Dead Dad Dictum

  It was that liminal moment when one class has finished but you’ve yet to make your way to the next period. She walked out onto the veranda of the demountable building school had installed while the permanent classrooms at the ‘new school’ were being built and told me to wait a ‘sec.   I had probably lingered longer outside class than was strictly necessary. Next period was maths and both the subject and teacher – Mrs Grindley, who oversaw enforcing uniform violations by doing things like getting the girls to kneel and then measuring the distance from the bottom hem of their skirts to the ground, and whose extremely hairy legs were visible through the sheer stockings she wore in winter – were not favourites.    English, on the other hand, was a favourite. I loved reading and I loved books. And our new year ten English teacher, Miss Cusack, was excellent. She made the books come to life, and I looked forward to her classes. It was 1988. The Bicentennial Year. I’d bee...

  Having spent most of my life as a rock pig, it’s been liberating and eye-opening to have discovered electronic music and hip hop in recent years. The sounds are fresh and point to the future. Most of the hip hop I’ve been listening to is ‘90s gangsta rap. The beats, the bottom end and the rhymes are SO on point. But it also makes me feel deeply conflicted: the raps are often misogynistic, treating women as objects of male desire and nothing more than a receptacle for male lust. I can overlook it, with the old idea of separating the art from the artist coming to mind. But it’s not ideal. (as an aside, I’ll generally hold to the art vs artist thing, but there are a couple of areas where I draw the line: if the artist is anti-LGBTQI, and particularly anti-trans, then that’s it. I won’t listen.)   One of the things I find so fascinating about modern pop, and hip hop in particular, is just how avant-garde the music is. Listen to it closely, and it shouldn’t work, but it does. Thi...

  “Why are your legs shaking?” she asked.   “I’m cold,” I replied.    It was late in the evening, a clear night with a bright moon casting jagged shadows across the small courtyard at a mutual friend’s house where we sat facing each other, our legs entwined.   We were both 17, and had grown close, recognising in each other a kindred spirit and a mutual desire to escape from the straight-jacketed dogma and conformity of the Pentecostal school we unwillingly attended.   The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me album played quietly on a boombox as we sat, content in each other’s company, smoking Dunhills and talking about the future. What would happen when we left school in a few months? What would our lives look like once we were finally liberated?   It wasn’t a boyfriend / girlfriend thing. We’d never held hands, let alone kissed. And the idea of sex? That just seemed like an alien concept. Our relationship wasn’t like that. I needed her and, I guess, she nee...

  A couple of years ago my life changed. I was hopped up, wanting to find something new to listen to, and Frank messaged me. “You gotta listen to Underworld,” he said, recommending an album called Dubnobasswithmyheadman.   I’d long been interested in electronic music, a fascination that began when I found a copy of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album in my dad’s collection as a young teen. But I’d never put any real effort into exploring it. Over the years I’d gotten bored with rock. Too often I’d hear something, and it just seemed like the same tired old riffs and ideas being trotted out. Rock had become stale for me.    Where was the new stuff that would challenge me, I wondered? Where was the new music that would change my perception of what was possible with guitars like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine did all those years ago?   But with Frank’s recommendation, I had an epiphany. Electronic music sounded like the future. Here was music I could get on board with, ...

  About 18 months after my first child was born, I found myself at an IT journalists' awards night, the sort of self-congratulatory event I generally hated because I’d long before reached the conclusion that most journos were self-important bores whose conversational repertoire only extended as far as how great they were, and their latest scoop.   So why was I there? I was a senior editor on a national paper -  I think we were up for some gongs and so it would’ve been bad optics not to attend. Besides, despite loathing the company of most journos, there were some old colleagues I liked, and it was a good opportunity to catch up. And unlike most journos, I generally found the PR folks in attendance to be good value, with a much richer world view and more interesting ways of looking at things than many of those on the other side of the fence. The drinks were also free: it would take a brave person to stand between a hack and complimentary booze.    After the cerem...

  I am a long suffering BUDD fanatic. Long suffering because, being from Sydney, they stopped touring here in the late 90s, maybe due to the demise of the scene they belonged to. I had looked on with great envy at the shows announced in Brisbane and Melbourne on and off over the last few decades, thinking “they’ll visit here next time…”.  When I heard about their latest show in the Cactus Room in Thornbury in Jan 2024 I decided enough was enough. Flights got booked and soon enough I was on the train out to the venue, happy to pass Northcote station on the way and see some young folks sparking up in a park where I alighted. I arrived in time to see the most excellent Smoke Witch play some very catchy and groovy tunes. A highlight was one of the band member’s teenage sons joining them for a song or two. Very heartening to see the next generation in development.  BUDD then start setting up and I was very happy to be seeing them play for the first time in 30 odd years. When t...