australian rozie

I heard about this via Tom last year and was keen to check out their next event. Interesting South gathers a group of random “interesting” people and they get 5-8 minutes to talk about their interesting topic of choice in front of a paying audience. Here’s a quick review of what I thought of some of the speakers:
Anatomy of cool – Remo Giuffré. The host introduced him as the coolest guy he knows (or something like that), I thought, well he used to be cool. Remember he had the REMO boutique department store on Oxford Street, that later became Gowings and is now American Apparel. Remo sold quirky and classic items which were big in the early 90s. Remo General Store also had the coin operated black & white photo booth where my friends and I would regularly take silly photos. Anyway, the moral of the story was, a cool person can make an uncool thing cool, but an uncool person cannot become cool by wearing something that is cool – or something like that.
I also enjoyed the talk by:
Steve Maxwell – Stand up! Be counted! – He brought his own “soap box” aka milk crate.
Miles Merrill – Perform your own stories (reminded me of The Moth). He made everyone stand up and pretend they were a talking alien!
Patrick Hofmann’s – Away with words – Creating Icons and Images To Satisfy All Audiences. it was fascinating to see what children recognise as symbols for the telephone, save a file etc. Not the same thing we Gen X plus folk do!
Cale Bain – How improv can save the world. – Actually I’m getting confused about whether it was this one that reminded me of The Moth. This is what happens when you don’t completely geek out and take notes during the event. Not that it isn’t geeky enough, that I’m blogging about it afterwards.
We also received free snacks from Central Baking Depot and lots of bananas! As well as a Rhodia notebook and a pen. Overall, Interesting South 3 was a very interesting night and I really enjoyed it. It made me think about all those interesting (to me) things that I want to do…

Scenes from Broadway Shopping Centre on a Saturday afternoon.

Matthew Herbert Big Band

Originally uploaded by Australian Rozie

I always mean to blog about all the great gigs I go to but never get around to it. So here’s a quick post about Matthew Herbert Big Band at the Sydney Opera House. The crowd was very mixed, lots of “young” Mad Racket type folks as well as older ladies like my Aunty Gladys! After a massive round of applause and cheering when Mathhew Herbert came onto the stage, I heard the guy behind me say something like, “he seems to be some sort of god-like figure for some of these people”. The performance and music was fantastic, so entertaining. The vocalist was amazing (I wish I could sing – so do my neighbours). For some weird reason even though the music was really loud, I didn’t need to use my musician’s earplugs at all! Maybe the Opera House acoustics suit my special volume needs??? Glad we spent the $$$ on this special event, was a shame we missed The Bug/ Rhythm & Sound night at Beck’s Bar though. Actually we did see R&S, because while on the bus on the way to the Opera House, we saw Sub Bass Snarl walking down the road with Mark Ernestus and Tikiman!

Dave uses a bubbler on Hay Streeet, near Belmore Park

Originally uploaded by Australian Rozie

Bubblers were a integral part of the school yard back in the day. Since then, bottled water has taken over and we know how that’s panned out – not very well. I have a reusable water bottle that I carry around with me, the problem is once I’ve finished drinking the water I brought from home, there aren’t many places in the city I can refill it, other than in public toilets. My favourite place to get “free” water is the bubbler located in the Sydney Apple Store. As a long-time Mac lover, I feel it is my right to go there and use their facilities (including the rest room and refilling my water bottle). Another place is in David Jones where they have a water dispenser inside the ladies rest rooms (at least it is clean and comfy in there). So 2 reasons there should be more bubblers in Sydney are:
1. Save money on buying water.
2. Reduce plastic waste.


Read more here

I had a great time at the Days Like This! Festival at the Entertainment Quarter on January 4. The event doesn’t have the same pressure as a New Year’s Eve or NYD event, but close enough that everyone still feels festive. I have to say that the line-up was quite tremendous and much suited to my current taste in music. Before the day, I had been telling people that it was the older clubbers or retired raver‘s festival. The variety of artists and the crowd made it really great compared to some festivals I’ve been to in the last few years. Also, the crap, gurning crowds have been a major factor in why I hardly ever go to music festivals any more.
I most enjoyed Flying Lotus in the Forum (hey airconditioning at a summer festival – different, unusual). It was the cross-over of live techno and instrumental electronic hip hop I’ve been looking for. I also enjoyed briefly seeing DJ Vadim, Recloose, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, A Guy called Gerald, Carl Craig and of course Public Enemy. After all these years PE still have an awesome presence and hearing nearly all of It takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back live was awesome.
The only bad thing about Days Like This! was there was not enough food stalls and there were no pass outs, so you couldn’t go into EQ to get something to eat. Sure I understand that promoters probably have some deal with the stallholders that they are going to have a captive audience but the lines at dinner time had hundreds of people in them. Could do better with the food.
See my Days Like This! photos here

You can read the Disco Dissertation review here

Kanye West: Glow in the Dark tour, Sydney 2008.

Originally uploaded by Australian Rozie

On Saturday night, I finally got to see the ego himself Kanye West in concert. I have been a fan of his production work for Jay-Z, John Legend, Alicia Keys etc etc as well as his solo releases. He has great showmanship and style. He’s performed in Australia quite a few times, there was the one at the Sydney Opera House with the symphony, Good Vibrations etc but when the Glow in the Dark tour of Australia was announced, I decided Kanye was going to happen for me finally. I bought a ticket for my bro for Xmas, Honka Princess and Dave (with paintball injuries) came along too.
Unfortunately, we missed Scribe, I had seen him before supporting the Beastie Boys. Next up was Nas (it was his first time in Oz, there seemed like a lot of people who were there for him). He did a really great set with some crazy backing musicians especially the guitarists. I couldn’t work out if they were male or female. Nas reminds me of Jay-Z a bit.
Then it was time for the big man, I noticed there was no hype/MC action which you usually get at hip-hop gigs, he just suddenly appeared. To be honest, I thought it was going to be better than it was. I think I had seen snippets from other performances Kanye has done this year and thought I was getting a huge spectacular, which it wasn’t. I was also surprised to see that the top section of Acer Arena was not used. (unlike Stevie Wonder, oops forgot to blog about that). When he did his old stuff, it was great, there are many great tracks (Heard ‘Em Say, Gold Digger, Diamonds from Sierra Leone, Jesus Walks, Flashing Lights, the one with Chris Martin from Coldplay). When he did his well know stuff everyone had their hands in the air! The young Asians in front were screaming and videoing everything, the posse of boys behind were dancing and whooping! For me, the best songs were Through the Wire, Touch the Sky, Stronger and Good Life. When he did his new stuff from 808s and Heartbreak he started to waffle on (in auto tune) in the middle of the songs, there was a part where he was talking about Britney and why people were hammering him for not sticking to rapping. Well, I think he should stick with rapping, producing records and not singing. Kanye, you’re no Marvin Gaye or even Lionel Richie (though the hair is coming close). Overall I had a good time seeing Kanye in concert but was disappointed that he didn’t actually glow in the dark!

Book of Longing

Originally uploaded by Australian Rozie

Dave and I went to this quite a while ago. I’m catching up on things that I wanted to blog about now that I’ve handed in my Cert IV TAA work in.
I wanted to see Philip Glass before he died. When I saw that he was performing the Book of Longing at the Sydney Opera House, I decided that tickets to this show would make a great present for Dave’s birthday. The show consisted of the poems of Leonard Cohen – he is not my man but I thought it would be interesting anyway.
After birthday drinks at the “perfect Sydney” Opera Bar, we headed over to the concert hall. We had great seats – in the third row from the front! Melody tagged along too in the last minute seats, but she’d seen him before (I think). We all received a little copy of The Book of Longing which was a nice touch, it was s bit like a wedding program, where you could follow along and see where we were up to in the performance.
Philip Glass came out and the crowd went wild. Then, the ensemble of musicians and vocalists came out and did their thing. It was – different, unusual. Dave even mentions, “daggy”. I think that I just wanted to see Glass perform The Hours soundtrack, instead I got nutty songs about love, loss and some rude words. Philip Glass sat on the stage, tinkled a few bars and would then wander off stage letting the other musicians do their thing, then he’d come back, tinkle a bit more, then wander off again. It wasn’t really what I imagined it was going to be. Oh well, I know how brilliant he is, if you haven’t seen Glass: a Portrait of Philip Glass in Twelve Parts, you definitely should check it out. And I got to see him before he… you know what.
Here are some other reviews:
http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/miaf/book-of-longing–philip-glass-1974.html
http://www.artshub.com.au/au/news.asp?sc=&sId=174548&sType=review

because…Major World Tour Begins May 2009, New Album Due April 2009
Their official website is under construction right now.
Speaking of concerts, here are a few gigs I’ve got coming up:
Oct 22: Stevie Wonder Now being the “old” legend that he is, this could go either way (bad like Barry White or awesome like err Prince). I saw him performing at the Democratic National Convention, so hopefully it will be good.
Dec 6: Kanye West I don’t care what you think. It’s going to be cool. He’s come to Australia about 4 times and I’ve really wanted to check him out, so this time it’s going to happen.
Other concerts I would like to go to but “wallet says no” are Kylie X Tour and Alicia Keys

There is a competition in Grazia magazine to be a blogger for 30 Days of Fashion & Beauty in September. You need to write 300-350 words in the style of a gossip blog. So I did. The magazine (the printed paper version) says to enter, log on to grazia.com.au to submit your entry. What sucks is that I can’t seem to find anywhere on their website to enter the comp – in fact they don’t even mention this on their competitions page. What gives? Such a shame the competition closes at 11:59pm AEST on August 17. I can’t even ring up or email anyone to find out more. AND, their isn’t even any Contact Us details on the Grazia website. AND it’s part of ninemsn which Dave advises me, sucks. Anyway, here is my entry:
On a cold and bitter Wednesday night, Honka Princess and I (Australian Rozie) ventured down to the Rosemount Sydney Fashion Festival for Review Show #1. Firstly we went up to the MLC Centre for pre-show drinks in the Rosemount VIP Wine Bar. We were greeted by very friendly staff who gave us a bag that included MAC make-up and a bottle of wine. We tried to get our hands on as much free food as possible, but sadly the waitress just passed us by, surely they knew we weren’t models and we wanted to eat. Just to make sure that A-listers’ shit don’t stink, they had Jo Malone candles in the ladies toilets!
We headed into the big marquee in the middle of Martin Place for the show. Luckily, I bumped into my brother who had spare tickets. His seats were much better than the ones we had, so we took them. Honka Princess went around to grab the goodie bags that were on the seats we didn’t take, she ended up with three bags – always the frugal princess. We ended up sitting right at the end of the runway, just in front of the the photographers, in the second row behind Simon Lock’s shiny head. The show featured Australian designers such as Alex Perry, Camilla, Easton Pearson, Lisa Ho and Hotel Bondi Swim. The models didn’t smile much. I don’t know why they didn’t look happy, if I had a body like that I’d be laughing. The clothes in the parade covered everything from cocktail dresses to bikini’s. The music was quite terrible, there was a Blondie track (how predictable), some of the mixing was really messy and they played a god-awful electro-clashy song that used the lyrics of Careless Whisper. Could do better! Before we knew it, the show was over and everyone was filing out. I saw the always perky, Catriona Rowntree and the Director of the MCA, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor (please, you’ve got to lose the tartan, even Isabella Blow changed her hats).

Dave said it was a bit negative, but I was just being a bitchy gossip girl.
You can see some more photos of the night here

Pivot @ the Oxford Art Factory

Originally uploaded by Australian Rozie

Supported by Kirin J Callinan – he was different, unusual. I actually found him to be quite entertaining, though it felt like he and his band may have not had many gigs before, if you know what I mean. It was kind of a cross between Boy George, Joy Division, Placebo and I don’t know what. I found it amusing when he couldn’t get the guitar strap on properly just before he needed to play a song and he screamed into the mic “freakin strap” or something like that. Dave said that it reminded him of a scene in 24 Hour Party People where the Hacienda has just opened and they have booked these odd avant garde indie bands to play but there are hardly any people attending.
Next up were Fabulous Diamonds – they were OK, sometimes the vocalist sounded a bit like Sinead O’Connor lite which wasn’t bad. The music was instrumental (keyboards and drums) and minimal. Wasn’t really paying attention at this stage as the room was filling up and getting crowded.
Finally Pivot came on (I’ve seen them about 4 times which is quite an effort for me – it must mean I like them a lot). They played mostly new stuff which was quite interesting. They seem to have got into a psychedelic, electronic with guitars style (sorry Matt, I am terrible at describing music). My favourite band member – the one who holds his guitar like Sting, now does some vocals as well. It was more like primal screaming with fx over it. I really like their podcast which seems like a mood board for their new album ‘O Soundtrack My Heart’. You can check it out here: http://www.pivotpivot.net/ Honka Princess came along too but she had a nap near the end.