This Page Is Still Barely Alive But There Are Better Places To Go

Hello, dear person trying to find me and/or my writing stuff.

This page is still sort-of alive, sure, but if you’re after words written by me there are better places to go. For example:

Andrew P Street’s Patreon page, where you can read all my regular rants about Australian politics two or three times a week! (And you can subscribe of course, that’d be lovely and much appreciated, but also a lot of it is free to read)

Andrew P Street on Facebook, which is updated pretty much daily!

Andrew P Street on Twitter, which is pretty sweary and again, very Australian-politics focussed but also has lots of unnecessary jokes in it!

Andrew P Street’s Authory page, which collects the various things I do for loads and loads and loads of different sites and magazines and newspapers and things, because there is a lot and it would be annoying to compile them physically because I am very disorganised!

Or you can get me through here. But those are likely to be more immediately useful.

You look great, by the way. That shirt really suits you.

Cheers,

APS

Better Places To Keep Across What’s Going On

Hello, people of the internet. Hopefully you’ve not been waiting too long for this. It’s been a while.

But! Rather than wait for infrequent updates here, you can keep up to date with Things What APS Is Writing And Doing at The Facebook and The Twitter, and you can subscribe to regular pieces from me at Patreon – as well as at GOAT, where I am currently Senior Writer.

Also, I’m collating all my published stuff at Authory, if you wish to scroll through freakin’ loads of things there.

And hey, hope you’re well. You look great.

Newcastle Writers Festival! A New Home City! And Other Stuff!

Dear The Internet,

So anyway, we live in Adelaide now. More accurately, I’ve lived here for a few weeks after abandoning Sydney and writing scathing pieces about why m’family made the leap south-west (such as this one and also this one), and while much of the last little while has involved either unpacking boxes or ineptly building kit furniture, it’s all pretty lovely.

Look, it’s a classic for a reason.

I am, however, popping back presently to NSW in order to appear at the Newcastle Writers Festival to talk about m’book The Long and Winding Way to The Top: Fifty (Or So) Songs That Made Australia on Saturday 7 April: all the details are here. And if you’e not going to be there but you’d like a (signed and personalised) copy of the thing, you totally can get one – I’ll even mail it to you! Using the post!

And I’m writing this from the airport as I zip down to Hobart to, ahem, make some music with the Majestic Horses, the band of which I am a third along with Kate “her out of the Holy Soul” Wilson and Kellie “she from Screamfeeder” Lloyd. I am, as that makes clear, the minor third.

And there’s a bit of other news to announce but… y’know what? I’ll get to that in a bit. But in the meantime, if you don’t already subscribe to m’Patreon column or follow me on Twitter or Facebook you… um, can. You know, if you fancy it.

Anyway, must pop over to that plane and get ready to play me some bass. Will update again, honest.

Yours ever,

APS

What I’m doing on Patreon! Long and Winding Way To The Top stuff! Things what are happening generally!

Dear the Internet,

We did it, humanity! We made it to 2018! Looked pretty iffy for a while there, but we got there in the end. Good on us!

This is a bit of an update just in case anyone’s popping by this site wondering what the actual hell I’m up to, which is a fair question.

Short version: still writing a lot for for loads of places, including getting sciency at Cosmos Magazine, being snide about Australian property at Domain, talking dad stuff at Direct Advice for Dads, ranting about music in The Australian and doing all sorts of other bits and pieces. You’re very welcome to follow me on Twitter and Facebook in order to be occasionally prodded about whatever stuff has been published that might pique your interest.

But right now the big stuff is as follows:

THRICE-WEEKLY LEFTY SCREEDS ON PATREON!

Three times a week I do a little rant about whatever eye-catching stuff is going on in politics, much as I did with my old View from the Street column in the Sydney Morning Herald but, typically, with rather more swearing and gifs of Spider-man.

If you’d like to try before you buy you can read almost everything that’s been written so far FOR FREE! at my Patreon page, since they’re available to everyone after a week. But if you’d rather not wait seven days for my hot takes on whatever dumbarsery has just happened in Canberra then you can subscribe and get it right to your inbox the second I publish – and it will cost you a mere $3 per month! (That’s US, since it’s an American site. So… $3.26, at the current rates? Man, that’s still stupidly cheap).

Come embrace the terrifying subscriber-led future of tomorrow’s journalism – today!

THE LONG AND WINDING WAY TO THE TOP!

Look, if you’d had a book launch where Jimmy Barnes cuddled your one year old son, you’d shamelessly post photos of it too.

My third book The Long and Winding Way to the Top: Fifty (Or So) Songs that Made Australia is getting very nice reviews and being totally buyable at shops, including Big W which is weird, and through people like Booktopia. And, of course, the indie bookstores that are the nation’s literary lifeblood.

If you’re interested in knowing what the actual hell it’s about, Rolling Stone have a nice thing about it, and the Age/SMH published an edited excerpt of some chapters. Oh, and here’s a Spotify playlist of lots of the things in it. And if you missed my appearance on Conversations on ABC radio discussing it with the genuinely magnificent Richard Fidler, then you can listen to it right now!

And, of course, you can buy a signed and personalised copy directly from me right here. It’s the perfect gift for that person for whom you can’t think of anything else to get!

And while everyone’s going on about Australia/Invasion Day in increasingly strident tones, it’s a nice reminder that Australian music is one thing about which we can all be unambiguously proud. Goddamn, we have some amazing artists – and fifty (or so) of them get celebrated in m’book.

AND THERE’S A NEW THING COMNG!

…which I will let you know about shortly, honestly. God, this is already shaping up to be a frantic year.

It’s nice to have you around, you know. Thanks for being there: I literally couldn’t do a damn thing without you.

Yours ever,

APS

Get yer signed copies of The Long and Winding Way to the Top RIGHT HERE!

Actual picture of the internet being the future of online shopping for my book.

Dear the Internet,

Short version: you can buy a signed’n’personalised copy of the forthcoming book RIGHT HERE!

Longer, APSier version: we all have people for whom we are obliged to buy an Xmas present yet no appropriate gift idea springs to mind. Fortunately this year THAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED because absolutely everyone – EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD THAT IS AUSTRALIA – will definitely not hate a copy of The Long and Winding Way To The Top: 50 (Or So) Songs That Made Australia!

It’s out in stores on November 22 and has chapters on all the songs your dad/mum/auntie/uncle/cousin/sibling/work colleague/neighbour/dog walker/copy editor loves! But why not go a step further and give them a signed and personalised copy?

Yes, thank to the wonder of ecommerce you can order a copy of the book from me and I will sign it, personalise it if you want, and then mail it to you, using nature’s The Post! Just whack the message/name of the person you want it made out to in the notes section at checkout and boom, done!

Books will be posted out after publication, and I’m going to cut off Xmas mailout at Dec 14 just because I don’t want to promise arrival for Xmas if I can’t deliver. Postage is Express Post for both speed and trackability.

Or, naturally, you can buy it in a shop and then chase me down in the street or a café or something and I’ll sign it for you with enthusiasm, unless I’m trying to feed m’son at the time because that’s a job that requires serious concentration.

And just finally: I’m so excited this is almost out. I’m pretty damn chuffed with this book and I think you’ll probably like it too. As will whoever you give it to: GUARANTEED!*

Yours ever,

APS

*Not remotely a guarantee.

Say, have you missed my View from the Street column? Then MISS IT NO MORE!

Dear the Internet,

As you’ve probably noticed with the imminent release of The Long and Winding Way To The Top: 50 (Or So) Songs That Made Australiawhich is on shelves in mere weeks! – I’ve been writing a lot more about music of late – and also, somewhat gratifyingly, science (or more accurately SCIENCE!).

However, there’s still a part of my heart which is forever obsessed with Australian politics and after attempts to keep my snarky, lefty View from the Street column as part of the regular column-mix at Fairfax failed during their rationalisations earlier this year, I figured it was the end of it.

Except that I kept getting emails and Facebook messages from readers asking what was going on, which made me think that maybe I wasn’t the only person who missed it. And then when I idly suggested that I start doing columns again as a subscriber-thing on Patreon the response was overwhelmingly positive.

And it’ll only cost THIS MANY MONEYS!

So: last Friday I launched my new twice-a-week politics column, for which folks can subscribe for $3 a month, and the first one went up on Monday. And oh, it felt SO GOOD TO BE WRITING IT AGAIN.

So if you were a fan of V from the S, or the 10 Things column in the Vine that preceded it approximately a million years ago, then you can get it straight to your inbox or browser window simply by joining up here.

I’ve no idea whether this is the brave new crowdfunded future of journalism or a deluded ego trip as barking as a conspiracy theorist YouTube channel, but heck: it’s an excuse to look at the many, many, many wildly silly things happening in politics at the moment.

The posts will be publicly available after a week at the Patreon page, so if you’re reading this in at least six days time you should be able to see what happened back… um, now?

So if you’ve missed my snark, or just think that maybe politics could stand to be a bit kinder and smarter than the current cavalcade of up-fuckery, then come join the new thing. There’s some very nice people there.

Yours ever,

APS

 

 

 

Quick primer on what could happen this afternoon with the High Court

Dear the Internet,

So, the Citizenship Seven’s fate will be announced in a barely any time at all – at around 2.30pm, specifically – and it’s important to know what’s at stake here.

Less bloody than the likely outcome

First up, there’s the least-likely possibility in that everyone is found to be totes safe. Then the three Coalition MPS – deputy PM Barnaby Joyce and senators Matt Canavan and Fiona Nash – breathe a massive sigh of relief, One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts smugly declares that he would have formed his own parliament anyway, NXT’s Nick Xenophon shrugs and keeps packing to move back to SA, and Greens senators Larissa Waters and Scott Ludlum look foolish for resigning on principle but could theoretically return to parliament (which Waters would do and Ludlum seemingly would rather not).

So realistically this only affects the fate of four MPs: Joyce, Waters, Canavan and Roberts.

Roberts is easiest to surmise: he’s probably toast. His laughably inept attempts to “renounce” his UK citizenship via means other than the very clear and well-established process are unlikely to be read as being sufficient to the requirements of the Constitution, since “yelling I RENOUNCE THEE! to an obviously wrong email” isn’t one of the methods covered.

It’s the other three which are most interesting because they have the potential to be massive headaches for the government.

Let’s assume they’re all deemed ineligible. Then what?

First up, the government becomes a minority one: without Joyce they don’t have a majority in their own right in the Lower House. Depending on who is in the chamber, this means the government could have its own legislation thwarted, assuming the crossbench are up for a fight. Joyce will have to face a bruising by election which he will probably win, even with the current scandals surrounding his personal life, and things will go back to normal.

It’s the senators which are the big problem for the Coalition because they’re from Queensland: the state which doesn’t have Liberal and National MPs but one big mushed-up combination of both labelled LNP.

In practice what this means is that MPs and senators are all part of the one party, but in Canberra they either join the Liberal or National party room because they’re really not as close to each other as you’d think. And what happens on the Queensland senate ballot paper is that the LNP executive choose (for example) a Liberal at #1, a National at #2, a Liberal at #3, a National at #4, and so on down the list.

If Nationals Canavan and Nash are deemed ineligible, they’ll be replaced by the next person on the ballot. Except the person after each of them isn’t a National: it’s a Liberal.

That means that the Liberals suddenly gain two senators while the Nationals lose them – and both had frontbench positions, no less.  And this puts the barely-stable balance between the parties wildly out of whack.

The Nationals will demand that they be given frontbench representation. The Liberals will look at which Nationals are there that don’t already have a ministry – George Christensen, for example – and say “…um, how do you see that happening, exactly?”

So the government will have a choice: elevate people who don’t even have the incandescent talent and brilliance of Matt “My Mum Did It” Canavan to the front bench, or risk splitting the already-unstable Queensland LNP alliance. You know, the one already rocked by Attorney General George Brandis described them as “very, very mediocre” when he didn’t realise his mic was on.

In any case, the results are nigh. Get the popcorn ready!

Yours ever,

APS

PS: Want this sort of thing in your inbox a couple of times a week? Check out my brand new Patreon thing!

 

 

The new book has a cover and a title and a release date and a playlist!

Dear the Internet,

As promised, the third book is done. DONE!

It’s called The Long and Winding Way To The Top: 50 (or so) Songs That Made Australia, it’s out November 28 through Allen & Unwin, and it’s the perfect Xmas present for literally everyone in your life for whom you can’t think of something better to buy.

And to get your appetite whet, most of the songs mentioned in the book are in this here Spotify playlist – most get a full chapter, some just get referenced in some detail and a few aren’t on Spotify, annoyingly enough – which should bring you no end of joy. Aside from the genuinely awful songs on it, and there are a few.

I’m really proud of it, and it contains at least one really solid joke about wedge tailed eagles. How many other books on Australian music can say the same?

And if it seems like a wild left-turn from the previous books, there’s a similar spirit in there. These are horribly divided and aggressive times, and I think there’s value in pausing every so often and reflecting on things we can be proud of as Australians – and nothing does that for me like Australian music.

I say this in the book, but if you want to know what Australia was like at any point in history, you could do worse than to look at the records that were being made at the time. So this is something of a cultural history of the last 60-something years, told in a typically rambling and unnecessarily footnote-heavy way*.

I’ll link to pre-orders and any upcoming launch events as things fall into place, but be assured: it’s definitely a real thing and it’ll be on shelves TERRIFYINGLY SOON.

Yours ever,

APS

*Yes, there are SO MANY FOOTNOTES. I think there are as many in this as were in the first two books combined. My next book will be NOTHING BUT FOOTNOTES.

My final moments with Cassini, via the Guardian

Dear the Internet,

So, I was one of the 30 people selected to be present at the CSIRO/NASA-run Canberra Deep Space Communications Centre for the final moments of the Cassini probe last Friday (15 September) before it plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn. And it was one of the most emotional nights of my life.

I wrote about it before on this very blog, but I also wrote this piece for the Guardian, entitled Tracing Cassini’s fiery death was like watching a heart monitor flatline, which was written immediately after negotiating my white-knuckled way down the hillside from the CDSCC site in Tidbinbilla after multiple warnings from staff about the propensity of local kangaroos to hurl themselves at passing cars.

One thing that I’d like to highlight was this bit:

“Half an hour before the signal was due to vanish, the skies above the complex cleared and everyone trooped outside to where the DSS43 was pointed at Saturn, which looked like an unusually bright star in the western sky. By this point, the data of the final transmission had passed the orbit of Jupiter and was heading towards that of Mars.”

And here’s a pic I took of that moment:

It was an amazing, once in a lifetime experience, and a much-needed reminder that we’re really pretty amazing when we work together on problems together, we humans.

Yours ever,

APS

 

New article: Marriage Equality – a History of Avoidance

“This festival of dumbarsery began in 2004 when the government of John Howard decided to change the wording of the 1961 Marriage Act because it didn’t specify that the people being married could not be of the same gender. A line was added to make marriage “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life”. And thus was an entirely avoidable political problem created.”

Even as you tick “yes” and send your voluntary survey ballot paper in THE VERY DAY you receive it, thanks, it’s important to remember the completely unnecessary bullshit that has brought us to this ugly point in Australian cultural and political history – and, importantly, the people who lied and keep lying to you about it.

That’s my new article at Rolling Stone Australia, Marriage Equality: A History of Avoidance.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: As anyone who listens to my’n’Dom Knight’s podcast The Double Disillusionists (available at Omny, or subscribe on iTunes) would be aware, the constant barrage of homophobic No arguments does a lot to send the message to LGBTIQ folks, especially young people, that they’re not welcome and not valued.

Therefore, I’m instituting a zero tolerance policy on my social media and this site: if you have a problem with marriage equality, you’re very welcome to rant about it somewhere else because I’m just going to delete anything hateful that’s submitted.

I don’t imagine that the sort of people wanting to check out an Andrew P Street website are huge No voters, to be honest, but in any case they don’t get to use my platform to spread their weird fears.

Yours ever,

APS