cucucu

"The Sugababes!" I snarl, slamming my rum and coke down on the bar.

"You simply cannot be more mistaken," says Cornelius J. Ferryweather III with a sneer, "Britney Spears' The Blackening will undoubtedly be the feel good party album of the summer."


"THE SUGABABES!" I roar, lurching unsteadily to my feet and knocking over my barstool as I do so. The bartender tells me that I need to leave, and that he's not going to ask again.

"On lead single 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' Britney channels her recent troubles into fresh artistic expression," Cornelius J. Ferryweather III states in his refined accent, "infusing her trademark bubblegum pop with a mature, earthy sexuality..."


He continues on but I am not listening. I can see the bouncers making their way to the bar, and I know that I do not have much time. "I foresee only one way to settle this...", I interrupt. "I propose a race around the world!!"

"Very well, I accept!" returns Cornelius J. Ferryweather III. "I have no doubt that my zeppelin, The August Queen Victoria, shall see me back in Sydney while you are still struggling across the Sahara in your solar powered hovercraft!"

I have no chance to reply, as I am now being carried out the door. I know not how I shall beat him, nor what perils I may face along the way, but I am steadfast in my conviction that I shall triumph in this race... AROUND THE WORLD!!!!

Random Link of the Day

Ruthless Reviews: The ABCs of Drunkenness.

The Sunday Lesson

Not drinking to excess: try it and rediscover the mythical 'Sunday'.

What I Did In My Weekend

There will be no instalment of this feature this week on account of J.'s birthday party being too hot for the internet.

Get Stuffed Grandad!

Withnail and I
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson

The year is 1969. A pair of broke actors, driven to despair by the miserable, impoverished lifestyle they are living in Camden Town, take a trip to the English countryside. Pratfalls ensue. One of our protagonists (the 'I' of the title) is a sensitive, thoughtful sort, while his companion (Withnail) is a hateful, manic sociopath. The setup sounds a lot like that of a stupid comedy starring a pair of B grade Jim Carrey wannabes, with the city boys making fools of themselves out in the farmland and learning a few valuable lessons along the way. Fortunately this movie is nothing of the sort. It's an independent British film over twenty years old with a way offbeat style and a dedicated cult following.

It's no surprise that this film never found a mainstream audience. The characters and situations, while they are particular to the time and place of the setting, are counter culture archetypes and the movie probably makes little sense without having known a few people who fit the parts. Withnail is a narcissistic nihilist, dancing perpetually on the edge of a drug induced early grave and is propelled through his squalid, haphazard life by nothing except sheer spite and the fear of ever sobering up enough to have to face himself in the mirror. The one area in which I thought the movie failed in was portraying the ways in which people like Withnail, through a bizarre sort of anti charisma, are so much fun to hang around and party with, I think it's a bit of a misstep that for the most part he is simply portrayed as a particularly imaginative jerk. Our narrator is an intelligent, gentle enough guy but while he's too smart to jump onto the endless treadmill of the rat race he hasn't the strength of personality to forge his own path and instead just gets tugged along in the current of Withnail's booze fuelled shenanigans.

Withnail and I has a reputation as a funny movie so it countered my expectations when it turned out to have very few genuine comedy moments and mostly took itself pretty seriously. However while you may not laugh out loud a lot there's still a lot of humour to be found, it's just subtle and quirky. Especially by today's standards.

I can't say I really liked the ending but it is at least an original take on the Sixties and pretty succinctly nails the reality of hedonism, not at all burdened with the rose coloured glasses through which most counter culture media views the bohemian (especially the Sixties counter culture) lifestyle.

Queen's Birthday Emo Kid Amusement Park Extravaganza

Come Together
Luna Park, June 9th & 10th

So last weekend was Queen's Birthday over here (happy fucking birthday you worthless old bag!), and in the interests of getting wasted in new and exciting environments I attended the Come Together music festival.

Some ska band

The festival was held over two days and the venue was Luna Park, site of former concert going shenanigans involving Lamb of God / Killswitch Engage and Nine Inch Nails. The amusement park was actually open while the festival was on and tickets to Come Together were valid for unlimited rides on the attractions, so there was a bit of amusement to be had in seeing drunken metal heads mingling with preschool kids and their families in the queue for the ferris wheel.

Some other ska band. No idea what they're called but they were pretty good.

The venue was well suited to the festival. They split the stage in two and were very efficient at switching between bands, I don't recall waiting more than ten seconds for the next band to start after the last one finished, compared to say the Big Day Out where you are routinely waiting fifteen minutes between bands for say Marilyn Manson to finish throwing a tantrum at his roadies.

Yet another random ska band. I don't think I even stayed to watch any of their gig but took this photo of them sitting on one another's shoulders while playing.

The two days of the festival were fairly clearly divided into 'punk and hardcore' day and 'rock and metal' day. Due to my lack of reading comprehension skills I showed up nice and early on the Saturday only to realise that it was hardcore day and the only band I wanted to see were Norma Jean who were not on until about nine that evening. Since it was punk day the average age of the kids attending was probably about fifteen. I did my best to try and appreciate some of the earlier acts, and some of the ska bands that played were pretty good, but I couldn't stand the little shits in the hardcore audiences, who think they're superior to emos because when they listen to angry music they wave their arms around and pretend to hit each other. I spent most of the day out the back in the bar.

Some pop punk band. They sucked but I liked the way this photo came out.

As well as Norma Jean the other band I made a point of checking out was Carpathian, just because I've heard of them a little and they have a somewhat metal sounding name. They weren't too bad, and they certainly put the metal in metalcore with some brutal riffs, but I almost felt embarrassed standing next to these teenage kids windmilling their arms around in order to work out their frustrations about how unfairly their dad treats them. The band themselves were certainly not averse to encouraging this behaviour; urging “all you little fucking emos" into performing the wall of death and other such behaviour.

Carpathian: it's not a real metalcore concert until the singer calls the audience a bunch of faggots.

Norma Jean were OK but nothing special, and by this stage in the evening I was fairly drunk and cranky, and very sick of teenagers so I went home to coma and get up again for the next day.

Norma Jean: Damned by mediocrity and all day drinking

Sunday was much better. On the way through Luna Park someone recommended Regular John to me and they were playing as I arrived. They were enjoyable, reminding me a lot of The Have, or maybe a kind of grunge Led Zeppelin. It was also weird to notice that suddenly all the kids in Sydney are wearing Seattle style checked flannel. Is this a sudden fashion trend or is it just because it's been getting cold?

Regular John looking regular

Next up were Mourning Tide who were a fucking joke. Enjoyable in a very cheesy way but I sadly suspect that everything I found so funny about them was not intended to be that way. They sounded an awful lot like Guns and Roses only with death metal vocals and seemed to be as much about cock rock posturing as playing music. I felt sorry for Psycroptic, waiting patiently on the next stage to begin as Mourning Tide went through at least three drum fill packed fake endings to their last song.

Mourning Tide. This photo doesn't quite do justice to the posing.

I'd heard good things about Psycroptic, a death metal band from Tasmania, and they were one of the bands I was keenest to see. They played technically accomplished brutal death metal along the lines of Suffocation but I suspect that that style of music is reaching the limits of its appeal to me. It was a decent concert but nothing that really impressed me. I did feel a lot of sympathy for the band, who managed to open up an enormous circle pit that no one danced in, while in front of the stage were a huge, almost entirely female, gaggle of teenagers trying to be metal. “So this is what it has come to.” I thought to myself, “One of the meanest fucking death metal bands in Australia literally reduced to playing for a handful of fifteen year old girls.”

Psycroptic

Psycroptic again. Bonus points for fucking rocking.

Next up were Ink. Their music was uninspiring, they made me think of a more metal version of Linkin Park, but they definitely got points for being the coolest looking band of the day. They also had hot girls in sexy black outfits dancing on stage and throwing giant black beach balls into the crowd. Believe it or not this is actually pretty typical for what passes as goth culture in Australia.

Ink. Believe it or not I forgot to take a photo of the dancing girls.

At this point I went to get something to eat and then of course on the way back I needed a drink...

[Scene Missing]

Some time later I shuffled out of the bar and on a whim decided to see a band I'd never heard of before called Mammal. As it turned out, they were fucking awesome. For some reason Australians seem to have a particular talent for funk metal. The first comparisons that came to mind for these guys were Rage Against the Machine or Faith No More, but on reflection they sound most like what the Red Hot Chilli Peppers would if they didn't suck. At any rate for the first time in two days the whole arena was packed out and going off. Popular opinion has it they were the best band of the festival and I would whole heartedly agree.

Mammal. Rocking.

I was tempted to stick around for Karnivool, but I had a vague feeling that I'd heard them before and didn't like them. I did come back out for Cog, who I did enjoy. They had a vaguely mathy style that for once actually did deserve to be described as mathematical, in a way that even Meshuggah doesn't.

Cog

Lastly, Shihad. I was surprised to realise just how popular they are over here (and even more so by the number of people who expressed disappointment to me that Blindspott cancelled). It was good to see these guys again, it's been four years since the last time I caught them live, and even then it was only because Fur Patrol were opening for them, having gone a bit dark on Shihad after the Pacifier debacle. But when you're a stranger in a strange land you take your Kiwi rock where you can find it so I rocked on up to the front of the stage for these guys, and had a pretty good time. They're still a good live band, 'Wait and See' and 'My Mind's Sedate' still rock and Jonny Toogood still looks like a cherubic schoolboy. The setlist was weighted towards new stuff, which was decent but not any kind of a return to form. Like a lot of bands these days they seem to want to reinvent themselves as U2. The old songs they played were 'My Mind's Sedate', 'Wait and See', 'Comfort Me' and 'The General Electric'. The first two were the highlights of the set, but I was surprised to find once again that 'Comfort Me' isn't all that bad. Maybe it just seems better in comparison to the rest of the Pacifier album. Anyway, it was a nice set to close out the night.

Shihad

Lastly the headliners were Grinspoon, so I went home. Well actually, to the casino, but that's another story.

Glue

by Irvine Welsh

You may remember Irvine Welsh as the fella what wrote Trainspotting. If you've read that book or seen the movie then you'll find his novel Glue to be in familiar territory, following the lives and loves of four working class lads from Edinburgh as they get drunk in bars, start brawls at the footy and take shitloads of drugs. The story is divided into four chapters, each set roughly a decade apart, starting when the boys are five years old and just beginning school.

The style of the writing is a little obtuse. A large portion of it is written in phonetic Scottish dialect, which I thought was wonderful as I love Scottish accents, but others could easily find it irritating. Welsh also makes an inexplicable decision to use hyphens as opposed to quotation marks to indicate dialogue, which I thought to be needlessly obstructive to the ease of my reading.

However if that doesn't bother you then it's a right barry read, yeah? Despite the perpetual grimness of their economic and social situations, the characters display a joyous, irrepressible lust for life throughout, and it's endlessly entertaining reading about their dubious intimate lives and extra legal shenanigans.

While the central sections were enjoyable and highly addictive reading, I found the end a bit lacking. The story in the final section took an abrupt turn to the depressing and I found the redemptive note at the end unconvincing, primarily because I'd found quite a bit to dislike about a few of the main characters by the time we got there. Still I can appreciate that the flaws these characters have is part of the books message, which (to simplify) is a tribute to genuine blokey mateship. All of our friends are dicks sometimes but the friendship wouldn't be meaningful if it couldn't survive the occasional hiccup, be it having an argument over a girl, getting in a drunken punch up with one another or covering up a murder.

It's Drinking Time!

Hysterical!



via Arts and Letters Daily, believe it or not.

Newsflash!

Jeremy likes beer:

The Monday Lessons

I'm starting remember why I used to drink rum. Something to do with me going nuts and being crazy...

I definitely remember why I don't drink bourbon. It makes me want to puke.

I'm tired of being shy. I want to be outgoing and confident. Without having to drink a dozen rum and cokes to achieve this effect.

The Sunday Lessons

- Typical Sydney: If you spend $100 on swanky new trousers you'll quickly get them covered in dirt and ditch water from crawling through a hole in the wall to get into an illegal warehouse rave that has been shut closed by the police.

- Don't try and argue with the riot police. They get angry very easily.

This picture was probably the best of what I took of the actual crowd. There must have been at least 500 people still there at the end of the night when we were forced to leave.

Even the dog was getting into it
La Polizia!


Guilty of:
Trespassing
Selling liquor without a license
Playing music without a license
Having fun without a license...

New Years Resolutions

Are made to be broken. I only had two and the first one was "drink more moderately".

I acquitted myself very nicely on Friday up in Brisbane, achieving only a responsibly pleasant level of drunkenness before calling it a night at 4am.

Flash forward 24 hours, and I am throwing up in the toilets of a club in Kings Cross before returning to the bar, sculling the rest of my beer and buying another sambuka shot to mask the smell of vomit on my breath. At least I retained the presence of mind to stay out of the strip clubs this time but it wasn't the finest hour for my new year resolution.