Category: [My stuff]

Look sharp!

So I socialised on Saturday night, club called Halo, a goth/industrial event that runs as an annual special event out of Oxford Art Factory… found it a bit flat this year, took me an awfully long time to get in the swing of it, and I think it was essentially just further evidence for what I’ve long felt, i.e. that if you can’t drink at a club (and I can’t, not really, and certainly shouldn’t) and can’t dance at it (which activity was always helped for me by alcohol, and which isn’t helped by my body being what it is) and you’re not DJing at it (which I used to, I had two regular monthly slots, but one of those nights ended and I appear to have been surplus to requirements since the end of 2019 for reasons I frankly don’t know), then it’s probably not really a lot of fun, even more so when your camera is frankly crap and you can’t even get any decent photos of the night… a fair bit of effort in my case for not a great deal of return…

…having said all of which, I will nonetheless not deny the skills of the sword swallower, Sian Jackson (one of various additional performers Halo offers); I only wish I’d got a shot of her when she had three swords down her gullet at once, but given how piss-poor most of the photos I took that night were, I’m glad this one turned out acceptable…

Pinegrove

Had to go to a funeral a couple of days ago at Pinegrove Memorial Park, which is out at Minchinbury and consequently a LONG way from my usual stamping grounds (such as they are)… fortunately had transport to take me there and back; unfortunately that meant I was dependent on them and couldn’t take any time to explore and so I only managed to get this one photo and I’m not even sure what it actually is. Just that it’s a bit past the chapel (which you can click to enlarge if you like) as you go in. Pinegrove looks awfully interesting, and I’d be interested in going back one day for a further look around… albeit hopefully on a day when the weather’s less boiling than it was on Wednesday morning.

Another bit of my handiwork

I saw an author on Threads a couple of days ago grumbling about paying a thousand pounds to an artist to do the cover art for her book, and being furious when the artist sent her a bunch of AI bullshit. The artist claimed that the author’s ideas for the cover couldn’t be realised any other way… fortunately there seems to be a happy ending to the story, in that the artist seems to have agreed (probably reluctantly) to a refund, but someone asked the author what their cover design concept was, and she replied “A ring, a crown, and a sword.” To which I replied “Good grief. I can barely draw and I could still do that without AI.”

And then I actually DID do that without AI, scribbling this bit of nonsense on the back of a handy envelope:

As you may be able to tell, there are multiple good reasons why I never went into book cover design as a career. But at least I was honest about my lack of skill.

Live music!

Goddamn, I actually LEFT THE HOUSE last night and SOCIALISED! I can barely believe it myself, and yet here is photographic evidence… I don’t do a lot of socialising like this any more, usually when I do go out it’s to a club, and actual live music is something I do even less (last gig I went to was in August last year). But a bunch of friends’ bands were playing at Moshpit in Newtown, so I decided to take the opportunity to go see some people I know at a venue I’d never been to before and give the new phone camera a test drive… click to embiggen.

First up, Moroderhead, who weren’t quite as heavy as their amusing name may suggest, and who only lacked mullets to complete their overall 1986-ness. I was thinking this was the first time I’d seen Alberto not playing as half of Neuropa, but now that I think of it I have very vague memories of seeing him at the Hopetoun in 2006 when he was still doing Junk Circuit as well…

I got this shot of the stage backdrop while waiting for Burnt Souls to start…

…Which they did a few minutes later. Lineup’s changed since I last saw them at the Town and Country a couple (?) of years ago—new guitarist, new bassist, no more drummer—but at least Colin’s still got the tallest hair in the room…

…And finally Sounds Like Winter, who I was mainly there for, cos Ant has also recently reconstituted what he calls “version 3.0” of the band, though the band’s always had a somewhat wobbly lineup including a Spinal Tap-esque revolving door of bassists, so I think “version 3.0” was technically about eight or nine years ago… anyway, whatever number the new arrangement may or may not be, they’ve had a similar change to Burnt Souls (new guitarist & bassist, no drummer) and it sounded good. New album is apparently about half done, so presumably we’ll have that by the end of the year.

I can feel the warning signs

Oasis are reforming! And people are losing their minds! Or at least they are on Threads, which I have recently started making use of, and where there seems to be a running battle between people loudly proclaiming their lack of interest and other people sniping at those people. I’m kind of more in the former camp in that I’m not terribly excited by this comeback, but I also can’t be bothered dumping on it too much… anyway, the Graun says:

Rock’s biggest will-they-won’t-they finally has an answer: Oasis have announced that they will reunite for a 14-date tour of the UK and Ireland in 2025.
They will not, however, be headlining Glastonbury festival as was rumoured over the weekend, nor playing 10 dates at Wembley and the Etihad Stadium respectively.
Instead, the concerts will take place in July and August, at stadiums in Cardiff, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. Tickets go on sale at 9am on 31 August, with prices to be revealed on the day.
A press release billed the dates as the “domestic leg” of the tour and said that “plans are under way” for it to go beyond Europe later in 2025.
Of the famously feuding brothers’ decision to reunite, the release stated: “There has been no great revelatory moment that has ignited the reunion – just the gradual realisation that the time is right.”

The fact that both Liam and Noel have undergone messy and costly divorces in recent years has absolutely nothing to do with said time being right, of course, and the fact that each is expected to personally make about 50 million is also perfectly and entirely beside the point.

Anyway… Oasis. Far from my favourite band of that era, though also far from my least favourite; never owned any of their albums but I liked a fair few of the singles and some of the b-sides and albums, at least up to the Standing on the Gramatically Dubious Misquote of Giants (you know what I mean) era. Just heard “Gas Panic!” for the first time in probably 20-something years the other day and thought it was great. But I think “Half the World Away” was always my favourite Oasis tune, and I have a certain very particular memory associated with it.

It’s March 6th, 2005, me and the folks are out visiting family friends who live in the vicinity of Lurline Bay. I’d been given a digital camera for Xmas, so I took the opportunity to put it to use. This one I got from their balcony…

…and here’s a couple of others I got after I wandered down to Marine Parade. Anyway, it was an eminently fine Sunday afternoon; I remember it being warm without being overly so, obviously untroubled sky, lovely day all round. And from somewhere at a distance there was music. I soon discovered this was coming from someone’s car, whoever owned it was presumably in the are, and they’d left the radio (or tape player, or whatever they had in the car for music) on. And that was where the music was coming from, and as I got closer I could make out the song playing at that moment. And it was “Half the World Away” by Oasis.

And for some reason that I still don’t understand and can’t really explain, everything just felt exactly right. I had this sense that, right there and at that moment, everything in the world was exactly as it should be. This beautiful Sunday afternoon looking out over the ocean, this weather, those people out on the rocks watching container ships on the horizon, that car and that song playing in the slight distance, me being there to observe it all… all of that came together with the feeling that this was completely what should be happening. It was kind of a mystical thing, which is probably why I struggle to put it into words. Sensations of this sort are kind of hard to analyse as such. But everything right there and then was perfect, and I was perfectly attuned to it.

And then the song changed to something else, and the moment passed. I’d never felt anything of the sort before, and I don’t think I’ve felt it since. And nearly 20 years later I still don’t understand it, but those couple of minutes when everything was perfect still remain with me… and Oasis were the background music for it. Which is not how I would ever have envisaged things, but so it was…

King of the castle

I finally got to witness King, my next door neighbours’ cat, up on my roof. I’ve heard him a number of times—he goes up there quite a lot when he’s not loitering under one of the bushes out front of the house or prowling around in the backyard—but this afternoon was the first I got to actually see him up there; he was making plaintive “get me down from here” noises, but his person from next door was unable to convince him to actually come down, and then, when he went away, King just started getting plaintive again. Joe has seen him come down by himself, so he’s able to do it when he wants… today was one of those times he evidently didn’t. But, as the bloke from next door said, he’ll get hungry at some point and work something out. I just wish King would do something useful while he’s up there like clean the gutter or something…

So I just wrote this…

Just been watching a Little Joel video on the Tube of You about some poet called Aliza Grace, who appears to be one of those “Instapoetry” types; I took this screenshot of her poem from the video:

And then whatever this fucking thing is just… you know, came to me. It didn’t exactly flow as such from my pen, or more accurately from my fingers over the laptop keyboard, but somehow once I had the idea expressed in the title, this bizarre list of things I wouldn’t do only took me a short time to produce… which I think is rather good, and quite surprising, considering I haven’t written anything for months.

Some Things That I Will Never Do to You

Compile a Florence Foster Jenkins mixtape,
Or feed you vegetables that aren’t quite dead;
Entomb you in a cavern full of milk,
Or stick you in a frozen peppermint;
Replace your flesh with oleander leaves,
Or extradite you to Ulaanbaatar;
Marry you to King Arthur and his knights,
Or leave you at the molten core of Venus;
Apply a Belgian waffle to your feet,
Or call you up outside of office hours;
Pretend that I’m a decent human being,
Or sing black metal to your Persian cat.
These things I would not do; but be afraid
Of all the things that I would do instead.

I have taken the liberty of posting this thing in the above video’s comments section too. Curious to see what if any reaction it gets.

On Hearing the First Eastern Koel in Spring

I know I promised to use this blog at least in part as an outlet for my own original creative writing but, well, there hasn’t actually been much of that to share… I can go for weeks without an idea even for a line, let alone a whole finished thing (the worst thing is when I do have an idea but I’m already in bed when I have it and I’ve forgotten it when I get up again). However, the other day I was moved to post a little rant of Facebook about the annual return of the Eastern Koel to my area, which I’ve now substantially recast from free verse outburst into these slightly approximate trimeters:

It’s fucking five a.m.,
Can’t sleep as fucking usual;
That fucking Eastern Koel
Outside in the fucking tree
Is singing its fucking song;
The fucking sun’s not up yet
While you make that fucking racket,
And every fucking year
Around now it’s the fucking same;
A hideous fucking noise,
No wonder I fucking hate you.
You bastard fucking cunts,
Go and get fucking eaten
By my neighbours’ fucking cats.

Why, no, I’m not a fan of the Eastern Koel, and I have no idea what could’ve possibly led you to that entirely correct assumption…