This post will probably be most renown for it’s brevity than anything else. Events have conspired against me in having any significant amount of time to write about anything of an important — some may say interesting — nature. This was bound to happen. If you had given me any kind of odds for not keeping to this routine I have laid out for myself with regard to making words appear here, I would have deposited all of my earthly — and some of my more ethereal — possessions on it. As it turns out this would have probably been a bad idea as I ran into some Middle Eastern dictator and just had to show you the proof. You can’t say I don’t treat you right. In fact, you can’t say anything; you are just a text editor.
What I may decide to do in the interim is briefly discuss a musical acquisition I made not more than two days ago. I had wandered into the local K-Mart, as is my wont, and experienced the usual, inexorable compulsion to make a bee-line for the section designated The Audio-Visual Department
. I am quite convinced — and a recent experiment supports this theory — that I would be able to walk into any K-Mart or related department store and, even while blindfolded, intoxicated and bleeding to death, be able to locate this section of the store. It is always at the rear of the store and has an extremely high probability of being in the rear right corner. A friend of mine tried to tell me that this was a deliberate measure taken by the store designers so that if some bad man wanted to come in and perhaps avail himself of something expensive within the department without paying for it, said man would have to navigate the labyrinth of aisles, furniture displays and five-year-old kids piloting tiny, annoying trolleys with big balls on the end of long antenna like protrusions — sorry, too descriptive? — before he could escape the clutches of the ever vigilant shop security. While this reason is totally plausible, I believe — being the highly cynical creature that I am — that the true purpose behind this seemingly inherent attribute of department stores is much more sinister. I am of the opinion that most people who visit the The Audio-Visual department
pretty much know what the hell they want before they even enter. This kind of prescience empowers the shopper with the ability to perform a rapid, clean and surgical commercial expedition. However, this is exactly the kind of behaviour that department store operators lobby governments to prohibit. It deprives them of the opportunity of pressing upon you the multitude of other, nefariously useful wares that they peddle. So to counteract this undesirable situation they force you to travel through eighty per-cent of the building, just in case you decide that you really would like to get some photographs developed right now. You know I am right.
By now you have probably just experienced my first major digression on this site and alas, it is highly unlikely to be my last. What I really wanted to tell you was just how good the new Zwan album, “Mary Star of the Sea”, is. Zwan is a relatively new quintet composed of band members from numerous other high-profile outfits; most notably Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin from the now defunct Chicago grunge group The Smashing Pumpkins. My first contact with Zwan had been through the single “Honestly” which has been given a bit of airtime of late on Triple J and was featured at number eight on that station’s Net 50 weekly broadcast. I liked this song, although most of my happiness lay in the fact that Billy was back writing songs and singing them as only he can. Let me tell you now that this track sounds a lot better on the album. It really leaps out at you with near infinite clarity in a perfect mix of bass and treble. In fact, the whole album has this quality about it; along with the other characteristic of sounding loud at any volume level (something Billy Corgan has said he aimed for while producing the recording). Other tracks that I am really besotted with at the moment are: “Lyric”, “Ride a Black Swan” and “Yeah!”. Needless to say, I am really excited about the future of this band and I wish them every success in their endeavours.
By now I think the title of this post may have been pushed into the lesser misnomer category. I will leave it there however for posterity’s sake. And no, I didn’t mean for the benefit of your behind.