The Weekly... Volume 5

Welcome back here to the Bee-ELle-Oh-Gee...

(That's what Richie Benaud would say. One day I will make it happen... A video blog maybe... Hmmm).

Well last night at the Brass Monkey kind of restored my faith in music. Not that it needed a great deal of restoring, but faith can always use the occasional "top-up" (for want of a better term), and last night topped it up quite nicely. Just 9 paying customers, but that's all it took. And if you don't understand, well neither do I really, it was just great. So thanks Brass Monkey - you did it again. And thanks to the band - Matt, Pat, Sarah and Andrew.

And if you've never been there, then PLEASE go. (Not for me - for yourselves!)

www.brassmonkey.com.au

(Diesel personally recommended the Hummus - I am serious!)

The rest of the week - well there was a show in Wollongong, a Banana Cake, and discussions with sounding boards (these are important).

And now it's just 9 days till I take off for Thailand. They have beaches you know... If you want to come visit, I'll be here:

www.twinpalms-phuket.com

And and and...

The lineups are now posted for the June residency at the Excelsior. Big one to Start with Move Trees and Kitch - look out! Wed June 4 - Gideeup.

Finally - more shows being added to the Europe Tour - cool.

Cheers for now,

Renny (Still in search of a new punctuation mark in between a full stop and the exclamation mark).

!


My road trip to Hurstville. 17/04/08

Hurstville, I have decided, it like a Microcosm of our fine city of Sydney. It's a nice enough place - got most of the things you'd ever need in fact. But you see there's this thing that's happened. They've built a town before they really thought about the town planning. So the streets loop round and back in and over the top of themselves, and there isn't really a system, and some of them are one way (usually the ones you need to go the other way on...), and there are traffic lights in odd places, and random pedestrian crossings, and a train somewhere in the middle of it all - which is probably running late for somewhere. Sound familiar?

And I could have accepted all that until it became obvious that the parking police had also adopted other general rest-of-Sydney-like characteristics. Unlike the distinct lack of planning involved in the street configuration, there is actually quite a lot of planning that goes into the training of a perfect "ticket dispensing prick". By that I mean the man in the bright yellow vest (Why do they make them wear those things...?) who managed to nail me by all of about 5mins. This despite me reaching him before he had finished writing the ticket. And despite me standing about 10m away from my car talking to some friends as he was writing the ticket (I noticed the yellow vest mid-conversation, but apparently didn't make it across to him in time). Would he listen to reason? No Chance. Did he have a conscience? Negative.

So you see I am not bitter, but I don't think I'll head back out to Hurstville again too soon. Not that it's a bad place, it's just that I can get all those things right here in Surry Hills, and it's a lot closer to the beach.

Adios.