Recently I started experimenting with open-tunings and it has opened new musical ideas
In the past I found that replacing the low E string on the guitar with a D string from a bass held pitch better, and also that DADGAD was a lot of fun for riffing.
One time I settled on DDAE tuning, which was interesting as it switched around notes when picking arpeggios.
Anyway, this time I've gone for DGDGBD and really like the way it sits sorta between a guitar and a bass.
It was using that tuning that I started writing the song in the video at the top.
However, a recent Junto project asked for a remix and I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit the song.
I knew there would be vocal performances that were close enough to layer together for the thick sound one gets through doubling.
The remix below worked from those pieces and added a 909 beat and a wubby bass part.
I'd read about the amount of iron it offered and noticed it was growing on the property where I was living, under kurrajong trees in the leaf litter.
When I was young, my mother would bake filo pies with layers of spinach.
For many years I'd eat the filo and try to avoid the spinach but, when I left home, I found myself cooking it and enjoying the sentimental connection to this dish.
That's where I began with nettle, adding it to spinach and realising that I couldn't taste much difference.
Cooking removes the sting, but a quick blanch will too.
Then I tried nettle tea and found the zing of the iron a nice complement for the green flavour.
However, when I brewed nettle beer, I began to wonder why this weed hasn't been embraced more widely.
So I began letting it go to seed where it grew in my garden.
This year the conditions have been ideal, late winter rain has brought up patches of nettle and mallow.
It's an ideal crop, self-seeding and filling a gap between winter and spring vegetables.
While there are a couple of spinach plants that have survived, the nettle has offered enough leafy goodness for a few pies and now I'm wondering if I should brew a batch of beer.
Parkview
Public School's third grade students were given a guided tour of
Fivebough Wetland on 20 August to learn about the important role of this
ecosystem, which attracts migratory birds from as far away as the
northern hemisphere
In
the much-anticipated follow-up to the Beak Technique workshop at the
School in July, that illustrated the relationship between habitat and
bird diet.
"This
excursion highlighted the important role the landscape plays and how it
has developed over hundreds of millions of years," said Red Earth
Ecology's Jo Roberts.
Activities
included identifying birds and beaks using binoculars, map-making,
hearing about the history of the Wetlands and seeing small invertebrates
in water samples using magnifying glasses.
"We're
grateful to the Murrumbidgee Field Naturalists for the loan of
binoculars," said Ms Roberts. "Their assistance was also appreciated in
creating the educational resources shared with students."
The
excursion also included walking along the Wiradjuri Loop at Leeton's
Fivebough Wetlands that demonstrates First Nations totems, fish traps
and other cultural practices.
Enthusiasm
among the students was clearly evident, as they were keen to share
their observations and detailed experiences with local flora and fauna.
"One highlight was watching a swamp hen through the binoculars as it
caught and ate a fish," said Ms Roberts, who also noted the popularity
of looking at the magnified water 'bugs', which was an eye-opening
insight into the microscopic world that supports the wetland food chain.
Worksheets
developed by Red Earth Ecology for the project were supported with a
Country Art Support Program grant administered by Western Riverina Arts
and Create NSW through funding from the NSW Government.
This week I watched two science fiction films and got me thinking
It
started with the sequel to Avatar, which I got curious about because
the original film was a cultural phenomenon that led to a brief flurry
of 3D movies.
I liked the experience of 3D, possibly because it
made me sentimental about the time I saw Creature From The Black Lagoon
as a small child.
3D worked well with the alien landscape of the
Avatar movies and there were films like Life Of Pi that I regretted not
seeing in the cinema to enjoy the effect.
However, it always
seemed like the 3D novelty wasn't going to last and I was aghast that
the local Roxy Theatre in Leeton spent tens of thousands of dollars
investing in it.
Cinemas had largely abandoned the format by the
time the sequel to Avatar arrived and I'm curious whether there will be
any 3D screenings of the third film in the series.
One thing I
liked about the original Avatar story was the way it contained elements
of Metropolis, particularly the use of a robot to infiltrate resistance
to capitalist industry.
The titular avatars are attempting to
support mining on the alien planet and the sequel takes the colonial
narrative into the sea, where it presents a version of the whaling
industry.
It's kinda grim, given how whaling persists today, but the audience gets to cheer the big fish smashing boats.
The next film I watched was Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which is a Luc Besson film I had missed.
He's a director who would probably have been cancelled for various reasons if he was American.
There's
a curiousity about the themes in his work for me, since I first
reviewed Leon The Professional and thought the relationship between that
character and a girl was also unlike the material from Hollywood.
Valerian
is a natural successor to the successful film The Fifth Element, which
again has a big age gap between the central characters, and in many ways
I thought the recent film was more polished and better paced.
As I reflected on the two films I watched this week I found myself admiring the sci-fi elements from Valerian over those in the Avatar sequel.
Besson's
film had so many more wow moments, where I'd shake my head at the
imaginative twists, and it was surprising to see Herbie Hancock in there
too.
Afterwards I read Wikipedia to see what I could learn and was surprised to read
the French director had been influenced by the first Avatar film:
Then I read an interview with Besson where he criticised Hollywood movies for being too dark.
It prompted me to reflect on how much angst appears in American stories, and I appreciated the fun I'd had watching Valerian.
France has a great reputation for film and sometimes
I find myself wishing that Australia had stronger quotas for local
content, because our film industry has diminished in recent years as US
productions gain tax-breaks to produce their blockbusters in our
country.
There are many qualities of our local stories that I wished could be represented in more movies.
Another
film I watched this week was Two Hands, which was called an Australian
version of Goodfellas but really deserves to be recognised without that
US lens.
This prompted me to consider the current discussion of Australian copyright and whether foreign-owned (so-called) AI (really, large language models) should have unfettered access to our country's cultural works for free.
While I am generally of the opinion that copyright is an antiquated model, it is the one that provides remuneration to a (small) group of creatives (but mostly the corporations that take ownership of works) and (in theory) incentivises the creation of new cultural material and other intellectual property.
Given the author of the comment quoted above wrote their reflection in 2022, I began wondering what they'd make of the contemporary debate about copyright.
However, I was reluctant to create a LinkedIn account and found that Lamb's Substack requires a paid subscription for me to ask, so I started looking for interviews with the author and soon found myself interested in the book he's been promoting -- a biography of Frank Moorhouse.
It looks like a good book and I'm really curious about the subject's experience of living in Wagga, where he worked on The Daily Advertiser newspaper.
That journal is usually referred to as The Agoniser by people I know, and it's become renowned as the place where sometime Nationals leader Michael McCormack wrote a homophobic editorial (that he's since distanced).
So, before long, I've found myself interested in learning more about Moorhouse from digging into interviews with Lamb.
My partner Jo and I go for walks along a nearby water channel
The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area has many of these and the gravity-fed system is an engineering marvel.
Recently they've been enclosing some channels with pipes, which has led to our local channel dropping to a trickle.
Many birds seem to be enjoying the opportunity to fossick in the mud, also some humans too.
There are many sunken treasures, particularly witches hats and bits of metal.
I had passed a strangely shaped object a couple of times, thinking it was a dumped toolbox before I recognised the XLR connections and realised it's a wedge-shaped speaker box.
When I shared this photo my friends commented that it's "monitoring the water level" and offers "sub bass"!
I have watched many of Emily's pedal reviews and enjoy her observations
One of the things that jumped out in this recent video is her recollection of an artist residency.
There's a lot in there about elitism in the arts, as well as the rationale for her new album.
If you have been on an artist residency though, then you might recognise Emily's comment about how it made her feel like an artist.
I think this is one of the best aspects of a residency, where the residents identify as the role after doing there own thing elsewhere and not considering it art.
The best residencies have an open-ended quality that allows room for this development to occur.
This seems like the sorta thing Disney would produce if they used pollsters instead of test audiences
Or maybe it's just a question of where the audiences are located?
Personally I pay Disney little money and have enjoyed their franchises, and am becoming really curious to see if the Shogun series can survive going beyond the book with a second season.
Sure, the Marvel and Star Wars spin offs have been hit and miss.
I read Shogun for fun in high school and the TV mini-series at that time already felt dated.
So it's been fun to revisit the story but reminded me how much I wanted to see the battle just beyond the end of the book.
I'm beginning to think that "toxic masculinity" is a term that appeals to many people
Rather than serving as a gentle way to change behaviours by suggesting something dangerous, it's become so polarising that it only succeeds in confirming biases in different directions across the gendered landscape.
In that way it reminds me of the crisises that feminism has encountered whenever someone with a marginal identity asks if a political movement representing 51% of the population can claim to reflect their particular margin.
Usually those moments see the margins considered, possibly shifted or given new labels, then the small number of people it impacted either follow the renewed movement or find their own splinter to support.
The feminst authors I've read are generally aiming to show solidarity with men where it will improve lives for everyone, such as reducing the burden of gender schema.
However, I think history shows that one doesn't simply change the rules and expect the game to adjust -- more often it leads to a new code of sports or church for believers.
So I wonder if masculinity is toxic enough to die or if it will just get more extreme?
