January 09, 2012

What year was it again...

MOVIES

I am the father of four children aged between two and nine. I haven't been to the movies and successfully stayed awake since 2002. I believe the last decade or so has been something of a boom time for the cinema and look forward to catching up with it all some time. I have seen Christmas in Madagascar or some such just recently. Well, bits of it. The penguins were funny.

LIVE SHOWS

I did go out to see Lloyd Cole a while ago. Was that this year? It was memorable because I fat-arsed the plastic chair I was sitting in and landed heavily and noisily on a bunch of bottles and stuff. Lloyd stopped to ask the middle-aged assemblage of pasty whiteness if gang war had broken out.  I was too annoyed to make the obvious joke about commotions and just sort of sat there in a pile of broken white plastic and overpriced bottles, making sweary sounds in my head.

MUSIC

I don't care enough about modern music to keep up with it. I don't own a radio and kind of gave up on the contemporary music enterprise about the same time Oasis et al took pop way past the point of eating itself and got around to eating really unsavoury things that appear to have already been consumed by someone else.

I don't reckon this is just a function of my fogeyness.  I reckon that the vast sea of digital music and the ease with which you can access what was once very difficult to find – despite the best efforts of dadas, Mills and 78s (thanks, peoples) – has meant that music has become kind of timeless, stripped of the usual signifiers of time and place. Generally speaking I have no idea if the music new to my ears is current or supposed to be cool or know anything about it at all really.

I can give you a list of some good reasonably recent songs though:

Devices – Vulture Whale (actually most of what Vulture Whale have done – Land It is the hit though.  Sensational performance.)
Bells of Harlem – Dave Rawlings Machine
Why I'm Bullshit – Mark Eitzel
Jens Lekman did some tune about a backpackers in Melbourne that is alright

Well, it's not really a list but I don't have any LP covers to read the details off, man.

If we allow that LP covers were good for rolling joints on and that CD covers were purpose built for chopping out lines of blow, we have to ask ourselves what drugs our kids are going to be doing? I feel this is more important than some half-arsed collection of the titles of songs which you are never going to listen to if you haven't heard already and which you probably hate if you had because you are tone deaf as well as stupid.

SPORTING MOMENTS

Any season which has West Coast doing well in it has got to be a bit shit. Confirmation of bias isn't always a good thing. Sometimes it's just flat and dreary.

Fremantle beating Sydney in Sydney was Fyfe-tastic. If everybody else at Freo got up to Fyfe speed, his delivery wouldn't look wrong and sloppy. It would be the scintillating fulfilment of natural excellence he intends it to be, if only his recipients were up to snuff.


WHAT ELSE

Well, I read plenty of good books.  Call me if you want a rundown.

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