Mar. 14th, 2009

hmpf: Me painted blue (fanatic)
I ordered Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" recently, vaguely inspired by fic research (which included rewatching "24 Hour Party People" to get a better sense of late 70s/early 80s pop culture in Manchester, which reminded me that I really love this song). "Unknown Pleasures" is from 1979. I only have one other album from that year (I think) - namely, Midnight Oil's "Head Injuries". Midnight Oil just had three reuninion concerts, today and Friday/Thursday, I think, so I've been watching youtube clips for a bit, which I also did for Joy Division before I decided to buy "Unknown Pleasures", and this made me realise that my two 1979 albums also both happen to be by bands whose lead singers have/had patently bizarre "stage moves"... They both look a bit like out-of-control robots when they really get going.

I don't think it's a 1979 thing, though. But it's a weird coincidence.

*

This post is not meant as an endorsement of Australia's - apparently - sadly ineffectual Environment Minister.

PS on PG

Mar. 14th, 2009 05:27 pm
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (Default)
I have to say post-Midnight Oil Peter Garrett mystifies me. I cannot for a minute believe that he didn't believe passionately in the things he sang about for 25 years. If fame, wealth or groupies ;-) were what he was really after, there'd have been easier, less controversial ways to achieve all of that - even in the 80s, angry left-wing environmentalist rock was not a particularly likely ticket to success in the music business; you don't do that kind of thing (especially not for a staggering two and a half decades) if you don't believe in it. So what the heck happened to him, between then and now? What does he think he is achieving, now? Can he really not see that no tiny incremental gain he may make in what I can only assume are complicated political backroom trade-offs, really means a damn? And that we - that's the Big We, aka, All Life on Planet Earth - simply cannot afford compromise and political change at a snail's pace anymore (if we ever could)? Frankly, if it is political constraints and not honest conviction that's guiding his decisions, then one furious and very public resignation speech exposing those constraints for what they are would do the world more good than another I don't know how many years on the leash in office. I assume he doesn't want to harm his government, on the basis of the assumption that it's the lesser evil compared to a return of the conservatives. But, really, sometimes the lesser evil is evil enough. And if the instituted political process really is that broken, then we need our radicals outside of the political establishment, agitating, not inside biting their tongues. (Political agitation has a bad reputation, but it's really a necessary element of processes of political change.)

Granted, I don't know enough about Australian politics to really be able to judge how much hope there is for 'changing the system from within.' I guess I'm just generally skeptical of that concept.
hmpf: (cop porn)
Templar, Arizona starts a new chapter with a marvellously polite exhibitionist testicular self-mutilator, Finder introduces us to what surely *must* be the strangest genetically modified sub-group of an already remarkably strange society, and I have received the first volume of Afterdead, whose weirdness is very insufficiently captured by the phrase "zombie camel robots with extrudable rectal seating."
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (Default)
Was: Procrastination, deep thoughts, and mindless rambling
New: Apocalypse, fandom, and kittens


I think this reflects recent developments in this LJ best. :D I thought about putting "Preventing apocalypse" instead, but then it would have sounded as if I'm also trying to prevent fandom and kittens. And changing the order around would make it sound as if fandom and kittens are preventing apocalypse, which... would be nice, but is unlikely. Although it would be worth a try. Anyone up for sending gift baskets of kittens and fanfic to world leaders?

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