Friday, 29th of November, 2002

Well Ange & I arrived in Auckland today at about 4pm NZ time, without having booked accomodation. Took us ages at the airport to find somewhere, but we’re right in the city, and there are a couple of FREE broadband terminals here. Cool. So what to do at 1:26am but write a blog entry?

Tonight, we saw DJ Shadow playing live at the St James thingummy in Auckland. What a fucking awesome show! I do mean live – although a lot of it was off CDs/backing tape or was DJ’d, he actually did play bits straight off his MPC sampler, which was hooked up to some laptops showing visuals too. A lot of fun, although I had the sneaking feeling that at least at times what was presented as live wasn’t really… Still, a fantastic set, all his own material re-worked, very very nice.

It is now way too late and we are going to bed. Tomorrow, Auckland during the day and then we fly to Wellington at 5pm. We’re then driving back up after a couple of days, so will have a little more time here before we fly to Melbourne. No doubt more blogging will occur! :)

Thursday, 28th of November, 2002

Thanks to Jordan, FourPlay’s very own ManaJor, for this link:
Kikkomaso, a very stoopid flash animation about a soy-sauce superhero, with a song sung by a Japanese dude (probably the programmer) who just can’t quite keep up with the beat. What fun!

Tuesday, 26th of November, 2002

My dear friend Naima has sent me an email about this. A Jewish woman in Canberra called Avigail Abarbanel is organising a national day of solidarity with Muslim women, in reaction to the absurd targeting of their traditional dress.

Headscarf Day is the 29th of November – as it happens, the day that Ange & I fly to New Zealand! We’ll be there for a week, and then go to Melbourne for a few days. Back on the 9th of December, but I’m sure I’ll be posting to my blog while I’m away as well.

Reading this week’s New Scientist reminded me about the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. So have a squizz at a couple of older incarnations of Stumblings!

Thursday, August 10, 2000
Wednesday, February 28, 2001

Some interesting old reviews there which I’ll try and incorporate into the reviews archive!

PS Yeah I know the scrollbar colours are pretty intense at the moment! I just wanted to change them to SOMETHING when I discovered how to do it in CSS. I’ll find some nice colour combinations soon.

Monday, 25th of November, 2002

Eagle-eyed readers will note that I have implemented the next change in my blogs format, facilitated by the move to Movable Type – the sidebar column’s reviews are now blog items with separate listening and reading categories. This makes for a nicer look and easier management. It’s nice also that items can have multiple categories, so that an important/exciting review such as the one previous can be assigned to the main blog as well.

Note that the main archive at the moment lists all entries, whatever category they are from. I am working on the Reviews Archives, to be split into Listening Matter and Reading Matter… I hope to be able to order them alphabetically, but I’m not sure Movable Type’s functionality is up to that – anyone?

So exciting is this news that I have assigned it to the main weblog as well as the listening category.
Hrvatski/Keith Fullerton Whitman has finally released not one but TWO new albums. I got the Japanese editions, released on P-Vine, because each has an extra track.
As Keith Fullerton Whitman, he makes music hugely different from Hrvatski’s usual distorted hyper drum’n'bass. The album Playthroughs, released by Kranky (US home of Godspeed You Black Emperor! among many others), is made entirely from guitar sounds played through (geddit?) various Max/MSP patches and the like. It’s lovely pulsating tones, practically nothing identifiably guitar-like, and I’ve enjoyed putting it on when I’m in bed at night. My favourite is “modena”, which has slightly more of a rhythmic movement to it, and more variation throughout. Also excellent is the extra track on the P-Vine version, a live recording which shows you just how little post-production was needed.
The long-awaited new Hrvatski album on Planet μ, Swarm & Dither is an absolute masterpiece. My joy is only slightly marred by the fact that I have some 9 out of the 13 tracks (14 on the P-Vine version) already. Still, it’s all mastered properly this time round. The fantastic Kid 606 “remix” (which is entirely Hrvatski’s work) is present along with various other old classics (“2nd Zero Mandible Investigation” was one of the first Vat tunes I heard) and newer classics (the marvellous “Marble Madness” computer game cover, an 8bit breakcore number here re-named “Marbles”), but the new tracks are damn funky and spunky too. The Japanese addition, “Gemini (revision)” appears in slightly abbreviated form on the 12″ release of Swarm & Dither, adding drums and guitar to the gorgeous glitchy rhodes theme I already knew from the autumnature comp on Greg Davis’s autumn records. What more can I say? It rocks, and everybody needs to own it. Now I need MORE!!!

I’ve seen this before, but it’s funny, so since Tim just emailed it to me, I’ll point it out again.
RELIGIOUS MERGER CREATES 900 MILLION HINJEWS

Saturday, 23rd of November, 2002

Something interesting to note: I’ve gone back to ordering posts reverse-chronologically in each day. On the one hand, this means that on the entire page, the posts go reverse chronologically, with the newest always at the top… On the other hand, it means that within a day, when I add something it will get stuck up the top.
So I shall be careful that if I’m adding something regarding an existent post of the day, I’ll update that entry rather than making another post. I think that’s a better system anyway.

Over at virulent memes, Graham is using Movable Type as well.
So I thought I’d try this “trackback pinging” thing and comment on one of his entries. This one, in fact. He has recently recovered from a bout of entry titles quoting “Fingertips” by They Might By Giants, and I can only respond to this entry’s Primus with more Primus.

That’s all! Dunno what this will do.

Well. I have just installed movable type and converted my entire Blogger backlog… I haven’t quite gotten the hang of the templates and style sheets and stuff involved, so forgive me if, for a brief while, this blog looks a bit weird. I can still post entries and whatnot, and am sorting out the archiving. Then I should be able to start creating new categories, and turn my right-hand column into proper weblog-posts too instead of an ugly static template file. Exciting times!

Friday, 22nd of November, 2002

Graham has responded to Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1980s (conspicuously lacking in anything Australian) by proposing a list of Top Australian/NZ Music in the Eighties. Hurrah, so I have jumped on the bandwagon and made some comments on my preferences. I’ve copied them below, and added links and other nice stuff.

I’m doing this on spec, so give me some slack…
I vote for:
Not Drowning, Waving – Claim and Cold and the Crackle.
I can’t choose between these two. A little cheating though; the truly excellent version of Cold and the Crackle came out in 1991 when all their back-catalogue was re-released on CD. The 1987 LP is still fantastic though, and the CD release adds tracks from ’80s EPs anyway. Claim, when re-released, just added a (great) remix of Palau, so it has more of a “claim” to be an ’80s record.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Tender Prey
His strongest album, IMHO, but From Her To Eternity and Your Funeral My Trial are well up there…

Midnight Oil- Toss-up for me between 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 or Red Sails in the Sunset. Both great experimental albums with a lot of strong songs and great sounds.

Severed Heads – City Slab Horror
It’s earlyish but not too early, and has the great “We Have Come To Bless This House”, as well as song titles like “Spasm”, “Spitoon Thud” and “The Bladders of a Thousand Bedoin”. Who could ask for more? [Well there's also of course sample-mangling and big drum machines that fitted fairly well into the genre they called "industrial", but was so far ahead of its time it's still got bite].

The Triffids – Born Sandy Devotional
Yeah whatever to “Wide Open Road”, it’s also got “Tender Is The Night (The Long Fidelity)” which is just gorgeous and heartbreaking. There are plenty of other Triffids albums that would fit the bill too…

Hunters and Collectors – The Jaws of Life
Graham will thank me for including this, and it is their best – experimental, krautrock-esque, with catchy and beautiful songs, and huge amounts of energy. But the self-titled first album is brilliant too (“Skin Of Our Teeth” being indispensible, and let’s not forget “Talking to a Stranger”…!)

The Hummingbirds – loveBUZZ
Yep it’s from the ’80s! 1989 indeed. I couldn’t include my fave (one of) Aussie band The Clouds, as their first EP was 1990, but here’s to the Hummingbirds. I think Va Va Voom (from 1991) is better, as are the later EPs. Some good stuff here.

I’ll bow to gjw’s nominations (see the RAN page) for Birthday Party and the Church. I like both bands, but don’t know them that well. Interestingly, despite my huge love of this stuff (and this applies to Graham too), I finished school in 1991 (just in time to go to the first Big Day Out), and accordingly am far more familiar and fanboyish with ’90s Australian music. Although by the mid-’90s I was thoroughly pissed-off with Triple J pap and was starting to withdraw into the electronica and indie/post-rock scenes… Call me a late-’80s/early-’90s boy.
Also… I’m very lucky to have an uncle (my Dad’s half-sister Kati’s husband Shaun if you must know) who’s ten years older than me (I’m 29 in January) and had this wonderful collection of (vinyl) records which one day he just GAVE to me. Decided he was going to listen to only CDs from then on, and that was it! Old Birthday Party, Nick Cave, Triffids, Laughing Clowns (must listen again!), Foetus(!), and so much more… What awesome taste, what a lucky boy I was. I don’t listen to that stuff nearly enough, but I have obtained a great sense of history therefrom.

By the way, my favourite New Zealand song ever is “Not Given Lightly” by Chris Knox (also of the Tall Dwarfs). And it’s from 1990! Damn damn damn.

I didn’t include, but should have:
Crowded House – Crowded House
I don’t care what anyone else says, it’s their best album by far. When they still had that edge from the Enz.
and thus, while we’re at it:
Split Enz – Too many by far. Whoever tells you you only need their greatest hits is A DAMNED FOOL.
Conflicting Emotions has about half an album’s worth of brilliance, and the rest is pretty good. “Message to My Girl” is a classic. Then, See Ya ‘Round, their sadly neglected post-Tim last album is awesome too! “Breakin’ My Back”, “I Walk Away”, “One Mouth Is Fed”; the whole first side is nascent Crowded House goodness; and the second side has the amazing instrumental “The Lost Cat”, and various other bizarre offerings (the car-starter-motor as beat in “Kia Kaha” is pretty cool for 1984).
I think, though, that Time and Tide gets my top vote, with classic hits like “Dirty Creature” and “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” (complete, here, with Eddie Rayner’s introductory instrumental “Pioneer”, the last chords of which can be heard at the start of other releases of “Six Months”) and heaps of other quirky and brilliant numbers (Neil’s “Take A Walk” in particular).

I’m sure I haven’t covered it all, even if this is just Australian ’80s music! Pitchfork’s aforementioned list, though hugely controversial, has a lot of Great Shit on it too, no doubt. What fun that was! I’ll update if I think of anything else essential.

“Black People Love Us!” say Sally and Johnny. Courtesy of the latest ShITe section of The Chaser, a hilarious site that parodies just about every racist and simply thoughtless stereotype about blacks…
And if you didn’t think Americans were stupid, go and look at the letters page… *sigh*

Thursday, 21st of November, 2002

Well do I understand my tardiness in blog-updation. Just hang in there, ok?
In the meantime, from the Guardian, an interview with Michael Moore.

Wednesday, 13th of November, 2002

The Sokal hoax, however much or little it proved, was a fun little joke against the gibberish-infested end of the postmodernist spectrum.
Now the very strange Bogdanov Affair has turned up in the physics scene. It’s not quite the converse hoax that it’s sort-of been made out to be. Physicist John Baez has a fascinating page on it, which is much more worthwhile reading than any attempt I’d make on it. I’m particularly interested because Baez has worked with, and is much admired by, the inimitable and brilliant Australian science-fiction author Greg Egan. I might email Greg and see what his opinion on this topic is!

Saturday, 9th of November, 2002

Like, TOTALLY FUNNY PARODY.

The great Daniel Dennett, my favourite philosopher, has a new book due out in February next year, called Freedom Evolves. He recently contributed a “postcard” to John Brockman’s The Edge, a fascinating website documenting a kind of intellectual elite promoting the “Third Culture”, an attempted harmonising of the humanities and the sciences.

Not much info on the new book, but I know it’s a kind of updating of Elbow Room, once again examining free will, and putting it along with ethics into an evolutionary context. Should be fascinating and fantastic. In the meantime, a large number of Dennett’s papers are available here, a page maintained by the Center for Cognitive Studies at Dennett’s university, Tufts. I drop in there occasionally to read papers before they get printed, or papers it’s hard to get access to otherwise. One highlight is The fantasy of first-person science, Dennett’s response to the “hard problem of consciousness” promoted by Chalmers and others. Lots of other great stuff, including two papers on post-modernism: Faith in the Truth and Postmodernism and Truth. Dennett’s views on mind, AI, philosophy of science and many other areas are highly convergent with mine. Only Greg Egan (with little doubt the top science-fiction author in the world, and my favourite author full stop), who owes a considerable amount to Dennett, comes closer among prominent writers.
(yes yes, I do have lots of “favourites” don’t I? Live with it.)
Needless to say await Dennett’s new book with great impatience!

Thursday, 7th of November, 2002

Buggrit. Why don’t I check everything BEFORE I upload it? It’s a nuisance to have to keep altering my sidebar and re-uploading it as I read it on the web. Me dummy. Enjoy the updates!

Andrew Refshauge, NSW Planning Minister, has reacted strongly against the Federal Government’s new population target of 50 million people in Australia. It would be devastating for our cities (not to mention the natural environment!)

OK I’m back to the blog, even if briefly. I plan, later today, to update with some more listening recommendations, lots of great stuff!

Just wanted to link to the Refusenik site here, with an automatically updating banner:

I’m not going to leave it permanently on my page (I’m not a banner kinda guy), but I’m struck by the braveness of the (currently) 501 Israeli soldiers in the IDF who are refusing to participate in the occupation and oppression they see as not serving in Israel’s defense. Have a read.