At the end of last year, as many of you know, I went to Malaysia.  Malaysia is very different from New Zealand. You can buy Milo in a can and it’s bloody good!  It’s very very hot all the time, there are mosquitos that can allegedly kill you.  It rains every afternoon at 4:30pm.  Anyway I had a series of fabulous adventures and am now back safe and sound in New Zealand, sitting about the fire telling tales of The Land where Winter Never Comes.

On my journey to there and back again, I met lovely people and made friends I will never forget.  I played a gig or two or three.  I read a lot of books, spent a lot of time on the train, ate a lot of new foods, wrote a lot of new songs.  I threw a magic ring into a volcano and defeated a dark lord.

THE VELVET ACES

I met Moe through Twitter when I’d been in Malaysia a little while.

He was looking for a guitarist and I was looking for a band, so after texts and tweets we organised an In Real Life meeting at Starbucks.  Soon there were jams and auditions and hanging-outs and shisha and The Velvet Aces began to take shape.

And like all bands, the band involved not just the people who happened to play the musical instruments in it but a group of friends and supporters and hangers on who all made up the musical family that had formed around Moe the nucleolus.

TRANSIT OF VENUS

And through playing in the Velvet Aces I became friends with Riz the other guitarist…

And he and I ended up jamming on some of the Transit of Venus music together with other friends Henry and Ash.

Unfortunately I had to leave before we got to play any gigs together, apart from that one time Riz and I hit an open mic night, which doesn’t really count does it? haha

But I just remembered ‘that one time’ I played some Transit of Venus songs with Ziam and crew at No Black Tie That was when I first got to Malaysia.

BINTANG

And then there was the time Moe and Sashi got me to play session guitar on their song Bintang, which was then nominated for an AVIMA award for the acoustic version. That was pretty cool I thought!

NEW ZEALAND

I arrived back home on Tuesday, started looking for jobs and flats and all those things one needs to survive.  I’m really glad to be back, though I’m going to miss a lot of things about Malaysia.  Even though I spent half my time in Malaysia missing so many things about New Zealand!  Mostly people are the things I miss, and I’m just so thankful that the internet exists and makes it easy to keep in touch with everyone!

(For those of you who want to know the gossip first-hand, long story short I moved to Malaysia for my boyfriends job and now I am back in New Zealand because our relationship hit some difficulties. But I’m ok, he’s ok, we’re still friends and all that so no need at all to look all worried and pat me on the head when you see me!)

Looking forward to getting back into the music thing here in New Zealand, got a couple of projects I’m working on, and a concept album I’m planning for release in conjunction with the june 2012 astronomical event – the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun.

Well, that’s about all I can be bothered writing right now. If I don’t update regularly enough feel free to nag me about it

Hope this finds you well,

<3 K xxx

p.s. check out The Velvet Aces http://www.myspace.com/thevelvetacesonline

The transits that occurred in the 1700′s were of great scientific interest at the time, as it had been proposed that by measuring these transits from different points on the earth and throwing a bunch of trigonometry at the parallax, the distance from the earth to the sun could be calculated accurately.

Guillaume Le Gentil was a french astronomer, one of many adventurers who set off around the world to observe the transit of Venus and take the necessary measurements. He began his journey heading towards a french colony in India, but on his way war broke out between England and France, eventuating in the English occupation of the colony he was headed for and the boat he was on doing a u-turn. He was at sea when the transit occurred and the rocking of the boat made it impossible for him to take the measurements with any degree of accuracy.

So Le Gentil decided since he had already come so far (I think he was somewhere in the southwest indian ocean) he may as well stay and observe the next Transit eight years later. He kept himself busy mapping the coast of Madagascar and decided he would go to the Philippines to for the next transit. However when he got to the Philippines he had trouble with the Spanish, so decided to return to the colony he had originally planned on watching the first transit from in India, Pondicherry. Which by this time was again occupied by the french. Arriving more than a year in advance he built himself an observatory in preparation for the big day.

On the eagerly anticipated day of the second transit, the day he’d been waiting for eight years for… the sky was overcast. Le Gentil couldn’t see a thing. He had failed.

But his bad luck didn’t end there, between dysentery and his ship being driven off course in a massive storm it took him two years to get home to paris. And when he did get home after an absence of eleven years in total, it was only to discover he’d been declared LEGALLY DEAD, his estate divided between his relatives, his wife married to someone else.

It’s a sad story, a play has been written about it, and an opera. And the other day I wrote lyrics about it from the perspective of his poor wife. Can you imagine what it must have been like for her? Husband decides not to stay out a few hours after work for drinks without saying anything, but to stay out 8 or so years after work without a word! Maybe he’d tried to write, I can’t imagine it being easy to get letters across the world in those days. But a letter than doesn’t reach you is as good as no letter at all.

I will give you some news about the band soon! I do actually have news, I’m just… waiting.

Talk soon <3 K xxx

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

p.s. Here are some pictures that I like, totally stole off Julians facebook because I forgot my camera and my phone was practically dead.

Left to Right: Julian Lee, Me, Moe Nasrul and Iz.

<3 K xxx

In the mean time… I’d love you to check out this music video, it’s a song called Hard by my friend Plum Green.  Go see her and her band play if you’re in NZ. She’s based in Auckland but seems to gig in Welly a bit too.

(If you can’t see the video below, click through to www.transitofvenusproject.com/554)

Here’s another little video blog with another song.  Take special note of the water splash bit between the two parts… I’ve been playing with iMovie *cheesy grin*

Sorry to Mr Anthony that I haven’t yet figured out how to flip the image from mirrored to normal so it doesn’t look like I’m left handed.  I’m recording in photobooth from built in webcam, if anyone can tell me how to flip it to record the normal way round, please send me blonde-proof step-by-step instructions. Cheers. I’m still new to this whole macbook thing!  It’s funny, when I had a desktop pc I refrained from acquiring any kind of wireless keyboard or mouse because I knew it’d frustrate me whenever I misplaced it.  Now with a laptop, I just misplace my whole computer!  (And lets not mention phones, keys, keycards, handbags, shoes, ukuleles or anything else that is small enough to be overlooked)

Apart from losing stuff and frantically running around looking for it I’ve been up to a few things.  Had some overseas friends come and stay with us so it was a good opportunity to do a few touristy bits and pieces.  Drove up to Langkawi for a few days, was nice to get out of the city.  Had some classic road trip moments, saw some beautiful scenery, accidentally drove over the bridge to Penang, got a flat tyre, had the best thosai ever in Ipoh (which I always want to spell iPoh), completely forgot where the town was we had dropped the tyre off to get fixed at, and then had a right fun time trying to guess when we went to pick it up on the way back haha!

Langkawi was nice. Touristy but fun.  I saw ‘Malaysias Largest Replica Guitar’, I saw a wild otter, I saw the scariest cable car ride I’d ever been on.  The cable car takes you up a very steep rise to the top of a hill (can I say mountain? Is it a mountain?) mountain and there are platforms with amazing views of the island and there is a tree top forest walk and of course a tree bottom forest walk (this is where you walk on the ground!).  We went on a mangrove boatride which I really enjoyed. Now where I grew up (Tauranga New Zealand) the mangroves don’t grow much past knee high. Maybe waist high if you’ve sunk knee deep in the mud next to them. So I was pretty much blown away by the size of the mangroves, and it was cool to see wild eagles because I’ve never seen eagles before.  There was a fish farm on this trip but I’m not going to talk about fish.

We caught the ferry from Langkawi to Satun which is in Thailand just across the border from Malaysia (I am in Malaysia just in case you haven’t been keeping up to date…). Oh and Langkawi is an island off the west side of the northern bit of the Malaysia peninsula.  We had hilarious times ordering food in Satun. I know enough Malay to order food but I know absolutely no Thai, I don’t even know the Thai word for rice.  The place we ate they didn’t speak english or malay, except the english words ‘chicken’ and ‘cow’. I don’t eat chickens or cows so I was trying to order plain rice and making a complete idiot of myself.  That’s the last time I cross the border without taking the appropriate phrase book or iPhone app hehe I’m such a dumbass sometimes

I got a text a couple of days ago from Moe saying that the song ‘Bintang’ that Moe and Loco had recorded together has been nominated for an AVIMA award.  (I played session guitar for the track so as well as being excited and proud on Moe and Locos behalf, I also thought it was a sign that I didn’t do a bad job of playing the guitar parts Moe wrote). You can hear the song here…

Well, it’s late, the vidblog is taking forever to upload and I’m being eaten alive by mosquitos so I’m gonna call it a night.

We’ll talk more soon! (And I’ll have some ToV news…)

<3 Kristie xxx

Luckily today I am not crammed against any apparent swine flu victims. Also, on today’s train there is thankfully not a mysterious drip falling from either the ceiling or the soaking wet very tall guy standing far too close for comfort.

In fact as the train goes on it begins to empty, and now there is room for me to fall over easier.

I can’t help but wonder if the people on the seats with their eyes closed are dozing while they wait for their stop, or have fallen asleep and missed their stop altogether.

Some people are reading magazines. Some newspapers. Some books. Some are playing with their blackberries, some have iPhones. Many wear earphones, one is wearing the anti-swine-flu facemask. I wonder if he is trying to avoid catching the flu, or already has it and is trying to keep it to himself. Maybe I should be wearing one too.

Oh here’s my stop!

If you can’t see the video above, please click through to http://transitofvenusproject.com/vidblog7/ to watch

Have been playing a bit of Amperzahn stuff on the acoustic lately, even video’d a song for you guys.  In my pyjamas. Because when you are a grown-up you can do whatever the hell you want.  The pyjamas pants with skulls on were a present from my sister Michelle (the other Michelle) to my boyfriend (this does make more sense if I told the whole story, but I won’t) and I STOLE them for myself muh huh huh haaa!  And rather irrelevantly, not only do Plum Green and I have THE SAME FAVOURITE MONKEY OMG (cotton top tamarin) but we also BOTH WEAR PYJAMA PANTS WITH SKULLS ON THEM OMG!  I think we might be twins separated at birth.

I am right now, this very second, at a place called ‘Meal Station’. Not in my pyjamas, I recorded the video yesterday actually.  Meal Station is a place I honestly really dislike eating.  They routinely stuff up my order, and not just in the didn’t understand what I ordered kind of way, but in the completely lost the order form I’d filled out kinda way, or they made my dinner then left it sitting in the kitchen for half an hour till it went cold and I started nagging for it kinda way. The only reason I come here is its the cheapest place I know that has wifi. I can get a nasi lemak and coffee for way less than the price of a coffee from star bucks. And added bonus I can spy on the fish people as they walk past and if I’m really lucky, maybe even have lunch with my own pet fish person Matt. So here I am, with my nasi lemak, my coffee ais and Mr Macbook, redownloading the bits I’d missed from Nosferatu so that I can finish putting it together for the special people on the mailing list. I’m sorry it’s taking so long. Really it’s not my fault. I blame the government. And aliens.

I made an amazing discovery this week. Sambal (some kind of malaysian food of the chilli paste variety) is very good on toast. Much better than vegimite, marmite, peanut butter, nuttella, jam, or any of the other toast topping I usually avoid like the plague.  For years I’ve been eating plain marge on my toast because I hate most spreads, but now my life is complete.

In other news about me and my life and such important things, I have band practice tonight with Moe’s band The Velvet Aces.  Gosh, Auckland peoples, do you remember how hard I was on people without transport or good gear who wanted to be in my band?  Now I’m one of those persons myself. With no car, and no amp, begging for rides and catching the train and stuff.

And and and Amperzahn. If you don’t know Amperzahn, check out www.myspace.com/amperzahn I think the site is still up.  I’m thinking re-union show next time I visit NZ. When sorting out junk on computer I’ve been watching the vids from our last reunion show and it looks like so much fun *squeee!*  If you run into Michelle Klaessens, Tory Staples, Joshua Smyth and or Josh’s stunt double Anthony Corban, tell them to start practicing the Amperzahn tunes!

Well, now my download is finished, I can get on with stuff yeah? Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Bye bye!