Hah, that Wolves! (of Greece)/Gringo news not being online is all my fault. I forgot to upload the updates Matt sent me. Duh. Go see here now: www.gringorecords.com. Lots of Gringo in the new, final Careless Talk Costs Lives which I’ve only browsed through quickly so far. Looking good though. I will surely miss it (if you can miss something when you could never find it in the first place..) but ET and Steve’s new projects sound Exciting so it’s not so sad.

I’m also putting a record out on my new Asking For Trouble label which is involving way too many forms and jargon. I’m normally great with forms (I could win a fastest DSS form filling competition for certain) but this is like suddenly losing all your brains. I had to go tackle some MySql databases to make myself feel clever again.

I watched the new Ghibli film, The Cat Returns, the other night after being told it wasn’t being shown at the GFT after all. I’d forgotten how difficult it is to keep up with subtitles while eating your dinner but the subtitles were pretty random so it didn’t matter too much. Once the story reached its climax the subtitlers obviously got bored and stopped subtitling for ages, leaving me highly confused. I ended up having to check the synopsis at Nausicaa to find out what the hell had happened. Anyway, translation traumas aside, it’s a fun little film though nowhere near Miyazaki standards. It’s all about a girl Haru who saves a cat’s life. Only he turns out to be the Prince of Cats and lots of cats from the Kingdom of Cats offer their thanks in many bizarre ways, eventually kidnapping her and turning her into a cat so she can marry the Prince of Cats. Oh no! etc. Luckily more cats in the shape of the Duke and his fat friend (who drowns temporarily in a vat of jelly in a truly Homer-esqe scene (Mmmm, jelly)) come and save the day. Cue elaborate escape scenes. Actually it’s got a similar feel as The Castle of Cagliostro, if everyone was cats.

I want to watch Totoro again now, particularly after reading an interview with Nintendo Hero Shigeru Miyamoto at Zelda.com (Flash required but it is lovely) where he mentions that he based much of the look of Zelda WindWaker with the Amazing Eyes on Totoro. Best film ever inspires best looking game ever. Speaking of, I completed Zelda Link to the Past the other night and now I need a new game. Suggestions please.

But I just bought the new PW Long record “Remembered”. It’s truly amazing. If you saw him at ATP last year then most of the crackers from his set are on it, recorded with a full band (who you’d think were Crazy Horse if you didn’t read the sleeve). Its more like Mule than his other solo records due to the heaviness of the band but the songs are so consistently memorable – especially Fish & Wine which I remember from the ATP set so well I could hum it. Its great to finally have a recorded version of it. He may have called me a faggot once but he’s the man.

Just a quick update to my previous message – the Wolves! (of Greece) 10 incher is coming out on Gringo Records. All done and dusted and going to be pressed and another 3 songs recorded for a seven inch afterwards too. Hurrah!

I’m back in the UK and its fucking freezing. Everyone in our street got burgled last week apart from us for some reason. I suspect my housemate Amelia is the culprit.

And I don’t have a job. But I do have a stereo again and my records.

Currently listening to:

“Bad Reputation” Thin Lizzy

“Fire Music” Archie Shepp

“Natural Boogie” Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers

“Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning” Mississippi Fred McDowell

“Hearts Of Oak” Ted Leo / Pharmacists

1993 Peel Session by PJ Harvey

“Rio Grande Mud” ZZ Top

Live bootleg of Unit Ama with Lungfish

“Who Put Out The Fire?” Monorchid

Rye Coalition, Ted Leo, Arab On Radar and Hot Snakes from MichiganFest DVD

Reading:

“Vampire Vultures” John Fahey

“Look Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gon’ Get Yo’ Mama!” Julius Lester

Doing:

Building another FX pedal board

Wanking

Finishing last bunch of Reynolds recordings, sorting out Last Of The Real Hard Men recordings (note this is below wanking in the list)

Wearing:

A T shirt with a Koala on it saying “G’day from Australia”

About 2 extra stones of body weight

A glum expression

xx

Like:

Irresponsible impulse-buying of things we can’t even begin to afford and really don’t need

Castlevania on the PS2 (see above)

Pilsbury Toaster Strudels (you can ice them yourself!)

Wolf Eyes (still)

No like:

Irresponsible impulse-buying of things we can’t even begin to afford and really don’t need

Insane weather (it was in the high 70s at the start of this week and now it’s a couple of degrees above freezing or something)

The idiots who apparently haven’t found the time to give me a work permit yet

The price of beer

Elsewhere this week: We saw Birdland who are two people who used to be in Love Life and Jaks. Katrina sang and shimmied around while Sean played organ and guitar at the same time which was very impressive. They also had an odd looking centrafuge type thing behind them which had lights and made a funny noise and seemed like it might be something to do with the organ. If anyone knows exactly what the purpose of this was, other than to look nice, we’d like to know. They were very good though.

We also saw The Matrix Revolutions which was a marvel to look at but was disappointing as a climax to the trilogy. I never liked anything to do with The Matrix before this summer, but after seeing the last one I was hoping for big things, which it didn’t deliver, at least not in terms of storyline. Some of the action is truly incredible though, and it’s probably worth seeing just for that.

Nice to see Chrisummerlin posting, now it won’t just be me who swears far too much. It’ll be quite something to finally see that Wolves record too, about time!

I’m very excited to hear the news that there is another INSTAL festival in Glasgow this year. Their website’s disappeared so find out more via The Arches (scroll down a bit on the right). With this line-up and the fantasticness of the previous 2 events, I shall definitely be there.

AMM: [Keith Rowe, Eddie Prevost, John Tilbury]
Vooredoms: The Boredoms
Merzbow
Ryoji Ikeda
Cosmos
Vibracathedral Orchestra
Paragon Ensemble
Whitehouse

Sun 23 November
4pm-12am £14/£10

Instal, the Arches’ annual new music blow out, is your chance to experience ground breaking and genre defining live experimental music in the unique surroundings of the Arches. In its third year, Instal features one-off performances from some of the most striking artists in contemporary music today.

You’ll also have noted that we now have Chris Summerlin blogging for us. If you don’t know Chris already, I’ll be very surprised but go read his profile by clicking his name on the left there or just go read his always-great columns. We hope to have some other new people blogging soon but they’re all ignoring me just now.

After about 1000 attempts I finally got Blogger to accept me. The bad news is the “interesting” segment of my life comes to an end on Friday when I leave Australia so I won’t actually have anything interesting to say after that.

But yesterday I swam in the ocean. It ruled. I haven’t done it since I was about 5. After about 5 minutes my arms were killing me but it was cool. Actually it was fucking FREEZING. Even Australia is cold in the shade at 5pm in the sea.

Then to top it off I saw a Ferrari Testarossa. Parked right next to to the beach where I was swimming. Australia has re-tweaked my interest in cars big time and I felt 12 again. Then I noticed my penis was hanging out of my boxer shorts (I don’t own swimming shorts).

I’m going to write more about Australia for the diskant column but yeah, its been weird but fun.

But I missed some great things back home. Firstly my fellow Wolf Of Greece Simons wedding. What a killer, I hate myself for missing that one.

Talking of wolves, the rest of them went to ABBEY FUCKING ROAD to master our recordings we did a year ago to release on a 10″ (one sided) before the year is out. They even met Paul McCartneys band. But the record: honestly, this time they’re coming out. The man responsible hasn’t updated his site with the info so I don’t know if he’s planning a surprise so I won’t say who’s doing it. But it’s cool. For me especially, it feels good.

And shameless plug coming up:

I am playing in a new band called LORDS (no “The”!). Its me and Phil from Wolves and Elvis from Twinkie. Its two guitars and drums and Phil sings, rather well too. We have some gigs when I get back to Blighty:

NOVEMBER

14 WORTHING VINTNERS PARROT (with Hey Colossus)

15 LONDON BRIXTON SECRET VENUE (with Cat On Form, hey Colossus)

19 NOTTINGHAM SOCIAL (with PW Long)

21 LEEDS PACKHORSE (with Macrocosmica and Bilge Pump)

Sweet!

new website too:

www.honeyisfunny.com

Sorry for the plug but I’m excited.

Elvis has been sending me bootlegs of all the gigs I missed at home. How good are the UNIT AMA? I haven’t been so excited about a band for a long while. Wow…

anyway, more lengthy rambles coming I am sure

xxxx

on friday we dressed up as zombies and went to see a band. a fairly standard friday night you may be thinking, but thankfully we saw japanese band mono and they were first fucking class. a few years ago i got completely sick of watching bands of skinny kids who sound like mogwai; there was too damn many of them and they were never very good. this is largely what i was expecting of mono, but after only a few minutes of their set they showed me that they’d done their homework and they meant business. there’s really no escaping the fact that they just sound like mogwai did 5 or 6 years ago: gentle gliding guitar textures that sway and build until it’s very loud, or occasionally switching from very quiet to very loud on a sixpence. the thing that sets them apart from the legions of second rate post-rock copycats is that they do it very very well indeed, the best i’ve heard anyone do it since young team, the holy grail itself came out and lodged itself firmly in my skull. when they were quiet it was all very nice and pretty and 1998 and when it was loud it was “fucking hell, that’s really very loud indeed and i wasn’t expecting that and SHIT it just got louder, well surely they can’t get… JESUS! there they go”. they reminded me why i ever liked this stuff in the first place, at a time when anything that sounds remotely like mogwai sends me to sleep within 30 seconds. the couple of times they went from quiet twiddley bits to SHREDDING THE PLACE TO SHIT i seriously began to wonder if they weren’t better than mogwai ever were, but that was probably the beer talking.

for those who haven’t heard of this band (most of you i’m sure) they’re a tokyo quartet who have albums out on tzadik and arena rock, and will probably be very huge if the nme ever decides to start writing about music again.

lastly, in an effort to get a photo into every blog, here is the amazing pumpkin kim carved.

As if handing over a fat chunk of the regeneration budget to the cloth-eared fuckwads at MTV wasn’t enough (‘cos the capital’s coke dealers need the extra trade now there’s a bit of a banking recession, presumably), at the same time, NATO is invading:

“‘After Iraq – a new transatlantic consensus? NATO at a crossroads!’ As well as high ranking military chiefs and political leaders, the 49th meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Association will also be attended by top executives of the world’s largest arms manufacturers including BAe and Lockheed Martin. Among those attending will be Supreme Allied Commander of Europe: General James L Jones (USA); Geoff Hoon, MP Secretary of State for Defence (United Kingdom); US Ambassador to the UK: Ambassador Nicholas Burns; Rt Hon Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, PC, Secretary General, NATO and Russian Ambassador to the UK: Ambassador Yuri B. Kashlev. Events will also include a Royal reception at Holyrood Palace, an evening on the Royal Yacht Britannia, a trip to see the Scottish Crown Jewels and a visit to Stirling Castle”

This is from the 4th-8th November and the schedule is up on Indymedia. Go spoil their party.

If I hadn’t spent half my life in the town, I’d advocate nuking the EICC.

I need a shower after thinking about this. And don’t get me started on this Musicworks pish either.

I should maybe follow Simon’s example….

Most people’s response to me saying I was doing this (it’s a Wednesday today) was to say “why?”, and there was a remarkable amount of surprise to my response of “no reason, really”.

Taking the day off for no reason, really is a great thing. It has reminded me that I do not exist to get up, go to work, and come back from work feeling tired. It has reminded me that the weekends used to be about more than resting and recuperating before another week of work. Today I have done these things:

– get up late
– watch a movie
– watch some tv
– write some e-mails
– do some writing
– listen to records

And I’ve done them all at a relaxed pace. I feel richer deep within my soul for this. It’s good to do nothing much for a while – it’s not lazy, it’s not a waste of time. Give it a try!

ok then, taking a cue from chris h, here is my ‘weird american things’ list.

– middle aged women like my accent.

– people drive like insane crazy loons. i have seen more accidents in the last three and a half months than i had in the previous 22 years. i’m not looking forward to learning to drive.

– a lot of people seem to think i’m from london, possibly because it’s the only english place they know.

– a lot of people regard me as simply being ‘from europe’ like there is america and then the rest of the world.

– meat is very popular on sticks.

– american curry isn’t as bad as you’d think.

– americans take charity shopping to bold new levels.

– the omnipresence of advertising is incredible. some days i feel i can’t open my eyes without being told to buy something.

– americans say “i could care less” instead of “i couldn’t care less” which makes absolutely no sense at all.

– the boss was correct when he sung ’57 channels and nothing on’.

– there are big scary killer insects and animals everywhere. locusts, raccoons, possums, groundhogs, and every other big silly weird thing you could imagine. including the guy pictured below who was without a doubt a big scary evil bastard killer.

[picture lost forever, oh no! – ed]

that’s it for now, there is probably more that i may post at a later date. chris h’s new article made me a little homesick. i kind of miss cycling everywhere, something i never thought i’d say. chris s’s beefheart stuff was pretty great too wasn’t it. to keep someone like me who knows nothing interested all through that stuff is no mean feat.

lastly, i am a jobless pauper who can’t afford to buy any records. if anyone would like to send me tapes or cd-rs or anything at all really, please get in touch.