Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television, But Radio? Go Nuts.

The challenge - type each of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television into iTunes and see what comes up. Post some kickin' tunes. This week, the word Piss doesn't seem to be used a lot by my favourite artists (or even the ones where I've just gone "Meh, that looks interesting" on Hype Machine then forgotten about), but what lacks in quantity we make up in quality.

• Jon Cougar Concentration Camp, Cold Piss - I wasn't expecting much when I downloaded this, being that I was more interested in the fact that this band has the funniest name I've encountered in many a year, but it's actually shitloads of fun. You think you're hot shit, but you ain't nothin' but - Cold Piss!

• Nirvana, Territorial Pissings - anyone remember the rivalry between Guns'n'Roses and Nirvana? Axl Rose, apparently expecting that he and Kurt should be natural allies - we both got beaten up at school a lot, right? - approaches Kurt in a friendly manner only to have Kurt immediately identify Axl as the guy who beat him up at high school a lot. Hilarity ensues.

• TISM, A Hard-Earned Thirst Needs A Big Cold Beer, But I Drink To Get Pissed - Truer words were never spoken.

• Patti Smith, Piss Factory - Keith McEwan, in his memoir Once A Jolly Comrade, recalled that the trigger to his joining the Australian Communist Party was getting the sack for being too good at his job. In this song, Patti discovers that on the production line, nobody likes a smart-arse.
  

• Ween, Piss Up A Rope - Apparently, you can't do it. I missed Ween's live shows this year, because I am an idiot, but Captain's Dead have kindly posted the Enmore Theatre show, which you should download immediately. This is nicked from that post. (You may like to cross-reference this with the similar sounding Tie My Pecker To My Leg, by Mojo Nixon.)

Honourable mention to Against Me!'s Piss and Vinegar - not my sort of thing, but it's available for download somewhere in this list.

Today's uploads hosted by box.net

Jock Cheese Alive & Well

For the many folk who have been coming here on the search "Jock Cheese", it is not Jock Cheese, the bass player of TISM, who died (despite what the Age and Beat magazine have to say), it is James Paull, the guitarist known as Tokin Blackman (but known to his friends as Jock) who has died of cancer at the age of 51.

http://www.smartartists.com.au/artists/jock.php

Seven Words You Can Probably Say On Television Any Time You Like, Part I

So here's the deal. I want you to type George Carlin's seven words you can't (OK, couldn't - this is 2008, and on Australian television you just need a warning before the show) say on television, one at a time, into the search box in iTunes (or another player if that will work). Post a list of what comes up, and post some of the more interesting tunes.

This will probably work better on punk rock blogs than any other kind, but country-and-western and metal should get a look in and who knows? There's some pretty explicit olde-tyme jazz and blues out there (and yes, I know what "jazz" means, but I would never say "Jazz me baby!").

Today's word: SHIT

Song	Artist	Album
The Ol' Shit	The Beasts Of Bourbon	Sour Mash
Shit Like That	Butthole Surfers	Weird Revolution
I Wanna Fuck The Shit Out Of You	G.G. Allin and ANTiSEEN	Murder Junkies
Tough Fuckin' Shit	GG Allin	You Give Love A Bad Name
Shitcanned Again	The Immortal Lee County Killers II	Love is a Charm of Powerful Trouble
The kids are all shite	Mikrofisch	Demo 2007
Boss Shitkicker	Moodists	Two Fisted Art
Degrassi Junior High	Pigshit	Box - a tv theme tribute
3D Sex Show	Shitdisco	Kingdom Of Fear
OK	ShitDisco	Kingdom Of Fear
Bullshit	This Is Serious Mum	De Rigueurmortis
The Horse, not the Horseshit	This Is Serious Mum	De Rigueurmortis
I Shit Me	This Is Serious Mum	Great Truckin' Songs of the Renaissance
It's Novel. It's Unique. It's Shithouse	This Is Serious Mum	Hot Dogma
TISM Are Shit	This Is Serious Mum	The White Albun
Don't Shit Where You Eat	Ween	Chocolate & Cheese
You're Full of Shit	X-X	1st 7"

TISM represent! This is not a bad selection of indie rock and punk if I may say so myself.

"I Wanna Fuck The Shit Out Of You" is about one thousandth as good as it should be, but "Tough Fuckin' Shit" is great and has a wonderfully incongruous surf guitar intro.

"OK" by Shitdisco is on permanent rotation in the "Aerobics" folder of my iRiver.

"You're Full of Shit" is a mystery song that sounds quite a bit like the Voidoids. I don't know where I got it, I don't know anything about the band, and I can't find them by searching (x-x is one of those unsearchable band names, like Fuck and The The) - little help here?

Ween are represented in other sections of this list. Today, they have some advice you really can't ignore.

OK, now it's your turn. And you know, tits shouldn't even be on the list!

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Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television

OK, here's the start of my meme. Watch and listen! Tomorrow you'll have homework.

A few quick bullet points

Hello. I haven't blogged lately because I've been having too much fun. I do have what I hope will be a tremendously exciting internet meme coming up very soon, but in the meantime, here are some squibs.

• Old School Unionism - In which an old school Fabian has Ms .45 punching the air and going "Fuck yeah!". It's about the continuing decline in union membership in Australia and the unions' frankly inadequate response, particularly in reference to young and casualised workers. I didn't know the stuff about recruiting shearers in the early days of Australian unionism, so this was a useful eye-opener.

• I've lost about 5kg since leaving uni in mid-2007, and have been utilising my workplace's small but SUBSIDISED gymnasium with inspiration by Stumptuous. Stumptuous provides a feminist view of health and weight training and is refreshingly free of faddism (if you don't count Krista's obsession with squatting). The recent Stumptuous Fitness Model competition was intended to reward women who have made improvements to their fitness in the face of difficulty, perhaps starting from a position of advanced age or obesity. Give it a shot, you're probably nearly as fat as I am anyway.
  

• Just in! Greg Wadley has recently had the opportunity to interview DC Root of ROOT! fame. It's a good interview - obviously done by email, giving both parties the chance to extemporise.

This is my terrible problem: if I sense everyone raving about a band, I'm out of there before you can say Thom Yorke. And I'll wait till about 5 years after they've had their day and disappeared off the face of the planet...and secretly love them! I must have rock-historian disease, or something. I have to enjoy everything retrospectively... I'm also still trying to catch up on artists I never knew during their day -- so last week I was listening to Dusty Springfield, Hunky Dory by Bowie, the Temptations. I had my experimental music phase a long time ago when I was hanging around black clad bookish girls in the vain hope that after a night of Jarry's Ubu trilogy performed by some avante garde troupe in a hell hole somewhere in Fitzroy we could cruise over to the Black Cat for a chinotto and light discussion about how becoming precedes being, and then maybe later she'd let me pop my Converses under her bed.

These days I prefer air guitaring at home to Thin Lizzy. I get about as much sex.

• NEW EYEZMAZE!!! Great idea, too - solve four separate mazes, you win when the family members are brought together. Not original as such, there are lots of games where you need to get multiple figures to the portal, but the fact that the mazes are in completely separate frames fucks up your shit just that little bit more.

Coming very soon - Rufus from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure...

Surviving the Coming Zombie Invasion

Kingdom of Loathing player Watts is hosting a competition in May - submit your zombie survival plan for three different situations (local, national and worldwide zombie infestation) and win great prizes! It's world-wide - if your entry wins, Watts will visit a website that delivers locally to your country and buy you the prize. The prizes are:

• Resident Evil 4, for whatever system suits you
  
• A copy of Max Brooks' World War Z or Zombie Survival Guide
  
• A t-shirt with the words "I had a great zombie plan but all I got was this Crappy T-Shirt" (probably handwritten in Sharpie by Watts himself)

The competition is intended to be aimed at Watts' fellow KoL/WoW players, and this post is aimed at the good folks who visit here from KoL (and occasionally JayIsGames). It seems a few of us have decided to give him a bit of free publicity - keep an eye on the competition page as he makes changes (or just collapses under all the extremely well-thought-out entries...).

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You Got Nothing I Want - Cold Chisel 101

Back in December '07, Bitterandrew from Armagideon Time posted a summary of an old issue of Hit Parader from November 1981, which rather intriguingly mentions Cold Chisel as "an Aussie rock outfit deemed 'likely' to follow in the footsteps of AC/DC and Air Supply". I asked if he'd actually heard any Chisels and he was curious, so I thought I'd remedy the total lack of Cold Chisel on The Hype Machine and try to explain it to our FTA partners.

How would you explain Chisels to an American? The first thing that jumps to mind is the "Freebird" joke. You know how this goes - you go and see some sensitive balladeer like Sufjan Stevens or Ryan Adams and, during a lull in the show, some wag in the audience yells "Freebird!". Well, in Australia, it's "Play some Chisels!".

An unsuspecting migrant trying to fill in Australia's immigration tests might wrongly think that Australia's national anthem is Advance Australia Fair. The correct answer is, of course, Khe Sanh, the poignant tale of a VietNam vet who returns to Australia only to fail to cope with civilian life. To adequately describe the significance of this Australian Marseillaise, I must turn to people far more competent than I:

an incredibly annoying song that is played at the end of every outer suburban Year 12 Social to a group of vomiting underage drinkers, and every function involving boorish Rock Spider Aussies making utter cocks of themselves abroad, and every footy trip/Grand Final barbeque/buck's night, or any other gathering popular with people who's main philosophy is 2-4-6-8-Bash-A-Gay-Til-He's-Straight...

During the 70s and 80s, Cold Chisel and their fans were despised by indie and alternative types, many of whom bore bruises inflicted by Chisels' more closely-related fans, and it was not until about the middle of this decade that Cold Chisel enjoyed a certain amount of rehabilitation (although songwriter Don Walker has always been held in high esteem by your male white Hornby wannabe's, and rightly so).

In general, Cold Chisel's most popular songs are straight-down-the-line rock, with some sentimental ballads slowing the pace a little. What saves Chisels from being utter shit is the quality of the songwriting. Mostly handled by Don Walker - but all members of the band contributed songs - the songs enable you to see the characters and step into their lives. I don't write this lightly - when you listen to Ita, you can see the stoner share-house full of bogans watching quality TV like Beauty and the Beast. You can relate to the guy who foolishly told his girlfriend they should take a break from their relationship, only for her to up stumps and get married to someone else. I absolutely guarantee you're hankering to rip the headset off, tell the customer to go fuck themselves and head off to Bow River, whatever that may be for you. I mean, for me Bow River is the East Brunswick Club (I have small dreams). The point is that just because I'm a middle-class* softcock doesn't mean I can't see myself in a Chisels song. Here's a great little explanation of the appeal of the Ian Moss-penned Bow River.

*For widely varying definitions of middle class - the reason this post is four months overdue is that I got a job as a real live pubic servant in February, and my life has been a whirlwind of business cases and benchmarking and probity, but not the good kind of probity.

You Must Know:

Khe Sanh
Just what it says on the box. If you don't know any other Chisels songs, this is the one you need to know.

My Turn To Cry
"When I told you just have a good time I think you took me all wrong - next thing you're engaged and a kid is coming along." Remember Barnsey next time you're thinking of suggesting to your partner that you should consider a trial separation.

Choir Girl
Possibly the world's only Top 40 hit about abortion.

No Sense
No Sense is unusual in two regards - firstly, it's stylistically quite distinct from Cold Chisel's typical output, and secondly, it was written by singer Jimmy Barnes, whose career both in Cold Chisel and as a solo artist has not suggested that spiky, post-punk screeds are really his thing.

Bow River
Like a more mainstream version of Take This Job And Shove It.

You Got Nothing I Want
Chisels' response to not breaking the American market.

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Matador Intended Play sampler 2008

I'm not the kind of person who buys everything on a label - I'd like to think people are over that by now - and samplers are often, erm, samply, in the one-song-is-awesome-the-rest-are-pants sense. But I downloaded Matador's annual sampler for 2008 (warning: that's a 70Mb zip file) in a flurried frenzy of downloading in preparation for Cherryrock08, and there's quite a range of decent stuff on it. My picks - Mission of Burma's That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate, The Cave Singers' Helen, Jay Reatard's Always Wanting More and Matmos' Polychords.

There's a reason I'm a public servant and not a record reviewer, you know.

The New Pornographers - All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth (live)

The Cave Singers - Helen

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Hark! A Vagrant, eh?

Please to be noticing in the Not Music column to the right, a link to comic website Hark! A Vagrant! It's Canadian! It's Catholic! It's hilarious! (fails to think of synonym for 'very funny' beginning with a hard-c sound, can't be arsed looking one up)

Click on Tesla to read about more famous historical figures. Margaret Trudeau, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry VIII and Marcel Duchamp provide fun for the whole family. Well, possibly not Margaret Trudeau.




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Casual Gameplay Game Design Competition #5

They're at it again in a seemingly endless series. Jayisgames' new Game Design competition gives you eight weeks to design a Flash game with the theme "Upgrade". There are great new prizes but also new entry requirements, so be sure to read the entry form carefully. Good luck!

Popular culture no longer applies to me - Art Brut, Corner Hotel, 19.12.07

I didn't know this when I went in, but support act Telecom won their slot by entering a competition on RRR. They sounded like the sort of band who win competitions - quite competent, with nothing overtly bad about them. I think you know what that means, but you decide.

Plastic Palace Alice were a tiny bit more interesting, but not my sort of thing. At first, from my position sitting on the floor in front of the Art Brut stage (note for non-Vics: The Corner Hotel has two stages) I thought "they sound a bit like Icehouse". Then I realised that what they were really after was Bowie. That's not a good sign, but they didn't suck, and perhaps you will like their stuff more than I.

Art Brut were FUCKING GREAT. At one point, it was as if I'd just woken up from a five-year coma and realised: I'M SEEING A FUCKING ROCK BAND AT A PUB AND IT'S FUCKING AWESOME!!! I have been ensconced in an arts degree, and for several years refused to even pick up a copy of Beat or InPress because my inability to afford rock gigs would cause suicidal ideation. As you can see from reading my blog, I've seen bands since finishing uni, but this was the first time I felt like I was 23 again (we'll just gloss over the fact that I was too creaky to get into the enthusiastic pogoing of the rest of the audience).

I don't have the second album, just a few downloads from other blogs, but it didn't matter because it's not like any of the songs were going to suck. And even if they did suck it still would have been fun. I can't remember any of the hilarious on-stage banter, just the general wackiness and the fact that everyone in Art Brut looks like they're in completely different bands, and narrowly missing getting kicked in the head by Eddie on a foray into the audience or in the middle of pulling his pants up.

A sure indication of how awesome and fun this gig was is my big complaint about the gig. You see, after the first two songs, Eddie Argos picked up the set lists, tore them up and instructed the audience to yell out what they wanted to hear. It was great fun... except that, instead of pulling the usual stunt of not playing my favourite song, they played my favourite song - Bad Weekend - second, after opening with Formed a Band. As a result, I was surrounded by happy people shrieking the name of their particular favourite ("EMILY KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANE!!!!!!") while I sat there feeling a bit baffled.

If your major complaint about a gig is that they play your favourite song too early, you can safely recommend it to thirty or so anonymous blog readers. Art Brut are touring Britain as of Jan 25 08, so if you're in the area I order you to see them.



Bad Weekend

When you're around, I'm always laughing - The Church and Divinyls, 16.12.07

I probably should have known this before, but Steve Kilbey is frickin' hilarious. I only know two Church songs, and I think you know what they are*, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Church's set without knowing any of the music. It was a bit prog but not offensively so, and Kilbey is not afraid to take the piss out of himself and the audience. Like so:

Because Sydney is better than Melbourne... [audience laughs] it's nothing personal, you just know it's true, because we've got it all, we've got cocaine and hookers and last year a guy in an accounting firm got done for sexually interfering with a rabbit [audience pisses themselves]

[to audience heckle] how's my ear? Or how's my rear? My rear's fine, my ear's not so good... you better hope your rear's this great when you're 53. ... actually, I'm only 26, I've just had a really hard life.

Interestingly, Kilbey actually looks better now than he did 20 or 30 years ago, an impressive feat (and a point of interest for The Fauves' Andrew Cox, who bears a startling resemblance to Kilbey). Apparently some bloggers have already dismissed The Church's support slot as crap - that's unbelievable, the sound was great and the music sexy. If you're going to catch this show on tour, just relax and enjoy the trip.

Enjoy the literary stylings of Steve Kilbey

*After I wrote that I only knew two songs, I searched YouTube and realised that, actually, I know more than I realised. Here's a good one, Reptile, chosen because it's representative of The Church's show tonight and because Kilbey looks fucking hot in the video.



Divinyls came on looking a bit stiff and haggard. Chrissie, as you know, has multiple sclerosis, causing people to point and go "ha ha, she's pissed" - but to be honest, so far it doesn't seem to be affecting her a lot. She's a bit slower than she used to be, but fuck me, SHE'S CHRISSY AMPHLETT AND SHE PWNS YOUR SORRY LITTLE ARSE. And she would do so in a wheelchair with a nebuliser and a colostomy bag.

In any case, the band loosened up after about four songs and you'd never know they were entering their 50s after a life of partying hard. I just discovered that Chrissie is married to the Divinyls' current drummer Charlie Drayton, which makes for an interesting in-band dynamic given her relationship(s) with Mark McEntee. Onstage Amphlett, McEntee and occasionally even Owen bicker like an old married couple, which is hilarious to watch. Everyone in the band's really old but they still rock like motherfuckers.

As always happens when I see bands I like a lot, my favourite live songs were the ones I don't necessarily like so much at home. I was a bit disappointed with Only Lonely, and why wouldn't I be? It's only one of my favourite songs of all time. Whereas the duellin' guitar between Mark McEntee and Charlie Owen on Make Out Alright was frickin' awesome, and the new tracks Don't Wanna Do This and Asphyxiated rocked much harder than on the free single we were given as we went into the show. (I actually like Asphyxiated much better than Don't Wanna Do This - when I first heard it I thought it must have been a song I didn't remember from Monkey Grip.) I was also very happy to hear a comparatively obscure fave, Guillotine Day from the excellent What A Life! album. Unsurprisingly, the highlight of the night was I Touch Myself, which I've been singing all night despite my inability to hold a tune if you glued it to my hand.

As I mentioned on my Stereo Total post, my favourite bands have a nasty habit of not playing MY favourite song live. In the case of the Divinyls, that's this one here.



[EDIT: Adem with an E has a great post with some footage from the Geelong gig taken by mobile phone. And great to see I'm not the only one who missed Siren!]

ROOT! Supposed He Was Out of the Question

Having seen ROOT! several times over the last few months, it was inevitable that the album wasn't going to be as awesome as the live shows. Whereas on stage DC Root sounds angry, or as angry as he ever gets in public, on the album he sounds like he's on Play School. It's like Tony Martin's story about seeing Neil Diamond live, but in reverse - whereas Diamond failed to deliver the line "Good Lord!!!" as promised on Hot August Night, on the otherwise awesome album version of Back to Mine, the bit about wrapping a brick in the cover of a book on management theory to take someone out of their comfort zone is mysteriously missing. Similarly, on School Mum (see below), the line "skinny girls with big fat issues/see you later, ain't gonna miss you" just disappears. Don't get me started on the fact that Crown Tower Blues isn't on the album at all.
Still, not everyone has had the privilege of having seen ROOT! five times in as many months, so those of you who have been cursing us Melbournians to the sky can finally taste the ROOT!y goodness. You'll like it - it's funny, it's bouncy, it bears only a cursory resemblance to country & western. And if you buy it, they'll be able to afford to tour, so you know what you need to do. Give ROOT! some much-needed touring money.

School Mum
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I took the "the temperment type" quiz on gURL.com
		I am... melancholic According to Galen's ancient theory of temperaments, people with melancholic temperaments are often perfectionists, and are analytically oriented. They are said to be sensitive and loving, but may also be hard to please because of their high standards. Read more... What's your temperment?

I'm not the revolution, I'm just your boyfriend - new Electric Six

It took me about four years to get into Electric 6, mainly because Danger! High Voltage! is, if not a novelty song, close enough if you need one. What converted me was the discovery that E6 are basically AC/DC on acid and possibly sleep deprivation. They bring the riffs and every other song is about fucking, with the additional benefit of strange, original and thought-provoking lyrics (admittedly, the thought is usually "WTF?").

Exterminate is a bit more polished and commercial than previous albums, but having been absolutely shat on by critics and fans alike for the grossly underrated Switzerland, they seem to have bowed to the demands of the fratboys derided in It's Showtime! and brought back the giant riffs and shouting. However, for those of us who actually liked Switzerland, there's still plenty of relatively subtle, poppy material and electronica. Supposedly, the theme of the album is "excess" (write me 6000 words on the theme of "excess" by the end of today, two weeks detention). The lyrics appear to have, if not story arcs - this is not a Tom Waits review - a self-contained motif, as opposed to shrieking about fire and America and stuff (not that there's anything wrong with that). That doesn't mean I have any fucking idea what they're on about; although there does seem to be a significant whinge about women who are just too demanding (Kukuxumushu, White Train, Lenny Kravitz... I mean, suck it up, dude), there's still plenty of senseless rhyming for the people who like that sort of thing (Rip It, Dirty Looks). Along the way there are Easter Eggs like "Satan destroys you/but Jesus puts you in a bowl and smokes you" (White Train) and the title of this post (Kukuxumushu). Even the songs that are a bit less good may have irresistible hooks (Dance Pattern) or amusing lyrics (Fabulous People).

I wanted to post a selection of tracks that would represent the range of styles here, but quickly realised I would just end up posting the whole album, and if I do that I'm never going to get another Australian tour. So I chose these two as covering the rock-electronica spectrum:

Rip It - YAAAAAAAY RIFFS!!!
Broken Machine - Emo electronica, Gary Numan stylee. You know you're chronically depressed when you think shit like this is really profound. Help me, I'm turning emo!

I've been an impoverished student for the last five years and therefore missed their last tour. For the love of Zod, buy this album!

Ding dong, the witch is dead

I'd like to believe that we have a new government because of this (slightly outdated, it's from a couple of years ago)...



...but to be honest, I think people just went "Ooh, shiny".

I'm also less than stoked by the landslide majority in the House of Reps, but the really interesting place is the Senate, where the conservative parties (Liberals, Nationals, Family First) have 38 seats, the "left" parties (ALP, Greens) have 37, and independent Senator Nick Xenophon, who split his preferences between a conservative ticket and a leftish ticket and who has tended to campaign on issues that should attract bipartisan support, such as gambling. He's in for an exciting 6 years.

There are two things that should give Labor supporters pause: firstly, the real possibility of an imminent economic downturn, and secondly, what will happen now that the ALP holds *ALL* Australian governments. In both instances, there is likely to be what the economists call a "correction". I know I wouldn't bleed very hard if Labor went down in Victoria - can you tell the difference between Brumby and The Other Guy? Victoria's not due for another state election until 2010, having passed a US-style law to hold elections on the last Saturday of November every four years, but it will be interesting to see what will happen to other states and territories.

This reserve won't stop me from shouting myself a tall glass of something with bubbles in it tomorrow afternoon, though.

More voting fun

GetUp have created a rather nifty little website called HowShouldIVote.com.au, which allows you to fill in a quick quiz to establish roughly how you should fill out your preferential vote card for the House of Representatives. (Such an exercise for the Senate would require SETI to power, which is why they don't offer it.) It's not 100% foolproof - my results had the CEC ahead of the Greens and the Liberals ahead of Family First - but it's near enough, and if you aren't too fussed about how the numbers after 3 flow, you may find it useful. (I wouldn't be devastated if my vote was submitted the way GetUp generated it, I just want to switch a couple of minor parties around.)

If the whole preferential voting thing makes your head whirl, GetUp have thoughtfully provided a mostly non-partisan guide to the Australian electoral system in plain English.

My life as a rockist

I'm not gonna pretend I had an idyllic childhood - it frankly sucked - and, like all bullied children, I had my refuge. Others had dungeons and dragons or SF - I had rock music. If, for any reason, I'm ever called on to discuss my religion, I'll say I'm an atheist or agnostic (depending on whether it's a nice day or I've gotten laid recently), but it would be pretty reasonable, given the role that music plays in my life, to describe myself as a "rockist". Consider the following:

ROLE IN FAMILY LIFE: My mum recently confessed that my parents' marriage is based entirely on the fact that "we both love rock'n'roll music". We spent a lot of time travelling (in one jaunt, we were on the road for six months in a hotted-up F100), and in that time not once was the radio off. We would sing along to "House of the Rising Sun" in our genetically-disadvantaged voices, in a painful but effective bit of family bonding. When we settled down nothing changed. I would wake up on a bright sunny day to be informed that, although the desktop hides Ita's hips, Barnsey's imagination is strong. When my mum discovered my dad was screwing around on her, she sang him Mental As Anything's "If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?" Alhamdulillah, they got back together after awhile, owing to the healing powers of rock'n'roll (and possibly being too cranky for any other partners).




RITES OF PASSAGE: Beginning with my seventh birthday, I would annually receive a gift certificate for Brashes record chain. The first album I ever bought myself was with one of these. Given my avowed love of disco, you will not be surprised to learn that the album was The Pointer Sisters' Greatest Hits. In addition to the rite of passage of learning responsibility for one's musical choices, I also learnt the taste of bitter disappointment as the season's current hit, I'm So Excited, wasn't on the album.

It's not just me, though: my sister and I were sitting around at Mum's place, as young adults, listening to Black Sabbath's Paranoid. My mum sighed nostalgically and told us, "I had my first passionate kiss to this song."




RITUAL AND SACRIFICE: As you would expect from a family of devout rockists, we owned a pretty decent stereo. My dad had this alarming habit of putting a pillow on the floor, putting the speakers on each side of the pillow, plugging in the headphones and switching the settings to play through both speakers and headphones (no, I don't know why it had this function either), lying on the pillow with the headphones on, cranking it up to 11 and playing Stairway to Heaven, loudly declaring "This song is better than an orgasm!!!".

Unsurprisingly, he suffers from tinnitus these days.*

*Just to let the truth ruin a good story, the tinnitus is probably industrial rather than a result of musical self-abuse, but this couldn't have helped.

ADORATION: Despite my self-description as a "rockist", I don't shy away from great pop and electronica, and as a kid I was a Durannie. I was deeply in love with John Taylor, and have only recently realised that he's actually a pretty decent bass player. My devotion was such that, when offered a chance to learn to ride horses at the age of 11, I refused, because The Reflex was showing on whatever shitty afternoon music video show was the shit at that age. (It was hosted by Jonathon Coleman and was called "Live Wire", if I recall correctly. It definitely wasn't Simon Townsend's Wonder World, which I also watched religiously.) I never really liked horses.



ADULTHOOD: For my 18th birthday, I was given tickets - plural - to the Angels at EV's in Croydon, an all ages venue. I say plural because originally, my mum's best friend's husband had bought one ticket for me. His wife tore him a new one and demanded that he buy me another ticket - a pointless and humiliating exercise for this friendless wonder. I asked some people who didn't really hate me if they wanted to go, but they were washing their hair. I tore up the extra ticket in fury, and went by myself. It's still one of the greatest rock performances I've ever seen, and I still go to gigs by myself.


Disappointingly, they didn't play Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again.

VIRGIN SACRIFICE: The loss of my virginity, at the age of 19, involved no music at all. Unsurprisingly, it was shit.


To be honest, this has nothing to do with any specific event in my life, although it was a huge hit at an impressionable age and is one of my favourite songs of all time. It's mainly here as a reminder that Stephen Cummings was totally hot back in the day, and prematurely gray 30 year olds still totally do it for me.

Voting above the line - will it bring on the apocalypse?

Last Federal Election, I spent a great deal of time printing out "how to vote" pdfs from the Australian Electoral Commission to reassure myself that I hadn't done anything that might have caused Family First's Steve Fielding to get elected. In fact, I hadn't - I'd spent a good ten minutes painstakingly voting below the line, numbering my preferences from 1 to about 15 or so, then going the other way and sequencing the bottom numbers from 63 up to about 40, then trying to remember where I was up to on each side so I didn't accidentally end up with two 36's and invalidate my vote.

(For non-Australian readers, voting is compulsory and enforced in this country, and it is preferential, which means you number your preferences in order, so that an electorate selects the candidate they despise the least. The AEC publishes a handy Flash guide here. It's pretty easy at the House of Reps level, where you'll have maybe 10 candidates at most to rank, but the Senate is where every unelectable freak chooses to express themselves, blowing out the numbers to 60-70 candidates. As a result, there is the option to vote "above the line", where you tick one box, say, Australian Democrats, and you accept that party's preferences. Understandably, it's a pretty hardcore political nerd who bothers to vote below the line.)

Anyhoo, for the current election I stumbled on the extremely useful listing of group voting tickets for the Senate. Simply pick the state you live in, download the pdf and find out how political parties are distributing their votes. Each party's votes cover two pages of pdf - just find the party closest to your ideological outlook and make sure they haven't done anything hilarious like preference a party that's largely against what most of their supporters would want just to spite a party that's reasonably similar to what most of their supporters would want. (You can interpret that any way you like.)

Your hide will make a fine poncho!

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TISM for non-TISM fans

This is a range of TISM mp3's for people who haven't heard any TISM or who have only heard stuff like Greg! The Stop Sign! They're in chronological order, and were originally intended to show the diversity of TISM's oevre... then I realised that I'd just picked comparatively obscure songs that I like and that weren't so topical they were outdated or incomprehensible to anyone outside of Melbourne's south-east, so they're not that diverse.

Lyrics range from extremely clever (Sex Tonite) to extremely stupid (Sid Viscous), so there's something for all levels of intellectual development. The main thread is that they all bring the rock - even the comparatively electro (There's Gonna Be) Sex Tonite is crunchy and satisfying. Enjoy!

I'm Interested in Apathy, Great Truckin' Songs of the Renaissance
Let's Club It To Death, Hot Dogma
(There's Gonna Be) Sex Tonite, www.tism.wanker.com
Sid Viscous, Best Off bonus track

[EDIT: I've just re-uploaded the Christmas specials from 2004, I Ain't No Christian, But I Believe In Jesus and Then The Answer Came.]

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