I'm a Hustler Baby

Listening to: Against Me! - New Wave. I know almost nothing about this band. I was fossicking around in Real Groovy one day and it was playing in the store, and I liked what I heard so I picked it up. Against Me! is american I think, and sound like a slightly punkier and thrashier version of The Living End, and australian punk/rockabilly band that apart from a couple of singles I have never had much time for. Its nice uncomplicated guitar rock, no samples or overdubs, lyrics you can understand that aren't complicated riddles or metaphors, and nice and noisy. Its not without melody and intelligence, although sometimes there is an evident strain to get a point across at the expense of some pretty clunky lyrical combinations. Most of the time though it is good yell along music that doesn't demand to be taken too deeply or seriously. This band sounds like it would be good live. I listened to it and a bit of AC/DC's 'Back in Black' on the way to and from netball last night and found it nice to get pscyhed up to.

I'm not sure when the 'Listening to' device became a sort of regular mini record review feature, but I like giving some context to the music I enjoy, in case any readers (vague and nebulous concept that readers are) are interested. For those newer readers, I almost always listen to music while I blog, and record what I was listening to at the time of writing at the top of the post. Sometimes its fleshed out like this, and almost serves as a vignette short before getting into the post proper (and is occasionally longer than the post itself). Other times it is simply a listing of album and artist. Almost never does the named music have any direct significance to the post itself. I started 'Listening to' not long after I started blogging, and there are now at least a couple of hundred entries.

This modelling thing

Those paying particular attention to writings here and on facebook over the summer just gone may remember cryptic refererences to such things as 'The Hustler Project', or 'The shiny metal monster'.

Sorry to disappoint, but it is plastic rather than metal, and is a model. I've posted about my hobby of model making before here, there and everywhere. Suffice to say I have been engaging in it on and off since the early 80's. I don't have as much time as I used to to devote to it, and it is now more of an acivity where much is accomplished in bursts of intense activity followed by lulls where nothing happens at all. A lull is just ending at the moment, mostly prompted by a competition I intend to participate in in September. The last project I finished was in February, and here it is. Its a Hustler (wiki history of the real thing here), which in 1:72 measures out at about 40cm long.

Here is the project at about half way, spray painted aluminium to provide a base for the finish that makes the plastic look like metal, which is easier said than done.
After a few days of adding different tints and shades of metallics, you arrive at something looking like this. Since the real things were made of varying kinds of metals, and weren't painted, there is a trick to getting the right look.

Once happy with the metals, decals provided the colouring in.

before final assembly involving all the delicate bits that would get knocked off if you added them earlier.

until finally you arrive at something looking like this, which in terms of how the final finish looks is one of the best looking of all my models.

Its seen as a childish hobby, and is much derided and ridiculed, but I think it can be a bit of an art form when it is done right. I think I am only in the last few years starting to get reasonably competent at it. There are much, much more skilled practitioners of the hobby than me out there.