Brian

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:39:34 GMT

Haven't posted here in ages... not had much to say, been working a lot and being a miserable sod in between.

I've been vjing again lately, which has been fun. I'm quite enjoying making content, and hopefully have some moderately interesting stuff to do over the next wee bit. I'd still like to do more work with live bands than at club nights but anything that moves me to do something creative is a good thing.

On the negative side I'm feeling generally unsociable and withdrawn. I've been going out and seeing people a bit, but it takes quite a bit of effort, though it is rewarding. More depressing is that I've been atrocious when it comes to interacting with new people, which often leaves me feeling rather bad about myself and life in general. Hohum. Hopefully I'll cheer up a bit soon.

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:38:30 GMT

yay! actual paid work! And at a good (conference tech) rate, too. corporate boredom and paying the rent ahead :)

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:08:30 GMT

There isn't some amazing alternative to ebay knocking about that I've missed, is there? their fees seem to have crept up to ridiculous levels - 14% once you include paypal, which they own, and they're miring down selling stuff with loads of additional nonsense.

Alternatively, noone wants to buy a kaoss pad entrancer or a PSP? thought not...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:24:43 GMT

as I predicted yesterday, today I am bored out of my mind. Argh. I wonder if there's anything actually worth doing on today?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:55:21 GMT

does anyone know any good interweb forums or whatever for getting in touch with musos in edinburgh? Or for that matter have a band or whatnot and want some visuals or a music video made? Gettting to the end of my current wee project and looking for another one, or two...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:41:22 GMT

Why is it that getting a dentists appointment is easy, while getting a GPs on is a total pain? With the dentist, I rang, asked if they were taking new NHS patients, they were, and booked an appointment. Job done. The Doctor, on the other hand, wants a pile of paperwork, proof of address and id, and won't take me unless I live within their catchment area.

It's not a massive deal, rally, but it's this sort of minor setback that really gets to me when I'm depressed, which is why I want to see a doctor in the first place.

Oh well. Need to think of sociable things to do this weekend, anyone got any ideas? The edinurgh doors open day is this weekend, anyone fancy chumming along a few edinburgh places you don't normally get to see?

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:48:57 GMT

christ, i seem to have drunk too much. still, good night and all that.

hrm, my life would be peachy keen if i had some sort of regular income, like what i could have had a couple of years ago from freelance work. Fucking recession. Ok, mibbe not peachy keen, but basically fine and a good enough platform to get shit in order from.

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:46:05 GMT

Christ, i hardly ever post on here. Oh well, update time!
Back in Edinburgh for at least a few months, or much longer depending on work. Which, by the way, there is fucking none of. Urgh. displeased at that. Still, the search continues, albeit a bit half arsedly.
Love life is non-existant, and this continues to trouble me more than it should really.
Have been making efforts to SORT MY SHIT OUT, i.e. getting much-needed dentists appointments that i've been putting off for years. Other things have stalled a bit but I should make inroads tomorrow - need to register with a doctor and go get head-meat pills, i'm depressed and it's rubbish. Other solutions are worth looking at too but I could do with the irrational depression to stop now ta. Need to start driving again, too, anyone got any driving school recommendations? I just need some refreshers lessons.

Working on a nice wee video project too, it's coming along nicely today.

Think if i drink any more coffee i'll be able to smell time. that'd be nice. (hence the slightly manic stream of consciousness here)

If anyone fancies doing anything sociable get in touch eh. oh, or if you need somewhere to live, got a room going in my nice new flat on mcdonald road.

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:45:12 GMT

Is anyone looking for a room? I'm looking at moving into a nice wee flat just off macdonald road, 3 bedroom, furnished, massive telly, proper living room and decent kitchen in fairly nice new build block. Rent's cheap - not sure how much exactly, 250ish a month i think? The other flatmate is an IT professional lass. Think rent and bills are <100 pcm inc. council tax. AFAIK the room is available pretty much immediately. If anyone's interested, get in touch and I'll pass on contact details!

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:12:06 GMT

well, now the festival's over and i'm jobless (woo/argh!) life is dull, anyone want to do anything cheap but exciting in the next wee bit?

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:47:54 GMT

Hello friends list! Does anyone have a wee tv i could borrow for a week or two, from monday-ish? it needs to have an input of some sort, a scart or a phono or something.

Might just buy one in a charity shop if i have to but i only need it for a while.

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:09:51 GMT

anyone fancy chumming along to the rat race - http://www.ratraceadventure.com/page40.asp - on saturday? I want to go and film some stuff just for the hell of it. should be interesting.

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:23:22 GMT

So, i left melbourne at 1530 on tuesday; at 0930 on wednesday i arrived in edinburgh. That's an 18 hour journey, but i also lost 9 hours into the bargain, making for a 27 hour journey time. woo. not counting the travel time to the airport in melbourne (a good two hours) and the 30 minutes it takes to get to the city centre from edinburgh airport.

So what did i do when i got here? Went to the pub obviously. Mind you, i'm now too tired after a few afternoon beers for evening beers which is a shame as that would have been nice. If anyone wants to catch up over the next few days gimme a shout.

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:44:35 GMT

so, i get back to the uk on wednesday. that'll be nice. give me a shout if you want to meet up for a beer or something. dunno how long i'll be about for yet, maybe just a couple of months.

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:57:41 GMT

hooray, finally something has happened that makes me feel slightly better about personal freedom and the general state of the uk - those fucking id cards are not going to be compulsory after all.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:08:17 GMT

I spent this last weekend, from Friday evening til Monday, at the Dreaming Festival, which is a festival of music, theatre, dance, art and film by indigenous folk from around the world, especially aboriginal australians. The concept does sound a bit pretentious, and there was a lot of cultural tourism, rich hippy kids, white middle class people, and few aboriginal punters. Nonetheless, the acts were fantastic and it was a great experience.

I was volunteering as an Assistant Stage Manager, which meant I spent 5 hours a day working in their theatre venue helping with... well, stage stuff. Cleaning stages, setting stages, that sorta thing. I'm not really a theatre person so it's quite hard to define.

One of the hits of the festival was an excellent play called "Page 8", about the life of David Page, who's now a successful composer, actor, etc. but who was Australia's answer to the young Michael Jackson in his early teens. Mostly it's about his family life, and has the best and most pertinent use of projection I've ever seen in a theatre show - it uses snippets of 8mm home movie footage he recorded when he was a kid to illustrate his stories about his family and friends. It was funny, touching and utterly engaging; the story is true, after all, and you can't help but be moved by his accounts of both good and bad times with the people he was close to.

I saw some great music, too; Mihirangi, a maori woman who beatboxes and layers harmonies with a loop pedal (yeah, everyone's doing it now, but she was still good), Blue King Brown, who were a stunning 9 piece funk/urban band, very dancable, Street Warriors, fairly standard but good rap, and the Rhythm Hunters, who wedge together Japanese Taiko drumming, Sumatran Islamic music, didgeridoos, and a guy in a blue spandex jumpsuit (no idea why) to amazing effect.

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:04:06 GMT

So, I'll be back in the UK on the 8th of July, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna come back to Australia in the middle of September, but in the middle of that I'll need somewhere to stay. I already have a couple of offers of rooms, but they're not entirely suitable for various reasons. Basically, I need somewhere reasonably affordable - probably less than 400 per month, including all bills and such - and within walking distance of George Square. Anyone got a spare room for a couple of months?

Sun, 31 May 2009 13:59:36 GMT

I just saw Battles at the Sydney Opera House, it was awesome... I was maybe 8 rows from the stage, in a fairly good seat. They're great, I'd well recommend seeing them, remind me of Mogwai but a bit less epic and more electronic. The drummer was awesome, and they had him front and centre which was pretty cool; but then their whole bag is that they're all amazing musicians, two of them play guitar with one hand while simultaneously playing keyboards with the other.

What i did on my holidays, pt. 2: Adelaide Part 2 (also long, also with pictures).

Thu, 28 May 2009 08:19:48 GMT

Right, i'm bored again, so time for more holiday-related journalling.

So, I left off about half way through the Adelaide Fringe. The first half of the festival was crazy hectic for me, but things calmed down quite a lot after that.

I spent a few enjoyable evenings hanging out with other techs from Fringe and the Gardens; here's a nice chap called Ben playing pool;

I went to see more shows, too; a pretty good Burlesque cabaret show called Tarnished, an excellent acrobatic circus comedy act called circus trick tease, and a play in a proper theatre called maestro, which was very good; somewhat intense holocaust-survivor piano-teacher/pupil drama type thing, with a good dose of humour thrown in. I think it's being made into a film at the moment, so that might be worth seeing when it eventually comes out. I also saw my friend Bec's show, which is coming to edinburgh this year and I'd recommend seeing.

Just about the point I was running out of shows to see and getting a bit sick of the fringe, I got shipped off to Port Augusta, a very small town about 300km North of Adelaide, for Desert Fringe. The concept of the event is to take a bit of the fringe to regional Australia for a weekend; not just acts but an element of the spirit as well, with a bunch of free events and various local and national acts. Port Augusta is basically a crossroads town, with the road leading from Adelaide through there to Darwin and Perth. We were put up in rather plush rooms designed for travelling workers, which had the incredible luxury of a wee kitchenette and laundry in each apartment; very welcome after a month in a youth hostel. There were a lot of bike police staying there, which made the inwevitable late night outdoor techy parties fraught with danger, but South Australia has lax laws regarding certain substances so we were fine...

It was great fun, and I got to be much more technically hands on than I had previously. What with knowing a bit about video projection, I got the... challenging... job of setting up the projectors for the opening event. This had two main elements; the projection one was a 5 minute architectural animation, where the artist had animated video to fit onto the lines of the building, so elements were contained within window frames, or were painted onto the building's different textures. Lining up 3 projectors into a single screen is pretty hard anyway, but here I had to do it in perfect sync to the building... It worked anyways, but yeah, tough!

here's a video of it, and here's a pic;

The whole thing was nearly destroyed the night before the event, when the sprinklers unexpectedly turned on right next to our projectors. Lacking anything handy to put over the top of them, I ended up resorting to standing in front of one of them in order to save the projector from being soaked... I didn't expect to get wet shoes in the desert, but never mind...
Anyways, that all went fine on the day. The other element of the opening event was a thing called Car-cophony, which was a sort of musical soundscape designed to be played on multiple car stereos in rough unison; we had 17 cars, which all started at roughly the same moment, and synchronised flashing lights and beeping horns with the music. The overall effect as very impressive, with the sound washing up and down the road in a rather pleasing manner.

Anyway, during the actual show itself, my job was working as the sound engineer. We had some excellent acts, notably the fairly famous tripod (warning! annoying flash website!), who were teh "big act" for the weekend and the excellent Juke Baritone and the Swamp Dogs; they describe themselves, fairly accurately, as "Tom Waits with a hangover at a Screamin' Jay Hawkins gig in New Orleans, playing music by Muddy Waters, Danny Elfman and Mike Patton...then you're getting close to a hint of Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs. " They have a song called Bill Hicks. They were a pleasure to work with and I loved their music.

Here's a pic from the gig;

It was great fun to do, really hard work because we had some 7 or 8 acts each night in the Fringe Club alone, which was a free open air gig in an old barracks courtyard. Choirs, bands, comedians... and we were also running gigs in the theatre next door, which meant I had to run from a soundcheck for one thing to a gig in another venue and back again. On the second night I had an insanely bad hangover too, having drunk until some silly time in the morning, which meant that during the first show of the day I was struggling to not vomit or fall asleep on the sound desk; said show was the Casio Brothers, the kids hip-hop show... still, it was all worth it.

As well as the various musical things we had a rather good amateur theatre show; apparently a piece that had come about from some sort of drama therapy group, but it was really charming and well put together. It was an oddly structured piece, with 3 women all called Karen being questioned by a 4th about their lives, and giving monologues on various subjects, a fairly uplifting one about death being the most memorable one. The end of the play nicely turned itself on its head, with the questioner revealed to be a 4th Karen, and being questioned in her turn; this was the point the 4th wall was humourously breached with references to drama therapy. It was certainly an amatuer show, not the greatest acting I've seen, but it's good humour and self awareness rather made up for all that.

Anyway, as well as work, which admittedly took up most of my time in Port Augusta, there wer a couple of fun excursions. The first one was a group trip to the best Indian restaurant i've found in Australia. Oz doesn't have a big subcontinental population, so Indian food is fairly rare, and often pretty crap when you do find it; oddly most curry houses seem to be run by Chinese folk. There's a big asian population here, and a massive Greek one; there are more folk of greek descent in melbourne than anywhere in the world outside Athens. There's a lot of italians too, who are colloquially referred to as "wogs"... oh yeah, and there's a brand of cheese called "Coon" which you can buy in any supermarket. Anyway, here we are at said restaurant, just outside the town;

That's Dave, the production manager, on the left, and Sophie who gave me the job on the right. She told me she thought I might have a nice scottish accent so she thought she'd give me a job. (obviously there was the cv and references, but...). We ate outside. So yeah, that was pretty nice.

The other excursion was to the desert, a half hour or so outside town, with these two lovely ladies, Stanners on the left and Mags on the right;

They took me out to see the stars, properly. Out in the desert, where there's not insane levels of light pollution, the stars are utterly breathtaking. You can see the milky way clearly with the naked eye, and an extraordinary nuumber of stars. I took a couple of very long exposure photos - 30 seconds - but they didn't come out. Possibly i left the lenscap on. I'm hoping to see the same sky on my imminent road trip, it was a breathtaking sight.

The road back to Adelaide held some impressive sights, too. We made a couple of stops on the way; one for fish & chips in Port Pirie, where we found a Barnacle Bill's restaurant in a lovely converted church. Easily the best bit of the trip back was the Locheel monster; it seems someone from Lochiel decided it was a good idea to build a tribute to Nessie out of disused tyres and piping on a salt flat... here I am riding it, along with two comedians who we shared the car with...

Salt flats are tasty, by the way.

I still had a few days in Adelaide after that, but they were pretty uneventful; I drank free booze at the festival awards party, had a few drinks with new friends, some of whom I've since seen again in Melbourne, some I'll be seeing in Edinburgh I hope, and some I hope to see in Adelaide next year, when I plan to return. It was a great month with some awesome experiences and memories that will stay with me forever I hope. The work related ones just reaffirmed how much I love my job sometimes, and even the non-work related ones were down largely to the great people I've met doing the work I love.

yay, and stuff. So, still to come, melbourne comedy festival and after, and actully a wee post about my first month here and where I'm living and stuff.

and on another note...

Mon, 25 May 2009 09:49:21 GMT

I'll probably be selling a bunch of stuff when i get back to the uk in july; things I haven't missed while I've been here and don't feel I especially need. this is as much for my reference, but if anyone's interested...

- my eltax floorstander speakers (unless i sold them to mike, er, i can't remember?)

- my sony psp 2000, with; patapon (*sniff*), loco roco, echochrome, 40k:squad command, MGS:portable ops. Or I might sell the games separately if it looks like i'll get better money. In fact, they seem to be going on ebay Australia for about what I bought mine for, so I may just sell it here, and take the games home - i left the cases so they wouldn't sell for much.

- my xbox and most of it's games
- probably a load of my xbox 360 games
- maybe even my playstation 1? problably not worth it...
- one of my film SLRs; a Canon 1000f, with either a canon 35-80 lens or a sigma 28-80, either way it's a good camera for someone looking to get into shooting film.

- maybe a load of 40k stuff, bit of a hassle though, I don't want to part with all of it but that means putting up lots of fiddly, small, low value ebay auctions. I should bit the bullet and get rid of a big chunk of it, I won't get round to painting or gaming with a good 70% of what I have.

- my video kaoss pad, probably. I can get up to twice what I paid for it and although I do sometimes use it, not that much.

What i did on my holidays, pt.1: Adelaide Part 1 (This is damn long but has pictures).

Mon, 25 May 2009 08:52:24 GMT

So, what have I been up to in Australia? Well, I spent my first month bumming about in melbourne, which was pretty nice but uneventful. In February, about a month after I got here, I went to Adelaide, to work on the Adelaide Fringe Festival, which for those of you who don't know is the world's second largest fringe festival, behind Edinburgh Fringe.

Unlike in Edinburgh, the Adelaide International Festival is bi-annual (actually, shouldn't that be demi-annual? anyway it's every second year...); the fringe was also every other year until 2007, when they staged it on it's own for the first time. It went pretty well, and 2009 was the second go at that. The receiveed wisdom is that in these "off years" the fringe is a smaller affair, however this year they did equally as well as last year's "on year", thus disproving that assumption.

Before I got to Adelaide, all I knew was that the job I was offered was as "event crew", which is a bit on the vague side; indeed, looking at my job description, it does't really describe what I actually did in any detail. But what the hell, I thought, it's a fringe festival, the worst it can be is just like edinburgh, with it's 14 hour days, no days off and living in a tiny venue for a month. As it turned out, it was great, with such stunning things as reasonable working hours, nice workmates, lovely huge parks to work in, and best of all, DAYS OFF. Sometimes even more than one in a row!

I arrived in Adelaide with as few days to spare before my contract started, giving myself time to acclimatise and settle in. The second day there, I popped into the fringe office to sign my contract. Here's an illustrative picture from later in the festival run, which should give an idea of why popping into the office was a good experience;

My first fringe-related experience was the opening party for the Garden of Unearthly Delights (henceforth known as "the Gardens"); the Gardens is the biggest venue on the Adelaide fringe, with some 8 or 9 venues spread across one of Adelaide's parks; one is a Spiegeltent, another couple are more traditional vintage performance tents, one is an outdoor circus space, that sort of thing. Imagine a much bigger speigelgarden, but with more of a vaudevillean carnival atmosphere. It's still filled with dicks on the weekend though. The gardens are the only major festival site like that at the Adelaide fringe, with the rest of the venues having only one or two spaces; that gives you an idea of the relative difference in scale, where the Edinburgh fringe supports at least 5 or 6 sites on that sort of scale. A particular bugbear of mine was hearinig kids at the hostel I was staying at saying they're "going to the fringe tonight" when they meant they were going to the gardens, or being asked where in the gardens I worked when I said I worked on the fringe. The party was great anyway, I met up with my friend Kristin who was working there, and ended up dancing like a mad bastard til 1am or so. Here she is blurrily riding the big wheel.

Anyway, turns out that Adelaide is pretty dull other than festivals, so I ended up going to the zoo on one of my other pre-festival days. It was much like other zoos, though i did see a possum getting it's ass kicked by lemurs, and this cute Meerkat;

On my first day working for Fringe, we had the typical boring induction stuff, fire warden training, that sort of thing. On my second day, things got more interesting; the event crew, who it turns out consisted of myself and 2 other crew and a stage manager, all decamped to Rymil park, where we would spend the next two weeks working on events. We spent the morning learning to drive a boom lift, aka cheery picker. Here's Stanners, the stage manager, demonstrating her new found skills.

The "training course" consisted of being told the 16 answers to the practical questionnaire, a bried demo of the controls, a couple of minutes driving the cheery picker and then answering the 16 questions... typical corporate training, really, as long as the cheque clears and you're not grossly incompetent you pass.

I spent much of the next week hanging festoon on trees - strings of lightbulbs, for the uninitiated - using this thing. If anything it's MORE fun to drive than it looks like. I'm definitely getting my UK operators license when i get back. The festoon took a very long time... there was fully a kilometre of it, so some 1000 lamps that we had to put in, then we had to put in steel catenary wires to hang it from, and finally actually hang the stuff. While we were doing that contractors were putting in the stage and its pa and lights, toilets, food stalls, marquis', and bars. Our main bar was cool, though for some reason i didn't take any photos; it was pinball themed; all the tables and chairs looked like bumpers from a pinball table, and the place was covered in strings of leds, ropelight patterns and other pinball table type things.

One of the coolest things we had onsite was the Pyrophone Juggernaut, a giant fire organ in the shape of a pirate ship; essentially it's a series of steel pipes which gas is pumped through and lit to creat odd music, along with lots of recycled percussion; car wheels, old water pipes and drums, that sort of thing.

The opening night party, when it arrived, was immense; some 40000 people turned up for it; it immediately followed the massive fringe parade, and took the form of a huge, free, open air party with bands and djs, as well as aforementioned pyrophone. It was much more impressive than anything Edinburgh Fringe do, and was engaging for locals which is something that's a bit lacking in Edinburgh.

I spent a lot of my spare time drinking in the Gardens and going to see shows; my workday tended to start at 8am, and finish by 5 or 6. I spent a lot of time hanging out with Justin here, one of the other event crew;

We went to see some great shows; an early highlight was The Boy With Tape On His Face, a rather charming phsyical comedy show with no dialogue and lots of audience interaction, but better than that sounds. I imagine it'll be in Edinburgh in August, go see it. Here's the boy himself, publicising his show in the sunny gardens.

Anyways, after the opening night party was out of the way we spent a couple of days clearing things away, then moved onto the next event, the sponsor's gala. This was, as it sounds, an event for fringe sponsors; we took over an abandoned factory, and in each one of 7 "zones" had a performance or performances taken from the fringe. The largest space had a number of circus shows and roving art pieces; this is one of the entrances to it;

I looked after a wee stage built in a paintshop, which housed an excerpt from a beautiful gothic puppet-show fairytale called the Grimstones. It was very Tim Burton, and the principle puppeteer, and puppet maker, was a lovely - and very pretty -deaf girl called Asphyxia. Presumably she has another non-stage name but who knows. The set was built inside a suitcase made to look like a book, and was incredibly intricate; here's a pic from when I went to see the full show a week or so later;

Anyways, after the gala was done, we headed back to our park, where some of our colleagues had already been setting up for the next event, the Family Weekend. I've been comparing it to fring sunday, but actually it's not too much like that the more I think of it. Basically, it was a weekend of workshops, music and art aimed at families. That did mostly mean children, but nonetheless I thought it was great fun. Our main stage acts included a faux-swdish kids hiphop act called the Casio Brothers, the Amazing Drumming Monkeys (a drumming monkey puppet show, who couldn't love that?), and a heap of great world music/dance acts, some of which were drawn from Womad which happened to be on at the same time.

Here's a few pics of stuff we had round the site for children to destroy;

Cardboard letters lasted maybe half a day...

Children made this web installation using multicoloured rags, which was wicked, but turned into a climbing frame and had to be taken down about 5 minutes after the artist left without bothering to tell anyone.

This giant snail was molested thoroughly by small children, though the two guys inside seemed to take it in their strides.

There were of course bubbles; here is Stanners behind one.

Probably my most memorable moment of the weekend involved a cardboard igloo, which was made by a young couple as a demonstration of temporary shelters made from recycled materials. Unfortunately, cardboard is not childproof, and as with all accessible things it was climbed upon, and collapsed. We cordoned it off and i did my best to keep children from entering it. It had two entrances; one, a small tunnel, was still stable, and we opened it up, but closed the hatch into the main area, which consisted of a suitcase with the bottom cut off, so w simply zipped the lid closed. I was guarding the other entrance when a very small hand appeared around the edge of the suitcase and deftly unzipped it from the other side; I rushed to contain the pouring horde of 5 year olds but was soon swamped by the tide. It was very much reminiscent of a George Romero movie. Only with very small zombies. The whole weekend was a great experience, wandering about a lovely sunny park generally sorting things out and being useful was rather fun and rewarding.

Speaking of zombies, I also helped my friend bec film an intro to her show; part of it involved making use of a Ninja flash mob that was occurring in Adelaide...

The Monday after the Family Weekend, I went to the Future Music Festival; it's a big-ass electronic music festival, which was partlyy on the same park as we'd been in the day before, and necessitated a rather late night for us to remove everything from the site. To be honest it was pretty shit, most of the bill was dull as dishwater hard house, trance or other chavvy nonsense. CSS played in the afternoon and while they were ok, it was nothing to write home about. Unlike other music festivals I've been to, there was pretty much nothing to do other than take pills and dance like a twat, and i went there way too early in the afternoon and on my own with no drugs, and ended up bored out of my mind for the most part. I hooked up with Justin later on, and another friend, Gene, who had sensibly arrived later but were also rather bored.

Bassment Jaxx were headlining, and were distinctly mediocre. the sound was bad, and the lights utterly banal. We ended up going to the second stage, and I'm very glad we did. Etienne De Crecy was playing; the music was mostly generic techno, but decent enough and I was drunk enough to enjoy it. However, the visual show was amazing. His stage set was a 3 by 3 grid of cubes, with a projector doing very simple geometric projections onto it, and strobes occasionally shooting through the back of it. The show built over time, too, starting with simple outlines and moving onto block colours and strobes by the end. It was all perfectly syncced to the music, so was clearly triggered onstage by Etienne. If you're into dance music, see his show if you get the opportunity.

Right, that's gotten rather long, and I'm probably about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through my Adelaide Fringe experience... comment if you got this far and didn't TL:DR... :)

Hostels, my life, and WHO WANTS A MUSIC VIDEO MADE?

Sat, 23 May 2009 10:06:35 GMT

hello well-travelled friends! Can anyone recommend a website for finding decent, cheap places to stay?

At the moment I'm defaulting to YHA's because they're reasonably priced and seem to generally have reasonably central locations. A bit of a safe known quantity thing. They're also a bit on the dull side, and somewhere with some life would be welcome on my imminent wee adventure.

Oh, , yeah. What have I been up to? Well, Melbourne Comedy Festival was ok at the time, but went a bit shit afterwards due to management bullshit. Ketil & Emma's wedding after that was lovely, hard work but a great party. Since then I've not been doing much, a few days casual work and some socialising, rather a lot of being a miserable fuck as well. I've largely gotten over that though.

I'm off to Sydney for 3 days at the end of the month, then driving to Brisbane with a friend where I'm volunteering on the dreaming festival as an Assitant Stage Manager. Should be fun! After that I'm in Brisbane for a day or two, then hook up with a camper van of friends to go to the Cairns winter solstice festival, where I'll be volunteering again. It's gonna be full of drugged up hippies... as long as I'm suitably lubricated it'll be fine :) After that it's back to melbourne, whee! Bear in mind, too, that these drives will take days each, and I'll be camping along the way, so it should be a nice adventure.

Oh yeah, also, anyone got a band or similar and want a music video made? I have IDEAWORMS IN MY HEAD ARGH. They need OUT, I have the technology and the knowledge, all I need is money for props and kit, some creative input, and your time. I'll be back in the UK early July.

aaaaaaaaaaaaand relax

Tue, 05 May 2009 02:12:38 GMT

woo, now that all the majorly stressful situations - work, wedding, erm that's it - are out of the way, i feel much more like a normal human being again. life is alright and i had a lovely cheery day yesterday.

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:45:15 GMT

Tef, you will love this -
http://www.hobnox.com/index.1056.en.html

mike, you will hate it.

life is ok, other people's lives seem to be much more fun though, bah!

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:44:54 GMT

So, I've been back in melbourne for a couple of weeks. I'm currently working 6 days a week at trades hall, the biggest indipendent venue at the melbourne international comedy festival. You probably haven't heard of any of the acts we have but there are some great shows, and some which I'll tell you all to go and see in august. I get Mondays off which is nice, especially as I only had one day off in between adelaide fringe and this.

This Monday I went to a park - Edinburgh Gardens - with some friends and a great many dogs. There was a band playing in the park, and we sat in the sun listening to vaguely funky music, drinking cider and eating various things that get dipped in other things. jinxremoving came a long a bit later on, and it was ace to see her again; she came back to my house and cooked us a superb risotto and generally hung out.

also, new photos on flickr, go look at them! they cost me a ton of money in processing...