These are a few of my favourite things.
Art vs Science vs Daft Punk
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Tag Archives: Music
Kids remember the darndest things
We had a little trip on the weekend from my parents place out to the Busselton Jetty and accompanying Underwater Observatory. The jetty is 145 years old and, at almost 2km, is the longest timber-piled jetty in the southern hemisphere. The Underwater Observatory is like an aquarium in reverse letting you take a walk 8m below the waves to check out the sealife making it’s home in and around the jetty pylons.
While waiting for our scheduled tour, we had a walk around the local Pioneer Cemetery. For some reason the kids are obsessed with checking out names and dates on headstones in cemeteries, and always ask if we can stop and have a look if we have the opportunity. In that cemetery we found lots of names like “Bunbury” and “Bussell”, obviously after whom these South West towns were named after.
One caught my eye. The name on it was Samuel Isaacs and without reading the inscription, Suzanne and I both turned to each other and said “Wasn’t that the guy…?”. Turns out it was the guy, and we both remembered the story from our school days. Isaacs and another local girl by the name of Grace Bussell (after whom Gracetown is named) rode their horses through the surf into the ocean to rescue people from a sinking ship. They ferried people back to the safety of shore by dragging them behind their swimming horses. You can read more about it here.
Samuel Isaacs monument, Busselton
On the way back the kids were disappointed to find that they brought the DVD covers but not the DVDs themselves so they couldn’t watch their favourite movie on the way home. You gotta hand it to them, though. It was a whole 6 minutes before the inevitable question came: “Are we there yet?”.
We stopped at a gas station for some road cokes (and chocolate milk for the kids) and while Suzanne way paying for them I dug out the trusty iPod as a backup with the intention of playing a little ZZ Top or Aerosmith. The Rolling Stones Forty Licks
Ashton and Jett have seen Tron once only, and they really enjoyed it. Hey, it’s an enjoyable Disney movie so it’s understandable. But by listening to the soundtrack she was able to recall and describe pretty detailed parts of the movie. “This is the part where Sam meets Kevin Flynn for the first time. Only he’s CLU,” and “I remember this is where they are falling in the elevator,” and “This is where CLU gave his speech about “out there is our DESTINY“, but Kevin Flynn said the same thing about “in there” being our destiny at the start”. Derezzed is pretty much the signature track on the album, and instantly recognisable from the movie. But soundtrack albums also tend to have a lot of slower background atmospheric music, especially in scenes heavy on dialog. But Ashton knew pretty much where she was in the movie based only on seeing the movie and hearing the soundtrack once. Pretty impressive.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I only just read this. The poet behind one of my favourite 1970s Soul pieces, Gil Scott-Heron, has died. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” has elements of Hip-Hop and Rap with heavy drum-and-bass and simplistic production. I’m not black, but it still speaks to me and I think a lot of what it says is universal. It’s on one of my “Dad’s Mix” CDs which gets played on high rotation when I drive.
A very Perth icon dies
It seems there’s always been this ragtime piano playin’ busker doing his thing in the Murray Street Mall, in Perth. What impressed me was that he was a busker with a freakin’ portable piano. Most buskers carry a guitar, or a flute or some smallish instrument. A certain accordion player was popular for a while. But this dude had a whole piano. It was an upright piano with the front panels exposed so you could see the movement of the little hammers on the strings inside whenever a key was struck. Since he was playing ragtime, there was always plenty of movement in the hammers. Kids, especially, would be mesmerised by the groups of keys dancing back and forth when he played the likes of “The Entertainer”.
Turns out he was a rather talented maestro by the name of John Gill who attended many prestigious schools and played in many bands around the world. He was playing in leading clubs and hotels in Europe and across the US before he moved out here.
I say “was” because he had a heart attack and died on the weekend. He had a bit of a writeup in todays newspaper.
Another little bit of Perth has disappeared.
We are hopeless at charades
We had an impromptu session 0f charades during dinner the other night, in response to the question of what we could do for family home evening the next time it rolled around. I’m surprised that we haven’t actually done charades in our family, but also surprised that the kids didn’t know what it was at all. I can’t believe that they hadn’t done it at school before. So, to prepare them for our family night we explained some of the rules of charades. They got the idea that you have to act out something without using words. We tried to make it as easy as possible by choosing some examples of movies we own or they had recently seen, such as Edward Scissorhands and The Karate Kid
I decided to test Suzanne, and there was also the off chance that the kids would get it too. I wanted to do Michael Jackson.
I figured the easiest way to convey “Michael Jackson” was to invoke his best and most well loved dance routine from Thriller.
Look, I’m not Michael Jackson. I realise this. I a fat, balding, middle aged white guy with little to no coordination or artistic credibility. But I did a pretty damned good Zombie Dance from the Thriller music video, including most if not all of the most easily identifiable dance steps. But could Suzanne get it? She just pointed and laughed and started thinking up random words and names which had absolutely nothing to do with thriller or Michael Jackson. The kids could be forgiven because they weren’t around in the 80s or 90s, but surely Suzanne knew what she was looking at.
Eventually, with a bit of humming and whistling, it was Ashton who finally got it. I really don’t know what was going on in Suzanne’s head. Heaven help us in our next FHE.
Will we be ruined by that which we love, or that which we hate?
An interesting web comic/graphic I found on the tubes. I can see that that there’s a lot of truth in this. In today’s society, we do indeed have in infinite appetite for distractions which lead us away from what is really important in our lives and I’m somewhat guilty myself. Can these distractions ruin a person? You betcha.
Galactica: Sabotage
Aliens movie rap
Abbey Road album cover
OK, so yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the release of the Abbey Road album. I’m not a Beatles fan, never have been, but I guess this album is significant in being the last album released by the Beatles. It’s also significant because of the cover. It’s somehow iconic and has been copied and parodied on at least a hundred albums I could find with some quick google-fu. It’s one of the most popular album covers to immitate along with The Velvet Underground and The Who Live at Leeds. Apparently it took only ten minutes to put together. Not a bad return for minimal effort, but that’s how it usually works, huh. The best photos just seem to happen. Here are a couple of my favourite immitations.
Imagine there’s no heaven
So Triple J had another one of their Hottest 100 of all time countdowns last week. I’m not all that keen on these “All time” themes. Triple J normally have a Hottest 100 for song released during the previous year but a couple times they’ve had an All Time countdown. Which is cool, because they don’t overdo it. Suzanne’s favourite radio station often has X Top Y songs, where Y is some awful theme, and X is in the hundreds or even thousands. They recently had a top “2400 love songs” countdown or somesuch and it went for a week. Good grief.
Anyhow, it turns out I already have 92 of these songs on my iPod, so it’s an easy task to make a playlist. I’m missing some. There’s a few I’ll admit I have never heard of and a few I wish I had. But there’s one song that will never make it’s way onto any iPod I own, ever. That song is John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
Why is this song such an abomination in my eyes (or ears)? Take a look at the lyrics to find out why:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Are you kidding me? I can’t imagine there being no heaven, and no loving God dwelling there awaiting our return. Well, yeah, I can imagine it but the world then becomes a pretty sucky place.
In the first “bridge”, I think you call it, he pretty much declares greed and hedonism is a pretty good idea. Do your own thing, don’t worry about tomorrow:
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Lennon goes on to attack nationalism and religion in the next verse:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
The next bridge is OK, I guess. All the world living in peace isn’t all that bad. This line dilutes the rest of this insidious, repugnant song.
The rest of the song is about having no possessions, a new world order and one world government. I’ll leave it to the reader to research why abolition of property (or abolition of ownership), and socialistic/communistic ideas are bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for nothing to kill and die for. I’m all for no hunger and a brotherhood sharing all the world in peace. But there is no earthly power which can govern the entire world correctly.