whitebait

gassing gangsters remix

Whitebait's remix of a Victor Xray track, 'Gassing Gangsters (Psybait inna dumpster mix)', is now up and available for your listening pleasure at the now more funked up Psybait myspace site (the photo of the surreal building featuring in the background was taken at Tokyo's Ueno park).

Victor Xray  (aka Scott) is a Brisbane-based electronic musician (also part of the Clan Analogue collective). Check his website, 'The Horse He Sick', as well as myspace, for loads of excellent musical downloads and to hear the original version of this track. What kind of tracks you ask? Well more recently, as his bio notes, he has been 'exploring the sounds of UK-garage-derived genres such as breakbeat, dubstep, etc'. And he does an excellent live show as Whitebait can attest from seeing him perform in Northcote recently. A big thanks to him for providing me the materials to work with.   

Whitebait's remix doesn't feature a kick drum--shock horror,  no doof, doof!--so don't be afraid to listen to it if the other psybait tracks weren't your cuppa! I was inspired here by the great title and ominous mood of the original (helped out by Scott's tastefully selected John Barry sample). For some reason I decided that in the remix the gangsters were being gassed in a dumpster - hence the banging that opens and closes the track. A very strange and unlikely take, I guess, but it just grew from there.

Brisvegas passes the acid test

FrauleinDrDr and Whitebait have a good collection of American fiction and non-fiction thanks to some formative years in the excellent American Studies Department at the University of Canterbury in NZ.

One book Whitebait never got round to reading until now is Tom Wolfe's The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test. Whitebait is a chapter in to the book and it is pretty intriquing. Here is a description of the moment when Wolfe first interviews Ken Kesey who is in jail on drug's charges:

Then I pick up my telephone and he picks up his - and this is truly Modern Times. We are all of twenty-four inches apart, but there is a piece of plate glass as thick as a telephone directory between us. We might as well as be in different continents, talking over Videophone. The telephones are very crackly and lo-fi, especially considering that they have a world of two feet to span [...] There had been a piece in the paper about his saying it was time for the psychedelic movement to go 'beyond acid,' so I asked him about that. Then I started scribbling like mad, in shorthand, in the notebook. I could see his lips moving two feet away. Hi voice crackled over the telephone like it was coming from Brisbane. The whole thing was crazy. It seemed like calisthenics we were going through.

Brisbane? WTF?

The back jacket of FrauleinDrDr's copy of the book has a great blurb by Terry Southern: 'Tom Wolfe is a groove and a gas. Everyone should send him money and other fine  things. Hats off to Tom Wolfe!'.

random thoughts on the Upfield bicycle path

'Every day, I make my way, through the streets of your town'. It has been an intense year. Lots of life-threatening illnesses reaching out to menace friends and family. And then, in Australia at least, the public figures like Irwin and Brock as well. But before those two, earlier this year, Grant McLennan passed away, 48 years old, in a  Brisbane neighbourhood which Whitebait has often visited over the past few years. For Whitebait, the Go-Betweens were one of the seeds of things he slowly began to like about the idea of Australia (from the vantage point of NZ). The melodies, the accents, the unashamed poetry and guitars (electric and accoustic) of Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express - an accidental soundtrack to the experience of his first year away from home, living in the city. Mid 1980s. Maybe it wasn't the best time of my life but even now the the music remains luminous.

places to blimp out in victoria

While in Brisbane this week for another conference, Whitebait found himself reading an article about one of those World War 2 Japanese soldiers who remained living in a cave on a remote island in the Phillipines long after the war had finished. Less documented are the stories of the fleeing Nazis who missed the turnoff to South American and instead ended up in the Great Ocean Road area in Victoria, making the best use of their no longer functional transport to build a future. Sometimes traces of this little known past history become visible (when you are hunting for a weekend away from Melbourne).

skylines

A recent post saw Whitebait misreading Myrick at Asiapundit and initially missing a great link to Diserio's 'Top 15 Skylines in the World'. It is the kind of list that makes grown anal-retentive bloggeurs go weak at the knees.

His list (including excellent images):
1. Hong Kong
2. Chicago
3. Shanghai
4. New York City
5. Tokyo
6. Singapore
7. Toronto
8. Kuala Lumpur
9. Shenzen
10.Seoul
11. Sao Paolo
12. Sydney
13. Frankfurt
14. Dubai
15. Seattle

Well, Whitebait certainly agrees on his number one and the top four overall. But to W's mind, New York should go to number two, Shanghai three and Chicago fourth. Tokyo, as readers will know, is a much beloved city for Whitebait but it doesn't rank as highly for this bloggeur in the skyline stakes. The dispersion of its skyline into multiple nodes produces a different kind of urban effect that almost takes it out of a consideration of 'skylines' in the conventional sense (though the view from the Rainbow Bridge is outstanding). In a different way places like Rome and Paris, which have sublime cityscapes, are similarly ineligible for this list. But that is a discussion for another post.

Back to the list then.  Sydney seems a bit hard done by here and to Whitebait's mind should probably pip SIngapore. As for the rest ... erm, he isn't sure as he hasn't had a chance to visit those cities and assess yet. Research funding offers welcomed.

BTW, he is not meaning to damn with faint praise when he says if we were to start a 'boutique skyline' list, Whitebait would be nominating Brisbane (viewed from Storey Bridge) as a top contender. It is certainly the best Australian city skyline after Sydney. Biggest ain't necessarily the most impressive.

urban humour flashback

Whitebait just read of an amusing joke which circulated round the late 1970s/early 1980s--presumably originating from Sydney--that editor Jim Davison mentions in his introduction to The Sydney-Melbourne Book (1986).

The joke identifies what a group of three people would be identified as in the respective state capital cities -- a deputation in Perth, a quorum in Melbourne, an illegal march in Brisbane, relatives in Hobart, and a thoroughly modern marriage in Adelaide.

(A bit of historical knowledge of the Australian political landscape of the time is required here--except for the Hobart crack. Can anyone explain the drift of the Perth reference to Whitebait?)

U got the look

Whitebait travelled up to Brisbane this weekend to assist in the celebration of an in-law's major milestone.   While one arguably always hankers for a bit more to do in Brisvegas you can't deny that this city knows how to look like a city. The night view of the city skyline driving over Storey Bridge gets Whitebait everytime.