Ignore the elephant. There is no room. There is no elephant.

Posted on February 25, 2009 by borysSNORC

Music has always played a bit part in my life. I always choose music to play in the house or in the car based on what sort of mood I’m in or what sortr of day I’m having. I know I often deliberately try to pick things to listen to when I’m not really in the mood for it, in an obvious attempt to change how I’m feeling. Occasionally it works but sometimes it’s a a bit much to expect to immediately become all Cat Empire when you’re actually feeling all Pink Floyd.

There’s a meme going around at the moment to come up with 20 albums, CDs, LPs whatever… that affected you or changed your life in some profound way or another. I don’t know if many albums have ‘profoundly affected me’ but I have lots of artists/songs that evoke memories and associations with certain people – some of them painful, some of them joyful, some of them comforting and some of them erotic even.

Keeping it to only 20 may be the challenge…

01. Meatloaf – Bat Out of Hell (learning to drive music)
02. The Clash – London Calling (first boyfriend’s fav band)
03. The Eagles – Best of (staying with the cousins)
04. Simon & Garfunkel – Greatest Hits (living at Birdwood Rd)
05. ABBA – anything (dancing in the back yard as kids)
06. The Riptides – Resurface (Sundays at Fisherman’s Wharf)
07. Alannis Morrisette – Jagged Little Pill (speedway days)
08. Soundtrack – Top Gun (lost my virginity)
09. Bert Kaempfert – Swinging Safari (every family dinner party)
10. Marillion – Misplaced Childhood (teenage broken hearts)
11. The Cat Empire – Two Shoes (loud. after late shifts to stay awake)
12. James Blunt – Back to Bedlam (hanging out with Dazzles)
13. Garth Brooks – The Hits (on repeat all over Europe in ’95)
14. Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes (cadet camps with Two Trucks)
15. Dramarama – Cinéma Vérité (getting ready to go out with BigSal)
16. Beautiful South – Carry on up the Charts (holiday in Ireland)
17. Bruce Springsteen – Born in the USA (AM’s Bedford van)
18. Enya – Paint the Sky with Stars (singing the Small Child to sleep)
19. The Waifs – Up All Night (missing absent friends)
20. Madness – Complete Madness (Schoolies ’88/’89)

I was a good little Catholic schoolgirl and it was my first time.

Posted on October 7, 2008 by borysSNORC

I was thinking the other day while tossing up the virtues of cleaning out my CD collection …."what was the first album I ever bought with my own money?" Took me a few minutes and I remember buying my first album – admittedly I purchased a tape and not an LP because we didn’t have a record player with us on holiday and no one had ever heard of CDs yet. Yes, yes, yes. I know – my crinoline petticoats are showing.

Me and BigSal had been given some money for Christmas and decided to go shopping for some tapes as we had a Sony Walkman circa 1983 and only tapes full of music we had taped off the radio. I shit you not. We used to sit by the radio waiting for our favourite songs to come on so we could tape them. We didn’t have a lot of disposable income back then… hang on… what am I talking about? We didn’t have ANY income, disposable or otherwise!!! Not like kids these days. OMG did I just say that? Hell, it’s not just my crinoline petticoats showing… I think my whalebone corset and bloomers are out in the breeze with that comment… sigh.

When did we get so old?!?! :S Hopefully I can restore a bit of street cred with my choice in music. My first tape was Quiet Riot’s ‘Metal Health’ album. Which I played to death! Even now, any track of that album rapidly makes me feel like I am about 14 or 15 again.

Big Sal picked up Midnight Oil’s ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ which was also a pretty great rock album. Goes without saying that my Dad wasn’t overly impressed with our selections 🙂
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Swingin’ Safari

Posted on July 30, 2008 by borysSNORC

I was out doing grocery shopping today … a task I absolutely loathe.. and yes, yes, yes… I checked the fucking eggs with the same little disheartened sigh that I always do. But I’m not bitching about checking the fucking eggs – for a change.

Today when I walked into the shopping centre I heard a very familiar tune playing on the PA system….

My Dad used to play Bert Kaempfert’s Swingin’ Safari when I was a kid. Which on it’s own sounds like a fairly innocuous sort of statement but it masks a gross understatement. My Dad played Bert Kaempfert’s Swingin’ Safari EVERY single time we had people over for dinner… since time immemorial. This album embodies all my most enduring social memories of my childhood… rabidly cleaning the house up before guests arrived, putting on our nicest dresses, running amok while the adults fixed dinner and sitting at a kids table in the lounge room. Dad must have been playing that record from the early 70s – long before I was old enough to be allowed to touch the record turntable and we were throwing it back at him right up until he passed away. I can still hear him telling us not to jump or dance on the (timber) floor because the record player was on and he didn’t want the needle to skip.

Over time it became the quintessential Cross Family Dinner Music and would be faithfully trundled out not only every time we had company for dinner but eventually for family dinner gatherings too. I remember hunting down the album on CD in the mid 90s at some point and I can still recall the curious and incredulous looks from the HMV staff when I ordered in 5 import copies of a dodgy old fashioned album they’d never heard of …..one for me, one for BigSal, one for Edouardo, one for Equinom and one for Dad of course.

I remember too giving the CD to the DJ at my little sister’s wedding and insisting he play the album during dinner… which as it turned out was all together too complicated for the idiot DJ and when the silly guy changed to something else after only the first song Edouardo had to go over ‘sort him out’ until he understood that he had to play it right through with nothing else. We also played the album at my wedding and at BigSal’s wedding too (DJ’s properly briefed this time so Edouardo didn’t have to play music Nazi).

It reminds me so much of my Dad that I only just realized that we haven’t really listened to it since he passed away and I was quite taken aback to hear it at the shops this morning. It was quite unsettling actually.
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Mumble fuck… mumble fuck

Posted on June 15, 2008 by borysSNORC

I’ve been catching up on episodes of ‘The Unit’ which is a gung-ho bit of Sepo bullshit sort of show but entertaining enough for all that. What I want to know is – Why on earth do the ‘powers that be’ insist of fucking with something when it’s obviously working for them. I am of course referring to the introduction music/sequence.

They had this edgy military cadence thing going on with soldiers jumping out of helicopters, climbing trees, shooting bad guys looking all intense while they did it bit… and for some reason – here comes season three of the show and they swap it for some soppy piece of shit that doesn’t have the same feel at all.

I don’t know if I’m alone here, but I tend to associate different bits of music with various emotions and memories and when they do shit like this to me in mid-stream it just pisses me off. Mr K and others hate it when we’re watching a TV series one episode after another and I tend to let the intro music run as the theme songs tend to be immediately recognizable and evocative of the sort of content you’re about to view. Now I admit by the time I’ve watched about 7 West Wings in a row that the intro can get a little old but some of them never do.

Veronica Mars – love that intro… it’s cute, it’s perky it’s teen America in the ’00s – or at least we love that intro until they pfaffed with it in the third season (Hmmm are we detecting a trend here?). The Firefly them intro – now why would anyone want to skip through that? Battlestar Galactica – the intro for that is about the only thing on the idiot box guaranteed to make me look up from my needlework to see the 30sec prelude that shows all the action that’s about to unfold. There’s really too many of them to go through but I really want to know what is the value in changing the damn song when they’ve already trained their audience into making an association with a certain tune and their content?

Stoopid eejits.
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Graph Jam

Posted on May 24, 2008 by borysSNORC

A while back I stumbled onto this website – Graph Jam – It’s one of those place for people who have way too much spare time on their hands. Most of it is a little strange, nearly all of it is a little nerdy, some of it’s incomprehensible and frequently only applicable to certain demographics. But occasionally there’s pearls of pure genius. Like so:

graphjam violent femmes prescription add it up

Gotta love it!!