July 3, 2008

i'm not here.

i'm finally over her.

i just wish my best friend were around to see this.

and now, for my next trick: relentless optimism.

just you watch.

Posted by reuben at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

May 5, 2008

redrum is dead. long live redrum.

this is where it goes down from here. i think. for now.

Posted by reuben at 9:57 PM | Comments (1)

April 14, 2008

don't die of shock. no, don't.

more than a year.

proof enough of the same old dilettante approach i've taken to this thing. it's getting old.

which means, it's time for it('s author) to undergo some reinvention.

a lot has happened, naturally - love found and foolishly lost, address changed, and fortunes, too (more in weeks to come on that note...).

but i am certainly going to be back. it might be a while - i need to think carefully about the next step. i'll be milestone older... 'there's always time' is getting harder to blurt out and actually believe. can't fool anyone else if i can't fool myself.

crackbook has made it easier for me to be lazy with the 'rum, which was initially a way of staying in touch. FB does it better; i can't blog anymore without a purpose. the friends i've made through 'blogging' are now: my housemates, reasons to travel interstate, home-fires burning. i don't do it any justice being this sporadic.

so i'll be back when the nascent blobs are more clearly defined.

i know, i know - quitting your blog is soooo 2006...

love

Posted by reuben at 9:22 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2007

comforting sounds/mew

sureness is something i have always found hard to come by. it's not for want of confidence, but for a certain restlessness of mind/spirit etc.

for the first time in years, i have music on a fairly grand scale in my room again. i sold my iPod recently, so i could get some enjoyment out of commuting again. i find the iPod experience helps disconnect you from the world, which sucks, as people are pretty disconnected from one another anyway, i feel. don't get me wrong - they're great for long distance travel, but for the regular brevity of the commute, i'd rather dip in and out of a book. just finished Martin Amis' "The Information" since you asked, and enjoyed it immensely. recommendations happily accepted.

life in funswick is wonderfully stable, insofar as i can derive any happiness from that - happiness is a tenuous proposition anyway, so i'd rather be stable and tenuously happy than unstable and tenuously happy.

changes since my horribly-ages-ago last post include: growing worry about how long i can mantain the facade of caring about a job i clearly have little interest in despite the life it allows me to live in terms of personal comfort, the arrival of lola , a cute and sickly little tortoise-shell into the funswick homestead (shown here on housie's journal), my rapid consumption of my first batch of homebrew (turned out great!), the feeding of friends and accidental offending of others, and the purchase and imminent arrival of this...

...further proving my financial management skills have not improved in line with the higher income/expenses. laugh all you like; so-called 'metal' guitars of this vintage are excellent playing instruments, and brilliant to record with. i'm buying it as a fire-up-arse-light to make some comforting sounds of my own again. if i fire up in public with a toneful ensemble, there'll probably need to be another guitar for that (for pure sonic purposes), but i'm growing in the confidence to actually play out with the/a shred-beast. my friend mel helped me confront this, actually, and i realised the coolsie indie-ness of only condoning the reverential use of indie-approved retro instruments is just another aesthetic fascism in reverse: these guitars carry a stigma because a lot of the bands that played axes like this often used an outrageous visual sensibility to compensate for musical lacks. ergo, the only way to shut the critics up is by playing something substantial and awesome with it. i think my 17 years of playing music, 8 years of writing and co-writing original tunes, and 30-odd years of super-broad listening might help there. all i do these days is shred the acoustic, while squealing away off key to exercise the vocal cords. the upside is, the chops are still good as gold, i just dont have anyone to write for. housie is remarkably understanding about the wailing.

i thought i didn't have much to say, oddly. but there's stuff to be learned/mined from life hanging sometimes pleasantly, sometimes blandly in this suspended state between desire and action, about normal for me. my foot slipped temporarily into my mouth while back-and-forthing with my favouritest (a pattern we'd somehow managed to blessedly avoid for nearly a year now) over some insecurity she's feeling, me and the housie have weathered our own little storm, i've grown increasingly complacent about a variety of things, and i'm (bizarrely) generally non-plussed by much of what the world has/is throwing at me.

it seems for me that 'calm' is a double-edged sword; the absence of many stresses also saps the desire for change. i thrive on change, but the uncertainty of it kills my mental health. turn the volume down or take my foot off the accelerator as i have for the past few months, and i think straight, but my heart quails a little - the upbringing means i'm far too comfortable with a life that doesn't match the (relative) heights i've allowed myself to hit when giving further sway to my more romantic leanings. i like risk.

so why don't i anymore?

the point (if there is one) is, i have recently got myself back into a position i was in about five years ago, when i risked a lot and lost. i got back to here by systematically restoring some touch points that have provided me with security - photos and music. i've hatched the roughest of plans for a new band, uploaded 700 odd photos to flickr - (check 'em out, do - it's all the past, but it's the sweat of film photography rather than the offhand snapping of digital - not dissing users, i just find that i don't 'think' as creatively with a dig in my hand: the process is part of the art *for me*, and film still wins). i also plan to move in the next 12 months back to writing (at least part time) again - reviews, interviews, etc. i need to flex in some format that isn't the bland diarising i always seem to fall back on here. i need to have a goal (ie. criticism, analysis) for what i write to feel that writing is useful. many journallers are so much more entertaining than myself, that i never bother with that here. plus i'm piss-funny IRL, LOL!!11!

so stay tuned.

i'll leave you with an image of my old amp, a pure monster, that i have hung onto not because of any material attachment, but because i only throw my heart after something (or someone) that i know has gravitas, warmth, power, potential for the future - something that will facilitate growth, that will give as much as it takes. in a fit of overblown self-congratulation one day, i re-labelled all the controls - boring stuff like 'bass' 'mid' and 'treble' - with terms like 'arse' 'thwack' and 'zing' because i thought they more accurately reflected what this amp could do. in humbug's last dozen or so gigs (the band i used to be in) this amp's sound got me more compliments from soundguys than in the previous 7 years of shows.

it will sing again soon.

ps. yes, that quote over the name badge *is* a quote from Dante - "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here."

i'd peel such pretentiousness off if every single word wasn't true.

Posted by reuben at 3:19 PM | Comments (9)

February 11, 2007

D'oh.

idiot that i am, i was all set to post something.

then, i got my muddy fingers all over the code in this thing and now it is doing crazy shit. please ignore the repeated posts (and banner, wtf?) appearing halfway down the screen if you scroll down. I R IN YR XML, RUINING YR RDNG XPRIENCE!!111!

i am trying to get friends with teh big branes to help me out, so i can get back quick smart to boring you with my pics and images, but for now i am just enjoying tearing my hair out and wondering why i never listened to my teacher who said 'learn about computers - they're the future. if you know how to work them, you'll own the future', when i was ten.

in the meantime, i finally got myself a Flickr, so i will be probs posting piccies there from now on.

if i can't get this shit sorted in a week or so, i will allow the redrum to die and simply break ground on a new bastion of navel-gazing excellence.

the tranquil looking fish are crosby, stills, nash and young, and they LOVE living in brunswick hella more than st kilda. they are full of vigour and, indeed, a not inconsiderable amount of vim, placed as they are near the sun streaming in through our delightful backdoor window, which has faux-leadlights with a tulip shape that looks decidedly like a pair of inverted cocks. simply dicklightful!

the photo above is of the bookshelf by our 'reading corner' which contains merely the overflow from me and the pirates' shared bibliographical resources. i think it's got something for everyone, frankly - all are catered for, from your garden variety pervert (120 Days of Sodom) to your wistful europhile (Le Petit Prince, Lonely Planet Western Europe - in which yours truly wrote the chapter on Northern Italy; the Netherlands edition next to it is my handiwork, too), canonical snooty-noses (the Norton, bard's complete yadda yadda) to nimble-fingered minxes who might want to try a spot of paper fondling, Nippon style. We even have kids books, for, well kids (or the young at heart) and a compendium of the 18 and 19C cussword stylings of those lovely genocidal Brits who founded this fine, remarkably white nation...

you are all invited to curl up in the sun in the corner of our kitchen like lazy cats whenever you like and read away, while pirate and i coax perfect espressi out of lucy, and program tunes to soothe or suggest in iTunes, your perfect Rancho-Relaxo style oasis of calm, unassumingly nestled in a quiet street amid the otherwise rapacious nihilistic lefty clamour of the Ghetto of Hate.

do come over, do.

that is all.

ps. LOVE! life in the ghetto
pps. if i ever offer to cook you a parma, say yes, because it looks like this - real chicken breast, real ham, real napoli/ragu, and no scrimping on cheese.
ppps. eggplant parmas at a day's notice for non meato-philes.
pppps. this is why we no longer pay $10 for that poor excuse at the east...

Posted by reuben at 7:33 PM | Comments (7)