Showing posts with label Australian music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australian music. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Dangers of the didgeridoo
Our gloriously narcissistic Rolf Harris—an almost Australian of the year—has finally been caught out and condemned heavily for ancient sexual offences involving underage females. What this means is that a hugely popular Aussie guy such as our Rolf might have a right to tie his kangaroo down, but he mustn’t allow the beast to raise its ugly tail and go groping around in the undies of young girls.
Jeez, there are things I don’t understand. Rolf wasn’t even a serious musician/entertainer, let alone an ordained priest! In cases like this, I can’t help wondering whether the innocent young victims, before running up and sitting down naively in Rolf’s enticing lap, had been wisely and sufficiently instructed by their parents about the terrible and ever-present dangers of the didgeridoo. Click here to start learning.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Play your didgeridoo, Blue
An unexpected advantage of owning an old automobile is that it often needs to be repaired, or at least undergo its obligatory annual checkup, and this means that the owner is forced to wander around for an hour or so in various dull urban environments where he wouldn't normally set foot. Consequently, one often makes interesting discoveries.
Yesterday afternoon, at St-Marcellin (home town of the famous cheese), I wandered down an unfamiliar lane in order to visit a big nondescript warehouse that is totally specialized in the sale of cheap and nasty goods made in Asia. If I understand correctly, the lady behind this enterprise had been an enthusiastic tourist in lands such as Indonesia. One day, she decided to pay cash for a container of assorted merchandise that would be delivered to St-Marcellin. That must have been several years ago. Since then, has she purchased further containers full of this stuff, or is she still trying to find buyers for the initial delivery? I really don't know… but I find it hard to believe that many of the sturdy local folk would be tempted to track down this out-of-the-way warehouse and buy goods there. But I may be wrong. After all, I've never been inside the homes of many citizens of St-Marcellin. Maybe, if we were to conduct a rigorous survey, we would discover that there's an amazingly large proportion of Asian junk decorating the local living rooms.
Be that as it may, the part of the warehouse that fascinated me most of all was a tiny corner holding an upright pile of objects that appeared to be Australian didgeridoos… which normally look like this:
Now, the didgeridoos on sale in the warehouse at St-Marcellin didn't really look much like that. First, they were almost perfectly cylindrical, from one end to the other, rather than tapered. Next, when I picked up one of them, I found that it was quite light: not at all what you would expect in the case of a hollowed-out eucalyptus sapling some 2 meters in length. Then, the decoration had a glossy plastic look, as if it were composed of sheets of industrially-printed fake-Aboriginal graphic designs that had been glued onto the surface of the cylinder. Finally, the price of these objects was more-or-less standard, no matter what the size and decoration: a couple of dozen euros. It was then that I noticed, on a price tag, that these didgeridoos were in fact made out of bamboo and manufactured in Indonesia. As the lady at the sales counter put it, they were purely decorative didgeridoos. Instantly, I started to wonder whether there were many families in the St-Marcellin area that boasted the presence, hanging on a wall, of a fake decorative didgeridoo.
An unexpected advantage of not having many local friends (in my case, not a single individual living in St-Marcellin) is the negligible likelihood of receiving this kind of object as a gift from a kind-hearted person thinking that it would bring me warm memories of my distant land of birth. Today, of course, if such a calamity were to hit me, I could always hand the object over to my dog Fitzroy. All I would need to do, then, is to leave the chewed remnants of the instrument on the kennel roof, and inform my kind-hearted friend that a slight but unfortunate accident had occurred when I was teaching Fitzroy to play the didgeridoo…
Yesterday afternoon, at St-Marcellin (home town of the famous cheese), I wandered down an unfamiliar lane in order to visit a big nondescript warehouse that is totally specialized in the sale of cheap and nasty goods made in Asia. If I understand correctly, the lady behind this enterprise had been an enthusiastic tourist in lands such as Indonesia. One day, she decided to pay cash for a container of assorted merchandise that would be delivered to St-Marcellin. That must have been several years ago. Since then, has she purchased further containers full of this stuff, or is she still trying to find buyers for the initial delivery? I really don't know… but I find it hard to believe that many of the sturdy local folk would be tempted to track down this out-of-the-way warehouse and buy goods there. But I may be wrong. After all, I've never been inside the homes of many citizens of St-Marcellin. Maybe, if we were to conduct a rigorous survey, we would discover that there's an amazingly large proportion of Asian junk decorating the local living rooms.
Be that as it may, the part of the warehouse that fascinated me most of all was a tiny corner holding an upright pile of objects that appeared to be Australian didgeridoos… which normally look like this:
Now, the didgeridoos on sale in the warehouse at St-Marcellin didn't really look much like that. First, they were almost perfectly cylindrical, from one end to the other, rather than tapered. Next, when I picked up one of them, I found that it was quite light: not at all what you would expect in the case of a hollowed-out eucalyptus sapling some 2 meters in length. Then, the decoration had a glossy plastic look, as if it were composed of sheets of industrially-printed fake-Aboriginal graphic designs that had been glued onto the surface of the cylinder. Finally, the price of these objects was more-or-less standard, no matter what the size and decoration: a couple of dozen euros. It was then that I noticed, on a price tag, that these didgeridoos were in fact made out of bamboo and manufactured in Indonesia. As the lady at the sales counter put it, they were purely decorative didgeridoos. Instantly, I started to wonder whether there were many families in the St-Marcellin area that boasted the presence, hanging on a wall, of a fake decorative didgeridoo.An unexpected advantage of not having many local friends (in my case, not a single individual living in St-Marcellin) is the negligible likelihood of receiving this kind of object as a gift from a kind-hearted person thinking that it would bring me warm memories of my distant land of birth. Today, of course, if such a calamity were to hit me, I could always hand the object over to my dog Fitzroy. All I would need to do, then, is to leave the chewed remnants of the instrument on the kennel roof, and inform my kind-hearted friend that a slight but unfortunate accident had occurred when I was teaching Fitzroy to play the didgeridoo…
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Country-music sisters in Australia
When I was a boy in Grafton, I was often in contact with a cultivated lady named Mavis McClymont, who was involved in urban affairs and also in charge of the public library. These days, in Australia, the McClymont surname refers particularly to three singing sisters from Grafton, grand-nieces of Mavis, known simply as The MyClymonts.
[Click the photo to visit their website.]
In their Chaos and Bright Lights album, the sisters reveal a beautifully clear country sound of Australian vintage. Besides, their fresh lyrics are pure country without becoming corny.
Their song My Life Again has overtones of Shania Twain.
Click the photo to hear a second extract, Shotgun, which has an infectious lilting melody. I like the unexpected style of the invitation to drop in: There's no shotgun hanging around my door tonight. Those words are incongruous in a land where you can now get thrown into jail for owning a rifle to shoot rabbits.
I'm convinced that these girls would be received enthusiastically here in France, where Australian country music is still largely unknown.
[Click the photo to visit their website.]In their Chaos and Bright Lights album, the sisters reveal a beautifully clear country sound of Australian vintage. Besides, their fresh lyrics are pure country without becoming corny.
Their song My Life Again has overtones of Shania Twain.
Click the photo to hear a second extract, Shotgun, which has an infectious lilting melody. I like the unexpected style of the invitation to drop in: There's no shotgun hanging around my door tonight. Those words are incongruous in a land where you can now get thrown into jail for owning a rifle to shoot rabbits.I'm convinced that these girls would be received enthusiastically here in France, where Australian country music is still largely unknown.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)