The first word is SENSATIONAL

Wednesday 4th May:

Trundled along down to the Fly By Night club in Freo with Zoe and Dijana to see...
THE SENSATIONAL ALEX HARVEY BAND!!!



Hooooo boy! This five piece glam rock blues punk Scottish outfit from the 70s was my favourite band in high school. Heard about them from Robert Smith of all people, front man of the Cure. Found the SAHB's Live record in Blowfly Records (Barrack St.) for about five bucks. SO AWESOME. They rocked harder than anyone I had ever heard before. Alex Harvey died in 1982, so they've got a new guy, Mad Max Maxwell, fronting the band.


(Mike Drew)

Well, you know, I think Mad Max is okay. He's theatrical enough, bit lower voice than Alex, he didn't go for some of the higher notes, but he had a good stage persona and all. I just think... well, I never saw Alex, obviously, but somehow I missed him. When we were driving home afterwards, we were listening to an old mixed tape of mine with 'Oh, Spartacus' on it, from the Mafia Stole my Guitar album, and it was like... dang! Alex was such a guy.

Anyway! So, the Wednesday gig! Got a few strange and/or bemused looks from the largely middle-aged (ex-Scottish?) male audience. Who are these girls? Have they turned up to the wrong show? They didn't come just to see the support act, did they?

The support act, they were kind of funny. Some local Freo band, the Del Rio brothers, but we dubbed them Dave and Jim. They were pretty good musicians, it's just we weren't so impressed with their humanitarian hippy meanderings when we'd come to see a bawdy brawling Scottish shenanigan. That's all.

Tried to explain to some guy over the noise that was Dave and Jim that I was actually a SAHB fan, I'd heard about Alex Harvey from the Cure.... No, the Cure! THE-- oh, never mind.

Loud! It was so loud. It was like standing in an 119db shiver of sound, just below the threshold of my ear drums bursting, the air was vibrating so much you could touch the music. Okay, maybe that's my young, sensitive, as yet undamaged ears talking. So to speak. Which was strangely awesome, to be enveloped in the sound of these songs which I know like the back of my hand, nodding my head in time, staring fascinated as Mad Max followed his bottom lip around the stage.


Play list: in no particular order! Except the first and the last three songs, which I remembered.
The Faith Healer
Midnight Moses... Isobel Goudie... St. Anthony... Swampsnake... Gang Bang... Framed... Next... The Last of the Teenage Idols... Action Strasse... Amos Moses... $25 for a Massage...
Vambo
Delilah
Boston Tea Party

Yeaaaah! They played Vambo! Vambo rools, OK!

Dijana was so into it. I loved it. (Zoe thought it was okay.) When I'm 58 I hope I'm as cool as Zal Cleminson, the most rockingest harlequin guitarist.

(courtesy patrickraff)

I was the winner of the Teenage Idol competition
And I knew in my heart we would never part...
I was the winner of the Teenage Idol competition
And I knew...


Love y'all.

Sir Bono.

Holy cow! Bono just received an honorary knighthood!

SOAWESOME.

Now let me tell you, I used to think Bono was a complete twat. Well, he probably is. But I got over "The Sweetest Thing" and I'll never have to meet him, so it is now my unconsidered opinion that he is THE MAN. For services to humanity? For writing modern day psalms that ache my heart? For faith and passion and importunity and love and a voice that's not afraid to sing the high notes? Yeah... that... and his grunge 80s hair. Whoo!

mo'hair

Slept in till nine, finished breakfast by 8.30. Got to love the end of daylight savings.

So, another week is over, a new one just begun. Seeing as I haven't written in here for a goodly many weeks (slacker), I guess I'll just review that one just finished. Should make for copious, if not fascinating, blogging. (As if 'fascinating' was a prereq of bloggage.)

Last Sunday! My headshaving party! Despite me organising it, I had a lot of fun. As the afternoon progressed my hair went from mostly fine to mullet to mohawk, thanks to the handiwork of some very patient friends and a girly razorblade.

"You only get two blades? How do you shave with these things?"
"Yeah. Discrimination against women. We have to shave twice as hard to get half the result."

I promised Minh pictures. So, okay.
From hair...



...to mohair... (one word: irascible)










...to no hair. Not many folks have seen this-- I wear a hat nowadays.










Big Love to everyone who came along, massacred my hair, provided me with muchas moral support, and sponsored me. You people are awesome.

The rest of my week was fairly tame in comparison. A none-too-strenuous nine hours at uni, which I am loving madly. Who knew Aboriginal languages could be so much fun? Even my psych. unit about vision is interesting-- we're doing a real proper experiment to find something out, something to which we don't know the answer. I can't stress the coolness of that point enough. First and second year psychology is tedium ad nauseum, but this semester we will add to the field of knowledge. Enthused! In a nutshell we hope to determine if there is one neural mechanism to detect and recognise all shapes, or an invidual detector for each shape.

So, for the first time ever, I am enjoying all (okay, both) my units. I can't stop smiling.

Worked Friday and Saturday, so I am in a fair way to getting rich. Bah. You know what irks me? Superannuation funds. I dunno, I kinda have a problem with the government taking my money and giving it back to me when I retire. I'll retire when I'm dead. In the meantime I could be doing something with that ~9%, something worthwhile. Superannuation doesn't sit too well with my faith, I guess. I want to trust God that I won't end up homeless under a bridge, I don't want to be forced to make provisions for myself in the abstract future when for Christ's sake I mean there are kids who don't have a future for tomorrow.

No doubt I'll be glad to have that money some fifty years hence.

"Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is 'finding his place in it', while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening cirlce of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth... [the young] will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first... You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old."

-The Screwtape Letters,
C.S. Lewis.

Well, I think I've blagged enough for now

Whilst I was trying to study a few thoughts decided to delicately weave its way into my brain, and now, unless I resolve these issues, I won't be able to study again. Where do I begin?

Lets start with the cliche nobody's perfect... everyone has faults, everyone has things about themselves which they would like to change and everyone has things about them which annoy others. The question is, how much of this are we able to change, how much of this is actually within our control? Or do we continue to be creatures of hiprocricy, with what we say about ourselves being what we'd wish to be contending rather viciously with what we really are?

Is there any escaping it?

Feet Are Still Landing

Hi Amy,

Sorry I haven't written in this blog for ages...I was really busy leading up to Melbourne and I been recovering eversince I got back. Melbourne was so awesome! The long walks in the Royal Botanic Gardens, the naps by the lakes, the unusual encounters in the zoo. Oh the list goes on! Seeing Jen again was the best part. It's amazing the impact a great friendship has on your state of mind which inadvertantly correlates with your state of self. Congress was good fun, but twas a lot more different the first time round. I did meet a few memorable characters which made Congress a lot more interesting emotionally :P

But yeah, back to earth now. Many interesting things awaits and life goes on...

Minh?

I got the feeling this would happen. But it was a nice try, anyway :)

The living dead.

I just spent my Christmas book voucher on the Essential Calvin and Hobbes anthology. Yeah, real highbrow. I think perhaps the giver of said voucher was hoping I would buy something more... literary? But I don't buy books as such, novels, and in my humble opinion there is not a cartoon more humourous, beautiful, crazy, and poignant than C&H. I'd like to meet Bill Watterson one day. I think we'd get along well.


I also saw Marie Antoinette today. Overall impression: pretty and boring. Well, I don't know much about the French revolution, but I imagine the politics and riots would make for an engaging film. Not this one. Maybe that wasn't Sofia Coppola's intent. Maybe she was more interested in portraying an extravagant, frivolous lifestyle in all its technicolor frills and thrills, but it wasn't so over the top as to be fascinating. It was just... empty.

Happy Feet: I really quite liked this film. I thought the plot was thin and not very well developed, but singing penguins don't need a plot. It was a big, vivacious film. Sometimes funny ("I heard an animal once do that and when they rolled him over he was dead"), corny, scary (I don't like water), and poignant (there goes that word again!). When the film was over I felt like a dumb foolish human.

Night at the Museum: This was my favourite of the three movies I saw this week. A guy gets a security job at the museum of natural history where the exhibitions come to life at night under the power of an ancient Egyptian tablet curse voodoo hoodoo thing. It was the characters that got me: you can imagine, a film with Theodore Roosevelt, Sakagawea, Attila the Hun, Jedidiah the cowboy pioneer, Octavius, cavemen, an Egyptian king, a talking Easter Island head, wild animals, and a dinosaur... what a line up. It was fun. It made me want to learn history. And it reminded me of the crazy imaginations children have, which we seem to lose along the way.