How much delight can a melbourne music goer bear?
On a night when the rest of the world was huddled around the s/MCG watching everyone from Kylie to Wolfmother and Split Enz, Annie and i headed for Northcote’s Wesley Anne to see the ethereally magnificent Flying Scribble with Pikelet playing solo.
Louise and gray are in very fine form; their new magic shines wonderfully just like the old numbers. gray’s drumming always astonishes and Louisie somehow manages to play 15 instruments at once, pumping out eg bass, organ, accordion and macbook samples.
Yes i was transported again by their beautiful rhythmic genius.
Here they are caught on video back in ’07:
Great News: they’ve finished recording the new album! Bad news: Shame the wesley still shuts down sound at 11pm.
Who’s Flying Scribble?
Lou and gray are one amazing melbourne duo. Find out more:
Some days are just brilliant. The Melbourne theatre scene is alive and well.
i was lucky enough to have a sneak preview of Roundangle‘s latest – “in the dark” – which promises to be very enjoyable and innovative. (Part of the Art of Difference festival.)
It was an early dress rehearsal, so Jodie would say things like, “You have to imagine a long screen here. You can’t see those people.” .. and “Okay now it’s a complete blackout, so close your eyes please.”
Later that night Zeena and i headed to the recently rescued La Mama in Carlton for a fabulous evening with Moira and Yumi’s “Salon de Dance“.
Gritty, sexy, horrific in places .. as you’d expect from those hellish dancers; and romantic in an old-school kind of way.
This show opened with a priest stripping down to his red-crucifixed knickers. Hilarious! and raunchy.
Yumi wrestling with her jacket, a couple of young Town Bikes apprentices dancing out an actual wrestling match, Moira slow-dancing with a cigarette on Highway 66. All fun.
The centre-piece was Moira and Yumi playing out a Gothic feast, beginning with the tall one eerily peering through the window .. and ending with an outrageous red wine splash-o-rama.
Gorgeous.
My beautiful old iRiver died while i was travelling in Cambodia. It disappeared from my luggage on a bus. Device death by disappearance.
i was sad, i was disappointed. But sooner or later i had to have another music player**.
So i chomped on the ammunition and stole an iPod classic from JB hifi. They took $325 from me but it felt like a steal anyway.
Heaven.
Glamor-tech.
Charming.
and no i don’t have to run iTunes. So Relieved About That!!
Yes, Winamp manages an iPod just fine.
Just drag the files across and there they are.
Yay Winamp.
PS: not perfect, this device.
**Yes i have the iRiver e100, but that’s a kind of joke really. When you put the micro SD card in, all the screen writing reverses to mirror image. Fortunately i can read mirror writing just like da Vinci.
photo credit: Themis Chapsis
xkcd is funny.
A Masquerade Ball is always the way to feel fabulous. This was fun.
Melbourne’s Underground folk turned out in their finest dress-ups to celebrate the powerful mystique of our local music scene. What could be better than dancing to the Barons of Tang and then Spoonbill.
Hobo Piano in the foyer .. tattooed glamour from wall to wall.
Zeena and Cam and i danced the night away, revelling in everything. i just wish i’d taken me camera ;-[
One day i went to drop off some of my ex-boxes, and discovered the Reservoir Tip computer recycling facility. Masses of old rubbishy broken machines, and one smashed up MacBook Pro!!
i thought maybe Tim could use the parts so i surreptitiously grabbed it and drove off. Sure enough, later on that night we took it to pieces, and found the hard drive and the battery were still in working order.
Working enough to find out that somebody had left all their data on the drive. So Tim gets all the data off and then does the decent thing, contacting this person and asking if they need the backup.
Turns out this person, whose identity shall remain secret, had taken the laptop to the shop. The mechanics had said, “Can’t do anything love, it’s broken. Can’t get your data off, but don’t worry we’ll make sure noone else does either.”
What kind of computer shop doesn’t know how to get the information off a working hard drive??
The moral of this story? Don’t trust a computer shop with your data.
And don’t sit on your macbook pro.
It was katie’s birthday, so i spent the whole day making cupcakes with margot. Seriously fun, if slightly nerve-wracking. Turns out mum is the genius when it comes to getting the mixture in the patty pans. She learned from her Aunty Phyl .. back in the day.
And look, here’s the cake backstage at Handsome Steve’s.
Yes i know Katie really wanted a profiterole mountain made out of mini-magnums, but i just couldn’t work out how that would be as much fun.
So tough luck kt you’re stuck with a mountain of cupcakes.
Some serious research before-hand led me to find out that there are dedicated cupcake bloggers out there. That’s right, people who blog about cupcakes and nothing else. take a look at the vietnamese coffee cupcake recipe.
Nice one Albert. i get an Einstein quote every day in my iGoogle feeds. This one made me jump. i think Albert spent much of his life regretting his contribution to inventing nucular weapons.
.
Daryl the lovely minister at Northcote’s heathen / community church, has pulled together a bunch of performers for a big event in support of bushfire sufferers.
$10/15 money goes to uniting church Victorian bushfire appeal.
Daryl says: “Please come and have a great time with us in solidarity with those who have not only lost so much but now contemplate a long physical and emotional rebuilding process.”
(Some moments of reflection involved.)
PS: i caught Heidi’s choir, and they were really good. Heidi sang solo and she was fab. Then Zeena and i fled the choir scene, over to Wesley Anne where “The Tiger and Me” were playing. They Were Good. Alt-Country-ish.
plus: get your Flyer here: Northcote-Concert-Flyer(pdf)
photo credit: alana jonez
Thinking back to my time in Vietnam, one of the best things about travelling is the people you meet along the way ..
And that’s not even counting the flocks of wonderful people in Phnom Penh, lovely exPats and aid workers, volunteers, NGO people, teachers and masterful communications officers!
Really it’s all about the people isn’t it
so tell me .. who did you meet in an exotic location?
photo credit: shapeshift
