Two videos for the edification of aspiring Australian Idols

I'm working on a long post about No Country for Old Men (the movie not the book) but I've mostly been drifting around YouTube looking for hours in a hypnotised sort of way at early footage of all my formative musical influences. So while I work on the serious post, here as filler is one of said influences plus some girls I've never seen before, singing one of my absolutely favourite songs.

Idol aspirants of 2008! Will you be able to achieve even the palest shadow of these two performances (one for boys and one for girls here) when the time comes to co-operate and sing in a group? If not, go home now and save yourselves the humiliation.

So here are Crosby Stills and Nash around 1970,



and the Wailin' Jennys in 2006.



Note also that all six of these people actually look like adults. Observe in particular the mesmerising beauty of Stephen Stills at 25, already a veteran of university, the army, and Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young, and despite the early-70s hair and sidies -- that's genius you see glowing there. No amount of product or styling can replace it.

The difference between writers and ex-footballers

When your daily email online Age arrives with the main headline 'Police Arrest Carey', you're fairly sure they mean Wayne not Peter.

Elvis to the left of me, His Bobness to the right ...

In the Central Market this morning as I shopped for strawberries, they were playing top-end-of-vintage Elvis all morning. And in the car on the way in I caught the whole segment on Andrew Ford's fabulous Music Show of Dylan tragics Imre Salusinszky (with whom I once worked, and a good colleague he was too) and the brilliant Amanda Rose from Flop Eared Mule, talking beautifully about Dylan's Sydney concerts, and his latest album, and all things Dylan in general.

I've almost stopped listening to music (and am still trying to work out what that's about -- something to do with it being too important to do in passing or as background; go figure), so I haven't heard Modern Times at all. But at the end of the segment, Ford played a track from it called 'Spirit on the Water'. Imre had earlier been cursing the Philip Morris Company for what Dylan's voice now sounds like at 66, but although much of what musicality he had in his youth is gone, I noticed something very odd: he is more precisely on pitch than he used to be, and though his notes are no longer resonant nor sustained, he drills a sweet hole straight through the middle of the pitch in a way that sounds new to me.

It was a lovely upbeat track, light years away from the venomous snarl of some of the really early songs -- I still can't listen to 'Positively 4th Street' without feeling a bit sick -- or the tragic edge of Blood on the Tracks, and I wound the window right down to give the crowds of pedestrians the full benefit as I crawled down through the almost-gridlocked Gouger Street.

Amanda reckons His Bobness will come back to Australia maybe one more time, when he's about 70, and will spend the concerts sitting on a stool, alone in a spotlight, with an acoustic guitar and nothing else. I hope she's right. I'll go to that one.

At the gates of Graceland

Sometimes I think the people who say that Elvis is still alive know something I don't. Even when he's been officially dead for 30 years.

Does he sound dead?

I don't think so.

Bored ...

Here are some names that are either no longer 'news' or never were 'news' in the first place, and that one wishes, however unrealistically, never to see in the 'news' again:

Paris Hilton
David Hicks
Angelina Jolie
"Baby Catherine"

I'm sure you can think of others.