Exercises from 1st Class

About a Record

I have always loved my dad's record collection. A lot of it is really fun! My dad has all the Smiths records, all the Morrissey records, all the Split Endz records. So I guess he's a tragic for tragic 80's indie rock. Which is great, because he and I are both now tragics for modern tragic indie rock.

A few years ago I started going through all of Dad's records that I want to be able to listen to, playing them back into digital format. Lying on the dusty lounge-room floor with laptop uncomfortably balanced on my brother's guitar amp, a long analogue audio cable going from the headphone jack on the record player to the mic-in on the computer. Once the record was played back into the computer I would painstakingly cut up the tracks into individual mp3 files so I can actually listen to them. My friends would call my blasphemous: 'Intentionally subverting the purity of vinyl'. I called them irritatingly nostalgic luddites. While it may be nice every so often to lie on the loungeroom floor and play out a record in it's entirety, the reverence for rituals associated with an antiquated technology is just silly.

The entire process was mostly pointless anyway. The songs were taken from 20-year old, often listened to records, played out on a record player of the same age, to the headphone jack, down the cheapest variety of audio cable I could find, into the analog mic jack in an aging laptop and finally converted to mp3. By the time they reached my mp3 player they were almost unlistenable. So I just ended up downloading the albums my dad has on record from bittorrent. Just keeping up with the times.

About An Alien!!!!

The cold black desert stretched on as far as the eye can see. The gritty dark surface an unsightful blight on which no life could have ever survived. And yet there are some signs of life. Massive, semitranslucent beings tower through the rifts of the desert. At dusk their gargantuan cries echo between the dark peaks: "Whoororororororo!! Whroooororororo!". And lo, the black desert rumbled from their cries. On the third day one of the massive creatures trampled towards our camp. It moved so fast that we could not escape. I stood in front of it, waving my arms and yelling "Stop!!!! Or I shall be trampled to death by your spiked mass!". To my surprise it did not listen. I was stompled to death. I died. I was both astonished and astounded, as well as being slightly constipated.

I continued my trek across the desert. A giant spire, shooting up into the sky, millions of feet. The ancient groan of twisting steel ripping through the night air like a chainsaw through a bathtub of baby Onolungian Salad Zakkers. It sounded exactly like Rolf Harris' first album: "Whoororororororo!! Whroorororororo! Whroorororororo!!". My cranium was turned inside out! Luckily, one of my shuddering assistants was nearby to pour me into a soup bowl.

With impunity!