Guitar Hero Coming to Wii
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeah!!! Guitar Hero on Wii. So very happy right now.
New Lens, it’s a Fishy Spy One
My birthday present from the Rachgirl finally arrived from Russia. It’s a Zenitar 16mm fisheye. Loads of fun.
Review on CDMotion, more pics on Flickr.
New Lens, it’s a Fishy Spy One
My birthday present from the Rachgirl finally arrived from Russia. It’s a Zenitar 16mm fisheye. Loads of fun.
Review on CDMotion, more pics on Flickr.
Photos from Bobby Flynn and the Omega Three gig, Cremorne Theatre
I’ve put photos (taken by Der Rachgirl) from the Cremorne gig on Flickr.
Here’s my favorite:
I’ve also posted a gig report on CDMo, with my thoughts about VJing for rock rather than electronic music..
Angry Don, of the EAS is getting married this afternoon. So I suppose it’s time to iron my shirt, crack out my suit and start looking hot.
Uber-long weekend is about to hit. We’re taking the XBox, Wii and Python, hitting Toowoomba for Friday night and then Rach’s dad’s place at Noosa for the rest of it. Eddie and Jade gave me Averna for my birthday, so. AWESOMENESS!
Time passes, bodies heal, eventually the pooping stops
It’s been a long time since posts. Moments after my last rambling rant about Vietnamese interpretations of western food, I came down with likewise heinous food poisoning, which had Rach and I holed up in our hotel room until our holiday ended and we flew home.
Where we promptly relapsed, and spent another week pooping and recuperating. Really, I can’t stress how horrible food poisoning is, and especially how embarrassing it is when you realise that your food poisoning came from Oreo cookies.
I don’t want to talk about it.
What I do want to talk about is: Awesome stuff which has been happening!
Holidays with Rachgirl are awesome, we’ve resolved to do many more this year. Christmas with the parentals, sistwerp and her boys was fantastic, and relaxing, despite the fact that the stupid buggers bought Drey (who, for those who have lost count, is just over 2 years old) a drum kit. Interesting idea. The drumkit is staying at the grandparents’ house though, so they’ll have to deal with their move.
New Year party here, good. Fun people. Stunning drinks (Eddie). Awesome music (Lee). Long lost friends returning (Haj), and awesome companionship (Everyone Else).
In the intervening time I’ve been working hard, on CDMu, CDMo and O2K web stuff. CDM has been having some massive server troubles, which are hopefully on the way out now, so hopefully we can focus on writing and making the site better, rather than trying to make the support monkeys at various webhosts understand that OUR. SERVER. IS. DOWN. UNRESPONSIVE. NO. WE CAN’T RESET IT. IT’S NOT RESPONDING.
Calm down Jay. Time to watch Lasse:
To bring us up to speed with the now (because there is lots of stuff happening in the soon, so I can’t spend too much time rehashing the then):
I just spent the evening with the charming Bobby Flynn, who came over and chatted and enjoyed dinner with the gang, and I must say is a poet and a gentleman. Not a rude evil fucker like on the telly… It turns out that I’ll be joining Bobby’s merry band “Bobby Flynn and the Omega III” as visualist/VJ. We’re not quite certain what will be happening yet, but I’m guessing it will be along the lines of projected moving images accompanying music and singing. It’s all pretty exciting! There has been talk of a national tour and world domination and some kind of performance art involving pygmy eskimo hamster gymnastics, but we’ll get past the gig on Saturday first.
Yes. Very late notice, but I shall be playing my first gig with Bobby at the Cremorne Theatre on Saturday night. I’m going to check out a practice tomorrow to have a listen to what’s being played, so rest assured that it’ll be an extremely professional, polished performance. Supported by Chris Pickering (who I believe has been billed with Rowley before). It’s looking like it will be loads of fun. Come along if you’re free. Or if you’re not free but would prefer to be at a gig rather than somewhere else probably not as cool.
In Other News: I caved, cravenly, and bought a Wii on Ebay. It should be here soon, and I am rather excited. Rach’s christmas present finally arrived from Hong Kong. It’s beautiful.
Did I mention that my parents bought a drum kit for their 2 year old grandson’s christmas present? Stupid buggers.
He who orders pizza from room service in Hanoi deserves whatever he gets
We’re back now in Hanoi, having spent last night in a junk on Halong bay. This was extremely fun - cruising around, kayaking, checking out caves etc. - until Rach came down with horrible food poisoning after dinner last night. So this evening we decided to order up room service because: Food Poisoning! Rach is only eating plain rice and if she feels really adventurous she might try a couple of chips. They can’t possibly stuff that up. I decided to go with temporary insanity and order a pizza, because room service demands either a BLT or pizza. I felt that I’d have a better chance of getting an edible pizza, so I ordered a medium “Meaty”…
Everything we ordered was delivered cold, which is perfectly understandable. The lift can take a very long time to arrive, and the 2 flights of stairs to our floor is just epic when you’re burdened with a heavy tray containing 3 plates of food and a 330mL can of drink. So obviously the temperature of the rice, fries and pizza is going to drop by a good 50-60 degrees. That goes without saying.
What I’m not quite so sure about is how, between leaving the kitchen and entering our room, the pizza got quite so fucked up. The base burnt. Not a little crispy around the edges, or burnt where the bottom contacted the glowing bricks of a wood fired oven, but burnt evenly on top of the base, underneath the toppings. That’s a bit of a feat for a prankster porter with only one hand free. He is obviously skilled.
Extremely skilled, as he also managed to re-wrap the slices of salami in their slim little rings of salami paper.
So it turns out that I’m a little pissed off with our hotel: Viet Anh. I’m a little less pissed off about the food issue, as the girl who organized it (whether she’s the cook or the person who called out to a greasy spoon somewhere to pick this stuff up is unclear) just dropped in with a plate of orange wedges, some soup for Rach (who they are quite aware is sick considering her state when we arrived), an apology and assurance that we won’t be charged for the pizza. This was unprompted, except perhaps for the tray left outside our room containing left over slices of evenly scorched bread, so I guess I’m ok with our culinarily inept but beautiful and caring friends.
What I’m not happy about is the nagging feeling that the hotel is somehow engaged in dodgy dealings at the expense of their guests. Viet Anh reviewed quite well in Rach’s Lonely Planet, receiving a “reviewer’s pick” box. So they’re quite busy and didn’t actually manage to turn my initial web-based reservation (over a week ago) into anything tangible. They took a couple of days to reply that the hotel was full, but that they’d recently opened the “Viet Anh 2″ hotel nearbye, which had availability. I replied about an hour later asking for the address of this hotel and agreeing to a room there, waited 2 days for a response and eventually called on the morning of our flight to Hanoi. I finally received a response to my followup email this afternoon.. After spending 2 nights at their hotel, a night on a boat and finally returning to their hotel.
So they’re flakey on email. Not so surprising, it took about 10 emails and 3 weeks to organize our internal flights through a different group. Moral of the story: if you’re trying to organize travel in Vietnam, just use the phone.
Here’s what makes me uneasy: The “Viet Anh Hotel” has reviewed well in Lonely Planet. So their business picks up. They probably have to start turning people away (perhaps people whose emails get lost and they end up just showing up at the door). So they use the money from their increased business to buy another building around the corner, do a quick renovation job and open this up as the “Viet Anh 2 Hotel”. Unfortunately, this hotel is nowhere near as nice as the original, nobody would go there given the choice. So they book people in to Viet Anh 1 and then, when they arrive, say “Oh, so sorry, this hotel full, but there is room around the corner at our second hotel, you stay there one night, then room free here”.
Of course, when I say “when they arrive”, what I mean is “when we arrived”. Because, it happened to us. We ended up in the vastly inferior #2, with a shared bathroom out in the hall, shower situated directly above toilet, wipe room and toilet down with towel after showering. In what is supposed to be a 2 star hotel. Our bathroom on the freaking boat was better than that.
Then, the next afternoon: “Sorry, other guests didn’t check out, so you have to stay another night in the portapotty room…”
Now we’re back, and happily have an ensuite! Hurrah! Happily for all involved really, if I’d turned up this afternoon with a potentially dying girlfriend and been greeted with “So sorry” I would have breathed flame, sulphur and screaming demonic wasps over the fuckers.
Hoi An: The dirty village with tailors in it
In which our sweating, blistered travellers have some clothes made and get accosted by kiddies
Waking up at 3:45am to be ready for our 6:30am flight. I gingerly lowered our 32Kg suitcase down the multitudinous flights of stairs to be greeted by hotel employees sleeping in the lobby in beds comprised of restaurant chairs pushed together. Quite a sobering sight, and made me feel like a bit of a shit for bitching to Rach about the hardness of our beds. Saigon’s final touch was to have the Taxi driver rip us off at the airport. An extremely obvious move in hindsight, but we were just too groggy to argue. After this excitement, the hour in Saigon airport and flight to Da Nang was uneventful, as was our ride from Da Nang (International? ok, if you insist.) Airport to our hotel - the Van Loi - in Hoi An.
Hoi An is famed for its tailors and cobblers. These skilled artisans aren’t just going to rely on reputation to get them work though, accosting anyone passing by their shops with “You! Buy something!”. At first glance there seemed to be plenty of cool clothes and shoes available, but after wandering around the town we realised that they’ve all stolen exactly the same designs, including colour schemes.
We eventually located the tailor “Nguyen’s” recommended by Coxy and Cath, and set about picking out some suits for Rach, and for me, as it turned out. Suits and plenty of copies of my Dogstar pants (sorry Masayo, if you had boy stuff in your shops I wouldn’t have to resort to commissioning cheap knockoffs). After 3 fittings we ended up with a huge mound of fantastic clothing. Rach is especially delighted as it’s impossible to find clothing for her body shape in Australian retailers. We also ended up in “Happy Shoes”, being badgered into custom shoe purchases by two very cute proprietresses.
Aside from the clothes, Hoi An isn’t the most thrilling place to visit. 3 days is more than enough to get sick of being attacked by shop owners and little kids forced to hoik the same gear to people in restaurants (for reference, they are offering carved whistles, tiger balm, necklaces, bracelets and postcards). So we’re happy to be jumping on the plane for Hanoi in about 5 minutes.
Saigon 101
In which intrepid travellers begin their holiday in Vietnam and don’t need motorbike, thanks.
Saigon has plenty of wireless internet. It also has plenty of other fun stuff which kept me from posting blog-stylee while there. Now we’re about to leave Hoi An I can take some time, take a breath of (shoe glue solvent laced-) air and catch up.
In Saigon/Ho Chi Minh city (although everyone seems to refer to it as Saigon) we stayed at the Bi Saigon mini hotel. Yes, they refer to it as a “mini hotel”, although the 10+ flights of stairs to get to our room didn’t have much “mini” about them. The hotel is quite cute - internal awnings to bathroom - if a little creaky and worn. Vietnamese beds so far are incredibly hard, and I was pissed off to be sleeping in 2 single beds pushed together ala grade 10, but with those stairs and hotel next door being around 1m away from our window, fitting the rooms with double beds is obviously out of the question.
The Hotel’s attached Restaurant (Table de Saigon) is incredible! Well, I say “attached”, it’s actually an open kitchen on the other side of the alley. I have no idea how they produce all the dishes from their 100+ item menu in this tiny space, but the food is absolutely superb, and they create everything from Vietnamese staples to Burritos and Guacamole.
So, while I usally would run screaming from a hotel-based restaurant, we ended up eating here 3 nights in a row. Particular favourite is the “Traditional Vietnamese Egg Pancake”, a crispy fried omlette folded over a mix of vegetables, sprouts, pork and shrimp, served with Thai basil and chilli dipping sauce. While munching on this fantastic stuff we were treated to a constant stream of street sellers hawking copied books, sunglasses, cigarettes and “ma-wanna”. There’s something quite funny about eating dinner while a drug deal is made openly on the next table.
The region we were staying is called “Pham Ngu Lau”, and while we ended up at the rather dodgy pub thing “Allez Boo” most nights for a wireless internet fix, we should have spent this time at Le Pub (review is of Hanoi version), which we didn’t discover until our last day. It’s extremely clean, sexy fitout, good menu, cold beer and fast wireless. Much better option than the ‘Boo. Apparently the Hanoi branch is just near our hotel, so we’ll be spending some quality time there.
Non-culinary items of note in Saigon
The shopping is fun, if overwhelming. Based around Le Loi St, we found plenty of camera stores and managed to pick up an Asashi Pentax F1.4 50mm lens for AU$30ish. It’s a little battered, focus towards infinity is stiff and it has a small collection of lens-flora growing inside, but it takes wonderful photos and lets in sooooooooo much light! Sharp photos at night! Gig photos without massive blur! It’s hardly been off the camera since we picked it up.
Walking in another direction from the hotel we found an area we dubbed Hardwareworld! but I think technically it’s the war surplus market. It covers a city block and is filled with tiny stores selling engine parts, war surplus gear, air compressors, multimeters, kitchen gear, airbrushes (picked a nice one up for AU$40ish), ball bearings, switches, computer fans… All covered in dust and stacked in precarious towers and mounts. Great fun! I couldn’t spend too much time in here for fear that Rach’s brain would melt, but if I ever want to start a workshop or fit out some kind of technical studio I will make this place my first stop.
An overriding hatred of planes and airports
Has fuelled this post. That hatred keeps me conscious while waiting in lines, going through customs, performing stupid security theatre movements, waiting in seats, standing in more lines, raging at stupid bovoid humans unable to get the hell out of the way, flying, eating horrible reconstituted synthesised microwaved refrigerated food, being unable to sleep, landing, waiting for more cattle to get the fuck out of the aisle, and then escaping to Singapore airport, home of free internet and XBox 360.
The last couple of weeks has been nuts. I haven’t blogged for ages. Been prolific with the work and art and design, but nothing has actually made it out into the web. I’m now on a 3 week holiday in Vietnam with Rach though, so I hope I’ll be able to give j.com a little love in between sleeping, eating, and not sitting at my desk for 12 hours at a time.
Gig last Friday was fantastic. I absolutely killed it and incidentally didn’t spill any conductive liquids on my laptop. Photos on inthemix seem to indicate that I don’t ever smile when I’m playing, but I’m having a blast, promise.
Rock.
Movie Reviews With More Hatred: Ash Karreau Returns
There’s something great about watching movies and calling it “work” (or at least “research”). If not for the VJ thing, I think I’d want to be a film reviewer. Except of course the interweb’s best reviewer has started writing on the 16mm Shrine again.
Ash Karreau is the Mark Driver of film review, an ironic ball of angry, politically incorrect racism and sadistic narcissism. Here are the first two sentences of his comeback review:
Like Seth Putnam of Anal Cunt, I like drugs and child abuse. Unfortunately, the closest I can come to the latter is punching my underage girlfriend in the stomach after unprotected sex.
From this quote you can probably already tell if you’ll enjoy his writing. Movie reviews are about figuring out what you want to watch. You find a reviewer who likes similar things, then you can go to see movies they like, because you’ll probably like them too. Ash hates basically everything though, so it’s a rather novel method of movie selection. If the things you hate are similar to the things he hates, then you go see the movies in which the things he’s hating are things you’ll actually kind of like. Umm. I think that’s how it works. Anyway, he’s written possibly the best film review ever, so read the 16mm Shrine.