mikeh.

chunks of time.

2010-11-03T07:13:00.003-05:00

i was talking to a guy at work today who was having some issues with his leg. he was saying how it might require a hip replacement and that he would have trouble even considering that if that's what it took to fix it. he said he wouldn't be able to take 6 months off work. he wouldn't be able to afford it, he would probably lose his job. this is all true.

it made me think that it's a shame our bodies just fall apart. something bad happens and although the human body has an incredible ability to heal some things just don't mend. some things just get worse and worse. which is what would probably happen when you need a hip replacement. it would just keep grinding and grinding and straining the muscles until one day something very serious happens like your leg pops out of your hip.

it's depressing to think that we're really just made out of meat. in between whatever works there's a spark that keeps us moving along, keeps us functioning, keeps the cogs turning inside. our brain takes care of the stuff we're not aware of like all the internal organs. things just work. we want to move our arm and we do, we want to move our leg and we do. we want to talk and once we've learned, we can do it. we can process things, mull them over. we're given that luxury.

for some people none of that is possible. or only some and in a very primitive, strained way. some people are barely even capable of conscious thought let alone bodily control. imagine. imagine not being able to do anything you can do now. the agony of that.

i don't think i'll ever be done pondering over mortality. i'm still too scared to die.

damn, that's a bit heavy. here's something to lighten the mood:

conspiracy theories.

2010-11-02T06:38:00.002-05:00

i've always naturally latched onto the idea that things aren't what they seem. as most people did i saw michael moore's bowling for columbine and it made me want to think the world wasn't what it seemed to be.

except bowling for columbine turned out to be garbage. which is what most conspiracy theories i've looked into are. i'm sure people mean well (sometimes) but i was talking about it with my father the other day and he summed it up nicely to me. he said that people don't like the thought that no one's in charge. they don't like the idea that things just happen, that the melting pot of the world's people produces completes crazy results.

i'm sure some of them hold weight. actually i'm not sure of that at all. all the nutbar ones have ruined any interest i have in discovering the legit ones so for the moment, i'm done.

there's the blockade!

2010-07-01T05:29:00.003-05:00

it's been a while. i'd like to start this blog by saying thanks to martin from belgium. or bavaria. uh oh. i've fogotten where he's from. but anyway he told me in paris that he reads my blog. so thankyou. nice to know i'm not typing into the abyss.

sooooo germany. it was legit. i visited the augustiner brewery and brew house, hofbrauhaus and walked around a bunch. one night i worked out with joe and jord to meet them at 10:10am at rosenheim station the next day so we could go check out the eagles nest in berchtesgaden. google it. this required me to be awake at about 9 to catch a 9:30 train from just up the road. well since i have no phone and the watch i have has no alarm (but i worked out later my ipod does, fml) i rely on going to bed at the right time in order to wake up at the right time. this failed me, i woke up at 10:55. great. i sat around in bed for a while dwelling on the epicness of my fail at not making it to basically why i came to munich for (eagles nest) before dressing myself and trudging downstairs with little hope. after a quick google i decide to jump in a taxi and bolt it to the station.

turns out the taxi driver took me on the most random-ass route possible so instead of going straight down the road to the station he did like a massive loop so my route compared to the ideal one forms a massive grinning mouth. sigh. i get inside and run to the ticket booth and wait around for a bit before the guy is like "choo canten maken ze 11:50 tvain becoose ze platvorm iz to var avay, lol" so i bought a ticket to the next one then bolted and caught the early one. take that dracula. yeah i know dracula wasn't german, hush. so i get to rosenheim with no hope of the guys being there. i was stressed on the train ride but animal collective calmed me down. superb calm down and make happy music. yeah so i got off the train and wandered for a while around the station before going to info where the only guy who spoke english was occupied by some woman buying what must have been a house or something equally as significant because the transaction lasted for like 2 hours. okay maybe 25 minutes but it was long.

he told me how to get to berchtesgaden and i went to the right platform. a couple of minutes pass then i spot jord and joe coming up the stairs with bikes. the most amazing coincidence known to man. we laughed for ages at the pure chance of it. turns out they'd tried to email me a few times and just decided to cycle around for a while and wait to see if i'd show up. so we got on the train and headed to berchtesgaden, finally. we met a guy from brisbane who is studying bass trombone in germany somewhere and buddied up. we got to da berch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berchtesgaden btw) but found out we couldn't get to the eagles nest because the last bus was about to leave so we wouldn't be able to get back. sigh. we decided to go to konigssee instead, this epic glacial lake about 5km away. we had two bikes so jord ended up riding on the back while i rode cause i'm heavier. we got there and it was amazing. seriously so good.

suss this photo - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:063007-Konigssee-dusk.jpg - see the little island out on the water? it has a statue of a king on it with some ruins and such. it's awesome. we stripped (stripped makes it sound drawn out) and swam from that left edge of the shore just beyond those boat houses (in the forest) out to the island. the water was FREEZING. i'd be wagering it was close to zero. joe's toes went white and he couldn't feel them for a few hours. we hiked back to the village and tried to hitchhike but ended up doing the dink thing and riding back to berchtesgaden. tried to find a tavern for a drink, no luck. ended up getting beer from the train station which came in insanely solid bottles and tasted incredible. the beer in germany...wow.
caught the train back to central in munich and went back to the hostel after a train station dinner with the gents.

eventually we flew to london. we got to the airport not 100% knowing how we'd get picked up but eventually mark and jack appeared seemingly out of nowhere. cause the 10kg GPS i'd been lugging around with me didn't seem to work we ended up without one so we drove around london for a few hours trying to work out what to do. we found a nandos across the street from our hotel and ate. the hotel was interesting. no air con. like the van we hired. oh yeah, that's right. no air conditioning in the van and the only windows that open are the front two and a skylight. pretty amazing. this is now sweat tour '10 aka. disgusting thin layer of oily gloss that forms on your face when you're in a vehicle for too long with no fresh air or air conditioning...tour '10. later that night i went to my sister's to hang out for a bit. we hadn't seen each other for like 6 months so it was pretty legit. went home and "slept". next day we picked up ro and bree and headed to manchester for our first UK show. it went alright. the venue was nice. don (one of our managers)'s daughter and her boyfriend were there which was nice. some food after then off to the hotel to sleep. the next day we caught a ferry to ireland which was pleasant.

ireland was just pleasant overall. the people ruled, the venue was nice, we got fruit, show went good, people bought us guinness (guinness in ireland tastes about 50 times better than anywhere else in the world). quality time. shame we couldn't find our hotel later that night and after 3 hours of searching we just slept at a petrol station near the ferry docks. caught the ferry at a time that was too early, arrived in england again and drove to glastonbury. nice drive. due to some misorganisation on my part i'd written off any chance of my sister finding us at glasto but somehow she turned up just as we did exactly where we did. for anyone who knows anything about glasto's grounds, this is a bona fide miracle. the weather was perfect. we ran into polly and some of the mumford lads which was great. they were in mourning over the soccer. we walked across the fest to our stage (it took about a half hour...glasto is big) and got some food. eventually we wound up talking to some of the other dudes backstage who turned out to be chief, the band playing with us at bush hall in london in about two weeks. really legit guys. we ended up doing some acrobatics and inventing games with little tables and chairs around the place. everyone nearly got seriously injured a few times but all in the name of fun. jack and i met a fellow named avi buffalo who was after us on the stage who was super nice. he asked to listen to my ipod cause i was warming up to pig destroyer. he said they shredded. he is not wrong.

chief played and killed it. really solid live band, pretty chill. drummer michael reminded me of doug clifford from creedence. solid and entertaining to watch. sweet d00dz. we hung with them for a bit, played our set (it was alright) then walked around a while. my sister was hanging with us too which was most excellent. we found our way back to the van eventually with the chief dudes (to give them a lift back to their hotel) but when we got there we had to wait in line with the van for what must have been about 2 hours. it was insane. the line to get out was just. not. moving. joe got in the boot with mike (chief) and my sister and had a bit of a banjo hodown. nice work guys. eventually we got out and headed to ben mumford's place for some sleep. we woke up nice and late, ate some great breakfast then headed to brighton for the show that night. it went pretty good. first of a few shows with pearly gate music who are sweet people. after the show we drove a while to get to a hotel in dover near the ferry for the next day only to find out that they had no record of our booking. sweet. we drove and found another hotel and slept for about half an hour before heading to the ferry to head to calais to drive to paris. we got there and drove. it was a pleasant drive toward the end. paris is legit.

we loaded in and sat around for a while before soundcheck. joe and i washed our clothes then trekked around for a while trying to find a laundromat to dry our clothes in to not much avail. but that's cool. we eventually found one. it dried our clothes real good. sam octigan showed up at the show which was rad, sweet pal from back home. good to see another familiar face. emma, a friend of my pal nikoli was there too which was rad. show went pretty good. nice crowd. strangely large venue. we left our gear there afterward and headed back to the hotel where some of us stayed and slept and some of us went out. i slept. woke up to the hotel phone ringing and the hotel brought us up some bread, croissants and coffee. thanks guys. checked out and headed to the eiffel tower. it was big and not bad. octigan met us there, we walked around for a bit, got ice cream, took some photos with the tower then got some lunch back near the van. i had a weird frenchy hotdog. said our goodbyes to octigan (see you in three weeks!) then started the drive to cologne where i am now.

i watched a film called werckmeister harmonies by bela tarr. it's a hungarian flick about a guy in a small town that's having kind of an existential crisis when a big whale is brought to town as a freak show type exhibit. it's made up of only a few really long intricately planned takes. all shot in black and white. sparse music. very, very beautiful film. haunting is the right word. i recommend it highly. a few bits of forced emotion but the rest is great. you need to be patient with it.

we got in, ate, slept and i am now awake and it's like 1:15pm. we're playing in koln tonight. notbadnotbad. i'm hungry.

catch..

dead kings.

2010-06-17T11:16:00.005-05:00

bonnaroo was intense. kinda like how i imagine woodstock would be if they tried to run it today. about a tenth of the people and widespread commercialization. they had a helicopter too. jay-z gave me a rap hat, thanks mate. well, not him personally but his clothing brand. i don't really wear it but it's a good'un. we played on a little stage in front of where weezer was playing which was interesting. never played on a stage in front of another stage before. i ended the set with a white towel wrapped around my head held on with a garnier fructus elastic headband. may have inadvertently bolstered the rep of just being a band called the middle east and seeming like we're from the middle east. after the set we all caught some dinner together (tme and mumford & crew) which was excellent. the food and the company were unbeatable. we said some goodbyes and i ran off to get a rap hat while everyone else went to stevie wonder. i went to stevie after but couldn't find anyone so i just caught a tiny bit then bailed back to the van. we went back to mike & ash's, split up the gear, did some general cleaning and sorting of the van then mark and i set off to get to jackson, TN. we arrived and slept.

we woke up and drove. and drove. and drove. and drove. and for a change then we thought it might be a cool idea if maybe we considered possibly just driving a little bit more. eventually we got to dallas and i got on my flight. after some drama with my credit card eventually they gave me inflight wireless internet for free. this therefore made it the best flight ever. inflight internet is amazing. anyone who saw all of my facebook updates understands how much i loved it. anyway. landed at LGA in NYC and caught a taxi to rich's where i slept. the next day i woke up and pretty much just started to plan my next few days. after working out a rough plan rich and i met up with sasha and we went and saw sally seltmann play at a sweet dark little bar. she ruled. then sasha and i headed off to the empire state to try and catch the sunset but we missed it by like a half hour. that's alright, we enjoyed it anyway. after that we went to planet hollywood in times square. what a weird place. the most unusual memorabilia hanging around the place. some rad stuff from se7en that i really wanted. some stuff from beetlejuice (yep). some stuff from fifth element and die hard 3. a bunch of stallone stuff. you could tell who owned the place. the food wasn't too bad. a couple basically broke up next to us which was kind of distressing but we tried to block it out. after that we bid our farewells (see you in australia!) and went to our respective places of rest.

the next day (the 15th) i went on a bit of a mission. i dropped some rolls of film (14) off at a sweet photo lab, walked up to the NYC public library and took a look, then went to the chrysler building and took a big long look at that (favourite building in NYC next to the empire, definitely), then checked out grand central (mark told me i'd love it and i did), then dropped some stuff off at our business manager's office, then went to NBC for a fallon taping. it was pretty rad. such a tiny studio, really surprised me. the guy who was warming up the crowd singled me out as the orrstrayylyann so we had a bit of a back and forth which was entertaining. the roots came out and played thought @ work to get the crowd ready (awesome) to which i reacted like a school girl to the beatles in the 60's. the roots are still the best. see them live and try denying it. cedric the entertainer was on and he was funnier than i remember. he made some crack about there being an ipad app for where to buy weed in the hood and ?uestlove made a "he just say that on fallon?" face. it was a pretty awkward comment. fred willard was on too and wasn't as funny as i'd hoped. still cool to see him in person though. broken social scene played a song too. killed it.

afterwards this feller named paul took me down and showed me the set which was pretty cool to see. i got to see ?uest's kit up close too which was pretty surreal. learned a few little things i might try and work into my setup. after that i walked down 7th and found a cinema and watched get him to the greek which was alright. might have to see it again. i dig jonah hill so i was always destined to see it. walked back to rich's and slept. i don't remember what i did the next day. i think i went and saw splice which was pretty surprisingly rad and legitimately disturbing. and really well made. after that i bailed back to rich's then went out again and saw best worst movie which is a doco about troll 2 and the recent cult status it's achieved. really good, really funny, really entertaining doco. kinda heartbreaking in parts too. definitely recommend it. after that, sleep. next day i got up and saw breathless (godard) at the film forum which was a pretty killer experience. brand new print, lovingly restored. looks good as new. still as fresh of a film as ever too. after that i headed back to rich's and we picked up greg and went to brooklyn bowl to see the roots/john legend play.

pretty surreal little show. not a big venue which was odd given who was playing. i watched ?uest and john the whole time, and james poyser. i didn't even realise poyser was playing with the roots now. he's amazing. pure fire on a piano. did a ridiculous solo in one of the songs that had everyone else in the band cracking up laughing from the sheer sickness of it. after that we bowled awhile while ?uesto dj'd the night away. i did good on my first game but sucked royally after that. what's a boy to do. the lakers/celtics game was playing all around the venue at the same time and when the lakers won, ?uest was spinning that kelis "i hate you so much right now" song and he dropped it back to probably half the speed or more for a couple of minutes to really emphasize exactly how he was feeling about the lakers at the time. we eventually headed home and i slept.

woke up, hectic times. picked up some photos from the shop, packed my bags, booked hostels...a few other things before i left. bid my farewell to rich (who's a legend for putting me up for the last couple of days/nights), jumped in a cab, raced to jfk as fast as i could (it took around an hour and forty five...nasty) only to find the computers were down so they just manually checked us in. which was interesting. the flight was alright, i watched star wars episode III: revenge of the sith. if you take out all the clowning droid voices and basically every scene (except the choking one) with padme then you have a really solid film. easily the best of the prequels. very badarse. the opening is the best of the prequels too, straight into it.

I HAVEN'T SEEN YOU THIS NERVOUS SINCE WE FELL INTO THAT NEST OF GUNDARS

i also read child of god by cormac mccarthy. pretty intense book, not for the weak of stomach or those who don't like weird stories. definitely his shortest book too. after i got off the flight they put us with a different carrier to get to munich (the flight went into dusseldorf) who charged me excess baggage which is a whole other kettle of fish but i eventually got on the flight and listened to animal collective the whole way. real short flight, might have actually been less than an hour flight time. once i got there it was a juggling act with all of my gear. when it came to stairs, cause i had my rolling luggage, snare and cymbals (and backpack but that doesn't count), sometimes i had to take two items up some steps, come down, grab the lone item, grab one of the two items i already brought up on the way past, go up further, go down and grab the straggler and so on. painful. but i finally got to the hostel where i am now at. sigh.

the title has no relevance to the contents of this post, i just think they're a badass band.

catch.

in nashville.

2010-06-12T12:48:00.002-05:00

phoenix was pretty good. we ended up hanging out exchanging party tricks by the end of the night over a few beers. then we (mumford + crew & tme) attempted a human pyramid. we did not succeed. this would not be the last attempt, however.

after that we high-tailed it to austin. the venue was basically a big shed but sounded surprisingly badass. i only played ONE tables tennis game against rohin and NO POOL AT ALL besides both being free for all for the whole night. this bums me out a lot. all the denton crew came down for the show which was amazing, so good to see them all again. i ended up going to a bar named mohawk and hanging with two new friends, liz and bob. liz is a singer-songwriter and bob is a comedian. they were real interesting folk and nicely bought me a drink or two. we headed back to chance (heck)'s house which is HUGE and hung for a bit. bree, carly sue, lesley, courtnie and myself then went to kerby lane for some late night (4:30am) eats. i had some enchiladas. they were good. lesley chose a chicken sannich so she could sit back in the corner of the booth and chill. that was the actual reason she told us she chose it. good reason. went back to chances, slept for a few hours.

woke up, head to dallas. i watched some more penn & teller and listened to the new deftones. penn & teller ruled, not so sure about new deftones yet. think it'll be a grower. it's a little too overtly melodic in some parts...what i mean by that is it always felt the melody in deftones was understated. part of the song as a whole that seemed to write itself in there because it fit perfectly. some of the stuff on the new album feels melodic for melodic's sake. this sounds weird, i know. i need to listen to it more. as pretentious and weird as it may sound, i kind of see deftones as the radiohead of metal. they do whatever the hell they want and always pull it off...well, i need to listen to the new album to make sure they pulled it off. so to speak. anyway.

we got to the house of blues in dallas. it's a killer venue, one of the newest HOB's in the country. actually i think it is THE newest one. the downstairs room is excellent and big and the room we played in, the cambridge room upstairs, was also sweet. dealey plaza was a 5 minute walk away (where kennedy was assassinated) but i didn't end up going there which i now consider a mistake. we got some free chow (i got the elwood: sourdough bun, tomato, lettuce, chili mayo, cayan chicken & chips...amazing) and somehow got the sweetest dressing room in the whole building. it overlooked the main downstairs room where wonder girl were playing with 2PM. 2PM killed it, wonder girl not so much. the sound of girl's screams was DEAFENING. insane. we played okay. before the last song we started thanking people which went on for about 3 minutes or so. we even thanked cheverolet for making the van we toured in. mumford ruled too. pretty sad being our last show together though. bonnaroo doesn't count.

after the show i ran into mel who is a pal of my friend andy. she stayed at a house i lived in forever ago (2007 i think) so that was a weird chance encounter. later we tried to do the mumford/tme pyramid again after taking an end of tour crew photo but we failed aaahhhgain. i blame the top two rows for being too scared to scale our mighty 'mid. after that we headed back to denton to hang with everyone which was sweet, then went to bed. goodnight.

next day we got up, hung for a bit and said our goodbyes. next stop, nashville. the drive was pretty good. i bought at the mountains of madness which is shaping up to rule pretty hard. did some more listening and watched some more penn & teller with joe. got to nashville to mike & ash's (they rule super hard) and hung for a bit before sleep. just woke up before to some amazing breakfast from m&a and now we're about to head to bonnaroo, our last show in the USA for a long while. this is epic. after the show we're splitting up our gear for our respective flights to different places. pretty crazy.

catch.

good grief.

2010-06-08T00:22:00.004-05:00

i am BEYOND behind. ugh. it's like forgetting to do homework and running off and doing cool stuff like playing under the broken fire hydrant in the street while tribe called quest blasts from some boombox nearby being held by a dude with a flat top and you're wearing bright coloured parachute clothes probably adidas and everyone's dancing and having a good time and some old man is yelling at us to stop dancing and making such a racket and so on but then when you get home and relax into the couch for your favourite session of cat dog or rocco's modern life or even beavis and butthead you find a crumpled piece of paper wedged in the gap between the sofa cushion and the sofa back and it turns out it's actually your maths homework but you're not good at maths and it's due tomorrow but there's no way you can do it so you just don't and then forget to do it and then the teacher calls you up the front in class and you act all cool like forgetting to do your homework is sick but then the teacher makes an example of you and you get all up in her grill and start fumin' all over the place and she just sends you to the principal's office and you get expelled.

that's what it's like right now.

alright so we did a bunch of stuff. ummm...redwoods of northern california. amazing. super tall trees. very tall, verrryyy dangerous. we ran into jack johnson there. i think he was just hanging with his fam. we had a debate amongst ourselves as to if it was really him. we have decided it was probably him after some research. everyone saw a brown bear run across the road but me. i shot two rolls of film but one broke inside the camera so it was ruined and the other didn't even go through the camera so i felt pretty dumb about that. we went to san francisco and played there and there was this chef named jose who was amazing. he also had this kitchenhand who's name i forget. apparently, according to jose, "children of bodom, they come here and they play, they ask for jose". he also said silverchair ask for jose. jose was a pretty amazing cook, i'll be honest. i went back for seconds, possibly thirds. sasha (hough, pal from melbourne) came out to the show. cool seeing a melbourne pal in another country. she had a girl she was travelling with too named tania. i said "had a girl" just then like tania is a bag or something. which she is not. anyway.

after that i don't even remember. i ended up in LA, walked around a while, caught one of those touristy tours that's like AND THERE IS THE HOUSE JENNIFER ANISTON LIVED IN WHEN SHE WAS ON FRand stuff like that. pretty lame but 25 bucks to sit down for 2 hours and see most of beverly hills and hollywood was a pretty sweet deal. plus i got to see zanuck, goldwyn, newman...all these awesome estates from the golden age. and aaron spelling's house which is incredibly big. the LA shows went pretty sweet, a bit of fun. met some crazy people. i went to amoeba which was overwhelming and i ended up walking out with nothing. actually wait, that was the second day. first day i walked out with new dillinger, cult of luna - eternal kingdom w/dvd and chasing amy (criterion...4 bucks!). tried to go to the cinerama dome but i missed all the decent sessions. fail.

we did a show in costa mesa too which was nice. that was on our lonesome, not with mumford. i was on fire when it came to pool that night. i seriously couldn't miss a shot. i was surprising even myself, i hadn't played since brooklyn like 3 weeks back. i hope this pool mojo continues until i get home and then i can smash andrew, aaron and vallejos in one swoop. look out boys.

then we played a show in solana beach with mumford. that was...weird. turned into a bit of a slap-dash set but i guess that's okay. we hung out with christina (VH, friend from aus and traveller/wanderlust extraordinaire) and she gave us a place to stay and shared breakfast with us this morning. that was excellent. i had eggs, toast and strawberries. it worked. then we drove across the bloody desert and now we're in phoenix. we just played before, mumford are playing now and killing it. everyone is singing every single word. i swear if marcus coughed the crowd would cough at the same time. brilliant.

catch.

p.s. won't be so long next time. promise.

wow, delay.

2010-05-22T18:04:00.003-05:00

why have i NOT posted an entry for like 10 days? ridiculous.

alright so the philadelphia show wasn't at the filmore. it was at another venue which i forget the name of. oh well. it was fun. i got some photos developed, my first lot with the yashica and they turned out okay. shame about the developing, didn't work so good. we drove back to our hotel in jersey and hit bed hard. the next day we drove into brooklyn and had breakfast/walked around. somehow we ran into the mumford guys. you'd think we were on the same tour or something. they showed us a few things then mark and i went for a long walk to try and find a music shop. we probably spent about an hour walking around to no avail. eventually we loaded into the venue (the music hall of williamsburg) and went off to find the real music store that actually existed which we did find because it actually did exist. amazing. back to the venue, soundcheck, eat some food. we played alright. mumford did too. we did our first "whole band does a song with them" and it worked pretty well besides a lot of bung hits from me. after the show we went bowling at some bowling alley which was a ball. no pun intended. back to rich's, sleep time.

we woke up super late and rich took us to eat some burgers at some burger joint which was sick. it was also raining a lot. i went and tried to get my film developed but to no avail. we headed to the venue (webster hall). i could spend so long in that venue just looking around. it's beautiful. i took a lot of photos which will eventually be developed properly. we did another shared song which went better and it was an enjoyable show all around. for me at least. after the show we retired like babies and just went to sleep. the next day was our own show in NYC at the mercury lounge. earlier in the day we went and had lunch with rich and jordan (TAO) at soho house. very snooty. food wasn't bad though. after that we went to the venue and loaded in to get set up. it was an early show, we played at 8:30. it went pretty good. crowd was quiet which is always nice. the venue runs two shows a night so we had to load out straight after we played. we hung around for a while, went to a bar or two then mark and i headed into the city to go to the empire state building.

this was the fulfilling of a long-term dream of mine. i've always kind of romanticized about the empire state...it's always been a bit mythic to me. king kong hung out there for crying out loud. i knew it was an art deco masterpiece too which got me even more excited. it was about as exciting as i expected which ruled. i took a lot of photos. it was 20 bucks to go to the 84th floor and another 15 to go up to the 104th. we just went to the 84th. i might do the 104th when i come back. for sake of completion of the dream. i was too scared to get too close to the edge too. you get serious vertigo that high up. you could see everything, even the statue of liberty despite it being tiny. after that we went back to rich's and slept. time to leave NYC.

we headed to washington d.c. next, the 9:30 club. before we got there we drove around for a little while. to be honest i didn't really dig the place. i understand how important it is and it's really clean and nice and such but it's just...kinda dull. sorry d.c. the venue was real nice, i like the 9:30 club a lot. nice vibe, nice sound, nice layout...real chill. and they give you these amazing muffins! chocolate filled with cream and 2 (TWO) layers of icing with 9:30 written on top in some other kind of beautifully delicious amazingness. so good. i think i ate like 3. bad me. we guested with mumford again but did it in our underwear this time. they were surprised to say the least. after that we went to the hotel and slept.

the next day we headed to cleveland. we played in a ballroom. the beachland ballroom. kind of a ballroom in the 70's sense. just a big room with curtains and a few other things. i went to get some photos developed but they turned out garbage so i demanded a refund. it's crazy how varying the quality can be sometimes. definitely not keen on walgreens or CVS developing anymore. going to wait for pro-shops. shame cause of some the photos i could tell were going to rule really hard going by the (bad) prints and the negatives (which the dude dropped on the floor while i was getting my refund...thanks). the show went nicely. all the mumford guys joined us for better times which was kinda fun. oh wait, ben wasn't there. he was off buying food. might do it again tonight but with all of them. mumford played solid and we did our usual whole band guest appearance with them too. everyone gathered around winstson and thrusted while playing their instruments. solid. after the show we messed around for a while and went to a bar from some pool and hangs. morgan came out for the show which was nice, real sweet to see her. we went to her grandma's house in canton, ohio to sleep. it was a really legit old house.

we woke up real late (like 12:30) and went for a drive through amish county. buggies, bonnets, long shapeless dresses, chin straps, the works. i really liked it there. we stopped at a place where they made cheese (a LOT of cheese) and sampled some along with some fudge. then we went and got some chow at a big amish market. pretty sweet. morgan's dad bought it for us which we were pretty stoked on. thanks morgan's dad! i forget his name which is really bad considering he bought us chow. sorry morgan's dad! we high-tailed it to columbus where we are now cause we were running late. quick sound check and a bit of a recline before the show. looking forward to it.

catch.

mmm. yais.

2010-05-16T17:51:00.002-05:00

the drive from montreal to boston wasn't too bad. i don't remember if we stopped off anywhere or not. as we were leaving montreal though one of our windows suddenly smashed. it was utterly bizarre. nothing on the ground near the point of impact that could have done it. no sign of anyone. i wonder if it was a sniper with a frozen bullet. it wouldn't need to travel very fast to break our window although i guess that would depend on its' shape. it could be a pellet type or perhaps more of a standard pointed bullet style. from an elevated position (there were apartment windows all around) i don't think they'd have much trouble. but then you have to think about the wind. i guess since we were in the north we didn't have to worry a whole lot about humidity wrecking the usefulness of the ammunition given the bullet itself is made of frozen water. or perhaps another heavier liquid.

food for though. it was probably just a rock but it helps to think about these things.

we got boston and unloaded. turns out the venue was in a basement which isn't very fun for loading in or out. but that's okay. after the load in i got a salad and wandered a bit. ran into simon (binns) who i know from a while back from the antiskeptic message boards (that's really taking it back). we talked awhile; i expressed my jealously that he had seen christopher walken in a play off broadway and he expressed his envy that we were touring with mumford. a fair trade i think.

we played and then mumford played. we both did okay. load out and head to the hotel. sleep.

the next day we drove into NYC. this ruled. a lot. i've been waiting for us to reach NYC for a long time. rich met us outside his apartment and we went for a walk up to this thing called the high rail which is this old railtrack above the streets on the upper west side that's been out of use since the 1920's. plants grew all along it and eventually the city decided to invest in turning it into this swish walkway. it's really awesome, very surreal to just be walking around in the city above the city. i dig it. we went to some italian restaurant/bar after that which was real nice. had some pizza and some laughs. back to rich's, watched the end of hangover then tried to decide what to do with the night. eventually jord, jack and i headed to times square for a look around. i bought some black & white for my yashica electro GSN. i just finished it tonight. we got back to rich's after that, finished off some of true lies then headed back to our hotel in jersey.

woke up and went for a walk. i found a battery shop which was good but then it was closed which is bad. got some subway, sat around for a while. i finished watching all of the nightmare on elm street films (all 7). 1-5 were pretty alright and 7 too. 6 sucked. eventually we headed off to the venue in philly where we are now. the filmore. it's real nice here. i walked around for a bit and snapped some photos. i'm typing this while we soundcheck. should be a good show. i wonder if ?uestlove will come out for it...

catch.

moomfudd n soons.

2010-05-14T00:11:00.002-05:00

so we played our last show with laura in portland which went the best. it was jord's birthday and i think it made the show better somehow. we were all playing well, it felt great. laura played stunningly too, man she's good. smoke fairies killed it too. it was sad to leave those guys but hey, it's not like we were going off on tour with a bunch of non-brits again. mumford ahoy!

we slept then bailed on the road up to canada. along the way we saw some pretty stunning sights. this amazing hotel just sitting in the middle of this big wide open area with huge picturesque mountains snow capped in the background way away. and we stopped off at a lake between two enormous mountains too. we just don't have scenery like this in australia. next to the lake basically at the same level as the lake were a bunch of trees and flatland. like a flooded zone. it was just...don't even know. it was kinda surreal-ly awesome. i wish i had a camera at moments like that. thanks a lot detroit.

two hotel rooms in montreal again. amazing. rohin's birthday, i guess that was the occasion. they have those crazy bike rental systems here too, like in paris. i kinda wish i'd done it, looked like a bit of a lark. i wound up going and seeing the nightmare on elm street remake. i get to the cinema and it's like oh ho ho ho frenchy. everything was in french. even the ticket guy was like BONJEWER OH HO HO. so anyway i ended up seeing it only in french and without subtitles. the title was translated badly too. it translates back to english as "the glove in the night" or something. weird right. i understood what was going on most of the time. the wonder of horror films. but anyway besides some really cool looking shots the film was a mess. some of the closeups were tons out of focus and the pacing was just wack. like you see freddy properly like 5 seconds into the film. goodbye tension.

after that i tried to get a royal with cheese but it was just called a la quartear pewendearrr or something like that. boring. i went to a pizza store after that but they had no pizza. why was it still open then? sigh. back to hotel, sleep time.

woke up today and some of us went and sussed some breakfast for ro's birthday. after what felt like 2 months of walking we found a place and ate. delicious. back to hotel. we went out after a bit to the op shop and i bought a nice jacket, scarf and a winter hat that looks like something a woman in the 20's would have worn. nice. they had this ballpit there too but instead of balls it was clothes. like it was a whole other room (pretty big too) that you took your shoes off and went digging through these mountains of clothes. seriously so awesome. this was a sick op shop.

after that we went and loaded into the venue. nice little theatre kinda thing. so good seeing the mumford guys again. many hugs all around. ben (mumford) bought a cooker that he thought was for rice but it turns out it's a slow cooker so his meals will now take hours to make. this is hilarious. mark and i went and found food and i ate too much and felt sick while we played. mumford played solid. we all had champagne and a tiny little cake for ro's birthday. it was grand. we loaded out and now i'm back at the hotel. the hotel is literally like 20 metres walk from the backstage door of the venue. now that's taking care of business. lotty would be so proud of us.

boston next. tomorrow night.

catch.

hi it's vince with the sla-sla-sla-sla-sla-sla-sla-slaslaslaslaslaslaslaslaschopchopchopchopchopchopchop - WATCH THIS.

2010-05-10T23:06:00.003-05:00

hi it's vince with the slap chop, and you're gonna be in a great mood allll day, cause you can slap all your troubles away with the slap chopSLAP SLAP all your troubles away with the slap chop.

alright so canada was nice. i had a crepe. if you imagine crepe as a different way of saying crap then everything to do with crepes becomes funnier. try it out. make it happen. turns out there was a whole stack of australians at the show. weird huh? i love australians. they remind me of home for some reason. after canada we went down to somewhere. oh yeah, grand rapids. that was nice. i don't really remember much about the show though. oh wait now i do. i just asked joe. we played at a venue called the women's literary club. it was like a little recital theatre kinda thing with a stage and curtains and everything. it felt like we were in one of those high school movies. they gave us money to eat dinner too. i love it when shows give you money. also there was chocolate.

turns out laura marling & her band (and smoke fairies who are the second support) are basically the nicest people ever. touring with british people is amazing. they're all so courteous and funny and proper and excellent people all around. can't say enough good things about touring with these guys/girls so far. they're all killer players and performers too. their sound guy joel rules too. and the guitar tech, dave. i could tour with these people for ages.

after grand rapids we went to detroit. detroit swallowed my phone and for this i will deny it being talked about. f u detroit.

next: the most exciting stop for me so far. the andy warhol museum. it was real sick to play there. i spoke to this guy ben who runs the museum i think and he gave me a bit of a tour. showed me the projection booth. they have a bunch of the negatives for his films there but unfortunately they usually show them on dvd. bit of a let down but understandable cause they're showing them every day. they'll probably do some new hi-def transfers of them soon. not bad. the show was weird, felt a little sterile. i think cause realistically we were playing in a cinema. ben gave me this dvd after the show which is 13 of andy's screen tests of actors set to music. it looks pretty sick, keen to tuck in. he was telling me that george romero and tom savini are locals so they do stuff there from time to time like zombie nights and tom savini will screen films he's worked on there. apparently they're rad dudes. i would love to come to a halloween party with makeup done by tom savini. imagine that! also apparently romero's kid runs a few haunted houses on the outskirts of pittsburg (oh, i forget to mention that's where the museum is SORRY) that rule. i'm so keen to visit one it's insane. like i would lose my mind in one. go legitimately crazy. i haven't been to a good haunted house in a while but a good one is GOOD. thinking of trying to get to the one at disneyworld or land. i don't know if i'll end up there though. bit of a bummer. hmm.

also rich was there. we went to an eatery for lunch and it was great. good to see a familiar face, especially one as friendly as rich's.

next night: buffalo. this was a weird venue but pretty sick. it was FREEZING in buffalo. it's in new york. new york is cold so far. anyway while walking around (poor bree turned into a breesickle) we found this thing which turned out to be the city hall. it is actually the coolest building i've seen in america so far and I DIDN'T HAVE MY CAMERA BECAUSE IT IS LOST IN DETROIT. sigh. here's pictures anyway.

seriously. so good. i wish i'd gotten to go inside. it was so intense just turning a corner and seeing this massive thing. suss out more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_City_Hall. if you enjoy art deco stuff this is a goldmine. hoo boy.

so yeah, the building excited me.

marcus (mumford) turned up at the show too. it was so good to see a familiar face. fantastic hugs were had. he did a bit of mandolin with laura too. laura's cellist ruth finally joined the tour as well and adds so much to her sound live. it's great. also it was joel (sound fellow)'s birthday. rachel (TM for laura marling) organised a cake and champagne and everything. it was such a good time. eventually we loaded out into the freezing cold and went back to our respective hotels. we slept in a bit then went and saw niagra falls on the way to portland (maine) where we are now. the falls were sick. just watching the water continually fall was hypnotic. weird looking over and seeing canada too. the drive took a while. i watched the end of the last detail, sunset blvd (amazing), in the electric mist and i finished off watching izo and the keep. good sesh. it's jord's birthday now. we got two hotel rooms for the first time in a while too. it's so good not to have to be sharing one room with 6 people. the best. might try and see a film tomorrow (still haven't been to the pictures in america...criminal).

catch.

in canada.

2010-05-05T10:22:00.010-05:00

alright so the rest of the time at don's was killer. we went to a bunch more places and spent a bunch more time sleeping and getting our lives rejuvenated. one night we went and saw the dead weather play at this little venue which ruled. another night we went to a restaurant on top of this huge mountain looking out over birmingham which was real nice and then went and saw the black keys in a little club. blew my mind. flat out blew my mind. on our second last day there we played for a bunch of indie record store owners from all over the states in a warehouse in birmingham. it was a weird mood playing in a warehouse. wouldn't have picked us to be a band that would work in one but it seemed to go okay. i got some records real cheap too. gnarly. on our last evening we went to dreamland. they had bbq ribs and a lot of them. they had bibs. the lady put mine on for me. it was amazing.

i still haven't been to a cinema while i've been travelling yet. this is insane.

after that we went to nashville. we made friends quickly with some people named norman, lady pearl, delbert reese, barbara jean, connie white...all up probably around 24 people. there was even this guy with a tricycle riding everywhere. he seemed to transition into every situation we were in. not kidding. just before we left everything climaxed in the parthenon. there was a concert and everyone was playing. crazy. i guess christmas has always smelled like oranges to me anyway. i managed to get a photo while we were there.

that's linnea reese. she really brought the house down. best kids too.

anyway from there we went to bloomington. it was alright. more mexican for eats. good times. the show we played had approx 10 people there (i think 7 were from the two openers) but that's cool. good chance to try out some brand new stuff and experiment a little. we stayed in some hotel (they all look the same now) and woke up the next day and drove to newport, kentucky. we played at a converted house called southgate house. apparently the tommy gun was invented there.

a tommy gun.

the house was pretty sweet, would be cool to live there. show went okay. tried a beer or two. blue moon, a wheat beer they had really killed it. they put some random stuff in there to make it taste better. excellent. we stayed there for the night and i was trying to work on my film script but this burly friendly guy with an eye patch kept bursting in and talking to me about working stiffs and stuff like that. but he was friendly enough. here's a photo of us.

things got a little weird by the end. flames and such.

we met some sweet girls who let us stay in their attic and made us awesome pancakes in the morning. we schooled them on how australians talk. one of them couldn't get it right and sounded like they were deaf. we travelled along and found our way to canada. crossing the border was pretty easy. we got inspected a little though.

"i'm sorry about this ma'am but you can never be too careful nnnnnNGMOOOOO"

we didn't really get inspected. then we got some food. then we drove to the hotel which looks like every other hotel. i think i'm slowly going insane. we're playing in prescott tonight. apparently the venue is nice. keen.

catch.

delay delay delay.

2010-04-26T21:42:00.003-05:00

alright so i keep forgetting to blog. or maybe i'm too lazy. or both. maybe i'm too lazy to even forget to blog. maybe i just don't blog. maybe there's no explaining it. i give up.

last entry we were in denton, right? right. we played a show in dallas on the 22nd. it was in a venue called the loft. they had like 50,000 rooms and they were all pretty darn big. vinnie paul's band was playing downstairs when we were. pretty funny. the show went pretty well. the room was full of friends from denton and it was a good vibe. lesley's mum lisa made an appearance and she rules. legit southern babe. after the show we had some ihop (we were a little delirious, i think we freaked out the staff) then went back to lesley/courtnie's for a little bit of hang/party before a little bit of sleep. we woke up and drove to little rock, arkansas for the next show, our first with frightened rabbit. they finally escaped the lava-y clutches of that volcano.

they're super nice guys. joe, jord and i had a delicious meal in the restaurant part of the venue we played (the rev room) with an excellent wine. SPLENDID. we had a few sound issues which made the show a bit tricky but eh. after that we drove to memphis through a pretty incredible storm. sheets and sheets and sheets of rain. it was like driving in the ocean. there was amazing lightening all around. i put on some cult of luna and treated it like a big exciting fireworks display. i was really hoping for a tornado and kept watching the skyline but no dice. we did our usual sneak-all-of-us-into-one-hotel-room trick and got a bit of rest.

woke up too early and started our drive to atlanta, georgia. real nice drive, probably my favourite so far. we stopped off in birmingham, alabama to have lunch with don (one of the managers at TAO, our management company) at a sweet mexican joint. it rules. i got a gnarly taco salad. after that we trekked on to atlanta. after load in i scoped out the place. it was called the masquerade. pretty intense. like a castle but turned into a venue with 3 main indoor rooms and apparently this outdoor venue that has a 6,000 person capacity. crazy. in one of the indoor rooms (called 'purgatory') there were these 3 spooky statue figure kinda things on one of the balconies. looked like something out of from dusk till dawn or dracula or something. real spooky. that show went alright too, the sound was a little better. cool to have don and jason in the crowd (jason works for TAO too). the load out after the show was tricky cause it was bucketing down but we managed it somehow.

we drove back to birmingham with a short stop over to a waffle house/wendy's for some late munchies. the storm was raging on the way back too but we managed to miss the worst of it. apparently a tornado hit pretty heavily in mississippi and like 10 people were killed. nasty. we got back to don's house which is amazing...music memorabilia everywhere and one of the best music collections i think i've ever seen. music heaven. eventually got to bed at i have no idea what time. i'm sleeping in his home theatre which is in his basement. no windows and no clocks. it's like i exist outside time and space down there. woke up real late and went for a bit of a drive later on with don and his wife through birmingham. picked up some groceries and went home for dinner. elaine (don's wife) cooked up some black beans and rice and we had some roasted peppers and bbq chicken and SO much amazing food. we were officially spoilt. some decent wine too, and these chocolate chip cookies...wow. it was like heaven after touring food hell. tour diet is like a punishment. i saw rohin tonight at this thai restaurant we went to and he looked like a new man after decent food and sleep. the effect was almost shocking.

that night we watched nirvana live at reading and man...what a concert. kicks you in the face. really punchy and full recording and really good performance. legit. stayed up late and watched glory with joe and jord (not great...some good scenes but i'm surprised at how strong of a rep it has) and then dazed & confused with jord. stayed up for a while trying to find all the theme time radio hour episodes on torrenz.com but could only find a bunch of season 1. hard to find, those shows. sleep then woke up, hung out for a bit. didn't do much. some table tennis with joe. eventually we went out for a drive around birmingham with don. he showed us a lot of civil rights landmarks; birmingham was kind of the epicentre for a lot of civil rights stuff in the 60's. i've seen a lot of photos from that time, was interesting to see some of the real locations. after that we headed to a thai restaurant which was legit. now we're back at the house. joe and i finished watching the jackal and now we're working our way through the pacific getting up to date.

catch.

offsite blog entry.

2010-04-22T02:49:00.003-05:00

i did a blog about coachella for home & hosed on the triple j website. enjoy.

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/homeandhosed/blog/s2879700.htm

since coachella, however, we've played another show with beach house in tempe, AZ. the short run of shows we were supposed to be doing with frightened rabbit are probably picking up after a dallas show we're doing without them tomorrow night but we're still waiting to see. we're in denton at the moment. back in trusty denton. this town is great and we love everyone in it.

catch.

oh gosh.

2010-04-15T19:04:00.025-05:00

WARNING: this entry is long.

i'm dreadfully behind. sorry everyone. part III coming later.

alright so we left denton on the 12th. we travelled to flagstaff which is in arizona.

it snowed a bit which was sweet. the next day we woke up and went to the grand canyon and it rules awfully hard. on the way we found a smaller canyon which was pretty epic and awesome, and not a lot of fences.

in that second photo, where jord is sitting...very, very high up. and he's sitting right on the edge. it's a drop straight to the bottom from there. i got serious vertigo up there. also we found some snow.

after that we went on to the canyon. it was big.

this is me at the canyon. it was really, really big. looks a bit like a painted backdrop actually. sigh. after that we got some postcards. then we headed into a town to get some lunch. taco bell.

******TACO STORE REVIEW BREAK******

this was a taco bell attached to a kfc. UNEXPLAINED. i mean, why would you combine the two? this was disturbing. like it really got to me. a CHICKEN store...and a TACO store. why were they not just single stores? anyway.

you can see here that no one is attending the counter. why is this? it was like this for about 2 minutes or so after we walked in. fast food people should be all over you like a bad stink asking "WOULD YOU LIKE TO ORDER" almost before you've walked in the door or even had a chance to decide you're hungry and going to eat their fast food. the lady who eventually served us was nice, at least. the food took a little while to come out. i ordered the...uh..."stufd burrito"? in beef. i think.

this was the view once i sat down. pretty boring, you will agree. step it up, taco bell. my burrito looked like this:

fairly well wrapped. the rolling was firm and comfortable to grip. soft to the touch, but not floppy. just as a good burrito should be. after a bite or two, the taco took on this shape:

there was rice, guacamole, sour cream, salsa and beans. every good burrito should contain at least this. accept nothing less.

******END TACO STORE REVIEW BREAK******

we headed on. eventually wound up in bakersfield, CA. i walked to a barnes & noble and bought a book which is a bunch of directors talking about their first films. pretty cool, i've devoured about 280 pages in the last 2 days. it's that good. solid sleep, woke up, free breakfast (including waffles, thanks hotel). we set out to get to davis, CA. we got a bit lost but wound up at the venue for the night, freeborn hall (at UC davis). the show was with passion pit and mayer hawthorne & the county. we loaded in and soundchecked after mayer.

the show went pretty sweet. mayer and the dudes were really nice and passion pit were too. i love it when good bands are good dudes. ultimate win. after the show we headed off to turlock, CA (somewhere in CA...) to sleep. i slept on the floor cause there wasn't enough beds. so did bree and mark. what a time to be alive. bailed in the morning after some FROSTED FLAKES and headed to pomona, CA to the fox theatre for the show with pavement. this theatre...man. incredible.

watching pavement soundcheck was most excellent. such a legit band. i ran off to find a lady who i was told bore the name of "maria": she had the keys to the projection booth which i noticed sitting up in the dark upper balcony of the theatre. once i found this lady (who happened to be incredibly nice and awesome) she showed me around. and boy, what a sight...

i bet you're looking at it and thinking "eh, that ain't much of a sight" but to someone like me...hoo boy. not quite the mother-lode but still very impressive. the further 35mm projector is going to be junked because it sucks but the foreground one is still in impressive nick; they're keeping it for history's sake but getting 2 new/refurbished 35mm projectors donated from a heritage society. they've got an original follow-spot in there and a slide projector...both from the 1930s. quite amazing.

they showed the wizard of oz not long ago and admission was $1. $1! for the new print from the restored negative! amazing. i wish i could have gone, apparently it was a full house. kids were loving it, adults were loving it. everyone. LOVING IT.

******GEEKY CINEMA INFORMATION GO******

the fox theatre, as maria informed me, was opened in around 1931. it was originally owned by fox studios (which joined with 20th century in 1935 to become what we know today as 20th century fox) hence the name. it seats around 675 on the balcony and i'd estimate around 1200-1300 on the floor (the seats were taken out, this is just my guess). the belltower:

originally used to store the air conditioning for the entire theatre. it would intake air through the roof and using tunnels/pipes it'd feed it throughout the building to cool paying clientel. it is now used as a storage space. here's an inside view:

the balcony area was originally just a roof but more recent owners decided to turn it into an ourdoor area. it rules a lot. all the interior detail is original with a few exceptions. unfortunately a club owner who hosted a bunch of raves in the place decided to paint the entire interior black which must have looked hideous so a new paint job was in order when the theatre was being properly restored. it also originally had a pipe organ to accompany silent films (by 1931 they were still doing the rounds despite talkies coming into vogue around 1927) exhibited there. the pipes remain but the organs...gone. sadly. the carpet is replica of the original.

they've recently got a nice digital projector in there (i'm not a fan but this one was pretty legit) accompanied with a semi-new surround sound system which was most excellent. go dolby.

a beautiful theatre. it's a pleasure/honour to play here and i can't wait to come through here again and see a film.

******END GEEKY CINEMA INFORMATION******

we headed out to get some dinner and i snapped a nice photo of the sun setting behind the main facade of the theatre.

and a nice one of bree and jord standing in front of the sign (the sign is still surreal):

we had some solid dinner then headed back to the fox and played. it went surprisingly well. i met a tech fellow named tim who works for the mars volta who looked EXACTLY like andy serkis. quite remarkable. maybe i should get a photo before we bail. i forgot to mention the band room was upstairs which made for a fun walk each time to get our stuff but looked pretty nice out once the sun went down.

we're driving somewhere tonight to sleep. next couple of days is a show with beach house, coachella, frightened rabbit tour...going to be intense. will hopefully be more dilligent with blog entries. and entires to my tumblr of film stills. and part III my favourite songs. phew.

catch.

favourite songs ever pt. II.

2010-04-09T16:10:00.016-05:00

part II COMINATCHA.

the dillinger escape plan - the mullet burden. off under the running board, 1998.

the dillinger escape plan redefine the term acquired taste. if you listen to their songs just once you'll get the impression that the songwriting is amateur and there's no order to it all. at first glance it's just chaos, mindless noise. invest a bit more time and you'll keep discovering layers of rhythms, melodies (i use that term loosely), meters and everything running every which way at all times...but all perfectly wrangled into this monsterous sound. with NIN breaking up recently i'd say dillinger have just grabbed the baton as the most forward thinking "heavy" band in the world still active. big words but they're true.

ennio morricone - once upon a time in the west. off once upon a time in the west (soundtrack), 1972. later released on the legendary italian westerns: the film composers series vol. 2, 1990.

i can't remember when i first heard morricone's music. it's quite possibly when i first saw "the thing" which would have been about 10 years ago. while the score for that film doesn't rank in his ULTIMATE BEST EVER it's still sick and an example of morricone not restricting himself to the kinds of films he scores. this song is the main theme for once upon a time in the west, sergio leone's 1968 masterpiece and it really gives you an idea of the scope of the film. the female vocal kind of sneaks in there but becomes the best thing about it, swelling with the orchestra and reminding you why you love morricone: he rules, that's why.

blind willie johnson - dark was the night, cold was the ground. off about 5 million cheap store gospel compilations. likely recorded in 1927.

i do believe i first heard this song in around 2005. far too late into my life, to be sure. blind willie johnson, in my opinion, has the rare distinction of being the most badarse blind musician ever. i rank him higher than ray charles and stevie wonder. BLASPHEMY? definitely not. dude used a KNIFE for slide. well, was rumoured to. but that's a cool rumour, right? he has a scant 30 recordings to his name which makes his music all the more treasured, and his guitar playing is revered as some of the best slide guitar there is or ever was. this song was selected for the voyager golden record to be shot into space. hopefully somewhere in the universe there's some 100 headed green alien dude who breathes pure fire that's listening to this song and crying.

hank williams - why don't you love me? released as a single with a house without love as the b-side, 1950.

hank williams. what can really be said about him? a lot. but i won't say that much. if you don't like country, hank can be the one to turn you around. most recommend johnny cash as a starting point because of his crossover appeal (and basically universal acceptance) however i'd probably point to hank first. his music carries a more simplistic approach that's disarming at first but have a go at reading his lyrics with dry eyes. it's interesting to read them as opposed to hearing them sung because of the music they're set against. it's almost like they don't suit but at the same time you can't imagine anything suiting more. screw emo bands, hank's lyrics are some of the most heartwrenching written by human hands. he could out-drink keith richards by a country mile. he had a rough life and died at 29 but had produced a startling amount of music by then. we're lucky to have it.

hank williams - i'll never get out of this world alive. released as a single in 1952 then posthumously on honky tonkin', 1954.

another one of hank's songs where the title betrays the musical mood of the song, it was meant to be taken in an ironic fashion but anyone who knew anything about williams' life could easily take a more chilling perspective. in a real sting of irony it was also the last song hank ever released.

hot rod circuit - safely. off sorry about tomorrow, 2002.

a friend from a while back burnt me a bunch of hot rod circuit albums in around 2003. this was the one i gravtiated towards the most and remains that way (with the exception of some tracks off the underground is a dying breed, 2007). this song in particular i think is the strongest on the album with unassuming verses leading into a killer chorus. a good slice of early 2000's vagrant brand emo-rock.

keith green - because of you [live]. originally recorded in 1978, later released on the live experience, 2008.

keith green was a bit of an anomaly in his day. as a christian singer/songwriter he didn't fit easily into the christian music machine mould of the era he was active in (70's and early 80's) instead opting to do things like record full albums then after morgaging he and his wife's home to fund the recording, offer them completely free of charge (or at a price determined by the purchaser) as well as refusing to charge for concerts at which atendees sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands. these tactics are employed today in the digital age when there's less at stake but keith did it because he felt it was wrong to do anything other than give all of his music away. with moves like that it's hard to deny his heart was in the right place, especially listening to a live recording like this where it sounds like he's floating off his seat with excitement and enthusiasm for the song and its' message. unable to contain himself he litters the performance with comments and impulsive noises between lines, often running out of breath but not caring in the slightest. around the 1:54 mark he throws in an impressive piano roll just for the hell of it and you can picture him pulling a ray charles-esque laughter-head-throw-back after it. whether you agreed with his beliefs (i happen to) or not, you can't deny keith was a legit performer.

keith green - your love broke through. off for him who has ears to hear, 1977.

christian or otherwise, keith's 1977 debut album is a pretty strong start to a songwriting career. although he only got 5 years or so of a recording career in before his death in 1982 he put those years to good use and this song is a prime example of his songwriting abilities early on. he even managed to rub off on bob dylan a bit when the two became friends in the late 70's as evidenced by the musical direction of dylan's gospel albums (which often divide fans and critics). ace troubleshooter do a killer cover of this song i've never managed to find. well worth it if you can get your hands on it.

levon helm - growin' trade. off electric dirt, 2009.

for the uninitiated, levon helm played drums and frequently performed lead vocals in a band who were called the band. besides a number of albums under their own name they backed bob dylan on a number of his recordings in the 60's and 70's as well as a number of tours and live recordings in the same period before breaking up in 1976. put simply, they were sick. levon's solo career began not long after the end of the band's with his first "solo" album coming in 1977 with many more following. after suffering from throat cancer in the late 1990's it was questionable whether he'd ever sing again but his voice broke through in 2004 and while a shadow of its' former self it's become something unique and very distinctive already. this song is simple and a good introduction to helm. try not to whistle along.

the mars volta - the day of the baphomets. off amputechture, 2006.

the volta hold a special place in my heart. they're not one of my favourite bands really but i watch them closely because they're always going in a few different directions at any given time, sometimes with varied results. after holding the first two albums in high esteem amputechture came as a bit of a rude shock to me. it felt like a randomly strung together collection of songs compared to the other albums which felt more...cohesive. it took a lot of listens to begin to really appreciate the structure and now it's just about my favourite album of theirs. this song is a favourite because it has just about everything i love about the mars volta contained within the one tune. being on the BDO tour with them earlier this year was incredibly exciting and getting to see them perform multiple times within the space of a week or so was the best. THE best.

mastodon - the last baron. off crack the skye, 2009.

for mastodon fans this may seem like a weird choice. i tend to really massively dig entire mastodon albums as opposed to songs but with crack the skye, i didn't dig all the songs. seeing them live earlier this year (like 5 times BOOYAH) when they performed the entirity of the album from start to finish helped me to make more sense of the songs i didn't really enjoy on the album, but it's still not their most solid release in my eyes. anyway, this track is the last one and it goes for about 13 minutes. without hearing it you might assume it would get boring but it really doesn't. also there's a sick guitar solo at the end. nooge.

mastodon - crystal skull. off blood mountain, 2006.

i remember my pal ben and i used to laugh about how much blood mountain rules. even friends of mine that don't like metal kind of dig it. this song just kills, really. it has a sick solo toward the end and what has to be one of the greatest "metal claw" inducing moments in musical history around the 2:00 mark when scott kelly (of neurosis) decided to put his bit in. if you like heavy music you will like this track. if you don't there's something legit wrong with you and you should really get that checked out.

mewithoutYou - silencer. off [A --> B] life, 2002.

easily the best lyricist you've never heard about. mewithoutYou as a band are incredible but you should really google "mewithoutYou lyrics" and have a read. this album is rough-as-nails compared to their later more elaborately orchestrated efforts but it's just as good if not better. essentially this is a breakup album but to call it that is to reduce the impact (you'll know what i mean if you read the lyrics). it's a bold statement but if there's anyone around for bob dylan to pass the mantle to lyrically it's probably aaron weiss. did i mention the lyrics rule?

mewithoutYou - seven sisters. off catch for us the foxes, 2004.

catch for us the foxes is an unskippable album, as far as i'm concerned. i actually downloaded it initally because i had no idea where to buy it (i was 15, give me a break) and actually didn't get this particular tune in that version. when i wound up buying the album it was an awesome shock to discover this song right in the middle of the tracklisting. the album was mixed by brad wood who helps then inject just the right amount of reverb to turn this album into a world all its' own. the guitars float around you and everything sits where it should...but sometimes not...which also rules. the lyrics as usual are incredible.

mewithoutYou - carousels. off catch for us the foxes, 2004.

not sure what else to say about mewithoutYou really. you just need to hear them. now. my favourite line in this song is "if there was no way into God, i would never have laid in this grave of a body for so long". perfect.

miles davis - ah-leu-cha. off 'round about midnight, 1957.

i had this album on a cd-r for ages that i copied off ANOTHER cd-r from my dad's friends house around 2001. i never knew what the album actually was until about 5 years later, all that i knew was that it was miles davis and i loved it. i still love it and this song for me is the highlight. it drives forward so strongly with the opposing horn lines and philly joe jones' impeccable drumming dancing all over the place. hard bop at its' finest.

part III'sacomin.

favourite songs ever pt. I.

2010-04-09T00:37:00.019-05:00

so i was sitting around bored and thought it might be fun to come up with a list of my favourite songs. these are just songs i own, there's others that i don't that i'm probably forgetting. but that's cool. they're in rough alphabetical order. it's long (60 songs or so) so i've split it into 4 parts.

here's pt. I.

aphex twin - avril 14th. off drukqs - disc 1, 2001.

i first heard aphex twin when i saw the windowlicker music video on rage. must have been 10 years ago. richard d. james has always struck me as the genius type, probably because he's a genius. this is a simple track off drukqs, probably the simplest but i also find it to be the best. it's not flashy or particularly complicated. just nice. the lonely island sampled it for "iran so far away" which unfortunately missed being on incredibad because despite richard being cool with it, warp wanted a ridiculous amount of money. shame.

the appleseed cast - steps and numbers. off low level owl - vol. 1, 2001.

the appleseed cast are one of my very favourite bands there is. they manage to portray such subtle beauty through so little. they started out as a rough-as-nails emo band in the late 90's and flourished into a particularly beautiful post-rock machine. this track shows off what's best about them: intricate rhythms, twinkling guitars and shovel-loads of ambience, especially in the closing half.

the appleseed cast - rooms & gardens. off low level owl - vol. 2, 2001.

this is one of those songs i'll put on repeat to fall to sleep to. the dynamics almost distract me some nights but i'm never annoyed about that. it puts me in a different place. i find this release (together with vol. 1) to be the best thing they've done to date. that's not to say their other releases are particularly bad, it just means this one rules super, super hard.

the appleseed cast - song 3. off peregrine, 2006.

whenever people ask me if i have a song i don't think i'll ever wear out, this is my immediate answer. though i've only been listening to it for 4 years, i've probably listened to it hundreds if not thousands of times - and i'm not exaggerating. i fell asleep to it on repeat for about 2 years. sick.

bob dylan - lay down your weary tune. outtake/b-side from the times they are a-changin, 1964. later released on biograph, 1985.

i'm sure everyone's got a song they love where they knew they loved it about 30 seconds into their first listen. i don't know if this is a strongly revered track among dylan fans but it ought to be. the lyrics betray how young dylan was at the time and still shock me with how strong and clear the imagery is.

bob dylan & the band - most likely you'll go your way (and i'll go mine) [live]. off before the flood, 1974. later released on biograph, 1985.

one of the best live albums available, hands down. not even open for discussion. kicking off with this number, bob & the band set a high standard that the rest of the songs have no difficulty matching or even besting. the only difference between these versions is the biograph version trims off the first half-minute or so of crowd noise.

bob dylan - sad eyed lady of the lowlands. off blonde on blonde, 1966.

even though this song is 11 minutes and 20 seconds long, it holds your attention the entire time. put simply, bob dylan rules. hard.

colleen - everything lay still. off the golden morning breaks, 2005.

my pal/bandmate joe introduced me to colleen after he got this around the time it was released. he told me it wasn't really music, more just an album of textures. he was right on the money, but that said the textures are very musical and beautiful. if you're every having trouble sleeping, put this on. it'll put you right out.

converge - heaven in her arms. off jane doe, 2001.

another one of my favourite bands. no one does visceral, ugly, raw, honest brutality like converge. this album is often passed around as their best and while i'm in two minds, this track and another i'm about to mention really make the album's disgustingly awesome head stick up above the crowd.

converge - thaw. off jane doe, 2001.

now that i think about it, i remember the first time i heard converge. i used to post on the P.O.D. boards a lot (yeah, i know) and someone posted a link to the downpour video. it was embedded into the artwork for unloved and weeded out on a webpage and besides the video, the artwork stayed with me. after not thinking about it for a while i saw a poster for unloved and weeded out in missing link (flinders lane...so long ago). picked up jane doe not long after this and basically lost my mind.

converge - in her blood. off you fail me, 2004.

this along with jane doe is in a dead tie for my favourite album of theirs. you fail me injects a solid chunk of groove into their sound that was missing before, the production is a bit clearer (but still with that beautiful tape sound) and the writing is more precise. i challenge you not to nod your head along to this song; not only in approval of the total kickarseness of it but also with how solid the groove is. yes, this track has a pocket, and it's deep.

creedence clearwater revival - born on the bayou. off bayou county, 1969.

i bought creedence solely because the dude (if you don't know who the dude is, get out) loved them to death. i wasn't disappointed at all. with the exception of some of their later albums, CCR didn't really release a weak album. that rules.

dirty three - some things i just don't want to know. off whatever you love, you are, 2000.

my dad used to let my sister and i listen to JJJ most of the time when we were in the car with him. he lived on the other side of melbourne so we were in the car often, not that i'm complaining. it introduced me to buttloads of music. i remember hearing "some summers they drop like flies" and making my dad buy me this album. i was 13 at the time and it was a complete musical revelation to me...i couldn't believe music this emotional existed. i was always into film soundtracks and it was like a blues band playing beautiful soundtrack/orchestral music in their own way...but totally different. they're one of those bands where you either love them to death or you don't know who they are. i don't know a lot of people on the fence. there isn't a band who does what dirty three do anywhere near as well as dirty three do it. there just isn't.

dirty three - ends of the earth. off ocean songs, 1998.

if you like putting on music to escape, especially in a scenic location, you'll find no better album to accompany you than this. my friend joel once sent me a picture message of a beach in perth saying something along the lines of "this and dirty three in my headphones." he didn't have to say anything else.

ed harcourt - until tomorrow then. off the beautiful lie, 2006.

ed harcourt's an interesting one. he often gets written off for faux-sentimentality but i find his tracks pretty damn honest. this one in particular is hard to argue with. he's got a hell of a set of pipes (sonic honey would be a good way of putting it) and instrumental talent to boot. the music has a real depression-era otherworldliness to it. i love that.

part II tomorrow. hopefully.

last few days.

2010-04-07T15:27:00.002-05:00

hmm let's see what i've done. nearly nothing, as usual.

i've watched...the brood, el topo, zabriskie point, the incredible melting man (yes, it's as good as the title suggests), some more of voyna i mir, rob zombie's halloween II, dans ma peau (in my skin)...i should really keep track of what movies i've watched sometime. pain in the arse. i tried searching through my browsing history but it's filled with tyler perry stuff...out of context this would make me look like an idiot but i was really just interested as to how the guy can keep making movies. that's all. REALLY.

i've watched a ton of other movies, why can't i remember what they are...

anyway that's just about all i've done. olive (dog) has been peeing everywhere. i swear i found pee on the ceiling the other day.

oh, and we picked the tracklisting for the album but i'm not going to tell what it is. suckers.

catch.

linko.

2010-04-05T22:50:00.002-05:00

http://mikejh.tumblr.com/

i'm going to use that to post shots from films that i love. every now and then i'll sneak some of my own photos in there too. suss it.

catch.

days blurring.

2010-04-04T05:41:00.003-05:00

before i forget - if you read this blog even semi-regularly, follow it. i think it's on the right hand side. click follow. it helps me keep track of who's reading and it means i can read your stuff too. come out of the woodwork, pals.

uhhh so where did i leave off...IHOP? i forget what happened after that. i've been keeping a strict 6am-1pm sleeping pattern. pretty good for me. been working my way through 1001 movies you must see before you die. i counted and i'm coming up pretty short...only seen like 280 or so of them. sighin. working on the rest though, i assure you. my mind is actually a bit scrambled at the moment. URGH NO.

i've just been watching films and eating. and a bit of hanging out. not much else. i am turning into a couch potato.

i watched...uhh...sliver? wasn't very good. phillip noyce dropped the ball. some cool scenes but not enough. shivers, cronenberg. his first movie. not that great either. promising and gross but not great. the 1997 tv version of 12 angry men. william friedken directed it. impressive casting (jack lemmon, james gandolfini, george c. scott etc.) and it follows the original teleplay pretty closely if not precisely. it seems a little useless though, lumet's version is still as affecting and relevant as it always was.

i've listened to you fail me by converge a whole slew of times over the last few days. i think it's my favourite album by them. it has a feeling none of the others have, except maybe jane doe. on no heroes/axe to fall they've gotten really clever and the albums are great, but you fail me still really gets me. i remember waiting ages for it to come out and being super stoked when it did. i preordered it and got the lithograph and all. what a fanboy.

catch.

productive day.

2010-04-02T03:43:00.003-05:00

last night before i slept i finished off transcribing an interview with nergal from behemoth. i tell you: deciphering not-quite-there english with a polish accent down a telephone line recorded on a mini-recorder is interesting. but hey, what are friends for? then i slept. when i woke up i hung out for a bit listening to bob dylan and organising my movie collection. jack needed some drums done for his album so i walked over to the house he was recording at and smashed it out. took about a half hour. good times.

walked back home and continued to sort my movies out. tried watching a bit more of voyna i mir but i couldn't focus all my attention on such an epic piece of epicness. eventually mark came and got me and we all had pizza together and hung. practice. listen to how album is coming along. go to ihop (international house of pancakes). i had new york cheesecake pancakes (wow). delicious! we made jokes about this being the fat tour and what it would be like if we were all morbidly obese onstage. it was superb.

oh i forgot to mention rohin dacked me and mark snorted milk out his nose at this. amazing.

home now. sussing more movie collection organisation. bed time...SOON. don't know what i'll do tomorrow. sit around and wish peckinpah was still alive.

sigh.

catch.

dinner fail.

2010-04-01T03:03:00.002-05:00

alright so i went out to have dinner with jack, courtnie and lesley. first place we hit was jimmy joe's (i think). it's a sandwich place. i was stoked at the prospect of an excellent sannich in denton but unfortunately, this was not to be. i ordered the beach club. how could i go wrong with such a name? i was excited to hold the sandwich in my hand. what delicious surprises would this length of bread-surrounded joy reveal? not many, it seems, except for one: the lack of t-bud happiness. i could taste sprouts, lettuce, a hint of tomato and a bit of turkey loaf. the description was more exciting than what i ended up with. i guess that always happens with food.

my stomach still yearned for satisfaction so we moved on to taco cabana. i ordered the tex mex dinner. it was fairly cheap, i was expecting it to not be too big. lo and behold, it is MASSIVE. once i journey through the contents of the bag i discover that the packaging to food ratio is about 20:1 in favour of the packaging. a massive styrofoam container just for a little taco. there was some random red thing which ruled pretty hard but the rest, ack. sigh. no fork, no knife, not even a napkin. according to courtnie and lesley they only give you these things if you ask for them. the same must go for taste. OH!

i feel bad as courtnie and lesley drove me around to sample these promising eateries. sadly tonight was just not my food night. big thanks the girls for ruling hard though.

passin' the time.

2010-03-31T23:14:00.006-05:00

it's a sad time in your life when night rolls around and all you're pumped about for the following day is that fantastic strawberry and blueberry cereal you got from wal-mart the other night. not that i would know. or anything.

so i found basically the most amazing site ever to be created by humans.

in70mm.com

it's a big history of large-format motion picture film. i realise it won't hold the interest of 98% of the people who read this blog but that's cool. i thought i'd share my enthusiasm with all of you because it's my new favourite place and i've geeked out on it for the last two days solid. did you know that star wars' sound team used spare channels in the magnetic soundtrack on their prints to store sub-bass information, therefore providing a more solid "thwack" at the right times in the film? AMAZING. i bet you didn't know that. that's why i asked. how cheeky.

i've developed an unhealthy interest in abnormally long films too. starting with bondarchuk's "voyna i mir" (war and peace), lanzmann's "shoah" and tarr's "sátántangó" i'm gunna try and work my way through obscenely long movies as long as they have merit. no "cinematon" for me (it goes for 150 hours). maybe i'm just going crazy in down time but hell, this is my chance to go nuts on film unhindered by australian download limits.

not much has happened besides these two things over the last few days. i've been listening to common's universal mind control album and it's...incredibly weak compared to his best album, 2000's like water for chocolate. if you doubt hip hop's ability to rule incredibly hard (do these people still exist?) you need to hit that album up. i've been listening to way too much paramore also. there's something about how all the elements of their music come together that really nails it for me. hayley's voice is satisfying as are zach's drums and everything else sits nicely on top of that, like a well made cake. delicious.

catch.

first visit to wal-mart.

2010-03-30T01:04:00.002-05:00

so today i watched halloween (rob zombie's one) and part of devil's rejects. halloween was pretty impressive for what it was. rob zombie knows how to make legitimate horror flicks. he knows how to take the wind out of your sails and his films are uncompromisingly violent and genuinely disturbing. anyway. eventually courtnie and leslie came home and they brought this obscenely massive pizza from hot box. i had 3 slices cause it was too big so i put the rest in the fridge for tomorrow. stoked. we headed to james' house and then went to yoghurt story.

it's kind of like cold rock but with yoghurt, self serve and much cheaper. i got a tub (they only have one size but it's the size of the largest tub you can get at cold rock) and it cost me 6 bucks. 3 different yohurt flavours, fruit, m&ms, syrup etc. amazing. so much stuff. finished that off and then we headed to hastings where i got the 5-disc watchmen ultimate cut (hoowee) and lonesome dove (HOOWEE). then we went to wal-mart and i got some more cereal, 2-disc superbad and some tooth brushing stuff. oh and orange juice. then we headed home and now we're watching it's always sunny in philadelphia. it's good.

that's pretty much it.

still incredibly impressed...

2010-03-28T13:41:00.003-05:00

with option paralysis. album has high replay value. i keep finding new bits that i like. there's a LOT of bits on the album.

let's see...last few days, same as usual. sit around, go for walks, watch movies and tv shows...what a world. listen to dylan, read about dylan, read about war. i'm halfway through band of brothers and it continues to rule ever so hard. i watched the 1999 film adaptation of titus with anthony hopkins which was pretty insane. the closing 3 minute shot is already one of my favourite shots i think i've seen in a film. really beautiful, especially with the music. i also watched cronenberg's scanners. pretty intense movie, not as relentlessly gooey as i was expecting though. what happened to michael ironside? that's what i want to know. he killed it in this flick.

been watching a life in pictures about stanley kubrick and getting super duper inspired to do film. he was a real master. i'm still scared to watch 2001 before i watch it because it's got that epic power about it. if you fully embrace the themes it's a hard film to take.

heading into dallas today to do some shopping and such, should be interesting. album is coming along nicely.

losing track of time.

2010-03-26T02:28:00.002-05:00

i forget specific days now. everything is just a mash.

i've been downloading a lot of WW2 documentaries and old films. i'm working my way through bob dylan's discog. i've been watching band of brothers. i've had some pizza. i've talked to people back home. i walk twice a day. olive (a dog) keeps peeing everywhere. my feet are freezing.

told you the next few entries were going to be boring...

holy goodness.

2010-03-25T02:12:00.001-05:00

i don't even know how to describe this in a way that does it justice. dillinger outdo themselves again like 10 times over on this disc.

you need it. if you enjoy music and what it can do, you need this.

the next couple of blogs will probably be really boring.

2010-03-23T17:45:00.004-05:00

so we woke up on sunday and no one really knew what was going on. it's alright, we were allowed to be frazzled after SXSW weren't we? mark watched children of men which ruled pretty hard. i'd forgotten how amazing it looked, such a well shot picture. joe played some modern warfare II.

ah-MAZING. after regrouping we worked out we were missing a few select personal items that were at venues in town so after getting ready we hit a few of those spots to try and retrieve those items. one was closed so we had to wait around a while for that. went back to colin's said hi/bye and headed back to the venue to pick up the item. still wasn't open so we went to the driskill and hung for a while before heading back to pick it up again. this time: success!

just to clarify, the sequence of the events mentioned above is dubious. we dilly dallied for a hell of a long time to wait for the venue to open (6pm) and i lost track of what happened before what.

somewhere in our dilly dallying we managed to acquire two dirty thirties (30 can packs of beer) of miller high life (one of which we later donated to lesley & courtney), a bottle of gin (which i recall was thrown out on account of a leaky lid and smelling disgusting) and several boxes worth of fruit juice smoothies (which were incredibly sugary and even the general flavour made us call the taste buds of "healthy" US citizens into question). the drive went for a long time. during it i watched the first episode of band of brothers (killer), the seventh continent (intense michael haneke flick about a family that commits group suicide...yes, it's a sombre film) and started watching black narcissus (really good 40's flick beautifully shot in technicolor...apparently the film that inspired martin scorsese into wanting to make movies for sure). probably listened to some levon helm in there somewhere also. we arrived in denton around midnight and immediately went out with all the d00dz (morgan, lance, lesley, courtney, wes, carly) to waffle house for waffles.

the waffles at waffle house are surprisingly good, and quite waffley. no ice cream though, minus one point. i had a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit (biscuts are english muffins for all you not-in-the-US-ers) and a hash brown as well. it was a darn tootin' feed. carly put freebird on the jukebox among other country tracks (i use the term country here as loosely as i've been using brackets in this blog entry) and we eventually left. came back to the homestead and watched some king of the hill which has ignited a pretty strong passion for it WITHIN MY SOUL. it's really quite funny. family guy was pretty good too, two episodes of that. i was waiting up for tim and eric but everyone wanted to sleep. soz guys.

woke up kinda late and we all headed out to find joe/jord/ro. we found them at mike's cafe and went to a thai restaurant around the corner to eat and meet. it was solid. from there we met up with morgan and headed to her cousin (i think)'s house to check out the area we were lookin' to record in. it turned out to rule pretty hard which was nice. joe/jord/i played chucked the pigskin around in the back yard for a while while some stuff was loaded into the new "studio" and then we headed back around to lesley/courtney's before dinner was to begin. joe and i (and sometimes morgan & lesley) watched the first 2 episodes of the pacific. it's shaping up to be pretty darn tootin. really got to me and made me want to research war, which is what i've started doing. joe's a war buff as is my friend aaron crawford. maybe one day i can converse with them what i've learned about war...maybe one day.

eventually we headed over to the recording house for a "grill" (bbq for all you non-usa-ers). carly grabbed the dirty 30 on the way out.

we got to ze party and i spent a bit of time on facebook but eventually de-hermitted myself and got food/socialized. had some good conversations with different peeps and the meat was delicious. carly tore it up on the rhodes at one point.

move over herbie hancock!

eventually we got tired/bored and headed back to lesley/courtney's house for king of the hill which was excellent once again. desire to sleep took over and so we indulged. woke up feeling gross but eventually shook it off. jon left back to australia today so we said our goodbyes. i watched kurosawa's rashomon (in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birth) and some of a WW2 doco that had too much music. went for an hour long walk around the burbs and got some tostitos dip and tortilla chips. relaxed again and now i'm working my way through bob dylan's discography. i think we're sussing a family dinner tonight.

catch.

super whammy double day rundown part 2!

2010-03-21T04:09:00.014-05:00

for the optimum experience, read the last post (part 1) before reading this one.

woke up in the morning and realised no one was home, i didn't have a phone and we had a show in a few hours. i panicked for a while and eventually jumped on skype, attempting to call rich with my one free skype call but it rang out. sick. i tried to buy some skype credit and the money came out of my account but my skype credit didn't arrive until after rich logged on and i could call him for free anyway. sick. sussed it out, jon eventually came and picked me up. we headed to the convention centre for the KCRW showcase, first show of the day.

this girl named lissie was playing and she is amazing. incredible throaty voice, effortless. real sweetheart. we played and it was a bit of a sterile environment but everyone was chilling out so that was okay. finished, loaded out and headed to the next venue: red eyed fly.

after loading in, joe and i got hot dawgs from some kingly gentleman.

they were okay. did i mention that it was absolutely FREEZING? it felt like it was about 5 degrees. celcius, that is. everything was cold. life was cold. anyway, we played about 4:30 and it was still cold.

it was so cold that rohin introduced the show by saying "hi, we're the middle east and this is going to be hilarious". it reminded of the paste party at galaxy the other day cause a number of things weren't quite right so we were all a little annoyed and played really angrily. which kind of added to the set. it turned into a good thing. NEG VIBE CONVERSION. talked to some cool cats after then loaded out and walked around for a bit. went to a beautiful hotel called the driskill to have some food but we ended up just sitting in the lounge drinking water. i got a little bored of that so i decided to walk around the hotel taking photos.

i must have looked like a real creep snooping around the hotel taking photos. i had to hide my camera a few times which would have looked even more suss, but heck the hotel was so nice i couldn't resist. after that i made my way down to 6th to grab some pizza and find maggie maes to load in for the next show, the aussie bbq. eventually ran into ro and we found everyone in maggie maes. started getting set up while washington soundchecked and then played. i really enjoyed them, the front lady meg has a killer voice and can hit those keys real nice too. dappled cities followed them with a super solid set. i'd never actually seen them live before and i was really impressed. they've got entirely their own vibe going on and i love that.

we followed dappled. it was nice playing to some more australians again. not that we don't appreciate the US crowds but there's something about playing to a room full of your own countrymen in another country that's weird and nice. we played a pretty good set i think, it was a bit of a celebration for us because it was the end of the intense grind that was sxsw 2010. met a bunch of cool people at the show including paul and moe, two gentlemen who'd travelled all the way to sxsw from near dallas just to see us cause they'd missed our denton show at the start of the trip. really straight up guys. there were two other guys that travelled to see us too but i forget their names, i feel bad for that. they were really encouraging and had most excellent tattoos.

i wandered off and got some more pizza and checked out the alamo ritz.

it's this beautiful cinema right on E 6th in the heart of austin. there's a few more alamos around austin but this is the original and (apparently) the best. besides being a nice big well designed ornate cinema it also has tables running along the front of every aisle of seats so you can order food before the show and eat it during. it also had a stage so i presume they had music and maybe sometimes theatre in there too. the lady who was running the door was nice enough to let me go in for a few minutes and watch what was playing (a documentary about rural studios which was really interesting) so i could see the cinema. here's a sneak peak of what it was like out on E 6th at around midnight on the last night of sxsw.

after that i headed back upstairs and rich pulled out some more cigars (i'm assuming they were "sxsw is over!" cigars) and we headed downstairs to light them up. i believe it was rich, don, joe, hootie (mel's husband, andrew), rohin and myself. jord popped in a few times too. jordan (TAO) got a good photo of don and i with our respective rolled leaf sticks.

don's a bit of a dude as you can see from this photo.

while finishing up our cigars we started to pack the van. a nice lady named diana was helping keep the cops off our back so we gave her a vinyl (the EP was recently released in the UK on 10") which she appreciated. i talked to her awhile and found out her favourite band was don castillo who i am going to look up. after that we decided to leave but mark and jord went ahead and we lost them so joe, bree, ro and myself went with don and rich to the hilton to have a quiet drink and wait for the van to come back.

don's a hell of a photographer and showed us some great shots. rich helped me get internet but it kept dropping out. thanks anyway rich! eventually the van came back, picked us up and we were outta there after saying goodbyes to don and rich. went back to colin's, found beds, sleep time.

i just woke up. we're driving to dallas today.

speak soon.

super whammy double day rundown part 1! (this one is long..also: photos!)

2010-03-20T11:25:00.026-05:00

okay so if memory serves, we left off with us hanging out at colin's house waiting to go out for dinner. let's pick up from there.

we ended up going to a place called wholefoods which was a food court styled eatery with a big supermarket kinda section as well. all natural awesome foods. we met up with morgan and colin (carly and lauren were also there but we met them upstairs) and made our way around to find some food. i got an intensely awesome burrito and a berry smoothie (legit). upstairs there was a stage and a real sweet neo-soul/reggae band playing. we sat and ate and were merry. after that we got some beer and headed to our hotel to hang out for a while. it got late, we got tired so some stayed and slept and the others went home and slept.

the next day we had to get up real early for a photo shoot with NME.

we shot some photos in an archway and a bunch of other places like a little stream and such. rich had some cigars so some of us used them in some of the photos. they were prettttty nice cigars. rich enjoyed them so much he decided to smoke two at once.

after that we headed to the IFC studio downtown to do another taping.

it was a weird vibe, felt extremely studio. the people were super nice though. food was great, amazing breakfast burritos. i was pumped about those. they had a ps3 with the new AvP game on it too. the best. i asked the IFC guy if he knew anything about IFC picking up gaspar noe's enter the void and he said he didn't know. i said that's cool. i guess i'll see it at some point in my life. after that i missed the van with my bag in it so i walked up to the hotel to get it but couldn't. on my way down to 6th i had the insanely good fortune to find an horse doing an acoustic thing on the side of the road.

after that i tried to find the myspace gifting/interview. took me a while but i eventually found it. missed the gifting pretty solidly (i got a tee shirt) but i might try and go back today. apparently they had cowboy boots. nuts. interview was really informal and sweet. i didn't talk most of the time but at the end i piped up a little. i mentioned that i wanted questlove to produce a middle east album but not before he produces the dillinger escape plan. good times. after that we headed down to an old power plant to do a taping for MTVu.

and my personal favourite:

looks like mark is a deity and has disciples gathered around him. best lucky shot ever.

after that we went exploring for a little while and found this massive underground room and started doing gregorian styled chants and chamber choir stuff in it.

sorry about me laughing and singing badly so much. i wish i'd let it go, it really sounded incredible in there. amazing. we played some american football for a while after that.

then we headed to the convention centre to get some shoes and other stuff. toms shoes. they're real nice, good american airport shoes we're told. you have to take your shoes off when you go through x-ray which is a real pain in the arse. thankyou tom for your shoes. they are gah-rate. after that we headed off to a lovely dinner with TAO (rich, don and jordan), mel (AU/NZ manager, she's a sweetie) and tre (from billions, our US booking agent) and all of us tme-ers. it was a rad mexican restaurant.

sorry the photo ain't so great. there's only so much my phone camera will do.

after that we all kind of split up. jack and bree went to see she & him and surfer blood, jordan (TAO, not TME) and i went to try and get into muse and the others hung out in the city or went home. jordan and i had no luck cause the passes we got were no good past a certain time so we went and met up with gary (he runs TAO, our management) and rich (yay rich you got a mention! actually i've mentioned you like 50 times already but...) for a small bite to eat and drinks. gary's got a lot of good stories. a LOT. really killer dude. from there we headed to a little bar which happened to have a rad view of muse so we caught the last 2 songs.

jordan and i hung out a while then started walking around aimlessly so he decided to go sleep and i decided to also do the same.

we headed to the hilton to pick up my bag and i got in line to wait for a taxi. after 45 minutes of waiting this limo service car pulls up and is all like "yeah man, only 10 bucks more than a cab". alright, sick. get in, drive back to colin's (the house we're at), all good. time to pay...$40. US dollars. the taxi would have been $10. i mean, the car was nice but i don't have that kind of money to just get home. oh well, had to pay and did. i got out and opened the door of what i thought was colin's house. walked up the stairs, headed for the lounge then realised the house was decorated entirely different to colin's. i heard girl's voices as i was walking up the stairs and they stopped when i was nearly at the lounge. i realised my error and simply turned around, walked down the stairs and left the house as soon as i could. NICE ONE MATE. entered the correct house, found a room, internetted for a bit and then crashed.

hectic + party mode + locked out + etc.

2010-03-18T19:58:00.003-05:00

after having some wind down time at home last night we headed into town to get the show sussed. it was in a little outdoor tent thingo near the centre of the city and it was packed which made it fun to get through to set up our stuff. the band before us (here we go magic) were uh-mazing. really solid. drummer was super tight and had a rock solid groove. one of those bands you watch and don't want to play after. after they'd finished we set up: for the un-initiated, our setups tend to take 25-35 minutes most times to get everything right. we figured it's better to have everything sussed and play a better show than inevitably sucking due to how many gears there are in the tme machine. too much can go wrong.

anyway, we got set up and played the show. it went pretty good. jack's bass cut out at the end of blood which was kinda funny, we all just played on and extended the ending. i put everything i had into the closing moments of the song and was stumbling around for a while afterward. we loaded out (surprisingly stress free given the venue/situation) and stood around out the front meeting people we've been speaking to forever but haven't met yet. i finally met gary (he runs TAO, our management company), jordan (he's the TAO web guy), don (helps manage us at TAO), will (works for chess club who put out the EP as a 10" in the UK), james (susses radio for us in the UK) and trey (our booking agent at billions agency). i'm sure i met a few other people but they're all i can remember, it was a bit to take in all at once.

trey is super cool. we talked music and such for a while. turns out he used to play for pedro the lion and starflyer 59 and a band that used to be on tooth and nail. he came up through that whole scene. blew my mind! super sweet guy. from there we headed to a place called stubbs where some band was playing that we caught the end of. spoon were playing in the other room and apparently broke up on stage that night. might just be a vicious rumour though. morgan and i tried to get in but we got denied. whooooopzzz. i talked to gary for a while about film and that was a most excellent talk. we discussed scorsese, fincher, nolan...the man knew his films. we both had "lean back and raise voice out of sheer excitement and passion about discussed subect" moments about different films we each brought up. it was killer. talked to trey again for a while and a few others. morgan/carly/lauren were there too which ruled.

we decided we were hungry so we went from there to try and find somewhere to eat. the girls knew about some apparently killer place which took us about a half hour to find even though we were right near it the whole time. WHEEEEEEE. waited there for a while. lance/colin/etc. all showed up hoping to have a sweet big meal with our crew but we decided to bail cause we had to wait ages and it was approaching 3am. we headed back to the house we're staying at to find it locked. we called the girls and sussed where they were staying, turns out it was this MASSIVE (and i mean massive) house which seemed to be occupied by mad austin longhorn fans (they're a college football team from austin). it was really something. we kept walking through it and it just kept going! they had a massive hall/room with TWO TABLE TENNIS TABLES. TWO. who has one let alone two? gosh. we sat around for a bit and then slept.

AWAKE at 8:45am, woohoo. headed into town and found some mexican to eat for breakfast. nothing like eggs scrambled with red onion, tomato, beans and other deliciousness. i got pretty pumped about it. we picked ro up and headed to the tequila mockingbird studios where we did the KCRW session (suss it at http://www.kcrw.com/media-player/mediaPlayer2.html?type=audio&id=mb100318the_middle_east if you feel so inclined...mix ain't great though). after that we went to the next show to load in our gear. this rad band who's name i forget was playing even though i asked the drummer like 4 times. sorry guy. up next after them was a band called the low anthem from rhode island...i don't think i've seen a band that good in a long time. check them out, stat. it was like tom waits' backing band got bob dylan for a singer. the set opened pretty quiet with double bass, clarinet, pump organ and a notable instance of the singer whistling into two mobiles phones calling each other on speakerphone creating an amazing swampy insect sound...so good. the set finished with the band-esque loud gospel type singing dirty blues country excellent.

as you can tell, i was impressed.

the day was running late so we had to cut our set short after setting up. we ended up playing 4 songs finishing with western which is our loudest one. it got REALLY loud. probably the most rock n roll the middle east have ever been and ever will get. it was rad, definitely stoked on the show. after that we hung out for a bit then loaded out and packed the van while the main guys did an interview for NME. they later said it was the vest interview they've ever done. the interviewer was real sweet. keen to see if it gets printed. back home we go (where i am now) to chill for a bit before we head in to have dinner where we tried to have dinner at 3am this morning.

i think this is my longest entry yet!

speak soon.

modern warfare 2, gibson and delicious soda/tacos.

2010-03-17T18:24:00.003-05:00

stayed up awhile last night. joe finished modern warfare 2. i am still impressed by that. i downloaded a bunch of public domain flicks and some tv shows. might have to get onto torrenting the pacific soon. I LOVE THAT AMERICA DOESN'T HAVE DOWNLOAD LIMITS.

slept for what felt like ages only to wake up and find i'd slept 5 hours. i had hectic dreams so i guess that made it seem longer than it was. i slept a little more, got up, got ready, put my boots on and headed out the door with the others for the first item on the agenda for sxsw: KEXP studio taping at the gibson showroom. jon had already gone ahead and loaded the gear in/set some of it up. whattaguy. got comfortable, found an amazing all-natural passionfruit soda (glass bottles, baby...the way, the truth, the light...i love the US so far if only for this) and tried to find internet (couldn't find internet).

cause it was the gibson showroom we had to tape over any guitar logo that wasn't gibson. fender amps/gweets were taped up and instruments were swapped for gibson ones. bit weird. i got to play a slingerland kit with gene krupa's initials on the front. really cool. 26x16 kick too. hoo mama, that's a man's kit. it sounded just great. i fiddled around while everyone got ready with their respective 'struments. soundcheck, got ready then the taping happened around 1:30pm. we did okay, cameras didn't seem to throw us off or anything. i thought i was gunna be terrified. i think it'll be on kexp.org soon for anyone who's interested. the room was super quiet, i accidently hit my hatrick a few times. couple of stray jingles can really make you feel awkward when it's silent.

packed up and headed to some food. joe, jack and i got tacos from jack in the box. 2 for 99c. that's pretty amazing, no? i enjoyed them. like pineapple a LOT. got some OJ and banana chips from ze superb-market and we headed back to the homestead where i am now. don't have to be in the city for a little while, just been internetting and listening to the new dillinger album (stream it from their myspace: myspace.com/dillingerescapeplan) with some paramore thrown in for good measure.

speak soon.

gotta stop staying up until like 5:30am.

2010-03-16T21:55:00.003-05:00

when i tongue my front teeth they feel shiny and clean. this is how i judge whether or not i've eaten badly on any given day. fun fact.

also: from now on i'll be putting in brackets some info about random names i may mention to give you context. if there's any names you want to know about that i forget to do this for, leave a comment and i'll hop to it.

i went to bed too late and woke up at about 2pm. rohin had woken me a little earlier to see if i wanted to go play pool in a "real texas pool hall". i was keen but i fell back asleep. after eating nothing for breakfast we (rohin, jack and i) headed into town to meet claire (she's a music promoter and manages art vs. science) and once we'd done that we started walking toward the thrift/vintage shops to find boots and coats. it took ages to get there, we must have walked for a half hour. we stopped at a cafe and i got an orange juice and some yoghurt with granola. we exchanged "unfortunate accidents involving stray object trajectory and placement" stories.

claire had her phone fall out of her pocket while walking down the street once and into a bucket of water that just happened to be there. i told them about powys' phone flying out of his pocket as he jumped for joy on the street after he, ben and i had our application for bruce approved. his phone flew out of his pocket and got run over by an 18 wheeler. i was the only one who saw it (in the rear vision mirror), i had to tell him he'd done it when he got to the car with ben and i inside. the phone still worked. incredible! then rohin told us that two weeks ago in townsville someone was mowing their lawn with a big heavy duty mower. one of the blades came loose, flew out of the mower and about 30m across the street cutting a woman's head clean off. the blade continued on for about 50m after that. people walked up cause they'd seen something weird to find a body and a head lying a few metres away. this actually happened. what a world huh.

claire looked up some stores on her blackberry so we started making our way around. first place we went was allen's boots. they had more boots than i have ever before seen in my life. i found one pair for $1200. i found a pair of sea turtle (yuck) boots for $500. the boots i wanted were around $300. toooo much. we moved on. at a st vincent de paul i bought a mid-length brown leather jacket (double breasted) for about $50. would have been hundreds new and at least $150 at a vintage store in australia. insane. jack got some boots from there also. we found a vintage store that had a ping pong table in it. ro and i had a few games. definitely going back there.

we ended up at a store called new bohemia where i found my boots. they fit like a glove. dark red (almost black). called deep oxblood. sounds nice and southern huh? bought those suckers, snatched them right up. from there we checked out a few other places before ending up at an organic grocery. jack got some coke, i got carbonated grapefruit juice & a bottle of water and claire got carbonated apple juice. we enjoyed those drinks until jon and the rest of the guys came and picked us up to go register for our SXSW passes. after a bit of parking confusion we finally registered and went for a walk to meet rich (our US/world manager) and then go say hi to aaron (he runs spunk). after saying hi to aaron we all (minus claire and jord) walked back to the van and came home where i had some tomato soup with some rice & adzuki bean chips. nice. also jon/joe cooked some fajitas so i had some of them too. i am now full.

tomorrow...begins hell.

speak soon.

failed to enter the void.

2010-03-16T02:53:00.001-05:00

i ran down the street in the rain...got right to the ticket box in line...sold out. next screening is the same time as one of our sets. sigh. looks like i'll have to wait until it gets released which could be a while. boo hoo right?

hangs and driving.

2010-03-15T22:48:00.002-05:00

so after the show we went and got some hot box pizza. it's this franchise pizza outlet that have a pretty rad one going on denton. a bunch of our friends work there and so they gave us a lot of free pizza. hellooo money saver. after that we headed back to leslie and courtney's house for a bit of a party. apparently shiner bock was the beer we definitely had to try, and so we did. it was pretty sweet. also had some millers high life which wasn't as good, but canned beer is rarely as good as bottled anyway. had some interesting conversations with wes and lance about ayn rand, politics in our native countries and architecture. also leslie/courtney told me a whole bunch of stories about living in the south like how leslie's dad would wake her up at night when she was a kid to "hold thuh torch while ah shoot surm armadillas", and how she was the prom queen and the song they danced to was "freebird" by lynyrd skynrd. in-credible.

we settled down around 4am then leslie/coutney caught me before i went to bed reminding me they were going to introduce me to metalocalypse, so we watched that for the next couple of hours and talked about metal before i went to bed. after a few hours sleep we all got up and went to breakfast at some place, the name of which i forget. then we all went into the square (centre of denton) and looked at all the thrift stores and boutiques. i bought the great gatsby on lance's recommendation which i'll begin after i finish all the books i brought over in the first place. i found some amazing snakeskin boots but the toecap was coming loose and digging into my toes. didn't stop joe from swooping in not long after and buying them. sigh. i bought a sweet leather vest.

we went and had some more hotbox which was delicious and said goodbyes (or "we'll see you in austin"s) before picking up the nord from UPS and heading on our way to austin. we stopped at a home depot (which is basically a bunnings warehouse) and got a power inverter so we could laptop for the rest of the trip. i torrented the oscars the other night and tried watching it but the second half of the file was broken. lame. we carried on and now we're in austin. i'm trying to get to the screening of enter the void at midnight but it's not looking good. sigh.

speak soon.

just finished first US show...

2010-03-14T22:55:00.002-05:00

...and it went surprisingly well :)

we played alright, sound was pretty good and the crowd seemed to dig it. maybe just because we're australian, not sure yet. some guy said we were better than the flaming lips but i think he was drunk. sorry guy, we aren't better. have you even SEEN the flaming lips?! dudes have orange EVERYTHING and massive inflatable balls and everything. we have a banjo. no competition.

i think we're getting pizza from this place called hot box. they do that thing that nandos in australia do where they use all this sexual innuendo on their shirts like "want what's in my box?" and junk like that. ugh. solid pies though.

speak soon.

show tonight.

2010-03-14T20:14:00.002-05:00

i'm at the venue we're playing at tonight, it's called dan's silverleaf. from memory, the last post ended when we were at house of blues?

we practiced at the house of blues in dallas. it was really something. dan acknroyd knows how to run a classy joint. after that we went to the apartment where our manager rich was staying which was pretty rad. from there we went to the mavs/knicks game at the american airways arena. i wasn't expecting how huge the arena was...it was the size of rod laver arena in melbourne, maybe a tiny bit smaller. just for basketball! amazing. i had a "grilled cheese sandwich" which was a burger bun with a piece of chicken in it, no salads or sauces. not quite what i was expecting...

from there we headed back to the house we're staying at after dropping by to pick up the rest of the guys from the apartment. when we got back to the house they had the makings of a party so we hung out for a bit and then retreated into the loungeroom to set up for sleeping. we watched knocked up for a while too, weird US edited television version. bleeps and everything. overdubbed lines over the cussing. amazing! i went to sleep about 4am and woke up around 12:45pm. we lost an hour due to some daylight savings styled thing which was weird but oh well.

from there we went to a studio run by a gentleman named eric who plays in a killer band called midlake. he let us practice there awhile and then we packed, eric came, locked up, and then we left. eric said he'd make it to the show tonight, we said rad. i hope he can make it, he ruled. we went to the venue which was just down the road and unloaded. rich, joe, jack and i went and got some traditional ice cream from this ice cream parlour in the centre of denton. it was super kickarse. i had butter ice cream and i felt my teeth melt as i ate. from there we went to get dinner for everyone else, salads and these things called po-boys. joe got a gator one. it tasted like popcorn chicken.

i just managed to fix my mouse pointer and now i'm sitting outside at dan's silverleaf, the bar we're playing tonight. the opening band playing now came all the way from dublin to play! i guess they're doing sxsw as well. also i learned we might be in austin in time for me to go to the midnight screening of enter the void (gaspar noe's new flick) at the film fest. i'm super excited.

i better go set up.

speak soon.

also:

2010-03-13T15:56:00.000-06:00

american food is TERRIBLE. everything is greasy. buns in burgers disintergrate from the grease. doves cry from the grease. it is the worst. will not eat here.

first few days in the you ess of aye.

2010-03-13T13:43:00.002-06:00

ben nicely drove me to brisbane airport on the 11th. we hugged, i went inside and re-packed half of my stuff into the accordian and cymbal cases. some nice virgin blue lady seemed fascinated by this and offered to move me up to an earlier flight so that's what happened. i left at 3:30pm instead of 4pm. i passed katie and adrian as i was rushing to the gate. hi and bye.

flight was fine, finished michael clayton and started cheyenne autumn. got to sydney, found my way to international. made final calls to people, got a bit of US monies. i spent the last of my AU change on a chocolate bunny that somehow found its' way into my sinuses and i spent the rest of the trip with a tissue jammed up one nostril. SEXY. the flight was surprisingly solid. i watched jennifer's body (not that great), precious (intense and great), mad max (excellent) and the men who stare at goats (not bad but not really good). the food was alright too.

we got to LA, a bit disoriented but that's alright. found our way to the american airways terminal, checked in, got on our flight to dallas. we arrived at around 12:30am on the 12th of march. that's disorienting. we found the shuttle to our hotel and headed there with allllll our gear (lots). after picking rooms jord, joe, mark, jon and i walked up the road to the service station. i had a chicken burger from whataburger (not very nice) and a whole lot of water which ruled. came back, slept.

we woke up at 12:10pm on the 12th. we were supposed to check out at midday, oops. jon and mark were driving around dallas a bit lost so we took everything downstairs and took over the foyer for a while after checking out. then we went to guitar centre and bought nothing. then we went to another guitar centre and bought...wait for it...

...a 1966 ludwig kit, silver sparkle. 2 12" rack toms, 16" floor and 22" kick. AMAZING kit. it's actually ridiculous. broke the bank a little but it's...wow. amazing. we also splashed out and bought a 1970 ludwig snare, white pearl. such an insane snare. i was in drum gear heaven. also jord bought a gibson J45. do you realise how insanely good of a guitar that is? wow. seriously. amazing. we got bags and hardware for the drums too and decided then was a good time to leave.

we then went to this place called jason's deli and had dinner. it was real nice. they gave us free stuff because we torked funny. then we drove to denton and met up with morgan who is this rad girl we're staying/not staying with (some are staying there, others at another house). we hung for a while with her and her housemates lauren and carly. i think i got their names wrong except for morgan. we headed off to the party which was at this sweet old house on a street with all these massive plantation houses. pretty much the coolest street ever.

we hung out there, had pretty sweet pizza and pretty average light beer and then went back to the houses to sleep. i slept by the door on the floor with a little blanket and it was freezing. i was freezing. it was cold. freezing. i was cold. brrrr.

woke up this morning, started reading the fountainhead by ayn rand, got 26 pages in before getting picked up by the van with everyone else. then we got really lost for like 2 hours and showed up at the house of blues late for rehearsal. we set up, rehearsed, packed up and now i'm sitting here.

tonight is mavs vs. knicks. it will be amazing and i cannot wait.

more soon.

in case you can't already tell,

2010-01-05T08:44:00.004-06:00

i'm bored. i'm in brisbane and i'm bored to death.

lotty has hassled me for a while to be mentioned on this blog (like anyone reads it). at his request, names have been changed.
-----

daniel says:
http://www.membersequity.com.au/personal/savings_accounts/first_home_saver.html
mikeh says:
interesting
fees?
daniel says:
not 100% sire
sure*
but 23% interest does attract me
mikeh says:
it says no account keeping fees
daniel says:
yeah
but 23% interest
is nuts
mikeh says:
haha
that curry mind of yours is ticking like big ben
daniel says:
you put in 5k you walk out with 5.850
definately
i have some news
firstly
read this
its short
http://www.seek.com.au/job/casual-b-marketing-b-work-on-campus-vic-university-students/melbourne/16342925/69/1/
haydon?
mikeh says:
looks good
you're impatient
daniel says:
yeah
so i just called the number today
turned into a 10 minute phone interview
i was successful and passed
so now they will send me some email application
later today
of which if i pass then i will get a face to face interview
mikeh says:
you are using today loosely
daniel says:
it seems like a perfect opportunity seeing that i will major in marketing
well she said yesterday
that tomorow you will receive an email
mikeh says:
obviously not going to major in "the use of today in conversation"
daniel says:
lol
oh michael
i hope i can get through
mikeh says:
get....through
daniel says:
?
mikeh says:
precisely
daniel says:
you would love the informant
mikeh says:
er
daniel says:
the movie
mikeh says:
yes...
oh lotty, he of failing memory
...
...
daniel says:
have u seen it already
mikeh says:
yahuh
told you that when you told me you were seeing it
daniel says:
i forgot
well did you love it
mikeh says:
inconsistent
but good
daniel says:
ok
mikeh says:
how was the date with harold
did he make a move...or did you?
daniel says:
very funny
ive been friends with harold
for
15 years now
mikeh says:
and you never thought he'd make a move on you...until tonight?
daniel says:
you are really bored
mikeh says:
avoidance...interesting
so...
daniel says:
yawn
mikeh says:
was he a good kisser? or
lotty this is important
daniel says:
yawn
mikeh says:
why are you so uninteresting?
daniel says:
im dead tired
mikeh says:
harold really took it out of you huh
where did you eat?
did he pay?
daniel says:
yawn
mikeh says:
just answer the questions
lotty?
daniel says:
(sheep)
mikeh says:
i don't understand
we're talking about homosexuality, not beastiality
unless you're changing the subject
daniel says:
(snail)
mikeh says:
that is just...wrong
what are you doing?
daniel says:
trying to open my eyelids
mikeh says:
call harold, his silky baritone will lull you into dreamland
daniel says:
(clock)
mikeh says:
clock
yes?
daniel says:
(tired)
mikeh says:
he's just a phone call away...
(phone)
daniel says:
gtg dead tired
get some sleep
mikeh says:
i'm going to post this on my blog
welcome to your granted wish!

----------

and that - as they say - is that.

you're off the case, mcgonigal.

2010-01-05T06:00:00.000-06:00

Sender: Joel Kenyon
Time: 4:36pm
Subject: Re: quick question

I dont get it, dogs cant be detectives can they? even if they could solve a crime who would they communicate their findings too? some kind of dog translator? do they even exist?

It just doesnt add up

Sender: Michael Haydon
Time: 4:39pm
Subject: Re: quick question

one case at a time, kenyon. what of the clothed swine?

felt like this was worth blogging.

2010-01-04T02:19:00.005-06:00

Sender: Joel Kenyon
Time: 4:36pm
Subject: quick question...

please review attachment.

Sender: Michael Haydon
Time: 4:37pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

where is the question?

Sender: Joel Kenyon
Time: 4:39pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

the question is "what are your thoughts on the attachment?"
I felt that was implied.

Sender: Michael Haydon
Time: 4:42pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

implication suggests the parts you sent for me to assemble myself would yield an obvious query. this is not so. however, now having knowledge of what you were asking by sending me that clothed swine i can safely say: i am confused. pigs are not supposed to wear clothes.

Sender: Joel Kenyon
Time: 4:49pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

check out this cheeky fella

Sender: Michael Haydon
Time: 4:51pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

insane. his buttocks are COMPLETELY exposed.

Sender: Joel Kenyon
Time: 4:52pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

it's almost like his outfit is impractical.

Sender: Michael Haydon
Time: 4:54pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

like it was designed for a human and then altered slightly to fit a pig. which is proposterous.

Sender: Joel Kenyon
Time: 4:56pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

of course, or...is it. something strange is going on, perhaps we should both investigate further...

Sender: Michael Haydon
Time: 4:58pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

i am terribly banked up with research on stanley kubrick, and a doubled-over napping possum trapped in the window fitting in front of me as i sit at this computer is also stealing most of my usable time. i encourage you to begin our journey toward answers and i will join you shortly.

Sender: Joel Kenyon
Time: 5:10pm
Subject: Re: quick question...

i'm on it.

---------------------

stay tuned.

friday 27/11/09 & saturday 28/11/09: sitting around.

2009-11-28T22:18:00.002-06:00

haven't done a whole lot. basically waiting to go on tour because it means:

a. i get to tour
b. i get to see more pals
3. i get to go home for like 2 weeks
d. i get to go on tour more, like a lot more, like pineapple a LOT
5. i get to see ze country

+ like 200 other reasons. at least 200. no i'm not going to list them all.

last few days i've watched:

scrooged
- not that great. definitely not bill murray at the height of his powers. i think when he's locked into comedy mode he has a hard time pulling anything else off like anger. the bits in this where he gets angry are just...bad. the production design is kind of cool, very 80's which i love. that weird production design/not production design that looks real but fake. like that horror flick house. or re-animator. it was directed by richard donner which was a weird choice given he could have done a lot better (and HAS done a lot better). dude directed omen, superman 1 (and 2, though his cut only came out two years ago), all the lethal weapons, goonies...sigh. whatta guy. it ends with a stupid kitsch-y singalong that just makes you groan. oh well.

escape from absolom
- filmed in nsw which is kind of rad. ray liotta gets sent to a prison in the future where you never get to escape and the prison is run by a big corporation. never fear, liotta just baddies himself out of there and onto this island called absolom where there's tribal warfare and such. after baddie-ing himself out of one tribe and into another, he just continues to rule all over the place. this film isn't great but is kind of cool. initially you're like "hey, is that lance hendrickson?" and it is, and then you're like "IS THAT ERNIE GHOSTBUSTIN' HUDSON?" and it is. and then you're like "oh man, is that kevin dillon? dammit" and sadly, it is. martin campbell did this little doozy. who'd have thought he had goldeneye in him after this fun mess. side note: i'm a little cut it was filmed in 2.35:1 but the region 4 DVD is in 1:85. stupid oversight.

hard eight
- cool little flick from paul thomas anderson, his feature writing/directing debut. such a tight little story for the d00d who did boogie nights and magnolia (though i guess punch-drunk love and there will be blood didn't have many characters). i'm still not 100% sold on philip baker hall's acting. his presence is unquestionably awesome but some of his deliveries are a little stale. john c reilly does real well playing a dunder-head. gwyneth paltrow isn't bad as clementine, the sluzza with the heart of fake gold. for some reason, every character samuel l jackson plays that holds a gun at some point becomes the same guy. i see his arms dealer from jackie brown, i see julius from pulp fiction, i see d00d from snakes on a plane. oh well. i love paul thomas anderson (i don't know many people that do, sadly) and it was cool to see where he started before getting all robert altman for his next two features. he really divides people, it's hard to 'kind of like' his movies. love or hate. i like that.

before the devil knows you're dead
- i'm starting to become a legitimate sidney lumet fanboy. after seeing network, 12 angry men, equus, the verdict and dog day afternoon (a film i bought when i was about 13 and loved to death, not knowing who it was by) and now this, he's one of the greatest directors still alive. not the most consistent, for sure, but when he hits he really hits dead on. this film hits dead on. ethan hawke is good as a bitch, albert finney is super intense with that distinctive voice of his. philip seymour hoffman kills it, as usual, same with marissa tomei. i only noticed that it was shot on HD when ethan hawke is pulling away in the getaway car near the beginning of the film, the rest was indistinguishable, which took me aback. maybe sidney just knows how to use it properly. the structure is excellent and those breaking glass transitions are pure sweet 70's technique. could have done without seeing philip seymour hoffman and marissa tomei get it on though.

the deer hunter
- can't believe it'd taken me this long to see it. i suppose the infamy surrounding cimino's heaven's gate made me a little reluctant. can you blame me? this is a character piece, through and through. i was talking to aaron last night about it and he said it was slow, boring and draining. i think it was meant to be slow and draining, but i never found it boring. every moment in it built to the events that took place. i've never seen walken act so well (except for catch me if you can). de niro kills it, as usual. cazale...man, cazale. i wish he had lived long enough to make more flicks. every film he was ever in was nominated for best picture at the oscars. that's impressive role choice. meryl streep in like, her second starring role is real good too. cimino's direction is solid. the scene where michael refuses to lend stan his boots is one of the best in the film. i loved the first deer hunting sequence set to the choral kinda music. really beautiful. the vietnam sequences were brutal, amazing how little of the film they take up too. cimino...you did well. shame about everything that followed.

double indemnity
- not much needs to be said about this. billy wilder really knows how to make a picture. i don't think i'd ever seen a 100% legit noir film and this is the grandaddy of everything anyone tries to do that's remotely noir. it's shot well, acted well, the production design is legit, the writing is great. just a sweet flick.

tonight i'm seeing paranormal activity. it will be scary. very scary.

sunday 22/11/09 through thursday 26/11/09: stuffs.

2009-11-26T06:54:00.000-06:00

kept forgetting to do this before i went to bed.

last couple of days i watched the wild bunch (amazingly best best sweet), crash (cronenberg one...messed, bold and flawed...do not see), the jacket (super impressive, see), the haunting (not great but looks amazing), T.A.P.S. (real good, flawed but real good), equus (crazily intense film with equally intense performances all around) and the colour of money/the hustler a few times. didn't do much else. saw ro do a bike race, he won. went to a mexican restaurant, awesome. been riding and walking a lot. like, a lot.

walked into the city and saw cloudy with a chance of meatballs today. it was so good. real funny script, good voice acting and it all looked super sweet. such good art direction.

watching new york stories at the moment. scorsese, coppola, allen. not too excited about coppola's, mainly cause i already know it's going to suck bad.

gunna walk into the city and see the invention of lying or new moon. we'll see.

until tomorrow (maybe), bye.

saturday 21/11/09: bergmanonia.

2009-11-21T19:53:00.000-06:00

woke up at 11ish. went for a walk, solid walk. shake (coffee again). settle down to watch wild strawberries. break halfway through to go get stereo with ro and weed. turned into pool session. cheated by eating 2 packs of grain waves and an oj. oh well, i'll just start walkin more. returned stereo because i'm stupid. came home, continued wild strawberries.

wild strawberries is about an old fella who's been crachety and cold his whole life. he's about to be given a high honour for his 50 years as a doctor and he's beginning to reflect on his life, not liking what he's seeing. he wanders in and out of dreams and reality while travelling to collect his new honour. it's such a beautiful little film. it was made in 1957 when bergman wasn't the oldest of men but he portrays the main character with such...understanding. it's just incredible. there.s a dream sequence where he's walking down a street alone, and it's a long shot and you can see his hands trembling...little details like that just sell the whole thing. visually bergman is like a humble fellini. he has understated flair that you just can't help but admire. great flick. and the transfer is AMAZING. i can only assume hopscotch got the criterion transfer because it's just immaculate.

next up, the silence. two sisters, one is quite a mother, smart and well mannered but physcially frail and quite sick. the other is beautiful, promiscuous and a little dull in the head. the plot centres around how the frail one prays but feels as if god is not answering those prayers, and quesioning why. this film - another bergman - is pretty unusual, almost feels like bergman trying his hand at surrealist thriller. there's a feeling of despair running through it all that you can't avoid. the addition of midgets and an old man who can't seem to speak any languages at all is inspired and creepy. it's not a horror, heck it's not even a thriller...just a really intense drama.

next up, through a glass darkly. the daughter of an aloof author has just been released from a mental health hospital. she is joined by her father, brother and partner by the beach in a house to spend some quality time together. as time goes on, however, she begins to have relapses into her delusional paranoid state and imagines that god is instructing her to do bizzare and suspicious things. this seems to be one of bergman's most mainstream films in terms of the amount of characters and how they're each explored within the story. it's complex but not as much so as winter light (1963) which only has 2 main characters and so can afford much more time to be spent on them. there are some amazing sequences including an above water shipwreck at the end of a rock pier in which the daughter is found midway through one of her mental attacks. as usual, well shot and acted (it won the oscar for best foreign film in 1961). bergman rarely puts a foot wrong.

finally, the virgin spring. the little known source material for the last house on the left (wes craven's 70's directorial debut), chaos (cheap ripoff version of TLHOTL) and obviously the 'reimagining' of TLHOTL put out earlier this year. in medievil times, a father and mother send their youngest virgin daughter to take candles by horseback to their church in the village. their older daughter who is pregnant dislikes her sister and decides to put a curse on her via odin (a pagan god). as the youngest is travelling she happens upon three herdsmen (two men and a boy) who are acting pretty downright creepy. as she is so innocent she is friendly and polite to them, however she is soon attacked, raped and killed by the two older herdsmen with assistance from the boy. the sister witnesses all this. her guilt festers, the herdsmen steal all the virgin's posessions and set off. they happen across the father and mother's house and ask to stay the night...

this film is hard to watch. it's hard to make such an old period work onscreen because it was a completely alien time to our own. max von sydow does really well as the father and he is the only actor of note. i believe this also won the foreign film oscar of its' year and it deserved it. it's disturbing, not the kind of flick you sit down to with popcorn, coke and a girl. bergman's camera doesn't flinch in portraying all the toughest part of the story but he is not cold or removed which is probably why you feel this film so much while you're watching it. draining but rewarding.

until tomorrow, bye.

friday 20/11/09: part 2.

2009-11-20T07:43:00.003-06:00

alright so my day. i woke up at about 9:15, troy was running around trying to wake mark up to help him with some new fridge. i went for a walk, listened to mewithoutyou while i did. great walking music. came home, had shower and shake (coffee). nothing to do so i started watching hud.

hud is this amazing little gem of a film. paul newman and melvyn douglas rule all over it, acting wise. it was made by this director named martin ritt who's only other film of note was another newman western called hombre. so unusual that he pulled such a masterpiece as this off. it's just shot so beautifully, all the acting is dead on. there's music 3 times in the picture: the opening credits, the middle and right at the end. so effective. and the music is so nice...ugh. such a cheeky little film. i was watching it with ro and we were both commenting on how intensely unsettling paul newman is in it, and how amazing melvyn douglas is...all his lines just have so much conviction. and what lines! what a great script.

next up i watched a prairie home companion. such a strange little picture but really tastily done. the ensemble cast is pretty crazy: tommy lee jones, meryl streep, john c. riley, woody harrelson, lily tomlin, virginia madsen, kevin kline, lindsay lohan, maya rudolph...how altman manages to wrangle so many people still astounds me. i've heard that a lot of the time he'd leave actors to make certain decisions themselves in order to alleviate the pressure of him directing every single nuance of every single actor in his usually enormous ensemble casts...apparently this makes the actors feel great too, so everyone wins. the story itself was okay...it's more about the characters than the narrative. some of his camera moves are just...ugh. i have no idea how he manages to not get the camera in mirrors at times. see any of the scenes that take place in meryl streep/lily tomlin/lindsay lohan's dressing room.

there's mirrors everywhere, even opposing each other but somehow you never catch a glimpse of the camera as it goes around the actors. some of it must have been digitally enhanced but it's not obvious...either that or altman was really that good. he uses the dolly/pan/zoom effect almost constantly which gives the film a nice rhythm. i love seeing films like this because even if they're not the best the director has to offer, there's so much to look at in it...so much technique going on. i watched the behind the scenes stuff and shook my heap with bewilderment at seeing paul thomas anderson sitting next to altman on set. i knew he was the standby director for the whole film (for insurance purposes this was required...altman was quite sick) but just seeing him there the whole time was so cool. he must have been in heaven.

then i watched spartacus. a stanley kubrick film but not. more kirk douglas' film. the whole thing was a bit underwhelming. some amazing shots, great acting from douglas, surprisingly good pacing for a film of its' length...but something was missing. maybe i'm just not a sword and sandal epic kind of guy. maybe that's why i have no deep desire to see ben-hur. but strangely, a massive desire to see lawrence of arabia. i understand why spartacus is a marvel of filmmaking but i just don't buy into it fully enough to be like YEAH SPARTACUS WOOOOO I AM SPARTACUS HELL YEAH GO DOUGLAS y'know. ah well.

then i watched the two jakes. for a sequel to one of the best films ever, this sucked. i knew that going in but i didn't realise just how average it really could be. jack nicholson directed it. robert towne wrote it (so why did it suck? urrgh). so many unusual scenes that had context but not enough to be really valuable to the narrative. i don't understand how nicholson sat down after locking the final edit of it and went "yes, this film works" cause it just doesn't. chinatown...man, if you haven't seen chinatown, you gotta see it but it's like comparing...se7en to sheitan. seriously, that big of a difference...and for a sequel, that's bad.

then i watched platoon. i'd always known its' reputation. best picture winner etc. it started and i was like yeah, okay. war film. as it goes on it just gets better and better. it's like apocalypse now but more concise and realistic...and dramatically so. the scene that stuck with me the most is when kevin dillon's character bashes the head of a villager in and is threatening to do the same to a lady standing beside him...the savagery is just horrific. and shortly after, charlie sheen's character stopping some of his unit from raping a little girl. seriously intense stuff...wasn't expecting it. dafoe is great. this film demands a closer viewing, there's a lot in it.

then i watched picnic at hanging rock. peter weir is a master. how he's straddled so many genres to the ground is beyond me, his filmography reads like a dream. kind of like spielberg, but more understated. spielberg has been a little clumsy in his handling of the different genres but weir usually nails it. he rarely delivers lukewarm results. i'd always heard about picnic at hanging rock, even when i was quite young. always been interested in it. it's very creepy. understated and overstated all at the same time. it's uneven but not in a negative way. it's shot and edited really well. umbrella did a killer job with the restoration too.

then i watched easy rider. after reading everything about it in easy riders, raging bulls i had a lot of anticipation. it's pretty well made for a stoner kinda road movie. there's no real full on narrative to it to latch onto...just a bunch of places they go and a bunch of stuff they do. the style showed me where oliver stone got the visual style for a bunch of natural born killers. apparently dennis hopper took loads of drugs and went crazy during shooting. the film itself leaves me feeling a little...hollow. it comes from such a different era to me that it's obvious i wouldn't be able to fully get it. but it was better than i was expecting.

after 7 movies today, i'm feeling a little tired.

until tomorrow, bye.

friday 20/11/09: part 1.

2009-11-20T00:39:00.002-06:00

so today i had an exchange with someone i didn't know through someone i knew's status update comments. the other person decided to delete all their posts, presumably saving face. i've replicated the conversation here for archive purposes and just because the process was so fun that i can't let it die with his post-exchange measures. i wasn't really on point the whole time but hey, you don't see me deleting what i wrote just because i looked a bit dumb. when someone starts getting all thesaurus on you it's interesting to see how far they can carry it.

Cassandra Emily Bird: ... Ok who's the cunt who called my house before pretending to be Dominic and pretending I was pregnant? Fucker.

Michael John Haydon: What's happened to you, Cassie?

Cassandra Emily Bird: ... Meaning what?

Michael John Haydon: You never used to sound like this...

Cassandra Emily Bird: No, I was always like this, I just hid it in certain places. Like church!

Daniel Cunningham: fight this fact in any fashion you may but it always seems to be someone on the 'outside' ( someone else ) who has the better view of who 'you' are...

Alexander Greenberry: Yeah Cass, you've changed.

Cassandra Emily Bird: ... And I've just realised nobody's with me on this one. Greenie, sif you'd know. Cuntingham, you too.

Daniel Cunningham: nice flawed defensive there towards me but if you had of let the other side of your brain take charge when launching that retort you may of noticed i gave a non-specific very generalized opinion giving no actual biased judgment on the topic at hand more so just something i have learned over time...

Michael John Haydon: You can only know a person based off how much they choose to reveal. So basically the only perception I have of you is that which you've chosen to give me.

Food for thought.

Daniel Cunningham: lamens terms 'one only can see what is visible'..

Brock Coombs: geez.. i agree people change and outsiders can see it more quickly depending on what we reveal. but cmon, if someone did that to you, you'd be pretty cut, no?

Michael John Haydon: I would be cut, but probably not cut enough to post it on Facebook like it will bring the culprit forward.

Daniel Cunningham: the in-ability to accept change within ones persona only shows one lacks a sense of realism within ones self... being 'cut' only makes someone look somewhat foolish and in denial...

Alexander Greenberry: This is a job for Batman.

Michael John Haydon: Daniel - what on earth are you talking about? Realism? I don't understand the context of what you were trying to say.

Daniel Cunningham: Michael : If someone cannot accept change within themselves would you agree and say they are not realistic?.

Michael John Haydon: Not realstic? Meaning them not accepting change is not realistic? Your question is ambiguous but I'll do my best: yes, if someone cannot accept change within themselves then a denial has taken place of what is most likely reality. Again. i don't understand the context.

Daniel Cunningham: Pragmatism... scroll up for enlightenment...

Michael John Haydon: Scrolled up - no enlightenment. Maybe if I sleep on it.

Daniel Cunningham: I would say so, i find my commentary fairly effluent. It baffles me as to how the context has eluded you.

Tom Prentice: English makes me happy, others sad. Your effluence has been most enlightenful, Sir Daniel, your command of the English language astounds and bewilders Michael and renders his immediate attention asunder. Truly, you are Grammar Incarnate!

Max Stekelenburg: Yeah so cassie's status is now about what now? prrrretty sure its not about cassie

Daniel Cunningham: of all the almighty epic fails Maximus, do you weild the fathomable capability that a conversation moves away from its point of origin as it transgresses into a discussion. Different people see a situation from different facets thus where we are now...

Max Stekelenburg: *coughwankercough*

Daniel Cunningham: --text missing--

Max Stekelenburg: And so your eloquent slander makes it more acceptable?

Michael John Haydon: First, Max can abbreviate to Maxwell, Maxamillion and even Maximo, but it is never abbreviated from Maximus, at least not in a formal sense, not to mention - unless there's something I'm not aware of - your leap in assuming his name was Maximus in full form as opposed to the alternatives. Second, you spelt wield wrong. Third, your use of 'fathomable capability' is ambiguous and ill-defined. Fourth, you started a question but failed to finish it with a question mark. Fifthly, your context of 'transgresses' is illogical as it implies a set of conversational 'rules' that is broken when a conversation 'moves away from its point of origin' and into a discussion, as if the two concepts are opposed or abohrrent to be compared to one another. Sixth, people cannot see from facets. Seventh, your use of 'thus' is poor grammar and the equal of saying 'so where are are now' which you'll agree, in context of the sentence, makes no sense in the English language. Eight, I just realised your first sentence does not allow the use of a comma as it does not flow logically from the first part to the second in a grammatical sense.

Try again.

Daniel Cunningham: not slander, an educated opinion based on the lack of perception show on your behalf in your initial comment... *cough* sub pseudo-intellectual...

Daniel Cunningham: THAT is slander...learn the difference

Daniel Cunningham: HAHAHAHAHA show me where it says illogical in the dictionary... and you want to try and correct ME!?.

Daniel Cunningham: It's amazing, one nights sleep and you go from questioning a mere understanding to typical keyboard warrior. --this was posted and deleted before i could see it, i only discovered it while going through my facebook emails to fill in the blanks--

Max Stekelenburg: k man you win life. I forfeit this conversation to your unreachable people skills. Go make some money writing Frasier episodes or something...

Michael John Haydon: You put ! before ? in your showing of outrageous surprise when it's traditionally the other way around, and you also put a period after that mistake.

I suppose the difference is, I never held myself up as a beacon of eloquence.

Daniel Cunningham: The hell you didn't. Your no better than any other individual cussing at strangers in a chat room as if to prove a point. If you are feeling somewhat in-adequate in life then do something productive with it and you still failed to tell me where this mysterious 'illogical' came from...

Michael John Haydon: "You're", not your. Were you addressing me in regards to the cussing comment? Cussing is a slang term for 'cursing' which I've not done any of in this 'discussion' (as opposed to a 'conversation'...wink). You seperated inadequate with a dash when it requires none. I tell ya, when you cut me down before I just...well I just felt so inadequate! You really cut right to the heart of me, Daniel. My life is killer and considerably productive, feel free to ask me about it if you'd like proof. "You've still failed", not 'you still failed'.

Oh, and I've failed to address your correction because it is incorrect.

Daniel Cunningham: you are FUCKING PATHETIC!... so far immature you have forgotten what this discussion is all about...it transgressed from a simple 'i don't understand your context' to 'lets be a typical keyboard toughie and stand over all who mean nothing to me like seriously dude...'no matter how well you play and win, you have already played there game and lost'...correct me again i really could not give a fuck ey...

Cass: you affiliate with some wankers...

Michael John Haydon: Nice of you to throw in some of that 'cussing at strangers' you repremanded me for. 'So far immature'? Remove 'far' and add 'that' between 'immature' and 'you' you've got a cohesive sentence. You've really got to look up 'transgressed' before you use it again. Read your reply immediately after Max's first comment to discover who first emerged as a 'typical keyboard toughie'. You failed to close your inverted comma before 'like seriously dude'. Did you use the game playing quote to make me feel like I've actually lost whatever game you're implying this is? Bit of a last ditch effort invoking the old 'I could care less' schtick, too.

And you still failed to tell me where this mysterious 'illogical is not spelled right' thing came from. You want to correct people but you can't stand it when people return the favour.

The only 'sub pseudo-intellectual' here is you.

Daniel Cunningham: and he continues... you and cass should get along fine =) ... both supremacists of mini victories only dif is shes not pathetic little individual like yaself... anywho head on down to fap town... i aint posting or reading here any more...

Michael John Haydon: Ah, the calm exterior. A keen tactic. 'She's not a pathetic little individual' not 'She's not pathetic little individual'. Sad to say I have no business in 'fap town'.

Adios!

admittedly, about halfway through i just started baiting him but it's amazing how quickly someone can lose their cool once the tables have turned. maybe i'm a wanker for keeping all this but hey, i enjoyed myself.

more later.

thursday 19/11/09: stupid pinky toes.

2009-11-19T08:16:00.000-06:00

woke up at 9am. alarm was set for 9:15. got up and ready and went for a walk. listened to hell or high water which went for 28 minutes, perfect length. shame the shoes i borrowed were worn away at the edges inside so my stupid wide feet made my pinky toes get insane blisters. ridiculously large. came back, conference call which was alright. gary is legit. we didn't do much after that really.

in the afternoon jord laid down some electric guitar on spell my name while i sat in. after that i watched flags of our fathers.

it's impressive how frequently clint eastwood makes such complicated productions and pulls them off. every film he's made in the 2000's so far has been a challenge for him to make, the audience to watch or both. i think he's entering his best years, and considering he's 80 next year that's pretty remarkable. gran torino made 270 mil worldwide! who does that at 79? clint, that's who.

anyway, flags of our fathers was pretty good. the scenes i found the most impacting were the battle scenes but i suppose that's a given. barry pepper rules. the visual effects were great. eastwood shoots in 2.35:1 which is my favourite format and he really uses it well. shoots simple, shoots strongly. he knows what to show you and what not to show you. the scene where ryan phillipe's character enters a bunker to find a fellow soldier killed in a particularly gruesome way, eastwood stays on phillipe's face and uses the flashlight to indicate his reaction. it's much stronger than just showing...it's like he wants you to feel it instead of be assaulted by the image. seems like an elementary observation of an elementary technique but sometimes that's all that's needed, and it moved me.

next up: letter from iwo jima. i think the general consensus - and i think i agree - is that this is the superior of the two companion films. perhaps it's the language (the film is spoken entirely in japanese) or the operatic and earnest acting style all the japanese actors employ. the story is more raw emotionally and there's more interesting things going on underneath the surface. the involvement of the japanese's intense honour system (till and into death) and how this extends into their military tactics makes everything more heightened and the cultural differences become massive. these are two very different films.

then we had a practice. learned western a bit more. finally, i watched candy.

candy is a hell of an australian film. uncompromising. both leads firing on all cylinders. this is what australian film wants to be like but 8 times out of 10 doesn't even approach. there's not much to say about it except that you need to be in the mood...it's a rough ride. i'll be watching this director closely, and i wish heath ledger was still alive.

until tomorrow, bye.

wednesday 18/11/09: good film day.

2009-11-18T07:28:00.000-06:00

woke up at 9 something. had a shower, did my washing, made breakfast, got water. downstairs, record some claps for western. break fo lunch, chille con carne. amazing! watched in the valley of elah.

i already talked about tommy lee jones yesterday so i don't need to do it again. he's much better in 'in the valley of elah' than 'the hunted'. charlize theron is pretty awesome too. was stoked to see jason patrick in there...james franco...josh brolin! amazing supporting cast. roger deakins killed it too. i'm a little annoyed though - my tv formatted the picture to 1:85 but it was shot in 2.35:1. still don't know why it did that. brutal story, well directed. see it if you feel like feeling sad.

then i came out of my room and we jammed on a new song. the guitar part is pretty intricate. needs both guitars to make it sound complete. drums are weird. after that i had a bar for dinner and settled down to watch the boxer. i was distracted and had trouble engaging in the flick so i turned it off when joe came around and put on road to perdition.

it's easily one of the most beautifully shot films i think i've ever seen. and so well directed! sam mendes really killed it. tom hanks was reliable as always. paul newman owns all over everything. jude law played against type and did so awesomely, same with daniel craig who's voice and manner were nearly unrecognisable. the music was stellar too thanks to thomas newman. can't say enough good things. the scene where tom hanks confronts paul newman in the rain is just...ugh. never seen anything like it before or since. i could watch it over and over. i don't think mendes can really top this. hasn't since, at least.

next up: jackie brown. never seen this before which is weird. incredible ensemble cast. on the whole it's all a little underwhelming. well executed but just not all that compelling. robert de niro is amazing and he just SITS there. barely does a thing. pam grier was solid. samuel l. just walks all over the thing...he has the most fun out of anyone. surprisingly shot in 1:85 as tarantino's aspect of choice is usually 2.35:1 (which inglourious basterds was shot and looks amazing in). i think cinemascope suits him better...jackie didn't have a whole lot of style about it. at least not compared to everything else he's made. quentin works better with his own material too.

finally: boxcar bertha. scorsese's first real film, a roger corman quickie. firstly, barbara hershey is a babe. it's weird seeing carradine act now that he's dead. funny that i don't feel as weird seeing paul newman...maybe it's just cause of how carradine died. changes the way you view everything in relation to that person. i'm amazed at the transfer of this mediorcre old mgm dvd release. the negative must have been in mint condition cause all the colours are so vibrant for a 60's film (albeit a late 60's film). obviously as it's marty's first flick it's a little shakey but promising. it's shot really well but that'd be mostly due to his planning...they shot it in 22 days on something like $300,000. inspires me a lot.

until tomorrow, bye.

tuesday 17/11/09: productive?

2009-11-17T08:43:00.000-06:00

woke up. drove to chemist warehouse, bought chille con carne, chicken korma, coffee shakes, pumpkin soup, cherry/choc bars. enough meal replacement to last me nearly a month. intense. came back, put down some percussion for western. not much, a bit. break for lunch, i went and bought a dirty clothes hamper and a water filter from castletown. both are rad. came back, didn't do much. watched lust for life.

lust for life is about vincent van gogh. it's amazing how much kirk douglas looked like him once he had the haircut and colour. gave a pretty amazing performance. production was a little too "mgm in the 50's & 60's" for my tastes...they should have it to someone like raoul walsh or john ford. a western director, someone who wouldn't ham up the character development, but i guess it's based off a real dude. anthony quin was good but not as amazing as everyone makes his performance out to be. they made the transfer from a theatrical print, not the negative, which is a shame given how much was written up at the time about how brilliant the colours were. the film stock they used was notorious for losing colour vibrancy faded significantly over time. as i watch more and more early films i come to understand the true value of film preservation. it's depressing to think that 50% of the films made before 1960 are completely lost, either lack of negative/distribution print or faded to red.

then i watched barry lyndon. what a film. i'd never had the balls to sit down and absorb it all in one sitting but man, it's worth it. cannot WAIT for a restoration of that baddie (dvd is from a theatrical print) on dvd and blu-ray. it'll knock the socks off everything (except perhaps baraka). some of the scenes are just masterworks in every possible way. and shot on 65mm...i'll be watching it again a few times over the next couple of weeks, for sure. with every new kubrick film i see (i've only got paths of glory and the killing to go) i feel like i've seen 10 from any other director. i think spielberg said that once actually and i couldn't agree more. watch dr. strangelove and as soon as it's finished, you will want to watch it again. seriously itching for that barry lyndon restoration. pheeyoo.

finally i watched the hunted. i should have saved barry lyndon for last cause the hunted was average. i wish you could edit dvds cause i'd cut the film down to the chasing and the knife fights, both of which were great and the only thing worth watching about it all. benicio del toro is so totally underwhelming you're shocked he won an oscar previous to this film. tommy lee jones could read the phone book and i'd be stoked so i enjoyed him, as always. there's just something about him. william friedken has really gone downhill...turning into just an action d00d. rules of engagement was OKAY but not great. he hasn't made a solid goodie in a while, and for a new hollywood director that's saddening.

my feet are freezing. we got formally invited to play south by south west in austin, texas next march. that's going to be pretty flipping rad.

until tomorrow, bye.

monday 16/11/09: not much.

2009-11-16T08:47:00.000-06:00

woke up. shake. hang with mark/jord/ro upstairs. get down to business, finish western. structure at least. break for lunch. go to wow with jord, buy escape from absolom and baraka (which i'd been waiting for to come down in price..13 bucks is a steal). come home.

baraka is already up there with the most amazing motion pictures ever for me. such a beautiful film...some of it is almost too much to watch. the whole sequence set to dead can dance's 'the host of seraphim' brought tears to my eyes. so powerful, can't wait to see it at the astor. i can't believe the director made his own camera to shoot it. in 65mm! astounding. the dvd itself is among the best looking i've ever seen too. such clarity...it's ridiculous. go out and buy this disc, it will blow your mind.

started watching high plains drifter. shake. practice. good practice. hang with weed for a bit. finish high plains drifter. weird movie. made very quickly and cheaply but with clint eastwood's trademark classicism directorial flourish. waste not want not is the rule of thumb in his pictures. not an amazing western but a merely interesting one. some great one liners. troubling attitude towards women too, but i suppose that's characteristic of the western genre as a whole. which sucks.

sleep now. tired. chemist warehouse in the morning for some bars and meals. been thinking about pizza all night. sucked.

until tomorrow, bye.

sunday 15/11/09: movies and germans and movies.

2009-11-15T09:35:00.000-06:00

the transfer on the french connection dvd was weird. like it was interlaced or something. it's strange, because it was shot on film so it should have an analogue source. it's like when they were doing the restoration (which is quite poor) they made a digital intermediate that was produced as interlaced...which is really unusual. also some sequences are clearly shot on 16mm blowup instead of 35mm like the second unit ran out of money for film stock or something. that film needs another look in terms of the picture...bad dvd.

so today i woke up and watched judgement at nuremberg. not a real cheery flick to watch first thing but i was really impressed. it goes for 3 hours but doesn't seem drawn out. spencer tracey rules as always, burt lancaster is amazing. judy garland was a weird addition for sure. only gripes were the dvd was mastered in 4:3, not 16:9. i looked at the back and the editon i have is dated 2004, which makes this anamorphic oversight kind of inexcusable (unless - and this is likely - it's just a direct copy of an initial release dvd from the 90's or something with new packaging). also, the transfer was made from a distribution print, a black and white positive instead of from the negative. you can tell because the reel change marks appear. this happened with the original dvd transfer of michael mann's heat aswell which was puzzling considering they had the negative for the re-release anyway. why don't they just nail things like that first time around? pretty disappointing, but it wouldn't surprise me if mgm lost the original judgement at nuremberg negative. i guess we'll see whether or not when they do a re-release (which they will do).

then i watched brick. now when i shared a room with jono he was always hassling me to check this flick out cause it was one of his favourites. turns out it rules. well shot, well acted, well written. impressive for such an ambitious idea. the noir touches were obvious but still quite sneaky. joseph gordon-levitt is a great actor and it was sweet to see richard roundtree in there (shaft!). the interview with the director was the only extra on the dvd but it was pretty good. for a half hour of the guy just talking it was better than expected. it took him 9 years to get his film finished...that's daunting but inspiring.

then i watched rounders. i'd forgotten this film even existed until recently when i saw it at JB for like 6 bucks. i think REL have bought up all village roadshow's distribution library in australia cause they're re-releasing all the films as exactly the same discs but with very slightly altered packaging and mega cheap. all the usual village hallmarks are there but it's just an REL release now. reminds me of miramax's releasing strategies in the 80's...anyway. rounders is about poker and it's flipping sweet. matt damon is rad as always, edward norton too...martin landau, nice surprise. john malkovich is hilarious as a russian poker joint owner named kgb. production design was great and it was shot so well...amazing a film like this slipped under the radar. so good.

then some german backpackers came over cause they're staying for a few days. two girls and a guy. jord's registered on couchsurfers.com and they saw us on there. they were rad. they taught us about german stuff for like 2 hours. beer, geography, dialects...the works. at times it was awkward to search for things to talk about but that's to be expected. i look forward to hanging out with them in the days to come.

finally i watched buffalo 66. it's a film that really sneaks up on you, that you can't judge in the first 20 minutes or so. you're not quite sure what to think of it. christina ricci is great, so is gallo. everyone in it rules in some way. even jackie treehorn from the big lebowski is in it! nuts. cool music and some great scenes, especially the bit where ricci tapdances in the bowling alley...heaps rad. the film looked...70's. must have been the stock, i don't know what it was. it almost looked like they shot on colour positive film. actually i think i read that somewhere. everything looked so warm and lush but muted, if that makes any sense. awesome.

now after nerding out, i gotta sleep.

until tomorrow, bye.

saturday 14/11/09: haven't posted in a while.

2009-11-14T08:14:00.000-06:00

so i guess for the most part i've been slack on this blog for the last month or so. when you get behind, you begin to forget.

a run down of the last month:

- flew to melbourne
- went to mark and leah's engagement party
- played pool
- saw the final destination in 3D
- saw robocop at the astor
- played a show for myspace with tme that went alright but then they brought this food out and it blew my mind. little noodle boxes with fish and chips (and little bits of lemon!), mini-burgers, beer, wine...wow
- played pool
- hung out
- changed my flight from 28th of october to the 11th of november
- hung out
- went to bentley's 21st which ruled
- played pool
- saw the shining and a clockwork orange at the astor
- saw the box
- saw this is it
- saw saw VI with riz
- saw the imaginarium of dr. parnassus
- played pool
- visited my dad/grandma with my sister
- gave dad a drum lesson
- swam
- ate
- swam
- saw all the lord of the rings' at the astor...breathtaking (and exausting)
- saw the box again
- had a birthday
- saw the box again
- saw a christmas carol (in 2D)
- ate salsas (oh boy!)
- flew to townsville which is where i am now.

since i've been back (got home on the night of the 11th) i've watched some movies:

- apt pupil. pretty interesting if really implausable flick. ian mckellen is amazing in it. great performances all around actually, especially from david schwimmer in a sweet dramatic role.

- the faculty. rad little sci-fi/horror directed by robert rodriguez and written by kevin 'dawson's creek/scream' williamson. surprisingly fun with a rad ensemble cast and cool effects. pure silly schlock.

- ed wood. can't believe i'd never seen it before. tim burton's best directed film without a doubt. and the black and white cinematography...gosh. one of johnny depp's best roles and martin landau is just flipping incredible as bela lugosi.

- stander. surprisingly cool movie about this south african cop in the 70's who becomes a major bank robber. true story too. thomas jane is naked in it more often than clothed though.

- mulholland drive. it'd been a while since i'd seen david lynch's 2001 baddie. naomi watts is amazing and so is laura harrin. justin theraux isn't so bad either and as usual, all of lynch's bit players are note perfect. the score is super rad but it's a shame the focus puller wasn't doing his job properly: half the shots fall out of focus part way through. sigh.

- the last tempation of christ. can't believe i'd never seen this before either. made me pretty emotional, very intense take on the subject and difficult to watch. dafoe just rules all over it...such commitment to his role. i watched it again with commentary which is something irecommend everyone who enjoyed the film should do.

- the aviator. i'd seen it a few times before but decided to watch it with commentary. it will go on to be a classic film not just in martin scorsese's body of work but in all movies. so solidly made and amazing work from everyone involved. probably scorsese's best production designed film besides age of innocence and casino. all three of those films just look so great.

- sheitan. besides vincent cassel's performance which is a riot, no one should bother with this flick. it's just nasty and badly made. eeyuck.

- celtic pride. besides one funny gag at the start, this movie is disappointing considering who's involved. judd apatow wrote it for crying out loud, what went wrong? i couldn't even finish it. jord and i were most displeased.

- the french connection. confusingly paced and edited but with some great moments. doesn't really approach friedken's best directing...exorcist still probably takes the cake for that.

gearing myself up for a black and white intense film marathon tomorrow. judgement at nuremberg and intolerance here i come. both happen to be 3 hours long each which should be interesting. we jammed on a few songs yesterday but besides that, just waiting around to get going on more recording. we only have 3 more weeks to use before we dash off on tour. when i leave townsville on the 3rd of december, i don't get back until the 8th of feb. that is a heck of a long time. i'll need to pack clever.

until tomorrow (maybe), bye.

thursday 22/10/09: golden AK-47.

2009-10-22T10:16:00.000-05:00

9:56 wakeup. made some porridge for breakfast while preparing for another day of nothing. sent a big ol' video file through yousendit which was fun in a not fun way. watched some more mccabe and mrs. miller but it's hard to get through. besides warren beatty it's just not all that captivating. but hey. then i watched 12 angry men which was pretty amazing. i was telling ro later that night how while glengarry glenross was 5 actors firing on all cylinders, 12 angry men is 12 actors firing on all cylinders. seriously amazing. watched the special features then went upstairs and made some pesto/pepper/cheese which was nice. eventually i headed back downstairs to watch solaris. weed, mark and jord joined me and it was excellent. steven soderbergh can really bring the goods.

after that i made a muffin with tomato and cheese. and also another one of the same. both were okay. i came back downstairs and started watching 'be here to love me', a doco about townes van zandt.

it's at this point i have to ponder upon how funny it is most of my friends thought i was moving up into a crazy hectic busy life full of excitement and whatnot. truth is, that happens every month or so for about a week and the rest is what you read here. food preparation and film watching. if you're lucky, i might start an exercise routine and go into detail about that!

i walked out of my room to find ro and joe who joined me for more of the doco. practice began not long after that and was probably the shortest we've ever had. ran through the set once, out of order. after that i watched more of the TVZ doco and then ro, weed and i headed to the rsl for pool. i think i won every game i played. that's a good average for the night i'd say. i was playing horribly last week, looks like i've got my pool mojo back. we headed home after that where i finished the TVZ doco (amazing...track it and his music down asap) and watched lord of war which is just finishing. i was pretty impressed with lord of war. the ending pulled no punches in terms of bleak realism which was impressive. funny to think i avoided the film for so long because i'd heard it wasn't so great. glad my dad and aj convinced me otherwise. the golden AK-47 was kind of cool too. also most of my friends seem to hate nicholas cage but i like him. so ner.

until tomorrow, bye.

wednesday 21/10/09: not much of anything.

2009-10-22T02:30:00.001-05:00

woke up, normal time. cereal + honey for breakfast. ro, weed and i went searching for a VGA cable which took forever. we tried like 10 different places. 30 bucks for a VGA cable? please. got a hot dog/frozen coke for lunch at castletown. came home and watched being there which was amazing. watched the life and death of peter sellers which was pretty good. more interesting than really good. got my stuff with ASUS sorted. notebooks.com.au were totally useless though. i paid $30 for a copy of my receipt to be faxed to ASUS to get my repair order off the ground and it took them forever. i called them 5 times. they even sounded irritated when i was only calling because they weren't doing their job! flipping nuts.

made some dinner, pesto with cheese and cracked pepper. excellent. apple cider too. killing it. watched spartan with jord and weed. it wasn't very good. surprising from david mamet. i don't even understand how the script was so bad. it's like it was written on the page without any consideration for how it would be spoken. "she just took the long way home". geez mamet. you wrote glengarry glenross! everyone went to bed and i stayed up to get some stuff sent off to the americans. my laptop is so completely screwed. i watched slap shot while i did that. and it was pretty sweet. paul newman was the best thing about it. that and the hanson brothers. not THOSE hanson brothers, obviously. then i went to bed. not much of a day.

until tomorrow, bye.

tuesday 20/10/09: part two.

2009-10-20T09:26:00.000-05:00

i was just thinking about how crushing ill health is. it's your body and it's what keeps you alive. when thing go wrong, the chances of you surviving can be so slim depending on what's wrong. you could have cancer sitting inside you, waiting to show itself and limit your life to even a matter of weeks, even days. so many types of health related issues can just kill you dead. often you won't know until it's too late and you're utterly powerless to stop it.

and that is truly terrifying.

tuesday 20/10/09: productive day.

2009-10-20T09:01:00.000-05:00

i think i blog because all my days tend to blend into one, so it's good to have a reference somewhere that my life actually has a series of events rather than everything melding into one.

so this morning i woke up at about 9:50, as of yesterday my classic wakeup time and headed upstairs to make cereal. i brought it back down to discover ro and mark mixing 'dirty looks' so after reading an issue of american film from 1988 in my room for a while i bailed upstairs to continue there with a few other issues. i was reading a big fat article about lawrence of arabia and realised i'd looked at it on dvd in woolworths yesterday but not actually bought it even though it was quite cheap. kind of silly. it annoyed me so much cause i wanted to watch it that i nearly walked all the way back to that woolies to buy it. i decided not to in the end. i finished off the myspace playlist and sent that off, then made some lunch and watched garth meringhi's (spelling?) darkplace with ro for a while. about lunch: never buy ainsley's instant cous cous. well, the citrus kind anyway. made me want to gag.

after that we recorded drums for a quiet song which went well. i switch to rods part way through the song which i don't usually do live. the wonders of studio recording eh? after that i read some more american film for a while and organised my laptop to be picked up for repairs. later i borrowed ro's car and jord & i ventured out to do things. first stop was jord's dad chris' house to pick up a gibson 335 for this ad thing we're recording. after that we went to jb where i bought a somewhat cheap toshiba dvd player. i went to buy lawrence of arabia but paused, contemplating whether i could justify buying a dvd player and a dvd at the same time. seemed like i didn't really need to, so i put it back down. then i nearly bought jaws before realising i would be doing the same thing i put ol' lorry down for. after jb we went to hungry jacks which was alright. ordering ettiquite (spelling?) is getting confusing now though. the voice in the box, instead of opening with the traditional "hi welcome to blah blah what can i get you today?" or whatever, today it was "hi welcome to hungry jacks, feel free to order whenever you're ready". out of confusing i said "what?" and probably interrupted something important because a different voice then sharply asked what i wanted. also the boy (he was probably 10) who handed me my food was funny.

we headed home after that and i set up the dvd player. problem is, the tv is a widescreen tv but you can only use the full viewing area when you use composite video. as the dvd player didn't have composite video, i was in a bit of a pickle. it did, however, have HDMI which the internet leads me to believe can be converted into composite. means i had to drop money on a cable but the picture itself is pretty darn tootin. my tests were the shawshank redemption and full metal jacket and both came up nicely. not a bad player for 99 bucks. i started watching mccabe and mrs. miller when bree came over and weed invited me upstairs so i headed up and we hung. i suppose it was a good thing, the sound mix for mccabe and mrs. miller is easily one of the worst i've ever heard which makes it difficult to watch given it's a robert altman film. there's a very natural speak-over-the-top-of-each-other nature to the way he writes and directs dialogue that you need a solid sound mix to back up. i'll return to it later, hopefully my first impressions are wrong.

later on i made some pesto and joe spilt apple juice on the floor. then he, weed, jord and i headed downstairs to watch the midnight meat train. joe left about 50 minutes in, jord about an hour in. joe was tired, jord wasn't enjoying it. by the time the ending rolled around i'd stopped caring for the characters but the film on the whole wasn't too bad. there's definitely worse out there but that said it's pretty darn graphic. nice to see ted raimi make an eye-popping appearance too (hyuck hyuck). i watched the special features which included a mini-doco on clive barker (the film is based off one of his short stories). the man has always fascinated me and this threw him in such a human light. i imagined him to be this strange sinister twisted d00d but he seems somewhat level headed. he had a real funny way of talking about his paintings too. my neck hurts.

until tomorrow, bye.

monday 19/10/09: part two.

2009-10-19T08:58:00.000-05:00

oh, and it turns out troy did use all the internet. 8gb in 7 days, 3gb alone on the day we left. sigh.

monday 19/10/09: bummer.

2009-10-19T08:53:00.000-05:00

the day started off okay. i woke up at a decent time (9:50am) and sauntered upstairs for porridge. ro was 15 minutes late (what a wanker) but that was okay. we laid some drums down for a song. a country song. then we went to cash converters at lunchtime to pick me up an air conditioner for my room. i am sitting in it right now and i can assure you, quite a cool room. i also saw that the cashies had call of the cthulu on xbox for 9 dollars. i resisted the temptation. then i went grocery shopping and bought a lot of food.

when we got back i laid down drums for another country song. that's a lot of country for one day, you might say. well i say to you: a day without country is a day wasted. and you can take that to the grave.

i started reading martin scorsese's personal journey through american film which is a pretty decent companion to the documentary (which if you like film, you should own). not long after this i managed to kick my laptop causing the already fragile screen which hangs by one of the hinges to slide just that little bit too far. now my screen doesn't work. joy. sorry rapture, i'll have to save you another time. it'll cost me 30 bucks to print out the original invoice for repair which is also awesome but at least asus will come and pick it up for me.

i forced ro and jord to finish putting together the playlist for myspace but they were shocked to find out that if the songs weren't on myspace they wouldn't be included. we all thought that was a bit silly. no jesse mae hemphill for ro. then joe and i got pizza and i bought changeling and the midnight meat train. don't know how i'm going to watch them exactly, how joyous. we went back home and we had a big ol' band meeting that went into the night. after that i tried to connect my laptop up to the tv in my room using s-video but for some reason my laptop just wouldn't have a bar of it. useless. sigh. sam rowe lent me a monitor to use but we don't have a vga cable so i guess i'm stuck up creek without a monitor to use as a makeshift paddle. i'm typing this from my phone because it's currently a better computing interface than my notebook.

until tomorrow, bye.

sunday 18/10/09: rapture needs me.

2009-10-18T10:40:00.002-05:00

so i woke up at 12:39pm today (sunday). you know when you're sleeping and then you wake up? that's what happened. i can't believe how late i slept. what a wanker. i walked upstairs, jord was playing splinter cell. i prepared too much mi goreng (2 packets) and too much milo milk (a huge transformers collectable cinema cup) and sauntered into the lounge room to watch jord do his thing. troy was also there. now, what tends to happen in our lounge is when the fan is on, you can't really eat anything hot because it gets cool so quick. there's an extra layer of suck with mi goreng also because it dries out and sticks together WHILE cooling down essentially turning it into un-eatable plop. this is what happened today.

to make matters worse, milo milk - especially too much milo milk - is probably the single worst thing you can prepare as a beverage to compliment mi goreng. not to mention the milk was tepid anyway, but with our fridge it's always like that. killer. so basically i ended up feeling totally disgusting, wasting a packet worth of MG that i'd left in the bowl (it had turned to the aforementioned plop) and finishing off the milk out of pure terror of wasting what is usually a wonderful mix. exhausted from my own stupidity i travelled downstairs to install farcry, which i bought yesterday (saturday) from cash converters for 5 dollars. after installation took the best part of 20 minutes i clicked on campaign and girded my loins for the TIME OF MY LIFE.

turns out my graphics card threw a hissy fit and displayed darkness as light, effectively ruining any chance i had of getting anywhere in the game (it begins in darkness). i quit and brooded on that for a while before loading up bioshock and continuing the last saved game i had on my pc which is from march 2008. to explain: i bought an xbox 360 and bioshock for it so i hadn't played it since. kind of a bummer. i played that until about 7pm - about 5 hours of gameplay - before rohin picked us up to go to the rsl for pool. i got wedges and a pie. pie was okay, wedges were the same.

points lost for savoury yoghurt instead of sour cream. points gained for consistently well sized wedges.

i think i lost all the games i played against everyone. after watching the colour of money the other week i've completely lost all of my pool mojo somehow. i think it was because tom cruise's character in that film made me hate pool while loving it at the same time. cognitive dissonance or some junk. even now that i own my own cue (well, 2 cues) i'm playing worse than ever. i HATE that. there has to be some way of fixing that. procedure. medical. if paul newman were still alive perhaps someone could pay him to come to my house in character as fast eddie to rough me up and teach me a thing or two about pool (and hustling, for that matter).

after that i went home, played more bioshock until about 1am and now it's nearly 2am. i hate that our internet only speeds up around 1:30am now. what the hell has everyone been downloading? literally every other member of the house besides troy was away on tour from about 2 days after the new internet month turned over until we got back a week later and it was shaped. i think troy did it. i can't prove it yet but once we see the figured for downloads while we were away...it's all over. troy will likely have pink eye for the rest of his time in this house. well, maybe not that drastic. but close.

until tomorrow, bye.