Me sorting out wires before the show, complete with my amplifier mascot Mr. McBunnyrabbit.

Rock moves. I don’t think I could possibly look any cooler than this. Note the gnarly shadow on the wall behind.

My flickr link is on the right if you want to go and check out the other ones.

Burgers of Beef during soundcheck (left to right: The cuteness of Blainie, some guy I think is Blainie’s B/F, Chad and Pete. Dee is behind the B/F guy). I only took a couple of photos last night - there’s one more on Flickr, but it’s just a blurrier version of the same thing. I think Liz has some better ones, but she hasn’t put them up yet.

So the show was pretty good. Pretty damn good actually. Lots of nice people showed up and we played without making too many mistakes. Tomas was good at his stuff and kept people interested even during the slow songs - he even smashed a computer keyboard in his usual Hendrix-smashing-a-guitar kinda way, which was a bit “aww, old times!” for me. Oh, and I think I did some okay rock moves as well.

The support band Burgers of Beef rocked as usual, despite the average sound system. Wade apparently liked them a lot, so we think they should market themselves to Tenacious D fans. I also scored a Burgers of Beef badge with a cartoon Blainie on it from their merch collection, so now I can wear the cuteness of Blainie whenever I want.

The best bit of the night, though, was just hanging out with so many cool people - plenty of friends, plus a bunch of people we know from the “Perth joke bands c. 2000-2004″ milieu, and the internet people like Liz and Sky. It was some awesome fun. Like I said before, it was better than most of the shows we played when we were a real band. Ah!

I need to go and do the dishes.

Tonight is the reunion show, so I’ll blog about it tomorrow. Cool?

Oh, by the way, the internet must see my cake:

See my cake and my sink as well. Cool.

Today I am not doing much, so as I can take time off from typing all day. This morning I fiddled with a remix I’m doing of Tomas’ song ‘5 Times’ but didn’t get very far. I’m used to rock and roll songs and this one is more of a funk thing. I have an okay beat though, and if I can get some fake-sounding Peaches-style cymbals in there it will come together.

This afternoon however, I will go off to my mum’s house while she’s out and annoy her neighbours by playing drums in the lounge room. Sweet.

Oh, I made a cake. A cream cheese pound cake, whatever that means. I made it from scratch, which is apparently the hard way. It did take forever. And although I am quite proud of this achievement and have been telling everyone about it and making everyone taste it, I also now have this enormous cake in my fridge that will take a few weeks to eat. So I don’t know. If you want some cake, come on over.

I would take a photo and put it up, but I spent the money for new camera batteries on a big rubber cake pan.

Today I was supposed to go and read a draft paper at Murdoch Uni, for the philosophy group that meets down in the cafe. Only a few people showed and they showed late, so I’ve been switched into the official honours / postgrad seminar. Sweet deal, I reckon, since I get a bigger audience that way.

The paper is about how gay people don’t have as many relationship conventions as heterosexual people and how this makes gay relationships more creative and interesting. You know, in a nutshell.

Saturday afternoon my mate Chris called me up and said hey, would I like to come on a car club cruise. So I said hell yeah and he came over after dinner and picked me up in his WRX and we headed for the meet point.

When we arrived at the meet point there was just a dude with a video camera and a chick posing on the bonnet of her Subaru STI. We hung out and looked at the map and watched the cars arrive - a bunch of WRXes mostly, plus some dickheads in Holdens that couldn’t park straight. The coolest car there was this flouro yellow Mazda with Japanese plates. Completely illegal, but fucking awesome.

The cruise was some fun times. Chris balled it down the freeway at the head of the pack, weaving through the traffic and dodging the huge Holdens that would roar up through any available gap and sit two metres behind the car in front. I thought about the people travelling home from work who were about to get buzzed by thirty or so speeding sports cars, and would probably write a letter to the editor about it. We travelled the length of the metro area, up and down, though got bored of racing after a while when it looked like nearly every car there could beat Chris’s stock WRX by a mile. Ended up in King’s park, looking out over the city. The thing that surprised me about this whole deal is that you can get away with hell. Down the freeway at 150, screaming through major intersections in peak traffic, welded diffs - and that big dude with his chopped Mazda, number plates half full of Japanese kanji. The arm of the law is way shorter than you’d expect. When I was kid I kinda assumed that most crimes were discovered and punished, now I figure people mostly do what they want and try not to stand out too much.

The other thing I did recently was write a song that is slow and minimal; a bit like a Smog tune. Except that it’s all about wanting to be a whale and/or a lion, and therefore completely unlike Smog.

Triple J are having a contest for the best mix tape with a sex theme, and the following is what I sent in. I was going for a sort of dynamic mood vibe. Slow at first, then boppy and sweet, then loud and crazy, and finally chilled.

1 - Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps (of course, it was a no-brainer to pick this one)
2 - Massive Attack - Teardrop (this was pretty obvious also)
3 - Led Zeppelin - Kashmir
4 - Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood - Some Velvet Morning (maybe I should have said ‘Summer Wine’?)
5 - The Breeders - Off You
6 - Chicks on Speed - Euro Trash girl
7 - The Blow - Parentheses (hell yeah - this track is well worth a listen)
8 - Yo La Tengo - By the time it gets dark
9 - Deborah Conway - Dust to Dust
10 - Mohammed Rafi - Teri Bindiya Re (fairly good song, but an absolutely stunning lead-in for…)
11 -Dirty Three - Indian Love Song (I wouldn’t actually want to get busy to this song though - it’s too loud and cathartic, and I don’t think I could live up to it performance-wise)
12 - Dirty Three - Better Go Home Now
13 - Sneaker Pimps - 6 Underground
14 - Velvet Underground - I’m Sticking With You (left-field, but it would be funny)
15 - Joanna Newsom - Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie

OK, so I’m not too sure about Chicks on Speed, but the others are cool. The competition will be running for a while if you want to make your own.

Yep, I saw the Violent Femmes. From the front rail. This time I was in between Gordon and Victor. After watching Victor, I figure he has the best stage moves of any of them. Also, they played a sweet Australian version of ‘Black Girls’ with some dude on didgeridoo. Pretty amazing stuff.

Other cool thing was I caught this photo. Luke from the Sleepy Jackson took it on a polaroid camera then threw it into the audience. Two guys jumped in front of me to catch it, but they both missed, and I just held out a laconic hand and snagged it. It was kind of a pity a real Sleepy Jackson fan didn’t get it - I left halfway through.

The sucky thing was the MASSIVE crowd. To get to the electro/dance stage it took something like fifteen minutes, and we didn’t get near the main stages at all. Then, going home, the Police had the gates to the train station closed and would only open them every five minutes or so - even though there were (no kidding) about a thousand people pushing behind the hundred or so who had to go through the funnel-shaped opening between the gates. I was almost knocked over and Tomas was crushed against the gates on his way through. I’m going to watch the news tonight to see if anyone was hurt. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if a riot broke out.

Sorry for the comments downtime there… someone must have spilled their Blue Lagoon into the server at the hosting company.

Tomorrow it turns out that I’m going to the Big Day Out. Yip! I will see:
The Violent Femmes
The Presets
The Killers
Peaches
and er, maybe some other stuff. Like My Chemical Romance and Sleepy Jackson just to see if they’re as lame as I think they will be. Actually all the good bands are on at the same time as other good bands so I won’t get to see half of them, but it’s all for free because Tomas is playing so I don’t mind heaps.

I hope I don’t get sunburn - I have to invigilate an exam on Monday. Heh, ‘invigilate.’ That’s where you look at people and maybe write the time they have left on a whiteboard. Sounds like fun.