I just came down with a nosebleed so am typing this one-handed. It's been a worse than useless day for my coursework - I went to the Pacific Advisory Group meeting but the Pacific Advisory Group never showed up. Is that what being on island time means? There was no cancellation announced, and there was a buffet table set so someone else thought the meeting was on. I got the slight consolation of a couple of olives and a bit of cheese. The nonevent is doubly annoying because it was going to double as a Pacific cultural story and a local government story. Now I have to find one more of each to cram into my already overloaded schedule.
Not that you'd guess I was busy from the last couple of days. Yesterday I deliberately took the afternoon off - with the storm it's so easy to stay indoors - enjoying time to myself at the flat. This flat is great, I'll be sad to give it up in October. I stayed in the lounge and did some guitar practice, found an ending to the short story which I'd been working on v e r y s l o w l y since May, and wrote a new song ("Metaphysical Girls #7"). Today was less productive but didn't involve coursework either.
I also bought the new album by The Fall yesterday - it's entitled The Real New Fall LP. It's brilliant. The Fall were pretty popular in NZ in the early 80s but somewhere along the line faded into obscurity, but they're still going (& never stopped). Their late-90s albums - The Light User Syndrome, Levitate, The Marshall Suite, Post-Nearly Man, The Unutterable - are great but this one marks another change of direction: the electronic elements have been pared back and Mark E. Smith no longer slurs his vocals. It sounds like he's given up the alcohol. Smith's the only original member of the band left by this point, I didn't recognise any of the musicians, but it definitely sounds like The Fall. It's not a radical departure, just great new songs. It's got raw guitars, insanely catchy riffs that stretch out forever, eloquence & humour, plenty of dirt, all the elements that make them the greatest British rock band of all time - not excluding The Beatles.
Nosebleed stopped, time for bed. Early start tomorrow, have to make up for lost time...
Postscript, Thursday afternoon: Work experience at the Regional Council today, where I was counting on getting a Maori cultural story done. One of the Maori advisors was away sick and the other didn't have any ideas. Pressure load increases. The good news is I got an extension for the Treaty of Waitangi project over the weekend. So an even exchange - still an intense time.
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Posted by fiffdimension at August 19, 2004 12:02 AM | TrackBack