Swandives

The beloved and I regularly talk to each other on IM - it’s like a creative lifeline/brains trust that lets you communicate all those random thoughts that occur to you during the day, but which you inevitably forget at the end of the all when the ‘Hi honey, how was you day’ conversation occurs. And every now and again, amidst the generalities of everyday existence, I’m given a nugget that reminds me why I married the man. Here’s today’s:

i am listening to joy division … and once again realise that possibly no other band will ever come close to their greatest moments … and they make me want to write .. because they make me realise art can be transcendent and stories - pain, beauty, joy, love and all those other emotions - somehow need to be fitted to pages … so people can breathe …

It’s funny how one piece of music can instantly transform you to a previous time and place with an intensity that is so full-on it’s like all your senses were on overload; smell, taste, colour, every detail like it was digitally captured in your mind for all posterity. No fuzzy analogue involved.

So it is for the Screaming Trees album, Dust. Sure, in 1996 the Grunge musical movement was in its death throes but it remains, Nevermind notwithstanding, *the* album of the Seattle sound.

Funnily enough, my digital memory moment is not actually from the nineties. It’s from 2003 when, newly married and on what remains the best holiday of my life in North West Australia, the beloved and I drove from Exmouth to Shark Bay. A honeymoon remembered for its blue, blue skies, rich red soil, sunsets to match, a long straight road punctuated every few miles by the odd dead kangaroo carcass and massive, massive roadtrain. We crossed a wide brown country that I had lived in all my life but never truly known in a white Nissan X-trail with The Screaming Trees blaring and the wind in our hair. And when I hear Dust I see, with utter clarity, a majestic wedge-tailed eagle taking off in front of us from the side of the road. It will remain with me forever.

So a sound that typifies a rainy American city reminds me of something uniquely Australian. It’s a paradox that explains why I love music, and why it endures.

I’ve rabbited on before about fab Irish band The Frames and lead singer Glen Hansard. Well, today he and Marketa Irglova won an Oscar!

I am doing a little dance of glee. Yay!

Mr Gee probably won’t post this on his blog, but I have no such scruples. An excerpt, I think, from a larger article from the Herald Sun:

MICHAEL Hutchence’s biographer says the rock star’s death cursed those closest to the INXS frontman.
“Everybody has struggled and, for many, it’s been messy or tragic,” author Mike Gee said.

I can’t stand to watch the Rugby League grand final (Manly is losing as I type) so I switched to Idol for a bit. There was this wonderful moment captured by the cameras of Dicko and Mark Holden sharing ‘a look’. Classic. I wish I could post it here. It was hilarious. Nice bit of tele. Now, unless the Sea Eagles can pull off a miracle, I’m going to crawl into a hole. Sob!

OK, so I was searching YouTube for Arcade Fire’s Intervention film clip, because the track is amazing and I feel the need to share it with as many people as I can. But instead I came across this: Arcade Fire and U2 doing Joy Division’s Love will tear us apart.

Wonderful stuff. For those who aren’t up on my latest musical love, Arcade Fire is a Canadian band from Montreal. They recently released their second studio album, Neon Bible. I recommend track four, Intervention - it’s incredible. (The first album, Funeral, is also awesome.) They’re playing at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark in a month or so. I’d give anything to be at that - Mike and I had a plan to go to Roskilde a couple of years ago…but work intervened unfortunately. They are also playing in Ferrara, Italy, at the Bands Apart fest (for those of us living in Italy…hint hint). It’s times like these I miss not being closer to the action.

Anyway, check out http://www.arcadefire.com, which has links to everything.

Apart from being the world’s dumbest moniker evar, Web 2.0 has people buzzing around the web likes bees on speed.

Everybody’s trying to get in on the next-best Web 2.0 application, thereby proving (supposedly) that they’re hip and with it and ahead of the curve. I’ve been sucked into it all over the last few days and I have to say, I am over it. Big time. And the worse bit is how insidiously you can be taken in. So far I have:

• Finally bowed to pressure and signed up to Linked In.
• Downloaded a Firefox plugin called ScribeFire so I can supposedly cut and paste things to post here. Having used it, I can say it’s just as easy to open a new window or tab, and post that way.
• Joined in on a blogging experiment at work (I don’t have the heart to tell them that blogging is already passe). I am using a newer version of WordPress tho, which is kinda cool.
• Purposely NOT signed up for Twitter, coz I think it’s a dumb idea for people with too much time on their hands. But man, it has some serious buzz going on right now.
• Claimed this blog on Technorati.

I think that’s quite enough for now; I’m crawling back into my hole to scowl at the world.

But before I do, here are some things I am loving (no, it’s not all moan, moan, moan):

• The new Silverchair album, which is AWESOME, and more than a bit Splitenz.
• The new QOTSA album, in which Mark Lanegan from The Screaming Trees does vocals for at least one track.
• The Gretski show (aka Big Brother) is back on the tele! More on this later.