If I don't pull my finger out and start doing something I really love with the hours in my day, I will get medieval on my own or someone else's ass. I'm dying slowly in this job.

Yet another BDO before I hit The Great Gig in the Sky.

It has been 12 long years since my first Big Day Out. There are probably several reasons for this hiatus -

because, with its iconic line-up featuring a mix of legends (The Ramones when they were all still alive), independent darlings of the decade (Smashing Pumpkins; Bjork) and personal favourites (Teenage Fanclub), I feared '94 could never be topped;

because back then, even at 20 with my fashionable middle parting (which was red along the scalp by the end of the day) stripey tee and connies, I was exhilarated but bloody-near flattened by the heat, the punishment of the mosh, the beer;

because I had started to feel like I cared less about rock than I used to (which I have discovered is still a fuckload more than most of the twentysomething STIFFS who watched silently; gormlessly while an ant-like but still mesmerising Iggy Pop busted out peerless classics many metres away);

because for many years after '94 I had believed in hand-selecting 'boutique' gigs to attend (Morrissey, New Order, Primal Scream, Franz Ferdinand) where the fans would really be fans and the gig would be full-length - rather than joining the great unwashed to eat dangerously pink hamburgers, queue for the girls dunnies and fight my way through henna tattoo vendors and socialist worker bookstands to see the back of some tall guy's head.

All that changed this year. I went to the Big Day Out. Much to my dismay, I didn't get bruised and battered in the glorious, insane thick of the mosh like I did back when people hadn't yet died in the name of rock (well, at least, not at the Big Day Out)...

But I still came away feeling like music has survived. and I'm here to tell the tale. Stay tuned......................

Hang about. Maybe I don't need to tell the tale, cos in the time honoured tradition my mazer has done it for me. Have a bead - it's pure gold.

Anger at the blood lust of a geek - a somewhat delayed reaction

Or... "Proof that we live in a big bad world #23,822"

My friend at work just mentioned that a woman he had just spoken to was a big fan of looking at burns victims on websites - which is quite wrong, though entirely in keeping with our voyeuristic times. This made me think, for the first time in ages, of the lurking spectre that was present at my car accident at 2am near the Vic Market some 8 years ago.

I guess the crash looked quite spectacular, with my crumpled VW '73 model Beetle flying sideways to be impaled on the 'No Right Turn' sign I would've done well to clock before the fact. It probably looked like blood, guts and corpses would make a showing. As it happens, I sat forlornly but unscratched with my crumpled wreck for some time before it was dislodged and dragged to the scrapyard, never to be seen again - my trainered feet dangling out the side of an old friend. But from the outside it must've looked like someone had died and was yet to be taken away. Indeed, some friends of mine - who'd wisely decided to walk from the same venue at which I'd been DJing in the happier, earlier hours of that evening - saw my little feet poking out of the stricken vehicle and gasped in horror, thinking they were casting their eyes over the erstwhile me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my small, belated rush of indignance that the strange man who was inexplicably filming the night's proceedings from the safe distance of the street corner (at two in the morning) was probably thinking, nay, hoping for the same thing! What a sick fuck!! He was hoping for a glimpse of my brains, dashed against the windscreen - and for no other reason than to satisfy his compulsion to see (and film - for a subsequent wank?!!) guts spill. Bet he felt ripped off that he was merely witnessing the birth of yet another boring insurance claim. Oh, and the death of my olive green v-dub.

Anyway - lurking, leering, filming types at car accidents, hey... just further proof that there is no depravity to which we humans will not stoop in the pursuit of twisted kicks. And, to get another political stab in there - further reason to curtail the machinations of a free market which will cater to every one of these whims. Snuff films? Not if I'm the star, baby!

Well, I guess he's the one person I can identify from the gallery of characters from my past who I can say with any certainty 'wanted me dead", though I'm sure he wasn't the only one...

Tony Banks

Well, I might have had my head in the sand, but I did open The Guardian long enough to read the gut-wrenching news that that animated, witty lefty commentator and some time British Labour politician Tony Banks died recently.

I always enjoyed his talking head on various current affairs programs, spouting its opinion in his special brand of rapid-fire south-of-the-Thames-Estuary English.

He also stood up for animals, liked sport and was a fan of the very, very great Tony Benn. What is not to mourn?

Britain's losing all its fine leftie pollies, it would seem.

Good Night, And Good Luck

I thought this film was elegant, eloquent and pertinent, free of condescension or compromise, and reminiscent of two brilliant films of the B&W era - Sidney Lumet's Failsafe and Billy Wilder's CLASSIC The Apartment. The latter in style, the former in content. Like Lumet's startlingly powerful essay, made at the height of the cold war and thus balanced finely on the axis of the controversy zeitgeist, Clooney's film makes a statement that is neither glib nor safe in times like these. It's not Saving Private Ryan: "war is dumb and quite messy", or Black Hawk Down: "American lives should be saved at the expense of thousands of 'skinnies' in their own country", or Titanic: "forget the ship - let's watch two vaguely attractive morons get it on", or...
let's leave it there, my housemate Robin has come up to ask me if I'd like to get a pizza. and I would.

Does happiness make you a bore?

Perhaps it really does. I must apologise, for in the last month I have been suffering from a severe bout of bloggers' block. It's not that I don't still have mad rushes of rant-inducing emotion - my head is still full of thoughts... I just haven't had the same aggressively nerdish fixation on stuff that, for me at least, has always bred a good blog spiel.

What has caused this temporary interference in Suze's circuitry?

...four fundamental friends were OS over Xmas and NY - in Spain, India and Taiwan. Less debate, less stimulation, less diversity in my social scene. Less love, but less maintenance too, it has to be said.

...disappearing to Tasmania over the festive season meant that I couldn't take stock of all the "that was the year that was/top 50... of 2005" round-ups in the print and electronic media; couldn't watch the boxing day test (or all manner of dreary Xmas telly for that matter); couldn't argue bitterly with my olds and get thrown out of the house during festivities like I usually do. Instead I engaged in timeless activities like camping, meeting some other olds (though not quite of the vintage of my dad), and participating in that special Tassie tradition, inculcated from infancy, of the duelling banjos - in this case updated for the 21st century by our kind sponsors (Sony Playstation) to allow the duellers to cast aside their instruments and squawk lines from modern pop classics at each other. I know who won that little contest baby, I know....

...and, recently, I have been sweetly insulated from all those Things Afoot In The Big Bad World to which I used to be inexorably drawn in disgust and outrage - draconian IR "reforms", race riots, legislative infringements on human rights - by the warmth of my affection for this darling Tasmanian native creature. I am still angry with the world, but it's talking to the hand for the moment. Inequity is never shielded from my hawk-like scrutiny for long though. Believe.

Anyway, whatever the reason, I apologise. I will be back with a vengeance in 2006. As Luke of Bendigo might say - peace out dude.