LABJACD having a zany time

Blues ‘n’ Roots 2009 @ Fremantle Esplanade

Every year, the Blues ‘n’ Roots festival makes its own unique demands upon music lovers. Chiefly, the complex logistics involved in AVOIDING some of the god-awful acts that play there. The John Butler Trio (Christ! Three times as bad as John Butler)? Missy Higgins (Jesus! Is she still barefoot?)? LABJACD (the notion that exuberance somehow creates good music)? Paul Kelly (pass the Nembutal)? Luka Bloom (what is Luka Bloom? Man? Woman? Algae?)?

Luckily most of those acts were confined to the main stage – which we gave a wide berth, apart from a cursory inspection of the adjacent “VIP” area for anything blogworthy. No such luck. The VIP area more resembled a school P&C meeting. Tables and chairs were neatly laid out in rows and you were asked not to stand in the way of people seated. RIP rock ‘n’ roll.

Nice way to spend an afternoon

We got out of earshot of Paul Kelly as quickly as humanly possible and went to check out the mung-bean food stalls. They were doing brisk business thanks to the mainly weed-smoking crowd. Crowd watching is always fun at these ropehead knees-ups. We saw a few lobbers but they looked hopelessly out of place. Their incongruously ecstatic contortions and gurnings to Paul Kelly’s “From Little Things” provided some light relief in a festival that was otherwise mostly devoid of humor.

The predominately shoeless stoner crowd also gave a gentle edge to the day – a nice change from summer’s other festivals which seemed to be filled with intense, badly tattooed, wild-eyed young people determinedly assaulting their frontal lobes with noxious chemicals.

And the joints were lit-up bigtime for reggae topliners the Easy Star All Stars in the JJJ tent. These guys had previously recorded a reggae version of Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon (Dub Side of the Moon) which received quite a warm critical reception at the time. They also did a reggae version of Radiohead’s OK Computer album.

Anyway, they kicked off with Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” (from Dark Side of the Moon) and it was fantastic. “Wow,” I thought. But after this stellar start they proceed to do half-a-dozen Beatles’ covers which were atrocious. I’m sorry, but they sounded awful. Irony doesn’t work that way. The only Beatles’ number that vaguely worked for them was “When I’m Sixty-Four” (don’t ask me why). The crowd didn’t seem to mind too much, though, they were baked.

The band finally got around to doing some more Pink Floyd with an audacious attempt at “The Great Gig in the Sky.” They shouldn’t have bothered, it was shocking. A clumsy and annoyingly dischordant reggae “beat” demolished the subtleties of any melody while the lass putting her voice through its paces had her voice so overly electronicized and digitally altered by the mixing desk (presumably to give it the oomph necessary) that it was a little embarrassing to be in the audience listening to it.

After the jolly japes of the JJJ smoking room, oops, sorry, tent, we headed off to inspect party band LABJACD. I have a theory that these guys and others like them (think Cat Empire) spend their lives tripping around the world from festival to festival. Cleverly, I believe, these guys have bypassed the usually obligatory “starting at the bottom” tenet of rock ‘n’ roll. They have shunned the traditional live music business model of local pubs and clubs and gone straight for the jugular – the festival/world music circuit. The Perth Festival, Womadelaide, Byron Bay, Montreux – on any given day there’s going to be some freakin’ festival happening SOMEWHERE in the world.

I don’t know what the festival circuit pays but I’d bet that playing a Festival of Perth Beck’s gig pays a hell of a lot more than the Railway Hotel on a Friday night.

And once you’re on the festival circuit, it’s probably an easy, self-reinforcing ride. If you’re the organizer of a music festival the last thing you want to be wasting your time doing is assessing the actual musical worth of the artist you’re contemplating booking.

“Hey, Sarah, what have we got for Friday the 12th?”
“Well, how about these guys LABJACD?”
“Hmm, they look cool. Wow, a turntable connected to a computer and some bongos. I love the Latino ‘tashes on those two! Are there any black guys in the band? Where have they played?”
“They did Womadelaide last summer.”
“Great, book ‘em.”

We only got to hear one LABJACD song. It was tight and competent but strangely devoid of musical passion. These guys make all the right moves and look like they’re having a good time but I don’t buy it. It looks like “a show” rather than a bunch of musicians creating something more than the sum of their musical parts. Cat Empire have this problem too. It all seems too calculated and designed around that tired cliché of “infectious latin rhythms” p-a-r-t-a-y time high jinx which CAN work (a la The Avalanches), but it has to have some authenticity in it, you’ve got to have SOME belief in what you do.

Not sure Homer would approve...

Time to go back to the JJJ tent to see Tony Joe White. He’s 66 and looks it, performing the entire gig seated in a plastic garden chair. He had a drummer and an Elton John clone on keyboards to back him up. He should’ve left them at home. The keyboard player’s weird electronic noodlings and samples did nothing to enhance The Swamp Fox’s dark tunes. There were some instances where you caught a glimpse of the man’s talent but he looked completely shagged and like he wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe it was the dope smoke leftover from the Easy Star All Stars set. The venue didn’t work for the man either, with booming noises crashing in from the LABJACD gig over the way. The Ellington jazz club should have booked this guy and it probably would have been a superb gig.

Seasick Steve signing autographs. Sweet guy.

We didn’t hang around for Dweezil Zappa playing his dad’s songs.

Was Wolverine’s “leaking” onto the torrents deliberate? In some ways the half-finished film is sexier than what it would likely be finished. Mmm, we’re seeing it with it’s clothes off… Raw CGI. Mwah, sends shivers up my geek back. Works for me. And no doubt works for the millions of teenagers now watching it (50K seeds when I peeked).

Maybe the kids can even finish it for 21st Century Faux! Rupert would be having a right laugh about that. Why leave the profit machine vulnerable to art. Just chuck it out there and let the “community” do the detail work.

Interestingly, the only media outlet that seems to be covering this story in any depth is the NY Times. I looked at Variety and (incredibly) couldn’t find it in the “news” listing. It’s a huge story, even if it doesn’t turn out to be deliberately leaked. No News Ltd coverage, unsurprisingly. Liev Schreiber’s great BTW.

11th March 2009

The Indi Bar is still doing a cracking job of keeping its gig guide top secret. It was only thanks to a hand written notice pinned to the local supermarket’s community notice board that I was alerted to the fact that the Kill Devil Hills were playing last night.

One of the country’s best bands promoted via a community notice board? Fack, that doesn’t seem very rock ‘n’ roll to me. Or then again, maybe it’s so rock ‘n’ roll that it ceases to be rock ‘n’ roll at all. And anyway, in the case of the Kill Devil Hills, rock ‘n’ roll is only an abstract concept that exists solely to get the shit kicked out of it by the filthy alt-country raucousness that the Kill Devils do so magnificently.

Despite the Indi’s stealth promotion, the gig still managed to pull a hundred or so punters who were treated to an adjective-defying first-rate slab of fup duck mutant mountain-man music. The band delivered the best stuff from their first album and some new material as well with a performance that I felt privileged to witness. Really.

The standout of the new songs was “Roselea”, performed with such energy and emotion that the audience had to pick their jaws up off the floor afterwards. By god these guys can kick arse (what is that violin player on?). It was one of those gigs that you don’t forget.

So, take some time to reacquaint yourself with their first album and crawl over broken glass to get out and see them if you can.

I’m not sure why Danny Boyle’s films have gotten progressively dumber over the years. In some ways his career has followed the same trajectory as former PM Tony Blair. Both Boyle and Blair debuted on the world stage in the mid-’90s, and like Damien Hirst, Noel Gallagher and the rest of the coke-fueled Brit-pack, they managed to surf the Cool Britannia tsunami for all it was worth.

But Blair ruined his track record in Iraq and now it seems Boyle has wrecked his in India. Or, more accurately, an imagined India cynically designed to manipulate the heartstrings and tiny minds of American cinemagoers.

Cravenly grasping for American audiences wasn’t always on Boyle’s agenda. He started off making very good films. His tightly wound and wonderfully chilling 1994 feature Shallow Grave was followed up with the era-defining post modern tour-de-force Trainspotting. Boyle had balls in those days. He took Irvine Welsh’s drug-addled narrative and put it up on the screen – complete with incomprehensible Scottish accents – just as Welsh had hallucinated it. And it worked, brilliantly, thanks to inspired casting, imaginative direction and fearless scripting.

Between then and Slumdog Millionaire, however, things have gone downhill, with perhaps 28 Days Later being the only decent movie he made. The rest of them – A Life Less Ordinary, The Beach, Millions, Sunshine and the execrable 28 Months Later – appear to be nothing less than a string of failed attempts to garner a US audience. And now, finally, with the deplorable Slumdog Millionaire (the dumbest of the lot), Boyle has achieved his aim. Perhaps now he can go back to making decent movies.

It isn’t just the overly simplistic boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl script that is the problem. Everywhere in the film, Boyle has remorselessly dumbed it down so that even the thickest of audiences will be able to consume it without fear of indigestion.

Subtitles must have been perceived by Boyle as being far too difficult for US audiences. So he’s removed them from the traditional area at the bottom of the screen and pasted them in the middle of the action, usually near the character who is talking. Thus the audience is saved from having to move their eyes. Bravo Mr Boyle! But why stop there? Why not just put a speech balloon around the subtitle? The comic-movie nexus would thus be complete!

Predictably, the main characters represent the aesthetically asymmetrical romantic juxtaposition that we’re increasingly being fed in movies these days. Sure, we’ll believe that a fugly, jug-eared, miserable, socially retarded untouchable can romance and win one of the most beautiful women in the world. Why not? Seth Rogen does it all the time.

Production design appears to have been mainly concerned with creating G-rated none-too-shocking tableaux of Indian poverty. So as to not upset US audiences too much, the dire circumstances that so many Indians live in is toned down dramatically. Empty plastic bottles and skinny dogs are the logotypes used throughout the film to indicate a lower socio-demographic location.

And, hey, dismal poverty can be fun! Our hero is a rascally young scamp who has all sorts of Huck Finn-like adventures with his untouchable pals. Outrunning fat cops, scamming money from gullible tourists, train surfing and cadging food are all fun and laffs when you’re an orphaned kid living on the streets of Mumbai.

But even if we forget all the above and let Boyle’s romantic view of poverty in India wash over us, we still have to contend with a brain-dead plot that makes Disney look like Wittgenstein. I haven’t read the book the film was based on but someone’s taking the piss.

I can only conclude that you can get away with this sort of storytelling if you set it in some far flung locale which has sufficient distractions (skinny dogs, game shows, cricket) for the audience to suspend its critical faculties. How in god’s name did this win an Academy Award? I thought Crash was a cynically manipulative piece of filmmaking but Slumdog Millionaire leaves it for dead.

Not a bird, or a plane, but a kangaroo has crashed through the bedroom window of a Canberra family’s home before terrorising its unsuspecting occupants.

The family, from the suburb of Garran in Canberra’s south, were awoken in the early hours of Sunday morning when their pet dog began barking from the garden.

Moments later, a kangaroo burst through a three-metre high window of the house’s master bedroom and onto the bed where Beat Ettlin, his partner Verity Beman and their nine-year-old daughter Beatrix lay.

“My initial thought when I was half awake was: it’s a lunatic ninja coming through the window,” Mr Ettlin told The Associated Press. “It seems about as likely as a kangaroo breaking in.”

While the family took refuge under the blankets, the injured animal proceeded to jump on top of them, gouging holes in the furniture and smearing blood all over the walls. The next thing Mr Ettlin heard was his 10-year-old son Leighton screaming from his bed: “There’s a ‘roo in my room!’ I thought, this can be really dangerous for the whole family now,” the 42-year-old said.

A chef, originally from the Swiss city of Stans, Mr Ettlin followed the thrashing and bleeding two metre tall marsupial and wrestled it into a headlock before dragging it down the hallway and out the front door.

Left wearing just his shredded underpants and with scratch marks on his leg and buttocks, Mr Ettlin described himself as “lucky”.

“I had just my Bonds undies on. I felt vulnerable,” he said.

As quickly as it had come, the kangaroo vanished into a nearby reserve and the family reported the intrusion to police and wildlife authorities.

Ms Beman praised her husband’s courage and said she didn’t know many men who would go head-to-head with a kangaroo.

“I think he’s a hero, a hero in Bonds undies,” she said.

(Thanks to The Age)

Watchmen @ Greater Union Megaplex, Innaloo

Hurrah! For the first time in a long while I actually enjoyed a movie at my local cinema. Greater Union Innaloo managed to start Watchmen at the advertised time, focus the projector and get the sound working – all simultaneously! Oh, and the movie wasn’t half bad either.

Watchmen could have been great, but was derailed in the last half hour by the usual American filmmaking bullshit where the “villain” has to explain everything so the audience isn’t left with any loose ends. “Jesus facking Christ, we haven’t explained how the hitman in scene 45 got hold of the suicide pill! Where’s that goddamn script editor?” Why is this clumsy reveal-all conceit such a consistent component of American movies?

Watchmen is based on the eponymous “graphic novel” by English writer Alan Moore. What’s a graphic novel? A comic book becomes a graphic novel when the prose is so turgid that the word “comic” runs away, hocks its box and gets addicted to smack in a rainy metropolis where hookers and thugs run riot. Moore’s other goth-politik comic books include The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta, both of which were made into very average movies (the former was merely a shit movie; the latter, a fucking shit movie).

Moore kept his name well away from those past productions and the new filum is no different, apparently penned by David Hayter and Alex Tse. But against all the odds, these dudes do a pretty good job.

Where recent superhero flicks like Iron Man have been a bit like a quick chocolate-bar sugar fix, Watchmen is more akin to French onion soup, beef Wellington and profiteroles, all sluiced down with a litre of absinthe. It’s dark as fuck and tells of the lives of a bunch of semi-retired second generation costumed heroes (NOT super heroes, they are all too human) against a background of impending nuclear war and the mysterious murder of one of their brethren.

The movie is long – about 2.5 hours worth. Most of it revolves around flashbacks about each character’s past. And what histories they have. Rape, child abuse, cannibalism, torture, war crimes… These aren’t your regular comic book heroes. And it’s absolutely delicious. I savored the first two hours of this film. The ending (the last 20 minutes or so), as I’ve already mentioned, is typical Hollywood crap, unfortunately, but don’t let that put you off, the rest is a cracking bit of filmmaking.

Yes, the violence is explicit, and often executed against women and children, but unlike the gratuitous violence and torture in the last Batman flick (Dark Knight, which I found genuinely repugnant), the violence here compiles the characters, painting these so-called saviors-of-civilization as profoundly conflicted mere mortals who on a daily basis grapple with utterly terrifying inner (and outer) demons.

Phew. It’s a wild ride and brought to the screen in a very stylish manner. The imagined alternative 1985 where Nixon is president and America won the Vietnam War (thanks to our masked mavericks) is beautifully rendered with a great deal of poignant and clever detail. Some of the scripting is a little bombastic and pretentious, but it can easily be forgiven. Check it out, it’s worth a look.

Ultimate freestyle milk fighting fans, join us for this keenly anticipated bout between heroic 70s gay rights activist Harvey Milk and his opponent, a feisty one-litre bottle of full-fat Harvey Fresh Milk. Who will triumph and emerge as the milkiest of them all?

Ding!
Harvey Milk was assassinated 30 years ago. Harvey Fresh Milk is still good for another week according to its date stamp. Biff!

Ding!
Harvey Milk was born in Long Island, New York on May 22, 1930 to William and Minerva Karns Milk. Harvey Fresh Milk is collected daily from award winning herds of Holstein-Fresian dairy cows. Ouch!

Ding!
Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk in the recent biopic Milk. Holstein-Fresian dairy cows play on environmentally pristine pastures around the town of Harvey. Kapow!

Ding!
As a child, Harvey Milk was teased for his protruding ears, big nose, and oversized feet, and tended to grab attention as a class clown. The kid on the Harvey Fresh Milk bottle looks inbred. Boffo!

Ding!
Harvey Milk was assassinated by fellow councillor Dan White. Harvey Fresh Milk is white. Kronk!

Ding!
Harvey Milk used to hang out in bath-houses. Cleopatra bathed in dairy products not dissimilar to Harvey Fresh Milk. Badoof!

The verdict after six rounds: It’s a tied match!

“Australia fires claim more lives”

“Australia police target arsonists”

These two headlines are from the BBC News website. OK, I can hear you now. “Yeah, there’s an “N” missing from Australia, but geez Will, why be such a pedant about spelling and grammar?”

Well, a single typo is excusable, but it crops up all over the BBC website. That’s not so much a typo as half-way to being institutionalized. But wait, it gets worse.

Here’s some screen grabs from The Telegraph, The Huffington Post and the venerable New York Times.

Fack! Is there some new drug doing the rounds of the newsrooms of the world? We’ve had Es, are anti-Ns the new substance of abuse?

Couldn’t these overpaid lard-arse sub-editors at least chuck on an apostrophe and an “S” if they can’t manage an “N”?

How hard can this be to get right? For godsakes, it’s a fucking country, after all! Don’t they get taught this shit at journalism skool?

Astonishingly, The Graudian actually managed to get “Australia,” “Australian” and “Australia’s” completely correct! Contrary bastards.

“Blowing in the wind…” Reads the caption in the Sydney Morning Herald. Tres witty! Those Fairfax photo editors show just how hilarious they can be with this flattering shot of cricket WAG Jessica Bratich on the red linoleum at some cretinous awards night. But the unwritten subtext here (sniff, Fairfax does have standards, you know…) is “WTF is that dark patch between her legs?”

The astute perverts among you will notice that she IS wearing panties, so it’s obviously not her pubic hair. The only possible answer then is that it’s a merkin – a kind of pubic wig that went out of “fashion” a couple of hundred years ago. It seems then that Ms Bratich is single-handedly attempting to overturn the current vogue for hairless pudenda and put hirsute minges back, er, front-and-center in the social pages. More news on the return of the merkin as it comes to hand…