Went to the Art Gallery of NSW today. The Biennale is on and one of the exhibitions is a phone which, according to the notice, Yoko Ono will call at random times. And you can talk to her. This is my niece Snow Pea workshopping such a scenario but it was silent while we were there. I did a Google but could find no reports of anyone actually speaking to her.

Erm, the only thing remotely Ono related in my collection is Dylan's potted bio of her from a Theme Time episode.

13 Yoko Ono.mp3

DailyLit is a concept that may send certain people in paroxysms of grief re: western civ. Serialised books via RSS (or email). I haven't really decided what I think of it, but I'll give it a go.

Isn't "The Millionaire's Inexperienced Love-Slave" the most wonderfully reedonkulous title? Even for something from the Harlequin stable? I was tempted to get it but it costs $4 and I am all about teh free. That is how I roll.

There is plenty of free, either the usual public domain classics or current works distributed under Creative Commons. I got The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James but at 200 plus installments ("War and Peace" is over 600!) I might break down and just buy the bloody thing before then. I also signed up for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow and daily articles on US Presidents from Wikipedia.

SMH FAIL.

Update. Sadly they have fixed the caption.

Muxtape, World Youth Day edn.

Further: How awesome is it that Mick/Proddy doctrinal stoushes are back in the papers? Party like its 1953!

I'm no theology geek but I'd sort of imagined the Second Coming would be heralded a little more, I dunno, auspiciously. Rather than just slipping the announcement in a Daily Tele article. Jesus will literally walk amongst us!

And it's happening here! Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi OI Oi!

There's this new show, see, on Ch.7 tomorrow night at 7.30pm The One: Search for Australia's Top Cold Reader Psychic. I've attended a few of the studio tapings on account of a good friend of mine, Richard Saunders, is one of the judges. I met Richard through the Australian Skeptics and he has taken on the daunting task of being commercial TV token skeptical whipping boy for low rent reality show. Go, Richard! Join our Richard Saunders Fans Facebook page! So I am in the audience for episodes 2 and 4 and watched episode 5 filming from the green room and back of the studio yesterday.

Richard has done an excellent job with a very tough gig, and has managed to institute a few extra controls on the "tests" although even with that they barely rise above parlour game level (except for one which is just deeply full of FAIL on the crass test.) And yes there's a legitimate discussion to be had about doing more harm than good in legitimising the mystery-monging but these shows are going to happen anyway and in Richard they actually had someone capable of, under pressure, quickly breaking down what was happening and really revealing the workings of cold reading on the spot. Of course he only gets a few lines and the vast bulk of logical fallacies, utter non-sequiturs, post-hoc rationalisations and face-palm moments have to go unchallenged. But the lines he gets are good, although its all in the editing, I guess. I took lots of notes in the last two sessions I was at so I might make further comment once I see the edited version. Podblack blog has made a loose comment about live blooging the first show. I hope she does, that should be fun.

I didn't take any of Skeptico's Cold Reading Bingo cards but perhaps you can print out some to play along at home. I guarantee you odds vastly better than the local Lions club version. You can't lose, in fact.

In my time there I saw lots of readings and "challenges" but not a single inexplicable or even particularly impressive thing, I did see a lot of the standard psychological techniques done to varying degrees of inexpertness and the glorious laws of probability at work. Which doesn't mean it won't "make good TV." It was interesting although LONG to sit through an entire day of faffing about for a few minutes of film. That's the glamour of showbiz I guess.

On the other end of the scale of seriousness I've been reading Ray Hyman's The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research and it comes highly recommended.

Apologies to anyone and everyone who got a spam email from my personal Gmail account this morning. That is, everyone I've ever had email contact with in three years of using it because Gmail stores 'em all. I have Googled (irony) about the problem and there are conflicting reports of cause and what can be done. Well, the cause of course is the EVIL that lurks in the breasts of men and the CONTEMPTIBLE RAT FRACKING BASTARDS who waste their precious time on Earth with this EVIL RANCID EVIL BULLSHIT.

I have done what I can to eliminate the risk of further hijacking, which included deleting my entire Contacts list. Which I did in a fit of panic and raging fury before saving the actual addresses so now I can't actually email many people individually to apologise. Le fracking sigh. Moderation of comments is still on here because of spam and all up I would like to do violence violently to someone. Many people, preferably.

If you were affected, I apologise.

Here in full is the 2/5 stars "review" by Bernard Zuel of Hayes Carll's "Trouble in Mind" from the Metro this morning:

You can see the attraction for the label. Here's someone who can be a lightweight-but-far-less-troublemaking cross between Ryan Adams and Steve Earle, with alcohol-soaked ballads and punchy mid-tempo country rock. It's easy to digest and has more grit than the Nashville-Tamworth axis but the trouble is when you take away the "troublesome" parts of Adams and Earle, you get by-the-numbers-alt.country.

The SMH reviewers, including BZ, generally do a good job in giving coverage to Music I Like and props to them for it, but I have a serious pet hate about their some of their critical MO. Namely: The constant and utterly unnecessary relating of everything slightly rootys to top 40 country and taking up space with irrelevant comparisons instead of talking about the music. In his excellent jazz reviews, John Shand never feels moved to mention that Mike Nock is not like Kenny G, but the blokes on the country/folk beat can't resist but shoehorn a reference to Keith Urban into damn near everything. Long time readers know I have ranted about this before. End the country critical cultural cringe!

I like this record (review coming this weekend) and he doesn't: fine, I'm not talking about that. The Adams/Earle comparisons while on the surface more appropos than Urban are misplaced too. Firstly, talk about the damn record. You've got about 50 words, why waste two of them on "Ryan" and "Adams", especially if you're not going to provide a meaningful comparison for potential purchasers? Hayes Carll is really very little like Ryan Adams musically, even when Ryan was at his most country. It seems Ryan is only mentioned because he provides a drug abusing songwriter bookend to the Earle reference which is more fitting, but still a waste of precious words. Why are we even mentioning drug abuse again? Ugh, who the hell knows.

Secondly, I strongly doubt the stated motivations apply to Lost Highway. It's just another the imposition of a random narrative that suits a lazy journo. (cf. the political op-ed columns every day of the week.) The easy-too-see attraction for the label is not that he isn't an vainglorious junkie, it is that he had already released a couple of critically acclaimed, award winning and successful Americana records and something of a reputation for being a genuine heir to the Texas country/folk songwriter tradition of Townes Van Zandt. These are the qualities that drew me to Hayes Carll three years ago.

If the new album doesn't live up to the promise, by all means say so. Don't just make shit up.

A further pet hate is the insidious definition creep of the term "alt.country." I see not the slightest reason to call Hayes Carll that, unless "alt.country" now simply means anything that doesn't chart on CMT and if that is what it now means then: over my dead body it does.

Subject line stolen from Phineas. It is too good not to be mine. Mux had a meltdown and my most recent one was lost. But it only nuked the last three weeks of stuff which means my last second account mux is still there. Second accounts breach the TOS, so hush. IMHO, it's rather a tasty collection of country, soul, funk -- old skool, yo.

The following is mostly a plea to Zoe on account of her awesome new food blog.

I had seen a few references to The Paper around the innertubes in the last few days and thought: weird. The Michael Keaton movie? Weird. If any of 1994s cineofferings was going to make a comeback to the zeitgeist, you'd think it'd be The River Wild. But then I read some recommendations of a couple of my favourite TV-related blogs (they both link to this) and I understood there was a new MTV reality series of that name. Of course it is not on telly here but of course I acquired it anyway. It follows the exploits of the Cypress Bay High (Florida) student newspaper. After the first minute I had to check Wikipedia to see that it was actually a reality show, so staged and scripted it seemed. But of course to a teenager in 2008 reality TV is so completely normal and even something to aspire to and we have reached the point where mock- has seamlessly cycled into doc- (umentary).

Mock will eat itself.

Time for a new muxtape. Since Laura alerted me to this particularly witless example of crushingly unfunny and pointless op-ed busy work and since I got a few Google hits in the last week looking for a "jazz muxtape", I thought I'd do a jazz muxtape. And they say bloggers are undisciplined, narcasscistic jerks -- Schembri (practically everytime I read him) more than proves you don't need to be 13 and writing in your PJs in your mother's basement to write like you're 13 and writing in your PJs in your mother's basement.

Hear my muxtape here.

Anyhow. I'm very much a "don't know much about jazz, but I know what I like" and this is pretty much the first 12 things I came to, with some exceptions because a lot of tracks (ie. everything I have by Charles Mingus) is over the Muxtape limit of 10MB in size. Also kept it to instrumentals. Jazz vocals is a mux for another week.

These are the albums the tracks are from:
Robert Mazurek- Playground. This was recommended on a message board thread about "heroiny jazz."
Sonny Rollins-Way Out West "I'm an Old Cowhand" is my fave but I put that on a mux before.
Art Pepper-Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
Irving Fields Trio-Bagels and Bongos
Getatchew Mekurya-Negus of Ethiopian Sax. African jazz is a whole topic by itself.
John Coltrane-Plays for Lovers
Dizzy Gillespie and Machito-Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods
Andre Previn- West Side Story
Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins
Thelonious Monk - Blue Monk
Buddy Rich with Dizzy Gillespie-Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980
Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans-Know What I Mean?

Based on accidentally viewing half an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica, there are a few obvious ways the new one has improved on it.

-- no obese Cylons so shiny they hurt
-- no cute children in main cast, especially ones called "Boxey."
-- And especially no furry animatronic teddy bears! especially ones called "Muffit."
-- better insults. "Go rust yourself" is no match for the frack family of cusses.

Bruce-phemy indeed.

This article was the pits when it was in the New York Times last week, it's even worse now the Herald has recycled it. The story? A couple of men in middle age had heart attacks and a computer geek eats junk food. I do think there are some interesting issues in the bizarro "professional" blogging world, this is a stupidly sensational hook for it.

Hey, so what's the deal with coming all the way to Australia and playing one gig in Melbourne? Deeply jealous minds want to know. This Friday. You'd be bonkers to be anywhere else. Eddie Floyd, y'all!

This his "Big Bird", plus intro and outro by DJ Bob Dylan. I think he nicked his script directly from Wikipedia. Hah.

26 Big Bird.mp3

On YouTube.

That's Bad! Australia Post "loses" package. Must do over and resend.

That's Bad! Withdrawing $60 at ATM, forgetting to take the damn money and finding it gone when you return a minute later.

That's Bad! Letter re: rental increase.

That's Good! Another muxtape.

Thanks to Phineas I have leapt aboard the Muxtape bandwagon. Muxtape is bringing the mixtape (with a Kiwi accent, apparently) into the digital age. You can't download the songs -- which is good. Buy the records -- but you can listen. I slapped together a really very random collection of things I've listened to recently. I just got Justin Townes Earle's record today -- yes, that's Steve boy and it is completely wonderful. A non-disappointing Earle album in the '00s! Who'd a thought? More on it later.

My muxtape.

I highly recommend Phineas' muxtape too, particularly the Roosevelt song and the Dengue Fever song. Dengue Fever are a LA band who combine garage/surf rock with Cambodian pop and I've been listening to their album Venus on Earth a lot. It made me hungry for Red Curry Chicken, but I realise that's Thai. Would you believe there are only two Cambodian restaurants in Sydney? I simply don't, but nontheless that's what the innertubes say. That simply can't be right.

Crossposted at Hickory Wind.

This post goes on, like a certain essential muscular organ of some musical fame. In the knowledge clicking on is too much trouble for many, here is your take home message: There is a book called Céline Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson, part of the Continuum 33 1/3 Series. You want to read this book. His blog is here, one of my favourites for years. Here are lots of reviews and interviews. AFAIK it isn't released in Australia so you can buy it here. If you buy me a glass of house red I will lend it to you, I will probably be too-aggressively pimping it to you even if you don't. You want to read this book.

You want to read this book.

Got it? Ah, but I have trapped you because now you want to know why you want to read a book on Céline Motherfrakinggoddamnareyougoddamnfrakkingkiddingme Dion. Sucked in. Onwards over the fold ...

I was watching American Idol tonight (What? Shut up.) and the whole joint was totally discombobulated when Simon referred to a mysterious object called "washing-up liquid." As in, "that sounded like a washing-up liquid ad from the 60s."

Ironically, this whole post is entirely about procrastinating from ... doing the washing-up.

I only have one song about it.

Willie Nelson: 25 Phases and Stages (Theme) Washing the Dishes.mp3

Speaking of:

This is in the Foxtel magazine. Ford Ranger is not, as I like to imagine, a closeted 50s matinee idol. It is a car. The sport being sponsored by this car is: cricket. Now, I loves me some baseball and if this ad were about baseball it would be entirely appropriate. Since it is about cricket, however, it is utterly egregious. "Batter" my ass.