Saturday, 28th of October, 2000

One of my favourite comics writers/artists is Chris Ware, author of Fantagraphics‘ ACME Novelty Library. Recently Pantheon released a hardcover copy of the Jimmy Corrigan novel, and if you have a Flash plugin, I strongly recommend checking out the hilarious and twisted Map of Jimmy’s family history at the Pantheon site, designed of course by Ware himself.

Thursday, 26th of October, 2000

Readers of this blog will be familiar, at least through me, with the work of the fantastic comics writer Eddie Campbell. As of last weekend, many more people will be familiar with him, as there was a glowing article on him on the first two-page spread of the Australian’s Review section.

Well, in a bid to be the stupidest people in the world, Aussie Customs up in Perth, on that very day, decided to ban all copies of From Hell (the utterly brilliant graphic novel about the times and circumstances of the Jack the Ripper murders, by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie) from entering the country. The reason? There is one scene (one of few actually graphic scenes in the book, which is entirely black & white) in which a breast is cut off a (dead) woman’s body. No matter that this is an established fact, nor that Moore & Campbell depict it as occuring during, basically, a doctor’s autopsy.
Ah well, Australia eh? Wouldn’t have thought, but then again… look who’s in government.
Let’s hope it all settles quickly enough and all Australians can have the opportunity of buying this truly great work of literature, in any medium, in the shops again.

Go to the Eddie Campbell Comics website to read the latest updates and send words of encouragement.

Wednesday, 25th of October, 2000

Danny Yee is an Aussie who’s quite famous on the net for his prodigious number of online book reviews. He writes very well, and covers a lot of topics I’m interested in, so I enjoy checking out his site.

Most notably earlier today I found a review he did of a Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. He echoes pretty well my own views on postmodernism and cultural/critical theory… I think he goes too easy on Foucault and probably Edward Said, but he’s got plenty of good arguments about what’s wrong with critical theory as philosophy.
Ooooh, Petey’s being contentious. Yeah well… I stand by my opinions. Write to me if you want to tell me what a political incorrect believer-in-an-objective-world I am!

Tuesday, 24th of October, 2000

Sydney band of the moment: Waikiki have just put out their debut EP Presents… - sweet guitar-pop with gorgeous female vocals… Strings on one track courtesy of Lara and me, although too late to credit us on the CD (the horror!)

They’re launching it at the Hopetoun in Surry Hills (Sydney) on Saturday night, and Lara and I will be there, playing our parts ;) They’re lovely and will go everywhere from gentle indie pop to raucous snarling guitars… Well worth dropping by for!

Sunday, 22nd of October, 2000

Today, you are commanded to go and read a very amusing and moving article by Michael Chabon, American comics writer. “Useful Expressions” it’s called. You don’t have to be Jewish, but it chyelps.

And here’s Richard Dawkins on the supposed convergence of science and religion. Sure to be inflammatory. Needless to say, I agree with him entirely (even though I don’t think his reasoning or expression is always as good as could be) - those who think that science and religion can be reconciled are talking bollocks.

Thursday, 19th of October, 2000

Science-fiction tends to be dominated by in fandom and in authoring by males. So today I’m featuring two first-rate science-fiction authors who happen to be female.
First is Kathleen Ann Goonan, who I rave about on other parts of this page… Her fiction is beautifully-written (perhaps more “literary” in style than much science-fiction) - in the nanotech series she describes a quite surreal (or hyperreal) world radically altered by nanotechnology; but as they proceed we discover that everything that might seem mysterious or even supernatural is unfailingly underpinned with a scientific basis (whether current science or extrapolations). So this is hard science-fiction.
The Bones of Time, a near-future novel not part of her nanotech world, also contains some mind-bending ideas, here about time-travel (she makes clever use of Roger Penrose’s quantum-theory of consciousness, which is a great plot point even though I think Penrose’s quantum consciousness stuff is bollocks), as well as a beautiful cross-centuries love story.
The website contains some great articles by Goonan, as well as links to some of her short fiction that can be found online.

The second author is Linda Nagata. I’ve read very little of Nagata’s work as yet; again it’s hard science-fiction, again well-written with many thought-provoking ideas about nanotech and consciousness… Unfortunately three of her four novels seem to be out of print, and all are very hard to find in Australia. The website is worth checking out at least.

Happy Birthday Mark! Mark, along with Kenny from Elefant Traks (fabbo Sydney electronica label) and some other mates of mine are having a multiple-25th-birthday party on Saturday - their fantastic web-based invitiation-website which Mark designed can be found here.

Mark also records innovative electronic music (computer-processing of his guitar sounds and other stuff) as Mysta - go check it out! He’s yet another person working on a FourPlay remix.

Wednesday, 18th of October, 2000

Sad news - Aboriginal leader Charles Perkins died today, after a three-month illness.

Here is a highly amusing cutting from an overseas newspaper…

And FourPlay are still in the Association of Indendent Record Labels (AIR) charts - both Albums Released on Independent Labels and Albums Released on Independent Labels through an Independent Distributor. Good to see people are still buying our stuff! Thanks, cobbers.

Monday, 16th of October, 2000

Courtesy of my Melbourne friends over at Grouse!, we have Experimental Penguins. Certainly the silliest chat room concept ever, but strangely compelling. You waddle around in a Flash environment, chatting to the other penguins there. I’d like more objects in the environment, that one could perhaps interact with…
Still fails to keep me interested very long - I think I lost my interest in chat rooms after about 1/2 a year of IRC-ing back in 1992 when I started uni.

Once again I must exhort you all to look at some comics. This time there’s heaps of them up on the web to browse through…
Please immediately point your browsers to Tony Millionaire’s website. Click on “Weekly Maakies archive” and start making your way through some of the funniest comics currently being made! Then once you get through them all, you can go and buy his books - the Sock Monkey collection from Dark Horse and the Maakies collection from legendary comics publishers Fantagraphics.

Sunday, 15th of October, 2000

I’m just back from a concert by the Australia Ensemble - their last subscription concert of the year. I’m so used to going to rock gigs and dance parties/clubs these days that I almost wrote “back from an Australia Ensemble gig”. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.
The first piece was Beethoven’s Septet, written in 1800. The second was Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1900. Getting the picture?
Well, I’m not what one would call a bit Beethoven fan; he bores me to tears generally, whilst simultaneously beating me over the head with an anvil… *ahem* So I continued to read the utterly brilliant Crescent City Rhapsody by Kathleen Ann Goonan, as discreetly as I could.
Schönberg? Well it all depends; I acknowledge that Verklärte Nacht is a very important piece of music. And the first page or so is utterly and pristinely beautiful. After that he goes all Wagnerian-late-romantic and I can’t stand the fucking thing, it gives me a headache.
My favourite 1900 composition is Mahler’s 4th Symphony - but then Mahler is just the greatest, in my oh-so-humble opinion…

The last piece, written in 2000, was a new commission by the wonderful and delightful Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith called fin/début. Commissioned, obviously, to represent in some way the turn of the millenium, the piece combined M W-S’s usual humour and cleverness with a beautiful maturity that really impressed and moved the listeners (at least those with open enough minds). The last movement was multi-media, with a CD-ROM playing a beautifully vocodered computer voice and animated text on a screen behind the players; there was frequent quotation from both the previous works among many others…

As well as being a fantastic composer (one of my favourite Australian composers, along with Nigel Westlake) and a pioneer of computer music in Australia (he was using Fairlight synthesisers - really early digital sampling musical instruments - way back in the ’70s, and founded the seminal computer music/audio-visual group watt in 1976), Martin is a tireless campaigner for a free East Timor. He and his two brothers (Peter, a lawyer and law scholar who writes or co-writes dazzlingly witty, clever and poignant librettos for Michael, and Rob, a political activist and agricultural scientist) have been involved with human rights campaigning in East Timor since the mid-’70s, well before it had any mainstream media attention; they also direct their considerable talents and energy to environmental causes and other human rights issues.

After the concert I was chatting to Jed Wesley-Smith, Martin’s son, who I know from his days playing bass in legendary Sydney band The Strange - their singer Tim Hall sang and played guitar in the Whitlams for a while (Eternal Nightcap era - you know the Tangled Up In Blue cover? That’s Timmy singing), and their drummer Joe Accaria has played with, well, just about everybody… Tim’s latest project, with Ian Shadwell from Cactus Child, is an insanely electro pop thing called Shakra Diva. Look out for them soon (now?!) with FourPlay playing strings of course.
Jed’s not playing much these days as he’s got two kiddies to bring up.

Totally legendary family. Go check out Martin’s webpages and buy his CDs!

Saturday, 14th of October, 2000

Well, those idiots in the Middle East are getting closer to all-out war. It’s not, to me, about Jews and Muslims, Israel and Palestine, or anything any more. It’s just a whole bunch of fucking idiots with no idea what it really means to be human.
Go on, blow yourselves up.
It’s just a shame there’s so many people there who don’t deserve to go with them…

The inimitable Graham says read this. I did, and now I’m telling you to. It’s a beautifully written piece, and I think you should go and read it and be moved.
Yesterday Graham commented on my Clouds posting, musing that

(At this point it seems as if Peter is just a better version of me, so perhaps I should kill myself and let the resources I would consume be used for a better purpose. On the other hand, redundancy can be a good thing. Umm. I don’t believe what I just wrote.)

Silly boy. Graham’s web-design skills are unrivalled - everybody should immediately hire him for their corporate image. And he’s eloquent and very very funny. Oh yes, and a complete phrootloop.
Look out for his brilliantly insane drum’n'bass remix of the FourPlay track Corrosion on the up-and-coming FourPlay remix project. He managed to beat me to the post on that one (I would’ve done something very similar…) - and did a fantastic job of it too.
He’s calling himself Antlerland these days, the long-running Kul Teng Funk Overdose having been rejected due to similarity with the Ku-Ling Brothers (even though Graham’s music is much better *grin*). The mp3.com page is still Kul Teng though - don’t be confused.

Thursday, 12th of October, 2000

The excellent Adelaide-based experimental electronic musician Tim Koch (previously known as Thug) has put some real-audio listening for y’all.

So go listen already! Open your mind.
Note - the server’s not set correctly, so in Netscape you have to right-click and save the files to disk. It should work in Internet Exploder, but as if you’d want to use that second-rate piece of crap… *grin*

Tim is one of the many fantastic electronic artists we have involved in the FourPlay remix project - to be released as probably a double-CD in January or so… Perhaps limited vinyl too, and other interesting formats. More info soon…

Australian band of the day: The Clouds.
OK so I admit they’re my favourite Australian band ever. Not that there aren’t heaps more excellent ones… They had a very big effect on me from their first EP in 1990 right up till now. Basically indie pop - two female vocalists, Jodi Phillis and Tricia Young, who wrote the songs and sang divine harmonies… Comparisons were drawn to The Pixies (another of my fave bands!), who were undoubtedly an influence, but there was much more to them - gentle guitar ballads, bizarre chords changes and harmonies (although I guess that was a bit of a Pixies trademark too)…
Jodi released a solo project as Lounge-O-Sound, and then formed the Dearhunters with Tim Oxley from the Verys (that Oxley family are ubiquitous in the Sydney music scene), Greg Hitchcock from You Am I and the last Clouds drummer Raff Whittingham.

Earlier this year FourPlay got to play strings on some tracks for Jodi’s solo album, pretty exciting for this little duck. The new solo album won’t be out for a little while, but the new songs are as wonderful as ever. I consider to be one of Australia’s finest songwriters, along with David Bridie (all the way back with Not Drowning, Waving through My Friend the Chocolate Cake to his new solo career), Nick Cave (is he really Australian any more?), the sadly deceased David McComb of the Triffids…
I’ll shut up now.

Gotta keep adding entries every day, so those goshdarned enormous fucking Tour Diary ones disappear! Slowly pushing them into archive-land… but gosh it’s slow! Only three more days of posts now… *scream*

Since I mentioned Neil Gaiman yesterday, I thought today I’d link to a couple of other great comics creators. For now, two from the very top.

First is Alan Moore. He’s just the greatest… His comics, of which there are an enormous number (he writes, but doesn’t draw (much)), are inevitably incredibly clever, but also frequently very moving and/or funny.
He’s the author of Watchmen, a legendary graphic novel in comics circles. It’s about a world in which superheros exist, but are just humans. It explores the politics of vigilantism and interpersonal relationships… It’s one of the most multi-layered works in any medium, unbelievably and engrossingly clever, yet amongst all the detailed structure, the characters are beautifully rendered, with moving and believable relationships.
He also wrote the anarchist parable V for Vendetta, and another of the greatest graphic novels ever written, From Hell. From Hell is superficially about the Jack the Ripper murders, but is much more - a detailed account of life in Victorian London, Masonic mysticism, the beginnings of modern journalistic excesses and much more. The detail of research is immense, and it rivals Watchmen for structure, relationships and… well, everything.
From Hell was drawn by my second choice for today…

Eddie Campbell. Eddie is a Scot, living these days in sunny Brisbane, Australia. I’ve had the great fortune to meet him a few times; he’s come to FourPlay gigs and his family enjoy our CDs
As well as collaborating with Alan Moore on From Hell, Eddie has also collaborated with Neil Gaiman and many others…
On his own, with some help from local Brisbane types (such as the fabbo Dee Vee crowd) written a long saga, frequently very funny, often educational and moving, called Bacchus - about that god of wine.
Even more notable for me are his various autobiographical Alec comics. He’s now self-publishing as Eddie Campbell Comics and Alec - The King Canute Crowd, the wonderful Graffiti Kitchen, The Dance of Lifey Death and his ongoing Bacchus comic (which these days involves new autobio stuff, reprints of old old stuff of his, and whatever else he wants to put in, including contributions from aforementioned Other Aussies), and much more (including From Hell) are all available from the website, as well as at your favourite comics shop.
He’s a legend and if you’re into comics you oughta check him out.

Wednesday, 11th of October, 2000

At http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/, if you click on Past Guest Authors you can find a forum-style chat with legendary comics author Neil Gaiman from earlier this year - it’s still running now in fact, with Neil participating!
If you’re interested in the guy (and he comes recommended from me - not just excellent comics, but short stories, novels, and on and on), this is the start of the discussion (you can also get there by typing 0-20 into the “jump to response” box)… It’s verrrrrry long though, so good luck to you!
Thanks to Chris for this link.

You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve updated the left-hand column! The current reading and listening info is actually up-to-date! Get reading, and follow those links kids!

Courtesy of acb (whose FourPlay remix is sounding spiffy so far!), a review of Kid A? Or rather, a pre-review, and since no preview copies were released, they made it up anyway.
Well, I laughed…

More music stuff. Check out the Oz Music Project, probably the biggest Australian music resource… Slightly annoying that you can’t search very easily, but not a bad site.

I feel like promoting three magazines I really enjoy reading.
First is the unparalleled ruler of music magazine’s, UK’s The Wire. Providing reviews, news, interviews and articles on all sorts of more fringe music, from drum’n'bass and electronica to experimental and avant-garde, contemporary classical, jazz and world… it’s all there. It’s infuriating that most of it can’t be found in one’s local shops at least in Sydney (and anywhere really other than London and New York and a few other places). However, Melbourne has the entirely wonderful Synaesthesia, both a boutique-style real-world shop and an internet mail-order store. And Mark’s a real sweetie.

Secondly, sticking with music for a bit, there’s the sporadically published Grooves Magazine. “Experimental electronics” is its tagline, and it covers all things idm (the “Intelligent Dance Music” email list) - in fact many of the writers are on the idm list. The reviews are well-written and there’s articles and interviews with many of the central people in the scene. It’s great to see how the production quality of each issue has improved. At isse #4 now, it’s beautifully presented, nicely bound with a lovely smooth cover, and well-designed.

My third choice is the greatest science-fiction magazine in the world, UK’s Interzone. Each month there’s excellent new short stories by some of the best people in the genre (and outside it) - people like my favourite Greg Egan, Paul J McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Simon Ings, Brain Stableford, John Meaney and many others… There’s also heaps of reviews, an extensive new release list, a frequently hilarious film criticism column… I only managed to finally find some copies whilst in the UK this year, but wolfed them down voraciously and am now a subscriber.

While on the topic, Eidolon is a fantastic Australian science-fiction magazine, and eidolon.net is a tremendously useful resource, with basically all the backissues online, as well as frequently updated Australia science-fiction news and plenty of resources.

And finally, infinity plus contains a seemingly-infinite quantity of science-fiction short stories and novellas by many of the authors mentioned above and more, plus interviews and articles as well.

Some musings on world news…

Whilst the Middle East and Israel seem to be imploding at the moment (see Indymedia, especially the new Israel server, and the current World News section of Sydney Morning Herald), I’ve recently had my attention drawn to some interesting facts about Edward Said, ouspoken Palestinian critic. Justus Reid Weiner’s Commentary Magazine article from September 1999 revealed that much of what he’d said about his past - growing up in Palestine, becoming a refugee in 1948 and so on - is in fact false. He was born there, relatively accidentally, and had an aunt an cousins living there, but was brought up in Cairo much earlier than he had previously admitted…

I’m not sure what to make of this. As a Jew who believes that a Jewish state is necessary because the diaspora is the single greatest cause of anti-semitism for the Jewish people (having been, for almost 2000 years, outsiders in every part of the world), I have to consider myself weakly a Zionist.
Nevertheless, the formation of Israel occurred in such a way as to make disposessed a large number of non-Jews, and the actions of the state of Israel, whether in its treatment of Palestinians, its occupation of various territories, bombing of civilians in Lebanon, supplying of arms to South American drug barons and so on are entirely deplorable.
What’s a Jew to do? Even an atheist Jew like me feels some sort of at least implied responsibility. I know, I’m a Jew, not an Israeli. Still, it’s difficult.
It should be added that the USA is even more involved in insidious arms trade (they set up Saddam Hussein after all), and most other world powers “on our side” as well as the other side(s) are responsible for plenty of atrocities. And it’s not like I believe Palestinian or any other terrorist activity is ever justifiable.

It’s waaaaay complex. In meantime, from sources like Indymedia, which I only just discovered, but from alternative current affairs on 2SER Radio in Sydney and so on, and from related readings on the new I discovered Edward Said a little while ago. He’s a Palestinian supporter, but his more recent writings have seemed to be quite balanced (maybe); and although he uses the language of critical/cultural theory which I find usually deeply misled/misleading, unreasonable/unreasoned and so on (without wanting to get into too much of a rant about postmodernism, “theory”, etc), I found him to be seemingly fairly reasonable/rational, and not leaning towards the imcomprehensible as so many suchlike “thinkers” tend to - I could even take the obsession with everything being “storytelling” (All is Text! - what crap…)
So it only makes it more complex to see how blithely he’s re-written his own personal history to aid his political needs - I’m a refugee, look how cultured a life we led before the Israeli genocide etc… He seems, in his recent autobiography Out of Place, to have re-re-written his childhood to conform more with the truth, but no mention is made of the discrepancies with earlier descriptions.
In addition, of course the accounts linked to above are written by Jewish commentators (or at least Justus Reid Weiner is Jewish)… So, who do we believe? Either we stick to believing who we’re comfortable believing, or we try to work out who’s got the better proof, who seems more reasonable, who seems closer to the facts as we think we know them…
ah goshdarnit…

Ah well, there’s no objective world anyway is there? It’s all text, free to be re-written and re-interpreted, deconstructed to the nth degree…
Crappity-crap. Thanks for listening.

Thursday, 5th of October, 2000

So. I still haven’t updated the current listening and reading columns. This is because I am a Lazy Boy™. Perhaps by the end of the day I will have done so!

Go check out some aleatoric insanity from John Cage at Indeterminacy.
Check out the FourPlay webpage, now with web counter, just like this blog! and updated gig guide.

Some of you may remember an independent movie called Pi that came out a couple of years ago. Directed by first-time director Daniel Aronofsky, soundtrack by Clint Mansell, from the greatest band ever, Pop Will Eat Itself.
Well, coming up soon is the second movie by Aronofsky, and once again Clint Poppie has done the music, with Kronos Quartet playing string parts - sounds fantastic!
Whether or not any of the above sounds familiar at all, I recommend one and all to check out the movie’s website, Requiem For a Dream. I have to warn you that it’s all Flash, but that said, it’s the most innovative, amusing, intriguing and clever website I’ve seen in a while. There’s so many layers there for a flash site, it’s incredible. Let’s hope the movie is half as cool!

Monday, 2nd of October, 2000

This weekend, from Thursday until next Monday, Newcastle is going to be the place to be, for TINA, the This Is Not Art festival.
It involves five festivals all happening at one time - Electrofringe (electronic music and media festival), Student Media Conference, Independent Radio Conference, National Young Writers Festival and National Independent Electronic Labels Conference.

I’m going to try and be up there for a couple of days of it, although it’s quite tempting to be back in Sydney to see the Avalanches supported by DJ Dexta (second-best turntablist in the world according to the recent DMC competition) at the Newtown RSL. This will be competing in my mind pretty strongly with Sqijital at Electrofringe, a four-room extravaganza that looks like it could rival Freaky Loops, with an excellent line-up of artists. At least I can be at Bassik Frequency on Friday night.

Looking forward to it! Drop me a line if you’re going to be there.

Yeah yeah I know. It’s been fucken ages. I’m sorry ok! In a day or so I shall clear this Tour Diary nonsense off the blog and put it on its own page, where I shall complete it and you can read it properly in order.

In the meantime, back to business as usual!
Got back to Australia a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been settling in, and doing quite a bit of session work for people including Friendly (nice Sydney electronica) and Tooth (good friends Shane (Sir) Robbo and Kevin Purdy’s fantastic electronica duo). Been seeing old friends, getting re-acquainted with Sydney, etc. The Olympics managed not to be too crap, Sydney was amazingly clean, everyone was well-behaved (hmm); we had great audiences at our three FourPlay gigs in Martin Place… It was fun.
On the other hand, they shipped out all the homeless people for the duration (who us?), and generally just swept everything under the carpet, so no doubt it’ll be business as usual again soon.

In the meantime down in Melbourne they had the S11 protests, one of the most successful protests in the world against capitalism and free trade. If I hadn’t just gotten back I would’ve been down there with them.

Readers will be pleased to know that I am an Experimenter (Dominant Introvery Abstract Thinker, along with only 4% of the population) according to the Spark’s “Famous Personality Test”. It’s just as much bollocks as all the other personality tests, whether Meyer-Briggs, Keirsey or whatever else. But it has a sense of humour, and came the closest to anything like me that any of them have. Every time I do the Keirsey test I come up with a different (just as inappropriate) result. It’s such bullshit *grin*

Well, glad to be back with you, hope you haven’t pined away too much in my absence. I’ll try and get the damn Tour Diary finished soon, with pretty holiday snaps scanned in and suchlike. In the meantime, I’m back to stumbling in the dark…
(Apparently “stumblings in the dark” may be a reference to some sortof Christian esoterica - don’t worry, I’m still as much of an atheist Jew as ever!)