Kthaahthikha

After listening to lots of distortion rock I have made a fist at sounding like Yo La Tengo. Whilst it is not a very strong fist, were it to possess a backing track, a bassist and a heavily-processed synth there might be small elements of this low-res sound file that would not destroy your mind with horribleness.

I feel okay putting this here because no-one reads my blog. Genius!

LINK TO FILE

So basically this is a continuation of my idea-dump tradition.

Also tonight I am going to see Faker supported by the Valentinos. I don't really like either of those bands much but it will be a fun time and I have made a pledge to start going to shows as a social outlet. Plus I will be able to tell people I saw Faker in a few years time after the band breaks-up and they become fondly-remembered legends for some reason even though they are mostly Australia's rocky answer to the resurgence of BritPop. Kind of like how Custard were kind of our more poppy answer to the original wave of BritPop. Except that Custard were really, really good, whereas Faker are merely quite good.

Learning!

Stolen from JP, who stole it from someone else, who stole it from Steve Allen, with the artist selection entirely randomised using the scientific method (a box and some scraps of paper).

1. John Cage
2. Felix da Housecat
3. Air
4. Mazzy Starr

5. The Grates
6. Nick Cave (and the Bad Seeds)
7. Francoiz Breut
8. The Arcade Fire
9. Ladytron
10. Sarah Blasko

What was the first song you ever heard by 6?
”Where the Wild Roses Grow”, it being his only #1 and all. Still, a damned fine song even if it does have Kylie Minogue.

What is your favourite album of 8?
They only have Funeral (actually they also have an ST, but I don't think it was released here). But it is a very nice album.

What is your favourite lyric that 5 has sung?
Use your bed like a trampoline
I said –
Higher! Higher!

Just for love if you know what I mean
I said –
Higher! Higher!

They are all about the class.

How many times have you seen 4 live?
Never at all. I’m not even sure if they’ve toured here.

What's your favourite song of 7?
”Si Tu Disais”. Especially the stripped-back, unplugged acoustic version.

What is a good memory you have concerning the music of 10?
Seeing her opening the Queenscliff music festival and dancing through “Always Worth It”, only to have the equipment malfunction live on national radio, with her standing there attempting to engage in awkward conversation with the few teenage girls who had been standing and dancing.

Is there a song of 3 that makes you sad?
”All I need”, perhaps. Also “The Word Hurricane”, but you didn’t say ‘Are there songs”.

What is your favourite lyric that 2 has sung?

I’m uncertain, but quite possibly the quatrain from Silver Screen Shower Scene:

“Sweet seduction in a magazine, 

endless pleasure in a limousine, 

in the back shakes a tambourine, 

Nicotine from a silver screen ”

It is arguably the coolest quatrain ever written. I mostly chose it to avoid having to type-out the lyrics to the entirety of “Short Skirts” or “Hunting Season”, though.

What is your favourite song by 9?
”Abercrombie”. It is the sound of an international airport turned to wonderful.

How did you get into 3?
I first startd getting into decent music and listening to decent radio stations the year that Talkie Walkie dropped. I had never heard anything like it before, and was absolutely entranced. The Virgin Suicides, a beautiful film, cemented my love.

What was the first song you heard by 1?
”Song for Marcel Duchamp”.

What's your favourite song by 4?
’Into Dust.

How many times have you seen 9 live?
Never ever at all.

What is a good memory you have concerning 2?
Walking through a city full of foreigners, drunks and sports-fans with “What She Wants” on full bawl at eleven at night. The neon made it good.

Is there a song of 8 that makes you sad?
”Une Annee sans Lumiere” is very bittersweet, but basically all of Funeral is tear-jerk material if you are in the right (wrong?) mood.

What is your favourite song of 1?
A Flower.

You know you are a sad fan-boy when you start making wikipedia entires for your favourite under-appreicated bands. Pivot today, Triosk tomorrow.

Excerpt from one of the several novels I started for NaNoWriMo last year but never finished. This was the magic-realist piece partially inspire by Zadie Smith's wonderful but very long White Teeth, using various interesting foreign words from a book I own as themes for brief, character-studying chapters. I got three done and they're my favourite things to come out of that train-wreck of an event.

NaNoWriMo 2005 is partially responsible for my having to retake ALL102 next semester.

It was her own method of avoidance, or of in some way deferring responsibility from herself and others to the universe at large. Of course, that was not the entire picture. Whilst doing so would establish that those dark and light things which happened in her life were to be blamed upon strange and unseen forces and mighty powers, it also created a situation where she herself was responsible for assuring the favour of these powers. Being confused by the issue, but well aware of the paradox of her comfort, Melissa nonetheless prayed every evening, secure in the knowledge that she was both entirely responsible for her successes, and able to attribute all of her failures to the uncaring, bitch-goddess nature of the universe.

Lying as she was exhausted upon the bed, watching the ceiling shimmer slightly from her fatigue, she contemplated the moral implications of what she had done with the young man who, some ten minutes earlier, had thrown-on his clothes and ran, reeking of sex, off to work. The heavy application of her powerfully-floral deodorants had done little to mask the scent, but he had been too hurried to take a shower – something for which Melissa was greatly to blame.

However, she did not like to think of it this way. It could hardly be said that the young man had been entirely innocent of the affair. But she was in a charitable mood, and obviously he had been also, and so both cursed that there was too little time and blamed everyone but themselves for the fact that he was going to be late, and that she was now considering going back to sleep.

The greater part of Melissa’s faith in the cosmic distribution of luck, could be attributed to the fact that she had failed to win the lottery so many times, only to suddenly do so. ‘Now obviously,’ she had said to her friends,’ I’d not won so many times. What were the odds of my winning now? It must have been something bigger. You know – there’s got to be more to this life than what is here on this earth.’

This logic, which appeared perfectly serviceable to both Melissa and several of her more spiritually-inclined friends, had not sat quite so well with Joseph. He had pointed-out on several occasions that, irregardless of what she might think, her chances had been exactly the same every time that she had gambled on three games. The fact that she had won three hundred thousand dollars was entirely random and (here he submitted to the specist and oddly-hypocritical reasoning that seemed to be his greatest weakness), if it had truly been a fact of divination, then why had she only won second division?

But say what he would, Joseph could not convince Melissa that she had been a benefactor of chance, and not luck. So he had given-up, which was probably for the best, as he didn’t really believe his own arguments anyway.

The bed, whilst warm, was not the best place to be. Melissa rose in her nightshirt and wandered into the shower, where she spent some twenty minutes under the flow of warm water, washing her hair and considering the amazing coincidence that the trees visible through the clear strip of glass above the window proper would occasionally, when the wind was right, look something like a face.

Melissa wasn’t really certain of what she was praying to. She had read a number of books, mostly about Ancient Egyptian myth cycles and neo-paganism, and had felt herself leaning towards the school of thought that states that a religion is always purer and more potent if very few people use it. This was somewhat ironic, as she rarely stooped to the level of mystical ludditism that her friend Crow was prone to – that strange idea that something is better for you if it was brewed from a garden weed, and that science was a malevolent entity bent upon the de-spiritualisation of the world and Modern Life. Crow was a strange woman, whose real name (at least, Melissa had always assumed that Crow was a pseudonym) no-one had ever been privy to.

After her shower, Melissa stripped the bedclothes and threw them in the hamper. She slipped-on her t-shirt and deep-blue denim jeans, hung her ankh around her neck and collected her oroboros key-chain, and left the house to go for a walk down to the supermarket, having discovered that there was no yoghurt left.

The supermarket was a low, broad building with a red aluminium roof and high glass windows along its front – much like most buildings of its kind. Though the staff changed constantly, there was one man who was always on the counter. His name-tag read Samuel, but not once that Melissa could remember had anyone called him by name. She herself would merely share a cursory ‘hello’, and perhaps exchange pleasantries about the weather. But, his name written there on his chest, she had never felt that it required bringing-up – and whether or not it was because she had felt this way, Samuel had never asked after her name for all the three years that she had been shopping there.

He smiled politely and slipped the yoghurt into the canvas bag, alongside a bottle of milk and a packet of chocolate biscuits with orange crème filling. The biscuits were cheap and terrible and horrible, and Melissa cursed the company for having lowered its standards. Once, the biscuits that the company had sold were delicious – easily able to compete with any other brand. But over time the quality had gradually declined as the company expanded, was bought by a foreign rival, re-emerged as a lone power after the rival’s collapse, purchased its former vassal, built several new factories, divided into three warring board-factions that eventually went their separate ways, and finally the biscuit-producing element of the corporation, finding itself in a strong financial position but with poor future prospects, had merged with a company that made motorcycle chassis. However, she did not buy a different brand of biscuit.

Samuel nodded goodbye and Melissa departed, wandering away back up the road through the shadows of paper-bark trees to her small flat, which she had bought from the former landlord for a reasonable amount.

It is your turn now, Jayaprakash. You are tagged.

"Shame":

Your black oil smoke-snake is slipping through the sub-terrain

And overhead the wind is howling,

Caught between the fractures of cracked romance.

Pick it and win.

Killroy and Tina is pretty awesome and it only take a few hours to get through the archives.

I am pimping for fun, not profit.

I think this is down but if it is not then goddamn it but Snakes on a Plane!

• Nelly McKay is fun.
• Homework is something I could do without.
  
• I spend far too much time spread between two internet messageboards
• Rose Byrne makes me weak at the knees
• 
• The Rage in Placid Lake is, from the half I've seen, awesome beyond easy comprehension.
• Milo is yummy.
• Joey Comeau is a good author but his character is a dick (at least where I'm up to), even if intentionally so.
• I have encountered the most civil debate over abortion in the history of the internet.
• I wish my local video library had more of the movies I like; I will rent 1990:The Bronx Warriors but Wild Zero would be nice too.
• I wish I hadn't known about the vampires when I sat to watch From Dusk Till Dawn.
• I have finally seen a Coen brothers film.
• Ted Savini always looks like he should be playing a campy demon.
• I have an exciting comic project in the work along with two or three other guys, and it will blow your tiny little mind.
• "Tiny little mind" is something of a redundancy.
• George Clooney is handsome.
• Everyone should be listening to The Last Beautiful Day by new Buffalo, which is truly gorgeous.
• It is impossible to find Quest for Fire in my Region format.
  
• I need to write more (fiction, not bullet points).

I finally saw Dirty Harry because it is one of those landmark films.

In perfect honesty I found it manipulative, short-sighted, narrow-minded, frequently implausible, guilty of using straw-man arguements and quite happy to take an incredibly complicated issue and try to dumb it down until it eventually becomes practically one-sided.

The most obvious example being the end sequence. If Scorpio was going to get on a plane, couldn't they have just put a couple of security guys on the plane disguised as crew members and had them get the drop on him? Then there's the bit where they agree to give Scorpio the money the first time - I'm pretty sure the cops would have developed some form of trap instead of just folding.

I'm also not entirely sure that Scorpio would have been able to walk so easily in the real world after his first arrest. Even if they didn't have evidence against him for the girl, he assaulted a police officer with intent to commit murder and shot another cop with a sub-machine gun which conveniently vanished from the scene of the crime. And this after being witnessed gunning-down a uniformed cop.

And all those times when Scorpio deliberately targets the most sensitive targets - kids, women and stuff! Shameless.

Then there's the fact that Scorpio quite clearly has a mental problem.

And how the hell did Callahan know where to be in the final sequence, ready to drop down atop the bus.

It was like watching The Thing From Another World all over again.

In short, I declare this particular segment of our shared cultural heritage non-canon.



...


Still, the photography and Clint Eastwood were good. It's a well-made film with some good performances and a memorable, if 2-dimensional, vilain.

This does not require a comment.

I came into the bookshop with a clear determination to make Anthers cut to the chase. He had been refusing to play straight with me for far longer than I would have liked – three weeks, really, of ambiguity, subtle hints and the only thing to lead me on his word and my misplaced optimism. So I came into the bookshop, and I headed for the back. They have a separate chamber containing Science, Crime and Children’s Literature. I leafed through a palaeontology text and bided my time.

When Anthers came he was red faced – not tired, just nervous, for his breathing was regular and shallow. He was dressed in a short coat and carrying a shoulder-bag, and he had a smile cut across his glowing cheeks.

‘Waiting long?’

‘A few minutes,’ I replied. ‘And you, did you have an easy trip?’

‘Quite pleasant,’ he replied. ‘Traffic was minimal. Come along, Ms Rosenthal, there is business do be conducted.’

So we left the bookshop – he bought me the book – and headed down the way towards the library by the old council chambers. Two lions sat across from one another at the foot of the steps, lifeless and unrealistic but with a certain charm to them that I had always found akin to that of the vampire.

It was a Saturday. Anthers shattered the library window with a towel-wrapped punch, and we headed into the gloom of the building as the clock on the wall marked the seconds until the police would arrive. There was a door at the back of the cathedral, beyond periodicals and French, that yielded to several powerful kicks from my feet – for Anthers is a rather old man.

The police arrived then. Regretfully, I drew my gun, and threatened to shoot. I don’t know that they were used to it – a man and a woman – but they dashed behind a shelf of Biology and we managed to make it inside. Past a tea-area with a fridge, down a too-long corridor and up a staircase to a window I wasn’t sure of, we found a landing. It was here that Anthers proved himself a man of his word.

‘Here it is,’ he said, taking a small, flat key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and slipped in even as I saw more police marching across the park from the fronting station. Anthers locked the door tightly and I sat down, half-watching him as I watched the door. He rummaged through the filing cabinet and the sideboard and the desk, sensibly ignoring the computer. I could here footsteps below and I still wasn’t sold on Anthers’ reassurance.

‘Ah!’ was all he said as he broke-open a cabinet. He tore it apart with his hands and a metal ruler, working the joins. I watched him, cradling the gun, as the shelves fell to the ground, followed by the door and the side-panelling and the base. A pile of wood sat on the floor, accompanied by several strips of siding leant against the desk.

‘So how does this work?’ I asked. I wasn’t as well-versed as I now am. Anthers has always been one for teaching by example, and he climbed inside the deconstructed cabinet and gestured for me to follow. We were both soon cramped in that three foot by two foot space, as the old man and I tried to drag the pieces of wood back up around us until, after a great deal of work, we had boxed ourselves thoroughly in.

Things being as they are, time and space don’t always play to how we expect them to. Sometimes they do. I tumbled downwards for a while, although it was more of a spiral. If the Earth is round (and I’m still not sold) then there is no flat plane from which to gauge down, but rather a sphere which draws things to its centre. We were headed straight for the centre of that cabinet, like astronauts in the ISS, spiralling around the centre of gravity and finding that, though its circumference was brief, its radius was very large indeed.

Of course there is no air in a vacuum, so I was unable to discuss with Anthers the peculiarity of the sensation. Rather, we simply tumbled, and I was prone to reflecting on whether or not Anthers had sold me out on some kind of murder-suicide – I couldn’t think of a motivation, but anything is possible. Perhaps I reminded him of the girl he was too quick on the draw for during one of those Beltaine sacraments back in ’43. Who’s to say? All there is is to continue as we is, but now I’m engaging in wordplay, and that just isn’t what I’m about.

My name is Rosenthal. You got that, right?

After several centuries we hit. I’m not exaggerating. It took one hell of a long time. Thankfully time had long since ceased to exist, although my perception of it was still barrelling along at a snail’s pace – so even if I was bored stiff my corpse was not stiff as a board.

Our destination on that Saturday afternoon was the international convention of the Order of the Seven Stars, as founded on the slopes of Ararat to prevent something untoward. I’m not certain what, and the Seven Stars sure as hell don’t know, so what they’re guarding against is anyone’s guess. My Uncle – who set me on my current course in life, and was, not coincidentally, one of the only men to ever witness the coronation of a Scout Bagheera and survive – was of the mind that it was the Seven Stars themselves that the order was set to protect the world from, and judging from the cloistered secrecy of their gyrations, one would not find this a jagged little pill to swallow.

So hiding inside of cabinets, at the points where angles and shadows intersect, were the Seven Stars, and it was with my trusty revolver and decaying geriatric that I approached the temple which rose from the mists, enshrouded in eldritch miasma of a bluish, necrotic hue, above a concave spherical landscape from the centre of which we had tumbled, to brush the extents of its stairways and moats with its overreaching tower. The moats of the temple of the Seven Stars consist of a single, perfectly circular pond that encompasses all. My readings speak of it as a gruesome and heinous waterway, and though it flows relentlessly around and around itself one has the feeling that witches might pass just fine over Escher paintings.

So we stood on the steps of the temple, which by now you have guessed is the innermost sphere of the hollow earth. Beyond the dinosaurs, the lost tribes of Israel and the savage UFOnauts, there lies this single dome that is really surprisingly-easy to access – all that is required of one is a cabinet and non-linear thinking.

We entered the temple through the gates. I kept my revolver close, concerned for my safety. Members of the Order of the Seven Stars have been known to shoot on sight. But they were all gathered in the tower chamber, or so Anthers assured me, the base of which was several hundred meters above us and the spire of which we were repeatedly forced to duck. Anthers cautioned me against touching it – apparently I might fall if I did. The surface is boring, what with its ETs and cyber-cabals, but at least down is consistent – or at the very least convex.

A low chanting reached out ears, akin to a Gregorian. But this was no Latin, it was some strange tongue forgotten by all but those permitted access to the hidden, ancient lore. Naturally, I planned to steal this. It has long been my aim to hi-jack the telluric currents and engineer a method of crossing boundaries between this dimension and the next – a plan, if you will, to loop time and space and superimpose an image from a preferable dimension upon this one that will fuse common elements and insert all those differences not present in our own; what I could possibly hope to gain from this could never really be made that apparent, but I suppose that it is my goal to merge a new myself upon myself, to attempt to fuse personalities in a way less difficult and more fun than LSD-induced schizophrenia. My Uncle, whom I believe I’ve mentioned, is of the mind that I’ve already attempted the less-preferable option, and that I am currently making my way through a bizarre cocktail of id and superego, constructing my own existence as I go in a way more than reminiscent of Total Recall. Except that I’m not Austrian.

We made our way up the staircase, a confusing design that from my perspective spiralled to the left as opposed to up. In the third tier the walls were lined with books and I had the distinct impression that the room was constructed at an odd angle, so as to give the impression of being top-side up. I pillaged a few tomes whilst Anthers looked about nervously. He was of the opinion that I was dangerously-close to sacrilege, and he probably would have fled if he weren’t a manifestation of my subconscious mind. It took me a great deal of time and enticing to dredge him up from the pits of my psyche, and a middle-aged man with a brushed moustache has raised more questions about me than any hard-core porn.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘so we’ve got the stuff. Now how do I get out?’

‘Out, Ms Rosenthal?’ Anthers shook his head. ‘It isn’t possible. I thought you knew that. I only know what you know.’

‘True, but you also know what I knew, but then forgot.’

I thought about it for a bit. Overhead and underfoot the Gregorian chanting was growing confusing. I knew they had sensed my presence, and would be coming for me soon to prevent my escape. The existence of secret societies hinges on a secret to protect, and they weren’t ones to know or care about my dimension-conjoining designs.

Of course you’ve probably figured-out what happened nest. As the darkness swarmed around me and footsteps clicked on polished marble, accompanied by the rustle of robes and the whisper of perturbed voices brimming with cold menace, I decided that now was as good a time as any to put Anthers to a second use. Being a figment of my imagination as he was, it was simple enough to imagine him outside on the surface. Of course, being as real as a real person, that’s where he was. And as a part of my mind was on the surface, it stood to reason that I was on the surface, and so I was, and the laws of physics be damned.

Of course, Anthers was dead. I felt bad about it – I really did. But then, he was me, or an element of me, so I didn’t take it too harshly. Suicide’s been decriminalised. I made several attempts with the book to fuse dimensions. I managed to desegment time and disconnect my perception of it, so that the past and the future were all stretched out to either side of me and I was a spectator by the way instead of out there on the field. It didn’t do me a damn lick of good, but it felt cool, and that’s what’s most important, after all.