Tag: 1991

1991: Kickstarting the Bucket List

Don’t grow old – just evolve.

(last updated: 9 August 2025)

Purchased in the early 80’s, that amplifier (pic 3) is still sought after to this day.


And for me, coupled with InterDyn P2 speakers of the early 90’s, should be on any audiophile’s bucket list. Only moderate volume levels are required. Slow jams of the 90’s were off the chain.

Boyz II Men - Uhh Ahh (1991)

Those speakers were bought for a “modern” Denon PMA-1080R, which was a good amp back then, but the sound just wasn’t in the same league as the vintage amp that was brought back to life. The Acoustic Research speakers stored away were crackling – they probably should have just been repaired.

The CD player was a Technics SL-PS900. I read Hi-Fi magazines back then and it got an unbelievable review. Our neighbour from Brunei who ended up at HP after RMIT, Lawrance, was also into Hi-Fi gear. He followed on from Mikito with a bunch of other tertiary students from Asia. They had a Marantz amp and kept a lot of vinyl. I think his speakers were JBL but he wanted Infinity. He really got into Luther Vandross. Really nice guy too, and showed me Windows 3 before anyone else and even helped me install it, as well as scan for viruses. This made me a sort of go-to guy at school.

I kind of struggled with fashion back then, I didn’t really know what I liked and what I didn’t. As long as I wasn’t in Stussy pants: I wasn’t good enough at skateboarding for those! They would turn me into a try-hard! I had gray Stussy shorts though as they weren’t as obvious.

[ 1993 ]

Justin and Julian said they met Lawrance on the way back from Chapel Street on the tram and he gave them a whole heap of KFC for free. I’m pretty sure it was them, but not 100%. At one point I gave Lawrance our Paula Abdul Spellbound CD to keep – I think it was brought back from Chicago by my mum and no one really played it. But his whole apartment rocked it, though.

My mum had been in Chicago representing a gallery alongside Tom Spender at the CIAE Art Expo (1991?)

She just went into a record store and asked for their tips. She brought back Diamonds and Pearls with a special edition hologram cover that I didn’t see in Australia. I couldn’t believe the simplicity of the Cream beat.

Prince & The New Power Generation - Cream (Official Music Video)

So I made a mashup with Paula in 2022.

OAKK and Paula Abdul - Madeleine Rush (RaveDJ, 2022)

The chorus is only gifted at 2:15. Incredible build-up.

One of Justin’s friends Charles (not from my school) gave me his Billy Hyde drum pad around that time not long after I met him at his home. I couldn’t believe it. It was almost new and he was around my age. He said he never used it. I used it all the time.

People, especially friends and neighbours could really gift more to each other and often it does more for the giver than the receiver because it comes back in multiples. If you have something you don’t want or need, give it to someone who does. So simple, right?

So one of the guys at the apartment with a souped up bronze Honda Civic was installing a new radio or sub-woofer and I was trying to screw in a bolt behind the radio with my small hand. I couldn’t see what I was doing and at one point I said “Have you gotta light?” and everyone standing around screamed with laughter. It didn’t matter – I got the bolt in regardless. No smoko required. Incidentally, that Civic had “Mugen” emblazoned on it, but I don’t think it was a real Mugen Civic. Not sure.

That was at the back of the building where I often went to hit a tennis ball and the apartment block is still standing to this day.

src

A few years later the whole apartment had cleared: maybe 1995 but Lawrance is still around somewhere – if you can get his attention for a test drive or test listen.

Anyway, by the late 90’s I was driving a gray Hyundai Excel (with Desmond in the boot) and had learned to double-clutch and rev-match. A lot of fun. I took an Indian girl from uni once for a spin and she blurted out “ooh, I love the way you drive.” I thought it was only backies that got the girls.


So at one point, I was close to buying a new car, and located a strangely inexpensive but great condition 1991 Honda Civic CRX Si-R VTEC. It belonged to a relative of a mechanic I knew at the time and I saw it gleaming in his workshop one day. His cousin may have had trouble offloading it because it was a 2-seater but wanted to keep the radio from it. After a few tense calls, I took it for a test drive and it was lit, especially for the price.

At $28000 it was about $2000 more than the Nissan Bluebird (1995 LX,  series 2) that I could’ve sold – money which I didn’t have. Maybe he could’ve dropped the price without the radio?? Using its VIN, I checked from the side of the road to see if it had an accident history over the phone and it did not. It looked like this and had the rare glass roof option.

Flooring it, Jeremy who somehow found me that day, blurted out “it’s like an M3!” And it was. Being a 2-seater sports meant I couldn’t get any more help buying it. I was out of contact with Lawrance – he may have wanted it, or his friend. Mugen not needed.

So another “close but no cigar moment” and another one for the bucket!

While driving, Lawrance turned to me once and said “you know, I can beat any car in a straight line race.” It was difficult getting him to actually do that or explain, but he sort of showed me how to anticipate a green light, and said something like “you know, you’re not really allowed to do that.”
✓ 3 weeks ago

1993: Shorn Right!

Bad hair days be damned and seeking other solutions!

(updated: 16 February 2025)

[ Light Blue, issue 113, Feb 2024, p8-9 ]

I was never sure what to do about my hair when I arrived at Timbertop. I liked my hair but wanted something lower maintenance so decided to get a “blade 2.”

In my hike group, “Lozenge” (below middle, black t-shirt) took the photo above left and ended up getting a blade 1, I think a couple of weeks after me. It was insane.

But both our hair grew back by term 4 to the point where I was asked to get it cut.

I still can’t wrap my head around how Owen Wilson (above, yellow T-shirt) ended up in the group without anyone batting an eyelid. Or was it his twin/doppelganger?

Whatever we did, it worked and I picked up equal first in the photo competition (with Sight Regained t-shirt) at the end of Term 1.

Also, our hike group of 6 people picked up 3rd place at the hiking awards for the distance we traveled at the end of the year with our group leader (above, Dolphins cap) receiving a free jacket. In that group, to the best of my knowledge, I did most of the navigation, sometimes with Lozenge. I was the designated navigator, was I not? Yet roles weren’t really important. I had already been navigating at Mount Buller with the ski map for many years prior, so it wasn’t hard for me.

So “Dolph” chimed in sometimes yet maybe he was navigating too, but was less vocal about it. Same with “The Big Dipper” (wearing glasses.) We very rarely got lost or needed to do a triangulation. If lost, the idea is to just stop and retrace steps and with good visibility, that’s pretty easy. I think the key is to always be working with the map and land simultaneously as much as possible by merging the two within the mind. That leaves the others to crack jokes and think about water. I think we aimed for ~30kms per day in pre-planning but also took into account terrain to obtain a time target instead of distance one.

Maybe the secret to our “success” was that 4 of the guys were all from the same unit, so had more cohesion. I also knew Lozenge from before Timbertop. In the long-runs, I was usually coming in 18-25th place – I think the best from our group. Maybe Lozenge did better on a couple of occasions. None of us were laggards. The most difficult groups are ones where there is a super-fast person with a super-slow person. Also, we were good with setup and takedowns of camp – that can really be a time sink.

D’s group scored first place – they all got jackets and a girl’s group led by a Japanese girl came in second. I think that was the case.

Getting a blade 2 before anyone else was the tough thing to do and a lot of people were checking it out.

  • pic 2,3,4 – unit master and science teacher S.
  • pic 5,6 –  “Passover or Passout?” with M and FT, 5 April 1993. [pic 5 was also in the school magazine with a description]

M’s not technically Jewish and it was very gracious of him to attend. More could be said about the passover but I’d have to double check with a few others first.

Speaking of which, I met W at Timbertop and he lived near me and we actually hung out a few times in the subsequent years. I hope he’s doing well. The last time I saw him was in late 1999 when I encountered him at the end of Huntingfield Road by chance with PJ (I am pretty sure that that is what occurred.)

Looking back at my life, I’ve missed so many formal occasions, I can only see it as character-building and a means of differentiation – Rites of Passage or Rites of Destruction? Religion divides as much as it unifies in this day and age. And for some, a Jewish guy married to a gentile is not even seen as married at all and that the wife could/should convert. As such, I’m not doing too badly. It’s also impossible to convert to another religion – you’re just confused.

There’s no map to the promised land – for me at least. Does one swim upstream or downstream? Is there even a choice? And I met a religious guy in Israel that aimed to do away with all the mitzvot and just attain the wisdom behind their underlying sefirot – a different kind of observance – but even that knowledge has been corrupted I suspect. Some people think that this life is all about attaining rebirth in the World-To-Come. Beam me up, Scotty!

Anyway, so my haircut was also a rebellion from my younger years when I refused to even get a haircut.

[Tasmania – first plane trip away from Melbourne]

With the curls, random women would come up and tell me how much they loved my hair and I would say that I hated it – probably due to the compliments but I still didn’t want to get a cut: I thought it would hurt! Something like that attention then happened at school but due to the lack of hair.

Due to the attention, after the blade 2, and until it grew out a bit, I covered my head with a beanie and picked up the nickname “Champ” in the process. That was from big ‘G’ who had just tried it on and was with R at the time.

— pic 2,3 – Bluff Hut for unit campout

It was actually a really empowering nickname – I kind of had to live up to it. I’m not sure many girls used it. And there was another Champ there at the time who was Thai and that was his real name but I don’t think we ever spoke.

G and R both got really short haircuts some time later (when visible underneath their cowboy hats) and perhaps the nickname came about more from their admiration of the cut, than of me. G played drums too. I was relieved people weren’t calling me AIDS like some had 5 years prior – alongside a few calling me ‘Einstein’ such as J. Only G knew what AIDS stood for backwards. I heard him reveal it one night in the San(atorium) in passing conversation. Shocking stuff.

The Champion brand was unknown to Australia at the time and my mum brought it back from Chicago a couple of years earlier. The shop had said that it was the hottest brand at the time. K-Ci can be seen below wearing it on stage in New York in 1991 (vid here.)

In the 1980’s I used to listen to American Top 40 (Casey Kasem) on the radio, and so got a headstart on what was going to be coming down the pipe from the USA ahead of time. Here he is announcing Huey Lewis as #1 in October, 1986. But if you mentioned 80’s music in 1993, people would think something was seriously wrong with you.

“J” took the photo below with my camera and has since become a professional portrait photographer.

I ended up leaving Geelong Grammar as my plan was always to do the International Baccalaureate there, but it was shorn out of the syllabus.

What did I expect?

But I never ended up doing IB anyway due to poor French performance, and I did do VCE Media (1+2) in Year 10 which was new at the time. A few other people ended up at Wesley like PJ and a few girls. I had trouble sleeping in a roomful of people… those damn sleepwalkers – maybe that was it. But hey, I snored sometimes. So on many a night I was the last person to “depart” so I departed myself.

Going back to board – all aboard!

[ 1993 – waiting to get onboard the bus at Spencer Street station with M who I knew from my earlier Glamorgan stint whereby I came into the school already knowing good people. ]

[ 1988 –  arrive at school early enough and there’d be tons of guys on the tennis court playing an elimination game – a few girls but not many. Another chap W also went to the same school from down the street and he rode there too. ]

Quality of sleep is something I should discuss at a later point as I had nightmares for many years starting in the early-mid-2000s I think. But not really anymore. There were also dreams of euphoria, and then various combinations of the two as the mind-body complex healed and purified from the soul outward. Healed from what, though?

  1. Original sin?
  2. Nanotechnology infiltration with a biblical past?
  3. Individual or collective pain-body?
  4. Unfulfilled Jungian archetypes?
  5. Not resonating with past lives and the soul’s journey?

…with those perspectives being in response to a foreign yet innate self-regulating process contained within my perception. Opening up the hurt-locker for a spring clean.

In our unit in 1993, G was very apt at hitting the snooze button and he did it a lot, and he also ended up school captain a few years later.

[ G – far right checker shirt + red t-shirt, further up, behind wheelbarrow. “S” above with the broom who G really helped out and S picked up an endeavour award that year.]

These days I prefer to see myself as waking-up more than anything else, and creating my own version of “woke,” if it’s possible. The beauty of life is that any type of meaning can be attached to it, it seems, but for how long remains in question. But I am always happy to laugh at how seriously I take myself.


✓ 6 months ago

1992: Spellbound from take to mistake!

The body soon knows where the nose goes!

(updated: 16 February 2025)

Timbertop next year (early 90's - Sep + Feb)

* In the video above, I mention using my brother Luke’s stereo and bike accessories (tyre pump) after he left for boarding school.

That clip was shot in February ’92 and when he returned for term 1 holidays, I admitted to using his stereo and other stuff. It was just a casual conversation we had. Sharing is caring, right?

My mother was somewhat okay with me doing so, but only under certain conditions.

He also used some of my stuff in the following year. We ultimately shared our stuff… within reasonable limits under the constraints of the time.

Also, from 1989 onward we used to share a number of things including a single 8088 XT clone for school work and gaming. Luke had the computer in his room for a while (so I was in there a bit) until it was moved into the family room, and it was often a source for conflict or disagreement.

[ colorized ]

Who knows, maybe it caused my visual short-sightedness (I got glasses in 1994) and derailed my handwriting but I was handing in printed assignments at school before anyone else and topped the class consistently, except for Hebrew.

So in around 1990, my mum was kind enough to bring home a pair of Bauer rollerblades from the USA (around a decade after giving birth to me.)

Then by 1992, Bar Mitzvah = gifts = much unused clutter.

1 2 ..

At the end of that year, I broke my nose snowboarding in France and I had only just started out shredding

[Buller, 1992]

And before that, Jeremy had initially lent me his board – an early Burton.

That was a year or two earlier and the boots weren’t great – I think they were rentals, though.

 

So I didn’t find snowboarding easy, but it was fresh and fun. So I ended up with a bump, like so many others.

[ Courchevel, early 1993 ]

Like being in Luke’s room, maybe I shouldn’t have ever ventured onto that steep run. I think it was Face de Bellevarde (Val-d’Isère) the Olympic downhill run and it was so foggy that day that I never intended to board there. Also, I lost my way and ended up tumbling over some rocks on the the side of the run at the bottom section. It really hurt.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. Unless you’re nosy.

It was a week or two after the pics below.

1 2

So my grandfather once told me he broke his nose, I think during the war, and he just used his bare hands to snap it back into place. There were no doctors around. He laughed about it.

But for me, I didn’t think of that. When I told my mum a few days later she suggested seeing a doctor. But I didn’t want an operation, and if I could still breathe through it, and it looked okay, I’d be fine. Yet perhaps the doctor could’ve manually reset it like with Fred. That’s possible if done within a week of breakage – but they could also wreck it more. Interestingly, I recently learned that mouth-breathing is actually risky to dental health, as it disrupts the oral microbiome.

“France is not really herself unless she is in the front rank,” wrote de Gaulle at the start of his war memoirs The Call to Honor. Only the French ?!?

As with de Gaulle, Freddy too also fought in the French resistance, whereby some fighters helped him cross the Pyrenees on his escape to Barcelona from Toulouse where he learned Spanish. I don’t think he handled a gun and am not sure how long he was with the group, though. I think he said his nose was broken in a battle – not sure. So he left in January, 1944. His younger brother (Jacques,) sister (Lily) and mother (Manya) followed in July with the help of “passeurs.” It took them 4 days and nights to make the trip over the Pyrenees to rendezvous with Freddy in Spain (see below.)

As a child, Fred showed me once at Mount Buller how to pierce an egg and drink the contents through it, which the resistance fighters did. Must’ve worked. Interestingly, to this day (Nov 2024) my mother speaks French and Spanish – both very well, as did her father.

Anyway, prior to the ’92 trip, I had also skied in France in 85/86.

With ski instructor Lionel at Club Med, Tignes Val Claret, for a 2-star award… great teacher and person.

So I had two other risky falls that trip while skiing in early 1993.

On the first day, I took a minor fall but a single ski catapulted almost to the height of the chairlift and almost landed on my head. I didn’t see any of it, but that’s what I was told. Some time later, I took a fall and ended up sliding down a steep run (in Val Thorens?) with only one ski attached, but picking up speed.

People on the chair were shouting at me but I didn’t know what they were saying. I managed to break my slide by doing some kind of self-arrest with the poles. Later from the chair I saw I would’ve dropped and slammed really hard into a traverse track had I kept going, maybe over the edge of a cliff.

Around this time, Rikka’s father saw me fall at the bottom of Bull Run chair amongst the moguls, when he stood there and said “Nice Stack” in a French accent. At least he was honest.

I had taken big falls on race courses too, unwilling or unable to ride the big ruts when they emerged in the fog.

[ 1993 ? – Shakey Knees, Mount Buller ]

Yet, I had been skiing since I was two so how could I overcome the discontent?

Maybe the equipment was the problem. Why carry poles if they were never even planted? I wasn’t using poles while rollerblading. My uncle once suggested to wear weighted gloves as an experiment. But in the end, the ‘right’ technique was dictated by the ski shape – yet that wasn’t enabling me to become the endorphin machine I know was possible.

1994 05 05 Endorphinmachine

So a little over a decade later in 2002, I did an introductory ski instructor’s course at Mount Buller, but didn’t end up teaching. A good thing as ski schools have very clear ideas of what’s right and wrong regarding technique. Yet so did I. I have the certificate somewhere.

That year I had started to Heartcarve in New Zealand (Mt Ruapehu) on some of the earlier parabolic skis and basically never fell from then onward as a result of my quiet revolution in style.

[ Salt Lake City + Snowbird – March 2003 ]

So skiing then became a sport about endorphins for me rather than adrenaline and that became possible due to my rollerblading practice and analysing the planes of Heart-motion, which I ended up describing in an article in 2008.

[ diagram ~2003 | March 2008 ]

And people on the Newschoolers site wondered if I was serious or not.

There are actually 6 separate carving styles within these planes. This deconstruction and re-imagining of skiing occurred consciously as I thought about new ways to use the parabolic skis that began arriving in the late 90’s from Elan which I had yet to use. I wanted a way to abstract myself away from the micro-management of movement that can lead to rigid thinking and limit flow-states. As mentioned elsewhere, “if nothing else, free the left-hand,” yet “free the heart” would also be great.

So Heartcarving was enabled by an evolution in ski design.

[ 2007 Buller x 2 | 2008 Whistler ]

And by January 2013 I was fortunate enough to be able to head to Zermatt with a pair of custom skis that I designed in snoCAD-X, were built in France and then sent to me in Jerusalem.

[  2012 Chamonix (Idris) ]

Skis on roof [Jerusalem late 2012]

Just ask Pierre.

"I've never seen skis like that!" [Jan, 2013]

Because who wants to break a leg?

[ Aug, 2017 ]

Furthermore, upon returning I started buying inexpensive crystals from ebay to help continue with this shift to the heart in day-to-day life – well that’s what I believed or wanted.

Heart Rhythm Meditation was something I came across in 1999 – and to me it makes sense to be aware of the heart and lungs simultaneously – along with everything else going on. The idea is to get more exit from the mind and more presence into the body because the body is always present. That’s what St Germain spoke about also in 1999.

"Rhodizite is an amplification stone." #crystal #rhodizite

[July 2014]

Others have said that the heart chakra is the most important one because it keeps the others in balance.

And even though I haven’t skied since 2013, (as of 2024) I feel I am possibly 50 years ahead of my time. Time will tell. And those custom skis ended up warping anyway, so perhaps the delay can mean better materials to construct true super-skis.

To this day, I don’t see why the body can’t naturally restructure itself to its original blueprint. Perhaps it never will whilst under a Witch’s Spell.

AC/DC - Witch's Spell (Official Video)

The original blueprint – can carving take me there?
✓ 6 months ago

Huey Lewis and the News – Stuck with You (1986)

Huey Lewis & The News - Stuck With You


pics
en.picmix.com/stamp/wedding-couple-on-the-beach-sunshine3-1468238
fanart.tv/artist/2be6ae30-d220-4419-80da-2a46813ed872/lewis-huey-news-the/
✓ 5 years ago

UB40 – Kingston Town (1989)

UB40 - Kingston Town (HQ audio)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFIh-zdK6YW/
✓ 5 years ago

Jimi Hendrix – Voodoo Child (live, Maui, 1970)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (Live In Maui, 1970)


✓ 5 years ago

Music, Money, Madness . . . Jimi Hendrix In Maui (trailer)

Music, Money, Madness . . . Jimi Hendrix In Maui (Film Trailer)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFROkK-h5Oh/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CE-dTLxnhHg/
✓ 5 years ago