Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Men Without Hats
Some mornings you just need to rock this joint. Also, the eighties were fucking weird.
PeterMBall
19/03/2013
Tag: Music
News & Upcoming Events
Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse
Cool Thing the First: I recently discovered that the StoneSkin Press webstore is live, which means you should now be able to pick up copies of The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables if you live in places like the US or Australia or, hell, I’m assuming you’re pretty much anywhere the internet reaches. There’s only a handful of times I’ve been really excited to work with an editor and, as I noted quite effusively last year, this project was one of them. Robin Laws is one of those writer/editor/creative types whose work effectively crosses many areas of interest, and I was a long-time fan of his frighteningly smart observations about RPG gaming as a younger lad. Cool Thing the Second: The Buzzcocks are Touring Australia in April. I’m not sure I can truly explain why this makes me happy, beyond pointing out that Have You Ever Fallen In Love with Someone (You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With) was one of those songs that
PeterMBall
27/02/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
I’m Hot and I’m Sticky Sweet…
Some days need a bit of Def Leppard. Some days do not. Today, well, it’s one of the former. Weirdly, I missed the period when Def Leppard was actually a big deal. Hysteria came out in 1987, which means I was both 9 years old and living in the middle of nowhere, far from the pop cultural embrace of TV and cinema and popular radio. I was far more likely to be reading books back in those days, getting exposed to music through my dad’s LP collection (although I wasn’t yet allowed to play records on my own) or the soundtracks to the handful of movies we saw when we came to Brisbane for the holidays. Basically, I didn’t even really process that Def Leppard was a big deal until they became a lyrical riff in Bloodhound Gang’s Why is everyone picking on me in the mid-nineties. They weren’t a band by then, not really; they were a pop cultural reference that
PeterMBall
09/02/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Wuthering Heights
Sometimes, my brain, I tell you. No, wait, none of that actually makes sense when it’s written as a sentence. Let me try that again. So on the way out of the house this morning, I passed my CD rack and thought to myself, you know what I feel like listening to right now? Fucking Bombtrack. It’s been ages. So I pulled the first Rage Against the Machine disc out of my collection and took it out to the car and rocked the fuck out on my entire drive to work. It was awesome. I mean, even the pub with its motorized esky races and its double-exclamation points on pretty much anything they’re trying to advertise didn’t bother me today. I was listening to some old school RatM and I was at peace with the fucking world. Then I got to work and I parked the car and I started whistling as I walked upstairs to the QWC office where I’d
PeterMBall
17/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Doll Parts
I’ve been listening to this a lot today. Back in the nineties, when grunge was still a thing, I listed to a lot more Hole than I did Nirvana. Sharing it here ’cause I’m in a retro kind of mood, and ’cause I’ve apparently never seen the clip.
PeterMBall
10/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Makin’ a Racket
I’ve been worrying my flatmate recently, ’cause I seem to have developed a jaunty whistle of late. This is not, as a general rule, the sort of thing that happens around our house, least of all to me. ‘Course, historically speaking, this isn’t actually true. I spend a great deal of my day with little fragments of music running through my head. I always have, one way or another, and I’ve always been fond of having music on while I work. What’s really happened is that I’ve inherited my sister’s stereo with it’s five-CD turntable and I’ve moved it out of my bedroom and into the study where I write, surf the internet, and occasionally play computer games. Up until this point, all my music had to run on either Fritz the Laptop (which meant he couldn’t do anything else) or play on the DVD player attached to my TV. Neither of these have been particularly optimal, so my music
PeterMBall
20/12/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
For what it’s worth…
…I still maintain that this is the sexiest two minutes and seventeen seconds to ever exist in music. If you can resist dancing while you listen to it, you’re a better person than I. The second-sexiest thing ever done in music is Nouvelle Vague’s cover of Guns of Brixton. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what this says about my psyche.
PeterMBall
09/12/2012
