Tuesday, 30th of October, 2001

Jack T Chick was one of the most bigoted Christians ever, and sadly made it his life’s purpose to convert others to his particular form of that religion.
His “Chick Tracts” are famous the world over, and now it seems you can read them on the web! Go here for a complete list of English-language tracts.

For an introduction, we have the convert-a-Jew one, “Where’s Rabbi Waxman?”, and the heaven-is-for-God’s-people-not-good-people one, “Flight 144″…
The latter is particularly revolting: However good you are in your life, if you’re not a believer of just the right type, you go to hell! Observe:
(quite an amusing image really…)

If that doesn’t make you an immediate atheist, well… oh well! I’m secure in my beliefs…

Thursday, 25th of October, 2001

At Keith Whitten (Hrvatski)’s pictures site, here’s a not-particularly-flattering picture of me, at the Frigid gig where he did an excellent Hrvatski set.

Via Darrin Verhagen (of Dorobo records, and one of our most beautiful remixers), here’s a highly amusing satirical piece: Baudrillard admits: “The Gulf War Did Take Place”. Baudrillard is, all in all, one of the greatest charlatans of the whole Theory brigade.

Tuesday, 23rd of October, 2001

Well, the Election Chaser, on ABC-TV at 9:30 last night, was way funny in my opinion! If you missed it, sucked in! And watch it next week. Best satire around, reminiscent of the D-Generation (or the Late Show more to the point) at their best.

Monday, 22nd of October, 2001

Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s From Hell is one of the greatest graphic novels ever written - a complex and multi-layered story (Alan Moore is one of the greatest comics writers ever after all) with wonderful artwork by Eddie.

Here’s Salon’s less-than-enthusiastic review of the new movie, very loosely based on From Hell, by the Hughes Brothers. As I suspected from the trailers, “loosely based” is putting it euphemistically! Oh well, one couldn’t have really expected a movie to be that true to the original…

Saturday, 20th of October, 2001

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald, John Casimir (with whom I very often find myself agreeing), writes a very perceptive review of Tori Amos‘ new album, Strange Little Girls.
I don’t want to harp on too long, but although I don’t mind it, I find her affectations generally annoying, and for all the covers of songs I know, I like the originals considerably better. The concept is interesting, but on the whole the interpretations just get annoying after about 1/2 a listen ;)

From this page, you can jump to the little mini-stories that the very wonderful Neil Gaiman wrote to go with each of the “characters”. Enjoy!

Tuesday, 16th of October, 2001

From acb (with whom I spent an enjoyable evening of music and computer networking last night), here’s an absolute gem from The Register, about WTC hoaxes. Debunking galore!

Melbourne rules! ‘Nuff said. Check ya later.

Sunday, 14th of October, 2001

I’ll have my trusty laptop Ravenous with me while I’m in Melbourne, so if we’re lucky I might be sending blog posts in from the deep south! Not that I’ll have a lot of spare time ;)

Melbourne’s one of my favourite cities in the world, and the only one other than Sydney that I could imagine (very easily!) living in. As well as the incomparable Slow Glass Books is also on Swanston St, and then there’s second-hand stores like Syber’s (one on Chapel St Windsor, and one in St Kilda), and weird shit like PolyEster on Brunswick St, which also has a record store down the road of course)… There’s a great cafe society, excellent food all around, and a live scene that makes me cry (well Sydney’s not at all bad these days, all things considered).
And of course Melbourne has not one but TWO fantastic community radio stations: 3PBS and 3RRR.
Can’t wait! *taptaptaptapjitterjitter*

Lucky acb got to see Hrvatski performing his processed-guitar stuff at my favourite record store Synaesthesia in Melbourne on Saturday. Oh well, I got to hang out with him a bit and see him do a few sets, not to mention jam with him (kinda), so I can’t complain!

Anyway, _I_ shall be in Melbourne as of tomorrow, until Friday. We‘re supporting the Corrs down there at the enormous Rod Laver Arena (insane I know), and then doing our own lovely headline show at Revolver (Chapel St, Prahran) on Thursday night, with me DJing before, in between sets, and hopefully afterwards - fun!
Then on Friday, back to Sydney to play at the Metro (in the new Roma Room) with David Lane and the wonderful Jodi Phillis. Hurrah!

Would’ve been great to be in Melbourne last week though - not only was Keith Whitman (Hrvatski) down there, but so were Dose One, Sole and Jel of hip-hop beat poets Anticon. Had a wonderful live improv session with those guys at the Opera House (the one which Hrvatski also took part in), and tonight at Frigid they were there briefly, and Dose came and had a chat. Shame they’re leaving tomorrow, but hopefully sometime I’ll get to work with them more.

Thursday, 11th of October, 2001

For the love of Bob!
Follow that link to some great SubGenius stuff on the WTC attacks and other…

The latest edition of The Onion is rather back in form. As acb points out, Freedoms Curtailed In Defense of Liberty is wonderful satire… Classic quote:

“We live in a land governed by plurality of opinion in an open electorate, but we are now under siege by adherents of a fundamentalist, totalitarian belief system that tolerates no dissent,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said.” Our most basic American values are threatened by an enemy opposed to everything for which our flag stands. That is why I call upon all Americans to submit to wiretaps, e-mail monitoring, and racial profiling. Now is not the time to allow simplistic, romantic notions of ‘civil liberties’ and ‘equal protection under the law’ to get in the way of our battle with the enemies of freedom.”

This is so close to the way things are really going in the US that it’s quite uncomfortable…

So it’s been a few days. So? Huh? Yeah, wanna take it outside?

So this is my inner robot:

I don’t really know enough about Star Trek to know if I should be disappointed.

Meanwhile, Paul McAuley remains one of the greatest oh, 3-5 science-fiction authors in the world. Once I get around to updating the left-hand column, you’ll know more about why
In case you’re starved for musical commentary from yours truly, go to Soot Records‘ or follow the direct link and download DJ /rupture’s extraordinary Gold Teeth Thief mix. Take equal parts dancehall, ragga jungle and noisy hardcore jungle, add liberal amounts of African music, one part each of Luciano Berio, Oval and Muslimgauze, start with Missy Elliott… Ohhh yeah. I didn’t stop listening to it for about two weeks after I found it.

Rupture has a great track on Hrvatski’s RKK records‘ RKK13 remix compilation, a must-buy for all!

I just wrote a highly enthusiastic letter-to-the-editor to Wire Magazine about Sound Summit and Hrvatski. Remind me to reprint it here soon.

Sunday, 7th of October, 2001

OK, good ol’ Graham, ever-reliable, cooks up a splendid election-issues list, and depressingly predicts a Coalition victory. It seems a shoe-in to me too, all things considered. It’s hard to resist the feeling that the whole WTC thing was somehow engineered by the Dubyah government as a way of distracting attention from the worldwide anti-globalisation, green and progressive turn that had been happening. Suddenly arch-conservatism (indeed, pro-active far-right-wing politics) are all the rage again. Let’s go to war! Bring in National Service! If not throwing out the wogs, let’s at least make fortress Australia. Those refugees? Terrorists in disguise (it’s obvious!) etc etc

Enough to make me puke. I’ll find something positive to say later - maybe I’ll tell you about the wonderful music I’ve been listening to, the delightful email conversation I’ve been having with American hard-science-fiction author Kathleen Ann Goonan (one of the best around at the moment), great new comics and books I’ve been reading… all my lovely friends etc. *laff* Actually life is great, if you ignore world/local affairs…

In the Weekend Australian, Phillip Adams reminds us of the US’s violent legacy, and the myriad stupidities of its foreign policy. A very good read.

Saturday, 6th of October, 2001

Interesting article from the Age about the lack of humorous approaches to the WTC thing. It mentions the Chaser, and I was sad to see that they had a negative response, so I sent off an email telling them how good the issue was.

I ought to write more about Sound Summit, but it’s all too overwhelming! It was fan-fucking-tastic, so there! On Wednesday night, I played a big improv session at the Studio at the Sydney Opera House for the second Electrolab night, involving a whole lot of Sound Summit participants. Jamming with the amazing drummer Lawrence Pike from Pivot, bass player Tony Buchen from the Hive, and the wonderfully sensitive Nick Toth on turntables was a joy. And then Dose, Sole and Jel from Anticon joined us, and then Hrvatski too, and my life was complete ;)
Well, hyperbole aside, it was extremely good! Wahoo.
Can’t be bothered with links today. Will add ‘em later.

Tuesday, 2nd of October, 2001

Just for reasons of proof (y’understand), here’s a pic-a-ture of me (second from the right on the table) at the forum I was on, courtesy of Keith’s delightful and bizarre picture diary… Next to me (far-right end of the table) is Mark from Synaesthesia, and moderating on the other table are Kenny Sabir of Elefant Traks and Seb Chan from Sub Bass Snarl, who were the two organisers of Sound Summit (and are of course l-e-g-e-n-d-s!)

Monday, 1st of October, 2001

Back from Sound Summit/This Is Not Art, and what an amazing experience it was. Lots of chats with Keith Whitman (aka Hrvatski, current electronica king in my opinion - read his “pithy summaries” here), DJing after the Fat Cat Daves, who played awesome sets and enjoyed mine, as did Hrvatski - and Keith played an absolutely awesome laptop set before. More distorted amazingly programmed beats than you can poke a stick at, ooooooohhh…
And that was just Sunday night! Not to mention Stinky Jim, wonderful dub producer/DJ from New Zealand, who runs Round Trip Mars records… lovely conversations with him too. So many promo CDs shoved at me, and gave various important people (see above etc) copies of Digital Manipulation…

Some excellent forums (I was on one with folks from Creative Vibes (*koff*) and Inertia, Mark from Synaesthesia in Melbourne (easily the best record store in Australia), and Ben Frost from Big Star in Adelaide (undoubtedly one of the next-best)… talking about independent distribution (or trying to talk over Heidi’s platitudes…) - got some nice comments from people about what I had to say.)
And went to a great laptop production workshop by Keith Hrvatski, Paul Pimmon, Nigel from Cindii, and the excellent Jeremy Yuille from Melbourne as well…

Just some of the highlights! Wowowowow.