What's Brown Right Now?

I love Dead Meadow. This is a film clip from their third studio album 'Old Growth'. Hans Fruck was supposed to review this album for Beat, I got tired of waiting for him to finish jerking off to PJ Harvey and her short dress and big stack, so fuck it, I went to YouTube and this is what I found. I apologise to all for the inevitable embed, but I think you will find it to be an enjoyable song. I for one can't wait to find it somewhere in Japan, which is probably never, even though I am their greatest fan. I don't hold with downloads, and Fruck won't burn and send a small flimsy CD to me.

Anyway, don't listen to anything Hans Fruck says about Dead Meadow because I already know their latest album will be wicked. The guy has a mangina. Screw you Hans Fruck, and without further a-doo-doo-doo, here is a song from Dead Meadow's latest album.

Late. Packed. Filthy. Don't cry, Metlink, our column was always the same.

On The Verge has been dropped from Melbourne music magazine Beat after a further complaint from Metlink was registered with the magazine's management, prompting senior staff to direct the editor to cancel it immediately.

Despite being a satirical column, many large corporations couldn't handle having a little fun poked at them and were quick to threaten Beat with cancelled advertising. The magazine's editor, Nick Snelling, was one of the few mag hacks courageous enough to allow satire be published in his magazine -- even when the subjects of the satire advertised their wares in his magazine. And, naturally, expected a complimentary editorial reaction.

Despite constant pressure from his bosses, Nick defended On The Verge on an almost weekly basis, and the magazine gained some editorial credibility as a result. A quality which is often questioned in Australian magazines in general.

Anytime someone mentions Peeping Tom in Melbourne, they are obviously talking about this band, right?  Well, not anymore it seems.

Mike Patton now has a collaboration album and band called Peeping Tom.  So, what would you call the band if you had to rename it?  

Eggs unwilling to hatch.

Our On The Verge column in Beat magazine was the original reason we started this website.

Over time we've encouraged a lot of Beat writers to allow us to post some of their work online, alongside our own, so that it can take its place alongside the vast jungle of opinion on the internet that only really reveals itself when you start hunting for pictures using Google images.

The content on this site has grown over the year or so its been in existence. Recently we decided to move, and just like when you move house, you start finding all this shit you forgot you had.

Some of the shit I've found, and found amusing, is some old On The Verge columns. Hans moved the bulk of the text across and I've added images and some sometimes-amusing captions.

No matter what the photographer tried, the childish little guitar kept poking his head into the picture.

I repent of the comments I made concerning the last Queens of the Stone Age album, in the review here.

Some time ago I bought the DVD/Live CD entitled Over The Years and Through The Woods. I've watched it maybe five times, and listened to the CD many more.

I understand now. Bereaved of Oliveri, the former bass player, I abandoned loyalty to the group. I fell into the conservative trap of wanting everything to stay the same, enduring no base imitation of the glory years. I didn't deny the new band was good, but I couldn't accept that it could be as good as the last.

I now see the fault lies with me, and not the band. The 90s have gone, hurtling into the void like a missed subway train. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can you do to retrieve it. The stupid thing is: what a stupid thing to mourn. The new band is better, in many ways. Never what it was, denying who it is, and metamorphasising into something different.

Author Kabex Fitzgibbon elaborates on the difficulties of his craft.

Aspiring writer Kabex Fitzgibbon decided to put his debut novel A Farewell To Reason to one side after striking trouble at the 1000-word mark.

The first part of the trilogy was planned for release in early 2007, but after the second paragraph Fitzgibbon realised it made “better commercial sense” to scale the book back to a single volume of about 50,000 words.

By the end of the first chapter, Fitzgibbon decided to “rationalise” the work to a short novella of about 10,000 words.

“After a few evening's work on the first sentence, I decided the themes of the book could be better communicated in a more condensed, but intense, form … I’m not a great one for padding,” Fitzgibbon told his friends yesterday at a Darlinghurst café.

When foreigners are not present, Japanese commuters are tame and may be petted.

I have a tendency to ramble, and time tonight is short, so I’ll get right to the point in case you don’t want to read much further: the odds of meeting the same stranger on a train in Osaka, even if the two of you knock off work at roughly the same time and get on the same train each day, are very long.

The odds of meeting the same rude, arrogant old crone twice in a row and have a carbon-copy reenactment of the same situation in such an outwardly polite society are even longer. However, I am here now, typing in a not entirely unpleasant haze of flu medication and medicinal sake, to tell you that it’s certainly possible – and that whatever the odds are of such an encounter happening a third time, if it does I plan to fight fire with fire and leave the good manners of a gentleman at the doors. Age may well come before beauty, and to my mind, women should be placed before men, but rudeness is exclusive to neither age nor gender and must be stamped out, vigilante style, no matter how cruel it may seem.