Tuesday, 27th of August, 2002

We’ve decided to get broadband at home, finally. Hurrah! So in a few days or a week or so, we should have cable internet at home. Now the downloading really begins! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Monday, 26th of August, 2002

Amusing stuff here: Cheesygraphics.com. This guy, who’s called himself King VelVeeda most of his life, has been sued by Kraft for apparent “brand dilution” of their Velveeta product, which is some revolting cheese spread thing. It’s all ridiculous, and VelVeeda was quite naive it seems, but has become highly politicised by his experience. Check out some of the satirical images, in particular the Ciga-Roni: “KRAPT Cheese Filtered Cigarettes”. Mmmm! Kraft are of course owned by nicotine-spewing giant Philip Morris, a fact which is nicely exploited here.

Tell you what: smoking totally fucking sucks. I hate going out to pubs or clubs for the express purpose of experiencing great music, and having to breathe in filthy smoke which makes my eyes go blurry and my throat constrict and my nose fill up, and stinks. It’s a fucking disgrace, so I say. Smokers, just get over it. Honestly…

Tuesday, 20th of August, 2002

The ABC Report has changed its headline to “Greenpeace action takes protesting to new heights”. The story is that Greenpeace activists today scaled the flagpole of Parliament House in Canberra, and replaced the Australian flag with a big banner saying “Ratify Kyoto Now” This has been timed to coincide with the beginning of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, which the Australian government has basically ignored (we’ve sent someone, but only as lip service at best).
Seven activists were arrested and charged with trespassing, it says – that’s the 3 climbers and the 4 people at the bottom blocking the Federal Police… Just got a call from Tim (my aforementioned brother and co-founding-member of FourPlay) who said that all seven have been bailed already, and the only charge was trespassing on Commonwealth property. So it’s a big success for Greenpeace.
All the ABC stations have been covering it all day, which is really great to see. It was lead story on the ABC news site for most of the day too. Hurrah!

And Rupert’s News Ltd has a breaking news article on it here. Sydney Morning Herald haven’t mentioned it yet, and nor has Melbourne’s also-Fairfax-owned The Age (whose website is strikingly similar *grin*).

Someone I know rather closely (could even be related…) might be involved in this ;) Although not actually climbing as such. A little message to our government to sign up to the fucking Kyoto Protocol already – courtesy of Greenpeace Australia and some rather amazing pole-climbing. Here’s Greenpeace’s press release on the event – probably written by my liddle brother Tim, who is communications officer in the greenhouse section…

This is important stuff (possibly the most important stuff, given that the implications of global climate change stretch far beyond “tree-hugging greenie” issues, with huge social and poilitical upheaval inevitable as things get more out of control) and it’s great to see Greenpeace taking some peaceful but highly public and inventive action. I doubt that it’ll change Johnny Howard’s tiny mind on the subject though. Lead story at the moment at ABC News – cool!

From a US radio show Morning Becomes Electric, that elusively great band the Flaming Lips did a live cover of Radiohead’s Knives Out – and rather lovely it is too, as you can hear from this mp3 download. Not a bad cover. audio link via this entry at sax and sunshine, and thanks to Alexander for adding this blog to his mainly-music-blogs sidebar!

Coincidentally, FourPlay are currently working on a cover of How To Disappear Completely, one of the more beautiful songs from the previous Radiohead album, Kid A. Superfun! We expect it will be a bit more rocky and intense (cf our cover of Depeche Mode’s The Sweetest Perfection, a fab late-’80s-type synthgoth tune that we turned into a dark and dramatic rock crescendo of a piece), although fairly true to the original, and we’ll be using looping pedals and stuff like that. Hm.

My mates Seb & Luke of Sub Bass Snarl run an excellent electronica club in Sydney called Frigid (disclaimer: I’ve DJed there a number of times, and played cello in various forms too), and have just re-launched their zine Cyclic Defrost. It’s free in print form in Australia, but all the content plus lots of extra stuff is available on the website – including music reviews from yours truly! And the cover article on the very nice and talented boy Tom Phillipson for issue #1 is written by one Angela Stengel, my own #1 :)

Well well. That bastion of free speech the BBC have decided to retain the ban on atheists from Radio 4’s Thought For The Day. Among the many atheist public figures who have signed a letter of complaint are playwright Harold Pinter, brilliant sf/mainstream author Iain (M) Banks, and Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy I’m currently finishing (and it’s pretty scathing with respect to organised religion!)

Friday, 16th of August, 2002

Here’s an article from the Guardian about the widespread opposition (political and diplomatic as much as civilian) in the UK to a war against Iraq. Tony Blair (and no doubt Johnny Howard) is dead bent of following Cowboy Dubya Bush into the fray – which could well have disastrous consequences.

Among the many people quoted are playwright David Hare (”It is wonderful to see the church exhibiting a moral point of view.”) and the great biologist and populariser of science Richard Dawkins (who describes ‘President’ Bush as “this unelected and deeply stupid little oil spiv”).

Tuesday, 13th of August, 2002

Roger Langridge’s Fred the Clown is one of the funniest and best-drawn comics in existence, and this week’s comic is too good to miss. If the one up there is no longer the Pooh parody, you may be able to see it here.

Dave Eggers, editor of McSweeneys, (an excellent arty magazine), wrote a great article on selling out which I hereby present to you, my faithful readers.

Mind you, the Beastie Boys are still legends, and Check You Head is my favourite album of theirs. Ah well. Everybody’s a mercenary bastard in the end, even Buddhist Jews, hey?
Unless it’s their record company (Capitol, which equates to EMI, which is Universal – ie evil) who are the culprits…

You know that Beastie Boys song Pass the Mic? Great isn’t it? Well, have a listen to the distinctive flute-with-multiphonics at the start of the song. That’s from jazz composer James Newton’s piece Choir, for which they did not ask permission. Newton has (remarkably) just lost a suit against the Beastie Boys for use of this sample, and even more offensively Newton is now up for the $492,000 in the Beasties’ legal fees… Go to this link and click on “James Newton loses to Beastie Boys: Amicus support requested”.

While I’m updating the current listening and reading lists, you may want to venture over to Charlie’s place and read this entry about overpackaging – complete with cute photographs. Oh the insanity!

Tuesday, 6th of August, 2002

When I was compiling the starting list for the “current listening” list (see sidebar – to be updated again soon!), one thing I missed was that I’ve been listening to most of the Plunderphonic works of John Oswald. Oswald takes readily available recorded music and morphs it into new and bizarre works, with echoes of musique concrète, hip-hop, and the noughties’ bootleg mashup boom, but predating most (except concrète), and not quite matching any of them. He uses cut & paste (literally, having started off working with analogue tape), reversing of samples, and a few other simple techniques, considering it important that all sounds are pretty much recognizable from their source (although they’re often so short you have to be quick!)…
What’s amazing about the stuff is just how musical it ends up being a lot of the time. You’d think it was just silly collage stuff, but there’s rhyme and reason to it. The notorious dab, his Michael Jackson cut-up, is particularly brilliant.

The same legal problems that beset the original Plunderphonic album (the record industry taking offense at his appropriation of copyright works, despite their obvious use as parody, and the fact that they couldn’t possibly be taking earnings away from the original artists) made it impossible for Oswald to release the double-CD Plunderphonics box set on his FONY label. Fortunately, kindred folk Negativland decided that no legal bullying should stop the release of this amazing work, and so they bootlegged the entire thing and released it on their Seeland label – a hardcover book with fantastic plunderphonic artwork, an extremely lengthy all-encompassing interview booklet, and 2 CDs crammed full of music. It’s an amazing document, and anyone interested in What Music Is ought to seek it out. You can mail-order it from Negativland, or probably find it in your local knowledgeable music emporium. Yar.

Little rant:
You know what I hate? I hate fucking webpages which have their links setup so that they control a separate page, and whenever you click on a link on the main page, the linked page changes. Making it just that little bit harder to have multiple links open at once. Fuck ‘em.

*hehe*
The RIAA’s attitude to mp3s, in a funny beach bully cartoon: Recording Artists’ Safety Guide To The Beach.
thanks acb

Friday, 2nd of August, 2002

Along with the blogs listed in the side-column, one website I don’t fail to check every day is comic-book writer James Kochalka’s American Elf. He has two books of Sketchbook Diaries published by Top Shelf – every day he draws a little autobiographical comic, which is both alarmingly disciplined and alarmingly self-revealing. Now he updates the website every day (just about) with the latest Sketchbook Diary entry.
And, more to the point, he’s INCREDIBLY CUTE. Go check it out, and if you like it, you can subscribe and have access to the previous entries plus other bonuses (such as songs from his band, James Kochalka Superstar…)

Thursday, 1st of August, 2002

Unfortunately when Blogger updates its Template in the Template form, it converts a lot of text into its own special format. They claim this is for compatibility reasons (”it’s fer yer own good”) but it tends to muck things up occasionally. Thus “über-glitch” and “Funkstörung” and “Björk” must lose their umlauts or end up looking unreadable in the side-bar. Sorry kids! If someone knows an alternative way of printing these characters, please let me know!

For my first real new entry, here’s a link to a new essay by hard science fiction superstar Greg Egan on Stephen Wolfram’s attemp to revolutionise science. It’s a balanced perspective on what’s quite a belligerent treatise, in which Wolfram claims that the entire practice of science needs a paradigm shift into viewing everything in terms of cellular automata. Most people are less than totally taken with these claims, but that’s not to say he isn’t onto something.

There’s a gem from Greg at the end of the essay as published on his website:

A mangled version of this review was published in the Bulletin, July 23, 2002, stuffed full of clichés, non sequiturs and other drivel.

Well, the listening list is now far more reflective of current trends ;) Let’s try the same for reading now shall we? And then we can graduate to RE-STRUCTURING! PERESTROIKA here we come!

I’ve started updating the “recent listening” section… Experimental pasting back of the template file will result in a fairly confusing look for a little while. Bear with me.