Here’s some Ariel, looking ruinously hot.

This is just a quick post to let you know, in case you missed it, I’m now hosting the Weekend Breakfast show on Triple J. If you’re from overseas, Triple J is a national radio station that plays some pretty awesome shit, and I was lucky enough to clamber into this gig through a combination of luck, help from loved ones, massive amounts of sugar and a little bit of skill. It’s on from 6am to 10am Saturdays and Sundays, and I’d be eternally grateful if you could give it a listen once in a while; it’s not entirely devoid of the humor you see on The Somewhat Ambitious. Also, when Luke gets his sweet invalid butt back to Melbourne, you’ll be able to hear him making the odd cameo.

And if you’re still not sold, every once in a while on the show, I do a nation-wise, interractive Choose Your Own Adventure, with you deciding the fate of the protaganist. Who is this leading man? Michael Douglas.

…I know, right?

/Paul

Well, I guess I sort of asked for it. Today, Luke kicked me into the Yarra. The premise of this weeks punishment (for the loser of No Fuck Friday 3) was to be “baptised in the Yarra”. The water was teetering around the six to seven degree mark, and I wasn’t so much baptised as I was kicked. Everyone was very nice about the whole thing. My reproductive system, on the other hand, has been rendered useless by the toxic slurry that I spazzed around in for fifteen seconds, before being hauled out and changing behind a towel in front of baffled tourists. They probably saw my clothing dissolving off my body, so at least they won’t try and go for a swim.

UPDATE: This is from the Wikipedia entry on the Yarra River:

Pollution

Levels of bacteria, particularly E-coli and substances like grease, oils and heavy metals in the Yarra River and its tributaries are a major problem.

High levels of E-coli, some up to 200 times the safe limit in its tributaries, are caused primarily by poorly maintained septic systems.

Up to 350,000 cigarette butts enter the Yarra catchment storm water runoff every day,[6] these serve as just a small representation of the rubbish and litter that are disposed of in storm water runoff areas that eventually make their way into the river.

Some industrial companies continue to use the Yarra as a dumping ground. For example in recent years paper company Amcor has been fined several times by EPA Victoria for polluting the Yarra and environs. In 2007 it was fined AUD $5,000 for discharging paper pulp into the Yarra from its Alphington plant and in 2008 the company was convicted for releasing oil into the Yarra from its Alphington plant and fined AUD $80,000.

Fuck.

Stay tuned for the video, and keep voting on No Fuck Friday 4!

/Paul

Photos courtesy of TJ!

Make sure you tune in using the link to Triple J (to your right, dear readers) 7.45am tomorrow, for Nerds of a Feather! I’ll be blathering about the swearing in of Obama, celebrity deaths, hallucinations, spaceships, and all kinds of bizarro shit. Also, tune in to Triple J from 1-6am for more of me, on the Mid-Dawn show!

/Paul

In a chonologically stupefying move, Paul and I have just finished doing Tuesday’s episode of The Somewhat Ambitious. WHA-? you say. Wha indeed. We have the hyper-caffeinated sound bites to prove it. My god it was tangential. But only suitable really, given that the theme this week was/will be, once again, shuffle. We just pick a track and then start jumping through our iTunes library and play the first 8 or 9 tracks that appear, in whatever order they appear. Of course, this is slightly qualified. I, for instance, chose not to include A Silver Mt. Zion’s beautiful, but glacially epic track ‘Could Have Moved Mountains’. Paul chose not to include the three separate extracts from the BBC’s radio play of ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ thrown up by his iPod. Possibly ill-advisedly, because Douglas Adams may well be funnier than us. He’s certainly more focussed. He wrote four chronologically linked and structurally sound novels. We can barely talk for four minutes without violating most laws of conceptual association and common decency. Don’t believe us? Here’s us discussing Bjork’s ‘Ambergris March’ while playing Bjork’s ‘Ambergris March’. Heh. Ambergris. Listen on Tuesday for more.

Here be the playlist, along with some mp3s and ramblings:

1. Yo La Tengo – Our Way To Fall [Paul - even when he has no choice in the matter he still ends up playing Yo La Tengo. I think he must have a lot of Yo La Tengo. If you say Yo La Tengo enough it stops having any meaning. Yo La Tengo. Yo La Tengo. Yooooo La Tengo. Yolatengo. Yo LA Tengo. And I'm done.]
2. Sebastien Tellier – Sexual Sportswear [Luke - creator of the beloved 'La Ritournelle' tries for a repeat performance with limited success]
3. Sergio Mendes – Pais Tropical [Paul - he listens to this while weekending at his villa with a small Portugese boy named Raoul]
4. Sufjan Stevens – Lo! How A Rose E’er Blooming [Paul - one of the tracks from Sufjan's five CD Christmas mega pack. Man, you must be really scraping the Merry Christmas barrel by the ass-end of the fifth CD. And up next, the little known Christmas jingle 'What's With All The Tinsel? No, Seriously, What's With It?]
5. Weird Tapes – Nikki [Luke - quirky, sample-heavy Hail Social side project. The entire 'Get Religion' EP is available for download here. Well worth it]
6. Jeff Buckley – So Real [Paul - Ah, Jeff, cheer up. Oh, that's right, you can't. Because you're dead. Remember kids, alcohol, depression and fast-flowing American rivers don't mix]
7. Mogwai – We’re No Here [Luke - This track tells you everything you need to know about depressing Glaswegian cityscapes]
8. The Beta Band – Assessment [Paul - John Cusack in High Fidelity liked it. Do you?]
9. Calvin Harris – Certified [Luke - This track tells you everything you need to know about depressing Glaswegian club scenes]
10. Bjork – Ambergris March [Paul - what do you think Bjork and Matthew Barney talk about over breakfast? Do they even eat breakfast? Perhaps they just sit there and feed each other pages from the Complete Oxford English Dictionary. Hmmm.]
11. Iron and Wine – Sodom, South Georgia [Luke - oh, this is so lovely it makes me want to curl up in his voice and go to sleep. Bringing Sodom back in to fashion. One of my favourite ever songs]
12. Fleet Foxes – Ragged Wood [Paul - pastoral folk rock from current indie darlings. No joke here.]
13. CSS – Left Behind (Midnight Juggernauts Remix) [Luke - Melbourne electro rock sensations remix Brazilian electro rock sensations]
14. Rick James – Ghetto Life [Paul - electro funk from the man once dubbed 'The Walking Sex Offence'. By me. This and this should tell you all you need to know.]
15. The Roots – 75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction) [Luke - song by hip-hop doyens off their latest album 'Rising Down', notable largely for the fact that they drop the 'N-bomb' 39 times in 3 minutes and 16 seconds. Impressive.]
16. Bonde Do Role – Melo Do Tabaco [Luke - Brazilian baile funk number by now defunct group. You may remember them as the band who briefly had their song in a Bonds' underwear ad, until it was called to the attention of the good people at Bonds that, when translated, the lyrics in the ad roughly meant 'Bite you like a whore/Come and play with my pussy'. Natch.]

Tune in next week (after you tune in this week…) for duets and collaborations. Paul and I may sing ‘Ebony and Ivory’ live on air. But probably not.

/Luke

So this week on The Somewhat Ambitious’ totally awesome mixtape-themed radio show, we decided to surrender all control of our music preferences to the loosely understood powers that be our iTunes shuffle function. Whatever the first 9 tracks that this capricious beast shat out, we had to play on air. As two relatively demanding music appreciators, we have rarely before had cause to call upon the ’shuffle’, so we were all rather intrigued as to what was about to be occur. And with good cause.

Despite our best intentions some editing had to occur because Paul initially found himself saddled up with no less than three separate ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ audiobook segments. Which, while admirable, may be a little much to include in a 90 minute radio broadcast. And says a lot about Paul as a music appreciator, if I may say so myself. But nonetheless, we soldiered on, and by the miracle of chance managed to accrue a playlist that canvassed obscure 70s funk, drum’n'bass, ambient/drone, acoustic, italian soft porn soundtrack, blog-heavy electro, brazilian minimal, french synth pop, 60s breakbeat, british indie, post-punk and Hendrix. Yeah, he doesn’t need a genre, he’s just Hendrix. He was also Paul’s. The crowd-pleaser. The full tracklist is below, along with MP3s to a few of the songs. Enjoy. And don’t tell the RIAA.

1. Eeeeaaoowww – Freeform Five (Luke)
2. Cosmic Dancer – T. Rex (Paul)
3. Bang Bang (Yuksek Remix) – Naive New Beaters (Luke)
4. Kick – White Rose Movement (Luke)
5. Self-Portrait With Electric Brain – Stereolab (Paul)
6. My Dick – Mickey Avalon (Luke)
7. Falmer – Nathan Fake (Luke)
8. Our Way To Tell – Yo La Tengo (Paul)
9. See and Don’t See – Marie “Queenie” Lyons (Paul)
10. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – High Contrast (Luke)
11. Look Around – Sergio Mendes and the Brasil ‘66 (Paul)
12. Acrostico – Gui Boratto (Luke)
13. The Build Up (feat. Feist and Leslie) – Kings of Convenience (Paul)
14. Tristesse/Joie – Yelle (Luke)
15. The Message – Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab (Paul)
16. Sweet Virginia – Gomez (Luke)
17. Holy Thursday – David Axelrod (Paul)
18. Crosstown Traffic – The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Paul)

We’ll be back again next week from 3-430 pm AEST on Melbourne’s 90.7 FM. We’d tell you to listen online, but the station can barely afford to keep broadcasting in stereo, so that’s not really on the cards right now…

/Luke