Friday, 24th of November, 2000

Readers may be interested to know my Geek Code.

Tuesday, 21st of November, 2000

Sorry about my absence. Partially due to Blogger going all weird, partially due to me being very busy, what with going to Melbourne this Friday, having played at the (fantastic) JuJu Space Jazz CD launch last Friday at the Metro in Sydney, and various other things. Life’s busy, but that’s how we like it!

New music in the Listening section, new books in the Reading section, life’s exciting! That’s certainly how we like it. Remember, read down the page because you haven’t seen the previous post yet either!

Friday, 17th of November, 2000

OK, so I’m embarrassed, I haven’t posted since Sunday! Sorry all you fans out there (where?), I’ve been busy ok? And I’m only getting busier this next week or two. FourPlay are touring to Melbourne in a week, and I can’t wait; love that city. Will be visiting all my favourite places of course, including Synaesthesia, one of the best record stores on the planet… Collector’s Corner on Swanston St are fantastic too. While we’re at it, Slow Glass Books are just what I wish Sydney had - a really good, in-the-know, science-fiction specialist bookshop. Not only does Melbourne have them, it’s also got Minotaur - a science-fiction specialist downstairs and excellent comics shop upstairs. (And nor does Melbourne have a dearth of other good bookshops and comics shops… Argh!)
Why do I still live in Sydney?

Yeah ok, I’ve got a heap of wonderful friends in Sydney, and a band that’s based here and etc etc. And hey it’s a beautiful place too I admit.
Speaking of friends, my good friend Mark just created a homepage with her own domain name for another dear friend, Julieanne (for her birthday), whose blog Blindspot I pointed out a few posts ago. A domain name of your own for your birthday? Pretty amazing! And Mark’s got an excellent eye for design I think you’ll all agree.

But then, speaking of design, this young lady from Newcastle, Amy, has a beautiful blog, stylish as they come! And not only a biotech scientist, but great taste in music, what can I say! Note the Dearhunters reference in there somewhere, Jodi Phillis’s most recent band since the demise of the Clouds, much-loved and much-missed, and my favourite Australian band for many many years.
Jodi’s working on her new album at the moment, and it shouldn’t be toooo long before it’s out I think. Needs a record company still. Strings of course by the ever-industrious us.

Sunday, 12th of November, 2000

Ah. OK I solved the editing problem, and it was kinda my fault. I’m using a fantastic little program called The Proxomitron which acts as a proxy locally on one’s hard-drive, and gets rid of sneaky java methods, horrible HTML-misuse and other stuff. It has a “frame jumper-outer” which is very useful for when a link inside a frame opens up the page inside that frame instead of in the whole window. However, it was stuffing up Blogger’s operation.
Fixed now.
I do recommend going to the Proxomitron site it you’re running a PC; it’s a very useful bit of software, and very easy to customise in any way you want.

Another fantastic comics-writer who needs to be linked to is Grant Morrison. So there, I’ve done so! Great page, amusing Grant tidbits of all sorts. He’s pretty much up in the league of Mr Alan Moore, or almost… Gets a bit overly postmodern sometimes, but hey, so does Alan.

Friday, 10th of November, 2000

*phew*! Blogger’s stuffing up and the “edit” command isn’t working properly. I just spent 5 minutes looking through the source code of the various frames to work out how to delete two extra versions of the previous post, one of which had the colour-tabs wrong and was fucking up the whole page. Found the delete command and was able to do it directly…
Glad that’s over!

I’m not going to mention the American elections.

I’m not, you know.

I mean, I find it extraordinary that anyone could vote for George “Double-Yer” Bush… But then this is America we’re talking about isn’t it!
It’s incredibly depressing that basically it looks like Ralph Nader, in his bid to establish his Green Party, has sabotaged the entire election. There’s no doubt Gore would’ve won (he’s considerably ahead in the popular vote anyway) in Florida, and thus the whole of the USA, without Nader there. Nader’s rhetoric about “A vote for Gore is a vote for Bush” is such bullshit. Watered-down centre-left Gore may be, but he’s a fuckload better than the highly conservative and just bloody stupid Bush.
What’s so sad is that most of Nader’s policies are fantastic, and if he could get enough profile/success to make a real difference, it’d be excellent. As it is, he got something like 3% of the national vote and if Bush gets in, America goes back to the Reagan years. Wa-hoo. Goodbye left-wing politics, environment, human rights…

*sigh* Ah well. As an indication of the times, I’ve created a logo for Frogworth Corp, whose CEO is my alter-ego J Peteypie Frogworth. Frogworth is the ultimate multi-national everything-corporation, set to take over the world. Or they would if they existed outside of my imagination, but as it is, this webpage will have to do. Check the bottom of the page to experience the beginning of a new era in… something. Perhaps.
Coming soon: the Frogworth page, downloadable banner ads, logos galore… to be followed by stickers, fully-poseable action figures, movie soundtrack tie-ins, breakfast cereals, a chain of burger restaurants (“Try Our New Frogworth Cuisses de grenouilles“), and of course the Frogworth Party. Not to mention Frogworth Radio - tune in now!
“Frogworth. A real alternative.“

Tuesday, 7th of November, 2000

Do you like my new logo? Tell me.

Am I alive? I’m not sure, this fucking hayfever headache thing is squeezing squeezing, and me am going “ouchie ouchie” and so it goes.

Enough complaining. I apologise for my absence in the last few days. I’ve been busy, and quite frankly there’s been nothing worth blogging about and/or linking to.
My dear friend Julieanne has started a blog of her very own - Blindspot. Nothing much there yet, but no doubt it’ll be fun and provocative. I’ll link again when it’s more developed.

Well in a day or two I shall get another lurvely order from Marky Mark Harwood at Synaesthesia, who imports fine music into Australia from his outpost in Melbourne. Much of the music I rave about in the left-hand column is bought or can be at least from this boy.
Also worth a visit is the home of the fabulous Inertia Distribution, a Sydney-based distribution company who are very young, yet have an amazing roster of overseas labels that they’re importing into Australia and selling at local prices. They’ve got labels like Bubblecore, Rephlex, Mille Plateaux, Planet µ, Kranky and Constellation (home of Godspeed You Black Emperor!), Skam, Chicks on Speed, Output Records (home of Fridge and Four Tet), Thrill Jockey (home of Tortoise), and so on and so forth.
Heaps of experimental, post rock, electronica and so on. They also distribute plenty of fabulous Aussie music, including my mates over at Elefant Traks, Cryogenesis (Sub Bass Snarl’s label), Soft Records (Kevin Purdy’s outlet for his Purdy stuff and his duo with Tooth, with whom I often play cello) and… on and on.

These people are bringing heaps of glorious music into Aussie-land.
Synaesthesia is single-handedly keeping experimental music alive in this country (well, um, perhaps I exaggerate), and as well as bringing in plenty of the same stuff Inertia does, he looks after the Mego stuff (Fennesz, General Magic, Hecker, Pita, Farmers Manual, etc), plenty of Rather Interesting stuff (Atom Heart’s label), Chocolate Industries, Schematic… Um, the list goes on. Also the often wonderful German jazz/classical/whatever label Winter & Winter…

Support ‘em! Go awn.

Thursday, 2nd of November, 2000

*ROFL*
My little counter down the bottom of the page tells me the referring page of any hits I get, and often people are referred from internet search engines. I’ve seen some odd ones, but none as bizarre as one I discovered today: A search on the Australia/New Zealand search engine ANZWERS for “women fucking dogs”. Sorry cobber, nothing about that particular topic here…

Wednesday, 1st of November, 2000

Last night I trooped off with a bunch of friends to The Basement (odd to be going there and not playing!) in Sydney to see David Bridie play. I’ve been a long-time fan of his since the days of Not Drowning, Waving (yet another of my fave Australian bands), and through My Friend the Chocolate Cake. When he put out a solo album this year I was excited, but the album was somewhat disappointing, overproduced and understated. Some great songs, but some fairly boring ones too, and for me, after a few years of only (the mostly acoustic) Chocky Cake stuff, the electronics and stuff only made me wish for Not Drowning, Waving to come back.

I must say, my reaction to the gig was pretty similar. His voice is gorgeous, his sense of humour extremely dry and very subtle, and his politics spot-on. But still, there was something distinctly missing, like I was seeing a slightly pale imitation-NDW. A shame.
Still, he was launching the new single, Float, and looking at his website, I shall have to go and get that tomorrow! Not only is it my favourite song from the album, but the remixers are top class this time: Full Fathom Five (post-rock band from Brisbane), Salmonella Dub (awesome dubby live drum’n'bass crew from New Zealand), and Moloko. Strongly recommended.

While I’m at it, Salmonella Dub are still playing around locally for a short time. Tomorrow night at the Oxford in Wollongon, and Friday night at the Metro in Sydney, supported by my mates Sub Bass Snarl and the Bird. Should be awesome, and sadly I can’t make it, at least until late…

One of my favourite discoveries while overseas was an Israeli/middle-eastern spice mix called za’tar (or za’atar, or other variants). How to describe it? It’s a mixture of something along the lines of thyme, sesame seeds, dried sumac (a type of berry I’m told) and salt. It’s a dry mix and is eaten usually by dipping bread into olive oil and then into a bowl of the mix. YUM! Alternatively, sometimes a pita bread or similar will be covered in za’tar and olive oil and baked like a little pizza. Delicious.

Here, for those interested in gastronomy, is a whole page (just in text file format unfortunately) of emails in discussion-list format about the spice, with various recipes throughout. Can’t wait to make it myself!

You’re all fascinated I’m sure. So you should be!