shimweasel

Tomorrow I go to the office to sign a contract and show them my passport.
No sewing for me, it seems: just heat, sand, and the comforting knowledge that I’m helping the world become a more sparkly place.

Well, this is an unexpected turn of events.

I just got a call from my Qatar contact, and apparently there’s been some political manouevring. They’re unwilling to send someone over to Qatar before they bond with “The Team”. Therefore, instead of going over on the 10th of August with the lighting team, they’ve offered me a two month gig at $1300/week with the costume team in Australia, followed by three months in Qatar with the lighting crew at $2100/week.

This strikes me as more than a little dumb.
For a start, it seems a little presumptuous to assume that a qualified C programmer (indeed, the only specialist programmer they appear to have) would be happy to sit in a workshop sewing lights into costumes. For another thing, I’d be getting no contact with any of the people I’d originally been contacted to work with, so the team-building thing seems a little perverse.

On the other hand… the wages aren’t absolutely terrible. They’d be paying me $30 an hour for something I’m woefully unqualified to do, but I suppose that’s their lookout. It’d also mean that I could keep my sydney contracting going a little longer. I wouldn’t ordinarily accept the job, but the eventual Qatar posting does sweeten the deal a little bit.

Gah. Just when I’d made up my mind. Nothing’s ever simple, is it…

Probably everyone who actually reads this knows already, but I’ve been offered a job in Qatar.
There are some pretty formidable drawbacks: Doha is not the most exciting city in the world - indeed, according to the Lonely Planet, it’s actually the least. I’ll miss a lot of bands, and all my friends and family (even if half my family is actually overseas at the moment).
At the same time, though, it’s a chance to do some (pretty decently remunerated) work overseas, which apparently is well-regarded in Sydney. I’ll be working on the light displays for the Asian Games, and if they’re willing to pay me more than $2000 a week on the evidence of knowing a couple of programming languages, I’m sure I can parlay that into another job once I show that I actually do know what I’m talking about. Even if that doesn’t happen, I’ll have enough cash to float around Europe absorbing culture for a few months.

This is exciting and challenging and one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, so, please, leave comments - let me know if you think I’m crazy or doing the right thing.

Last night, I saw DJ Shadow at the Hordern Pavilion with Andre, Michael, Damien, Phil and Zen. It’s one of the better big venues in Sydney, I think: you’re never going to see an artist like DJ Shadow at a more intimate venue like the Metro, and the Hordern is streets ahead of vast, sterile refrigerators like the Entertainment Centre. The lines coming in were pretty intimidating, though: by the time we got to the end, I’d practically walked home.

We got in eventually, though, and managed to catch most of Mos Def’s support act. I hadn’t heard much of his music prior to the gig, so his set was a pleasant surprise: he’s a skilful rapper, but can shift gears and sing at the drop of a hat. All night, he dropped in and out of other people’s songs, borrowing them, reshaping, and handing them back - I don’t know whether it’s a common thing, but I liked it a lot. (Michael’s comment as always: “He’s very good at what he does”, translated as “I don’t like this even a bit”.)

By the time Shadow was due to come on, the tension was palpable.

Big curtain, eerie blue lights… he was milking it pretty hard, but the crowd was lapping it up.

I’d heard of his light shows previously, and how integrated the visuals and music were, but I still wasn’t nearly prepared for the reality.

Not entirely sure how much I can add to the visuals… he played a few tracks off Endtroducing early on, sending the crowd predictably bananas. The early visuals were also very, very slick, and even had a little political comment: pictures of Marine recruiting videos collided with a cartoon of George Bush with a chainsaw.

After that was some of the new stuff. Honestly, I can’t say I’m much of a fan: he had a singer called Chris James, who was very competent, but the songs just never really gelled for me. Hopefully, he’ll work out the kinks as he gets further into his tour.

Thankfully, though, he moved back into the songs everyone knew and loved. “Mashing on the Motorway” from the Private Press was a standout for me. Energetic, propulsive, and compulsively danceable. The accompanying visuals looked like the bastard offspring of Magnum PI and Grand Theft Auto… absolutely perfect.

There was one encore: a very strange take on “Rabbit in your Headlights” with Thom Yorke’s vocals. He left us with another track off Endtroducing (to my shame, I can’t remember which), and the swirling orange vista below.

All in all, another top night out. Andre assures me that the “In tune and on time” concert series was better, so I’ll be trying to pick that up at some stage, but I left the Hordern exhausted and exhilarated.

1. FastCGI only works if you run spawn-fcgi as well. This makes me a little nervous, but I guess I can run a spawner/reaper process as well, should my inner responsible-software-engineer reassert dominance. It’s a bit more work, but the blog doesn’t run like a fat kid any more.
Edit: i tell a lie. it’s still running through CGI. Have lodged a ticket with textdrive, with any luck the new version of Typo will be installed soon and I can upgrade…
2. Typo runs a lot faster if you do this.
3. Getting drunk with your dad, then drunker with your mates, then really quite extremely drunk with the slack bastard from your primary school who’s still one of your favourite people is not a bad way of spending a Friday night.
4. The Bean should get an RSS feed on her blog. Bad hacker! Very bad hacker! Make me check your site manually… honestly, it’s practically medieval.
5. A picture of a Newtown protest, because you’re a bunch of illiterate bastards who’d hyperventilate without a badly-focused, questionably relevant photo.

All gig pictures are the same.

Frantic spotlights - check.
Adoring crowd - check.
Squad of white guys with funny accents and guitars - definitely check.

you could assemble pretty much all of my gig pics from an identikit, if you were careful enough to feed it through the custom blur-and-jiggle filter my crappy phonecam can’t seem to switch off. If you could include the sound, however…

The band in the picture is Mogwai, and they may be the loudest band in the world. I had industrial strength earplugs, and my ears still copped a beating. Somehow, no-one ever seems to mind, though: while they’re punishingly loud, there’s no anger, and there’s no brutality. Mogwai lift you up on a cushion of noise. Layers of guitar, bass, and keyboard fade in and out: the dynamics of this band are something to behold. One moment in particular stands out: there’s a lengthy quieter passage in (I think) “Mogwai Fear Satan”, in which the band gradually fades out, then comes back with a cataclysmic roar. Chills, I tell you.

My chronically over-excited friend Keith termed it “Mozart on guitars”. He wasn’t wearing earplugs, so it’s possible that his eardrums broke in the first few minutes and he happily imagined his own concert, but I think he may be on to something.

Next concert: DJ Shadow on Sunday. I’m more excited than a smack addict at Heroin Gelato.

I particularly like Nick’s unflappable demeanour. “Let the Glimmer Twins do their thing, I’m just the drummer.”

Oops, I totally forgot about the Vanguard gig… The Maladies supported some generic reggae band called the Zion Band. Mad, Nick, Sean, Cherie, Keith, and Keith’s mate Ed all came along and were suitably impressed, even if you do have to stand a long way from the stage. The recording didn’t come out, either, which is a real kick to the crotch. (apologies, the scrubs reference is more or less obligatory.) I’ll get ‘em on tape yet, I swear it.

Tonight, I pity everyone who isn’t me. The Maladies played the Excelsior tonight, and as always were precious little short of a religious experience.

Edit: Hm. I should really post more often - this was a few weeks ago now.

I have a setlist with me, filched from underneath the bassist’s not-so-watchful eye, so I can go through the set song by song.

1. “The Woods”.

An absolute fucking barnstormer.

“Oh Mary, dance along the wire/Because tonight, we’ll set these woods on fire” - this is one of my favourite Maladies tracks, and it was a perfect way to kick off the night. Daniel showed he could be angry as well as angsty - he’s got a massively powerful voice, and, while offstage he’s mellow and even humble, on stage he’s a consummate frontman.

1. “Glory” … I can’t remember how this song goes. I remember enjoying it massively, but that doesn’t help you much.

2. “Who’s?”

A bitter, country-tinged paean to obsessive, doomed, unreciprocated love.

1. “So Fine”

Another favourite, this song starts out almost brash, and slowly descends into madness - “my friends don’t like me/when I piss and I moan/so I feel so fine, I feel so fine”.

1. “Louise”

This was a Don Walker cover, and an excellent choice, too - I didn’t like the Bob Dylan cut I heard them play recently, but this perfectly suits their heartfelt, confessional style.

1. “Addiction”

A jaunty little sex jam about a Tasmanian girl. If there’s any justice in the world, Dan ought to have been admitted to hospital with a crushed pelvis and an ineradicable grin after writing this song.

1. “Jump Down”
2. “Falling”
3. “Take me down”

Given that all three of these songs are about downward velocity, I can’t actually remember which is which. Sorry, fellas.

Since writing this, I’ve seen the Maladies twice more, at the Sandringham and at an odd little concert at Home nightclub. The room was disappointingly sparse at both gigs - the headliner for the Sando gig, despite an impressive pedigree (X, the Saints) was nothing particularly special, yet the room was nearly empty for the Maladies and jam-packed for him. Regardless, I dragged a few new people along to the show, and they all enjoyed it - Jules was particularly tickled by the Metallica riff the guitarist chucked in between songs.

The Home gig was a little weirder. I saw the Dirty Three play beforehand with Daniel, and was mightily impressed, and he managed to persuade me to come to their set at 2:30. After a bit of argy-bargy with the bouncer at Home, who seemed to think I wasn’t on the guest list (cheeky bastard), I managed to get in and found the boys upstairs. Unfortunately, that seemed to be about as full as the room actually got - there were as many people on stage as there were in the band. (There was some momentary amusement from watching a couple of Beautiful People attempt to dance Home-style to the Maladies’ mournful melodies, though. Doesn’t quite work.)

Anyway, I’d better stop here before this turns into an angry rant about how people would rather pay money to listen to shit than take a chance on a band they haven’t heard before. I’ve done that topic to death, methinks.

And here I return, plunging gratefully into the comforting embrace of the past. I’m sorry we fought, baby, it was all my fault: won’t you come home? I’d rather be happy than right this time.

Pickings have been a little slim on the gig scene recently. Granted, the Maladies and the Thaw are both playing concerts in Sydney at the moment, but I no longer have the feeder pool of the Mandarin Club any more. Levins, please come back: the musically underinformed of Sydney need your obsessive diligence.

My gripes about variety aside, the few concerts I’m seeing, I’m enjoying wholeheartedly. The most recent was the Tucker Bs at the Hopetoun, supported by the Thaw and … a couple of guys, I’m sorry, they weren’t so memorable. For some reason, I was flying particularly high that night. Sean was in attendance with his friend Rory, as well as Madeleine and her friend Deb, and from the beginning things were considerably copacetic. Deb has a wicked sense of humour (she must - she laughed at my jokes), and bonded with Sean immediately over a shared love for guns, dirt, and following orders.

A beer or three in, the Thaw started, and after an initial period of seemingly gratuitous feedback, my compatriots seemed to be getting into them. This was an unmixed goodness: there is almost nothing worse than taking someone to a concert and to have them not enjoy it. After their set, while Mad and Deb chatted with the band, I set off around the room talking to more or less everyone: one of those nights when I felt like a ball of irrepressible (and hopefully not too obnoxious) social energy. As previously noted, the next band were pretty anonymous - quiet, unobjectionable, almost what elevator music in a perfect world might sound like.

Eventually, they finished and the Tucker Bs got on - I’d seen them previously at the Essential Festival, and was sort of ambivalent. They sounded ok, but I didn’t and still don’t understand the hype they’re getting. I bailed halfway through the set, but thanks to all involved - I had a great night out, and met some pretty cool people.

oh, endearing anecdote of the evening: overhearing someone from the Thaw say “Don’t put the Prodigy on, we’ll sound shit after them”. So cute!