It's been a busy week - I spent Saturday chained to my desk at home doing work, so I made up for it on Sunday by walking for about 6 hours - into the city, around a pile of little alleyways, and back up through Carlton and Fitzroy to the Merri Creek bridge on St Georges Road before heading back home.

[ start here for saturday's photos. ]

Via the sevs list, Phil Turnbull's put up another pile - the last, it says - of photos of Sydney post-punk bands - Voight/465 (Phil was in the band), Crime and the City Solution, Pel Mel, The Reels, the (makers of) the dead travel fast, Scattered Order, etc. Also, if you look down the end, you'll also see Hunters and Collectors' first Sydney gig.

Seems like my Lloyd Cole and the Commotions review's still popular - Some people at A band called O have been collecting reviews around the net, including Glenn McDonald's killer (re-)review of The Negatives (his original review was a bit too much for his readers...). So far they've also got pages on an old, old Tangerine Dream album, and Scott Walker's Tilt, which I've been meaning to go and find, lately, having heard it mentioned quite a few times in reference to that new David Sylvian album. I should've listened to it more when david/bruce brought it to work all those years ago.

Hero crossover! David Byrne has covered Lambchop's The Man Who Loved Beer. I just heard it on RRR this morning in a serendipitous "I was about to hit the CD button but then they started playing this instead" moment. I miss the steel guitar of the original, but it's nice enough.

Having made it to the end of the new Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, it's pretty obvious that it's intended as a kind of a joke upon people who've taken his back-catalogue far too seriously - not a bad joke, but a joke nonetheless. Just listen to the reworked I Am A Cinematographer. You can almost hear him laughing at us, saying "look, what did you expect me to do with this?" He couldn't have made it any more stark than the original. And he probably didn't really want to. Why mess with the masterpieces? I gather this was done as some kind of fanboy exercise where he polled fans to find out which songs he should redo. I don't think anybody expected the Nashville sound of this album, but maybe we should've expected a poke in the ribs, at least?

I was visiting family for lunch on the weekend, walking from the railway station as usual. This time, I noticed our family dentist had decided to rebuild his premises (a little sign explained that he's slumming it in Mt Waverley until later this year, when it'll be finished).

The doctor we went to a long, long time ago (why did we change? the guy we went to since then is about half the distance, maybe that was it) seemed to have abandoned his premises.

The kindergarten I used to go to was turned into a small carpark a long time ago (no photo of this one - maybe next time).

My old primary school's changed, too - a while back they changed the name and the school colours. Now the buildings are a curious mix of 60's/70's brick buildings merged with 90's/00's neutral-coloured modern materials (not visible in the photos - I took ones of the bits that still looked like I remembered them).

You can never really go home, right?

More stuff that happened while I was away - Brian Hooper, of Beasts of Bourbon and Kim Salmon and the Surrealists fame and such (hey, he also played on Rowland S. Howard's kick-arse solo effort of a few years ago), fell off a balcony and did himself some damage. He's now in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down.

I can still remember the Austin Hospital from when I had to visit dad in the spinal injuries unit as a 7 year old - tubes stuck up his nose, chemical smells, and the gatekeeper with his kittens and blood plums. Most of the other people in the ward had dived into the shallow end of a pool, crashed motorcycles, or something similar. A gliding accident wasn't the kind of thing that happened every day.

All the best, mate.