The Rest of Your Life (v4)

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for a fantastic year, and all your comments and encouragement, and continuing to read my drivel ! Big things planned for 2008 (but I say that every year haha !), but for now I just want to wish you all a Merry Xmas and a fantastic NYE, and I hope I see you again next year !

Party safe, and have an awesome time, gang.

Cheers
Pete (DB)

HEY ALL –

Here’s a little letter I just sent to a bunch of my Liberal-voting friends (I’m sure we all have some, poor misguided fools that they are) – you might like to do the same before the weekend.

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So guys, I know you’re probably sick of all the election stuff already over the last month. I also know SOME of you are avowed Liberal supporters, although I’m not sure all of you are – so please don’t take offence at my assumption if I’ve got it wrong in any of your cases !

You’d all be aware of course, that I’m not a big fan of our current PM and his party. That doesn’t mean I hold it against you if YOU are, it just means we’ve got different hopes for this weekend’s outcome. Whichever way you look at it though, it’s going to be a pretty ‘historic’ vote this time ’round, so that’s why I’m writing you all this quick email.

Given the ‘importance’ of this election, I reckon if I can get even one Liberal voter to change their vote (whether it’s putting Labor, the Greens, The Democrats, or the Utter Raving Nutter party first – it doesn’t matter to me, as long as you don’t preference the Libs first or second), I’m doing a ‘good’ thing. Feel free to discard this email if you vehemently disagree with everything I’ve just said – otherwise please hear me out for two seconds.

I don’t know if you guys read the fantastic ‘Opinion Piece’ by Paul Keating in today’s Herald, but I think he’s hit the nail right on the head.The crux of his argument is that we need regime change to find our way back to the principals and values this great country once stood for.

As Keating says, the eleven years we’ve endured under the present regime have seen a tragic errosion in the quality of our public discourse, and the very social fabric that underpins what it means to be ‘Australian’. Howard has not only championed, but actually encouraged a ‘turning inwards’, while seeking to solidify a ‘fortress Australia’ mentality to serve his own ends.

Our reputation overseas has suffered undeniable harm thanks to a whole range of issues such as mandatory detention, Tampa, our participation in the Iraq fiasco, and our refusal to ratify Kyoto. Believe me – I have family and numerous friends overseas – I know what people in other countries say about Aussies these days.

Domestically, we’ve seen the Liberals tear our public health & education systems to tatters, destroy housing affordability, and try to shaft everyone but the ‘big end of town’ with their onerous Work Choices legislation. We’ve heard ‘non-core promises’, ‘one day promises’, and outright lies. Yet perplexingly, the majority of Australians (myself excluded … but hey, you get that) have up till now continued to vote Howard & friends back in.

Now Johnnie has the arrogance to try and tell us that “change for the sake of change itself is meaningless”, and “you can’t change government without changing the country”. I think he’s missed the point.

All the opinion polls aren’t pointing to a Liberal defeat because people want change “for it’s own sake” – they want change because they are whole-heartedly sick of HOWARD, his party, and their inwardly focussed, self-serving policies.

The whole point is that the tide seems to have turned against Howard precisely because the electorate WANTS to “change [our] country”. We’re sick of the fear-mongering, the half-truths and distortions, the grubby little back-room deals which lead to things like the AWB scandal or sending our boys overseas to fight in a “War on Terror” which is ultimately America’s brain-child, and not our own.

We’re sick of a government that funnels money out of our hospitals, our public schools and universities, our welfare system, and our pockets via the GST and fuel excises, then pumps it in ever-increasing fistfuls into privately outsourced ‘detention camps’ which lock up innocent people seeking a better life in our country and the occasional Australian citizen, into Bush’s war machine, into pointless rounds of so-called ‘informational’ advertising designed to convince us we’ve “never had it so good”, into hastily approved (or worse) ‘pork-barrel’ projects to prop up Liberal and National seats, and into the pockets of its mates with their corporate kick-backs and high-income tax breaks.

Granted, there’s *always* a chance Kevin Rudd may turn out to be no better than John Howard in the long haul (although somehow I doubt it), but at least he’s paying lip service to a vision for the future which doesn’t involve more of the same feckless horrors above, which the Liberals have doled out to the people of Australia for the last eleven years.

THAT my friends, is why I’m hoping Kevin 07 comes through this Saturday, and Australia finally gets to see ‘Howard’s End’.

So please guys, as one friend to another I’m urging you to think carefully.

Please make your votes count this Saturday, and join me in letting the Liberals know that (to paraphrase TV’s Big Brother) – “JOHN, IT’S TIME TO LEAVE THE HOUSE” !!!

– Authorised by (your name and suburb go here)

I think I’ve just found a new love … Amazon.com ! Why ?

I got a little package, and something arrived in the post today as well 😉

That’s right mofos – the mailman has just dropped off “Planet Terror” & “Deathproof” on DVD for me at work. For those who don’t know, these are the two constituent films which made up ‘Grindhouse’, the poorly-grossing, yet undeniably appealing (at least to ‘so bad it’s good’ film buffs like yours truly) recent cinematic experiment from Quintin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez. Whilst the initial cinematic release in the States had these films playing together as an ostensible ‘double feature’, linked by a bunch of wacky faux-trailers to recreate the ‘Grindhouse Cinema’ / Drive-In experience, they’ve been split for subsequent international & DVD release.

There’s still hope amongst fans that they original ‘double feature’ experience will be restored at some point by a DVD release featuring both films plus all the ‘extra’ stuff showcased in the ‘Grindhouse’ US release, at this point it’s only possible to get the films separately.

‘Death Proof’ has only recently started showing in Australian cinemas, and in a judicious piece of casting stars Kurt Russel as a psychopathic stuntman who ‘stalks sexy young ladies’ (as the packaging blurb puts it), and kills them in his ‘deathproof’ 1970’s (?) Dodge Challenger (the yank equivelant of the venerable Valiant). Directed by Tarantino, it’s supposed to be some of his best work in years, so I’m definitely looking forward to watching it.

‘Planet Terror’ hasn’t even come out anywhere but the USA yet, and if I’m looking forward to Death Proof, I’m almost at the point of having a religious experience … in my pants … at the prospect of Planet Terror. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, this is a futuristic zombie splatter-flick starring Rose McGowan (my favourite Halliwell) as a stripper-turned-zombie-fighter who ends up with an M-16 in place of a leg for the majority of the movie.

I luuuuurve a well-done zombie movie (even when it doesn’t star Rose, although as anyone who has seen Jawbreaker knows, she plays a bad-girl very well), and if the trailer I just watched on the DVD is anything to go by, this is going to be one of those.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’ve raised my standards *slightly* since the days when I used to watch literally ANY shite which I could find in the ‘ten videos for ten bucks’ weekly rental horror / slasher / sci-fi aisle at Video Sleazy. Mainly because sitting through Rob Zombie’s ‘definitely trying way too fucking hard’ directorial debut (House of a Thousand Corpses) made me realise there really ARE some films which constitute two hours of your life wasted, which you are never ever going to get back.

Unlike the aforementioned House of A Thousand Corpses though, I have a strong feeling the ‘Grindhouse’ DVDs I’ve had arrive are NOT going to be waste – quiet the reverse.

Watch this space for reviews, after I’ve had a chance to watch them on the weekend. Who knows … I might even go all out to repeat my ‘ten videos for ten bucks’ experience of yore, and get a big arse bucket of KFC and a few bourbon and cokes in me, to go with that

… makes Homer go insane. No … wait ! 😉

Just thought I’d do a *very* quick post, to head off any vicious rumours before they start. I want to assure all my loyal readers (the whole 5 or so of you, if that) I’m still alive and well, I’ve just been busier than a hooker at a media convention with work, and trying to write a 50,000 word novel in my ‘spare time’ as part of NanoWriMo, which is why I haven’t been posting much. Factor in the added distraction of Fakebook … I mean facebook … and the fact I’m desperately itching to find some time to write a few new tunes (or at least lay down another DJ mix), and you can see why I haven’t written any new blogposts in a while.

Rest assured, ‘normal’ service shall resume at some point, most likely in December, when various Xmas parties and the like are sure to provide at least one or two drunken debauchery stories worthy of blog-fodder !

Gotta love the name of the nightclub too … “Throb” … only in Brixton, eh ?

Hey Gang,

So I thought I’d take this opportunity to plug one of my many extraneous creative outlets in addition to this blog.

It’s called

Bulletproof Streetwear

That’s right peeps – you can now buy T-Shirts from me, and they’re pretty damn good (if I do say so myself).

Check it out at http://www.redbubble.com/people/bulletproof

So … just read this over @ the SMH – “Between 3pm and 7.30pm today, there will be 92 motorcade movements around the city”.

Yeah … great … as if we Sydney-siders weren’t incovenienced enough already, with a FUCKING 5 KILOMETER STEEL FENCE AROUND THE CBD, crowds of renta-goons and uniformed police hanging around like a bad smell and frisking all and sundry (including the hilarious Steph over at Much Ado‘) as potential terrorists, the daily noise of helicopters & jets overhead, bus route disruptions, road closures, and ‘special clearways’ UP TO 11 KILOMETRES AWAY FROM THE FUCKING APEC SUMMIT SITE !!!

Who was the ABSOLUTE SODDING MORON that pitched for this thing to happen in Sydney anyway ? Was it Iemma, or did this come as an edict from Johnny up on high (given that APEC is after all a FEDERAL summit, not something that the State governments are involved in) ? I don’t see the benefit to NSW (and especially Sydney) myself, sorry.

The IDEAL place to have had this summit, in my oh-so-learned view, would have been Canberra. It’s a federal summit, so have it in the federal capital, right ? No real people live in Canberra (hehe sorry, but it had to be said), it’s the heart of the beaurocracy, so why the hell didn’t they hold it there ? Oh … right … Johnnie wouldn’t have been able to take Dubya to lunch at Bondi Icebergs on the Sunday then.

See, that’s something else that gets my goat. You want to block off the CBD so you can play ‘world politics’ with your mates ? Fine. You want to make it virtually impossible for Sydney-siders & tourists to enjoy famous Sydney areas like the Opera House, The Rocks, Circular Quay etc ? Fine. BUT STAY THE FUCK OUT OF THE SUBURBS, YOU GREEDY BASTARDS !!!

Here’s a little snippet from the ‘Bondi Bulletin’ of the APEC site –

“If you are having guests to your home to watch the ‘Festival of the Winds’, please let them know in advance that they will not be able to park at your home and to consider public transport. You will need to escort your guests to your home and vouch for your guest. Residents will be asked to provide identification.”

I’m sorry, we don’t (yet) live in a police state (or so you would have thought) … why the hell should Bondi Beach residents be forced to sodding ‘escort’ & ‘vouch for’ their guests, and provide resident identification, all so some fat fucking politicians wives + Dubya can have lunch at Bondi Icebergs ?

The other alternative to Canberra, if we had to have this shit in NSW, would have been to hold the APEC summit at some picturesque country location, like the Hunter Valley or Port Stephens. Book out all the hotels in Newcastle, plus all the actual Wine Estate accommodation in Pokolbin for a week, and you’d think you’d be right.

Now my mate G, who’s actually one of the boys in blue (and therefore working this weekend, unlike most of the rest of Sydney), reckons that the reason this had to be held in our town was because with all the delegates, their individual security teams, and various hangers on, the summit will actually have 15,000 attendees. Firstly, to me that sounds like an implausibly huge number.

15 HUNDRED I could easily buy, but 15 THOUSAND ? WTF ? Have we got the entire population of Nauru turning to APEC or something ? People, if we have 15,000 fuckers turning up to go to this thing, then there is something seriously wrong here. GET RID OF THE HANGERS ON, YOU DICKHEADS ! If we had 1,500 instead of 15,000 of the ‘Dubya & Friends’ fucktards to deal with, we could EASILY have fitted them all in to some suitably picturesque (and more importantly, out of the way) regional centre, instead of having to bring the centre of Sydney to a virtual standstill.

Anyhow, things being what they are, *I* am getting the hell out of Sydney this weekend instead, and taking my lovely wifey to the Hunter Valley again. So nyer, nyer, APEC fuckers … while you’re blocking off the centre of my town, and copping (rightly deserved) demonstrations and general angst from the people of Sydney, I’LL be eating cheeses, drinking wine, and shagging in a ‘picturesque regional centre’. To think y’all could have been there instead of us … and then everyone would have been happy !

Just a tip for next time, if you’re reading this Morris 😉

Hey dudes & dudettes,

SO for something a little different, below you’ll find a little something I’ve been working on in my ever-decreasing spare time over a fair while now. It’s finally finished, and it’s now up on YouTube.

That’s right folks … I’m talking about my first ever ‘trailer mash’. Especially good for fans of Kevin Smith films, I think it’s bloody hilarious (but then I would). Please let me know what YOU all think

[DELETED]

A big thanks to “The Theorist” from BBBA for posting the link to the above … sums up the whole series this year I reckon Check out the look on Cruz’s face (standing in back row, [your] left in the closeup), after Bodie has thrown the chicken – *CLASSIC* ! As much as I loathed him on the show, he redeemed himself somewhat in my eyes by pegging that chicken …

[UPDATE 6/08/07]
Unfortunately, it looks like SSE/C10 have made Youtube take the clip off. Ah well, such is life …

Listening To: Hard NRG 8 : Various Artists (MOS)

Current Horn Factor :

Quote of The Day
MyBumMyChum please describe web 2.0 to me
MyBumMyChum in 2 sentences or less.
mynameizzzEarl you make all the content.
mynameizzzEarl they keep all the revenue.

If you can’t tell already (by the fact I haven’t posted anything for the last few weeks), BB07 apathy has well and truly set in for me now dear readers. I don’t know if I can see it through to the end of the series, and I definitely can’t be arsed blogging about it at the moment. Besides, this blog is about so much more than just Big Brother, isn’t it gang ? 😉 So instead, I’m going to tackle a completely different topic for today’s enthralling TROYL installment, namely that of “collecting”.

Whether it’s stamps, football cards (baseball cards for our seppo friends), comic books, those poxy porcelein figurines off the back of the TV guide, or explicit polaroid photographs of their numerous sexual encounters, most people have at one time or another, kept a ‘collection’ of some sort. I myself started out collecting Tintin comics when I was a young lad (still have the whole set somewhere in storage), before moving on to “Australian Plastics Modeller” magazine, and a brief flirtation with philatelly (although stamps are a lot less exciting than your average Tintin, which is why the latter was a ‘passing phase’ at best). I also went through a stage of collecting scars in the latter half of my “difficult teens” and early 20’s, but thankfully the appeal of that eventually wore off also.

Now, some would argue that these days what I mostly collect is pornography and parking tickets, but I beg to differ. “Collecting” would be far too methodical a phrase to describe the chaotic nature of my prOn stash, and the parking tickets are not something I purposefully amass, they simply come to me as a consequence of being too lazy to ride my pushbike to work, and choosing to drive instead. Rather, I like to think of myself as ‘collecting’ something far more ephemeral. This particular “pashion” (or compulsion ?) for ‘collecting’ has been with me since around the mid 1990’s, and is a direct consequence of my being a (bedroom/part-time/amateur) musician.

You see gang, the “thing” (or things) I spend a fair bit of time collecting these days are – SOUNDS !

Hold up, hold up ! Before you shut down your browser in disgust (“Sounds ? You purple-haze, hippy, motherf$ka !”), let me explain.

Back in the mid 90’s, when my friends and I first moved away from our guitars and drumkits to PC-based music production, the ‘tech of choice’ for the bedroom musician was something called “software trackers”. I can see a grin of fond memory spreading across some of the faces in the crowd (“FT2” … “Pro Tracker” … “MMedit” …. ring a bell ?), but for the rest of you I’ll give you a very quick run-down. A software tracker (A.K.A “grid-based, sample pattern sequencing program”) was a way of arranging ultra-short snippets of sound (samples) into meaningful compositions. The upside being that the resulting music file would only save a copy of each “sample” once, along with a very simple record of the order (and pitch) at which all the sound snippets were strung together to make the actual song.

Think of it as a very early version of the humble MP3. Just like MP3’s, a lot of the resulting ‘compositions’ were nothing more than simple ‘rips’ of popular commercial tracks, streamlined for quick downloading and music piracy on the (pitifully slow … 3 hours to download a 300kb file @ 2400 baud) pre-internet data networks. However, just like ‘ground-breaking’ hip-hop and electronic musicians + DJ’s such as The Beastie Boys and The Prodigy could with their ‘hardware’ studio gear, some of us used the “tracker” software to produce original tunes. We’d grab samples from far and wide (a drumloop from an old disco record, a single note from a mate’s Juno synth, 5 seconds of dialogue from a 1970’s ‘Blaxploitation’ flick), and … viola … a cheesy 90’s ‘underground’ techno track to share with our mates in Helsinki, via the wonders of Fidonet.

Being in this ‘scene’ for a few years, I think it’s inevitable that everyone starts to build up a ‘collection’ of their favourite samples (sounds), which they tend to use more than others. There’s a whole array of ‘classic’ samples from that era now, like the so-called “Amen Loop” (a drum loop used on a plethora of 90’s break-beat hits), various TB-303 acid-bleeps (coz not every uneployed teenager could afford a 303, even back then when they were still relatively cheap), and so on. Yeah, I’ve got them all, just like every other man and his dog. MY big thing though was dialogue samples. Too much time listening to obscure bands like Cabaret Voltaire, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult & Ministry, and before you knew it I was raiding the bottom shelves of Blockbuster for all the Z-Grade Roger Corman and horror movies with titles like “The Demon Bimbos from Planet X”, just to get my hands on the same original sample sources they used.

This was before the days of DVD as well kids – much harder to get decent sound reproduction when you’re recording at only 16-bits from a vintage early 80’s VHS player using a coax cable and your crappy 90’s (unshielded) soundcard. Just like other groups of “collectors”, my muso friends and I would trade samples between ourselves, try to ‘out-do’ eachother with particularly “good” examples of sampling, etc. To this day, I still remember feeling really cut when one particular mate of mine used a great sample I’d taken from “Return of the Living Dead”

(the line was “I love you, and you’ve got to let me eat your brain”)

in one of his online tracks, before I’d had a chance to use it in a song of my own. It was gold dammit (!) … one I’d sourced entirely myself (instead of being inspired by one of the aforementioned obscure bands). To add insult to injury, he’d only swapped me a bunch of crappy 8-bit 303 sequences for it

I could go on and on about samples like a true obsessive, but as we all know – nothing stays the same, people and technology evolve. I got out of writing music for a few years, then started slowly moving back into the fold. Used samples & trackers again for a while initially, before discovering the newly evolving “modular studio software” technology epitomized (at the time) by “Buzz Composer”. No longer limited to simple samples, instead for a while there I was collecting “Buzz Instrument (and effect) Plugins” – which were basically little bits of independent software code that you could “plug-in” to the Buzz environment to generate sounds in REAL time (like little software versions of physical studio hardware). Buzz plugins are the pre-cursor to today’s VST plugins, basically. I’m not strictly collecting sounds (as such) at this point I guess, but sporadically gathering sound-producing tools.

Finally then we come to the present (or near present) day, when my 10+ year participation in that ‘orrible thing called the “workforce” finally starts to reap measurable ‘rewards’, and therefore my budget for spending on music production gear (not counting electric guitars, effects pedals and four-track recorders … I had THAT shit when I was a teen … over it hehe) actually becomes more than non-existent. Ergo, I finally start buying real music HARDWARE again, instead of just producing with software (and the occasional midi-controller keyboard, like the EVO mentioned in an earlier blog post). I buy my first ‘proper’ hardware synth on Ebay – a venerable 1980’s workhorse called the Korg-Poly 800. Shed-loads of tweakable parameters, lovely 80’s Depeche Mode synth-pop sonic possibilites. Unfortunately, the programming is a bitch (bugger all physical controls, just membrane buttons and lots of scroll menus). The synth comes with oodles of patch programming sheets the previous owner had squirelled obsessively from the ‘net … and

suddenly I’m back to collecting sounds again, but now they’re not samples, they’re rows of LFO settings, VCO routings, and DCO waveforms.

I get rid of the Korg after a few months of fiddling, but the ‘collecting’ bug has well and truly bitten by then. I go through a few bits of gear on ebay (the Korg, an Alesis-SR16 drum machine), lust over some brand new synths (and sounds) while I’m overseas, and eventually settle for a classic 90’s techno BEAST called the Roland Alpha Juno (gotta luuuuurve ebay !). Just like the guy who sold me the Korg, by this point I’m madly downloading patches and sysex editors for my ‘new’ pre-loved synth off the ‘net, the user groups, wherever I can find them. I’m making my own patches (the Juno being easier to program than the Korg), organizing the ones I’ve already got into “sets” … basically obsessing about all the phatt SOUNDS I can get out of this baby.

Some time after THAT, I get my Novation X-Station. Suffice to say, if i was drooling about the sonic possibilities of the Juno, I positively cream my jeans when I get my hands on the X. It’s not actually that easy to find patches/presets (i.e. sounds) for THIS baby on the ‘net, it’s only been out a few years after all … but believe me, I ALWAYS keep an eye out I’m so tragic now, I actually publically scoffed at the recent ‘new’ patch-set the manufacturers made available on their website (programmed by the keyboard player from Jamiroquoia supposedly) in one of the bigger user forums because “there aren’t enough NEW sounds in there – we’ve heard most of these patches before”.

And THAT, my friends, is my story. YOUR TURN NOW TO FESS UP – WHAT’S YOUR SECRET ‘COLLECTING’ SHAME ? 😉