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it's gawddamn great

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I Love Everything

(Jane Badler and Sir at Golden Plains)

'I Love Everything' is a song by Jane Badler and Sir. Not the theme of this entry because that would be untrue. I did love Golden Plains rock festival, but I'm not about to discuss this with you now.

Sidney Lumet’s ‘Before the Devil Knows Your Dead’ conveys how much it would suck to have a loved one murdered by accident. It sucks so bad you kind of wish you were the one dead, but you don’t because you’re a deadbeat.

The movie is acted with real balls by Philip Seymour Hoffmann and Ethan Hawke. If I was an actor I would not do the film but these guys are ballsy. They are successfully unenjoyable as characters throughout. Ethan has one great scene, that’s not enough and it never is, also it was the final scene.

I walked down to the toilet after the show and there was this mean-looking Samoan at the mirror picking something out of his teeth. My feeling was that he was going to pull a gun out and shoot me with it.

If there’s one positive to come out of this movie it’s that US movies take murder too flippantly and finally here’s a gruelling picture that shakes you to your core with death. Still I thought I would be murdered afterwards. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough.

We rode our bikes back home and there were cop cars parked at the Rainbow Hotel. This was right around the time that Spencer P. Jones was meant to take the stage.

I watched Beaches the night before last. Five girls who rock harder than any band full-stop. Beaches are indie rock. Poppy with classy, ass-shaking riff-mongering. The fact that they are my new favourite band is quite irrelevant. I really don’t buy anyone’s opinion of them not being their favourite band so don’t discuss it with me. I don’t even want to talk about it if they are. I don’t even find this discussion worthy of pursuing any longer, but I'll see you at their next show.

More GP Photos...

De Campee, Andrew and Gemma

Alex always grimaces when I'm within three feet of him

Jesse Shepherd in the art of the unwind











There’s only a few other things I would like to say at this point and one of them is that my outfits lately have been quite remarkable.

I am off to lay on the floor and listen to the Grateful Dead and read Thomas Berger’s ‘Reinhart in Love’. Read this book before you die.

Oh yeah I saw the ‘Russian Ark’ the other night. My response could be summed up in a text message I sent directly afterwards. ‘What a bag of Russian shit. Best part about were the end credits and even they were tedious.’ That may not be the actual text msg because I deleted my sent items the other night and my girlfriend deleted the msg because apparently, ‘it was of no significance.’

Ween, Forum

Cigarette packets and fortune cookies sat atop their amps. Like Bananas and Blow it was a typical Ween incongruity that made perfect sense. Deaner riffed a lot and made faces like he’s pounding his girlfriend unhappily. The intensity with which he flailed his guitar, we too felt on the receiving end of those copulant thrusts, his expression contorting within an inch of a Nixon mask, sweat gleaming through a wash of coloured lights, droplets raining down from his not-insignificant nose and chin. It was a bit heavy in there. Not up his nostril, but inside the Forum

Exactly where I’m at was a corking fuse to light up with. HIV/AIDS was a dance celebration, a very grim one. Voodoo Lady’s guitar solo was so dredged in classic sounds it warped back to the 60s and gave birth to a psychedelic chicken that laid an egg that hatched Lobby Lloyd! Jokey tunes enacted by a louche Gene doing the sleaze lounge get-up ala the Ramada Inn at noon on a weekday were particularly unpleasant — Piss up a rope being a high water mark, no pun intended. Gene then lit a ciggie, picked something gross off his face (seriously what was that?) and threw it down on the ground with impunity. From there, the band lobbied a sax-less, yet sexy Your Party. Good times.

"See ol' Jimmy Wilson dance, give that boy a dime and you don't stand a chance, oh see ol' Jimmy Wilson dance," Ween sang during Waving my Dick in the Wind and my girlfriend yelled out that it reminded her of Charles Portis' Dog of the South. I looked at her strange. "You're in that hotel foyer", she said. “And you my cuteness are on Planet Jupiter”.

The Stallion was good, to which an encyclopaedic fan nearby noted pedantically over the din, “ITS PART 5, THE FINALE IN THE STALLION SERIES!!”

Someone said the ex-Blood, Sweat and Tears keyboardist was the ex-keyboardist from Earth, Wind and Fire, but I thought those dudes were all brothers and this dude was white — anyway he played a fantastic synthesiser solo at the tail end of Zoloft, or at least that was what my notes said, but those things were unbelievable, not unbelievable like wow, but unbelievable like they should not be trusted.

The sounds and the smoke machine made everybody light up doobs despite the no smoking policy; this swarthy dude beside me was toking crazily. The guy to the other side of him asked him for a drag, and Richard Smoker started whingeing about how if he gave him some then he would have to give some to everybody and then he wouldn’t have any left and then the guy told him he was going to blackmail him and he would probably end up in prison new best mates with a seven footer named Bubba.

In Praise of Royalchord’s Car

They’re more fun than an action park full of Frisbee and a laughter and a scream and will be missed even though we hardly ever saw them (Berlin and Belgium bound and that’s indefinite). They popped over at the tail end of an impromptu BBQ we had last Saturday cause they operate on their own clock and are anything but predictable. Bless ‘em. Tammy busts out a horselaugh if you do something funny and Eliza is game for living a life that’s full of surprises. I’d listen to their music if only I had it on my person (I actually had this thought while at work. I’m at home now and can easily access their LP Nights on the Town from the next room, so all's okay).

We got in their car and they took us to a rooftop show in Carlton attended by a exquisitely bored cross-section of Melbourne’s art-damaged denizens, who Panel of Judges are kind of like the flagship of, though it must be said, Panel are legends and their performance here was one of the best I have ever seen probably up there with the best of The Clean and I don’t think it was because of the excellent views of the city and housing estates from Rathdowne Street though they were something else too.

Getting back to what I was talking about, it wasn’t an extensive trip in the Royalchord car, no longer than five minutes duration, but those five were five good ones. The girl’s have great taste in music, so of course the jams were pumping. The second we got in we were treated to ‘Fiesta’, that partystarter off the sweet new Ween album*. Last year at a party in a St Kilda backyard (punctuated by a sizzling Jon Langford performance) we caught a lift with them back to town and it was a real magical moment (photo taken by Campee in the backyard prior to the lift). A cross between Pulp Fiction, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Graffiti, Easy Rider and Corvette Summer it was. Can’t remember what we were listening to at the time but whatever it was we toasted it with a champagne. If this were the 70s, Royalchord would be driving a van with carpeted interior and there would be no funny business just oodles and oodles of good vibrations. They’re the Frank Whaley of motor-hospitality in this town, and now they’re gone. When the night ended De Campee hugged Tammy so enthusiastically her two feet left the ground!

*Ween kicked a lot of ass and produced much flavour last night at the Forum

Spanking the Monkey

Done some good writing today. Man you're only as good as what you write next. That's a pretty tough way to live. I feel like Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. Looking between the radiator pipes for a sandwich.