Tag Archives: death

Last days. Again.

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It’s funny isn’t it, how the busiest times seem to jam up at the death of things. It’s busy now, very busy, as we prepare another larger coffin for Severed Heads. How many coffins has this corpse escaped so far? Houdini!

zombie

Yeah, well, OK. But just once more.

Severed Heads is very weary. It shuffles along carrying another heavy load, confused by being alive and dead all at once. Reanimated for as long as some more publicity gets injected, but frankly it starved to death years ago. No one gave a flying fuck until it was buried. Now they keep digging it up.

dogwithbigbone

Look I found the track with old guy’s voice in it!

Weary. Now that’s the word, more spiritual than just plain old tired.

I think this coffin is going to be the big one. There’s going to be a TV crew, outside broadcast van, the contract is 47 pages long, residual rights blah blah names and likenesses blah blah LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT of this old cobble of bones. Documentation that this thing has finally carked it and “pity we didn’t go to see them when they were still around?”

Like any dying thing you keep gasping for air, it’s primal. You think that you can drag that few more minutes out of the universe, but you’re already gone. I’ve got a whole album of music I’ve been recording and some drunk midnights almost get to planning some kind of distribution. Thank God that next morning someone will write and ask if they can re-issue 1983 for the 1000th time and remind me why I just record for myself – cut out the middle man.

And frankly, the wonderful people (I really mean that) who are supporting us aren’t the current listening audience. We’re one generation away from people who go to The Opera.

Florentine-Opera-Company

If I go to the op’ra house, in the op’ra season
There’s someone sure to shout at me without the slightest reason
If I go to a concert hall to have a jolly spree
There’s someone in the party who is sure to shout at me
“Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile?
Isn’t it a nobby one, and just the proper style?
I should like to have one Just the same as that!”
Where’er I go, they shout “Hello! Where did you get that hat?”

So then, weary but not lazy. Let’s make a great show of it, entertain, play the old bones another round. Always have pride in your work. Do the song with the bloke in it after all it’s going to be on TV as long as that old Rock Arena horror. After that, well Stewart’s got a Tangerine Dream style band he keeps threatening to launch (and I’m mentioning to guilt him into launching) so I’ll ask if I can be Conrad Schnitzel. That sounds fun.

If you’ve got any suggestions for what his band should be called I reckon you tweet him. He’ll hate that. If you don’t tweet leave a suggestion here.

LikLik Retpela Hat

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Here it is. My contribution to the Gay And Lesbian Mardi Gras. Or as the mouth breathing scum that rejoice in the title ‘common people’ call it: “The Mardi Gras” with all that pervert stuff taken out. Oh they will be there – the radio has been pumping ‘I Will Survive” all week. Every straight guy within a km of Oxford Street is lisping and mincing but will be back to bashing pooftas and Muslims next week. Woo! Woo!

If I had a float, it would have Superintendent Mike Thomas on it. I don’t know what he looked like but he’d be the main attraction. I reckon. I think he was the Phantom.

Or Condoman, who as a near brother of the Phantom did all he could to save the indigenous population from AIDS. Back when we had Labor government. Don’t get me started, I can usually hold my inner Bolshie in check but the mouth breathers have been particularly bad recently.

Perhaps why Pauline Pantsdown is doing a show this weekend. Whenever I feel a bit queasy about going out and doing more shows I thank god that unlike Simon at least I don’t have to put back on the greasepaint. But it’s started to slide again and somebody has to …

INTERMISSION – Some drunk English dolly bird has fallen out of the Cricketers Arms into in my doorway babbling glottal stops on her smart phone like a parody of every UK Washed Up Raver Moved To The Colonies – “nah mate, it’s called Dub Side Of The Moon, Geddit? Drum And Bass! Wicked! Australians GO OFF this Mardi Gras mate not like back home of course what time is it there yeah got a job here cold calling gonna go to Thailand next” etc. etc.

If we are going to put people “on the boats and send them back” like the mouth breathers want can we start with this lot thanks. At least get out of my fucking doorway thank you. There, peace again.

Anyway. Simon teaches sound production at KUNST KAMP and is rightly known as one of the few locals to raise a ruckus over the evil racist shit that was going on at the time. He was rewarded with some popularity which didn’t save him from a bollocking at the same Homebake festival at which we performed in 1998. Of course the kids think something is hilarious, but even more hilarious is to beat up the person who did it. Then forget.

(sips his Victory Gin). No hope in the Proles.

This is getting maudlin. We need a joke. So the young bohemians are in need of a model again. Seems that Olde Darlinghurst is back in style, and they have discovered Madeleine Preston’s photo archive from the 1980′s. I enjoy this because I was there, but I can’t imagine why anyone else would. For example, my old drum machine:

Will the youth of today set fire to theirs so it looks chic toasted? Anyway the joke is a fashion glossy is going to be covering that extremely chic band Severed Heads and wondered if I had a bigger copy of:

Such style! Such Poise! And some minimal synth! He looks like he just realised he needs to go to the toilet and the synthesiser is too heavy to lift. The reality is it’s 1984 and I think we’re doing something for City Slab Horror. The scary thing is half the people I recognise in this photo archive are already dead.

I quite like this one:

The party is really swinging! On the floor is Bradbury and Cornaga probably arguing about something. On the bed please admire my taste in red socks and cheap trousers. Only the best from the local opportunity shop! Obviously rapt in conversation and cheap cask wine is the divine Chlorine Presley Smith who was the woman who tolerated me at the time. This is what people did before the Internet folks! Glower at each other.

(sips his Victory Gin.)

Detecting ghosts using Picasa

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The family home having been put on the market all the children have taken their burden of the artefacts that filled our parents’ lives. As the parents were in competition with the British Museum to pillage the planet for statues, carvings, parts of UFOs and weapons of mass destruction, I haven’t been able to fit much share in my little house. What I have taken on is the media including photographs that go back to the late 1800′s. I have catalogued and scanned about 4,200 so far. I think there are a few thousand more to go.

Each photo is scanned and added into Picasa, where I add tags and comments that e.g. ‘the baby in this shot went on to World War One and then must have survived because he’s the fat man holding another baby sometime later’. I turned on face recognition which was annoying at the start, but soon proved useful when it recognised Uncle Something Or Other over the decades. What I didn’t expect was that Picasa is determined to find every person in the shot no matter how bleary and distant they may be. I was deleting them when I noticed that Picasa was finding ghosts.

Here’s a typical Picasa face:

Nothing weird going on here. Ancient Ellard relative with beer.

Here Picasa insists that a face is somewhat to the left of what you or I might expect. But look again.

I am aged 8 and sitting on a couch. Picasa is much more interested in whatever is looking in the window. I can’t see it but then again Google is better at searching.

Quite typically our first real ghost is holding a ghostly beer. At least that’s what it looks like to me.

It’s the Invisible Man!

It’s not easy being green. That’s probably why he looks so down.

Keep in mind that all these showed up with face detection set to high confidence / low errors. I’m going to back up the database and then do another search with lower confidence – that’s going to really flush out all these spirits!

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The Ghost of James Dibble

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James Dibble has died.

If you are Australian and are not wearing black, you are not an Australian. If you are English then you should, because we’ll get upset when YOUR queen dies. Yanks – I guess the comparison is Edward Murrow, although it must be said Murrow was the greater man who took on demons and vanquished them.

Dibble is symbolic of … well of course whatever you want to him to be … but for me symbolic of the old colonial/socialist hybrid that was Australia, that ran on the well meaning corruption and crisp speaking we inherited from the United Kingdom. The elite were running the show, the workers had jobs, the indigenous people were tucked away out of sight, and broadcast was a signal that came from on high, holding it all together. The opposite of blogs like this.

Yet Dibble was one of the freaks, the stirrers. He was simultaneously the Voice of Control and out of control. He’d get in all kinds of escapades and could be found hanging out with the hippies and the punks in the right eras. That was part of the old system too. The ABC was an enlightened despot, as with the BBC, but with that tropical fever of the colonial administration.

In the 90′s Dibble got into computers and Internet. He probably was that 15 year old girl you thought you were chatting up on ICQ.

Richard Morecroft was like the ‘new doctor’, you know, when you grudgingly accept a younger reincarnated Time Lord and only realise how much you’d got used to him when he finally gets the shaft. Morecroft only lasted 20 years …

Must have been the flying fox he kept hidden under the news desk.

Now here’s a bit of weird shit. So I am reading about Dibble. Any cultured person would be, no doubt you already have. The odd thing is that a short while ago, out of the blue, I had a compulsion to read about Dibble. In times past we’d question what was meant by ‘a short while ago’ and did I really do so or is this just confabulation?

But browsers have memories too. On the 7th Dec at 9.23pm for some reason I did a search for ‘James Dibble’ and read his bio on Wikipedia. About a newsreader that last appeared in 1983 and I don’t think I had thought about him in quite a long time. Why?

Possibilities:

  • I am psychic about long retired television news readers. No.
  • He made a final mental broadcast from his death bed for all true viewers. Like it, but no.
  • I had posted on YouTube a cut up of the new ABC news theme I did in 2002 and it reminded me about the old news intro and consequentially James Dibble. Then he dies days later.

Sadly it’s number three. Jung would be well pleased, as it reinforces his ideas on synchronicity. As would Fort. But no psychic prowess required. Damn.

Hi Tom,

I may have posted this to you before, or to one of the Twister forums. Before you write me off as another Twister Loon, please check this link (one of Dibble’s ramblings/narrations with Russell Guy).

http://www.rumble.net/psychedelicatessen/

I’m sure you have a copy – but just in case it is lost in the archives….

Cheers

Lyle (Rhizomic)

Who is the puppet?

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Yooooooohooooooooo!

obese-woman-460x276

Whale ahoy!

Remember me? Don’t pretend! That’s right – I’m your BODY and you can think all you like but you aren’t going ANYWHERE without me. I’m with you your whole life, cradle to grave – and you can PRAY TO GOD about not needing me afterwards – but that’s not likely now is it?

No, you and me are deep in it together and you had better get used to it.

So you didn’t mind me when you were younger did you? Caught you looking  in the mirror a few times and it was ME that you were admiring. And you liked the feel of things – don’t need to remind you. Now you’re all pissed off that I keep getting older and your ‘mind’ stays young. I’ve gone flabby, my face is sagging and my hair is retreating faster than the Iraqi army. WELL TOUGH SHIT BUDDY. Take a good look in the mirror now because it’s just going to get worse and one day you’ll be howling to look as good as this again.

old-man-laughing

I'm feeling a bit better honest.

It’s all your fault – that flab is all the good times you had pouring crap down my throat, lolling around in front of a computer when you should have been doing laps. A nice sculpture of all the times you had ‘one more’. Then there’s the lines that come from all the bad times – all the times you screwed up and had to start all over again from the bottom. Shake it with genetics and serve on ice. We’re a real work of art and the best bit is way we’ve started stooping, a little now and then, getting ready to be a wizened old hunchback.

man_stooped

Pain is nature's way of saying hahahahaahahahah

Are you frightened? You better be. This is MY time. I already sent you a present with that pain in your joints. Enjoy that little tweak in your morning hobble? That’s just the first SOLO, you wait for the full ORCHESTRA. And you have to admit this week’s toothache was a real show – a lecturer that has 5 hours of continuous talking and a screaming pain in their gob. All those teeth got to go one day, may as well sound the first bugle!

Yep, by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll be looking at all the young people around you with a burning jealousy that’ll have you alienated and lonely in no time. But don’t be too jealous – for all their current youth they’re right behind you. Everyone has a body and they’re all dying.

Keep busy writing and recording and all that crap you think is going to ‘transcend’ me. We’re best buddies, and as I rot so will you. When you can’t even sign your own name – we’ll finally be equal, and maybe then you’ll just have to accept who was the REAL master here.

Totentanz_05_a

Wanna start a band?