what rhymes with chaos?

FROZEN FACE OF POLAR BEAR reviewed by JM Donellan (of Frozen Face of Polar Bear)

You might think it somewhat inappropriate for a musician to review their own gig. If this is the case you should be aware of the fact that all music reviewers are invariably one of the following:

1 Friends with the bands they see

2 Sleeping with one (or more) of the band members.

3 Would like to be sleeping with one (or more) of the band members.

4 Total jerks

The act before us is a girl with a name that I don't remember due to the fact that I was busy eating $1 tacos and being slightly concerned by the fact that Dave was finishing the lyrics to Trouble  approximately 28 minutes before heading on stage.

We had a lot of gear to set up, so while we were plugging in and tuning up Darragh entertained the crowd with an eighteen minute freestyle gangster rap on the theme of the potential sociopolitical ramifications of the large hadron collider. By the end of this the crowd had acquired a rudimentary understanding of quantum mechanics and we were ready to get started.

We opened with one of our more obscure b-sides from the early eighties, not our best song I'll be the first to admit but to be fair it was written when we only had a collective age of one Bieber (that's 16 years for those of you who aren't popular culture mathematicians.)

Soon after this point Dave got so excited that he smashed his guitar into a wall in a spectacular explosion of steel and strings. Whilst this certainly drew a rousing response from the crowd, it did unfortunately force him to play air guitar for the rest of the set, luckily Dave is an expert air guitarist and it didn't negatively affect our sound too much.

dramatised re-enactment:

Around midset Kate decided to sing the lyrics to Bluescreen in Swedish. This was an inspired move and no doubt would have lent a truly beautiful, classically European lilt to the song if not for the fact that the only Swedish that Kate knows was acquired from a childhood watching the Swedish chef on the Muppets. A Swedish diplomat who was by the strangest of coincidences in attendance began shaking his fist at us and yelling. Unfortunately, because none of us can speak Swedish we had no idea what he was saying, one can only assume it was some sort of fervent praise and adulation.

As we neared the end of the set I decided that we needed some sort of grand finale so I decided to climb on top of the speakers and perform a backflip. Tragically, it was only after I was airborne that I remembered the fact that I have no aerobatic skill whatsoever and I ended up breaking both my legs upon landing and had to finish the set playing bass on my back.

On a scale of one to eleventy thousand, I give this gig a high five. I would thoroughly recommend this and similar products to anyone with a healthy interest in either haberdashery or kierkegaardian philosophy.

Our next gig will be at SHOOT art party on October 2nd. We're planning to perform a 2 hour operatic piece based around the life and times of Rick Astley.

FUTURE SPECS: putting the "art" in party

 

 

YOU: "Oh hey man, how's it going?"    

THEM: "Oh hey there guy! Well, you know, pretty good, Carol's been redecoratising the living room and my little girl got a triple double goldstar trophy sceptre for her report on Miley Cyrus."

YOU: "Um...I'm pretty sure that there's no such thing as a triple double trophy sceptre..."

THEM: "what about you?"

YOU: "I'm going to FUTURE SPECS with all my heart and most of my liver!"

THEM: "Future Specs? I don't know Jimbo Jones, that sounds like lefto hippie commie pinko bullshit propoganda juice. Will there be....arty things?"

YOU: "All the types! Sound types! Look at it with your eyes types! Touchy touch with your fingies types! Watch the people do the things types! Plus there will be super cheap booze."

THEM: "Well Jackie James, that does sounds like all the fun things in the world. I guess I'll go. How when why wherefore?"

FUTURE SPECS

20th Feb TwentyTen

@

26 Church st, 

Fortitude Valley (just near the PCYC)

Brisbane

MUSIC>>>

RE:ENACTMENT

 

THE CITIZEN LOUD IPHONE QUINTET

 

MONSTER MONSTER

 

  

 

VISUAL ARTISTS>>>>

Beau Allen, Lix Bacskay, Anna Cooke & Rozina Suliman, Renata Fojtikova, Andrew Forsyth, Hannah Groff, David Heckenber, Monica Rohan, Jose William Vigers  

PERFORMANCE ARTISTS>>>

Daniel Santangeli, Giema Contini, Kieran Law, Gen Ganner, Thomas Quirk & Manda Boyd, Leena Reithmuller, Emma Schofield, Robert Millet's Amazing Time Machine

presented by the 4c arts collective 

FACEBOOK: 4c arts collective

TWITTER: @4carts

[email protected]

0406 083 976

CARAVAGGIO. ORWELL. ABORTION. XBOX.

I had an abortion this week. I was halfway through my follow up novel (for adults at least, my kids book is done and dusted) when I made the difficult decision to prematurely end its life. It was entitled Junk Quay: A Modern Ghost Story. Basically it was a story about blues music and quantum mechanics. This guy featured pretty heavily:

So far I haven't had any christian fundamentalists at my door, but I'm keeping plenty of death metal albums, gay porn and hardmount prints of Piss Christ on hand to ward them off if neccessary. The good news is that this has given me the chance to dive straight into my next book which I was much more excited about anyway. Expect God in a Coma to hit shelves sometime before the end of the world.

Lately I've been accused by many people, my girlfriend among them, of being a self-promotion whore. I justify this by the fact that this is my first art baby. I'm a bit like that annoying friend you have who's just had their first kid and starts working it into every single conversation you have with them by the most implusible segue imaginable:

You: Hey, have you read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart? I think, for me, it epitomises the pinnacle of African literature and perfectly encapsulates the feeling of fear and confusion that faces a ancient culture dealing with the plague of European colonisation.

Them: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PHOTO OF MY BABY???

You: Uh...yeah I think you should me one last week...

Them: Oh! That was when he was three months and THREE days. This is him at three months and SIX days! Doesn't he look so grown up! Look at the way he's looking at that Caravaggio print on the wall, I think he really has a basic grasp on critiquing and appreciation Baroque era Chiaroscuro painting!

"waaaah! Caravaggio's excessive use of shadows
exemplifying chiarsocuro painting displeases me! I'm having a pre-naptime existential crisis!"

In any case, it's only two weeks until the Australian release of A Beginner's Guide to Dying in India and in preparation I've been drinking too much and spending an unhealthy amount of time playing xbox, much like my literary heores George Orwell and Anthony Burgess did before the release of their respective masterpieces.

    "I pwned yr droids with my l33t skillz!"

I've been asked if I'll sign copies when it is released. People, seriously, I will lick, bless, baptise and sign in my own blood any copy you want to obtain in exchange for your not very hard earned cash. 

People outside of Os-Tray-Lee-Arg can already get it here: AMAZON.COM:http://is.gd/4EcCk or here:THE BOOK DEPOSITORY (UK/EUROPE): http://is.gd/4EbWt

Both stores ship anywhere in the world except Sarah Palin's house. Plus they have heaps of other amazing books like the Bell Jar and Of Mice and Men that TV characters sometimes mention in a very obvious and unnatural way when the lazy script writer is trying to make them appear educated in the space of the few minutes of content between coke commercials.

If you write a review for me I will be forever in your debt. Seriously I'll give you a kidney or something. It may not be MY kidney, but nevertheless...

PEOPLE (AND OBJECTS) I WOULD RATHER BE THAN DAN BROWN

Often when I mention to people that I am a writer, their eyes light up and they say :

"Oh! So you’re going to be the next Dan Brown!" Here, for the record, is a list of people and objects that I would RATHER be than the aforementioned ‘writer.’

THE MOULDY STRAWBERRY IN MY REFRIGERATOR

Sure, this little bugger has missed his moment. There was a time when it could have brought both joy and sustenance, whereas now he will be relegated to the refuse, along with all my mail marked 'payment due immediately'. But at least this strawberry once HAD this potential. 

 

     

Once, like its brethren that are still in passable shape, it could have been enjoyed with ice-cream on a warm summer’s afternoon, or as part of a delectable fruit salad, or even in isolation as a light and tasty snack. The same cannot be said of The Davinci Code. I mean, have you tried eating that thing? It has an awful texture and a taste so potently bland that it makes the interior content look positively sumptuous in comparison.

THE MOP BOY AT THE PEEP SHOW IN THE VALLEY

This has long been regarded as the most notoriously foul job that a human being could ever attain. Sometimes I wonder what he tells his parents he does for a ‘living’? “Yeah mum, work at the office is going great. Lots of mergers, and…um…acquisitions, closers and…hang on I think that’s work calling. Oh, shit. I gotta go. There’s been an unexpected liquidation.”

That said, he probably gets to look at naked girls all day. So there is that. And any trauma that the poor fellow has endured cannot possibly compare with the guilt of sullying the minds of millions with pedestrian dialogue and a plot structure so contrived it could have been written by the scripting team of Saved by the Bell. Which brings us conveniently to:

SCREECH

Saved By the Bell wrapped up in 1993, to be followed by Saved By the Bell: the College Years, to which Screech returned, after knocking back offers from Scorsese, Spielberg and Tarantino. His real name is Dustin Diamond, as if you even care.

    

                At first I was like                             But then I was all           

Screech didn’t return for the cast’s recent 20 year reunion. Whether this was because he wasn’t invited or because he was busy researching the potential implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation in relation to the dynamics of subatomic particles in a closed environment paradigm I couldn’t say. All I know is I would rather be this weird looking guy that I will forever associate with canned laughter and bowls of fruity loops than the hack who penned Digital Fortress.

THAT CREEPY GUY WHO LIVES ACROSS THE ROAD

Sure we’ve had our differences (as detailed here) but no matter how much that surly, chain-smoking and mostly likely sociopathic creep terrifies me, he will never, ever harm me so much as the fateful moment when I walked into an Angus and Robertson bookstore in 2005. There, in the #1 slot of the ‘Top 100 Books of all time', was the Da Vinci Code. Next to that vast selection of literary genius, Dan Brown’s pulpy thriller looked much like an overweight, drug addled cross-dresser in the line up for Miss Universe auditions.

 

one of these things is not like the other...

The greatest books of ALL TIME people. That means more than the last five years. Come on, To Kill a Mocking Bird? 1984? Have you people ever even been inside a library? And no, being inside a librarian does not count. Much to my relief, when the list was updated last year, there was wasn’t a single Dan Brown entry in the WHOLE LIST.

This means that either:

1 People either repressed all memory of his books to the bitter depths of their unconscious, to dwell with their memories of having their eyebrows shaved at year eight camp and that time that their cousin made a pass at them after a few too many Jager shots.

 OR

2 The whole thing was just a terrible dream. Like the Bush administration.

Coincidentally, in 2008 a certain bespectacled wizard took the top spot.

With Twilight at #2. Yay?

TEQUILA WORMHOLES

A few days ago, during the blurry concluding moments of a satisfactorily debaucherous party I had been hosting, we got onto the subject of quantum mechanics. Now my knowledge in this area is superficial at the best of times, (I’ve been doing some preliminary research for my next book), but at 3am after consuming most of a bottle of tequila and the worm dwelling within I managed to start inexpertly rambling about the Copenhagen Interpretation and Many Worlds Theory. Embarrassingly, one of the two other people involved in the discussion was a PhD student whose research included work in this area and the errors in my statements were pointed out before I could manage to drunkenly talk my way around them. I am normally able to do this quite capably owing to the fact that I inexplicably become more verbose and articulate when drunk. I also frequently develop the notion that I am the world’s greatest dancer, and then proceed to epileptically flail like a monkey on psycho-amphetamines. But that’s neither here nor there, (nor on youtube, thankgod…)

In any case, my initial research into this field has left me questioning my place in the universe(s) to the point that I am having trouble sleeping. I’ve always been confused by people who say that they have recognised their part in the universe is insignificant and regard this as somehow emancipating. I believe the exact opposite. It takes just one single human being who generates just ONE seminal idea to change the entire world. Look at the impact of inspirational artists, activists and scientists like Einstein, Picasso, Martin Luther King and Larry Graham. Yeah that’s right Larry Graham. Imagine a world without slap bass. No, wait, don’t. It would be so horrible that your heart may spontaneously implode and I don’t want to be indirectly responsible for that unless you are Sarah Palin, in which case go ahead.

                                       

Many worlds theory, and I apologise for the hugely inappropriate brevity of this description, claims that every action or inaction ever performed by every living thing anywhere, ever creates a parallel universe. Ever time you drink dial your ex girlfriend, every time you eat one too many chocolate chip cookies, every time you mean to start reading ‘War and Peace’ but end up watching ‘Australian Idol’ you create a tangent reality. Your actions, according to this theory, do not only change the entire world, but CREATE entire new universes. Imagine something like the word of god with tourettes:

                        

I don’t believe human beings are in the least bit insignificant. I believe the true tragedy is that we live in a society where so few not only reach our full  staggering potential, but never even recognise that we are capable of creating change on a colossal scale. Every one of us is capable of becoming Ted Bundy or Mahatma Ghandi, Osama or Obama, Stalin or Steiner. Tragically, most of us end up as nothing more than Joe the plumber. Then again, McCain did seem to think he was fairly pivotal in the last election….