I do like badges. And these ones are especially cute.

They’re from Perth. Patrick Pittman of Omit Needless Words - but also freelance writer, editor, indie publisher (zines, an ethical guide to grocery shopping in Perth), community radio broadcaster - is selling these badges through his latest thing Novel Badges. They’re $3 a go.

I can’t imagine there are too many theatre companies that revel in walkouts. Syd Brisbane, an actor with 25 years experience who’s worked with the Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Shakespeare Company, founded The Rabble with designer Kate Davis and lighting/production expert Emma Valente.

Their latest - a version of the Biblical tale of Herod’s step-daughter Salome (first told for stage by Oscar Wilde), radically reinterpreted for the cavernous Bay 17 stage at Carriageworks - is short on words, big on physical drama. Apparently it’s inspired a few walkouts too. I’m looking forward to seeing it this week, but this morning Syd was our guest on Canvas.

(Me and Syd in the studio)

Here’s what we played.

Neu - DJ DSL
Percy On The One - Clutchy Hopkins
These Boots Are Made For Walking - The Boys Next Door
The Book I Write - Spoon
Come Around (Lovestoned Remix) - Urthboy
How Much I’ve Lied - Jason Walker
Time of Songs - Tapes ‘n Tapes
About to Walk - Throw Me The Statue
Shadowland - Youth Group
Are Ya - Mensy
Hold Me Down (Shoes remix) - Primary 1
No Tomorrow (prod Kirk Degiorgio) - Robert Owens
Wanderlust (Ratatat remix)- Bjork
So Low - The Mime Set
Aileen - Lindsay Phillips
Like Air From Your Lungs - Karoshi
Hands On Us - The Notwist
Bright Tomorrow - Fuck Buttons
Heart It Races - Architecture In Helsinki
Blue Planet (Abacus mix) - Chaser
Crying In Her Room - Silver City Highway

Jeff Burch was our guest on Canvas this morning.

(Jeff Burch and I in the FBI studio)

Born in New Zealand but living in Sydney, he’s released LPs (NY’s Magic Markers and his own band Songs‘ pop debut EP) and books by Max Doyle and others on indie publisher/label The Spring Press.

(Magic Markers - ST LP)

He works with fashion designer Therese Rawsthorne, he designs websites and record covers, writes interviews, makes films. Basically Jeff Burch is prolific.

Here’s a record Jeff originally released on the now defunct Brothers label:

Jeff Burch - As I remember, if I remember correctly, I arrived sweetly (51.8MB)

Jeff’s band Songs played at the Hopetoun last night - intriguing, that’s for sure - and they’ve got a few more shows this coming week in Sydney (more details here).

(Songs, live at the Hopetoun, May 3, 2008)

No Evil - Luciano
Not Fair - Skullsquadron
The Length of Your Breath - Matt McBeath
Hesitation Nation - David McCormack
August (Aeriae remix) - Catcall
Rise to Glory - Earth
Time to Pretend - MGMT
Totally Debase (feat Babymachine) - Suckafish P. Jones
Pumpkin - Tricky
Communication Pact - Traps
Relax In a Panic Free Atmosphere - Magic Markers
Keeping It Clean - Songs
Sunday Morning - The Velvet Underground
A Parade in Littleton - Tom Verlaine
Open - Kahn Brothers
Rockist Part 1 - School of Language
One Blood One Source (feat Rudey Lee) - Pinch
Beautiful Gloom - Padded Cell
Skinny Love - Bon Iver
Warm Rising Sun - Radar Bros
I’m Now - Mudhoney
Re-arrange Us - Mates of State

As if that wasn’t a headline waiting to happen.

Western Sydney community arts manager Lena Nahlous hinted all was not as it seemed with the 2020 Summit creative strand when she appeared on Canvas last Sunday morning. Nick Pickard’s article in today’s Crikey makes it explicit, saying the Initial Summit Report censored ideas discussed and included ideas never broached.

Oz theatre reviewer (and writer) Alison Croggon said:

Some points seemed disappear completely in the process: among them, a strong call for rethinking public broadcasting and the issue of responsibility towards climate change. Others surprisingly appeared: when Mr Rudd mentioned summer schools, the entire Creative stream went blank (”summer schools? who said summer schools?”) More generally, some concerns never quite made it to the whiteboards: a major oversight in the general debate was the digital gaming design industry, supposedly an area slated for discussion.

That shift came up in Pickard’s piece too:

What has amazed the delegates is that the initial report somehow changed ideas like develop “closer links between industry professionals and schools” into “Creativity Summer Schools”.

“No-one ever mentioned summer schools,” Crikey has been told by another delegate. “And the first time I heard about the Indigenous proposals was when the report was released on the Sunday.”

This is not to mention the contentious idea (also published in the initial report) which proposed that creative endeavours be funded “through a 1% creative dividend from all Government Departments for expenditure”.

“Everyone in that room knew that Queensland had tried that idea and that it had failed. I don’t know how that got put forward either,” the delegate explained.

Pickard’s source noted it wasn’t all negative:

“The summit has created a motivated group of diverse people who realised that we all have a lot in common,” another attendee has told Crikey. “Everyone realised that other people outside the stream were saying they needed the arts.”

Another attendee, the prolific (check his CV) Marcus Westbury, posted a blog entry saying much the same thing a week earlier.

Meeting people. The summit was a rare opportunity that brought together a wide range of people from across the creative, arts, cultural sector. Contrary to popular belief we don’t all hang out together all the time - particularly outside of narrow artform communities. It was both inspiring and practically quite useful to meet those people, realise that several issues cut right across the boundaries or artform or medium and begin to pull together a bit of a community going forward.

Understanding the power of symbolism has been crucial to Rudd’s government. But with this and the frankly bizarre delineation between gay unions and straight marriage - I’m married and certainly not “before God” - the government is showing the first signs of stumbling.

It’s true I guess. Sometimes I get half way through the day and realise all the clothes I’m wearing are from Incu and half the best jokes music I’ve heard came from Chris Wu at Popfrenzy.

Designer Vince Frost, uber editor Jess Scully, Sydney Festival director Fergus Linehan front up with Chris and the brothers Wu for a blow by blow from Time Out’s Sydney Style Council.

Chris on Sydney:

Until last year, I had been to the beach maybe twice in ten years, and then I moved to Coogee. Not that I go swimming or anything, but reading the papers by the sea or just seeing it from far away is kind of nice which I would have never thought. Maybe next year I will actually touch the sand.

He gave Cyclic a plug too:

Cyclic Defrost is also a local zine that is worth consulting because the articles are well developed and the subject matters usually diverge from mainstream musical trends and are written with a lot of heart.

Time Out must be giving the rest of the city’s tired looking street rags a real fright. Decent features (mostly), interesting, frank stories. What next?!

ICE director Lena Nahlous came in to FBI this morning to talk about last weekend’s 2020 Summit. She took part in the summit’s creative strand, and was one of a small number interested in (and demonstrably capable of) talking about digital media, creativity (as distinct from The Arts), and the audience out there for art drawn from outside the big institutions; art and stories from migrants, young people and women.

A Victim - Omar S
Around the World - The Death Set
Track 6 - Fabulous Diamonds
My Life (feat. Newham Generals)- Dizzee Rascal
You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son - Wolf Parade
Water Curses - Animal Collective
Dancing On Our Graves - The Cave Singers
Footwork - Guilty Simpson
Shall We Take a Trip - Northside
Shut Up and Be Young - Parades
Magic Doors - Portishead
Goodbye Goodbye - The Lost Mariachi
I Feel It All (Escort remix - Feist
Marwurrumburr - Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu
Weapons - Son Lux
Counterpoint - Cleptoclectics
Eraser - No Age
Great Escape - No Kids
Arrabida - Portable
Slow Motion World - The Longest Day
Ethiopio - Noze

Thanks to Shannon O’Neill for putting me on to former Severed Head Tom Ellard’s hilarious blog.

In the coming week I am booked in for surgery, it’s a minor procedure and the specialist says that I will only be in the ward one night at most. This is a problem that many people are starting to recognise and secretly have treated - yet people are ashamed to talk about it. If you are of a certain age, you are more than likely to have this problem but you won’t find it mentioned on Oprah or even the medical blogs that crowd the net.

I have always believed in saying what needs to be said. Perhaps if I come out and say it, others won’t feel so ashamed.

I don’t like Daft Punk.

See also Ellard on ’80s music. And Shannon on this year’s Now Now festival.

Often I find these sit in a shopfront stunts contrived - like the infamous Jabba/Regurgitator band in a bubble one a few years ago - but Hiromi Tango, currently holed up in the new window space at Redfern’s Grantpirrie, matches the wonderful colour anarchy of Japan’s Harajuku girls with the reflective self-assessment that has to come with sitting in a shop front, among your thoughts, for days on end.

She was described as “very enthusiastic” in an Auckland Festival performance last year: “she would have liked to have slept in her shop and be there 24/7.” The current one, ‘Am I Here, Can You See Me?’, has progressed a long way since the pic on Grantpirrie’s website was taken.

I took this photo on my mobile this afternoon, and I think Hiromi was bustling around behind the mess of tags, thread and letters.

Visit soon, Hiromi heads to Melbourne for Next Wave in May, where the Queensland Government’s given her $10,000 to set up another public performance piece.

Brisbane sound artist/musician Tom Hall put together a series of processed field recordings in reaction to one of Hiromi’s earlier works in the Brisbane Arc Biennial. It’s available for download here.

The Guardian’s music section is on fire at the moment.

For one, you’ve got this fascinating piece on late 70s race relations in the UK, and the growth of the Rock Against Racism movement (with bands such as Aswad, Steel Pulse, the Ruts, the Slits and the Buzzcocks).

It was 5 August 1976 and Eric Clapton was drunk, angry and on stage at the Birmingham Odeon. ‘Enoch was right,’ he told the audience, ‘I think we should send them all back.’ Britain was, he complained, in danger of becoming ‘a black colony’ and a vote for controversial Tory politician Enoch Powell whom he described as a prophet was needed to ‘keep Britain white’. Although the irony was possibly lost on Clapton, the Odeon in Birmingham is on New Street, minutes from the Midland Hotel where eight years earlier Powell had made his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. But if the coincidence was curious, the hypocrisy was breathtaking: Clapton’s career was based on appropriating black music, and he had recently had a hit with Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ …

‘There is a danger in believing that politics is all top down,’ explains Ian Goodyer, who is writing a book on RAR, ‘that Thatcher just pulled the rug from under the racists’ feet, but the truth is that by 1979 Rock Against Racism and the ANL had thoroughly discredited the National Front.’ Before RAR, the NF had staged intimidatory marches in areas with large immigrant communities, but once RAR began to demonstrate that they could put thousands on the street in opposition to them, the NF were forced to retreat. ‘We isolated them at work and we isolated them at the colleges,’ claims Roger Huddle, ‘and by the end of it they were a spent force mentally and politically. I don’t want to overstate what we did, but I am sick to death of understating it.’

There’s also a short piece on the BBC’s new take on the art of making charts: Sound Index. It trawls Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube every six hours, counting and analysing around 10 million comments, posts, plays and views to make a top 1000 chart. It’s possible to filter by age, sex, genre and location. And if you just wanted a regular survey of a range of taste-making blogs or radio stations, for example, you can do that too.

And if you’ve ever wanted to know what was going on inside Fall singer Mark E. Smith’s head, they’ve got that covered too, dropping one segment at a time from the singer’s upcoming autobiography.

Northern Territory readers take note. I’m taking a virtual trip north today covering for the music guy on ABC Darwin’s Mornings show.
***
And… several hours later, I’ve chewed the fat with Mornings presenter Leon Compton, made my first ever appearance on the national broadcaster, and here’s what I played.

1. Institut Polaire - ‘Kentucky Society Drought’ from The Flora and The Fauna (Popfrenzy, 2008)
2. Dan Sultan - ‘Your Love Is Like a Song’ from Homemade Biscuits (self-released, 2008)
3. Ross McLennan - ‘I’m Heavy As I’ve Ever Been’ from Sympathy for the New World (Mistletone, 2008)