Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
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Have spent most of the wekend writing the first third of chapter 2 of my book. About to type that up. Otherwise so far, nothing spectacular. Normal TV etc. (Years since I watched Con-Air – I’d forgotten most of it.)
Rain in Freo has affected my usual walk routine. Neither my dog or cat who usually both accompany me on my early morning and late night sorties around the block are particularly anxious to step outside after two soakings by sudden downpours. Nor does our normally longer afternoon beach stroll look much more promising for me and my dog, Tacker,
The rain is news in itself of course, but it also explains why I’ve spent many hours indoors chasing up internet commentary on Kevin Rudd and his corrupt activities so cleverly engaged in since his first venal acceptance many years ago of a vehicle loaned by a wicked used car dealer trying to portray himself as a friendly disinterested neighbour when all along he knew he could ultimately use this to lever himself into position to gain financial favours from this seemingly nerdy little pollie but one who ultimately was destined to a position of great power. Who would have thought a used car salesman could have such political and commercial nous?
Sun’s coming out and Tacker is making hopeful noises at the front door. Sheba’s having a good stretch in her basket. Time to go. Just in case it rains again will someone please add a bit more to the drama of Utegate with a comment for me to ponder on when I get back?
Helped answer phones this weekend at the JOY 94.9 Radiothin
Yesterday went to the Powerhouse with the uber ladies who rule my life. Got into serious trouble with my characterisation of the music from some self obsessed trio in the turbine hall as Bambi slush.
Played Samba in the park today to an empty rain soaked field. Some-one should tell the wankers who organise Feste De La Musique that it’s not the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere and that perhaps music in Newfarm park is not a good idea. Maybe a covered in venue??
At least we had the rotunda, after we threw out some pople who were doing strange things to some strange sounding music from an MP player and a tiny speaker.
Actually we did not throw them out and we actually treated them with great respect. More than any God botherer deserves. Should have stormed into the rotunda , demanded to see their authority to play there and demonstrated who was boss.
It’s cold wet and unpleasant in Brisbane at the moment makes a change from endless heat and humidity.
Huggy
Spent most of the day on a quest for an AC adaptor for my mobile phone, after realising I’d left mine behind in Brisbane and I’ve only got a 15% charge on my phone’s battery to last until Tuesday next week.
I ended up at the Sony building in Ginza, thinking that they ought to be able to help me out, as my telephone is a Sony Walkman as well.
Nope.
Nearly bought a dancing Walkman when I was in there, though, even with a price tag of around $400AU.
Maybe that’s one for the next trip…
Will try to see if I can get a ticket to the Kabuki version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream tonight, though.
And tomorrow, it’s off to Kyoto for me, and the distinct possibility of getting Brahms & Liszt in the company of a beautiful woman (or, maybe, seven)…
Meant to shoot off to Farmers Market first thing but got up too late for that, so to dog obedience club we went. Demi a bit of a pig in the lesson as I had feared–overnight rain brings up these interesting smells out the ground
Went through the practice ring after the lesson and she impressed the hell out of the instructor there! Then we did an Open ‘temperament test’ where dogs are stood in a line and handlers move off, instructor/judge then goes to each dog and basically pats it on back with dogs just standing there through all that. Demi handled that like she passed Novice months ago! Then an Open drop-stay, 3 minutes with handlers out of sight of the dogs. Demi did that pretty good for a minutes before she got a bit anxious: as a first attempt it impressed all present, how cool is that? Next week, Gepps Cross mock trial, next two Sundays after that, real novice trials!
Yesterday afternoon and again today spent a lot of time on-line, mainly Poll Bludger, tracing out Utegate. PB was first to realise the email was fake, well before the MSM anyway! Bloggers rool, OK?
I spent Saturday night dancing my ass off at the Northey St. Winter Solstice Festival. I left grinning from ear to ear.
Have two deaf Boarder Collies, very strange to have two at the same time, yet when I yell ‘get back you b$$^^s or I’ll bl*77* well leave you here’ or ‘go around’ ‘get away back’ , nothing happens.(oddly enough, at days end, we get everything done, their just bloody arrogant.)I’d take these bludgers to dog training,but they refuse to go. They can hear a bag of dog tucker being opened from about 300 yards.
However,do I get the Olympus E620, sell my old E,keep both? and how can I get away with it, can it just appear amongst all the lenses and bits I use to disguise such things, and put it down (the cost) to dog tucker?
I went for a haircut, apparently they’re now known as a “service” as distinct from buying “product.”
Having been “serviced”, I’m waiting to see which bit drops off because they didn’t tighten the bolts properly.
Or something.
Having been “serviced”
I’d be more worried about which bits are going to protrude.
Went for a ride
Didn’t finish writing up the rest of my trip, either…
terangeree – what is this “walkman” you speak of?
I had a day in the garden. trying to plan where to put a new rainwater tank. I also bought a bokashi bucket for my kitchen scraps, further confirming my status as an enviro-yuppie.
Once I got home I started over-thinking the purchase and worrying about methane versus carbon dioxide. does this fermentation process produce methane…?? I decided to stop thinking about it, but if anyone here knows the answer and it’s not going to make my rather expensive bucket seem very redundant, please share.
It seems it’s rained everywhere in the country but SA. Have we offended the rain gods, I wonder? Hard to know what to do to get back in their good graces. Any suggestions?
Spent a large part of the day lurking on email/utegate threads and having a good chortle, when I should have been stocking my new you-beaut pantry from the dreaded Ikea. I managed to put it together pretty much unaided, so am feeling rather self-satisfied. And I wasn’t deaded once.
I’ve been listening to Goon Show CDs, newly acquired from amazon. Just heard one of my favourite shows-The Canal with Valentine Dyall. Sigh! Those were the days; perched in front of the talking-type-wireless at 7.00pm Sunday nights for our dose of the Goons.
Take away chook for dinner. It doesn’t get any better than this, folks.
Yesterday we finally picked up a road bike for my son after years of MTB. Gave in to badgering and grabbed him a store jersey and matching nicks, then set off for few laps of the bikepaths in town before finishing up with a late lunch at Southbank.
The proverbial dog with two wotsits was not in the running.
His posing was glorious.
Lang Mack, they cut the protruding bits off, that was the ‘haircut’ I wanted.
A long, boozy, dancing Winter Solstice party; there went my weekend. At least it was near our house so we didn’t have to worry about transport.
Darin, interesting to hear…
From my observations, I didn’t think kids/teenagers tended to go for road bikes – it’s all about freestyle BMX, or at a pinch a really heavy-duty mountain bike.
I kind of assumed that road bikes were the equivalent of golf clubs for most people under about 20.
This is for Jovial Monk.
Yes, yes, I know the Brits do go in for some ridiculous looking competition garb. (Maybe it’s some new event where you have to do dog obedience, dressage and I don’t know, a bit of cameleering or sheep shearing?)
But look at them, just look at them. I seem to have something in my eye…
@Robert.. He’s 10 and has been a freak for road racing for a couple of years, my partner blames the TDF coverage. I told him he’d have to wait until he got taller, then he found a Giant OCR24 in the window of a bike shop we went to. It’s a 24 inch road bike with all the proper bits. He loves riding, but has never wanted to race MTB. Road bikes just seem to be his thing.
Coz it’s raining we went to see Samson and Delilah.
Margaret says:
I don’t know whether it’s about love as such. Definitely about caring and what it’s like to be truly on the edge. It’s tender, it’s tough and it’s a knockout.
David reckons y’all should go see it. David’s right!
Helen, me too.
Brian, seconded. It’s not like any other movie I’ve ever seen. I particularly loved how its non-verbal-ness made gabby types like me slow down and watch it properly, and how the director managed to make some beauty out of those terrible lives with composition and light, and to show how things really are without making a documentary.
Well said, PC. We were trying to remember whether the leading male character said anything other than his name, barely and faultingly on one occasion, when he was hungry and needed to say it to get food. We don’t think he did. But the film itself couldn’t have been more eloquent.
FB, this is the dancing walkman I was speaking of.
Ended up not seeing the Kabuki Shakespeare: ended up instead at a pedestrian crossing in Shibuya, saw the ugliest cosplayer imaginable on the train out of the place, too (high heels, fishnet stockings, microscopic skirt, camisole top, bunny ears and a five-day growth on the chin. Oh, and he was built like a front-row forward, too. The really funny part of it was that everyone else on the very crowded train acted as if every suburban train in Tokyo must by law carry at least one extremely ugly cross-dresser), saved a drunk from falling under a train at Harajuku, listened to the Astro Boy theme song being played over the tannoy and saw my first Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza at Takadanobaba.
Now to update the travel blog before snorage…
My partner’s moving back to Japan this week so we had her farewell party this weekend…
Rain usedta hafta be > 70mm to make the news. Now, sadly, 4mm can be news in some areas.
I draw your attention to Beneath Clouds as an earlier Australian film with a reliance (at times) on the non-verbal, and some themes and ideas in common, albeit not as successful a film in many ways as Samson & Delilah, and with a markedly different feel or tone, alongside a different position on Aboriginal experience in Australia. Also, it appears that Warwick Thornton is the opposite of Ivan Sen in how he frames his work and approaches Aboriginality via film. I would be considering looking into this all more closely, maybe even doing some comparative work, but I suspect that there will be dozens of research articles on Samson & Delilah appearing shortly, and so I’ll leave off and simply second the praise offered thus far. Samson & Delilah is a brilliant film, that unlike so many Australian films, seems to deserve the hype.
Canberra is just the place for the Winter Soltice, cold, wet and grey, still we haven’t seen snow on the mountains so winter hasn’t really arrived yet despite some promising early signs. Lots of local music on the weekend but I am envious of our northern brethren who can still party outside without freezing their butts off!
klaus k @ 27,
Haven’t seen Samson and Delilah yet, but you’re right about Beneath Clouds. A wonderful little movie. Another in the same genre that seems to have passed unnoticed, possibly because it is a deeply powerful tragic drama, almost Shakespearian in its intensity, full of wonderful acting, which disappeared almost without notice but is on DVD, is Yolnu Boy. (I hope I’ve spelt it right.) Absolutely brilliant, but very confronting.
Yes, I liked Beneath Clouds – I’ve also written on it – though I felt some of Sen’s shorts were more interesting, and the documentaries are excellent (though I missed Fire Talker in May this year, so haven’t seen what he’s been up to lately).
I still haven’t seen Yolngu Boy (that’s how the imdb entry spells it), though probably should at some point.
And I’ve used ‘though’ two too many times in that comment! Sheesh… marking student essays isn’t helping me to write well at all.
I think it was Wind that was my favourite Sen short, by the way, but if you get a chance to take a look at any of them they’re worth your time. If anybody’s in Sydney the AFTRS library has a lot of them because Sen was a student there.
speaking of indigenous themes in movies, this documentary will be in limited release in capital cities, starting this Thursday:
http://bastardydocumentary.com/
I agree with the praise of Samson and Delilah, it really is a fantastic film.
Yeah, fb, I noticed it was listed as playing at the Chauvel on Wednesday night. Not sure if I can make that session, but it looks interesting.
Like you klaus K, I think Sen’s shorts are better than the feature. Yolngu boy is worth checking out. It’s very similar subject matter to Samson and Delilah, but entirely different in tone.
PC, Laura compared ‘Samson and Delilah’ to Robert Bresson’s work in her blog. I think that’s an interesting comparison. There’s the same formal restraint, use of untrained actors and visual precision. Bresson tended to focus on outsider characters who attain some sort of grace through suffering and redemption, by the end of the film. He was a serious Catholic boy. Check out ‘Pickpocket’ or ‘Au Hasard Balthazar (which is about donkey) if you don’t know his work and you think he sounds interesting.
I was a reading a little Edgar Allen. He had this story entitled: How To Write A Blackwood Article. Very funny. This bit:
Seem resonate somehow of something. I forget what.
“Walk around some time and see if you can think of something that you’ve never thought before…”
Those are the opening words of “Zucker,” the delightful, witty, bittersweet mini-masterpiece by The Fastbacks that is one of the great unsung classics of 90s alt-rock. Over the weekend I found an old copy while doing some cleaning. I don’t think I’ve heard the record for ten years or so; all of a sudden it was the continual soundtrack loop to the whole weekend.
And to think, people once paid attention (and money!) to the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden instead of this stuff.
If you’ve never heard it, all I can say is, sell the grandparents and get a copy any way you can. The chord changes alone to “They Don’t Care” are worth the price of a used ute, never mind the hilarious lyrics to “Gone to the Moon.” Here’s a bit from one of the more astringent numbers…
“When I
Put things
Back in
Place,
There were
Two parts
I had
Left.
I won’t
Let things
Go to
Waste.
What do
You think
I’ll do
Next?”
Some day many centuries from now, alien history professors trying to explain the 90s to their students will simply play “Zucker” and maybe also “Thank You” by Royal Trux, and all will be clear. A pity it wasn’t very clear at the time, right? Ow, my head STILL hurts from that decade…
Darin: if he wants to actually try a race, there are junior races all the way down to under 11′s, I believe.
Unfortunately, you have to be 12 to do Around The Bay, even the 50 km version. But if he trains up for it and sits in the draft of a bigger rider, there’s no reason why he couldn’t complete a journey of similar length. Beach road is perhaps not the place for a ten-year-old, but the Craigieburn Bypass trail might be a good spot, particularly as you can take a train to Craigieburn and pretty much roll downhill all the way to the Western Ring Road trail.
Unfortunately, the best spot for a junior to try a hillclimb – Humevale Road – is closed due to the fires. The 1 in 20 (Mountain Highway from the Basin to Sassafras) is probably well within a ten-year-old’s capabilities if they pace themselves and maybe take a break along the way, but it has a fair bit of traffic on it so you’d probably have to sit behind him closely all the way.
He might also like to try Yarra Boulevard. It’s a bike lane all the way, there’s not much traffic, and there will be a whole bunch of other lycra louts around
Thanks, Robert. We’re in QLD..
I’m trying the clubs, apparently Balmoral has a proper junior development program, so that could work. I’ll just need to dodge any invites re masters…..
re # 34 Bresson/Warwick Thornton, it would seem it won’t be until Samson & Delilah is released in France that the “neo-Bressonian” tag gets a proper outing. I wonder if David Stratton was dying to say it, but figured it was a little old fogey for the racy 2009 At the Movies style?
I hope not, cause that tightly coded pain, pain, pain – redemption theme might be useful again soon. I reckon Pickpocket is one of the finest films ever made, and Samson & Delilah is one of the best in some years.
Bastardy is a wonderful film. I’m so pleased it’s getting a general release. People who can go, don’t hesitate, it’s terrific.
‘Bastardy’ is a marvellous film. It has a wonderful looseness and space to it that you don’t often get in docos these day.s
Darin: sorry, forgot there are two Southbanks with cafes in Australian state capitals