After Grog Blog

BIG STATEMENT

Dennis Atkins, who looks a lot older than the usual fatheads who - yawn - provocatively underrate the Beatles, on Alex Chilton & Big Star:

The boy who was better than the Beatles

This was why the Beatles deserve some recognition - they recorded two influential albums (Sergeant Pepper & Revolver) and almost everyone who used them to shape their music made something that was so much better.

BACKWARD FORWARD THINKING

A student is late:

"I didn't know it was not the end of daylight saving."

FAMOUS FOR BEAN FAMOUS

Turns out Melbourne's reputation for being a coffee city is undeserved. Well, it is according to the The Drum's James Panichi, who reckons Melbourne's coffee is disgusting:

Bad coffee gets a bashing

Here's something you'll never see in writing. In fact, so deep and dark is the conspiracy to keep a lid on this that I may well be signing my death-warrant.

Here goes: why is Melbourne's coffee so bad? I mean, seriously. It goes from the disgustingly bad variety served in the cafes of Lygon Street's Little Italy to the gut-wrenching, undrinkably bad at Melbourne Airport. And this isn't 'bad' as in 'good'. Sometimes bad is just bad, and the stuff being served by this city's poncy baristas is really bad.

Au contraire. You'll see it in writing right here. I don't drink much coffee, maybe one a day, but I always thought that was because coffee in general tastes vile, not just Melbourne coffee. I've only ever had one coffee that I thought "tasted divine," as coffee wankers say, and that was in Berlin.

THAT 70s GUY

Vale Alex Chilton:

Big Star's Alex Chilton dies at 59

Singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, a teen star who became an alternative hero with Big Star, died yesterday at the age of 59.

Walking back from the canteen just now I found myself humming In The Street, which made me smile. That's the ironic thing about Big Star songs: despite Chilton having bulk depression issues, his songs rarely fail to put a smile on my dial.

That 70s Band

Most of the readers here would know Big Star, I just felt like boosting #1 Record. It's not perfect, but it rocks. Get a load of these tracks: Feel, In The Street, Don't Lie To Me and When My Baby's Beside Me. Surely, those are four of the best-ever power pop guitar tracks. Even a couple of the lighter, more whimsical tracks rock out: The Ballad of El Goodo and My Life Is Right. Don't get me wrong, either, I quite like the Cheap Trick cover above. The kid doing air guitar - that's me. Well, not me, but like me. However, the cover lacks IT. You just know what IT is, don't you. IT is the cow bell. That ding-a-lingin' inspiration takes In The Street from Great to Really Great. Tell me you don't waggle your hand every time you hear IT. Nor is that the only bit of genius on the album. The other zinger lives in Don't Lie To Me. That's right, coming out of the second verse and into the third it's the penny whistle that accompanies the guitar crescendo. I think it's a penny whistle.

Stroll on over to Tim Dunlop's Basement. He's put together a tidy pocast: cow bell, penny whistle, the lot.

SNORTMANTEAU

A derisive response generated by the ugly blending of two or more distinct words.

Example: football + entertainment = footbotainment.

Was footbotainment invented by an Age or Channel Seven work experience kid? Some ports work, some don't, footbotainment doesn't.

Nor is footbotainment merely an ugly word, it's also an ugly genre. Extensive investigation undertaken by the AGB R&D department has revealed that for every successful footbotainment show, there are 123 rancid failures.

Richard Hinds eleborates, somewhat:

Risky business

IT SAYS something about Channel Seven's somewhat strange recent programming priorities that it plans to show the first instalment of its new "footbotainment" show The Bounce at 7.30pm on Wednesday - 70 minutes earlier than it deigns to screen the Friday night games from which it derives some of its hopefully thigh-slapping material.

For some reason, the picture at the top of the following article does not fill me with optimism. Debi Enker filters Seven's press release:

Taking a punt at the big league

CHANNEL Seven's first prime-time footy show in more than a decade kicks off on Wednesday at 7.30pm. But before the first official Bounce, the rules are being fine-tuned for its newly assembled team of television players.

Even the name of the show, The Bounce, leaves me feeling queasy; evoking, as it does, Foxtel's horrendous Before The Bounce. BTB started off with good intentions, but in the last twelve months has been reeking a similar reek to the corpse of Seven's late, but not lamented Live and Kicking.

WICKING TIME-BOMB

Matthew Quinn is metting his mixaphors:

"There's a faint ticking that I can hear and it's getting louder," he said in a speech yesterday. "The fuse is burning, and current metropolitan planning strategies are inadequate for our growing and ageing population."

NUFF ZED

Rod Quinn: Which 1969 film has the shortest title of any Oscar winner? I will tell you this: the film has just one letter in the title, and it's from very, very late in the alphabet.

Nuff: What does it start with?

BRINGING UP AUDREY

Rod Quinn: Who won four "best actress" Oscars between the 1930s and the 1980s?

Caller 1: Audrey Hepburn.

Rod: Noooo. So close.

Caller 2: Naaaaaaa. Dunno, mate.

Rod: Audrey Hepburn is not far off.

Caller 3: Audrey Someone?

Rod: Have you ever actually seen a film?

DISHHHHHHHHLESS

The Vulcan Dishlex broke down yesterday. I had to remove a full load's worth of dishes and wash them in the sink. By hand. Been thirteen years since I was forced to endure the teeth-grinding aggravation that is washing up manually at home. What a loathsome task. So loathsome, in fact, and since the Dishlex had a service phone-number with only seven digits thus indicating it was about twenty years old and ready to cark it, that me an' Boynton went straight down to Clive Peters in Richmond to buy a new one. The service was shit. We then went straight down to Clive Peters in Malvern and shelled over a grand for a new one. Well, straight down via home to confirm the kitchen measurements since all the dishwashers were 850mm high, but mine was 830mm and I needed to recheck the bench height. Turns out that doesn't matter since all the dishwashers have adjustable feet which enable them to be altered from 800mm to 860mm. So, to recap: we went straight from home to Clive Peters Richmond on Bridge Road; straight back home; straight to Clive Peters Malvern on Malvern Road; straight back to home in Richmond. Obviously, that's not straight as in "straight as a crow flies" since I don't live on Bridge Road or Malvern Road; it's straight as in promptly tout de suite and without delay. Got that straight? Anyway, if you own your own joint and don't have a dishwasher: why?

LIVE AMMO

Be grateful they didn't arm the rebels with Phil Collins songs:

How Bob Geldof's Live Aid funds went to Ethiopian rebels

MILLIONS of dollars raised through Bob Geldof's worldwide Live Aid project were siphoned from the mouths of Africa's starving into the arms of guerillas fighting the then Ethiopian government, according to a former senior Ethiopian rebel leader who has admitted taking part in the scam.

ACAPULCO GOLD

Funny how things unfold.

Last night I caught around half of I'm Not There, the film about Bob Dylan without Bob Dylan. After a time trying to work out what was going on, just as I was about to switch channels, a group of hillbillies (a "brass band" according to the credits) in a country bandstand played a lush version of Goin' To Acapulco. It goes alright. (It was better on film than on Youtube.)

Today I open up the Age to see:

True taste of Tex-Mex

A recent string to Calexico's bow was working on the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' 2007 Bob Dylan film I'm Not There. They played on a number of tracks, including the album highlight Goin' to Acapulco, with My Morning Jacket's Jim James.

Anyway, I figured this post was too long for Twitter.

THE RANTS PANTS