Archive for June, 2007

June 30th, 2007 day one

or da.yo.ne for people who stare at words until they no longer make sense. i was kinda amused by this on the back of my box of antibiotics - people always forget to complete the entire course i guess. it also means i have to have regular meals as they can’t be taken on an empty stomach.

i couldn’t really go to work while my mouth was stuck shut to my jaw, so i stayed at home for a couple of days. do the usual, watch movies, make music, when you can’t be presentable in public. the most irritating maladies are when the brain is still functioning, but for some reason or another, you can’t do the work at 100% (leg operation, sinus, swollen face after teeth extraction). by the way, i’m not a workaholic, i’m a part-timer.

so i finally got to see the science of sleep after missing its run at the cinemas. what fascinated me most was the interplay between languages, such as stephane telling stephanie she has good english (charlotte gainsbourg, besides having that other gainsbourg as a father, is the offspring of englishwoman jane birkin). or stephane telling his co-workers that they are driving him “schizo…” with their french/english conversations. the constant to-ing and fro-ing made me sympathetic for stephane, as i imagine i would be in a similar situation in france! i wonder if michel gondry wrote that in as a similar scenario in his daily life, having to switch from english to french constantly…

i expected to be carried away with surrealism, but found it easy to handle. i don’t know if i’ve been spoilt by all the crazy movies like adapatation or any spike jonze feature, where i expect to be so spun out that i think the whole films premise is clever. there were only two shots of big hands (gondry’s pet obsession) in the science of sleep, so i turned my attention towards the two central characters instead.

i’ve loosened up a lot in the last few weeks with regards to pop music. i finally appreciate all aspects of cubismo grafico (more on that later) and find that i love harco’s music more than ever. it could be likened to easy-listening music of the 80s variety, but sweeter and more poppish, if that makes sense. his voice and kaji hideki’s are quite similar, and in fact harco’s biggest hit is a song that kaji-kun wrote for him, be my girl.

on his re-released single, sekai de ichiban no ganbatteru kimi ni, there’s a b-side called dental dance. while we’re on the subject of dental work, i wonder what that one is about?

June 29th, 2007 the mooney suzuki

seems my ex-favourite band is releasing another album of 70s drenched leather whatever, which got me thinking about how much i used to love the mooney suzuki. i still wear the t-shirt, and the badge is still stuck on an old faded denim jacket. i remember grabbing their debut album off the record store shelves and shoving it into my discman as soon as i walked out the door. not long after i spotted several 7″s on ebay, and bought the your love is a gentle whip single for, oh, maybe A$20? the band was worth plenty to me in those days. their bio in 1999 reads:

Unaided by booking agent, label or management, the act has attained an unmatched level of regional notoriety. With nothing on record store shelves, the band’s success can be attributed solely to the tremendous word of mouth…

back then it did seem they were relying solely on their sweaty live shows, and that one 7″ released by garage band label estrus records. rumour was it that their guitarist had only picked up the instrument a matter of months earlier, though maybe this was invented to fuel the usual garage myth of three chords and no ability, because ultimately anyone can play in a band.

even i could use their music as guitar practice, beating out E D and A for three minutes until i believed i could actually play my telecaster copy. it seemed so much simpler then, from their all black mod getup to their self-made crude fliers, to the knowingly crap design of their first album, people get ready (that is definitely some shitty computer font for the title).

but in fact, isn’t there a weird resemblance between this cover and the other? most of their covers have been designed by the band or in conjunction with another party, so it can’t be accidental…

but back to the 7″ - the a-side is killer, and actually made we wonder if i needed to clean my record needle. because it sounds like this:

none of their later recordings have the same heavy impact, as they increase their levels of self-parody with each album (not unlike the ramones). in fact, the warning signs can be seen in this piece of artwork, the 7″ for in a young man’s mind, a single from their second (listenable) album, before the release of the bomb (alive and amplified):

still in the mod getup, the artwork has turned towards late 60s/early 70s, with none of that photocopied cut and paste that characterised their earlier releases. a sure sign of things to come.

actually, what do i have against the 70s? maybe it’s the hippie folk freelove shit, or the copious amounts of drugs which resulted in ten minute guitar wank solos by those too absorbed in their own musical universe. because switching decades makes the mooney suzuki do horrible things like try to write their breakout album (alive and amplified) with the matrix, and now i have to listen to songs of groupies, girls, groupies, sex, rock ‘n’ roll, liquor. boring. and the fact the matrix helped to suck all the dirt out of the rock didn’t help either.

i think my fan levels were at their highest when they made an appearance in the school of rock film. it was nice to have that superior moment to myself since i already knew the band and their songs, and couldn’t be bothered telling anybody else, as the short appearance by the mooney suzuki would probably have not registered on their brains anyway. but now i’m just being flippant, because i did want these guys to make it, but perhaps not in the way they’re doing it now. still, they have their fans, as 782+ pictures on flickr would attest. just that it doesn’t matter to me anymore. but writing this has made me hunt down those early 7″ singles…

June 28th, 2007 stickers work for kids, and with me

i always say stuff like “gross” when my dentist asks if i want to save my wisdom teeth for prosterity, so this picture of stickers is far better (plus it will remind me to “clean”). i can’t even get the nerve to look at dead teeth, so you are saved from the sight of bloody roots.

anyway, if i thought my square face was big, the left side is even bigger now. i had two teeth removed, but the difficult one needed a fair bit of drilling to shatter into pieces, and i spent a long time during the procedure thinking to myself, “boring!” that tooth is what the codeine in my painkillers is for, the extra kick to make me feel a bit more human, though i’m fighting the drowsiness as i’m typing this. and three different kind of antibiotics, which is probably a bit heavy handed on my dentist’s part, but amoxycillin got this song in my head all afternoon:

amoxycillin by magic dirt - kinda long, but still shorter than my appointment. and maybe that feedback is kinda like…

i’ve had so many trips to the dentist to fix all the problems with my teeth these last few months that i really quite unphased by it. this, i hope, will carry into regular checkups instead of waiting a couple of years to begin my transformation into a toothless old woman. i would like to emphasise that the dentist is quite unscary, and even more so with a good injection of painkillers. oh and the vietnamese dentist who came to check on my stitches was a real person’s person, and tall, and good looking, but unfortunately not my regular dentist…