Good! Bad!

Tuesday 29 March 2005

Good! I quit my job.
Bad! They’re offering more money to replace me.

Found Writing: The Long Dark Bundoora of the Soul

Tuesday 29 March 2005

Found at a bus stop, written on the back of a timetable for the 566 Greensborough – Lalor route. Click the pic for the whole thing.

She’s driving me to take my life. My solution is to get out of the state by air straitaway and never ever to return here on the advise that a psycologist gave me in regards to what I would find help full

Filler by Proxy XV: PostSecret

Tuesday 22 March 2005

http://www.postsecret.blogspot.com/

Bobby Fischer update: Icelanders, lock up your mattresses

Tuesday 22 March 2005

Way back when this blog started I cynically padded things out by regurgitating a story about chess master Bobby Fischer getting arrested in Japan. For the past six months he’s been parking his arse in Japanese gaol waiting for deportation to the USA to stand trial over a small matter involving an international war criminal and several million dollars, but just recently there have been several suprising developments. Firstly, I’ve updated the blog a few times. Secondly, Bobby is finally on his way home. To Iceland.
Iceland’s Parliament last night granted Mr Fischer full Icelandic citizenship, opening the way for him to leave Japan for that country.
Chieko Nono, the Japanese Justice Minister, told reporters that if Mr Fischer has been granted Icelandic citizenship, it would be “legally possible to deport him to that country”.

Can you imagine Amanda Vanstone agreeing to something like this?

Filler by Proxy XIV: Trenchant, Incisive

Monday 21 March 2005

The Spin Starts Here hunts for the most boring blogger in the world.
Their runner-up has been reading William Gibson, a writer whose books I thought had only recently been excavated by archaeologists digging through subsoil in search of a clear underlying stratum of Douglas Coupland for sampling and accurate carbon dating, undisturbed by eruptions of older deposits of Tama Janowitz and Brett Easton Ellis.
However, I am forced to consider Gibson’s oeuvre in a new light given the forceful analysis to which dno has subjected it. He encapsulates the reading experience in telling detail, while judiciously weighing up the merits and weaknesses of each book surveyed.
You may need to set aside an afternoon, but you’ll be richly rewarded.

Things overheard from a portable radio tuned to 3AW’s ‘Nightline’

Monday 21 March 2005

  • I think Guy Sebastian would be a millionaire by now.
  • Glen Campbell’s let himself go a bit.
  • But then in America I found this product called Ex-Lax which does the same thing.
  • Why can’t Channel Ten put together a weekly show of highlights of Bert Newton hosting GMA?
  • There’s a new one that Olivia Newton-John has just opened.
  • You can’t beat a good old bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil.
  • I like a good massage. That’s about it.
  • I just can’t understand knockers of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music.
  • It’s only lousy if you don’t like the music.
Had enough? No? Destroy your brAne with the all-consuming black hole of arse that is the Nightline web site.

The BLAD artist interviews, no.3: Danius Kesminas

Sunday 20 March 2005

Another two months have passed so it’s time for another scorching exposé of the lives and work of some of Melbourne’s finest artists.
Danius Kesminas first came to the attention of law enforcement authorities when he napalmed a large section of suburban Adeliade, destroying several hundred brush fences in the process. He avoided prosecution by claiming the prank was one of the nebulously-described ‘free community events’ listed in the Adelaide Festival of Arts program and, with the help of some friends on the staff of the Adelaide Advertiser, shifted blame for the swath of destruction onto Peter Sellars.
This succés de scandale gave public exposure to the theoretical basis of his art practice, elevating him to prominence as one of Australia’s leading aestheticians. His theory being, in essence, that the function of art is to permit antisocial misanthropes to tolerate human company for long enough to get thoroughly pissed and then set them temporarily at large in the community, instead of leaving them to moulder at home, drinking alone and yelling at the TV. Of course, this thought had occurred to many people before, but Kesminas was the first with sufficient tolerance of alcohol to state it coherently in a grant application “while the thought was still fresh in his mind.”
More recently, Kesminas has exhibited the crushed remains of the car art critic Robert Hughes crashed in Western Australia, in an installation that served a double purpose of seductively goosing the sensibilities of art curators while simultaneously gulling the ABC into believing it was a comment on the “clash of cultures” (yes, both of them).
This interview was conducted at ACCA in 2000.
BLAD: How much is this CD?
KESMINAS: Get fucked!
Danius Kesminas is available to make obscure, sarcaastic in-jokes about a dwindling coterie of arts industry figures at your next gallery launch, function or patron schmoozefest. Contact Darren Knight Gallery for a schedule of fees.

“Phelps Watch” can be found elsewhere

Tuesday 15 March 2005

  • Specifically, over at Karma to Burn.
  • Leisure Town is back online!
  • Rollertrain has the best opening line for a blog entry this month, if not all year. “After watching really gross porn all morning, I started thinking about all the things I’ve put into my ass.” And it just gets better.

A fishtank full of blood

Tuesday 15 March 2005

He’s back!
Krankiboy is gifted another cinematic masterpiece from maverick auteur Erik Blevins: Cancer Pond! The powerful concluding sentence:

They symbolically eat the fish, and mom makes an ornament out of the dead bird (a new artistic endeavor = hope and possible fucking in the near future) and that’s what the credits are rolling over – the dead bird ornament and it makes the audience think.

Out of the loop

Tuesday 15 March 2005

It’s March and, as promised, I’ve come out from under the bed. I’ve also run out of cheap nasty hooch so I’m inspired to go mooching around art openings again. Not that the scene is making it easy for me to get back on my wobbly, alcoholic feet.
I’m used to frowsy little artist-run spaces misplacing their mailing lists from time to time, but I didn’t expect ACCA getting all sketchy on me: New05 has opened and they haven’t said boo to me about it. Maybe they want to keep emails down to a monthly newsletter, but wd it kill them to mention what their upcoming shows are, not just what’s already up? I presume they plan that far ahead, at least for their annual exhibitions.
If I sound bitter it’s because ACCA doles out free booze at their openings. Of course they don’t tell you when these are on the website and regular mailouts but you can figure it out.

Filler by Proxy avalanche! Gratuitous exclamations!

Tuesday 8 March 2005

New frontiers in legal testimony!

She later told police the gunman was a good-looking, fit man about six foot tall and aged no more than 25. She told the court the gunman reminded her of a young Bert Newton.


Crap drawings!
But I bet you can’t do better.
Bad Toon Rising is a collection of drawings of well-known cartoon characters produced by amateur artists entirely from memory and without any reference materials whatsoever. We can all picture what Mickey Mouse or the Pink Panther look like in our minds, but getting that image down on paper is another matter! Never mind, we think that some of the worst drawings are the best.


Random image from someone else’s blog!
In Korea, expect a traditional breakfast like this:
Wholesale swiping from other websites!
Nick Hornby: About A Young Boy.
It was Monday. I was at home listening to my 10 inch original of Turquoise’s “Tales of Flossie Fillet” on my stereo. It reminded me of when I first heard that Arsenal had signed John Rape from Spartak Lowestoft. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone, as I’m a sad bald cunt with only football memories and crap ELO records for friends. Also, my son is some sort of spastic and he can’t knock on doors. He can tap them, though; he’s got a headstick which John Cougar Mellencamp signed. I hope he doesnt snap that headstick. It’s got sentimental value now. Anyway, it was a young boy. About 10, I guess. And black like my favourite black singer. You won’t have heard of him, but trust me he’s very black.
Anyway, this boy appeared to be bleeding heavily. I went to phone an ambulance but then I saw this boy’s vein spurting blood all over my floor – some of the blood was trickling towards my pile of old bus tickets. Nooooo! I kicked the little bastard out to die on the stairwell. Then I turned the volume up on the stereo and waited for the police.

Entropy

Monday 7 March 2005

I’ve been tinkering with the site a little bit, so there’s not quite so many italics to read, a few more links on the side, and some other minor tweaks.
Blogger has finally fixed the comments section so you can put a name to your messages without having to register. Also, in case you don’t know about it already, the links on the side of the page now include Bugmenot, a useful site if you land on a website that expects you to register before you can read anything. (According to The Age, my name is rewt.) If Bugmenot doesn’t work and you have to register, tell them your email address is something at real.com and pretend you’re teaching them a lesson about making bloated, intrusive media players.
Some of the tweaks on this page don’t work exactly right all the time, for reasons I have not yet figured out. In all likelihood I will never figure them out. You probably won’t notice the broken bits, but they’re there and will never get fixed. Every time I attempt to improve this thing it will get a little more broken until it disintegrates into an unusable wreckage of lousy code, but hopefully I’ll get bored and stop updating before that happens.

Remind us again why we’re supposed to care about Australian movies

Saturday 5 March 2005

David and Margaret dish out some soft prejudice on the new Australian movie, “The Illustrated Family Doctor“. It is advertised as a comedy.
An ambitious Australian film… you don’t really care very much about… any of the characters in the film. As a comedy, it’s a very academic exercise… sterile… keeps you at arm’s length from it… humour which you sort of register but you don’t laugh out loud about. But, you know, you sort of feel that all the ingredients go towards some sort of interesting mix.

If Dan Brown were a rapper he’d be on remand by now. Never mind.

Saturday 5 March 2005

AN extortionist who threatened to kill building workers unless they received a $50 million ransom from construction giant Multiplex used a 400-year-old code to communicate with the company. The Vigenere Code – made famous recently by best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code – was invented in 1586 and not broken until 1860.
The extortionist has been communicating with Multiplex via newspaper ads. It appears the extortionist, who threatened to kill crane drivers unless he was paid the ransom by Tuesday, made the company use the code to communicate with him.
The Daily Telegraph yesterday deciphered the message, which appeared as a public notice in The Weekend Australian on February 19.

Filler by Proxy XIII: a deadly portion of whup-ass

Saturday 5 March 2005

Krankiboy goes shopping for manilla folders and meets a shop assistant who takes the Real Ultimate Power website way too seriously and is writing a screenplay. Insanity ensues.

If you think most movies are crap, at least you can thank kooks like this for reminding you there are plenty of worse movies that could be made. Dozens of them:
Imagine Julia Roberts, Pres. George W. Bush, Mick Jagger and Olympic Gold Medalist Marion Jones all in the same room. Suddenly the doors to that room are locked behind them, and the famous four are forced to play ingenious and twisted games of survival until only one is left alive.
This is the first screenplay in a planned trilogy. It is told in a non-linear narrative style. A group of kids form a math club which turns into a nightmare of bureaucracy and ends up consuming their lives. It eventually leads to someone’s murder.
“Eyna!” (South African for “Ouch!”) is the comedic tale of a man, a manly-man, a sports-legend, national hero, nay a cricket god, who finds himself… pregnant? Ah, the fickle finger of fate and misguided storks.
Actually, I can imagine that last one as a comeback vehicle for Yahoo Serious.