Watching: Radiohead meets Eraserhead mashup

This is a bit of a no-brainer for me - OK Computer is still one of my favourite all time albums and David Lynch's Eraserhead is still my favourite bizarrely surreal film.

Jsmash has done a pretty nice job cutting this clip together - I like the tiny jumpcuts in particular. If you haven't seen Eraserhead, check it out - just don't go in expecting the story to make sense, treat it more like an abstract painting and just let yourself experience the feelings it provokes.



Here's a short clip from the film to give you some idea of what to expect - if you're overly squeamish you might give it a miss. I remember reading somewhere that Lynch came up with the idea for the film when he was feeling anxious about the upcoming birth of his first child.



(Oh and if you're a Twin Peaks fan, you might have noticed that Henry is played by Jack Nance, who played Pete Martell in the show)

Playing: Tunes for Lost Highway

There are a few personal faves in here but I made an effort to find a few artists that I've been meaning to investigate more fully so hopefully it's a good mix.

No place to fall (Townes Van Zandt) Lisa Miller Car tape 3:19
Helpless Nick Cave The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young 4:32
After the Gold Rush The Flaming Lips The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young 4:14
It's Just That Simple Wilco A.M. 3:46
Harry Was A Bad Bugger Tex, Don & Charlie All Is Forgiven 5:19
Salty candy Adam Green Friends of mine 1:39
Woke up this morning Alabama 3 Last train to Mashville 4:03
Chelsea Morning Joni Mitchell Hits 2:31
Blue Spanish Sky Chris Isaak Wild At Heart 3:59
Step In Step Out Weddings Parties Anything They Were Better Live (Disc 2) 4:29
Brown Bessy The Fuelers Hot Dang 2:20
Dirty Water Randall Blair And The Wedded Bliss Tattoos And Taillights 4:46
What If Lucinda Williams West 5:41
Make it Count Barb Waters & Kim Salmon Rosa Duets 3:35
A Fond Farewell Elliott Smith From A Basement On The Hill 3:58
Sweet Jane Cowboy Junkies The trinity sessions 3:35
Hold On, Hold On Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood 2:46
Our Sunshine Paul Kelly With Uncle Bill Smoke 4:22
Little Animals Beasts Of Bourbon Little Animals 5:14
New Day Of The Dead Beasts Of Bourbon Little Animals 5:17

Seeing: The Beasts of Bourbon - ANU Bar Canberra

Confounded study (and nerdiness) kept me from seeing much (or any) of the support acts - Roland S Howard and Magic Dirt - but I saw the Beasts of Bourbon play one of the most chaotic, shambolic and yet utterly ROCK shows I've ever seen last night.

From the small part of the set that I heard, Magic Dirt were tight and loud - and it appears fortunately that they're moving away from their much poppier sounds of the last few years.

But the show was all about the Beasts - (check out my thoughts on their new album here)

Tex Perkins, even off his tits as he appeared to be, positively exuded charisma - and this in the face of spitting on stage, regularly dropping the mic (not in a clumsy way necessarily, just not caring), breaking off midsong to banter with the band and spectacularly falling backwards off stage (like a scuba diver entering the water) halfway through the final song. For all of this, my friend Jo, veteran of rock shows, left the venue feeling even more gooey about the man than ever before.

So how did he pull this off? A combination of rock theatricality, good naturedness and just being generally piss-funny as well as bursts of rock'n'roll brilliance from the band. There was a sense that at any moment that whole stage could just totter into complete chaos, only to come back from the brink at the last moment - as a show it was compelling.

The hand gestures and showmanship, the running gags about how "tight" the band was and the seeming fascination with doing that tip the mic stand with your foot and bring it back (which the man is clearly a guru at) kind of brings to mind the Drunken Master kung-fu style.

I guess the ultimate measure of how good a show was is that I bought two tshirts - which I don't think I've ever done at a gig before.

(and all this with them not even playing Chase the Dragon - which members of the crowd had called out for all night. My thoughts at the time were - look guys, it's their big number, it'll have to be the final encore song, just relax - but then it never came. I was left with a feeling like the end of the final episode of The Sopranos - is it brilliance or is it wrong. Brilliance came out trumps)

Wondering: Are lolcats infiltrating the Herald Sun

I noticed this image on the homepage of the Herald Sun (Murdoch's Melbourne tabloid) last night and was struck by the similarity of the font to that in lolcat images. Maybe it's a new genre - polcats?

LOLing: Workplace Ad Parody (hmatkin)

I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of the mashup - remixing or re-editing one existing media product to give it a new (often funnier or more accurate) spin.

This YouTube clip by hmatkin is a fantastic example. Our conservative government radically changed industrial relations laws recently to move workers away from collectively negotiated agreements to individual contracts - and they've spent tens of millions of dollars trying to sell this to an increasingly unhappy public.



There are a lot of things I like about this ad - it's brazen and funny, it's just as political as the supposedly apolitical tax-payer funded version and in spite of some slightly rough editing it makes the point very well.

One of the things it made me think about is the way the government ads use post-it notes to convey their message. The way I see post-it notes, they're very temporary things, generally whipped up very quickly with little thought and they're easy to change. If I had the time, I'd explore this - something along the lines of "Your rights - guaranteed by post-it note" - this isn't exactly it, but you get the gist.

Alas, I has uni work to press on with.

Here are a couple more hmatkin clips.

Marvelling: Happy reading Art Bear

There's often something slightly sugary, kitsch or poppy about the elements of "Western" culture that you find crossing over to Asian culture - this was the label of the water bottle that came when I stopped in at the Senior Crocodile Thai cafe in Sydney last week.

It's a little hard to read (the phone-cam doesn't like low light so much) but it says "happy reading art bear, I hope you will enjoy reading my stories". I like it - it went well with the young kidult vibe of the place, which included the ubiquitous "beckoning cat" statues that seem to be popping up all over the place and the wall to wall concert footage of who I think were the Pussycat Dolls.

Actually, I've just read up on the beckoning cat or maneki neko - which I'd initially called the waving kitty and it's much more than just the latest kitsch cartoon character based trend - it's a traditional good luck/come-in-and-do-business thing apparently.



Makes me realise that I'm getting on a little (just about to leave the cherished 18 - 35 demographic) but that's ok.

One other interesting thing I've discovered while writing this is that if you can hold your drink well in Japan, you might be referred to as hidari-kiki (left handed). Given that left handedness often has negative connotations in most languages - sinister, gauche etc - this is interesting.

(Maneko image borrowed from elissadariel on Flickr)

Playing: Songs for Sunset

Young folks Peter Bjorn And John Writers block 4:39
Aurora Midnight Juggernaughts Dystopia 5:51
Thanks Beasts Of Bourbon Little Animals 3:15
Words And Dreams Fred Smith Bagarap Empires 2:57
Street Spirit (Fade Out) Radiohead The Chillout Sessions 2 (Disc 1) 4:12
I'm A Cuckoo Belle & Sebastian Dear Catastrophe Waitress 5:26
Off The Grid The Beastie Boys The Mix-Up 4:36
Weeds The Negotiators Apples and Oranges 3:59
Pink bullets The Shins Chutes too narrow 3:53
Dirty Water Randall Blair And The Wedded Bliss Tattoos And Taillights 4:46
Solar Flare Endorphin Embrace 3:52
Red Tan The Raveonettes Pretty In Black 3:48
In Front of Me Tzu Smiling At Strangers 3:37
Midnight Snack You Say Party! We Say Die! Hit The Floor! 4:03
Nude School Painters And Dockers Used And Recommended By 3:34
Appliance, Compliance Youth Group Urban & Eastern 3:35
The Brotherhood Of Al Wazah Radio Birdman Zeno Beach 5:30
My Baby's Man Vanlustbäder The People Versus Vanlustbader 1:40
The KKK took my baby away Ramones Anthology 2 2:31
Single Cable Love Of Diagrams Mosaic 2:36