I’m reading a book at the moment (Shock! Horror! But I’ll have you know I used to read like… some kind of reading… machine…), Alex James’ autobiography, Bit of a Blur. It’s entertaining, but worthless if you want any kind of insight into Blur’s songwriting and recording processes.

As a result I’ve been relistening to Blur’s catalague (I’m not so sure about my ‘listen to every song on my iTunes in order of shortest to longest’ idea anymore), and I have to say because I had such crappy stereos and headphones as a kid, I never realised what an awesome bassist Alex is.

It’s easier to read on a bus than it is walking, which is one advantage of living out here in Avondale. The other, I suppose, is that we miss the new motorway by a kilometre or two, give or take.

In other news… Parker did his first tummy-to-back roll today! Then wouldn’t stop doing them.

Mirrored from Radio Over Moscow.

Today was the 18th time I've moved flat/house since I left home in early 1998. It wasn't an overly stressful move, I've done it enough times now to know what I have to do, even if it means waking up on the day of the move knowing there's only three hours till the movers turn up, but still having a shiatload of stuff to sort out. It always works out, my instinct kicks in and knows exactly how much I can leave till the last minute, even if I don't even notice it :)

So we're now back in a place of our own, a tiny little flat but as long as we stick to the promises we made to ourselves to stay tidy and whatnot, it should be great. The property managers seem quite hands-off in a good way. I have a little, minuscule 'bedroom' to use as a music room for now, which should be cool once I have new gear to record with. I'm not going to do a luna spark album this year it would seem though, I was doing the re-recordings of an old one one track a month, but that's on hold now that the equivalent of the sheet music for the next song due was stolen (it was on a memory card stolen with the Playstation). I'll be working on the Raid Over Moscow album as soon as I have the gear, which is a not entirely different project, but one that's meant to have a band behind it (four or five practises down, we're making a hell of a racket, loose as hell but so much fun, perhaps the polar opposite of what the album will be!)

Musically, I've been lost in U2 for the past couple of weeks - I'm up to 1993 in reading U2 By U2, re-acquired their first couple of albums (Boy and October), and saw U23D last night. The book is farking awesome, like the Beatles Anthology or equivalent Monty Python book, chock full of detail and hilarious anecdotes - I know, it sounds boring when I put it that way, but really worth it. Despite the common perception of the band being a bunch of doucheheads, particularly Bono, it reveals a darker, funnier side that many people haven't heard about - particularly in their early days and the Achtung Baby/Zooropa period. They were definitely more punk in spirit than many give them credit for. And those first two albums, the production is pretty sweet, but everything they've ever done pales in comparison to Achtung Baby, sonically - surprising when you actually read about the recording/mastering of the record (dubbing over stereo mixdowns, last-minute guitar solos, wanting people to think their record player was broken when they put it on).

I remember reading once when I was younger in Rolling Stone the '90s in music truly began when Nirvana released Nevermind, which I understood, and when almost simultaneously U2 released Achtung Baby, which I didn't really understand. Now I do. For the (actual) biggest band in the world at the end of the 1980s to come back from a critical disaster (Rattle and Hum) with a completely new sound
and not only succeed, but create an album even better than their career-defining high point (The Joshua Tree), is pretty incredible. It's easy to scoff at them now, after two albums which basically refined their classic sound for a modern age, forgetting they once dabbled in hardcore techno, opera and country-dub-electro, but what they did with Achtung Baby would be like if the new Coldplay record was not only a cross between the Klaxons, Battles and Trans Am, but was actually better than A Rush Of Blood To The Head.

I didn't mean for this entry to rave on about U2, but they're on my brain. The best parts of U23D weren't what you'd expect - I really enjoyed Miss Sarajevo, and Bono totally pulled off the Pavarotti part without a hassle. It's not a song I really know that well, being one of the Passengers songs and all. There was a bit of awkward proselytising from Bono, but at least it wasn't too drawn out. The 3D, for me, was really good - at one point I felt a tinge of anger at the dick spraying his water everywhere, and thought for a second the Edge's guitar was going to bash the guy sitting in front of me in the head - but tariqa wasn't so impressed, as her eyes are differently tuned or something - she could see the outlines that are meant to be hidden through the glasses that cause the 3D for much of it, whilst it was pretty much crystal-clear for me, bar during With Or Without You (which only partly ruined perhaps my favourite song of theirs). As an experiment in new technology, it was understandably a little restrained in its composition, but still pretty fucking cool to look at - if only they'd been able to do it when they weren't all old men, haha. If anything it reinforced my view that Adam Clayton is the coolest guy in U2 - he's about 45, looks about 60 but in a good way, still holds his bass like he's in the Sex Pistols, and has this 'I can't believe how fucking cool this is!' grin on his face the whole time. Reading the book reinforces this, seeing as he apparently couldn't actually play to begin with, and had his first lessons in the mid 1990s.

Ryan Adams' blog takes up three or four pages of my friends list every time I look at it.

TOP 8 ALBUMS OF THE LAST FORTNIGHT...

1. Supergrass - Diamond Hoo-Ha
2. U2 - Achtung Baby
3. Duffy - Rockferry
4.  R.E.M - Accelerate
5. Andrew WK - I Get Wet
6. Morrissey - Greatest Hits
7. U2 - Boy
8. U2 - October

The new Weezer song sounds like their first album stuff, it's on their website streaming.

So you've heard of Yulia, right? The Hayley Westenra-like popera singer who moved here from Russia a few years back? Right. Well, today I proofed an article that's in the upcoming February issue of Real Groove about her recent antics, which intrigued me... check this out.



It's her on Good Morning, performing her new single Love Siege. I have only three words for it... W. T. F?! The best part is, in the article her manager/fiance claims it was deliberate and fully choreographed, inspired by Beyonce and Kylie videos. Err... I've seen plenty of Beyonce and Kylie videos, and I can't say I ever saw one that featured a guy standing on a practise guitar amp while a former popera singer wearing face paint fondled his knees and struggled to hit notes any Idol contestant would nail with ease.

The article I won't spoil further for you here, but it's well worth the magazine's cover price alone, trust me. Read this first though - the press release her manager put out earlier this month announcing their engagement is bizarre enough in itself, and a good primer for the full-on weirdness that is the Real Groove interview.

In other news... I'm reading The Tipping Point, which is quite interesting, and I'm enjoying it more than Gladwell's other well-known book, Blink. We've started writing new material in the band, the lack of a permanent practise space means it's taking a little longer to have ready than we'd have liked, but it'll be good to have some new material when they are ready, for Camp A Low Hum hopefully. Speaking of which, I was checking out the website for Camp yesterday, and holy crap. If there was something like that when I was 17, it'd have been the best four days of my life, haha! Could still be, but I'm less easy to impress and a little more grown up now (a little).

And on that note, I'm going to practise setting up my tent.

I watched Idiocracy on the weekend, it was very awesome. I got (Weezer genius) Rivers Cuomo's home recordings album today, which could be very awesome. I went to the central library today for the first time in ages, and reminded myself how awesome libraries are.

Now I have too many magazines, too much music and too many books to get through, as well as a new toy (see previous entry), and no full time job to take me away from them. Woe is me... (financially for sure)!

I just found out Trans Am are playing in Auckland in a couple of weeks! YAY! It was at a Trans Am gig on April 1 last year that I decided to move to Auckland. They're one of the best bands I've ever seen live, so there's no way I'll be missing them this time. I'll have to drag tariqa along too, so she knows what I mean when I say they're awesome live.

Went to a job interview at Telecom this morning, pretty sweet as they'd already been over most of the questions last time I went in. I'm pretty sure I'll get an offer, depending what my manager here said... eek... 

Tidied the house good the other day. Gonna keep it that way too. This time. Honest. I can't work on music when there's a mess I find, unless it's a mess of musical things, which isn't good to have when there's already a mess, cause then you get your messes confused, which isn't good.

I'm reading Angels and Demons. The camerlengo just got shot!

...layout. That last one just wasn't quite doing it for me. Or the IE, Win95, 640x480 computers at work. Cause there's nothing else to do there on weekends at the moment, especially when you can't hear the music you're playing cause of the renovations upstairs, and the customers are barely able to stay more than two minutes.

I'm not gonna do the course. It's too short notice, and in four weeks no doubt I'll have something else to fetish over. It's the way it always has been and always will be. There's another intake in July, if I'm still keen by then. Somehow I feel being 26 and earning minimum wage will be all the motivation I need to sign up then, considering it's entirely feasible I could earn more per week on the student allowance and working part time, with a pot of gold at the end of the tunnel. Or rainbow. Or whatever it is I'm supposedly following.


No one should have to work in summer. It's too freakin' hot. Let everyone go on holiday, and if anyone wants to eat, they can make their own food, or find someone like the ant in that fable by Aesop, and bludge off him.

This Bible really is weird. Either modern day Christians/Jews ignore the majority of it, or they've misinterpreted it on a biblical (erm) scale. According to Deuteronomy Chapter 4 (I think), it's okay for non-Israelites to worship the moon, sun and stars. And people. And idols. Like Cassius Clay Aiken and co, I assume.

"Do not be tempted to worship and serve what you see in the sky - the sun, the moon and the stars. The LORD your God has given these to all other peoples for them to worship."

Hey, thanks God! So it's okay to worship the moon after all. I suppose in the New Testament Jesus comes along and changes all the rules though... but the Bible's a long book, I'm sure I can get in a fair bit of moon-worshipping werewolf action before I get there. I like this bit though.

"For your own good, then, make certain that you do not sin by making for yourselves an idol in any form at all - whether man or woman, animal or bird, reptile or fish."

Ooh, Fish Idol. I'd love to see that. There was a question on tonights Mind Games - asking where is the Mona Lisa located. Luckily, having read The Da Vinci Code, I knew the answer - the Louvre, in Paris. When I was in the library on Wednesday night, waiting for Bro'Town to finish so I could watch the tape of it when I got home without having seen the ending first, I asked a librarian about the possibility of reserving a copy of the first Robert Langdon based Dan Brown book, Angels and Demons. They laughed, and didn't even bother to check the computer. Turns out there's a ridiculous waiting list, which isn't surprising. I think before I left Hamilton I enquired about borrowing ...Code, only to find there were 160 people ahead of me in the queue. That's over ten years of waiting. So I bought it.

You think they could make a trilogy or something out of Robert Langdon? His name isn't as catchy as Indiana Jones, is it? And they're making ...Code first, so they'll have to do the prequel-thing with Angels... And as the girl in Angels is hardly mentioned in ...Code, it could get tricky when they try to tie in the love interests that'd inevitably have to be a part of any Hollywood movie franchise. Hmmm.

Fuck, trying to write that last paragraph without the use of Rich Text was dang annoying. Rich Text wasn't working for some reason when I began this entry. Which I'm typing on my knees, cause Tariqa has stolen the chair to sit on while she dips her ear in boiled water. I'll leave that at that.