Month: January 2023

What

Yeah, that might be YOUR reality, Don Boy, but (un)fortunately I can’t do enough drugs to join you in it… I’ve no doubt Alan Alda also wishes he lives in a reality in which he actually won an Oscar instead of just being nominated for it, but, well, we can’t have everything, can we… [EDIT: yes, I’ve had it pointed out to me that this is a parody from this Twitter account, which evidently does a lot of this sort of thing. The fact that this is indistinguishable from something I’d expect Donny Jr would actually say makes me wonder how well it succeeds as parody, though.)

Splitters!

I kind of love when Australian politics takes a silly turn, and damned if it’s not doing that right now…

Not quite a year ago, advertising for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party was … everywhere.
Now, disgruntled former candidates and members of the United Australia Party have come together to establish a new political party, The Australians United.
The name sounds similar, the colour of the party logo is yellow (once synonymous with the UAP billboards), but they say their management will be different.

Yeah, you don’t have a fucking weirdo billionaire bankrolling your failure this time… although allegedly you didn’t last time either, cos TAU leader Jamal Daoud is the guy who sued the UAP for “mismanaging” their federal election campaign that famously ended up with the Clive gang just getting one senate seat and eventually being deregistered; Daoud was whinging about having to spend his own money on campaign materials (which other UAP members apparently claimed he didn’t actually have authority to do anyway), and I see by looking at his Twitter he’s actually been trying to whip up the People’s Front of Judea… er, The Australians United since last August, not long after the angry fist-waving came to nothing. The funniest thing, though, is that if Daoud and his mates do stand in the March election, they can’t actually do it as a party cos you have to have been a registered party for 16 months before you can do that, so they’d all have to stand as independents. And even fewer people will know or care who they are then; I feel like Jamal might come out of this wishing for the days when he could get as much as two percent of the vote…

Wonder how he feels about Bashar Al Assad these days, by the way… long before cosying up to Clive Palmer, he was kind of cosying up to Julian Assange as part of the Wikileaks Party, in which capacity he was part of a much-criticised 2013 visit to Syria by party members who were accused of cosying up to the dictator of Syria. This at a time when Daoud was marketing himself as a refugee advocate, too, so not a great look… Anyway, I don’t suppose there’s much danger of him standing up for refugees these days, cos he evidently left the Wikileaks life behind a while ago for the far-right grift instead; the only question now is how long until Ralph Babet forms the Party for a United Australia…

Molly is 80

Ian Alexander Meldrum turned 80 today, and I’m having trouble imagining that.

I mean, he was born on January 29 1943 and today is January 29 2023, it’s eighty years since Molly was born. That’s eighty years right there. He was already a grown adult (insofar as he’s ever been one) when he and Ronnie Burns were thrown out of the Beatles’ show in Melbourne in 1964. He started as a roadie for The Groop that same year. Writing for Go-Set in 1966. Producing Russell Morris’ “The Real Thing” in 1969. Countdown. He’s been at this for a very long time when you think about it.

Which is the thing, cos, well, I didn’t think about it until a couple of days ago when he was trending on Twitter cos his eightieth birthday was coming up.

Eighty?

Molly Meldrum has just always been there. I’ve never thought about how old he actually must be. That may be because doing so makes me realise how old I’m getting myself… Countdown started on November 8 1974, a week to the day (almost to the hour, in fact) before I popped into the world myself. I’m 48. So… Molly kind of must be 80?

Um, as the man himself might say.

Anyway, happy 80th, you strange individual. Even if it is kind of inconceivable.

Hottest 100

Yeah, it’s that day of the year again. Australia Day has passed, that controversy has quietened again, and we can all get down to doing what REALLY matters: pissing and moaning about The Young People and why Triple J’s Hottest 100 sucks now compared to whenever we old farts were The Young People.

I know when I stopped listening to the J’s, i.e. after Merrick & Rosso left for commercial pastures at the end of 2000, but I’m not sure when I stopped actually caring about the Hottest 100, which I still did for a few years; I still explored new music, I just found it in different ways, it was the oughts and I had community radio and Internet forums and so forth… then Angus & Julia Stone inexplicably won it one year, then the amount of stuff I actively disliked started outnumbering the stuff I liked, then eventually I stopped actively disliking stuff on the list cos I realised almost none of it was worth getting passionate about one way or the other. Even the stuff I thought was good wasn’t really worth getting worked up about.

I was old.

And Triple J no longer needed old people…

This infamous Twitter outburst would be followed the next day by this:

Ouch. The criticism they copped for sniping at us whiny old people complaining “it aint like it used to be in the 90s” while being kind of ageist regarding some of the artists (particularly female ones) it played, or rather didn’t, is something I can’t really comment on being a non-listener and all that, but the question still needs an answer beyond just “fuck you, ‘youth’ radio station which is part of a network whose Group Music Director turns 59 tomorrow”.

And that answer is… not really? It was one of those things that just happened. I got older, Dig and the revived Double J which emerged from that proved more to my taste by playing stuff that was more like what I used to like (and still did, and still do), and I don’t even listen to that any more. It didn’t hurt. Far more painful things related to age assail me every day. The Hottest 100 was for other people, and I didn’t need to care about it.

But then this happened:

The Wiggles—THE FUCKING WIGGLES—winning the 2022 contest with a Tame Impala cover was probably not something anyone expected. When it did happen, it was magnificent. Not only was their version of the song actually pretty good in its own right, the whole situation was just screamingly funny; it was the best thing of this sort to happen since the La La Land/Moonlight debacle at the Oscars. And much like the Oscars should’ve just quit after that cos they would never be anywhere near as interesting or entertaining again, the Hottest 100 should’ve ended on that wiggly note. It could never be so much fun again after that.

And, well, this year it wasn’t, the winner being some bit of r&b electro meh of no particular distinction that I could see by Flume. If that actually was the best 2022 had to offer (and I don’t know, maybe it was) then, well, I have a lot of older music I’ve never heard before that I might actually give a shit about. Leave me to that.

One thing that does puzzle me, though, is the antipathy towards Beyonce Knowles making two appearances on the list,e.g.:

30 years ago, when they topped the 1992 Hottest 100 of all time (the year before the J’s started limiting the competition to the best of each year), Nirvana were on Geffen, which was not only a label but a goddamn big one, with distribution by Warners and MCA. Labels have never NOT had control of the industry. Personally I find Beyonce tedious as hell, obviously got the technique but it’s kind of empty, so I wouldn’t vote for her myself but that’s just me… I just find it interesting that people are snarly over her and not, say, Billie Eilish, who’s on a major label as well. And I actually do kind of like her, I think she has a bit more going on than most of the other modern plastic poppers… but she’s still on a major label. I don’t think that’s an argument either way, and I’m more persuaded by the argument others make about why JJJ considers Beyonce acceptable but not, say, Taylor Swift…

Telephone to glory?

Something a bit curious I found on Tumblr, via Cory Doctorow. When I first looked at it I misunderstood it as some sort of telemarketing for Jesus type of deal (and wondered how many of the 70,000 individuals on the back cover were happy to have their day interrupted by Harold trying to palm God off onto them in the middle of dinner), but then I realised it was actually one of those things people call into… and how did they get people to do that? Well, as I found by a little extra research, by being ever so slightly deceptive…

More than a year ago a Seventh-day Ad­ventist layman visited me in my office in Atlanta to interest me in purchasing a Code-a-phone. Now a Code-a-phone is a telephone answering machine capable of giving as much as a three-minute message and also capable of receiving and record­ing a message from one who calls. This layman suggested that it might be possible to give Bible studies over the telephone. […] Arrangements were made, the telephone line was installed, the ma­chine was delivered to the office, and I re­corded the first message. […] We called a newspaper and put the ad in the personal column of its classified section: “DO YOU NEED AD­VICE? DIAL 288-1666.”

https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1967/11/the-magic-of-telephone-evangelism

I suppose telling people upfront that “this ad has been placed by a cranky 19th-century semi-cult” might’ve put people off, and this vague enough to be meaningless thing might at least have attracted some people’s curiosity. Which, according to Harold in the above article, it did:

Of the 650 people who called the first week of operation more than 100 gave their name and mailing address. In just a few weeks our line was so busy all day long that we installed a second telephone and a second answering machine. In another few weeks the two machines were so busy we needed a third, then a fourth. Our four Code-a-phones are now giving our two­-and-a-half-minute message twenty-four hours every day and are receiving names and addresses by the hundreds […]
In about eight months 80,000 have called and listened to our daily program in the city of Atlanta. Of that number 11,500 have given their name and mailing ad­dress to receive our free Bible course. You can readily see that this is a way by which the masses can be reached on an individual basis.

Which, however, is an awful lot more people not doing that, and I do wonder just how unhappy some people would’ve been having called this mysterious phone number only to find Adventism at the other end. At least Harold acknowledges that sort of thing did happen, but that doesn’t make it any better; I presume, too, that they still made money off the 70,000-odd they didn’t succeed in selling their thing to, cos I daresay that phone call wasn’t free… I feel weirdly sure the money the Adventists would’ve made from this thing mattered more than the 11,500 people they got addresses from (wonder how many of the latter actually persisted with them afterwards)…

January 26

It’s nothing if not a complicated day here in Australia today, what with our complicated history and our… mixed response to that in the present day. I confess my own response has been blunt in the past, given my own Scottish ancestry; England has been fucking over my folks’ old country for several centuries longer than this one. You’d think I’d be more sympathetic to our indigenous cousins on that account but no, I wasn’t, which is something I’m not proud of…

Anyway, I found the above image on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy FB page nearly ten years ago, it turned up in my FB memories today, and, well, it offers a perspective I’d never considered before that time. I’m still somewhat indifferent to Australia Day as such cos, let’s face it, I’m not affected by it, but there’s a lot of people who are affected by it and I have more sympathy for them these days than I once did. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think the majority of people here give a fuck about the national day itself and wouldn’t care about the date being changed as long as they don’t lose a public holiday…