I went to the Steve Kilbey/Jack Frost concert at the Brunswick Ballroom. It was a cold wet night and didn’t really feel up to going, but I went. I drove my car in because I couldn’t face public transport, wasting all that time and encountering idiots on the train. It was a great night, I’m glad I went. Steve and his band put on a great show with some Jack Frost songs I’d never heard before. The first set was the entire first album interspersed with long monologues about Grant McLennan. The second set was a greatest hits compilation, including Steve’s Church songs and Grant’s Go Betweens songs. I bought the triple LP Jack Frost album he was flogging too. I also recorded the audio of the first part because I wanted a record of Steve’s monologues about Grant. For a complete review of the night go here.
Mario at work showed me a nutty old TV commercial about Holden cars. It name checked football, meat pies and kangaroos. Besides these, every few seconds there was a ‘subliminal’ of bikini babes, to keep you watching. If it’s any reflection of how we were back in the Seventies then we were a bunch of yobbos. Mario also gave me a couple of recommendations about zombie shows on Netflix that I’ll pursue. Mario is my go-to guy for pop culture weirdness.
I watched a little bit of Army of the Dead, a Netflix show Mario recommended. I didn’t much like the set up, with the zombies corralled inside Las Vegas and a group of humans attempting to get in there to steal money. Yes, that’s right, the story’s about risking your life to get money. In a zombie outbreak money would be the least of your problems. After the first couple of weeks, where disaster Capitalism would kick in, money wouldn’t mean so much. Stupid premise. I’m guessing the robbery aspect will turn out to be just a cover for something else, something more important, that’s hidden inside Vegas. Maybe it’s Elvis’s corpse. Anyway, I also watched a couple episodes of a show called Black Summer on Netflix, another Mario reccy. It was a zombie show, but with a difference, in that the humans who were running from the zombies were the main enemy. Pretty tense and interesting so far, but people were still acting like money is a thing. Interestingly, blowjobs also have currency here.
I watched another episode of Black Summer. This one was set inside a high school with some survivors encountering a group of resourceful and mean school kids who trap them inside. It was okay, and I get the point that it’s the people that are worse than the infected, but I think I’m over this series. In fact, I think I’m over Netflix…
I cancelled my Netflix subscription today. I just don’t have time for it. There’s a couple of things there I’d like to catch up with, like Pluto and some other animes, but I’m just wasting money on it at the moment. I’ll probably take it up again when the next instalment of Squid Game or Ranma ½ is announced.
My old desktop computer decided to work today, so I took the opportunity to finish burning some album projects. I tidied up my Beach Boys In Concert album, and added that b-side to the Hollies album What Goes Around. I also re-did my Frampton Comes Alive album and made an ‘Orphans’ album of stuff I have lying around in that old computer, including a B-52’s Love Shack 12 inch. It’s good to get these things out of the way.
I grabbed another bunch of free grubby DVDs from my library today. They were Dune Part One, A Clockwork Orange, Disney’s Aladdin and A Rainy Day In New York. The last one’s a Woody Allen film from 2019. Funnily enough, Timothy Chalamet from Dune is in it. There’s no cases, just the discs, but I’ll take ‘em. I’m interested to see what the Woody Allen film’s like, though the Letterboxd reviews are pretty savage. There was a time when they were essential. I saw Aladdin long ago with my nephew Ben, back in the days when I used to take him to the movies. I remember it as a fun film with some nice music. I’m not a great fan of A Clockwork Orange, but I like its style, its vision of the dystopian Seventies future. I like the way it’s also a kind of sequel to the earlier film, O Lucky Man, which Malcolm McDowell also starred in (and which got him the role in Clockwork).
I started and finished the seventh volume of the Mao manga. We’re getting a lot of detail about Mao’s early life in the Goko clan temple, especially the big secret meeting in the five-sided temple, where the Master instructed five of his apprentices to kill Mao and each other until the last one standing became the new Master. We meet two of these apprentices, Natsuno and Masago. Masago is in Shiranui’s temple, which is at the bottom of the ocean near Kansai. Mao and the gang infiltrate the temple in hopes of saving Masago, but she’s already dead. I really liked the Earth Golem creature created by Natsuno, who’s a wiz at conjuring Earth spirits. It’s kind of a land whale cum nautilus submarine that carries people in its large mouth. It’s quite a complex story that will repay a re-read.
Watched some Youtube, including Twice Zzimbangz ep 3. The girls did a who can sing the highest contest, and Nayeon won. She got pretty high, but I’ve seen other idol singers get even higher – like whalesong screechy bat high. They then got to play at an arcade that’s part of the Zzimbangz centre. Jeongyeon seems to be an ace basketball scorer. Jihyo not so much. There was the inevitable mukbang soon after. During it Jeongyeon said she’s had her eyebrows tattooed, which surprised the heck out of the other two. It became a bit of a meme. But I’m not sure how true it is. Maybe Jeongyeon was having them on. She is the joker of the pack, after all.
Having finished another book it was time to choose a new one. Big decision. Sometimes the next one is obvious, sometimes not. Do I go with another short story collection like my Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, or do I go with a novel? I decided on the latter and a book by an author I haven’t read but who I need to give a go. It’s a book called Quarantine by Australian author Greg Egan. I just started it, so no opinions about it yet.
I finished Volume Two of Bocchi the Rock manga. It finishes pretty much where the first season of the series ended with Hitori-san buying a new guitar and the band entering a festival competition. It was interesting seeing how the manga compared to the anime. The anime was pretty faithful to it, including pretty much all the same beats.
I finished reading the Bocchi volume 3 manga I’d read before. I wanted to re-read it after getting up to speed with volume 2, and I’d forgotten a lot of the details. It looks like they will be making a second season, so we’ll get to see this manga animated, and I can’t wait. Bocchi and her Kessoku Band members are still preparing for the big festival competition, writing a new song called Gloomy Goodbye, making a music video for it, and doing some street gigs. Some new characters come along, including Yoyoko, the leader of metal band Sideros, who’s a classic tsundere who both helps and criticises Kessoku Band. The final sequence where they play a club in Ikebukuro on a bill with a death metal band, a cutesy idol group and a lame-o old dude is a definite highlight. I stayed in Ikebukuro a few nights in Japan, so I like to think they were playing just down the road from my hotel. Damn, I missed them!
I finished the latest Yashahime Vol 6 at my favourite reading spot in Croydon. You know, the one in the park, near that ghost tree? The bat demon babe Shiori apparently appeared in the earlier series Inuyasha. She mentions how Inuyasha saved her life when she was a girl, and we get a flashback of that event. I have the entire anime series but I’ve only seen the first season. I wonder if she appears there, or just the manga. I’ll have to get back to it!
I started a new game of No Man’s Sky, this time in Permadeath mode. This meant, if I died, I would not be resurrected. It was fun while it lasted. I got my spaceship, and was searching out resources for my ship when the planet’s toxins overtook me, and I died. It makes me want to try again. Survival mode is more fun than Creative mode – and once you survive you can be creative as well. There’s a new iteration of the game too, called Relics. It includes display cabinets you can put your newly found relics in. I may pursue this.
Mainly played No Man’s Sky when I got home from arvo shift. I started several new games, the first on Permadeath, where I died again, the second on Survival where I’m surprisingly still alive. It was a fun and intense session, though. I played through to around 2AM. I have my ship and it’s flying, but the system I’m in so far has no space station and I don’t have Hyperdrive. I’m stuck in this crappy system of six crappy planets. Well, one’s a Bountiful Planet, but its Sentinels are super aggressive. I wanna get out of here!
Bought a couple of DVDs at the op shop. They were the Greta Garbo film, Camille, and the Melanie Griffith film, Working Girl. I wrote about the latter recently, so it was on my mind. Camille was a complete surprise. I’ve never seen a copy of it anywhere, it seems like a great lost gem. I watched it long ago during my Garbo phase and I’m very curious to see if it’s any good. I talk more about my weird Garbo phase on the Phases page elsewhere.
I watched the film Working Girl. It was even more impressive second time around. It’s definitely Melanie Griffith’s film (but she gets third billing), but Harrison Ford is a revelation as a suave Cary Grant type acting against his usual action man stereotype. Sigourney Weaver is also impressive, but her manipulative office bitch character disappears through the middle of the film. This is a genuine old-school screwball comedy with the kinds of twists and turns that make for an enjoyably unpredictable story line. If Griffith’s Tess McGill character is sometimes a little dishonest (the word used is ‘gumption’) it’s only because she knows she needs it to survive in a cutthroat world where others like Sigourney’s Katharine Parker are even more dishonest. The Eighties economic rationalism on display is both critiqued and celebrated. There’s an argument to be made that this film and Wall Street are the best things that came out of that pernicious economic policy. I’m not sure if Joan Cusack‘s working class gal pal of Tess is meant to be sympathetic or satirical though, her look is so grotesque. The comments for this film on Letterboxd, as mentioned earlier, are some of the best, funniest and most insightful I’ve seen for any film. Check them out, and watch the film!
I bit the bullet and bought a ticket for the upcoming Nmixx concert at Festival Hall. I did it with some trepidation because I fear there won’t be many going. Even though they’re great, Nmixx just aren’t that popular. I hope I’m wrong and there’s a big crowd when I get there. Also hope I don’t stand out too much as an oldie! But it will be interesting to see Festival Hall again. Wow, the concerts I saw there back in the day!
