from 50s rock n roll to Neil Young psychedelics. Early in the 00s he collaborated with the WuTang's GZA for the soundtrack to his cool GHOST DOG fillum a seamless collaboration as GZA's droney triphop stylings met comfortably with Jarmusch's offbeat visions. Anyway, in LOC Jarmusch's has mined the psych-metal drone scene with music from the likes of Sunn0))), Boris and Texan shoegazers the Black Angels. I imagined these drone-metal groups to be kinda like Black Sabbath, and alas that is what they are, albeit with a more updated flavour that borrows heavily from New York art-minimalist composers like early John Cale, Tony Conrad and the intense trance drone of LaMonte Young (I was fortunate enough to sit in Young's 'dreamhouse' for about 40 minutes last year, imagine the sounds of a 50s sci-fi UFO blasted full bore through 4x4 rock speakers in a yoga practice/techno raveparty chillout room!)..Another band featured in LOC is OM, who I saw last year in Brooklyn, and whilst at the time wasn't totally blown away by their bass/drums harmonia, I was compelled enough to purchase their album Pilgramage, which has grown on me via my 'in car' listening ventures. The thing I'm finding interesting in these drone-doom bands is their investment into ancient Gnostic Middle Eastern /European religious thought and poetry. OM are Greek-Americans, and are probably the most rocking Greeks on the planet this side of J.Mascis, Vangelis and Jimmy Sfetsos. So the OM crew like to mumble about 'godheads', 'Lazarus', and blokes with crazy beards that wear black and still look Old Testament-like. Sunn 0))) I dunno what their religious/satanic affiliations are besides probably shooting heroin with fat hillbillies from Seattle. Their MONOLITHS&DIMENSIONS record come packaged in this nice slipcase. I was also interested to find that Aussie noise-legend Oren Ambarchi is a member of their nebulous collective. Opening bulldozer 'Aghartha' kicks off proceedings with a deliciously thick sound of an over-distorted guitar, so perfectly overdriven that it's almost like they are reminding you what was so exciting and terrifying about the sounds of an over-distorted electric guitar in the first place! These guys revel in the sound of an over-distorted guitar chord, and apparently their live concerts are the things of modern psychedelic-rock legend. It seems quite clear why Jarmusch used these guys, their sound isn't that far removed from Neil Young's 'live rust' and more pertinently WELD explorations. But that's where things stop. Sunn 0))) as I mentioned previously are informed by experimental sound-scapes, and I'd also throw in the crazy-junky hoity-toity New York art expermenta of Diamanda Galas and even the Swans. But where I hated the inbuilt nihilism of those 80s artists, these guys keep things kinda 'warm'. The grand-canyon guitars segue into some Eastern-European Vlad-the-Impaler lunatic grepsing in the lowest most evil sounding growl this side of Darth Vader. The lyrics are strange and expansive, singing about exploding universes and apocalyptic battles for chaotic reform ??? Yeah maybe I'm losing it! They sound like a death-metal band on 33. But then they throw in these Biblical choirs and MetalMachineMusic layers of textured noise so next thing you feel like you may have suddenly tuned in to a 3MBSfm classical music hour. Horns then crash in like some Biblical epic, but they don't remodel that shit into the lousy limp American-Judeo-Christian mainstream of 'niceness and lies that help you become rich materially if you follow our dogmatic rules'. They model it into the harsh, trugeoning, dirge across the Exodus that the Old Testament is. I mean if you don't believe, open your nearest copy of 'the Book'. But it don't stop there, the Eastern-Euro growler in Sun 0))) seems to be conjuring demons in some sort of middle-ages battle between pagan Earth Gods and the man made hell of the Crusade, its like the best soundtrack to a wonderfully satanic Lucio Fulci masterpiece like THE BEYOND or CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD!!!!!! AAAAAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

So taking a break from all this pleasant synapse-feeding meshigarse I picked up this re-issue of Aussie-Adelaide noise-punk psychos GRONG GRONG. I used to read a lot about these guys in the pages of legendary Aussie underground-rock journal B-side, but like B-side bands, the artists involved were helpless drug-casualties and being under-aged it was difficult to sneak into gigs to experience these godhead punk compostors. GRONG GRONG are the sound the Birthday Party left behind. In Adelaide. Feral as all fuck their music makes me want to shave my bumfluff with a broken VB stubbie! The interesting thing about GRONG GRONg is their uber-hardcore trash-slash style. They inject amphetamine psychosis into the Birthday Party sound, and Charlie Tolnay's incredible slash-wash of noise and riff is the first to acknowledge the genius of Rowland S Howard's similar, yet more stylistic pioneering sound. Henry Rollins compared RSH's style to Antonin Artaud if he had an electric guitar, but it's probably wiser to give that title to Charlie Tolnay. His guitar kills, slashes, burns, cuts and absolutely fucken flies through the murk of most of the lo-fi noise on this CD, but it becomes clearer in the murky live footage of GRONG GRONG, that appears on the complimentary DVD. First and foremost, GRONG GRONG were a HARDCORE PUNK band, albiet of a more expansive and seminal kind.

Which brings me to contemporary Melbourne noise-punk heroes ZOND. I saw them earlier this year and they were a blast. The have this drug fucked girl on guitar who seems to be the Melbourne un-glammed version of New York's Julia Cafritz(pussy galore) and three nerdy blokes on other guitar and rhythm section. The other guitar bloke has a rack of around 20 shit noise boxes, basically switches them all on, until it's a bleeding surround-sound wash of white noise, as the rhythm section blasts away in motoritik precision. It was like watching My Bloody Valentine do their 'noise' section of 'you made me realise' cut up into discrete, Sex Pistols-like punk 'tunes'. And it was awesome. Happy New Year to you all.

.....It's the end of a decade so I'm trying to throw in my 'best of' list for this decade, and whilst I was listening to a lot of 'reissues' of glorious old shit like Bob Dylan and the La's and the Coloured Balls amongst many others, there was still time for new pleasures, books, films, comics, movies, books...

VocalCity- Luomo (album) - Northern European luxurious techno house. Still holds up. Great neo-80s sequencing and set the tone of techno pop for the decade.
Rhythm and Sound – album of totally awesome dubbed out neuvo krautrock that cracks, pops, hisses, depth charges and sends you into a very strange and sedate place..
The White Stripes – Elephant – took me a while to take to these punks, but after seeing them live and do an incredible mash-up almost techno type gig, I understood why they were and may still well be 'the future of rock'
The Drones live at the Tote – as part of this Spooky Records thing, at which my friends the Double Agents were playing. I heard the Drones do their scree by accident live on PBS fm and seeing them live, play the 'cockeyed lowlife of the badlands' was a totally modern Oz-rock experience. I felt like I was back in the POW circa late80s!
Mullholland Drive – Lynch
Paria – French movie shot on digital. about a young guy trying to get home.
YiYi – Korean film
Punch Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood (films)
Discovering the cinema of Bresson, Chabrol, Rohmer, Antonioni, Giallo and euro cult cinema, Nicholas Ray, Tarkovsky, Larry Cohen, Sergio Leone, Robbe Grillet, Jodorowsky, Zulawski, anime and STAN BRAKHAGE.
Collateral and Miami Vice – I grew up on Miami Vice in the mid-80s and rediscovered Mann's cinema work once again. HEAT is possibly the greatest American crime movie of the last 20 year. With Collateral and Miami Vice, Mann started using DV and Hdv in order to get better clarity on his tecture of skies, namely sunsets and clouds. The result whilst not totally mesmerising dramatically, is a gas for the other senses.
A.I, Minority Report and War of the Worlds – Spielberg get back to his sci-fi roots, and whilst the films still had his daggy 'happy endings' were still state of the art.
Discovering William S Burroughs – oh yeah. Esp. 'the ticket that exploded'
Discovering Boris Vian – oh yeah oh yeah. Esp 'the dead all have the same skin' and the even just as totally nuts and wild 'I spit of your graves'!!!
100 Bullets comic – unbelievable comic artistry. Opaque, hardboiled and terrific saga about a war between ultra-crime gangs.
MPD Psycho - an absolute mind bender. A cop has multiple personalities, tries to solve some bizarre murders, then finds he is part of a larger mind control conspiracy that includes cult-like rockstars, programmed assassins and some bizarre Government experiment that has become an all-out war between some sort of psychic freaks and something else. Includes some of the most amazing mindblowing action pieces I've ever seen in printed form. A hijacked 747 crashing into the bow of a massive cargo ship/drug laboratory anyone?

Jodorowsky's THE INCAL, Technopriests and Metabarons intergalatic sci-fi epics. Totally and unremittingly mind-blowing and brilliant. Fuck Freud and Jung, and take Jodorowsky's intergalactic, brutal and beautiful sagas.

Curb Your Enthusiasm – I can't understand how brilliant this story of my fantasised life is! And funny too!
The Pianist (Polanski) – the greatest Holocaust story ever told. The triumph of art over adversity has never quite been demonstrated in narrative form like this movie.
Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch) – meditative and fantastic.
The Savage Detectives and 2666 – Roberto Bolano. Hmmm, it's like literature is dead right? All pomo-homos and diary-keeping fucksticks that become rich and global. I didn't like Savage Detectives. Bolano just seems like a Kerouac for this era. But I persisted and getting to the end of his long psyhotropic road-epic it all seemed to make a totally unclear sense. Are aesthetics dead? I've only just started 2666, and whilst he seems to be mining similar fields, this time something weirder and stranger is going on. Is reality cracking at the seams? Is this James Joyce meets Philp K Dick. The attack on the simulacra of modern life begins!
The Road (Cormac McCarthy) – it was devastatingly awesome. And now there's a film. Whatever.
Platform (Michel Houllbecq) – French grump who was also devastatingly awesome, but funny too!
Lou Reed live – well when he came out for 'Ecstasy'. The first 15 minutes were worth every cent. Shame it became dull whiny shit after that!
Marilyn Manson – best American corporate American hard-rock show razzle dazzle. I find his music cheesy and lame, though I don't mind his single, but live his fantastic bands and wild stage show was probably like what glam rock was like back in the 70s.
Synecdoche NY (Charlie Kaufman) – one of the great American art-films of the last decade.
The WIRE – TV series. What can I say. Masterpieces never stop. So why complain?
Sin City (Rodreguez) – the sexiest and best comic book adaptation of all-time. Easy.
Children of Men – best sci-fi film of the decade. Best film as comic book too!
Missy Elliot – live techno, hyper-media-multi-mix show, like a KISS concert but now. And I guess that's why it was only 45 minutes long!
Finally seeing Spritualized live – the were fucken awesome, an ecstatic arsed-kicked shot of space rock.
Seeing GEORGE CLINTON/Parliament live – unbelievable that a guy who is 60+ years old can play for like, what? 3 hours? Amazing.
Seeing NEIL YOUNG live – Greendale which while being a bit hippy/Canadian and ODD, was fantastic. Sitting only 7 rows from the front was better. As was the spliff I had during the encore! And the sound was beautiful. A perfect night!
Seeing the PIXIES live. My brother saw them in the late 80s and described them as 'thrashy' back then. I'd purged them from memory and was half-arsed about going but it was a worthy punt. They were more 'cow punk' and intense than I expected which was a surprised. But once is enough.
Gym and yoga – I love it. Not that I want to get massive. An Iggy Pop physique will do me nicely! Yoga, chill me out, and I get to perv on MILFs at the same time. Can't lose!
Brendan Fevola, Eddie Betts, Marc Murphy, Bryce Gibbs, Jarrod Waite, Matthew Kreuzer, Mark Jamieson, Nick Stevens, Michael Jamison – all gave me hope for my footy team Carlton who experience the apocalypse this decade! Two wooden spoons, cheating, drunk bum president, going bankrupt and ..redemption! As much as other people hate them, a good, strong Carlton is still 'good for footy'!!

Playstation 3 – I think this is the greatest 'toy' ever. Blu Ray, games, internet connectivity, can watch downloaded .avis, and umm CALL Of DUTY MODERN WARFARE etc...
Oh shit where is the addiction/mental well-being therapist?

ROWLAND S. HOWARD R.I.P I was a bit of a fan back in the 80s and did some volunteer work on his never (or soon?) to be released documentary that I will no doubt be written out of. Fuck it, I can be bitter it was a great story squandered - as a friend said, kinda like Wim Wenders 'lightning over water'. Unfortunately this story belongs to another person who probably has more talent and ability to do it justice, que sera, sera..... Rowland had a 'world class' style and attitude. He was one of the all-time great guitar stylist/heroes of Aussie rock, he made an intellectual, rebellious sound that was totally unique, totally memorable. Art. See ya later Rowland, thanks for the great guitar solos in 'guilt parade' and 'hey sinkiller'.

The Limits of Jarmusch

2009-08-21T23:47:00.007+10:00

The Limits of Control - Jim Jarmusch

The latest Jarmusch film starts off like a visual treatise grafted off the pages of Gene Youngblood's cult cinema tome THE EXPANDED CINEMA. All natural coloured psychedelic pulses and swiping flashes, before we are introduced to Isaach De Baankole as 'the Lone Man'. Who is this man and what is his mission? A mysterious African killer agent, ripped straight out of Burroughs, 'the Lone Man' is sent on a mission to reboot reality and hunt and kill 'the American'. And off we go. Through the luminous, modern city-to-landscape spaces of Spain - exotic skyscrapers, labyrinthine city streets and the empty desert shrines of rural wastelands. On his mission he meets a new-wave temptresses, trippy old men, a female Albino cowgirl and a lost cowboy rockstar. They all have a message as the 'lone man' finally finds his way. While Tarantino Jacks off with his comic-book marsers, Jarmusch re-feeds us more acid from the early 70s. A 'head' movie for the Internet generation - well, not quite - they more than likely won't see this. Jarmusch avoids the sharp-cutting hyper mania of modern film. His scenes roll, the droning acid rock soundtrack from Japanese psych band Boris rock, as 'the Lone Man' cruises to his destination with strange shades of darkness seeming to claw at the edges of his (or our) reality. Black helicopters, black sedans, men in black - all refracting back to our 'black' protagonist. 'Limits of Control' is a simple 'fuck you', a message from the counter-culture against the forces that try to crush the dream.

stranger than paradise

written and directed by jim jarmusch, 1985

'Stranger than Paradise' is one of my favourite films of all-time. It was probably the first modern film (of the time, 1985) I ever saw that was filmed in black and white, since when you're 15, black and white films were the sort of stuff your parents would watch. Watching this film was a total punt at the time, and I think the only reason I went to set it was because there was a review of it in the 'Jewish News' when the Jewish News was readable, and also because I read somewhere that it was made for less than $100,000 and it was funny. It took me a while to figure out what this film was about, but I found the whole style of it completely compelling and watchable. For one the whole film was in black and white. Then each scene was filmed in one single shot, and separated by a 2 second 'black out'. Then there was the really wild music by Screaming Jay Hawkins, the song 'I put a spell on you', this music was completely foreign to me at the time, since all I knew was British 80's New wave and Talking Head. I thought Screaming Jay was a fucking legend. The story was pretty dead beat - some bludger of a guy has to look after his cousin who arrives from Hungary. He's such an arsehole to her than she runs off to Cleveland. After a few months, the guy and his best buddy decide to visit his cousin in Cleveland, and then they decide to go to Florida for a holiday, but when they get there the weather is shit and the lose their money. Basically this film is about things fucking up in a Zen sort of way, which is very funny coz, well thing fuck up, you get angry, and then you don't give a shit. My favourite scenes are when the two bums visit their old Hungarian aunt who speaks not English and whips their asses playing cards. Me and Itchy found this scene extremely poignant, since it reminded us of both our mothers, who were old European ladies who played cards all the time. 'Stranger than Paradise' is a fucking legendary film, that has not dated, and is better than 90% of the indie cuck that gets made these day and is term 'cool'. Watch this film and you can see where blokes like Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez got their chops.

J.G. Ballard R.I.P

2009-04-20T13:14:00.002+10:00

See ya later old fella. Thanks for the HighRise Super Cannes Drought

Jandek joins Black-Rock Coalition!!

2009-04-10T19:59:00.001+10:00

In Texas!

Sonny Sharrock live via Jandek!

ROn Ashton RIP

2009-01-07T14:43:00.004+11:00

Ron Ashton , the one leaning over to grab Niagara.

Well you all know the news, Ron Asheton, Stooges guitar L.E.G.E.N.D cucked it. Despite having my mind blown by his incendiary, raw guitar playing, I was fortunate to have a few of my fillings dislodged when I saw him play in Melbourne almost 20 years ago with DARK CARNIVAL. Ron was a bit of a grobber, he played the same ULTRA-LOUD solo, but it was brilliantly hilarious and 'punk' to see the guy play a little club with a small clutch of 'high energy' rock slobovnics, and they still sounded better than EVERY Seattle and Melbourne grunge band that were doing the rounds back then (and my, how dated and shitty 'grunge' sounds today!)..I went to the Stooges reunion a few years back at the Big Day Out rock concert, thinking I might get lucky to squeeze up front, but unfortunately the tattooed, back flipping cockroaches up the front were too plentiful.

It's shit when a music/art legend you respected and inspired you dies.

Life to go....

2008-12-05T22:45:00.004+11:00

DIED PRETTY - FREE DIRT (Aztec Records) - SO literally out of nowhere, or 'out of the unknown' as their song goes, comes the reissue of DIED PRETTY's (Aztec Records, 2-cd digipack, liner notes, extra songs special edition) master work, and one of my all-time favourite albums – FREE DIRT. I remember clearly hearing this album getting hyped by 'the ghost' Stephen Walker on 3RRR fm, and my brother buying it for me as a get well gift, since I had a bad flu at the time. I listened to it once, but a few weeks later had a stoner session and literally, at that point, my mind split open! From the glorious panoramic blare of opener 'Life to go (landsakes) to the violent and transcendent lead break of 'Just Skin' to the awesome drone-out of 'Next to nothing' that includes that FUCKEN AWESOME KEY CHANGE (around the 4:34 mark), that to this day still causes me to get Goosebumps. But the record doesn't stop there....Side 2 takes a more country-pop kinda weird hillbilly direction with feedback in tracks like 'Blue sky day', 'round and round' and wig out'...there pretty much isn't a dud track on the whole album. The disc also include the sublime 'Next to nothing' ep featuring the killer narco-ballads 'ambergris' and 'plaining days'. If anything, FREE DIRT was the first Aussie indie album to really attack and challenge the hegemony of the whole Nick Cave fucken post-punk pretentiousness that is still the 'benchmark' for worthwhile left-field Aussie-rock to the rest of the world to this day (Cave still is Australia's biggest global cultural export and rock star)..FREE DIRT holds it's own as a purely original record, with a truly unique sound and artistic vision that set it apart from it's contemporaries at the time who, despite being all great, had more 'obvious' sonic lineages, ie : the MC5/Dictator/Ramones rifferama axis..Sure there's a Velvet Underground/Suicide thing sort of going on, but you don't 'hear it' as obviously as most undie-rock bands post 1988 did. I love FREE DIRT and NEXT TO NOTHING and all the singles of that Frank Brunetti period DP, and to be honest they were never the same band after got sacked, I lost total interest in them, but they definitely became popular with a shitload of inner-city nebbishers and crummy Aussie film directors.

If anything though, despite all the obvious accolades Peno and Myers and Brunetti still get from this era of the band, the sound proves one important fact abouit rock music that despite their obvious 'atiste/auteur' kudos A GREAT BAND ARE ONLY AS GOOD AS THEIR RHYTHM SECTION!!!@#! Died Pretty at that stage had possibly one of the greatest and most under-rated Aussie rhythm sections ever. Front and centre is Chris Welsh's absolutely swinging psychedelic jazz drumming. Welsh films every single blank with his cascading and flowing jazz fused rolls and fills, and he absolutely eclipses the over-rated jazzpunk cucking of the Dirty 3's (read: rock n roll fraud) Jim White. It's one of those great cosmic injustices that Jim White gets to live in New York and play with indie sweethearts like Chat Power and Palace, and Welsh is struggling in NSW somewhere. One listen to FREE DIRT and Welsh's rhythmic GENIUS is apparent. Likewise Mark Lock's noodling psych basslines add a complexity and sophistication that allows the 3 amigos out-front to really outdo their own limitations, but more importantly transcend their influences and thus create something truly original and inspired and PURE. FREE DIRT/NEXT TO NOTHING sill shines bright to this day...

But the paradox of time and re-appraisal can be cruel, and within the awesomeness of this re-issue, you can also 'hear' the demise of Died Pretty happen in real-time. For me personally, Died Pretty were all over once they released that lousy 'everybody moves' song, and the subsequent LOST album was not much chop either (and don't start me with their friggen REM-stage when they did that dull EVERY BRILLIANT EYE & DOUGHBOY HOLLOW abortion and HARNESS UP ECH!..!) You can hear the energy drop like when a bipolar takes their meds on the flatulence that is 'everybody moves' and 'tower of strength'. The songs meander around, the lead breaks start to become a 'formula', and unfortunately that's what DIED PRETTY became - a dull meandering formula that fit snuggly into the dull 'middleness' of suburban 'lucky cunthead' Australia (and more succinctly 'alternative' Australia). A dull middleness that exists to this day starting with dogshit like the Meanies and Even, Steve Pav and his Sydney Pavlovavites, the Fauves, the bloke from the Corner Hotel, lefties in the Northern suburbs, Christo Tsiolcackas, people that buy Nick Cave records, Australian cinema, OZ hiphop, Powderfinger, JJJ, 'the glasshouse'. 'rock wiz' ..I mean look at today's hotshit alt-Aussie bands like the Drones..They start off incredible and become...PAUL KELLY.

I blame him. The fuck.

Fucken OATH!!

2008-10-29T22:25:00.004+11:00

Sonic's Rendezvous Band - Live, Masonic Hall, 14/1/1978

My opinion/review:

"...F***EN OATH!!!!..."

Hooked on classiques

2008-10-27T10:52:00.004+11:00

Since George Bush and his bunch of fuckheads have stuffed it up for most of us, purchasing exotique imported musique off the Internerd is becoming something that only the truly elite can afford to do. SO in my struggling state and via ANY MEANS NECESSARY via mutual bartering amongst other nerds who haven't got their lives together pushing 40, I stumbled upon this latest 'opus' by techno heavyweights MORITZ VON OSWALD and CARL CRAIG (who I'd only rank as a bantam weight)...SO the two tweakers have sifted through the Germanic tradition of classical music and remixed some of it into a very nice Phillip Glass pre-1980 type drone build-up infused with the shuffla offa Manuel Gottisching's E2-E4 - a track Craig already fucked with some years ago..Startin' off with the waltz from Bolero the track fanfares and wanders up until the 20 odd-minute mark when the drugs start to kick in, and then those Afro-Jamaican type kettle drums start to wobble in and the Pine-Needle poke of techno tweakiness and brain-abstract- layer reconstruct slithers in...it's still pimping away now, but it seems that the 'nu style' for the technosepickers is upon us...

And for any other persona out there that bother to read this Blug, I am back in Melbourne, Australia, knowledgeable that my town is actually more 'interesting' and 'happening' than the New York City I was just at!

Getting stronger!

2008-10-06T03:18:00.000+11:00

Roky Erickson, live Granada Theatre, Dallas, October 4, 2008

At the Crossroads...

2008-10-03T00:08:00.002+10:00

At the 'Crossroads'. Clarksdale Mississippi, October 1, 2008

In drones begin responsibilities...

2008-09-24T02:10:00.005+10:00

The Dream House beckons..

HARMONIA, live NYC September 23, 2008

Sarah Palin, meet Pauline Hanson!

2008-09-23T00:34:00.004+10:00

Classy chicks, both of them!

But, me, I'll take "..Jackie Onassis in my pants..."

Gimme Liberty! Gimme Gastro!

2008-09-20T03:22:00.011+10:00

New York Shitty??

I used to love this place. In fact I wanted to live here, but didn't have the balls or skills to get a job/sponsorship...Yeah I'm a coward! Second time here, and I'm not so sure..Maybe it's the global Internerd that has made everything available in Real Time

so YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON NOW! Geographically there isn't much chop about New York. It's Hong Kong with everyone speaking English.

Sure there is alot of entertainment here, but not all of it is good. Restriction, lack of choice, isolation brings out more me thinks. The only things of any real architectural beauty is the Empire State,

Chrysler Building and Statue of Liberty, compared to nearly any European City, New York is chopped liver, there's just more people in the one place is all.

This trip seems to have taught me one thing. The English speaking Empires are finished. I felt like a real fucken idiot in France and Spain, two sophisticated, cultured countries, groping

with my lame French and retarded Spanish. I didn't feel in any way culturally superior or sophisticated. I felt like a vulgar English speaking git.

England is a fucking shithole. If Mick Jagger felt Australia was the 'arsehole of the universe' why did he kick off his pathetic solo career there, or did he realise then that he was a piece of shit? Maybe he was addicted to the smell or arseholes. Stupid Limey fuck-knuckle.

Besides the castles and chirpy people England is the dullest country on the planet. A living festering cold turd. The weather is constantly shit. They get sun for 15 minutes, then it's cloudy. England lives in a constant state of overcast humdrum. No wonder they went out and created an empire. The Poms are obsessed with supermarkets, something they do well in the modern age. Supermarkets and Airport terminals! Hail Britannia!

France is maybe 20% more interesting/cooler, but at least the climate changes as you go down south. For a sophisticated country, everything seems invariably simple. And I'm not sure about 'beautiful French women', maybe it's my gay side coming out, but I found the bulk of French women to be invariably ugly, and at least the English scrubs had bigger tits! But if you like movies and books and can speak French you will be in nirvana. Books on heavy deep shit everywhere, small press, big press, English, French, Chinese, Cambodian, Iranian, Eastern Euro - whatever, they got books on it. And the films are also from all over the world. Retarded ex-convict settlements like Australia have to have film festivals to pump up the jams, but in Paris it's a film festival all year. The Gaulic architecture of efficient compacted suburbs is nice as well; the 'chalet' style houses give everything communal, village type feel.

Spain kicks arse. Well I was in Catalunya, which is half of my ancestry, so I might be only speaking of a portion. I always had this impression of Spain being full of hot bloody, Spico morons. Blame fucking John Cleese and Fawlty Towers (and my crazy mother for that!) These English should make more fun of their own lack of culture than everyone else’s. Maybe I should do it, as it’s funnier than them making fun of everyone. Barcelona is probably the coolest city in Europe. You have the Mediterranean and its climate (though I think I may have got a rash from the dirty (???) water), an ancient, middle ages based city, mashed right up against the crux of modernism. Slightly similar to Israel (other distant half of my ancestry, Poland may make me want to suicide), w/o the warlord obsessed Arabs and the moronic-vulgar Israelis. The labyrinthine streets literally teem with stores, bars, apartments, people hanging out, music and hot women wearing not much clothes. Especially at the beaches. Boobs. Unfortunately I couldn't touch any. Their art scene is right out there, their politics currently totally progressive, interesting as I thought they were a Catholic banana republic mafia-racket like Italy....Maybe Catalonia is the exception not the norm......

So now I am in America, New York City to be exact. It still has that dense population, big-city-I-always-see- in-the-movies-but-now-it's-real-feel when I arrive here. But it's changed. Everywhere you go they try to sell you shit, like EVERYWHERE. I go to the Empire state where temporary ropes force you to line up a particular way so they can offer you tours you don't want, gifts you don't need and when they made us take photos - which I though were for security/terrorist profiling(you now have airport security on all the tourist sites, thanks terrorists - it was for shitty ChromaKeys tourist photos! I coulda vomited. And the food here isn't as good as I thought it was. Matzo ball soup is sloppy and soft, but the chopped liver is good. And the haute culture food is over-rated. The pizza isn’t much better. Overall American food doesn't taste as 'fresh' as in Australia. And they don't have decent beer.

The 'hipster' scene here is execrable. Everyone fucken looks the same and talks the same shit! It's incredible! Talk about fucken GROUPTHINK!! Where are people that you can have a conversation with like an ordinary mentsch?? I've tried to talk to women, and while I can engage in small talk, most are too busy sending SMS's to their other boyfriend or whatever. So I don't really expect to make any really meaningful relationships while I'm here.

But New York’s funky/fashionable/artistic ‘cutting edginess’ is based on dogshit. Fashion magazines, wannabes, fucking status seekers, poseurs, rubbish. Though they have lots of book, almost as many as France and Spain, and way more than England. And people here read more, unlike Australia, where people can't actually read... The most interesting thing in New York are the migrants, and black people definitely not the WHITE PEOPLE getting paid big money in fucking fashion/lifestyle ‘image creating’ magazines. They sell so many fucking shmattas here is insane. I can’t even buy a pair of durable sandals around here!! New Yorkers just wish they were European.

Me and my ex-pat Aussie mate I'm staying with went and saw ESG at this place called Santos Music House, which is owned by that Andrew WK guy who seems to have taken his money from his record advance and started a hip and trendy club, it's like Revolver in Melbourne. ESG were good, I also saw Vernon Reid & Masque at a 'free' show, where I ultimately dropped 50bucks on drinks and they pass around a 'band donation' hat, so it wasn't really free. New York stuff. But the gig was great, small; club with about 40 'hipsters' shame they started at 1am on a Monday night, I was nodding off around the 2 mark. I need sleep ya know I'm not 25!!!

That's probably the kicker, I'm getting old. I'm single. I have a kid. I still want to go out and boogie, but 25 year old preppies and hipsters won't talk to a 38 y.o curmudgeon (well I’m more that way on paper, or HTML). I don't look like fucking Heath Ledger and I'm not rich! Then the 'older set' are all uber rich and have dinner parties on the upper west side, so what the fuck am I supposed to do? Sit on the Internet? Watch CNN all day? I’m just another ‘tourist’ I suppose… (Actually I went to the Statue of Liberty yesterday and queued up with these Germans that had peculiar moustaches)

Anyway I bought some culture:

CD's : Mars CD, Sonics Rendezvous Band, Reigning Sound, RVNG presents Justine D - all good

BOOKS : Night of the Living Dead BFI, Chomsky on Anarchism, The Urban Homestead and Evil Paradises

MAGS : Ugly Things, Wax Poetics (black rock issue), Cinemascope, Neural.it

and too many pairs of shoes!!

So I been watching the Presidential Race, it's very similar to what was gong on in Australia, except John Howard didn't stand down and his party got thumped. The Repubs were smart to lock Dubya in the cupboard (Closet??) but McCain, oh is he a first class shmendrick! And then they put in that Palin shickser (I mean she empitomises the word for those have that no idea what I'm talking about.) McCain quite literally talks about nothing, he's a cypher. Palin YACKS LOUDLY, she reminds me of a more sophisticated Pauline Hanson. I figure that when the Republican's lose, she will quickly appear on a really camp and gay reality TV show like Hanson does in Australia (‘dancing with the stars’ or some diarrhea)..I love how Americans throw up all these pseudo ideas like 'feminism' etc to give her gravitas. She's a nothing. Now Obama has alot of integrity on the surface, he speaks well, thing is, I don't see anyone running with him, its just OBAMA, OBAMA, OBAMA, where is his fucken posse? (OK I only been here two weeks!) Really the way I see it, is that if all the people (esp. black, hispanic, Indians, biafrans etc) get off their arses and vote, Obama should win this election. The economy is getting trennered in the shitter every second. But I don't feel threatened. If the Americans can't see the potzes in power have fucked things up so bigtime, they have sent America back 30 years, they have made the USA a laughing stock outside it's own protective cyber-bubble or whatever, well you Americans can accept more shithouse rock bands, you can accept more fucking Paris Hiltons, and you can accept more Mel Gibson and Ridley Scott movies, coz that’s what you fucking well want! But don’t expect a silver bullet, if Obama and the Invisibles win, things will be *slightly* different if THEY DON’T HAVE A VISIONARY PLAN AND STICK TO IT! Then in 4 years time, and if Palin doesn’t get her lucrative reality TV show, you might have your FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT!!!! Now where are those 'American thighs' that that not-actually-born-in-Australia band once sang about?

..and also time to get off the Internerd…………OFF!

May the Ballard be with me...

2008-09-02T18:48:00.007+10:00

I'm currently tramping around Europe, and while I'm indirectly complicit - like the typical Ballrdian situation - in this age of global warming and mass blind, idiotic consumption, one of the disturbing things I noticed about Europe is it's paradox with travel, mobility, and it's affect on global warming. The first thing I noticed in arriving in the Uk is the constast, muted thunder of passenger aeroplanes. Like CONSTANT. In France it was worse, I mean it's a modern day blitzkreig with no less that 3 passenger planes darting the skies at one time, it's a wonder they don't collide..

Anyway, my cousin took me to the Cartier Institute where we saw an exhibition by modernist sculptor Cesar, immediately bringing to mind my top-3 novelist J.G.Ballard..

In Barcelona my mind is getting blown every second! Hot women, great weather, extremely sophisticated culutre. England seems like a horribly repressed memory of ugly architecture, bad weather, bushpigs and horrible food - but the people are nice and often funny.. But Spain, well, it's no wonder the artists here live until 100!!

But the body\planet scarification of cheap airfares continues, amidst the complex, labyrinthine architecture and blue skies I see..

..and this right next to that other polluter - a Cathedral - more planet scarring {but alas the architecture of God is finer than commerce, the paradox!}

..so stumbling around Barcelona, obviously some VALIS led me totally blind to here {I shit you not!}

..anyway thats enough geeking for now, the weather is too fine, life is good, off to La Plaja to be cleansed and purified!

[sorry about layout, I am using a spanish keyboard and everything is different, i am also staying with relatives who speak no english, so I feel like I'm in a Jim Jarmusch movie! LOL!]

I'll be around....

2008-08-24T10:12:00.002+10:00

I'm actually overseas...Just in Paris listening to some speed garge from 10 years ago, when I thought I'd impress my cousin with this BASSLINE stuff I picked up in Nottingham, where I just came from..The older stuff is better :)

So yeah, I will be posting lots of pictures and some narrative one I get settle on my groove over here...

10-4

Sheriff Goldblog

Chuck D - you're the VOICE!

2008-07-26T21:14:00.009+10:00

Ya know, the guy is probably 'anti-semitic', just like Mel Gibson, but is probably eating his words when his closest ideologue in political 'thought' – Noam Chomsky – is one of those wicked devils he's spouting about (but ya know he's not, get over it). I remember about 8 years ago I went to one of those September11 anti-Globalism Protests at the Clown Casino (I beleive in that politque, even if the people championing it are fucking cockheads), and as I soon as I rocked up, the stoopid motherfuckers were playing fucking Johnny Farnham's 'You're the Voice'...Now I don't gives a stuff that they were trying to 'appropriate' or 'subvert' that song, but as soon as I heard it I RAN away from that awful sonic Balagan! ( Regardless of what their righteous albeit dumb-idiot agendas were, that song makes me VOMIT, not want to bomb a bank, whatever the “””point””” is 'supposed' to be!)

But clearing that shit from the table, of all the black/Afro-American SINGERS that have come out in the last 25 odd years, Chuck D definitely has the best voice. Chuck has perfect lyrical flow, and his lyris are dense, not just the chump change most rappers spit out...But Chuck's got that thing called soul. His 'performance' on By the Time I get to Arizona is just bomb. And except for maybe Method Man, Chuck is one of those rappers that just clears the room of all other bullshit and punches through. His shit is heavy and his voice is heavy too. It's incredible that Chuck D never fronted one of those 80s black-coalition rock bands, something in between Bad Brains and Living Colour(unfortunately his rock 'combos' have all been terrible!). I have no doubt if that happened, well then 'rap' woulda become another strand of the hard-rock virus keeping it alive for another 20 odd year...But it didn't happen, and most turned away from actually listening to the guy. He's still out there, and even if his vocal chords are being stretched like a 'Stretch Armstrong' toy to the point where it's gonna plutz and that thick-sticky glue stuff oozes out. Chuck D is one of the last truly great African-America yellers. You got Henry Rollins kvetching around but Chuck D just does it without effort. Word.

The best thing since .. QUADRAPHONIC 4 !!

2008-07-17T18:25:00.003+10:00

For those that don't know and more than likely don't give a shit, I actually made a few drachmas reviewing DVDs for a friends magazine that didn't make them any money so I lost my job..Alas, look where I am now: the shlobersphere or Blogosphere or whatever the poo-shooters call it..Anyway I was lucky to have been given a DVD-audio setup and amplifier which totally reconfigured my ears for the end of days with the 5.1/Dolby Digital/DTS meshigarse. When I was a wee cucker in the middish 70s, my older brother had one of those Quadraphonic4 amps, I remember playing with the funky remote, but never listening to anything on it, but these days I have it back!!

Basically the DVD-audio/Super Audio Cd format is dead in the toilet, so some generous and tech-savvy legend have now compiled a site where you can download the muisc and burn it straight on a CD or DVD as an encoded in DTS-format music disque..which means basically all you need is a simply DVD player surround sound set-up with DTS capability which you can get for about $150 at yr local Yum-Cha-Electronic store/supermarket and listen to some stoner audiophile dreck from the 70s 80s 90s 00s in 4.1 or 5.1...This legend at this site has also managed to digitise some old QD-4 vinyl, such as the pearler in the photo.. SO go forth and E.X.P.A.N.D!!!

Click here shtoompock!

THE FUTURE OF ROCK!!

2008-07-01T09:21:00.001+10:00

..and they sound like the Velvets!

MadMax and pussy

2008-06-22T12:42:00.004+10:00

THE ENGINE – MAD MAX

“ …She’s the last of the V8’s. She sucks nitro, phase 4 head..”

There are many wonderful ‘shots’ in MadMax, which still stands as one of the most beautifully lensed, edited and composed Australian films of all time. I’ll let other people articulate what those are in more florid words than me, but my own personal favourite is the unveiling of ‘the Engine’: “..she’s the last of the V8’s, she sucks nitro, phase 4 head..’ Now the obvious Freudian/Delleuzian/post-modern/lazy etc..etc..etc response, is that ‘the engine’ – and visually so in this case – is the unconscious representation of the phallus. But this is what is so cool about this shot, it's not what it's 'supposed' to be, on the contrary. The camera zooms in slowly to this dark....slot, Max gently tweaks it for more power…it purrs, he’s seduced, in awe, dumbstruck, and suffers a Petit-Mort all in one shot!

Goose declares: ‘He’s in a coma man, he loves it!’

For a country that invented such wonderful philosophical concepts as ‘ the female eunuch’,a concept it seems would define sexuality in the Australian cinema for way, way too long, here we have a proud one-finger salute in this single shot. Max has just been (mind) blown!

But in this same moment a Faustian pact has been unconsciously made. Max would discover further down the narrative, that ‘the Engine’ would become his new love interest, signalling Mad Max as the first truly ‘Ballardian’ movie. He will be cruelly denied the flesh; this brief mating ritual with this crude, high-powered lube-loving machine will soon define his fate.

I remember vividly the experience of seeing MadMax2 in a packed-out Rosebud Cinema down in the Mornington-Peninsula in the early 80s (I was too young to see the shocking, ‘transgressive’ R-rated MadMax, and had to see it later on video) It blew my mind, the first truly transcendent Australian cinematic experience. The theatre was packed with mix of locals and migrant-Australians who loved their cars more than their mothers (or maybe not). The hyped murmurings after the movie were in regards to Max’s tricked out super-powered ‘Charger’. It was the engine that means the most - ‘what the fuck was than reh?’, ‘Nitro, man’, would be the reply, ‘my cousins, bothers, mate does them mods’..It was a warm communal afterglow that we all must of felt, after being unceremoniously blown by the purring, screaming force of ‘the engine’.

Ed Kuepper mega-mix!

2008-04-23T19:02:00.004+10:00

Ed Kuepper (far left) and some schizophrenics on day-release.

Ed 'the Head's' best songs.

Ed Kuepper is one of my all-time Aussie rock heroes. As a teenager I really got into his 'electrical storm' record, and then dug through his Laughing Clowns stuff, and a few of his solo records, including the stuff he did as the Aints. But I have a big problem with Ed. For all his prolificness, the guy really knows how to churn out buckets of shit. Sure it's difficult to deal with his whiney/droney voice, and his guitar playing is always quite excellent, tasteful and rock n' roll, but he puts out so much music/dreck, that ultimately most of it is really unlistenable dreck. More often than not his albums might have one or two killers (which happened more often after 'Honey Steals Gold') with the rest all quirky rubbish.

So I thought I'd sift through the back catalogue of his that I actually own, and pick out what I reckon are the real winners, and see if there's enough to make an Ed Kuepper 'megamix' so the young shnooks can get a grasp on his inconsistent 'genius' without wasting to much time and money.

NOTE : These are not in order of best, but there is some chronological order going on:

Eternally Yours – post-punk drone-boogie bliss
No words of honour – Velvets type guitar and pp beat
New Bully in the Town – killer with a disco beat
Crystal Clear – another floor stomper
Holy Joe – rumble and weird jazz
Mr. Uddich-Schmuddich goes to town
The only one that knows – Ed's got something with the E-A-D chords

That's only 7 killers/classics off the 'Laughing Clowns collection of 51 songs, so go figure...

8. Car Headlights – hasn't dated well, be still pretty strong

9. No more sentimental jokes – solid

10. Master of two servants – it that badly recorded mandolin that does it

11. Another story – great outtro guitar solo

12. Electrical Storm – all the re-recorded versions were never as good as this one.

13. Told Myself – not sure if Ed was listening to Junior Kimbrough back in the 80's but this is the best white version of JK I've heard.

14. Palace of Sin – big-beat

7 tracks of 'Electrcial Storm' which has 11 track, so IMHO, his 'masterwork'

15. Without your mirror – nice folky/blues acoustic track, shows Ed's guitar skills

16. Show pony – there's an instrumental break thats really cool

17. Not a soul around – Ed starting to get a bit more 'commercial'

18. Nothing changes in my house – ditto, he was going for the Mellencamp thing.

19. Everything I've got belongs to you – it's cheesy and sentimental but its a good song.

20. Honey Steals Gold – fantastic spag/western/noir instrumental with droney loop

21. The way I made you feel – another killer song

22. Closer (but disguised) – great upbeat number in Ed;s weird way.

23. Blind Girl Stripper – great instrumental, with Spacemen3 type drone

24. Black ticket day – another uplifting Ed number

25. It's still nowhere – The Aints. Flanged-out electric guitar, but it works!

26. What's it like out there – more flange hysteria, the outro is friggen killer, good example of Ed's guitar work when its good.

27. Ascension – noisy guitar, for 11 minutes. I wish Ed did this more often, he's a fucken great rock n' roll guitarist. Maybe Australia's best!

But that's only 27 songs out of 300 or something, that's like 9%!! But that 9% outweighs nearly 98.9% of all recorded Aussie music. So go figure.

Flop flip

2008-03-27T00:47:00.004+11:00

Southland Tales

Easily the best science fiction movie this decade. Many tried: the Wachowski's, Aronofsky, Linklater, Assayas, but this is the ONE. Of course the 'confusing, misdirected mess' or whatever most thought the film was, is far from it. Writer/Director Richard Kelly isn't doing anything more radical than Kubrick did with Dr. Strangelove. In fact the first 15 minutes is like a hyper mix of Kubrick, Michael Mann and Buffy! The basic problem 'critics' and even the core 'audience' had with the film was a simple matter of aesthetics. Basically Kelly has taken the last 20-odd years of modern comic/graphic novel story telling, and dumped it steaming and hot onto the lap of Hollywood and cineaste intelligentsia. Kelly's intricate plot takes the airiness of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and slices and dices it with the Ninja blade of anime surrealist hyper-modern story telling. Sheeit, there are healthy doses of the LSD-fried LA sci-fi of Phil K Dick, KW Jeter and Tim Powers, but fuck that shit, the cocksucking film 'critics' wouldn't have read that dope shit (let em read Jonathan Lethem for all I care, and they still won't get it!)!!!! In a nutshell, it was all too fast, and to into it's own rhythms to worry about what the 'others' thought (Jodorowsky comics anyone?) Kelly has a made a subversive modern American satire. No wonder the thing would flop in today's 'market. It's basically Repo Man shotgunned into a PS2, via the weird pulsations of todays 'post-Christian-Corporated-everything' world. Also throw in the Craig Baldwin hyper-linked info-steria, and you've got a modern cinematic version of agit-prop angina(don't have a heart-attack y'all)! I mean I still haven't seen it in 'perfect cinefillic conditions', rather corporate screener 'blech', but alas that shows how far this film has been tooches trennered !!! Let the global warming sun shine down(and out of my arse!)! (I'll get my 36+)

Bastille Day in Detroit

2008-03-21T18:59:00.001+11:00

Word.

Road Worriers

2008-02-19T21:10:00.004+11:00

Films I've recently watched...

Been sitting on my arse watching stuff on DVD, starting with...

TWO RARE AS SHIT FILMS by ALAN CLARKE (U.K)...The cinema of Alan Clarke has been getting a bit of how you say 'chi-chi' reappraisal in recent years, most notably via Gus Van Sant and every film he's made since ELEPHANT, which was inspired by Alan Clarke's short film of the same name, as well as alumni of Van Sant, Harmony Korine, who lists Clarke as one of his favourite directors. You also get Clarke's' influence in many of the trendy 'grunge' film-makers, most notably the films - at least up to TRAINSPOTTING of Danny Boyle, and other trendies like Lynne Ramsay who made MORVERN CALLAR or even that guy who recently made that Joy Division movie KONTROL, and then let’s not forget Belgian guns the Dardenne Brothers, who's steady-cammed social realism -owes more to Clarke's films than the easy comparison to Bresson made by 95% of Johnny-cum-lately film reviewers or whatever they call themselves these days. For those that want to dive into Clarke's work, well you don't have to look too far. The most-excellent cult-cinema label BLUE UNDERGROUND put out a box-set a few years back that comprised of his most well-known film, the borstal-basher SCUM, as well as the equally excellent MADE IN UK, THE FIRM and the previously mentioned ELEPHANT. The box-set it OOP, but the titles are available as individual film. Clarke's final film (he died too young in 1990), the dirty-comedy RITA & SUE & BOB TOO is also available from the UK... But Clarke's other stuff is extremely rare, made more so by the fact that most of Clarke's output for BBC television as one off 'movies of the week', so if you know someone who taped them when they screened in the 80s yr in luck...

The first of the two films I saw was the most excellent CHRISTINE, which is pretty much the day in the life of a young, working-class female junkie. Living in drab flat, Christine basically spends her days shooting up, and then walking to her friends’ houses to shoot up some more. Dialogue is kept to a minimum as Clarke's steady-cam stalks his main protag with a low-rent Kubrick styled efficiency. There's no drama, just the blunt, dull and monotonous process of the junkie shooting up, nodding off and then repeating. Clarke uses his signature of 'the walker' to great effect here. A running theme in Clarke's films, despite the overall bleakness of Thatcher's England, is the concept of 'the Walker'..Nearly every character in Clarkes' work is walking through a bleak, almost alien environment, as if they are stuck in a prison, in this case working class England. Steadycam is the method to follow his protagonist’s journey and events literally unfold along the way, in real time. CHRISITNE is no different; she walks, shoots up and nods off, all the way until the last fix, where she may have just found an inner peace...

The second Clarke rarity I saw was THE ROAD...Some rate this one quite highly but it didn't do much for me..based on a play, the film had too much talking heads complaining directly to the camera, punctuated by a brief steady-cam shot of each character...The film revolves around the lives of two disenfranchised woman and two guys they meet at a drab disco. Interspersed are the monologues of a sad old divorcee, a sad old man, and a sad young couple. The film sits very much in that Irvine welsh TRAINSPOTTING type mould with people talking in a heavy British vernacular and complaining about the system and whatnot. The film is a lot more stylised that Clarke's other work, with scuzzy settings and characters mugging for the camera in freeze-frame. If you want to know where Danny Boyle got a lot of his original ideas you should try and check out THE ROAD.

Finally I watched the totally off-its-head JE T'AIME MOI NON PLUS directed by French-frog pop hero serge Gainsbourg. Starring Warhol beefsteak Joe Dellasandro and French-fry junkie-chic Jane Birkin, the film tells the story of Krassky (Dellasandro), a gay truck driver who falls for a chick with no tits and look like a boy called Johnny (Birkin)...Poor Krassky, he thinks he's falling for this anorexic, until he has to sleep with her, and then in frustration can only consummate his love for her Greek-style! Yeah well, how do you interpret this film? To me it was like a Fassbinder movie meets one of the those 70's mid-western acid movies like something by Monte Hellman or an early Hal Ashby film..The premise is more ridiculous when you tell people about it, than when you actually watch it, but the whole film works on such a unique don't-give-a-fuck and provocative manner, that you can't help but be entertained, and realise they just don't make shit like this anymore! Oh, and for those who dig Monsieur Gainsbourg, this film is actually an adaptation of his hit song Je T'Aime Se Nous Plus, so suck on that one!

Stealth rock around the cock

2008-02-03T13:23:00.000+11:00

THE WEDDING PRESENT - BIZARRO

..don’t ask me what the title means, you can figure it out for yourself coz I know yr that smart. The other day, being the sad-old-cunt that I am within the 35+ ‘demographic’ that-still-buys-music-as-albums--on-physically-tactile-formats, I picked up probably my favourite UK-indie-shmindie band of all-time, the Wedding Present's sorta-kinda-classic album: BIZARRO. Now I actually bought this album back during the great pre-war days of the earliest 1990’s, though I’d initially lost interest in the band after purchasing their hit-album ‘GEORGE BEST’ a neat, though badly produced record, that was still important in that here was one of the first indie-rock bands that proudly championed their love of sports before it became trendy with fuckheads (the hardcore pnuk scene', and also just before mid- 90s via Ameri-undie bands like Pavement & Yo LaTengo and who seemed to have become sports fans over-night in fear of the great gay-takeover or some shit whilst doing their art-farty humanities course at Uni, and realized they aren’t exactly part of the great ‘art’ dominant paradigm.)

NOW the Wedding Present in their day (what? 1986 to about 1990 or 1993) were basically up there in the big two of Brit-pop. It was Wedding Present vs. the Smiths), and while the Smiths are still championed for Morrissey’s exquisite charm and pomp and backbone of ALL British musique since 1972, GLAM, the Weddoes were always seemingly ignored because of their natural hetero boy-meets-girl-boy-has-complexity-with-girl-nobody-really-wins bittersweet paradigm. Which as I have been informed by a ex-pat servant-of-the-Empire buddy, made them quite popular with the chicks. I can vouch to that, though all I had was blue-balls-and-frustration/heartbreak with the only chick I ever went out with who was a Weddoes fan (there mighta been another, but she was into droney jazz records amongst the Stooges, and Nick Cave and PJ Harvey. ) In Australia, the Weddoes had fleeting indie-cult appeal with the sorta dancefloor ‘hit’ ‘My Favourite Dress’, that was the tougher antedote to the Smiths juggernaut in their songs ‘How Soon is Now’, ‘Big mouth’ etc…Another thing that didn't win the the Weddoes a fan base outside the UK was they were another trainspotter specialist type band. This was partly due to the fact that they WERE a 100% indie band pre the onset of 90s indie-rock globalizm fracas, while the Smiths already had major label distro in this country. You could and still to a great extent, only buy Wedding Present produce via ‘specialist’ stores or directly from the maker via the Internerd. Adding to this, still to this day, no skerrick of the Wedding Present ‘empire’ have ever been to Australia in the live-on-stage format. As a result being a fan of the Wedding Present immediately put you into a secret cult that almost immediately helped you identify with other secret agents of the resistance or some such shit.

SO we have BIZARRO. Following up to their indie-smash-hit and genre defining ‘product’ - GEORGE BEST - the band created waves in the UK by wrenching post-punk ideals by the balls, taking full ownership of their own work based on their substantial cult-following and having one of the first, we produce-it-and-you-cunts-distribute-it-better deals with a major (RCA) which would become the norm with grunge-etc..(tho’ wasn’t anything really new, since the Rolling Stones pioneered it).

BIZARRO immediately saw the band taking another step forward, album opener ‘Brassneck’ was pretty much a representation of a UK band absorbing the ‘Blast First’ records American-invasion on the indie-underground, immediately pushing this band into a more ‘rockist’ realm, which would aid them immeasurably in the next dam-busting raid that would occur some 4-5 years later over the pond. ‘Brassneck’ is basically the Wedding Present interpreting Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ without losing their own unique identity, unlike the shoegazers soon thereafter. No doubt setting up the forgotten fact that BIZARRO is pretty-much one of the DEFINING (or seminal) records of the shoegaze cannon. The next three tracks ‘crushed’, ‘no’ and ‘thanks’ still stick the ye-old-school Weddoes ‘sound’ of jingly-jangly Anorak-spangly guitars and ennui lyrics, until the big-one ‘Kennedy’ comes along. Fuck a duck! The first Velvet-Undergound disco-‘floor’ track, with a cha-cha that’s still as limey as Blancmange’s ‘livin’ on the ceiling’, and a track that is more subversively ‘witty’ than anything Herr-Morrissey coulda penned. I crapped on before about the Fall’s BEND SINISTER being one of the first Chmosky-style albums, well ‘Kennedy’ would rate as one of the first Chmosky-stylee bubblegum pop-songs!

One of the great things about BIZARRO is the Wedding Present’s ability to take the ecstatic ‘What goes on’ strum without giving a fuck about the outcome. Critics would write this off as ‘boring indulgence’ since all they are really doing is strumming and not really going anywhere for five odd minutes. The only real flaw in this may not be as much fun for the listener as it is for the artist. But listening with fresh ears in my olde-age, the ecstatic strum-outs sound more like a response to the eccy-trance of the dance music at the time as well as a nod to the Daydream-Nation psych-expanses of the other mob. People forget that the Wedding Present were actually a dance got ‘what have I said now?’ on the rocker behind me now and contrary to the indulgence, just stopped it’s ecstasy-strum a bit too early! band in the post-punk sense. They were still the offshoot of Joy Division (if Ian Curtis lived would the Weddoes have existed???), Wire, the Fall, but were possibly subconsciously taking a more dance stand via say their New Order or even their Gang of Four stylings. In fact, I got ‘what have I said now?’ on the rocker behind me now and contrary to the indulgence, just stopped it’s ecstasy-strum a bit too early!

But the rest of side-2 (or last 6 tracks or however i-dopes ‘schedule’ music these days) is all fucken great soft-psych jam-out noise bliss/fun/release/groove/meshigarse/primitive ritual –whatever!

Gedge’s lyrics were always as interesting and obscure as the sonics. Whereas Morrissey was always on his Oscar-Wildean via Derek Jarman via (showing my ignorance of UK culture here) I dunno Coronation-Street repression-Marxist-position-of-the-homo-‘other’ encoded-shtick, Gedge would stick to hetero boy-meets-girl-boy-has-complexities-with-girl as only he knows how, and alas pick up all the Morrissey ‘fans’ who knew they could never fuck him! Gedge lyrics have a matter-of-fact rawness and honesty/ awkwardness/neuroticness that makes him some sort of John Cassavettes inspired poet, even if he probably never watched any Cassavettes movies. Similarly, they have that quaint-but-potent interplay, humor, potency and bla-bla-ness that you find in most Eric Rohmer films..

Rohmer's bitter sweet summer lovin' re: 'Take me', 'don't talk just kiss'

..or even stuff like Godard’s ‘Contempt’ and plenty of Trauffaut (which probably adds to the Weddoes popularity with indie Franco-philes and American indie film-makers!) I was trying to position Gedge with UK film-makers of his time- in the way that it’s so easy to position Morrissey into the Jarman-Greenaway vanguard that was moving at the time - but it’s proving tricky (which is good). Despite having a sort of ‘kitchen sink’ reality about them, for the majority, Gedge’s lyrics were never as blatantly Marxist-leftist as the Leigh/Loach films of the time. The closest they would have resemble (of which I’m not terribly versed in either, remember, I am not a hardcore Anglophile) would have been the cinema of Alan Clarke, and even then, only ‘Rita & Sue & Bob Too’. (NOTE: If anyone wants to add more films or other culture I would never have seen, that might have been in alignment with Gedge’s lyricism, please fill me in I AM interested!)

So now it’s its time to put my pinhead hat on and do my lame attempt at charting the impact of this band that seem to have been written out of Brit-roque history. From my R&D the Weddoes were definitely the next step from the Joy Division/New Order sonic paradigm, and interestingly used the whole Factory-records ‘indie’ model for their show-business affair before nearly any bands of their generation. This probably set themselves apart from their Marxist (marx brother-ists?) C86 peers. The Weddoes weren’t afraid, to use the capitalist paradigm to their advantage, in fact they were probably more organized and together in the head than their peers, and probably were reviled for having such ‘careerist’ agenda (and tags that were wrong, but fuck the critic wankers)..Despite being emerging from the C86 thang, they were always a bit rougher and ‘rockist’ than their polite passive-aggressive contemporaries. That basically beat their own path. They also pledged allegiance to more ‘rockist’ post-punk groops like Wire, the Fall and the Buzzcocks (but then so did the fucken Fine Young Cannibals - aint pop music strange at the best of times?), not forgetting the Velvets, the birthday Party (apparently Gedge was paranoid there were too many similarities in name, that never ever occurred to me until I Googled it recently!) and elements of American hardcore via the faster-louder paradigm. But BIZARRO would create its own unfairly forgotten cross-the-and -in-pond tremors. The whole shoegaze thing owes a debt with the softer-louder dynamics of BIZARRO’s side-2, the early 90s Amerindie ‘sound’ was shaped as much by the Fall as the pop-accessibility of the Weddoes, from Superchuck, Pavement, whole pockets of the eastern-board US undieground, to fuck I dunno? the Strokes, the strumarella of the Arctic Monkeys?? Many more decorated and possibly more eloquent and better dictioned rock writers bemoan where British rock disappeared and re-emerged in it’s own right, it never ceased to amaze why the Wedding Present were never considered, and there’s probably smarter dudes who could tell me why. (NOTE: The Weddoes drummer ain’t too shabby!)

All I can say is, ain’t rock history a prick?

It's Straaannnnggeee, what looooooooovvveee does!

2008-01-17T22:24:00.000+11:00

The Lynch Mob (or 'Bomb' Squad?)

..with INLAND EMPIRE (the DVD), David Lynch gives us a double-album’s worth of film. Prolly better as two 120 minute blocks, it isn’t dissimilar to Tarantino’s KILL BILL 2-fer, but with Lynch you get a real paen to experimental or ‘underground’ American cinema, especially when it comes to the 70-minutes of ‘more things that happened’ DVD extra.

‘More things that happened’ basically works off two story strands. The first features an Eastern European super-model, who contemplates buying a watch off a dodgy Slavic who only wants to hold her hand…The second story features another male-Slavic crossover point, this time Laura Dern improves sad ‘confessional’ memories to what looks like a sloppy PI, goes through a great trippy reality-warp via creepy doorways and staircases and hallways and weird rabbits, only to confess some more, before we find our supermodel as an LA whore - actually a gaggle of whores who all have various states of herpes!

It’s Lynch. It’s experimental, and works more in the favour of yr hardcore American avant-garde set like yr Ken Angers and Brackages and Michael Snows, albeit with a slightly more ‘mersh bent, than anything else. The music is great, verging from yr usual ‘body-w/o-organs-gripping-drone' to some ‘hearing it from another room doof’ trip-hop to some lovely Cage-ian piano plonks, to the final dubby Blues-shuffle, that sounds like Lynch trying to do Horace Andy or Dawn Penn or something….

Yep it’s a double album of Lynch, some of it could be shorter, but when it hits ya, you know yr in safe hands.

(NOTE: The last few shots are very Kubrickian, made even more amazing by the fact it was done on a PD150!)

I'm still here

2008-01-14T23:27:00.000+11:00

Meltzer :Here

Dylan : There

And it was on the 14^th Day of Teshrei in the year 5478 of the Holy Calendar that lapsed Hebrew tribal-member and all-round legend -

Richard Meltzer - wrote in his holy tome THE AESTHETICS OF ROCK (which may have been written under the addled influence of mind-expanders, just like those bananas in the Mid-East did once upon a time many moons ago), that Bob Dylan - ‘the voice of the disaffected 60s generation and every generation until Armageddon’ or something like that - rather than give us meaning in his music, actually FREES us from meaning (I will quote the exact page and lines when I get home)…And so I sit in the ‘Common Era’ or A.D (After Death of Hesoos) date of 14^th January 2008, in a $5.50 el-shnorrer session to see ‘the greatest film of the last three months’ as voted by every critic and semiotics student and cult of Humanities students preparing papers to justify their courses, ‘I’M NOT THERE’ take two-odd hours to tell me what Meltzer said nearly 40 years ago in less than one sentence! …So did I like this film?

Well, yes, it’s a kaleidoscope of bio-pic, post-modern hipster mix-mash of hip European directors like Godard and Fellini and Mark Lester and even Tarkofski, and well fill in the rest..The film blunders around a bit as the two ex-Aussies in it overact to buggery, and Christian Bale doesn’t get enough screen time, but it all looks nice and is so intricately pieced together that there’s really not too much to dislike. It makes Dylan an icon on top of an icon, it fiddles with Haynes’ ‘identity’ politics deal, and never once mentions or addresses his Judaism. I dunno, was Mel Gibson a silent investor in this venture? It’s basically SPINAL TAP, but about a ‘real’ person or something like that (am I making sense? It’s all so Deleuzian or something…)

..Then I sit down in front of the Cable-Babel TV and watch another cool film, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, directed by Terry Zwigoff, who has now made three really good films, but hasn’t quite made a great one. ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL is basically a loose remake (or re-imaging?) of Fritz Lang’s great SCARLETT STREET. It’s also a semi-autobiographical story about EIGHTBALL legend Dan Clowes (who wrote it), and his struggle to get laid and respected as an artist with TALENT and SKILL in art-school. It’s very funny, very honest, has a bit of thriller/giallo action to boot, and a really sheyner shicksa with a nice toochus.

For a shlepper like me, what more could I need?

(Actually I'm gonna waste more time watching 'The Lab with Leo Laporte which makes things like Blogging seem 'sexy'. NOTE: It still hasn't got ME laid!)

I WILL be back...

2007-10-30T21:45:00.001+11:00

Finding peace with Ubuntu

Yes, I have been SLACK...Yes I should do more...Yes I will be back...Geezz I'm starting to sound like a POLITICIAN, and what we do have an erection, I mean ELECTION coming up, so the bullshit is squeezing out...But I have been busy, tired, depressed, excited and just plain lazy (prolly a combo of all the above!)...

In that time I have converted to UBUNTU< style="font-style: italic;">shnorer uber-Nerd operating system, that used Lurvely pictures like the one above as their 'official' wallpaper! How can you NOT like that? And it's all free! SO no more Mac dreck for the Yuppy-fartsys and no more PC cuck for the Johnny-come-lately computer 'genius'..It's hardcore fiddling and wasting time with Ubuntu, and hence the dearth of posts as I learn to use the fershtinkener O/S from scratch! But at the end of it, it works, and at thew end of it, you feel a sense of achievement, like building a model aeroplane or something....

Inland Empire Part.1

2007-08-08T20:35:00.000+10:00

Shreik Yerbooti

So I just saw David Lynch's new film INLAND EMPIRE. A 3 hours slog, that rubs the synapses no better nor worse than any of his other meshigarse, on reflection I kinda liked it. I really like the fact that I sat in an un-airconditioned cinema with narrow seats, and an under 30s audience that were so cool they couldn't lower the temperature in the fucken cinema, but I'll stop kvetching as this point. Basically the film is about some actress that gets a warning, enters a dual-identity headfuck, and then it goes on for three hours. The film reminded me in look to Sukhorov's RUSSIAN ARK, with an abundance of baroque interiors and exteriors. It also reminded me of Phillipe Grandrieux's LE NOUVELLE VIE, which I reviewed somewhere on the blog last year, basically coz alot of the film is set in Poland, and there's sex-trade. Nice boobs make an appearance as well. The image above doesn't happen in the film per-se, but something similar does. Lynch has made the best American DV movie so far. I always find it interesting how guys like David Lynch, as they get older, seem to always find a younger audience. I guess that means he's pretty hip. End of Part.1

Richard Thompson, minus the folk

2007-06-20T11:16:00.001+10:00

Truth, beauty and great guitar:

Tony Mokbel impersonator, DAVE GROHL, captured!!

2007-06-06T21:47:00.000+10:00

"..I'll stick around, I'll stick around...'

Well known Tony Mokbel impersonator DAVE GROHL was captured in Greece today living the high-life with his stripper girlfriend who gave birth to Dave Jr a few months ago. Grohl was found with three mobile phones and a bag of cocaine pellets and a fake passport that said his name was 'Steve Pappas'. The well known rock star had become disenfranchised with being the leader of the worlds biggest Husker-Du cover band, and decided to become a notorious drug-lord with an empire estimated to be worth at least $20million. The fugitive was not repentant. 'Imagine how you would feel screaming stupid lyrics and predictable chord changes to million of fucking stupid bogens who think they are punk and then go on to become middle managers?' Grohl has sold over 20 million album worldwide, but found that selling 'party' drugs was way more interesting and 'rock n roll' than making pedestrian music for pedestrians. 'You know when I was in the Foo Fighters I'd hang out with deadshits like that guy from Queens of the Stones Age and Bjork. I mean people think 'wow' those guys are so zany, but you know they're just 'regular guys' who just happen to fuck hotter people than most other dudes. I mean the drug empire I built opened me up to a lifestyle rock stars can only dream of. You get hot sluts, free entry to heaps of nightclubs, a new penthouse apartment with a plasma TV, surround system and see-thru shower, a new $100,000 car each month and I mean amongst others you get to hang out with rockstars, film producers, actors, politicians, lawyers, doctors, presidents of football clubs - you know REAL HIGH FLYERS, THAT ARE POWERFUL and INFLUENTIAL, unlike those fucken rockstar clowns.'

Grohl will be extradited to Seattle from his idyllic Greek hideaway next week.

Australia's finest no-wave boogie band

2007-05-27T21:34:00.000+10:00

I was talking to a mate the other day about how despite all this InterNerd downloading hoo-haa apparently destroying the pope-musique industry, that I've still been buying heaps of music these days, albeit they are all remastered RE-ISSUES..My mate went on about how 'yeah that's because you're getting older and you know there's not much better ahead, so you listen to old shit to remind you of the 'good ole' days' or something.' I told him that's a piece of bullshit, I like 'contemporary' or 'new' bands like the Drones (OK, so they're quickly turning into the new fucking Paul Kelly band or something, but they had their moments as few years back) and James McCann's Dirty Skirt Band and the Eddy Current Suppression Rings and the Hate Rock Trio amongst a handful. Am I'm always checking out young bands to see if they're any good or trying anything different and fucked up. But they reality is the young bands are fucken shit that must be killed. None make music in their own image, they all have an image before they have a sound, and despite the fact that most of the young bands are really fucking adept at playing their instruments, none can actually 'play' and if they do, they sound exactly like the Kinks or Ac/DC or some other fucking shit. I then forced this friend to watch our hip video-clip show on the Telly – RAGE – and all these bands have video clips that are more expensive than the last 5 Werner Herzog movies, they all have that fucking real-drummer-playing-disco-beat sound with a singer that sounds like fucken the guy from fucken Spandau Ballet, and the 'indie' bands are basically just trying to get their stuff endorsed as product by the next season of 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy', and/or sound like B-grade Matador Records bands from the last I dunno 15 years. So I beat my mate in this particular argument, and basically told him that the cool thing about re-mastered re-issues is they sound better and are good value for money in today's expensive I-borrow-more-than-I-can-afford times...SO I start with my favourite re-issue of the minute...

X – At Home With You...Another totally fine and 'value for money' re-issue by OZ-rock re-issue kings AZTEC MUSIC...X – the AUSSIE ONE – in their day were something like the Australian version of Motorhead...They weren't quite punk (just like Motorhead weren't quite 'metal'), were always on the verge of being 'the next big thing', had a strong live following, and were probably the heaviest band of their time (and place)...I was lucky to see X in the middish 80s sorta twice. The first time I walked into the Seaview Ballroom and X had just finished. There were squashed beer cans, vomit and a well known (and dead)skatepunk junkie on the floor. The second time I saw them was at Melbourne University. X headlined a gig that featured Ed Kuepper, Venom P Stinger, and Nick Cave doing spoken word. Everyone had gone home by the time X took the stage. Ian Rilen kept fucking up all the songs. Cathy Green was in a shit mood. They played maybe 30 seconds of a song properly, but when the it, it all seemed to make sense..In those days Australia had a triumvirate of 'grunge' 3-piece bands well before hippie-rednecks from Seattle made it cool. There was the always rumoured killer 3-some gig featuring the Cosmic Psychos, Feedtime and X to be held at the Prince of Wales in St.Kilda, unfortunately it never happened.....Anyway their 'masterpiece' 'At home with you' has been released in a lurvely digipack with extensive liner notes and a great 'live' bonus CD...The quality here isn't much better than the album, though the songs have aged quite well, expect for throwaways like 'you say that you love me'..Everyone keeps trying to pin what 'X' sounded like. Sure they're as punk as you wanna be, they rock n' roll like the best of them, and they even have that pub-rock slobber with the horns and whatnot. Rilen's bass rolls like an alcoholic porno-star, Cathy Green remains truly under-rated as one of the HEAVIEST DUTY female drummer of all-time, and Steve Lucas had a great voice and primal scratch guitar style with classy chops. Put it all together and Aussie X's 'extremeness' made them one hellava great no-wave-boogie band.

The bonus CD was recorded live at the Prince of Wales Hotel, which in it's day was like Australia's version of Max's Kansas City, a place where junkies, fags, alcoholics, transsexuals, recently freed criminals and rock fans could see live music in a suitable decadent and free-think environment that just DOESN'T exist today, despite the great grunge-indie-liberal revolution of the 90s or whatever... The recording initially sounds flat as it was taken off a mixing desk, but once 'Degenerate Boy' kicks in, you'd check yr ears that it was done of the desk, as the remastered job has somehow transcended the general dullness of desk-recorded jobs. Absolutely killer is 'T.V Glue'. Lucas plays a truly transcendent sonic drone chord, loaded with overtones that has to be heard to be believed...

..and speaking of drones and overtones, some old-cunt called LOU REED has released a new album on some indie new-age/meditation label, designed for people to meditate to! Now what LOU has basically done is make a HARDCORE meditation record that will undoubtedly freak-out the Prozac-addicted yuppies that buy this shit. Titled HUDSON RIVER WIND MEDITATIONS, First track 'Move your heart' pulses like those alien-pods out of Luigi Cozzi's CONTAMINATION for about half an hour, while the second drone 'find your note' is basically an update of all that LaMonte Young/Tony Conrad/early Cluster drone. 'Hudson River Wind' sounds like an out-take from the ERASERHEAD soundtrack and closer 'Wind Coda' is just a lazy mish-mash of track 1 and 3 but for only 5 minutes. HUDSON RIVER WIND MEDITATIONS definitely ain't a new age record, nor is it like a true meditation record like Tony Scott's 'music for zen meditation', but it'll definitely work for people who read THE WIRE or the Forced Exposure catalogue, and that ain't no mean feat for an old cunt.

New Lou

2007-05-20T23:23:00.000+10:00

Meditate, don't masturbate (actually masturbating IS meditative!)

Yep, Uncle Lou has put out an ambient album to meditiate to called 'Hudson River Wind Meditations'...Basically electronic ambient music comprised of drones and the like, nothing really new for Lou since he's been doing that shit since Year Zero, but it's pretty nifty for nervous wrecks like myself. You can only buy this from some 'new age' health joint.

Otherwise, you can always chill out to the last Ryhthm & Sound album, or Eno's 'Music for Airports'.

Ar'll be bark

2007-05-20T21:12:00.000+10:00

DRECK MIT LEIBER is a Yiddish saying that literally means 'shit with liver', and probably the perfect word that describes the way-over-the-top sadistically violent 'shoot-a-gook' fest that is the trailer of the world's most famous steroid abuser's latest Rambo vehicle. why couldn't the pussy go out and splatter a few Islamofascists instead of some harmless horries? Anyway my life has been a busy mess, hence no verbal spewage and gulchural vomit, but I have the following lined up for Bloggage:

The rest of the best non-Bava-Argento giallos
Feeling like a coke-addicted pr0n-star listening to the Sisters of Mercy
..and a review of the great new 'Jason Crest' novel 66MindFuck99

I'm sorry for nothing

2007-05-05T02:33:00.000+10:00

In one of the most outrageously nutzoid examples of Conservative pressure, Australia's second best Aussie-rules football player, Ben Cousions of the West Coast Eagles, made a pre-recorded 'apology' to his fans, club and most importantly Corporate sponsors for his recent apparent drug problems. In recent times, Cousins has been known to hang out with drug dealers, and besides being a fan of the socially acceptable 'piss' (alcohol), he apparently is a coke head and in recent times an Ice head. Kinda funny considering the fact this guy earns well over a million bucks a year, is probably the most famous person in Western Australia, and he smokes the cheapest and nastiest loser drug ICE! But enough of that. His pre-recorded 'apology' after his much falooted Malibu rehab session would have made Osama Bin Laden proud. Basically Cousins's didn't give a shit because this media joke is a pure example of 'conservative' or neo-Con pressure on this guy to 'get in line'..It seems kinda obvious Cousins was sent to a drug clinic, where the experts there found him to be a recreational user, not an 'addict' as all these clueless conservatives media 'experts' and sport commentators have painted him. Why don't we take on these bozo ALCOHOLICS in the conservative media at their own game? Just coz it's legal, don't mean it's any better, let alone 'moral'. Sure Cousines is a TERRIBLE role model for kids, but everyone likes an outlaw, especially in sports where these days they're all bloody robots. Imagine how I feel, my team Carlton, used to be like say the Dallas Cowboys, and now we're probably as good football players as the guys in Debbie Does Dallas or something!

ANYWAY I just saw the 'hot' new Aussie 'punque' banmd the EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING. Yeah I like their songs and will buy their album. Their live show was slick, and their rhythm section was tight and pro as the West Coast Eagles midfield that that Cousins guy plays in. This bloke, who is the Molly Meldrum of the indie-internerd-underground has been hyping them as the new messiah of the week. Sure they sound like Wire meets the Modern Lovers meets the Fall with the lead singer on the Victims out front, but part of their popularity is becuase they really sound like the Storkes, I mean Strokes or the Kings of Leon. Good luck to 'em. good night.

Lobby Loyde RIP

2007-04-23T22:13:00.000+10:00

Up there with G.O.D and a few other legends...

Thanks to the anonymous bloke who informed me of this via this Blog. Nice to see some people read it! 'Thats what mamma says' off BALL POWER still sounds transcendent. I was lucky to see the Coloured Balls last ever gig in December last year. Lobby was just one of those legend guitar players that occur once a decade. Total rock intensity, originality, method, attack and transcendent/psych/jazz/freestyle woosh. The stuff that, I swear to you, puts goosebumps on my arms and makes me wanna plug into a valve amp and just turn the fucker UP! The missing link for the *true* Melbourne rock guitar sound..Here's a link to probalby Lobby's last ever online interview...Now to check out his 'spacerock' stuff! Have a peaceful time out there.....

more crock action...

2007-03-31T12:10:00.000+10:00

You know I'm fat, I'm fat, I'm really, really fat...ham on!

The ears are ringing, the joints are aching, but old man Goldblog here is a strong believer that loud high-energy music (well high-energy doesn't always have to be loud ya know) is good for your all-round life, taken in the right doses!

Wednesday night was spent in a shitty big-commercial rock-barn watching that forever to be trendy Boston band the PIXIES, play in Australia for the first time. Now I didn't give a shit whether I saw this band or not, but a last minute call convinced me otherwise, as well as all the well presented hype on our national broadcaster ie: 3 hour specials of live shows, interviews, etc.., which sorta helped me build some faint hope of excitement. The Pixies were and are a 'first two albums of the late 80s band', up there with Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, etc...etc..etc..In my universe it means that these were bands that I really loved as a late teenager, but seemed to 'magically' lose complete interest in after their second album, when the formula kicked in and all the sonic tricks had well and truly fallen off...But I digress, I paid my drachmas and was lucky to score a ticket after the concert had sold out on the Internet faster than a mouse click. I'd made a choice, but everything was pointing to a dull-night-out (I'm getting that way more and more, only to have things turns around - must be the depression or lack of sex or something....) The venue was bad, the venue was filled

and full of bald guys near or beyond 40 in jeans and t-shirts talking about how 'Trompe Le Monde' is the Pixies most underrated album. There were fat-chicks in black t-shirts everywhere, and the support band 'the Panics' made Crowded House seem like a heavy-metal band, and I HATE Crowded House more than, shit, not much...! And so the Pixies appeared: Two short baldies, a fat-chick with black hair who chain-smokes and a bearded, blading guy who looks like a nutty-professor/hobo. The thing that useta irk me alot about the Pixies, is that despite their first two albums having quite a nice 80s-post-hardcore-punk propulsion, they never seem to translate it on the live recordings I'd heard. Well in this particular live setting, it was good to see that a band nearing 50 in age or whatever, they still had that propulsion. Highlights for me were their 10 minute 'cornfed dames' cover 'Vamous', the two versions of 'Wave of Mutilation' and 'Gouge away'. I was pissed they didn't do 'Broken face'. I mean everyone with a reasonably sharpened head knows in the long run, the Pixies are more Violent Femmes than say Mission of Burma or even Husker Du, but I dunno, maybe not playing together to 15 years or something was a good idea for this band, as they had plenty of zip to highlight that their songs are quality, and the simple fact that the Pixes are infintely BETTER than every fucking shitful band that copied them (no mean feat).

Last night my mates the PINK STAINLESS TAIL launched their 3^rd maxi-mini album THE INIFINITE WISODM OF...Now when I first heard these guys, I though they sounded like some Fred Negro St.Kilda band bulldust. Coming off like some sort of sleeper-cell of the Melbourne Mafia (ie: Nick Cave and all his look-alike/sound alikes eg: Dirty 3, Brian Hooper, Dave Graney etc...) - well Harry, Rowland S.'s bro' is in the band, so I guess the link is genetic – the

band are one of those rare entities that seems to have improved over time. Their rollicking, loose, almost retarded shmutter - driven with rusting Teutonic precision by Zonke Rickertson, the most psychedelic-bass-player-in-Melbourne-since-Tim-Hensley, Nick Dodington, and fronted by suit-wearing-Englishman suffering from a rare form of Tourettes-Syndrome as being a well-know skin-flick archivist, Simon Strong – was in top shape last night. Playing a MARATHON set that went well into the night, the boys blew the support acts off the stage, and may have inadvertantly blown half the audience out of the room at the same time! On their night the PST are actually some sort of sloppy

British-invasion-big-beat-garage band for aging intellectuals on one level, or possibly the best 'post-punk' 80s-revival band (in the Fall/early Happy Mondays mould culture), minus the Calvin Klein/Collette Dinnigan/Stella McCartney DNA. But if that's what you want (or definitely wanna fuck), well the kids were definitely there earlier to see Melbourne's seminal guitar legend Rowland s Howard ejaculate his mumblings and two Lou Reed covers over the very good-looking under-25 crowd that were all sitting on the floor, smoking cigarettes and checking each other out. Fellas, if you want to perv at genuinely hot chicks at gigs, well go to an RSH gig. He's the Pied Piper of Melbourne! The other supports included 'New Estate' who I think are ex-members of the hardcore-C86 indie scene. They sounded in parts like YoLaTengo and the AuPairs and had a really nerdy dude playing bass with his fingers which was admirable and really odd at the same time.

Opening slot was by Biddy Connor, who plays fiddle (unlike me who just fiddles), who uses ambient loops and stuff and at times sounds like Henry Flynt, but at others the Dirty3 or Sigur Ros...I guess she's only young, but......

Oy! Those shicksers!

NOTE: When I was younger it useta to shit me that my Semetic genes didn't allow me to have have as good a hairstyle as all those Nick Cave cunts here in Melbourne, and hence I couldn't score those sophisticate art-school biotches that I'd have crushes on that would hang out with drug-addicted-'romantic' creeps like that. I also resented the fact I didn't have a really WASPY sounding surname and most importantly THE MIDDLE INITIAL! I was at one point tempted to change my real name - Aaron Goldberg - to something like Lou Reed or Bob Dylan or Ron Jeremey or Thurston S Howell the 3rd, but I couldn't be fucked, and I ended up fucking one of those sophisticated art-school biotches anyway..NB: Nick Cave's new song is called 'no pussy blues', Iggy sings 'my dick is turning into a tree', now who's the real deal? )

some hot stuff around the traps

2007-03-24T21:31:00.000+11:00

LAND OF LOOK BEHIND (Dir Alan Greenberg, 1982) – For many years I used to tell people I liked reggae when I really didn't. When I was a kid the sound of it used to freak me out. Bob Marley used to freak me out. He looked weird, and at the time (very early 80s) there were all these sex-cults run by Rajneeshies and shit, and Bob Marley looked liked one of those guys who ran such a cult. And that wacka-wacka sound that is the reggae groove seemed weird since I'd never heard something sound like that before...SO I generally stayed away until I was a Uni student, via hiphop and that Gary Clail Tackhead On-U stuff. I sorta dabbled in dub, but still didn't get it..It was just, boring, and didn't really seem 'psychedelic' music. Then this dude I went to Uni with was telling me about all this reggae stuff, and took me to a boring gig by the Wailers, but he lent me this video that was really neat, it was a docco about the history of Jamaica as told by musicians and had all these wild interviews with guys like Lee Scratch Perry filmed in his studio, with dogs and cats and little kids running all over the place, and guys with teeth growing out of their lips smoking pot in cigar sized joints, it all seemed so scungy and raw, and started to seem more interesting. Also all these fucking Israelis and Jewish stoner bums who went to Habbo would be into it, especially the Bob Marley stuff, coz they wore Moogen-Doovids and didn't hate or want to kill the Jews, but all those creeps reminded me of the stoopid hippie love-cults I mentioned earlier... Bit I still didn't get reggae. About five years ago I went to this DJ gig run by that Soul-Jazz record label, and well, for some reason on that night I FINALLY GOT REGGAE! I guess it was hearing it in the right environment, and people playing the right tracks, and mixing it with hiphop and shit like that, but there was something that suddenly clicked. Suddenly this aimless, hippy, jockbonghead music seemed incredibly HEAVY. SO I started learning about the Studio-One and Wackies labels, and listening to records by Prince Far-I and Horace Andy and all this German techno on the Basic Channel label...and these days I pretty much can't get enough of the music from Jamaica. It's just played so well, and there's all these little subtleties and inflections in the guitars and keyboards, and the lyrics seem so positive and soulful...ANYWAY, my new favourite DVD label SUBVERSIVE CINEMA had this upcoming film called LAND OF LOOK BEHIND in their 'coming soon' list online. It was their first 'music' film, and the trailer looked interesting and really raw. The music by GREOGORY ISAACs and BOB MARLEY sounded interesting, but this whole package seemed to fit into that raw pre-digital Studio-One style Jamaican music that I have been hooked on the last couple of years. BASICALLY, LAND OF LOOK BEHIND is a documentary in the trippy-transcendent style of Kraut cinema-hero Werner Herzog. Directed by ALAN GREENBERG who worked with Herzog on HEART OF GLASS (and apparently friends with Dylan etc..etc..) and filmed by JORG SCHMIDT-REITWEIN who shot Herzog classics like THE ENIGMA IF KASPAR HAUSER, WOYCZEK and the awesome THE GREAT ECSTASY OF WOODCARVER STEINER (about a ski-jumper!), LAND OF LOOK BEHIND very much looks and feels like a Herzog film. Greenberg went to Jamaica in 1981 to film Bob Marley's funeral and ended up shooting hours of footage of the locals who live in a dense jungle area of Jamaica called the..LAND OF LOOK BEHIND..

You basically have eccentric characters describing their lives, talking about Jah, smoking lots of pot and thats about it. The film drags a little in the middle, but some great live footage of Gregory Isaacs brings thing back in line. The film was shot in 16mm, so has a raw, grainy feel which adds to it's rootsy ambience. The initial soundtrack music done by electronic muso K.LEIMER has that very trippy

Popul-Vuh synth type vibe that works really well with the surreal landscapes. Extras include some great interviews with Greenberg and Herzog himself, a commentary track and a nifty booklet written by director Greenberg talking about the difficulties making the movie. Also the first 5000 come with a soundtrack CD that has nice tunes by Marley and Isaacs amongst others. The soundtrack has been OOP for quite some time, so hardcore reggae nuts will probably want this pretty soon. All up a good night in with a joint and brew or two.

...I guess everyone in the whole world knows there's a new STOOGES album out. The STOOGES gig at the Big Day Out was one of the biggest disappointments in recent times for Moi. Stuck in a field with 25000 bogens, with the sound waffling through the air and watching Iggy via a video screen wasn't inspiring to say the least. I'd already seen Fat Ron Asheton blow my ears with DARK CARNIVAL and saw IGGY at his legendary BDO gig about 12 years ago, so I'd pretty much seen what I needed too..ANYWAY, I heard some tracks of the STOOGES new rec on the radio, and they made me wanna vomit. The song MY IDEA OF FUN sounded like a shit Sonic Youth song, with Iggy sounding like a male version of Kim Gordon, who any person with an IQ higher that 5 realises, shouldn't be allowed near a microphone. I downloaded the record, and initially it sounded like the last two shitty Iggy albums. Underplayed, over -emoted rubbish. Albini's production is underdone to say the least. The wanker can't record anything that isn't plugged into a wall. His recording of Steve McKays sax is pathetic. Albini really needs to be punched up badly. He's a smart arse dork who thinks he knows everything, but is really a one-trick pony when it comes to recording. His future is well and truly behind him...Pushing that simp Albini aside, though, the real winner here is RON ASHETON. His playing on the WEIRDNESS is FANFUCKINGTASTIC, his solos fly, he still has some weird riffs up his sleeve and the wah-wah still wah-wahs all over the place. Scott Asheton pounds mechanically away, and Mike Watt really pins down the rhythm section, though it'd be nice if Albini recorded it BETTER..and Steve McKay back on board is pretty cool, though I wish he played on more of the tracks..Iggy sings HORRIBLY on some tracks but really well on others, and I don't mind his idiot lyrics, I reckon they're funny. There's some really bad press going around about this record, but I think time will treat it better than well, the real let-down being Albini's uninspired production more than anything chronic...So far my fave tracks are 'Trollin', 'Free and Freaky' and 'Mexican Guy'..It's funny, the better tracks on this album sound like something CRIME woulda done back in the mid-70s, in fact a lot of the album sounds like CRIME, maybe the STOOGES shoulda got Eliot Mazer to produce it instead of Mr.Al-Weeny?

The Psychadelic Stooges

2007-03-04T21:56:00.000+11:00

THE STOOGES - EXTENDED PLAY (Easy Action)

I been on a bit of a Stooges binge lately. It's funny you know, coz I picked up the first album and FUNHOUSE 2-disc re-issues new in the bargain bin at the JB HiFi chain stores here in Melbourne. In some weird cosmic-rock synchronicity I picked up the first album on vinyl for 10-bucks in a bargain bin at a suburban import-shop some 18 years earlier! Anyway, I'm one of the 100 or so fucken sad-freaks that has 'adopted' that failed sonic technology called DVD-audio. The 00s version of Quadraphonic-4, DVD-audio basically pipes your musique into a 5.1 speaker layout. Technically, or in terms of soundspace that means you have the vocals in the centre, gtrs/keys/bass in left and right, and drums in the surrounds, or the band in the front three and FX or crowd or farting noises in the surrounds. Either way, a good mix can emulates that 3D-psychedelic sound you get when you take hallucinogenic substances (which i don't do anymore)...SO think of my surprise when I found out that THE STOOGES have a DVD-audio 5.1 mix! I thought, shit, I'm having a drug relapse or something. But I didn't expect much, because really these 5.1 'remixes' can only be done with good source material, and considering most of the STOOGES source material was fished out of rubbish bins, well, what can you expect...This recent 'Extended Play' is basically 5 tracks done in DVD-audio 5.1 Hi-Definition and 3 on normal CD..Apparantly these recordings in their current state or whatever have never been released before, and there might be some STOOGES archivists out there that can prove this. They seem to be either RAW POWER out-takes or demos done around the time the band were based in London. Regardless, the recordings still prove out-right that the Stooges were the greatest modern-rock-n-roll band. THE band that invented 'heavy metal' as we know it, laid down the template for grunge, and punk and any other minimalist/maximalist mega-heavy rock as well know it. The bands that re-arranged the 'chugga-chugga' and 'boogie-woogie' or the old rock n' roll and turned it inside out into this new, technologically refined greyhound of sonic crunch n thump n grind. The 5.1 surround opener 'I got a right #1' sounds fucking GLORIOUS. Williamson has this pure crunch guitar, the song speeds along laying the raunch template for Poms like Motorhead and Williamson spazzs out well before Greg Ginn. The surround mix is slight and a bit gimmicky, but the sound quality reproduction here in terrific for a demo. The 'Louie Louie' cover is pretty crappy, and 'Gimme some skin' and 'I got a right #2' have pretty nice mixes and pack into more chorderama which of course would be mimicked by Radio Birdman. You can here it all in pure and simple detail on this DVD-audio, which will make your ears cry.
The CD sticks to the typical bootleg fidelity we're all used to for rare Stooges recordings. Though this one is really good, they've used some sort of technology to get rid of the waffly sound caused by shitty tapes, and the rock action is all smoking.'Hard to beat' is basically another version or 'Raw Power' with some burning soloing, 'Head On' well we all know that's the great unrecorded Stooges classic, though this version doesn't sound as spiteful as the one on the Whisky Au-Gog-Go bootleg, but still sounds like a meaner version of the Exile Period Stones via the Doors. CD closes out with an VERY psychedelic version of 'I got a right' that features Iggy's vocal acid-echoed to the max. It will blow your fuck from your bonged-out loungeroom to Uranus or somewhere.

Favourite songs

2007-01-29T21:11:00.000+11:00

DENNIS

RIVER SONG - DENNIS WILSON : The sound of what happens when a Beach Boys finds god and cocaine simulataneously. Also he was the drummer, so this piece of ULTRAPURE (columbian) pop swings and rollicks in its epic glory. You WILL beleive.
FINAL SOLUTION - PERE UBU : Flat chat white-soul-funk. Laughner's guitar solo is the great air guitar solo freakout ever.
BLANK FRANK - BRIAN ENO : simulataneously acknowledge the Velvet Underground and Bo Didley, throw all meaning once the beat kicks in and the machine gun electronics take over.
HOLIDAYS IN THE SUN - THE SEX PISTOLS : smash your head! smash the fucken!
OH SWEET NOTHING - THE VELVET UNDERGROUND : more religious hand-holding, the song 'Hey Jude' never was!
FOUND A JOB - TALKING HEADS : just for the last 5 minutes where they rip off Parliament.
ROCKS OFF - THE ROLLING STONES : more mileage out of a high E chord than any band except the Velvet Underground.
BOSS HOSS - THE SONICS : this song makes me want to get drunk in a good way.
MOTHER SKY - CAN : a song that starts in the midlle of a song and never stops with the second best guitar wank lead break ever
BONZO GOES TO BITTBURG - this song by the Ramones makes me cry.

About a tree and a well

2007-01-18T21:25:00.000+11:00

Painting a Quince

As you can see from my reviews, I like to mix the very high with the very low brow's of art, though my general orientation is towards the low-brow stuff...But every now and again I like to have my synapses massaged by some really slow, really artsy-fartsy Euro cinema, where nothing happens, landscapes are everything, psychology is thrown out the window and EXISTENCE is all that matters. Victor Erice is one of those Euro directors I describe as 'elemental'...His films ooze natural rhythms and colour, most of them being orange browns and dark greens, and the sounds are ambient winds and rains. I saw his 'Spirit of the Beehive' a few years ago in a cinema after smoking a few joints, and yes the slow languid arthouse pace was almost putting me into a coma, but there was something else going on, from the rustling trees to the endless landscapes to the slow shots of a young girl walking across a barren landscape – the whole spaciousness of the film riveted me. Erice's cinema's is organic and wide. So after having it sit on my shelf for some special occasion I pulled out his 90s film 'El Sol Del Membrillo' (the Quince Tree of the Sun), which is basically 2 and a bit hours of Spanish painter Antonio Lopez painting a quince tree (interesting to note that Lopez does lots of moderns urban landscapes). Yep, a movie about a guy painting a tree. Now this is no ordinary tree, a Quince tree is like a pear tree. The Quince has a firm, rounded texture and is is bright yellow. It is, by for all intents a purposes and very 'artistic' tree, in that is has lots of surfaces and textures. Erice doesn't miss a beat in capturing thought surfaces and textures, but then capturing the more important aspects that surround or enliven the tree visually – light, shadows, visual composition. This is a move as a painting and a film about making a painting. Erice takes the 'visuality' of cinema to the core of all visual art – painting – a makes it interesting in it's own right.

The jungle

In between Lopez battles with elements, talks with other artists about like and art, while the world around his changes in complex synchronicity with his emerging work. This is deep stuff without hitting you on the head with morality and psychology, it's a film that just happens – a tree grows, a painter paints it as it grows, and then the fruit falls, dies, decays until next season. Life.

Life is a rotten quince..

The DVD I got is a killer, it's a Spanish release with English sub-titles. It's not perfect hi-def quality , but image quality is nice, there are screen artifacts to keep it all real – the print is approved by Erice himself. There's also some great extras including s Spanish TV interview with both Eric and Lopes and a fantastic video sketchbook of Lopez painting done by Eric himself. All up a quality film and a quality, 'exotic' DVD package.

I finally watched the bootleg I've got of Budd Boetticher's fantastic western 'the Tall T'..Boetticher is quickly becoming 'the bloke' when it comes to American westerns in my headspace. His compact, violent and meaningful B-westerns are all worthwhile. The ones I've seen – 'Seven men from now' and 'Commanche Station' – are all A-grade stuff contrary to their status, but 'the Tall T' is what I'd call a killer. Randolph Scott once again plays the good moral guy Pat Brennan, who comes to a small outpost and promises the son of a friend some candy. On the way though he loses his horse, and hitches back with a newly web couple. Upon return to the ranch they find it taken over by ruthless thugs, his friend and son both murdered, and a hostage situation ensues when the pussy-husband uses his wealthy wife as a bargaining chip for their freedom. This is dark, violent stuff, especially for a 50s movie, but it proves that
even in violence and immorality you can still play tough but fair: Brennan shoots the motherfuckers in the front not back, which in todays fuckhead world is the norm.

Dont mess with Mr. T..!

It's also proudly politically incorrect, having one of the thug be a psycho Asian called 'Chink. Scott is once again solid as a rock, Richard Boone adds complexity to Frank Usher, the thug's leader, and Henry Silva, known for his roles in Italian poliziescos, like the classic 'Manhunt', plays the outta control 'Chink. It's a crime that such a great, brutal Western like the 'Tall T' isn't on DVD, and buggered if I know why it's called 'The Tall T'!

Turkish Delight!!!

2007-01-08T20:19:00.000+11:00

This film looks totally fantastic. And that psych-guitar!

On a faraway beach...

2007-01-07T12:54:00.000+11:00

Sealers' Cove : 4th Jan, 2007, 7:41am

Heppy News Year! (well thats how my mum says it)..And according to my horoscopes this will be my best year in 10 years because Jupiter is in the way of Saturn blocking out the view of Pluto rising between the Sun and the moon and arrr, fuckit...Anyway hopefully they represent something good since 2006 was officially a grande annulus horribulus for this blogger... So I kicked off 2007 with a 20km round-trip hike that has left me awed and sore..As you can see the loverly beach I ended up at was called Sealer's Cove down a Wilsons Promontory, one of the most spectacular spots on this here lucky-Cunt called Australia. And it was all WORTH IT. This was one of the first decent hikes I been on for nearly 14 years. The last was in the early 90's, climbing Mt. Warning in Northern NSW, and before that, I went on a hike to the Dead Sea in Yeretz Yisrool on my birthday , to be treated to 'Biblical' views of some desert and Masada, coupled with soldiers graduating and F16's buzzing the joint. It was pretty kewl...

But back to the bizniss of this Blog, which is me talking shit about shit I like. 2006 was a Pathetic year for anything 'new'. No interesting music, a smattering of films and book. So I'll start:

BEST MUSIC 2006 : THE ZEN VISION:M 30gig multi-media MP3 player etc...I finally was bought of those new Walkmen things after 5 years too late, and after research picked the Creative anti-iPod. It sounds great, has a video player that I never use, displays photos, magazine, Podcasts etc... So basically I have been digitising my own records that I hardly have time to listen to and listen to them again. Rediscovering that Nick Cave is horribly dated and BORING and should be put out to pasture, indie-music of the 90s doesn't cut it with me at all for the most, though the first couple of Palace records could be genius. Yo La Tengo are another band with a serious law of diminishing return , up there with Dinosaur, Pavement, shit ANYTHING on Matador Dreckords. The first Teenage Fanclub record and SeaMonsters by the Wedding Present were the best two English records of the 90s, or even this decade for that matter. Techno music is as dated as Nick Cave. Hip hop has a great future behind it. BOOTLEGS ARE THE ONLY WAY> Unadulterated, shitty recordings of bands in their prime (or worse) never seem to date. Hence I been listening to bootlegs by the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Palace Music, etc..etc... But the BESTEST sonic adventure this year would hafta be the bootleg DTS-DVD 4.1 mix of Pink Floyd's DARK SIDE OF THE MOON...Yep, the ultimate drongo album, biggest selling record of all-time bootlegged off a SURROUNDSOUND mix done in the 70s by Alan Parsons or someone, and it sounds t-riffic, especially on my 5.1 surround system. In fact it's one of the very few 'surround' recordings thats worth the listen on this new format. And it's FREE via a torrent download which took me nearly three months to complete. Oh well, good things take time I guess.

BEST FILMS : a few goodies actually: 1. MIAMI VICE – coulda been better, and really it was just an episode of the TV series with a bigger budget, more explosions, blood and swearing, but boy was this film one of the nicest to look at this year, if anything else (and aint cinemah supposed to be a 'visual' medium?)
2. CLIMATES – Turkish arthouse film, also done on the HiDef digital. Like all decent arthouse films, the story of a love-affair breakdown, done with slow shots, landscapes and a pretty rough and ridiculous sex scene. It also looked really nice and moderne just the way I like to see movies.
3. THE PASSENGER – Antonioni's 'lost' movie got a cinema release before getting the 'budget' DVD release. Jack Nicholson goes for an identity swap in an Arabian desert while getting to bonk Maria Schneider and then have something 'mysterious' happen.

4. THE RED DESERT – yeah so I been on a bit of an Antonioni trip this year, watching the Passenger, La Notte and L'Eclisse, this baby got a semi-decent DVD release here in R4/Australia. LURVELY and surreal movie and Antonioni's first in colour, so he's made everything pretentiously perfect and lurid and composed, but fuck, thats alright with me. But the RED DESERT is foremost seminal , esp. on the like of Tarkovsky, and sheeit, even the Turkish guy who made CLIMATES.

another faraway beach : The Red desert

5.SUCCUBUS - I also been on a bit of a Jess Franco trip. Yeah, that crazy Spanish guy who is compared to Ed Wood Jr, and made really bad pornos, but his late 60s/early 70s stuff is really, really good – shit I'd say 'great'. Geared specifically for the 'counter culture, Swinging 60s crowd', Franco's drug-fried kinky mod-sex sagas make little sense, over-use the zoom-in, but generally have great soundtracks, sexy-chicks, confused vampires and sex- demons and shots of exotic locales. If you have at least 3 seconds of time for say David Lynch, you'll have plenty for Franco. SUCCUBUS involved some woman who does a live S&M show, some guy who wants to bonk her, trippy soft-focus nude frolics and people namedropping Stockhausen and the Rolling Stones. I mean what's NOT to like?

6. THE PARTY GIRL – got this off a torrent. Nick Ray does it again. Hard-boiled story of a stripper and her links to the mob. Shot in Scope, it's as colourful and gay as a musical is supposed to be, even the bits where a mob psycho pistol smashes a guy in the face! Yep.

7. MATCH POINT – Voody Ellen does a good one. In fact he does a Chabrol film but with Scarlett Johansen's ass in it. This will prolly be the last decent film Ms. J does before she becomes the new Melanie Griffith or something.

8. THE RED QUEEN KILLS 7 TIMES – you know what, I can't get enough of these crazy European psychological ghost/vampire films. From the hot Euro babes, to the crazy stories of infidelities to the wonky mythologies of hauntings and vampires, to the classy Modish locations and decadence. Yep it's all so early 70s exploitation, grindhouse vernacular cinema and while some may pass these films off as camp and trash, well there seem to be heaps more going on (thematically, visually) than yr general arty-farty flick and they're FUN to watch to boot, well at least better than drunken fathers and gay cowboys – thats for sure!

9. THE DUST DEVIL – I had reservations about this flick and the guy who made it – uber goth-geek Richard Stanley – who made one of the worst, most rubbishy films I've ever seen (but a cult with heroin addicts and fans of industrial music like Ministry)HARDWARE..I read an interesting article with Stanley in a book a few years ago and he was crapping on about Leone and Tarkovsky, and how DUST DEVIL was him trying to be like that..Well sorta...More Leone than Tarkovsky, the film is really 90s pulp-kitsch, but it had enough moments to keep me in there, and the fact that it was a genre film that was creating it's own mythology made it a moire than interesting experience. I guess the fact that this was an el-cheapo release with 5 discs of doccos and interviews of varying quality prolly touched my inner schnorrer more than some other grander aesthetic thing, but in the end I enjoyed the sucker more than say the Departed....

10. MARY – Abel Ferrara is still one of the best directors in America, and seem to be the only director who knows how to get a performance out of Matthew Modine. MARY made PASSION OF THE CHRIST look like the bloated, gory, self-important and ultimately stooooopid film that it was. Unlike Gibson's chest-beating Fulci movie, Ferrara actually gets religion and its inherent paradoxes, without actually having to preach it.

11. A SCANNER DARKLY – just. Not a great film, but still the most 'literal' and true PKD adaptation.. He coulda done just as good a job without the bullshit Macintosh animation crap.

BESTEST BOOKS

Hmmmm....I really liked James Lee Burkes' TO THE BRIGHT & SHINING SUN, Jonathan Lethem's AMNESIA MOON, Burroughs NOVA EXPRESS & Artuads WATCH FIENDS & RACK SCREAMS..

...non-fictionally I dug FX Feeney's MICHAEL MANN coffee tabler, Legs McNeil's THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD, and Mikel J Koven's LA DOLCE MORTE about the giallo genre.. the very worst book I read was Bret Easton Ellis' LUNAR PARK. What a piece of shit.

There's a time to f@ck, and a time to crave..

2006-11-25T13:35:00.000+11:00

Welcome to the 'new life'

LA VIE NOUVELLE - Dir: Phillipe Grandrieux

..if there's one concept the French are really, REALLY good at it's nihilism. This is probably due to the fact that they're a pack of hypocritical cowards, that love to pick fights, but to not actually fight them..And when it comes to culture, they are 'experts' at nihilism. I've recently been reading the excellent 'Watchfiends & Rack Screams', a collection of the late-period writings of French nut-bar visionary, Antonin Artaud. An ex-surrealist, Artaud spent most of his life in mental asylums scribbling a feverish poetry that explored the boundaries of human-physicality, yet he despised sex, so instead or yr 'Salt, Saliva, Sperm and sweat' (asper Phillip Brophy's experimental short film), yr left with ;Salt, saliva, sweat and ...*cough,cough*, Kaka! Yep Artaud was a pretty out-there case, and he's poetry of self eruption, while at time hard to read, seems to get under yr skin. It's pretty powerful, abstract stuff, but reading it, it's undeniable to see how his work influenced the likes of Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Bukowski, Arrabal, Jodorowsky, hard-core metalheads and self-headjob-giving performance artists amongst others. That he was kicked out of the surrealists for being anti-politics and Marxism adds to his enduring legend and their subsequent demise as a relevant creative movement..

..Artaud started his own movement called THE THEATRE OF CREULTY in which he used extreme performance relating to the body, sound and vision to 'shock and awe' audiences.. Mexican surrealists like Arrabal and Jodorowsky were heavily influenced by Artauds' THEATRE of CREULTY and recently watched a torrent-bootleg of the oh so very nihilistic and French and Artaud influenced movie LA VIE NOUVELLE by French experimental-nihilist film-maker Phillipe Grandrieux, which could be described as a CINEMA OF CRUELTY circa 2003. Now I been reading about Grandrieux for a while, especially here and here. And just like every other these uber-hip film that 'everyone must-see' that you read about (no different to the music of the same must I add), it's almost impossible for the average-schmo like myself (who is always curious to expand the parameters to these types of culture) to actually see (or hear). So after about a week of torrenting, I was able to download a bootleg of this film. Luckily the film has very little dialogue, it plays like a silent film, that gives it vastly more visual and experimental edge. Let me just stress now, if you like David Lynch you will love this film, if not, stop reading. The story basically revolves around a love-triangle that revolves around an Eastern European sex slave her captor and an American client. The film uses a very natural, modern visual style for the most, made up mainly of close ups, shaky handheld and natural light, as is the norm for contemporary Euro-cinema. But Grandrieux takes things an extra step utilizing blur, out-of-focus and night-vision to push the film into a really edgy, surrealistic realm. The film plays a lot like one of those really nightmarish Chris Cunningham videoclips where everything is based on extreme claustrophobic sensation, and the threat of extreme violence lingers at the edge of every frame, made even more powerful by the fact that no-one really says anything. Obviously the paradigm is sex and death, throw in the location of Eastern Europe - where life is cheap, nasty and very COLD - and you have a dark nihilism personified. Music and sonics play a big role in this film. The whole film has that dark-industrial drone through it that bedrocks the feel of pervasive thread, and the throbbing 'doof' of the sex-club makes the film come off like some post-decadent techno nightmare. Throw in Grandrieux's dizzying 'concrete' visual style and you've got the cinematic equivalent of a Jeff Mills Detroit-techno album. LA VIE NOUVELLE is a dark, modern, nightmare, where the human soul is bought,sold and pulverised at 125bpm.

..in Eastern-Euro HELL!

G.O.D in my backyard.

2006-09-30T22:07:00.000+10:00

The Coloured Balls - Ball Power (Aztec Music)

Sometimes you get lucky living in the Lucky Country especially when it comes to popular-gulcha and music. I mean, I must confess, for such a little pisher country, we produce some very fine hedonistic, psychedelic rock n' roll music un-fettered by politics , Political correctness and bad artists in general. Another thing is that I was fortunate to be a city-slicker (well suburban slicker) in my up-bringing, as opposed to 95% of Farmer and Faygel nobs that make up the 'cultural elite' that gives Aussie art and culture such a snore inducing rep in the first place. Well anyway, as a kid, I remember once some family friends of ours son came over, he happened to be some sort of burnt-out drug-casuality who'd been in rehab and mental hospitals and the like, and somewhere along the line he mentioned this bloke LOBBY LLOYD, and was saying things along the lines that Lloyd made (Billy) Thorpie look like a Poonce. He was MENTAL, his guitar was louder than anything on earth, and he used to live in Centre Road East Brighton ( a reasonable, though not ostentatious upper-middle class suburb to boot!), which was around the corner from where I grew up! SO I had Aussie punk rock history in literally my own back yard! Now at the time I was getting into a lot of garage punk music via 80s bands like the PAINTERS and DOCKERS and COSMIC PSYCHOS, and LOBBY LLOYD's name useta get mentioned as he owned or had something to do with RICHMOND RECORDERS here in Melbourne, that was where all these shitty Melbourne punk bands used to record and end up sounding like rubbish. ANYWAY, in the late 80s and early 90s I used to see loud-garage rock bands from Geelong and Camberwell (funny how in Australia you had rich kid dropouts making music with poor drop-outs and they all rocked the same, I guess that's DEMOCRACY in the purest sense, eh?)...But this Lobby Lloyd influence would never go away. He produced the Aussie X, the Painters and Dockers, the megaultrahardcorethrashmetal DEPRESSION and I think a BORED! record or two. BORED! covered 'Human Being' in their live sets, and I was lucky to hear the Cosmic Psychos version of 'Guitar Over-Dose' in the studio, where it sounded great, until I heard the CD version. Then this mate of mine had an art teacher called Phil Brophy, who useta dress up like a 'sharpie' which was pretty much the main subcultural audience of the COLOURED BALLS. The 'sharpies' were this mutant working-middle class youth culture of the 70s here in Australia, that mixed the look of English 60s mods/skinheads and David Bowie Ziggy Stardust(!!!) into one. But instead of them being bisexuals, they'd drink beer and break each others noses and knife each other and shit. Initially the 'sharpies' meant the way you dressed, but this was quickly punched-in-the head, and came to mean the sharpness of yr flicknife you carried, or bottle you smashed to rearrange some bozo's face with. The 'sharpies' existed for most of the 70s until punk came along. The 'Sharpie' look is sorta trendy now, but alot of it moved to the country and mutated into the 'bogen' subculture, which the Cosmic Psychos cashed in on in the 90s. But it was the Psychos who kinda piqued my interest in this Lobby Lloyd bloke, as this 'G.O.D' track was awesome, amphetamine, motoronic pounding psychedelic ROCK. I said to myself meekly that Lobby Lloyd was a legend. And yesterday the stars aligned, the bank balance was in the black and a beautifully remastered, repacked and LOCALLY PRODUCED CD version of the long out-of-print, impossible to find BALL POWER album emerged. In my hand I had the new Bob Dylan record and BALL POWER, and I said fuck-it, I will support my own PRODUCT!!! Bought the bugger, popped it in the car CD abd floored it all the way home as 'Flash' blasted out of my quadrophonic-4 stereo system via the tunes' Who-meets-MC5 propulsive "yeah"! Then you get some so-so boogie-woogie numbers until the Sabbath rifferama of 'Human Being' and a really up-beat version of 'Whole Lotta Shakin' comes along, but Lloyd plays the chords in a higher key that makes it more psychedelic and droney than the usually chugga-chugga style. Album killer is the 10 minute plus neo-Pink-Fairies workout 'That's what Mama said' that features some very nice primal-electronics that sound like Sun Ra's Kahoutek mixed in via a rousing chant like chorus that'll get even the most drunken slob dribblin the words out in no time. There's a collection of six singles as extras, that vary from some dated boogie-woos Oz-Rock vomit, to prolly the best song on the whole albumand the best song the Who never did 'Love me girl' and the very Punk Fairies or High Time MC5 rocker 'Devil's disciple'... Album closes with a totally remastered to get blastered-to 16 minute version of 'Guitar Overdose' recorded live at Sunbury in 1973. You are unlikely to find a more transglobal, psychedelic, elevating, teeth gnashing, smash yr head more than an Islamic Mullah dose of energising rock anywhere in the known universe. And it makes me feel even better that G.O.D lived in my back yard! Amen!

another TEN on the ZEN

2006-09-25T00:03:00.000+10:00

..a proper post soon to come, but here's some filler for the toilet break, random Zen shuffles:

JANDEK - 28-8-05 LIVE @ AUSTIN bootleg - part of the Perplexed-one's on-going world tour. His guitar meanders down the fret board as he whines about wanting to be loved, really he's not that different to Elton John or someone, ya know.
U2 - IN GOD'S COUNTRY - Christian rock, it even has that fucken tooty-flooty sort of sound that Briar-butt boys play. Gee the Irish are a pack of cunts.
MUSIC MACHINE - TALK, TALK - Nuggets gold. Fuzzed out to shit with lotsa keyboards. This one reminds me of THE SHOWER SCENE FROM PSYCHO, that Melbourne 80s band. Could also sound like one of those Timbaland tracks.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE - TREMOLO - this sounds like the Beatles when they went psychedelic, especially something George woulda done. There's even a timbla or whatever those Indian percussion things are called.
WIRE - KIDNEY BONGOS - a mate of mine reckons this is perfect 80s pop. It's actually pretty shit.
ROLLING STONES - SHAKE YOUR HIPS - The guitars on this sound like they were done a four-track. Bloody smart-arse limeys.
HOWLIN' WOLF - HOLD YOUR MONEY - You can't go wrong with Howlin' Wolf. Sounds like it was recorded in a really small and really packed juke-joint with Negros high on speed. You see, this stuff, it just swings.
KIM SALMON - YOU GOTTA LET ME DO MY THING - Salmon wishing he was doing soundtracks for John Holmes films, of course, there's a flute in there.
THE GUN CLUB - GOODBYE JOHNNY - this sounds tinny and shit. It influenced a tinny and shit Aussie band of the same name as the track. Pack of fucken junkie alcoholics. Now there's a band called the Drones who sound even MORE similar, just not as tinny.
THE MAGIC MARKERS - WE ARE THE MAGIC MARKERS - the youth of the SOnic Youth who have emerged as part of Thurston Morre on-going no-wave social-project. At least they're better than SOnic YOuth. Lots of angry young art-fuckers saying 'fucken' and over-distorted lo-fi blare, they remind me of Black Flag for some reason. It's alright.

THE RETURN OF THE 5 BEST NON-ARGENTO/BAVA GIALLI!

2006-08-27T23:13:00.000+10:00

Women drivers - DEATH LAID AN EGG

NUMERO TRES : EQUALIZIO: DEATH LAID AN EGG and THE FIFTH CHORD

Run to the Vatican coz its back...!

My next two 'Best non-Argento/Bava' gialli, while don't really figure so much in the story/plot or boobs/blades and blood department, definitely do so in terms of there succinct visual style and to a large extent weirdness. The first is DEATH LAID AN EGG. Yep its premise is very fucken STRANGE to begin with, coz literally, it’s about eggs and death. There's this guy called Marco, played by IL GRANDE SILENSIO' Jean-Louis Tringitgnant. who owns a hi-tech poultry farm and is married to Gina Lollabrigida and has a hot sorta blonde secretary that he wants to fuck, and you sorta know the rest. But if sexual infidelities and murder are the basic templates, it’s the mind-fucked visual cut-up style that raises this film above the sum of its parts. Giulo Questi, who directed the great and very violent-and-off-its-head Spag-Western DJANGO KILL, IF YOU LIVE..SHOOT! tries his hand at the giallo genre (as did nearly every other director from Italy in the late 60s early 70s) and does a pretty diffracted, but no less interesting job. For one the premise involving a high-tech Poultry Farm is pretty weird, especially when you have some loopy subplot involving mutated chickens. But then you have this completely LSD flash-backed visual style with erratic jump shots and a completely acid-fried title sequence that makes everything feel a bit nisht. And the soundtrack. Well think of all that weird musique concrete stuff from the 60s that all theses sonic mathematicians were doing in European Universities, and yr pretty much there, in fact this whole film feels kinda musique concrete for that matter.. The visual colour scheme uses lots of yellow, keeping with the genre and maybe due to the fact that there's chicken and eggs and whatever in there somewhere. In many ways this film comes off like one of those late-60s acid-fucked Godard movies like WEEKEND or 2 or 3 THING I KNOW ABOUT HER but using the giallo framework, there's also lots of weird architecture and sexual violence like some sort J.G BALLARD novel, and Gina Lollabrigida shows some booty just to keep things nice and orderly.

Spinning out with the FIFTH CORD

Italo-cult legend Franco Nero stars in the FIFTH CORD as a shicker journo who becomes a suspect in a murder, done by some guy chopping off fingers of a glove that he leaves next to his victims (turns out he’s an Australian from Sydney). The film borrows heaps from BAVA's gialli like BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, and for most of it, is a bit of a snore-fest, but like EGG the film is redeemed by its visuals. In this case, the film was shot by uber-Italian-legend-cinematographer VITORIO STORARRO. Now I have a friend who is some-sort of cinematographer and he like many other people of this talent, swear by the work of STORARO. Some of his work includes film like APOCALYPSE NOW, ISHTAR, THE LAST EMPEROR, THE CONFORMIST, the mod-giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and *ahem* THE LAST TANGO IN PARIS. THE FIFTH CORD was one of Storarro's early efforts, and what an effort. In fact I think this is one of the first films I've ever seen where the cinematography is more interesting than the film itself. Storraro's sugar-shit-sharp lensing gives the film a cold-clinical look, and his usage of muted colours gives the film a relentless atmosphere, despite the fact that not much is really going on. In many ways this film works like an Antionioni-giallo (innaresting as Ant-o refers to LA'AVENTURA as a giallo in reverse!) with it's nice usage of space and architecture to create a cold environment and atmosphere of emotional dislocation. The Blue Underground DVD has been remastered off High-Def or something, so everything looks super-duper clear. The film is nowhere near as kinky or shocking as the liner notes say, but yeah, the cinematography is STUNNING, and probably the best seen on any gialli this side of an Argento one. But that’s the whole point of this list, ‘aint it?
Looks like the cover artwork of some band from THE WIRE magazine

CREWS'in for a BRUISIN'

2006-08-23T22:19:00.000+10:00

AN AMERICAN FAMILY - Harry Crews

With the miniscule fanfare of a GOLDBLOG post, Harry Crews recently released his last novella AN AMERICAN FAMILY via the small 'Blood and Guts' press, and distributed via Vagabond Books. Sure the Internet is shit, but hey, I would NEVER have known a new Crews book was out, let alone be able to buy it without the global 24-7 mail-order-catalogue that is the InterNerd (and if yr not an Americanski, buy it direct from Vagabond press, you'll get it cheaper and quicker than Amazon)..I can admit that like every other shmendrick my age, I 'heard' about Crews via that neo-riot-grrl 'project' that featured Lydia Lunch, Kim Gordon and some female wrestler(really?) called Sadie Mae. I heard the record once, found it to be nasty unlistenable dreck, but really enjoyed the liner notes by Byron Coley. I soon ordered an import copy of the only book I could get at that time A FEAST OF SNAKES, and was subsequently disturbed in the same way I was when I first heard a Jandek record (Telegraph Melts). Maybe I started in the wrong place, but I was convinced that this literature AND music was custom designed by and for seriously fucked up nihilist heroin addict art-punk motherfuckers. Yes. I started in the wrong place. Needless to say a FEAST OF SNAKES is a totally mind-fuckingly GREAT novel - truly the last great 'Southern Gothic' novel. At the time I'd just read AMERICAN PSYCHO, and FEAST not only kicked its ass, but probably punched it another asshole. It's nasty and violent and horrible, but you'll never forget it. But Harry Crews is more than some lame-ass transgressive motherfucker for the sake it, like so many 'hip' shitty one-trick-pony writers that really deserve Iranian Fatwas on them - Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh after 'Ecstasy', Poopy z Brite etc.. - are. Crews is a fantastic satirist, a moralist, a great yarn spinner, writer of 'dialogue' and really, really original. He's also horribly under-appreciated, and I still find it criminal that the God-awful Chuck Palahnishnook is one of the biggest selling 'counter culture' writers in America, and Crews can't even sell a limited run of 2000 books or something. ANYWAY, Crews latest is a novella that you'll probably read in under an hour. AN AMERICAN FAMILY has one of his typical consumed-by-self-loathing and loserdom characters stuck in a rut, and finding a way out via some comic, over-the-top scenario. The main character here is a bloke called Major Melton (yes Crews ALWAYS has fantastically evocative character names) who discovers his baby has a birthmark on it's dick(!!) and starts to lose the plot from there, meeting some hilarious characters along the way, including a Korean called Bac Bong Suc. Yep Crews is at it with his redneck-with-the-heart-of-Gold shtick once again. People are motivated by primal (generally sexual) urges, the guys are dogs the women are bitches - in fact all of America is pretty much a giant dog-pound. Yep, Crews is a bit of a neo-Con, yep, he's a total Greenie, yep he's a big Anarchist, and most importantly, he's a died-in-the-wool humanist. It's all in here and the book’s only 100-odd pages long. Don't believe the liner notes that claims it's Crews 'most savage and disturbing book yet’, far from it, but it is very FUNNY, and sweet. And don't worry; Crew's innate ability to make the simple incredibly profound is still intact. It 'aint a classic, but it delivers, like one of those 7inch punk-singles from back in the day.

Now it's interesting to note how the 'Harry Crews factor' has permeated the bobular-gulcha over the years. In music circles, besides his popularity with the Nu-York-Shitty junkie-art set, some of his fans have included more commercial college-rock types like Bob Mould and Maria McKee, and he appears in some documentary that features all these nu-cunt, I mean no-Depression nu-Country types like the Handsome Family. Obviously Crews has a reasonable 'indie' or 'college hipster' type following, and it's interesting to note his forays in the flim world. He had a cameo in Sean Penn's under-rated THE INDIAN RUNNER (blew my mind when I saw it in the early 90s since I was on a massive Harry Crews bender, and had no idea he'd be in the film!) and apparently wrote something with Michael Cimino, and also wrote bits of a Sean Cunningham (Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th) shlocker the NEW KIDS, which I still haven't bothered to see. I was recently lucky to see THE HAWK IS DYING, which I was terrified would be another Sundunce shitty American indie-film, and while it went down that way, turned out to be actually not such a bad film, and totally TRUE to Harry Crews work, especially in regard to his less comic and gnarled work (ie ALL WE NEED OF HELL)..I thought we'd be lucky to get a reprint of THE HAWK IS DYING, but so far no-dice, and the film has died an inglorious (and I reckon unfair) indie-film death. If there's one failing of the film, it's probably casting Paul Giamatti as the main guy, sure he tries his butt off, but he doesn't quite cut it as a Southern bum - I guess that's all part of the cruel-capitalist machinations of getting a 'small' film by a 'not so hip these days' writer like Crews off the ground - you need a fucken 'name' actor to get an 'audience' of fuckwits that wouldn't know better unless they were at an REM or Sicker Ross gig or something.

Anyway I couldn't finish this post without posting my Crewophile 'trophies', because really Crews novels are so rare that literally become them. I only have on hardcover, funny that, the book I just yakked about. My first was FEAST OF SNAKES, the one with the white cover, then I got THE KNOCKOUT ARTIST, one of those Simon&Shuster editions with the funky art-pulp yellow (giallo!) covers. Also in this series are editions of THE GOSPEL SINGER and ALL WE NEED OF HELL. My personal fave is SCAR LOVER. MULCHING OF AMERICA is a cracker; I reckon it was one of the best literary indictments of Capitalism in Amerikka written in the 90s, no-one else did so I must be a born idiot. The CLASSIC CREWS trilogy is all good, as is FLORIDA FRENZY. BODY is fucken dynamite, CELEBRATION was so-so. My rarest is the English run of KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT that has some Twiggy look-a-like doing a terrible karate pose on the cover. I've also got GETTING NAKED WITH HARRY CREWS and PERSPECTIVES on HARRY CREWS. To round it out I even mail-orderd that documentary HARRY CREWS: GUILTY AS CHARGED, I'm still trying to find a fucken NTSC video so I can convert the fucker to DVD for posterity! Shit I'm so sad I even photocopied all of BLOOD and GRITS from the library at the University I work at!!

1985 on Ice

2006-08-16T22:33:00.000+10:00

MIAMI VICE - then.................... and now (if only it stuck to the sell-line more..)

MIAMI VICE (2006) - written and directed by Michael Mann

For some people the 80s was a cultural nightmare worse than Mao's 'Cultural Revolution: MTV, gated drums sounds, Neon, synthesisers, heroin addicts in Germany, 50s and 60s kitsch etc..etc... When it cames to TV shows in the 80s, the interesting thing is that TV shows were starting to become more and more like movies - Hill Street Blues, A-Team, Knight Rider etc.. - until now many TV shows are in fact better than the movies. One line of thought is that cinema is pretty much dead, TV is where it's at. At the top of this heap for Tv shows trying to be films , for me anyway was Miami Vice. It was my favourite TV show of the 80s, and watching it now, well, *cough,cough*, I guess I was only a teenager. But, still, when it worked, it was pretty hardcore for a TV show, and when it was shit, well just more 80s dreck then, eh? Part of the appeal was that at the time Brian DePalma's 'Scarface' was one of my favourite movies of that period, and well 'Miami Vice' was pretty much 'Scarface' every week.

FOOTNOTE: I was one of 4 people who actually liked Mann's follow up - the massive flop 'Crime Story' HEAPS better than 'Vice'

Anyway, Michael Mann, the man who directed and produced most of the series has finally made the TV-show-that-was-trying-to-be-a-movie into a movie. Over the years Mann has gone from being a pompous-stylistic bore - I remember seeing 'the Keep' at the legendary Valhalla Cinema in Richmond, one of those cienmas that had couches for people to smoke pot down the back, and thinking, what a slow, drawn out crock of shit - to some sort of 'master' that knows how to stage a suagr-shit-sharp modern gunbattle. And nu-MIAMI VICE has some nice gun-battles. In fact the gun battles in this film seem to be inspired by some of the footage from skirmishes in the Middle-east, and the HD-digital photgraphy makes them even more real and cracking. When it comes to violence as poetry or an 'artform' in the fillum-world I rank Mann up there with Kubrick and Peckinpah, some of the violent scenes in this nu-MIAMI VICE are that good. If you don't like any of that stuff, then don't see the film.

The first 40-minutes of nu-MIAMI VICE just fly. It's bravura film-making - guns, gadgets, girls, guts, drugs, spicks, butts, chinks, -Nazi white-trash, yids, bids, and skids. That's just content. Mann uses his mix of HD-digital and film, fast cutting, mad-modern landscapes, arhcitecture and fractured, mini-bite story telling to set everything up. It's relentless, it's confusing, but it cranks. And then...well, Mann being the trendy (hip?) type of 80s-yuppy-guy that he is, decides to try his hand at a Bong Car-Why move and the film falls into a duller than Miami canal-water conflicted luff story. Trust me it was BORING - but then I thought, 'this is just like how every 4th episode of VICE would be' - you'd have Crockett have one of his 'living on the edge of the night' sensitive-new-age-bozo story-arcs. I guess the film is ultimately arse-fucked by the Holly (Charra) Wood paradigm for mainstream idioten story telling - define yr main character, follow his 'journey', love interest, other action - etc.. In this case Crockett is fair and sqaure the main story and the rest are just cyphers. Mind you, Mann does his usual 'subversion' of the paradigm, as he did with the TV show (which I won't say coz you already know). Anyway, once the middle shit is over, action ensues with a great cracking Iraq-Lebannon video feed shoot-out. Farrell is pretty good, though ultimately a slobby bum(he almost seems to turn into Russell Crowe as the film goes on..), as Crockett, he lacks the Southern edge that Don Johnson brought to the original. Foxx is not-much as Tubbs, but who knows he might be moved to the front in the sequel if it emerges. Gina and Trudy are replaced by some butch hispanic J-Lo and a black chick with a great ass. Zito and Zwyteck are made into bigger shleppers than the originally were. And Castill has been replaced by Fat Albert. But don't worry, the Columbian drug-lords are as fantastic and deadly as they always were.

The film is B-grade dreck, pure and simple. It looks fucken GREAT on the big screen like it's supposed to, and credit must be given to Mann for sticking to his dull, downbeat style, than making the film into a camp ejaculation of rubbish like every other worthless TV adaptation.

One thing is certain, Michael Mann surely knows how to make every film he's ever made seem like it was made in 1985.

Lets art-fuck, shall we?

2006-08-13T11:04:00.000+10:00

Found this innaresting link about Pommies pondering about modern stuff for a change, but really, I like the pictures!

Being there with Jandek

2006-08-13T01:37:00.000+10:00

jandek : glasgow Monday- THE CELL

The worlds greatest ex-rock crit, Richard Meltzer accurately nailed Bob Dylan's shtick to a large extent, when, in his tome 'The Aesthetics of Rock' said something along the lines that 'Dylan frees us from meaning' rather than the other way around (which is the case for 95% of innerlectyul fuckheads, myself included). But there's something incredibly powerful, profound and perhaps transcendental about art that delivers us from meaning. In fact, maybe that’s the thing that makes music 'spiritual' - and in today's milieu, that is a very dirty word (though Terry Riley, in a recent tour in Australia was effortlessly waxing lyrical about the role of rock n roll and popular music being a way for young people to express their spirituality). You could say that it all goes back to that undefinable term "the shit's got SOUL", or if you are the modernist, non-believer - it's got FEEL. Either way if the music's got it, you'll get it somehow. Mr Sterling R Smith aka Jandek aka the Representative from Corwood Industries recently released I think it's his 48th record GLASGOW MONDAY : THE CELL. The disc is another whopping 2-CD set, immaculately recorded from one of his recent UK live shows, and is another bona-fide masterpiece from the man, as far as I'm concerned. A live 'concept' album no-less, in the great tradition of live concept albums, like FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE, TOMMY LIVE @ ROYAL ALBERT HALL , THE WALL live at Krakow or some other place of megalithic grande-gestureness. So Jandek, in his infinite jest gives us his own version of 'The Wall' in THE CELL.

Immediate thoughts: A jail. A holding cell. A good title for a Swans/Michael Gira party-tune, but THE CELL could also mean, a battery, one of those solar things or most importantly, the smallest known living organism. Jandek once again frees us from meaning with the simplest of terms. But let's not get too carried away with his royal Perplexed one here.. The album cover features another jaw-droppingly great example of minimalist art photography with a shot of an ancient looking, possibly Celtic in origin, stone-dwelling that gives some sort of visual representation of Jandek's 'Cell'. The thing that baffles me the most about this album cover is what appears to be a stone table in front of the rock-house:

..I mean, what the fuck is that thing? Is it another of Mr.Jandek's Photoshop tricks?

Anyway I listened to this album straight through this afternoon while cleaning the garden of my own 'Cell':

It was a really pleasant sunny day here in Melbourne-town, a nice break from the crisp but dry (and finger-and-toes-freezing) winter we've had so far and Jandek's hot new album went down a treat and ended just as I filled the green bucket with the last chunk of rotting, possum-eaten lemon that fell of the tree in my back yard.

ANYWAY, I'm gonna attack this album on two fronts, namely the MUSIC and the LYRICS.

THE MUSIC: Jandek on piano. Richard Youngs and Alexander Neilson as the main pick-up band doing Cello-ed Bass and ambient-pavement saw percussion (and I mean really ambient, so you don't think yr listening to Throbbing Gristle or Neubaten or Pussy Galore). Jandek plays a very luverley piano here. I mean the playing here is so staid and quaint you could play it to an old fart who listens to classic-FM and they'd probably like it. It's quite astonishing to hear this type of 'civilised' playing from a bloke who has sonically raped, tormented and psychotically-epsisoded hundreds, if not thousands of left-field brain-splattered listeners over the decades. I mean this record is of the cheese-and-wine and Government-grant 'produced' standard (FOR WHAT THAT'S EVER FERCUCKTEN WORTH)..Yep, it's mature listening for snobby adults. It's a fuckhead's aesthetic-circle-jerk-spunk-bubble-feltch. I could go on... But don't despair. Coz sonically this is another great avant-rock-piano album in the tradition of John Cale and John Cage and Michael Nyman - this record is the antithesis of the 3-Ben's Axis of Evil (Ben Lee, Ben Queller and Ben Fold Five, a sonic threat as truly diabolical as anything Iran/Korea/Syria, Al-Qaeda and Johnny Farnham and the Family First Party could muster). The album still has that rootsy, gnarled and beautiful edge that only Jandek can muster. In fact, on initial listening it sounds like chamber music taken from a Merchant Ivory Production about British noblemen and maidens. The piano aint new to Jandek - his sayonara to the millennium - the fantastic THE BEGINING album featured the magnum-opus that was 'The Beginning' 14 and-a-bit-minutes of Jandek passionately (nuttily, whats the diff?) noodling with his mother's grand-piano the piece being equal parts frustrated catharsis, infantile tinkering and introspective plinking. In GLASGOW MONDAY: THE CELL, Jandek sticks to the introspective plinking, and obviously has some pretty reasonable chops to display. But the real kicker that makes this record something beyond dull wine-and-cheese MOR-plonk is the fact that this record is a 'one riddim rekkid', just like all those old reggae records and the recent 'See Me Yah'/BASIC CHANNEL production. Yep. Jandek plays pretty much the same tune 10 times with slight and subtle variations on each while Youngs and Neilson chip in with their classy tutored-embellishments. Youngs seems to be playing a bowed-electric bass that drones, and slowly and deeply changes keys at specific moments. Neilson uses lots of feed backed-industrial sound washes, jingly bells and ever so slight rattles of wood or something of a similar timber. As a whole the thing has that elegiac feel that isn't dissimilar to rock-works like the recent Reed-Cale 'SONGS FOR DRELLA' or even Lou Reed's MAGIC & LOSS, or imagine a whole record that sounds like that spooky-otherworldly piano on Sonic Youth's 'Providence'. Also the piano sounds similar to the sort of thing you'd hear on some soundtrack to a serious-melancholy arty film. Right now I can only think of bits of EYES WIDE SHUT but there's prolly many others that might be familiar.

LYRICS: Jandek actually sings/talks quite nicely here. In fact he sounds remarkably like Robbie Robertson in parts. The main turn of phrase for THE CELL is: 'What do I have?’ In fact every 'Chapter' starts with the statement 'What do I have?’ which if you care to think about it, isn't that far off from the repeated verse-statement structure that many religious hymns use, and is also used in many of the great poems of the times. In many ways the lyrical content of THE CELL finds Mr.Jandek going from the material to the cosmic to the intergalactic. The whole thing feels like mediation on life/existence/death and his imminent passing from this 'material' world - hence 'What do I have?' coming off like the ultimate challenge to the physical/material paradigm. The stanzas vary from Part One where he talks about the Body/Mind connection, to part two where he talks about modern-life-banality: 'What do I have/Some ability to pay the bills/Well lets get them done!’ Each 'Chapter' gets more and more esoteric in the subject matter and phrases, but no less poetic. In fact as it goes on, it reminds me in FEEL to Goddard’s 'Eulogie De L'Amour' movie, who knows, maybe Godard will get Jandek to score one of his flicks, (or maybe they'll both leave this mortal-coil together in some sort of cosmic-existential-fractal boom?) But his lyrics here are rich with evocation: 'A ship without a crew', 'some bastion I guard', ‘Phoenixed (?) out of here', 'when it's all gone and black, the guardians step aside'.etc..etc..

If there's one film THE CELL reminds me of, it's Hal Ashby's BEING THERE. Maybe it's Jandek's cryptic, meaningful-but- meaningless phrases, the seemingly naive approach he has to making music, and the way at times that it all becomes so effortlessly transcendent. Jandek is like the character Chancey in that film, in that with his 'simple' manner he was able to see through all the complexities and manoeuvres and cruelty in life and see them for the bullshit that they are. Another quote from that film that might equally apply to Jandek is that 'life is a state of mind'. In BEING THERE, Chancy leaves his 'Cell' to embark on some sort of quasi-religious/symbolic journey, not much different to the story Jandek imparts in GLASGOW MONDAY: THE CELL.

Make no bones about it, this album aches, with age.

Peter Sellers in a Jandekian state of mind.

Time outta Joint

2006-08-06T21:10:00.000+10:00

Inside the French brain machine

Je T'aime Je T'aime In my younger days I was very influenced by the splatter-brained journalism of FORCED EXPOSURE fanzine on a musical level, but running in tandem was a personal interest in cyberpunk and 'speculative' sci-fi literature. Then, I noticed that FORCED EXPOSURE gave big kudos to similar lit, so I started to become more interested in their coverage of similarly splatter-brain counter-culture lit. Some of the writers they championed were already big in my mental-verse - Phillip K DIck, and some of the Californian trippers like Rudy Rucker and K.W Jeter - two writers who incidentally got big coverage back in FE back in the day. Anyway, in recent times the splatterbrain-psychadelic-cyberpunk sorta genre has become popular in the cinema. Films like the MATRIX and now the adaptation of Dick's A SCANNER DARKLY, lesser know films like the confusing too-smart-for-its-own-boots PRIMER, the hoity-toity promised more than it could deliver DEMONLOVER (including a totally wasted Neu and Sonic Youth soundtrack!) have all tried and failed miserably except in the eyes a few Villgae-Voice/Filmfestival post-fuckstickist indie-cinemah tossers(I mean shit, BACK TO THE FUTURE, is truly INSPIRED compared to some of the recent hipster attempts)...But I digress..The film I'm gonna yak about that prolly set the agenda for the time-outta-joint mind-fuck genre as we may know it, I reckon, is a film called JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME by French Nu-Waver Alain Resnais. Now this film is totally unavailable in legit formats, so I was lucky to see it on a Torrent-seeded bootleg. Set in the late 60s or some other 'modern' time, the story centres around a suicidal bloke who gets selected for some strange top-secret science experiment that involves time-travel. The guy gets stuck inside a giant-brain type machine that suddenly makes him revisit his life in a sorta locked-groove. Scenes start to intercut and jump around, and we slowly learn about why this guy got depressed, but the device puts him into a loop that leads to a pretty bummered out and profound climax. Trust the fucking French. The title 'I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU' obviously mimicking the time-out-joint mind-loop this guy is caught in, and the 'emotional' nature of the loop..Sonically the film has a soundtrack by Krzysztof Penderecki, giving it that ambient-muzique concrete speculative wha? edge, though the sound quality on this boot was a bit like yr typical Velvet Underground bootleg. I'd heard Resnais name thrown around a bit, especially in recent times by Steven Soderbergh, whose last couple of films seem to be pretty much Resnais-by-the-book in terms of how he cuts-up the narrative and the diagenic sounds. JE T'AIME JE T'AIME's use of cut-up is very Burroughsian in it's execution, though it seems Resnais is trying to mimic the movement of a mind trying to piece together bits of experience to form some sort of whole, and yet that whole is never quite reliable (which reminds me I better stop pummeling the Brain cells). Of Resnais previous work I've only seen HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, which I didn't mind but didn't love, I've still got the Holocaust docco NIGHT AND FOG and the other classic surrealist mind bender LAST YEAR @ MARIENBAD sitting on the 'to watch' pile, but JE T'AIME JE T'AIME seems to have well and truly sated my appetite. Another recent film-maker who seems to owe a bit to Resnais splintered-narrative would obviously be David Lynch, but a bloke here in Melbourne called James Clayden, seems to be screening a similar riff, either way I'm always up to watch these type of psychotronic curiosities, as long as I'm not too tired and narky. Dig the source.

Body Swerve

2006-07-26T13:08:00.000+10:00

So I'm back from an extended delay. Though my 'fans' out there prolly don't give a shite, considering the dearth of posted messages left on my Blog. Not much has been happening, and I have been HIDEOUSLY PROCASTINATIVE with this blog thing, prolly coz no-one gives a shit. Yes, I am motivated by positive re-enforcement, despite being brought up in the negative. Blabbing. Me and a friend are considering writing a book on 'shitty Aussie music'. Of the fourth biggest Ingrish speaking cunt in the world, we make some of the most HORRIBLE mainstream (yet obscure to the rest of the world) music known to humankind. I mean, we produce music here that is REALLY, REALLY popular amongst Orsies and them alone, such 'fantastic' bands like Something For Kate , Yo Am I, and 'legends' from the 80s like Uncanny X-Men , and the ultimate KING OF ALL AUSSIE DRECK MUSIC : JIMI BARNES . I have a great story about 'Barnsey'. One night coming home ripped off my tits, they played his track 'Ain't no second prize' on the radio. This was around 1990. The sound of the song, everything from the hysterical blare of his voice, to the wanky guitar solo and deadened chords, to the WAY OVERPRODUCED PLODDING MID-TEMPO GATED DRUM SOUNDS, was just too much. I pulled over and dutifully vomited out the door. So me and my mate are thinking about writing the first 'anti intellectual rock crit book', actually it's more like a mutated version of Meltzer's 'THE AESTHETICS OF ROCK' but for shitty obscure mainstream-Aussie music.

Random nose-picks off the Zen, right here, right now, by resident rock-crit Failed Carcass:

1. Jandek - The Cell: Part One , Glasgow Monday. Yep. His latest. Possibly very VERY best. Well at least most 'normal'. Jandek plays sad piano, in tune, with some sort of order, sounding like the piano off Sonic Youth's 'providence', while Lee Ronaldo does fucken pavement grinder ambiance in the background. Jandek says 'What do I have?' and sounds like Robbie Robertson. This one, really, really aches, with age.
2. Hawkwind - Down through the night. From solemn death dirges to drug fucked ecstasy lurches. Acoustic guitar, shimmering wah-wah white noise, and echoplexed horns. It's kinda hippy, strummy, but it's on drugs, so I guess it's OK. '
3. Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions - Untitled Track. More dirgey drone. VERY WARM. VERY TRIPPED. This is the best acid-folk record since the Nico one I yakked about. I fucken LOVE it, my favourite record on the 00s. I listen to this at night and levitate. Betcha yr new records can't get you to do THAT!
4. Captain Beefheart - Her Eyes are a blue million miles. OK. I admit it. Part of the reason I haven't updated this blog is because I had alot of shit on my plate AND I been smoking a wee bit too much pot. I guess that's why the Zen is performing so well, randomly of course. Emmes!
5. Sonic Youth - Providence (live CBGBs) - seriously I DIDN'T PLAN THIS IT JUST HAPPENED BY RANDOM, I JUST CLICK >. 5 minutes after I just typed the fucker. This is just phone messages and feedback. Not much really. But that random synergy just happened. WEIRD!
6. Brian Eno - The Big Shit, I mean Ship - it's great how when Eno produced U2 it just musta been the easiest and best paying gig he ever did. I mean he just fucken said 'here you fucken dumb Irish cunts, sound like THIS'. And those dumb Irish cunts did. 'With or without you!'
7. Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions - Bavarian Fruit Bread - so straight up I get it now. This sounds like Harmonia (Musik Von) with a hot chick with a great voice singing. No wonder its so fucken GOOD!
8. The Scientists - Human Jukebox - OUCH! I better turn this fucker down. Suicide in a toilet. When Ossie music was interesting at least. More seminal than John Holmes cock. Alot of groovy young bands around Melbourne are sounding like this now. It's kinda cool when you see teenagers trying to sound like this.
9. Palace - Oh how I enjoy the light. I must admit I really like this Palace stuff, 10 years or so after the fact. It's sounds so 'nice'. But I was never such a big fan of John Denver.
10. Luna - Bewitched. Tone, tone, tone. This is actually a shitty track. Too twee. There's good tracks on this record. Sterling Morrison played on it too. And played quite well.

Real Wild Adult

2006-07-06T16:41:00.000+10:00

Jandek. Someone's ripped a clip off the DVD. Fretless guitar. No chords.

Techno!

2006-07-03T20:35:00.000+10:00

Sun Ra Hendrix freak out:

..Alan Vega always freaked out...

Dicking Around with YouTube

2006-07-02T22:06:00.000+10:00

Alot of the sites, blogs and fourms I spend my time not watching TV at, are plugging in some totally WILD and rare videos of great rock and the odd great film trailer. Here are some happy-pills of classic rock, shloch and other ephemera that might keep youse excited for the next five minutes, starting with uber-cult band 'The Sparks' a band who I always though were kinda queer and odd, until I had a good hard listen, but even better was finding my favourite track of theirs 'this town aint big enough for the both of us'..well..

..as well as ripping live performance by my favourite Pommy contemporary psych band..

And fuckaduck, they even had a fucken LAUGHING CLOWNS video, just top remind me how good AUSSIE POST-PUNK/NOWAVE/ARTROCK was at one stage..

..and the trailer to one of my favourite Spag-Westerns, Corbucci's kick-ass COMPANERO's starring Franco Nero, Thomas Milian and Jack Palance as a stoner!@$!

..arrrr fuggit, I can't help myself, being a kid of the music-video-age, i remember seeing this in many a late-nite-muzikvideo-marathon, the ultimate in 80s neon-cocaine-soft-pr0n dreck, Belois Somme's clip IMAGINATION.. Yo!

The ultimate anti-MOJO live DVD!!

2006-06-25T22:47:00.000+10:00

JANDEK - Glasgow Sunday the DVD

From the hand of Corwood Industries themself, I was informed:

"...3. We EXpect The DVD IN September, but it hAs beeN delAyed beFORe.." (Note: Case mismatches were part of the handwriting)

My order from Corwood Industries biggest advertiser, Forced Exposure Industries, is in the mail...you WILL be informed....

ZEN meditation

2006-06-24T23:55:00.000+10:00

I was fortunate enough to get one of these spizzy Mp3 player Walkman things. Being the non-conformist that I am, I didn't get an iDop, I mean iPod 1. Because the are still too expensive 2. Because every other fuckstick has one 3. Because the i-Tunes software is the clunkiest piece of bullshit software out 4. Because you can't readily port your device into many other computer, the iTunes software only works per individual machine..etc..etc..Anyway I got this Zen thing coz the sound quality is better, it's got an fm radio and it records so I can use it as a tape recorder. The iDop might have a better design, but I'm a person who prefers FUNCTION over design, any day. Anyway, the notion of buying tape recorded songs off the Internerd to play on this machine doesn't gel too well with me, because ultimately, I like to have some tactile information in my hands like recording notes, lyrics, photos etc,, you know some sort of ARTIFACT. Basically I rip CD's off my own collection, and steal the odd track or twenty off SoulSeek and if I LOVE the music enough, I'll buy the CD and add it to my REAL collection..Anysway, I'm gunna post from time to time random ZEN JUKEBOX top 10s, see what ghosts pop outta the machine, like:

Public Image Limited - Religion2 - not as 'out there' nor 'extreme' as I thought. At least Lydon still sings like a punk BEFORE he went to jail.
Buffalo - Sunrise (Come my way) - Aussie re-issue label Aztec Records finally gave theses 'legendary' lost Aussie stoner rock classics the red-carpet treatment. This plods nicely. Sounds a bit like the Cosmic Psychos, Black Sabbath and maybe Blue Cheer. Only problem is the singer sounds kinda Christian.
Le Sun Ra and his Arkestra - medicine for a Nightmare - nice finger popping be-bop jazz from the late Mr.Ra, offa his 'Singles Collection' which I initially ignored thinking it was too straight. What a fucken idiot I was!
Chrome - All Data lost - The great thing about the Zen Vision is that it has enabled me to listen to music I haven't listened to in year. And it sounds fresher, even better now to my ears. Chrome must figger as one of the ultimate post-punk bands. I wonder if this stuff has dated better than the Butthole Surfers?
Jack Nitzsche - Marie - Off the Rhino-handmade '3 piece suite' CD thats outta print. This is really, really nice West-Coast symphonic pop or transcendent pop for better more learned words. Kinda like a rawer, more down to earth version of the Beach Boys.
Arik Einstein - Hayo Haya - this is something I stole off the Internerd. Israeli psychadelic pop, made sometime between the 6-Day and Yom Kippur war. It sounds Manfred Mann or something.
John Lennon - Nobody told me - I remember this being a MASSIVE posthumous hit in the early 80s. The guitar sound reminded me of all those British power-pop bands of the time, esp. The Pretenders, did they rip him off?
Leonard Cohen - Night comes On - This is off one of those budget Sony 'the essential' series. Sounds like something he did in the 80s. Great lyrics as always, but next...
Derrick May - Wiggin (the remix) - Detroit tegno from the late 80s. Sounds a bit dated, but the thing I like about this stuff is the almost naive approach these guys had to using shitty 80s Roland and Korg synth instruments.
Dragonforce - Through the fire and the flames - ultra-nerd neo-80s Dungeon & Dragons metal. Like Iron Maiden played at 45. Designed to drive you totally meshiger and make you laugh so hard you'll spray beer from nose (thx Ian Jane of DVDManiacs for that line!)

The Velvets Influence

2006-06-18T09:47:00.000+10:00

Gerard Malanga in the E.P.I

..while John Cale looks on..??!!

I just watched Mario Bava's rare psychedelic/psychological/(bi)sex? comedy FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, released by Italian-cult DVD label Raro, who also released that fantastic Velvet Underground/Vinyl DVD. Blog/Black2Comm maestro Chris Stigliano has a great theory about the 'Velvets Influence' on pretty much everything thats' worthy in modern rock music from the Stones to Alice Cooper, New Yawk ponk, heavy metal, Krautrock - EVERYTHING (except maybe hiphop and disco, though there have been acid-house/mash-up covers of HEROIN and VENUS IN FURS, and Edan the white-rapper has used scungy neo-Velvets type sample in his blunted rap, and you could argue 'Waiting for my man' and 'white light/whiteheat' as being floor numbers, and 'The Murder Mystery' and 'All tommorows parties' thump as beinf rap-like, but hey, didn't Lou brag about being 'The Original Rapper' in the 80s.!@#$!#$)..
Anyway it's interesting to note amongst cult-cinema aficionados that MARIO BAVA can be likened to the Velvet Underground in terms of his own influence on the modern-cult type cinema, especially all the Italian giallos, splatter horror films, and well beyond, made even more pertinent as Bava worked in may different genres (tho' not sure he did a Western, but I may be wrong..ANYWAY Tim Lucas of the VideoWatchdog has recently written a 10,000page BIBLE on Mario Bava, so everything will no doubt be explained there..But after watching FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, the (indiriect) VELVET UNDERGROUND INFLUENCE (or WARHOL for that matter) on BAVA (who might be perceived as the Velvet Underground of clut-cinema no less!!!_) could not be ignored to these eyes, especially in the scene where they go to that bar for unusual people, complete with an all-female garage band noodling away in the background! Trust me, you'll NEVER wanna look at that terrible I SHOT ADNY WARHOL flick after seeing this!

Frisky in Frisco.

2006-06-17T19:02:00.000+10:00

You reckon they could get Brad Pitt for the Charra-wood remake?

I’m repeating myself here, but I need to, to make this point. When it comes to the giallo, popular thinking immediately places Argento-Bava at the top of the pile, in much the same way the punk-think pleb puts the Velvet Underground or Stooges at the top of the musical pile. And sure these are MASSIVE cannons to fill, but like any well developed innerlectyool mind with a capacity beyond that of an inner-city-sharehouse-groopthink tank, there are just as valid, inspiring and FUN works to found outside the gucheral box. In the case of the giallo

The big problem with Fulci’s work is that too much of it is championed for its barf-bag extremist nature such as films ZOMBI2, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE BEYOND and NEW YORK RIPPER. As a result he has quite a big following amongst genetic-defective grunge-core self-flagellators and people who like watching ‘extreme shit cinema’. Still, Fulci’s cinematic career as a whole, rounds out as one of the most interesting in the Euro-cult world. It was tragedy in his personal life that would effect his work from the 70s on, but it would help create one of the most interesting and mind-bending career paths of any auteur in the modern-cinemah era this side of Roman Polanski. And that’s the big kicker, the fact that Fulci still hasn’t been given the ‘high brow’ kudos as a major European ‘auteur’.

But as in all GREAT ART time is the penultimate judge, and the clock and cultural payback has been very kind to the unsung ‘maestro’. Which leads me to my next ‘non Bava-Argento’ giallo you need to see…

NUMERO QUATRO : ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER (Una sull'altra, 1969)

Made at the arse-end of the swinging 60s, ‘One on top of the other’ doesn’t play like a ‘by the rules’ giallo. Sure there are black gloves and babes in there, but not much splatter and slashing for all you sick cnuts. In fact it plays more like a rip-off-type noir ala DOUBLE INDEMNITY, albeit with a trippy and swinging 60s edge. Popular Euro leading man Jean Sorrel plays George Demurrier (said De-moori-yay), a rich, but dodgy doctor based in a very frisky-Frisco, who has a nagging asthmatic wife and is having an affair on the side with a sexy photographer called Martha. So one night after a hot shtoop, wife happens to wind up dead, but to complicate matters she has left him a massive insurance payout. So all fingers are pointed in one direction…Then while trying to relax in an insanely fantastic strip joint, he becomes entranced by the mysterious stripper Monica Weston, played by the insanely hot Marisa Mell

(yep DANGER:DIABOLIKS’ partner in crime and quality time!), who just looks a little bit like his ex-wife..

Notice the black glove?

Can George prove his innocence? And who exactly ARE all these hot ladies screwing him and his mind? While it may not be a flat out giallo, Fulci’s ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER must rate as one of the seminal (literally, figuratively, and maybe physically for some!) ‘Erotic thrillers’ of the mod-era. Tapping into the late swinging-60s vibe, replete with a very burlesque Jazz-score, lotsa sexy-psych visuals and oodles and oodles of - as Joe Bob Briggs would say – garbonzas, ONE OPN TOP OF THE OTHER is top-shelf, classy cult-trash. But it’s Fulci’s clever twisty plot, his usage oh-so-fine visuals including the odd-jump cut, split-screens and some subtle rear-projections, that make this film more than the some of its parts. And despite some of the narky plot holes and clunky expositions, there is no doubt that Fulci was a fine narrative craftsman, especially in the last twenty minutes, where film gets kinda dark, without someone having to vomit up their entrails or get their eyeballs gouged out, or something similarly disgusting. Many Fulci experts rate the giallo he made after this one LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN – as his best, but I disagree. ONE ON TOP moves better and has a more ridiculous, but no less SATISFYING conclusion, and prolly works better than LIZARD as a whole. In many ways, the film can be seen as a precursor to that very popular American giallo of the 90s’ (also set in San Fran) BASIC INSTINCT, but really, would you rate Sharon Stone anywhere near Marissa Mell?

Soon to be used as an album cover by some shitty nu-punque act.

If you wanna see this film and can’t wait for the Anchor Bay Special Edition that was meant to appear late last year/early this year, you can buy a bootleg from Luminous Film Werks on the Internerd. It’s basically a video copy ported onto a DVD-R. But this film DESERVES the red-carpet treatment pretty soon…