Category: Musings

Mr strangelove – ed sikov. A new biography on the life of Peter Sellars that caught my eye one day in the Brunswick Street Bookshop. Sellars died quite a few years ago now but he’s still a fascinating character. Like many people I know him mostly from his Clouseau work but he was a prolific actor, starring in fifty or so movies throughout his life. The biography is very readable and constructs a view of Sellars as a troubled genius, creating amazing characters on screen but lacking much of his own character. Very good read at the start then tails off a bit at the end.

Post by Matt Hobbs

Adelaideeooo

Phew. Been a busy couple of days here in Adelaide so feeling pretty knackered. This is probably not being helped by being in a dorm again for the first time in aaaaaaages and dealing with other people’s sleeping noises and creaky beds. Last time I was in a dorm was slightly more fun back at the Nunnery for a night, where I learned the useful technique of hanging sheets to make a curtain (amongst other things). That aside the Cannon St Backbackers is pretty nice, and even lets you borrow DVDs to watch so saw Ice Age yesterday (sorry Dom, still think Monsters Inc is better).

Anyway, back to Adelaide itself…

Adelaide feels like many of the small towns I passed through back up the east coast in terms of size and layout. The main difference is that arts scene, pretty much everyone seems to be involved with it in some way or other. The town is pretty low down and spread out with the central business area being pretty compact and walkable. Most of the bars I’ve hung out in so far are around Light Square and Hindley Street, although today’s treat was Latze (meat and noodle soup) in the chinatown/market area to the south of the hostel with Lisa and Richard.

First evening was here went to the opening cinema show for the Fuse festival. Lots of music videos made for up and coming artists, some of which were outstanding. Then next door to Isobar for a few bands and beers, then onto the Grace Emily hotel to hang out with Holly and her mates a bit before heading back to the hostel to crash. Good fun, and lots of names to remember (or try to remember anyway given my general lack of ability in that area).

Yesterday wandered round the Adelaide museums and art galleries (as well as shops) before hitting the opening night Fuse gig at Garage. Hadn’t quite realised this was a guestlist only event but managed to wander in anyway (thanks guys!) to find it was a free booze do. Huzah! Few lovely bands and awards and vinos later found myself hanging out with some of the organisers who are a very luverly bunch indeed and mostly from Melbourne strangely enough. Quite fun to be at an ‘industry’ do for the first time in a while and managed to chat briefly to photographer Tony Mott and get some hints on portraiture (ta for that). Then staggered off to see Fruit – who are a great Adelaide five piece with awesome harmonies and an amazing lighting show. Well worth checking out if you get the chance. Ended up in bed around 1am completely exhausted. Good evening indeed…

Rainy days

Woo-ee! Another crazy Melbourne weather experience. All day it’s been bakingly hot to the level where I ran once round the park before almost collapsing, and then repeated the experience carrying my washing a few minutes down the road. The heat comes straight from the air into your lungs, sweet. Luckily our house has this great way of holding cool air in the southern part if you remember to keep the kitchen door closed. Yep, that is southern part of the house which threw me at first but then I remembered we’re in the southern hemisphere, so the sun’s in the north (duh).

Then tonight the heat was staying with us for a change. Normally it has been going really suddenly cold in the evenings as a sea breeze comes in which is pretty nice for sleeping. Was over at Vee and Dom’s (and now Matt and Denis’) for dinner watching this amazing lightning on the horizon from the 26th floor. Reminded me of the storms I sometimes used to see from the top of the world trade tower – they have the same clear line of sight well above city level. Awesome stuff. Except of course when you’re getting soaked by tropical rain on the way to the tram ‘cos you forgot your brolly. Oops.

Ah well. Off to Adelaide tomorrow to see Holly play in the Fuze festival and catch up with some other folk. Looong coach journey with an 8am start so I should probably be getting to bed. Bonsoir…

Hot in the city

Wow. Summer has, finally or yet again – guess we’ll find out soon, settled upon Melbourne. It’s heading towards 35 degrees today and not in a nice fluffy way. The heat bakes right through you and the breeze doesn’t cool but just brings more heat straight from an oven. Esh!

Yesterday the heat was slightly more sane – about 30 degrees, so I eventually managed to get myself down to St Kilda beach for some sun and swimming. Pretty busy even for a Friday and lots of local accents surprisingly – thought it would of been mostly travellers out at that time of day. Nice to be back down the beach, and even got myself in for a swim for a brief moment which just reminded me how cold the sea is round Melbourne! It’s not exactly the tropical warmth of the sea north of Byron Bay.. more like when you’ve (most likely drunkenly) decided that swimming in Brighton England is a good idea… Brrr.

In the evening we all hung around in St Kilda enjoying the balmy summer breeze on Ackland Street. This turned out to be disturbingly like being back travelling up north again – with the palm trees, open bars, warm weather and thousands of drunk people wandering up and down the street looking for the next bar to slake their thirst in. Oh no wait, that was us! Very strange feeling to be back amongst that again after so long away from it.

Oh, and also bumped into an old friend from England and her boyfriend next to Luna Park! Very strange coincidence indeed as she now lives out of Melbourne. What made it even stranger was that just before I bumped into her I thought I saw someone else I knew from ages ago but wasn’t sure it was her, so I was actually thinking about how cool it would have been to bump into her when I bumped straight into someone else. How weird is that? Ooooo….

A little birdy told me

Ouch. Another painful sunday morning… Ah well, sometimes you pay for a good night out!

Last night’s exploits were sited at the Corner Hotel where the up and coming band Little Birdy were headlining. The corner hotel is a great venue, I suspect I will be going down there again even though it’s a little bit south of the river for my North Fitzroy tastes. Little Birdy weren’t that great, the lead singer has an amazing voice and great presence but the band seem to let her down a bit. My favourite band was the second support, Dan Kelly and the Alpha Males, who played a sort of countrified/Nick Drake/Blur blend of ‘slop-rock’ as my new chum Chris described them. The lead singer is completely laid back, looking a bit like my mate Gubby strangely enough, but has an amazing understated voice and some stunning songs – check them out if you get a chance.

What really made last night wasn’t the music though but a few other things. First off we made some new friends – Holly and Chris, both from Adelaide (now Melbin) and both band folk – with whom we happily propped up the bar (hence the head pain this morning) and chatted away as the bangs played. Looking forward to seeing both of them play soon.

The next high point of the evening was bumping into an old friend from one of my Surfari trips – Karen! This was highly surprising as I thought she was living in Sydney, so when I first saw her I just assumed it was someone who looked like her. Transpires she’s moved to Tasmania now but was back in Melbourne visiting her new boy who she’d met in Tassie – in fact she was only here for a few days so that definately rates high on the random coincidence-ometer. Luverly to see her again though. In fact had another random bumpage later when walked past Irish Ruth on the streets nicely tanked up post-Irish defeat by one point to Aus. Guess Melbourne’s getting smaller all the time.

On a more techy note – Chris pointed me towards his nephew’s website (JibJib) which is very nice indeed. What I particularly noticed on JibJub aside from the cool Flash stuff was a link to GeoURL, this is a site where you can register the longitude and latitude of your website and then find out sites that are ‘near’ yours in the real world. This is very cool indeed so I’ve put this site on it (thanks to MultiMap for the lat/lon stuff). You can click the new link at the bottom of the page to see which sites are near mine.

Attack of the brain worms

La la la.. la la la lah la… I can’t get you out of my head… Yep, it’s those Kylie moments again when you can’t concentrate due to some song or other swimming around in there and distracting you. Dom explained the other day that there’s a German word for these type of songs – ‘ohrwurm’ (meaning ‘ear worm’) – and now the beeb has picked up on it as well.

Of course the most important tactic to remember if attacked by an unwanted ohrwurm is to try and sing another one that you don’t mind hearing so much. They have vaguely cannibalistic tendancies and tend to eat their own kind – as shown by the Kylie versus New Order remix…

Rainy days

Well after a few on and off extremely nice and sunny days Melbourne’s gone back to being grey, cold and rainy again. Grrr.. Was quite enjoying the sun last weekend! Luckily not as bad as South Queensland where golfball sized hailstones were causing havoc so glad I missed that one.

Great weekend though. We finally got round to the big night out that t’other Matt has been threatening for over a month now. Went down to Honky Tonks – another back alley bar in classic Melbourne town centre stylee. Music was pretty good but a bit too Saturday night mainstream crowd for my tastes – luckily the sambuca helped gloss that one over for a while.

After the clocks had changed, and a quick 4.30am Hungry Jacks (the Aussie name for Burger King) we wandered off to a party just north of my house where Charlie and Michelle were celebrating getting engaged. Charlie’s a British lad currently ex-patriating and we bonded over a love of esoteric British techno (Eat Static and the like who he actually knows). At which point the sun came up and bed started to call… so wandered off home.

Sunday was looking to be peaceful and restful – but luckily Mos and Brock came to the rescue with a barbecue down in St Kilda. This turned out to be at their mate’s dad’s place. Great views of the seafront where a small gale was propelling windsurfers along at vast speeds, plus great food and combination so a good chill out day. Topped it all off with a re-watching of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Smashing. Strange to watch that again after so long – realised that most of the music is in fact a direct rip off from Star Wars.. interesting emotional resonance.

Now it’s back to the life of a code monkey.. Tripsta’s taking a bit longer than anticipated and I’m getting a bit code-shocked now. Not to mention the toll on my poor wrists! Almost there now for first launch and then I can take a well deserved break – huzah! Hard to convince people that building something off your own back where you’re not paid is ‘work’ though even when I’m pulling longer hours than them…

Slash. Slash. Thud.

Been a fairly busy week considering I had nothing planned a few days ago. Managed to score some free tickets to see a preview of Kill Bill Vol.1 the other day which was awesome (I’ve got a review up on epinions). The weather’s been veering between warm and sunny (yay) and amazing torrential deluges (including hail) so I’ve actually been out running for a change.

Best thing is that the Melbourne Arts Festival is currently on, themed around dance. There are so many events going on, many of which are free, that you can’t really get bored. Every night at 6pm in Federation Square (the new square in town) they teach different dance moves. Last night was hip hop, with basic body popping and 3-step patterns and freezes – where you ‘lie’ just off the ground supporting yourself on your elbow wedged into your hip. They made it look incredibly easy of course when it’s actually pretty hard – kind of like an dance version of the harder yoga moves. Amazing to watch though. Melbournians love hip hop and the crowds were out in force. This was followed by watching Beat Street, an 80s movie about New York hip hop then onto see TZU, a local hip hop band where the local possee was out in force. Good fun.

Vividesque (43 points on triple word score)

Wow – what a fun concert. Not as much fun as wandering around Glasto by a long way but Melbourne venues are really well set up and organised. No real trouble and the only time I couldn’t get in somewhere was when I was about a minute too late to get onto the floor at Jurassic (I’d been sitting down recovering from bouncing too much at Lamb). Energy levels were pretty low though after partying till 5 night before – very hungover (twice)…ouchie.

The final line-up I saw out of the many bands to choose from (in order):

  • Pacifier – mainstream rock. Spent most of my time looking round the Rod Laver arena which is HUGE. Has one of those slidey roofs which was quite surreal to see a shaft of light coming in. Prince is playing here in a bit but he’s already sold out.
  • Hellacopters – shite, unoriginal 70s/mosh rock. Crowd was pretty unimpressed.
  • Resin Dogs – good hip hop stylins. Amusing video and whole room was bouncing. Think they might be more local band so had a big following. Hip hop is generally very popular in Melbourne with a big local scene.
  • Har Mar Superstar – very funny if a smidge misogynistic. He got a bit snitty when his radio mike died on him but did a great bit where he ran all the way into the crowd in his ‘I’m the greatest’ hand made vest top. His dancing girls are called the ‘Town Bikes’ and do this kind of bad ‘erotic’ dancing. Whole crowd was laughing.
  • Lamb – SO good as always. Went right to the front for this one. Show hadn’t really changed much from when I saw them at Brixton Academy and was another really ecstatically enjoyable gig. Mostly songs from new album but a couple of classics that the crowd went mad for. Andrew the keyboard guy’s brother was in the crowd which was funny. Very buzzed after that one..
  • Jurassic 5 – Another wow. Was pretty exhausted from Lamb so sat down for a bit and missed getting on the main floor (arse) but had a great time. They mostly did Power in Numbers stuff and a few Quality Control bits but no Lesson 6 (shame). Great show though. They’re very playful on stage and get the audience really going. Then the DJs had their own turns and they were stunning plus some little sampler drum track stuff. Ended up with them all playing those plastic tubes you spin round that make the ‘woooo-ooo’ noise. Weird bit was they flipped out at some guy in the crowd who had a noose or something (probably waiting for Linkin Park) but went right down into the crowd to have a go at him being disrespectful and threatening to ‘beat him and his homeboy’. Sad really – everyone else was really into it big style, whole arena was going off.
  • Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – was sitting at back on floor for this in half empty arena. Much more mellow and chilled out than I expected, really nice. Shame I missed them with Primal Scream last year.
  • The White Stripes – Crazy stuff. They have so much energy for two people one of whom is just sitting on a drum seat. The whole set is just sex in rock form. Their interplay is just so charged and the way they have the mikes set up round the drum kit just looks like they’re shagging. This was aided by Jack hanging right out, which you could see from 50m back so those groupies must be sore, and Meg for all the world looking like she wasn’t wearing a bra and bouncing up and down as she played the drums as if she was straddled across them/him. Phew! Heady stuff indeed. Jack’s voice is amazing and the instrument playing – so simple and they fuck up all over the shop but it so doesn’t matter as they know each other so well they just pull it together and make it part of their charm. You can hear all his influences in the guitar playing, blended together to create this new rock melange. Wow. Wish I’d had more energy to push forward a bit more.

Also watched some skating and some MC mike-offs. Quite a bit of random fighting in the crowds near the front which the security guards seemed to completely ignore although Lamb had a ‘go’ about it (“we’re about peace not fighting – we’re all one person”). Yay, go hippies! A great day out.