Curse ov Dialect

I’m sorry, what was that? You wanted to hear about bling, tits and arse?

 

Teenage Crimewave

Archive footage of teenage delinquents and spastic dancing set to motorik punk thrash – it will cure whatever is wrong with youse.

My cross-processed mother (now with more curves!)

I have always felt ambivalent about Photoshop. Well all know it presents a major conundrum to photographers, as the reigning idea is to get the exposure and composition “right” in-camera. While there is a growing mass of people who scoff at this thinking as being restrictive, you can’t argue against the classic and seminal work predating the digital age . There’s no doubt all our visual information has become plasticised to the shit. Don’t even get me started on HDR. I can take seeing some stick-insect model with a vanished bellybutton but if I see another ‘dynamic-range’ landscape with a moody sky taken in Ireland, I’m gonna blow chunks.

Like all pioneering tools of the trade, it can be viewed as both divine and evil. I have recently acquired my first full version of CS4 and it’s still way to early to tell how I will feel about it in 12 months, but it’s probable I will love it – hence my ambivalence.  The real reason I’m excited right now is because I look forward to making grotesque collages containing drunken photos of my friends.  For now, some lazy and shitty attempts at imitation cross-processing and filters will suffice.

 

Some cheesy pre-school filter fun…

An arty rendering of resident stoner Dale, who is soon leaving our sunny shores for frosty Canada:

Ian trying to be Hugh Hefner:

World Goes Fanta

Sydney dust storm 1, originally uploaded by Stella Gray.

Imagine waking up to this sky at 6am. That’s what happened to everyone in Sydney today. This was the view out my kitchen window.

Them Crooked Vultures tour Australia 2010

Comprising of John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin, Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), and Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters), Them Crooked Vultures may very well make good on the aural orgasm their names promise on paper.  I got my tickets today and this made my otherwise shitty day. At last, a real supergroup for evil 2009.  Extra kudos to whoever is overseeing their ’branding’ – their website and imagery is deliciously dark.  Here is a tantalising sample of what they shall bring:

People Who Died

It’s been a fascinating year for publicly reported deaths. Witness the media saturation of Michael Jackson, who stole Farrah Fawcett’s thunder, who in turn had stolen David Carradine’s, and let’s not forget poor Patrick Swayze who will at least be remembered for being fun to watch in movies rather than a creepy drug-addled beacon of shame. This week we also say goodbye to Jim Carroll, author of the infamous Basketball Diaries.

Hands up if you find the story surrounding the death of David Carradine utterly sordid and fascinating in the
classic, vintage vein of Hollywood’s golden ‘babylon’ era? Adding to this is what appears to be a moratorium on reportage of the circumstances surrounding his death. Here is one of the juicier links which appeared soon after the news hit: 

http://www.bittenandbound.com/2009/06/07/david-carradine-death-hanging-photo-published/

If Carradine’s death has served to remind me of anything, it’s to remember never to lend out books to people. 
Some years ago, amongst the ephemera of tiki, 50s kitcsh and kustom car culture at Faster Pussycat in Newtown, I spotted a book I’d heard about for ages: The Amok Journal, Sensurround Edition. At the time, I just wanted it for the interview between William Burroughs and Jimmy Page, but elsewhere in the book were shocking and intriguing depictions of depravity gleaned from medical journals and anthropologists, about things like acrotomophilia (people with amputee fetishes) and autoeroticism, and people dying while getting off. Far from TMZ.com - but brave in motive – weirder shit exists and you don’t even know about it.

Which is why I’m shitty about lending that book to a friend, because I never saw it again, and now I have lost the chance to whip it out to prove my aforementioned statement about weird shit. Of course, these themes still manage to seep into the mainstream news channels:

Five children were orphaned by a married couple’s “act of love gone terribly wrong” and a subsequent suicide, a NSW coroner has found.

Julia Gauci, 36, and her husband of 17 years Christopher Gauci, 45, were found dead on June 9, 2008 at their rural property near Gulgong, in central western NSW.

Deputy State Coroner Hugh Dillon was told they had a “phenomenal” marriage, and that Mr Gauci had been “besotted” by his wife.

“She was his princess,” friend Peter Cork told the inquest at Mudgee.

Mr Dillon on Tuesday found Mrs Gauci had died from “manual asphyxia” by misadventure.

He noted her body had been lovingly dressed in her daughter’s white debutante ball dress, with a Virgin Mary statue placed nearby.

Mr Gauci’s body was found in the property’s machinery shed, with the coroner finding he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

“It is one of the saddest stories I have heard and it is particularly sad because the children have been left behind, orphaned – left in this terrible way,” the coroner said.

The Gauci children, now aged between seven and 18 years, are in the care of relatives and were not present at the inquest.

Counsel assisting the coroner, Rebbecca Becroft said, on the day before their deaths the couple had visited friends and appeared “happy” and “normal”.

They had no financial problems, no history of domestic violence nor any substance abuse issues, the inquest was told.

Mr Gauci was the “primary carer” for his wife who suffered epilepsy, Mr Dillon was told.

Forensic pathologist Timothy Lyons said Mrs Gauci’s airways had been blocked and that a “moderate amount of force (had been) applied for that to occur”.

There were no signs she had resisted the asphyxia, he added.

“There appeared … to be two possibilities. First, that Christopher killed Julia deliberately … and that secondly (she died) while they were engaged in marital relations,” Mr Dillon said.

“There is, in my view, a weak case that Christopher deliberately killed Julia, but there is a much stronger case that this was a terrible mishap – something that went terribly wrong in their bedroom, not because of anger … but paradoxically, because of their love for one another.”

He accepted evidence the pair were in a “powerful”, “loving” and “passionate” relationship that had produced five children, and that Mrs Gauci’s death was “an act of love gone terribly wrong”.

The court was told that before his death, Mr Gauci told his eldest daughter: “Mum’s passed away, look after the kids.”

He also reportedly called his wife’s father, John Delaney, to inform him of his daughter’s death.

Such acts were not those of a murderer, Mr Dillon said.

“His remorse was so deep, so profound, he felt that he could not go on living himself,” Mr Dillon said of Mr Gauci.

The couple’s eldest daughter called triple-0 after seeing her father go into the shed, put a rope around his neck, pick up a firearm and climb a ladder, police said.

When police found Mrs Gauci’s body in the main bedroom, she had been dressed in a white debut dress.

“It seems extraordinary for a murderer to dress his own wife in a beautiful dress,” Mr Dillon said.

“It is much more likely that he did that because he loved her and wanted her to look beautiful when found by police or by ambulance officers.”

Outside court, Mr Gauci’s sister-in-law Marian Gauci said the couple’s children are “doing well”.

Other family members present welcomed the finding of misadventure.

It could be your neighbours!

Tame Impala’s nod to the late 90’s

You can usually judge a band’s courage and the scope of their record collection from their choice of covers. The best covers have not necessarily just been songs that a band loves – they’re proof that a band can shape its own sound. Example: Led Zeppelin’s  hormonal reworking of  of Garnett Mimms “As Long As I Have You”  at the Fillmore in 1969. Listen to the original Northern Soul track which shines in its own right http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc2y9X08tN8

Tame Impala, a fashionably revisionist psych-rock trio from Perth, are showing some bravery and cleverness in this regard. I say revisionist because that’s really what they are – following on from Wolfmother’s blinding success, Modular no doubt signed them in anticipation of a (yet another) fresh wave of bands doing the power trio + hairy singer thing of the late 60s-early 70s (Cream, Hendrix, Sabbath, Zep et al).  

While there are hundreds of bands reading out of this particular textbook, Tame Impala are playing an intriguing choice of covers and you get a hint they may a few more other things going on in their floppy-haired heads. Rather then covering the Velvet Underground to show what great long-haired nouveau rockers they are, Tame Impala are giving us their thumbs up to the 1990’s electronic music scene, whose diversity we already seem to have forgotten; how it was truly layered and tapped into influences far away from its expected idiom.  Their take on Massive Attack’s Angel, which has also been dropped into their live sets, the soporific beat going down perfectly with flanging guitars and droning vocals.  The aforementioned link doesn’t really do their performance justice unfortunately – if anyone has a digital copy of their JJJ Live at the Wireless set, please email me…

Remember Me  first surfaced in 1997 with the insistent refrain of its title as sampled from Marlena Shaw’s “Woman Of The Ghetto” from 199. Blueboy’s infectious 12″ mix:

Tame Impala’s cover:

I loved Blueboy’s single when it came out then and I love it now. Yay to a rock band covering an electronic act. Enough of  lousy mash-ups!

The Future Is Wasted

Ok so maybe it started with The Cobra Snake. Or someone snapping pics at Studio 54. Or Andy Warhol. Or Life magazine. Has photojournalism devolved into hack social photography – the snapping of people when they’re wasted at parties? I’m not talking paparazzi here. Or the hacks that walk around nightclubs taking pics of people gurning at 3am and handing them a card so they can gawk and gush at their inebriated selves on a website for posterity. I’m talking about the style you can now clearly see popping up, the artful take on documenting the nights that everyone’s brain cells won’t be able to process the next day. I’m talking about artsy, black n white shots of someone passed out in their own puke, or with their genitals on display, or both. It’s a bona fide art form and it’s here, by Dasha Yastrebova:

Dead Whale + Dynamite = Bad Idea

“The humour of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber flew everywhere…”

Pookie Bear La-La