Chris

11:39 am: Nadya’s 101 Candles Orkestra
I don't go out enough, so I am going to a gig tonight. I haven't heard the band before, but that's ok because I like surprises. And Quirkz usually have good stuff on. And they are the type of venue that YOU need to experience.

The email I got had a quote from an anthropology professor, for some reason, saying:
“…Nadya’s 101 Candles Orkestra vibrates souls, its infectious spirit bonding communities with each other and with the locals, and as past is mixed with present, generations blend. Musical traditions, which have stirred deep emotions, released ancient yearnings and kept feet dancing in Europe for centuries, are re-vamped and brought into the present by effervescent Sydney girl Nadya Golski, the central personality and lead singer who’s prodigious ear, intense vitality, and extraordinary vocal delivery have brought together a disparate group of virtuoso musicians from multi-cultural Sydney. Nadya’s is the voice which makes the music present and exciting, never suppressing the individuality of the musicians, and producing an unforgettable sound. And as the 101 Candles lives and changes, it embraces Poland, Russia, France, Spain and even South Pacific Island cultures with surprising twists of jazz and blues in English, woven magically into the vital and mysterious tapestry of a wonderful performance…”

So, who knows? Might be good. Anyone else at a loose end tonight?

EDIT: Too late, I got a better offer :P

12:41 am: Where the Wild Things Are
Max was a good Max. His rumpus was true. The indy soundtrack was not nearly as precious as I thought it would be and actually worked very well.

The Wild Things themselves. . . well, I just expected them to be wilder, you know? They were basically lost children with adult New York accents, and each some aspect of Max's personality or family. Disappointing. But taking it as it was rather than as I wanted it, it was really well done. It made me care about Carol, who was the wildest wild thing, and it does take some decent cinema to make me care about big furry suited thingies.

This movie also included the essential ingredient of children's movies, a child doing incredibly dangerous things without an adult around to tell them not to. So it ticks that box.

And it did make me want to put on horns, run up to the top of Sydney Park and howl at the moon, and I was only mildly discouraged by how this might inconvenience whoever was screwing in the bushes that night. So I guess it was successful?




We'll eat you up; We love you so.

05:14 pm: The Magic Google Door.
The boy discovered a magic door, just like in the book, except it wasn’t a portal into an icy forest populated with talking creatures (and don’t creatures talk to each other, anyway? The only thing special about those creatures was that they learnt a lingo the tourists could understand), it was a door into other people’s google searches. Not only that, but he could change their search results. Trolling sex searches got old quickly. He redirected “2 girls” to a blog post by a siamese twin on the diffuculties they faced being treated as an individual, “brightny spheres” to an astrophysics blog. He redirected “why do i sleep so much” to sites on lucid dreaming techniques. “sex is for making babies and revenge” he just fobbed off with a bunch of contraception sites. He read one that said “fucked by an invisible ghost”, but he didn’t really know how to respond.

A lot of people would search “when to say I love you”. Sometimes he would respond with poetry, sometimes with a civil war in a far-off country torn to pieces by the colonial aftermath and damned by first world middle class indifference.

For the heartbreaking “what can i take to make me feel good”, he answered: anything, as long as you don’t pay for it, and redirected the search to a selection of how-to sites on shoplifting.

He painstakingly redirected a thousand fundamentalist and creationist searches to the most careful, friendly explanations of evolution he could find, and likewise redirected every search for “Dawkins” or “Hitchens” he could find to various explanations and explorations of eastern philosophy and religion.

The door was like Narnia, time passed differently. He didn’t need to eat or sleep, didn’t even have a body, as such. When he emerged, he had been in there for months, years even, but barely a day had passed in our world. And he knew when he emerged that he may have changed the world. But it’s hard to tell.

Tags: stories

11:50 am: This library keyboard will not pull out far enough for me to put it on my lap. Are there more keyboards than people in this country? Would it be better if people were keyboards? We are all constantly frustrated by the physicality of tools. We are impatient, we want to think it and it will be done. Learning skills wastes time. We don't want to learn, we want to know everything. We DO know everything. We heard about it. We know about vaccinations and conspiracies and the truth about 9/11 and the history of psychology. SHUTUP, YOU don't know about the HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY! I KNOW ABOUT THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY! Tell us more, you are clearly a well-balanced individual. Well, Tom, as you know, I am famous and you should listen to me. You may have heard conflicting "facts" from journalists, scholars, historians, but let me ask you this: do any of those so-called "experts" have haircuts as nice as mine? Do they? And how many films have they been in? Oh sure, that guy over there says he is a "doctor", but when it came time to pay someone umpty million dollars to play a doctor in a film, was it him they called? I don't think so.

So, apparently that is too long for a facebook status update. Whatevs, man.

12:18 am: There it was at the bottom of the abc news story I was reading, a link to another story:

HAMSTER EFFECT: Anyone wanting to experience life as a hamster need not go all the way to France.

It was listed under political analysis.

There is no way, I thought to myself, that I am clicking on that, because I know very well that what lies beyond it is mundane, and all the possibilities are so much more interesting.

11:45 pm: As it turns out, I find it very hard to put aside an unfinished essay (which I now have an extension for) to work on more pressing ones. I need closure damnit.

Now I need to exercise willpower to stop doing an essay? The fuck?

Anyway, just in case anyone cares (I care!) the 12th of November will be the final thing I hand in, and I will be at leisure, to do leisurely things.

I may even keep writing 1500 words a day, but only in a leisurely fashion.

Tags: uni

10:14 pm:


I'm writing an essay about celebrity!

I suspect I shall have to read some Baudrillard. Hmph.

....

Oh crap, I just realised that I have miscalculated when everything is due by about a week.

I am going to fail everything. Fantastic.

11:12 pm: Low brow. Or "lo-brow".
Decent post content once again eludes me at this hour, so here is some filler:

( Read more... )

You can tell I have stuff to do, can't you?

Not at all particularly fun fact: October 2009 is the time by which Rudd promised to reinstate the anti-discrimination act when he ran for office.

So, whaddya say, federal government?

*sound of crickets*

Hmm.

04:28 pm: Moon.
You know when you look at all the stuff that has happened since you last updated LJ, and then you kind of scratch your head and just give up? Yeah.

Anyways, I am seeing this movie tomorrow night. Who wants in?

10:29 am:

Should be doing my work, but everything is the colour of pisschrist.

More shots here:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/photos/#id=2693741&num=13

Tags: pics

07:52 pm: In which you get to witness the sorry spectacle of C geeing himself up for a thing.
The China in the 20th C course has the exact same structure, assessment wise, as the China in the 19th C course I did last semester. As such, I need to turn in a full 2000 word draft tomorrow on an essay I haven't really planned yet, as it isn't due for another 3 weeks. It's only worth 5%, but I don't really have quite the volume of depression and self loathing that served as an excuse for not doing it first semester. And I missed out on a distinction by 2% in the first semester. So I should totally do it!

So why am I writing this instead? Why have I only written 500 words and done barely any research? Is it because I resent pointless busy work? Is it because I hate the idea of putting all that work into something that won't be read? Somewhat. Maybe I'm also a procrastinatory jerk. I am considering inserting some sort of story into the middle of it.

...Another, oft-ignored aspect of Mao's success both in gaining peasant support and in negotiating his way to chairmanship of the party was his adeptness at handling dragon politics. It was in fact the support he gained (by fox like trickery) from the two serpents that slept under the Huanggang Peak in the Wuyi Mountains that allowed the Jiangxi Soviet region to be successfully defended for so long against the forces of Chang Kai Shek, and it was the knowledge of Dragon lore he reputedly picked up in this experience, as well as his ability to recruit peasants to the cause, that ensured Zhang (who had dragon blood on his mother's side) would never be able to challenge him again for leadership of the party once they had both retreated to Shaanxi. This also explains how Shaanxi itself was so effectively defended, despite being made almost entirely out of roast pumpkin.

In other news, civil wars can be depressing.

Also, apparently it is possible to take space pictures for less than US$150, so I guess that's pretty cool.

Edit:
I emerge from wikipedia several hours later with the following useful information:

-The article on the Uyghur people has been edit-warred so heavily that it is, for the moment, completely empty.

-The perpetrators of the Ern Malley hoax were both from my high school.

-So was the winner of The AVN award in 2004 for Best Oral Sex Scene, in "Throat Gaggers #6."

D:

-It doesn't tell me which founding member of the KMT went there, however, which is what I was looking for.

-Lists are great. But an attempted list of all the revolutions and rebellions ever is a pretty scary sight.

Tags: uni

02:42 am: negation
I was going to post when I got home tonight. About what I don't know. Happy stuff? Sad stuff?

Instead, I read, played guitar, and made a slightly embarrassing comment on the blog of one of my favourite authors. Should access to those you admire really be that easy?

I will tell you, though, that I hear but never see the fireworks go off in my neighbourhood each night. And in the morning there was smoke in the air.

I will tell you that someone saw me and I didn't see them, and maybe that has too often been a thing with me.

Probably sleep is advisable. 'night, world.

11:44 pm: CONSUME!
So the first thing I had to hand in this semester was a diary of things I purchase over the course of a few days.

Prepare for too much information.

A Complete record of everything I buy from the 9th to the 12th of August.
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08:06 pm: Stand By Me


Tags: music

10:10 pm: And things.
I was going post a proper update and stuff, but my real computer has died completely, and this one has an annoying keyboard and is making a high pitched noise, so instead, here is a picture of a tortoise:



I'm off to watch Hedwig with my housemates.

09:27 pm: Summer, 1897


More.

Tags: history

07:17 pm: A supreme court official.
She was quite large, and very friendly, and when we opened the door she apparently regretted to inform us that our landlord was in the hole to the tune of about 1.8 million dollars and that it was extremely likely that the house would be repossessed in about 8-10 weeks, at which point we would get a months notice from the sheriff.

So, poo.

Whenever I have counted my blessings in the last few years, this house has been among them. It's in the right place, the people I live with are amazing, and there is nowhere, I mean nowhere in the entire inner west that is anywhere near as cheap. And now I'm going to be finding a new place sometime in the middle of exams, thank you very much 2009 are you quite done yet. We housies would like to find a place all together, but they can't afford much of a rise and everything's expensive. So we may be split up, which is just crap.

I can't believe that I probably won't see another Summer at this place.

01:16 pm: Legitimate theatre.
Ronnie Burkett is one of the most gifted character actors of his generation and one of the better playwrights. He puts on one man shows and often plays several characters at the same time.

Because his medium is marionettes, you probably haven't heard of him. But I saw his show a few years back at the opera house and it moved me, a lot.

So... now he has another show on in October, and I have a thing for cheap ($39) tickets, but I need to buy them before the end of Friday, so I was wondering if anyone else would like to join me.


http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/priority/billytwinkle.aspx

And why yes, it is a puppet show about a puppeteer, so you get to see marionettes operating marionettes. How cool is that?

Possible dates are:
October
1
4
6
7
8

Tags: puppets

12:23 am: (more boring uni wank)
Sew.

China in the 20th C has a problem with Sex, Violence and Transgression. So to speak. And Australian Gothic, an English Unit I was quite looking forward to, is clashing with not one but two of my other units. So I guess it has to go.

But what to replace it with? I've really no idea. Candidates include Fantastical Women (Fantasy! Women!), Religion & Society: Conversion & Culture (History! Religion!), Consumer Cultures (Consumers! Culture!), Technocultures (Technology! Cul...well, you get the idea), Modernism (people have warned me against this), From Silent to Sound Cinema (old movies!), and Modern Cinema:modes of viewing.

If anyone has any perspectives or experience with these, or the ten million other things I could potentially do, I'd appreciate hearing them.

02:03 pm: Life Drawing.
For free, at the Sandringham hotel tonight. 7 pm.

Anyone interested?