i like awkward moments

the littlest bird

2006-08-29T15:10:00.000+10:00

so, i went and saw the magnificent jolie holland at the spanish club the week before last.

BEST. SHOW. EVER.

she catapulted to the top of my favourite gigs with her sublime performance. and while i wasn't surprised to be completely transfixed by her languid torpidity, i was surprised by a few other things.

she is way smaller than i thought she'd be. tiny, even. barely five feet tall. yet combined with that is a certain awkward heaviness - she stumbles around on stage like it's a boat on a choppy ocean. moving between songs, or from piano to guitar or violin, it seems she has a different relationship with gravity to the rest of us. it pulls her down a little further, makes her a little more clumsy.
when she's playing though, she's the very definition of grace.

she is much prettier than any of the photos i've seen make her appear. her skin is ultra pale, her lips a darkened smudge. a broad face, rounded cheeks. hair that she hides behind. she swayed as she sang, her eyes flickering behind almost closed lids.

live she is much more rock than on the albums. she still slows time itself down somehow with that bluesy, rolling voice, but there's a toughness to her that i wasn't expecting. which is at odds with her oh-so-californian speaking voice, where every second word is 'like.' the dreamy, giggly stories she told at odds with her sharp and quick responses to the good-natured heckling from the crowd. her intonation when speaking is just as unique and varied as her singing. "sun frunciscoo". "i'll be meouving on".

i don't know if i can really capture it. so much about the way she sounds is hard to explain. her phrasing is constantly surprising - she could be from anywhere. and her whistle is an instrument in itself. like she has a bird trapped in her throat that she lets sing now and again.

if you've never heard her, check her out. my housemate squeeky finds her too mournful, but for me her music is vivid and truthful, sometimes heartbreakingly so. whether she's singing about new love or tortured love, whether she's hating herself or loving her ukelele, she cleaves right through skin to my bones and settles in. so eerie and compelling - just gorgeous, really.

i thoroughly recommend her and i'm sorry that it comes two weeks too late to actually see her. if it's any consolation the second show she did at the spanish club wasn't anywhere near as good as the first. but if anyone's in, or going to, the uk in the next month or so, i think that's where she's headed next.

my first meme

2006-08-25T10:27:00.000+10:00

mskp over on the path tagged me with this, which has served the twofold purpose of providing me with my very first meme (which i am, perhaps sadly, very excited by) and encouraging me to post, something i've been struggling to do for days. i have at least 17 drafts* i just can't get motivated to finish and was close to despair.

until, finally, the gift of a post that didn't require independent thought.

and, believe it or not, i was almost thwarted in my attempts to follow the simple directions (grab the nearest book, turn to page 123, find the 5th sentence and reproduce the next four) by the fact that the nearest book is to me at the moment is the age good food guide (i'm at work, ok?) and on page 123 there's an ad for lavazzo coffee which doesn't even have 5 sentences.

however, just a few more centimetres away is the smh good food guide, and from page 123 comes this rather enticing description of the fare at sailors thai canteen, in the rocks.

"It's heady with lime, spiked with chilli, decadently herbaceous and invariably fresh. The curries are always made from scratch: perhaps a light version drizzled over fried prawns with crisp rice-flour-battered herbs. Whole snapper may be deep-fried, and the salads are lively and interesting. If you're after some privacy, try to get one of the tiny tables out on the deck; and if you'd like the food hotter, just ask for a dish of chillies to light your fire."

phew. it's getting a little warm in here ..

* this is a lie. there are 2.

i am confused

2006-08-14T15:18:00.000+10:00

john howard's plans to make australia even more racist and hostile have been scrapped. rather than face a defeat in the senate, he's withdrawn the proposed legislation altogether.

now of course this is a good thing. petro georgiou, one of three backbenchers who followed their consciences (i know - who thought they had them?) and crossed the floor to oppose this legislation, described it as the most 'profoundly disturbing' he'd ever encountered.

what concerns me though is that this disunity within the Liberal party may actually end up working in howard's favour. shaun carney (the age) writes that by withdrawing the legislation before it went to the senate, the pm managed to block most of his frustration from the public view - that his authority was diminished, yes, but his 'strategic retreat' means that it happened out of sight.

so. the pm is frustrated? excellent. humiliated? even better. but the Liberal party also seems a little .. well, liberal. i mean, don't get me wrong - i'm glad that there are principled ministers within the party - even more so that they stopped this legislation from getting through. but i'm now worried that instead of remembering the content of the proposed legislation, its defeat will actually end up working for john howard by reassuring those liberal Liberals (and apparently they do exist) who have been feeling alienated by recent policy decisions, that they can still be represented by the party, and therefore Liberal support may actually increase.

or am i just being pessimistic?

the chicken that lived

2006-08-10T11:10:00.000+10:00

i have had a rather turbulent couple of weeks.

here are the stats in a vaguely chronological order that does not in any way represent importance.

the number of:
- deaths of people close to people close to me: 2
- days spent in bed due to shivering, aching illness: 4
- miff films missed due to illness: 6
- fred and ginger films watched in bed: 3*
- times someone stroked my forehead til i fell asleep: 2
- streets in which i noticed trees that are beginning to blossom: 4
- our chickens beheaded by a fox: 2
- stunning, sunshiny days that made me believe in spring: 3
- our chickens that turned up roosting on a bike in the neighbour's shed: 1

the last is my favourite statistic of all. my household was very traumatised by the loss of our beautiful black hens, scout and jem. i now know a lot about the habits of poultry predators. go on, ask me. apparently there are 15 foxes per square km in the CBD of melbourne. i've seen foxes slipping away into the undergrowth along the merri creek, or being swallowed up by mist in inner-city parks, but they always seemed surreal. so still, even in motion - an economy of movement coupled with an instinctive shyness and grace. i just wasn't convinced they were a threat until i witnessed the oddly bloodless aftermath of their visit.

boo, the ringleader of our feathered companions, had fled the coop (heh) the day before the massacre. there was no sign of a struggle and we were baffled. after we found scout and jem, we concluded that she'd been the first victim of the fox. but it seems she just went on an adventure. and now she's on holidays while we work out how to keep the foxes away. pissing around the perimeter of the run is supposed to help, as are clumps of human hair placed at strategic intervals. they hate the way we smell apparently.

off the topic entirely is this site i came across recently. a photographer cataloguing the moments he missed on camera, but captured with words instead. a strange idea that seemed a bit gimmicky at first, but as i read through the entries i found them more and more compelling.

so i checked out his photos as well and some of them are stunning.

* i LOVE fred and ginger films. everything about them appeals to me - the dancing, the elegance, ginger's wardrobe (oh, the dresses that arrive seconds after the body wearing them does) the opulent, art-deco inspired sets, the silly humour. even the flimsy, predictable plots work for me.
i am struggling though with my newly-acquired knowledge that ginger was a staunch republican and anti-communist whose mother 'named names' to HUAC.
i still love her but i feel betrayed.

the youth of today ...

2006-07-28T10:23:00.000+10:00

are disturbing.

the boy who hugged the prime minister with a screwdriver in his hand?

his friends decribed it as "so awesome". he said it was the most "famous thing" he's ever done. it was "one of the most exciting moments in his short life."

i hope it gets better for him.

but i fear for the future.

UPDATE: i should have done my homework - jess and davethescot covered this here and here.

in which marissa dies and i learn to play the piano

2006-07-26T12:49:00.000+10:00

so, marissa cooper is dead. yawn. it was actually funny. i mean, who the fuck wouldn't pull over if some madman started ramming their car at top speed on a dark and windy cliffside? and ryan staggering manfully down the road, marissa in his arms, while the car exploded behind them was just silly. flashback, flashback, cue dodgy version of 'hallelujah' and we're done. still, there was a moment there when i actually felt sad. manipulated and scornful, but still a little sad. also somewhat concerned by how readily i'd accepted that it would actually impact on my life if i didn't see this episode. i barely even watch the show (i swear it's true) but i wanted to see her die.

channel ten: this is a defining moment of television history.

me: oh, ok then. thanks. i'll be there.

in other news, after years of envying my musician friends i have finally started piano lessons. until now i assumed if i was meant to play music, i would been compelled to play when i was younger. and i wasn't. i took piano lessons very reluctantly when i was 10, and learnt oboe for another couple of years in my adolescence. my teacher was cross-eyed and i used to spend my lessons trying to work out if she was looking at me. i never practiced.

i love music though. passionately. i'm always attracted to musicians because i find what they do (making harmonious sounds! jamming!) so intensely fascinating.

so what i've realised is that i suffer from wanting to be better than average at everything i do. this could be motivating, yes? well, no. not when i refuse to continue with those pursuits i don't instantly excel at. i'm struggling against this now. i can't immediately play comptine d'un autre ete (from amelie) and i want to give up.

my teacher (who is also my friend and who probably anticipated this reaction) made me pay for an entire term in advance though. he also says i should be less ambitious for now.

oh well. at least i've nailed 'when the saints go marching in'.

when did i get old?

2006-07-17T15:05:00.000+10:00

it's happened.

i have become conservative. not a conservative of course - but i found myself in the odd and unfamiliar position of drifting around the fringes of a very decadent party on the weekend, arms folded and mouth set disapprovingly.

it was oyster's birthday. she turned 28, which is only just younger than me. she invited people for a dinner party, spontaneous performances and drinking games. squeeky spent the afternoon cooking. i was in an anti-social mood but generally happy. we built a fire in the back-yard and nursed oyster through 3 hours of pre-party anxiety.

oyster: no-one's coming. i feel sick.

me: of course people are coming.

oyster: i don't want anyone to come. oh god, i hope no-one comes. what am i going to say to them?

splat: you'll be fine. at least you're at home. you can always just go to your room

oyster: i just got another text from someone who says they're not coming. it's raining. maybe we should all just go out.

we made soothing noises. fast-forward a few hours and there were dozens of people there. it started off well. people eating. chatting. drinking. then things started to go a bit pear-shaped. it seemed everyone was suddenly a bit too drunk or a bit too high. the dog was shaking and biting people. there was dancing and lots of screaming. from where i stood it looked like everyone was determined to be the loudest and to be having the most fun. i was bored.

once i had the liberating realisation that if the party was happening anywhere else i wouldn't be there, i jumped on my bike and fled at about 2am. after a terribly exciting adventure involving broken glass and my front bicycle tire, i actually ended up having an amazing night watching these crazy serbian musicians spontaneously perform gypsy tunes in the back room of a bar in fitzroy. they were incredible. it was like being in a tony gatlif film - everyone was clapping, every conceivable object was turned into an instrument. and this gorgeous woman with the most amazing voice i've ever had the privilege to hear sang songs that suspended the entire room on the breath that linked one note to the next.

when i finally worked up the courage to go home last night i really wasn't sure what to expect. it was so much worse than i could have imagined. it was even worse than the time i was 15 and we had a party at my best friend's house while her parents were away and people threw up on her mother's bed. we had to spend 8 hours cleaning up after that party, including filing cigarette burns off the toilet and cutting them out of the carpet.

my house looked like the aftermath of a schoolies party. like a thousand drunken 16 years old had rampaged through it. at one stage they had the popcorn maker on top of the pantry and were dancing underneath it while it rained popcorn upon them. i know this because there were two massive plastic bags of popcorn on the kitchen floor and i just had to ask. every piece of crockery, every single cup, all the pots and pans were filthy. there were insects drowning in soapy, scummy water in the sinks. there were piles of food on the floor. the house stank of beer and cigarettes and unwashed bodies. and my housemates and a few stragglers were sprawled in disarray, looking like vampires, and lining up on what was probably the only clean plate in the house. the animals were starving and looked haggard.

and i found myself judging them. and i found that confronting.

when did i suddenly become this person who cares about rugs and furniture? why was i so outraged? have i made some un-noticed transition into some faux adulthood? does this mean i'm boring? and old? why should it matter to me that i didn't have or overhear one genuinely interesting conversation? was i just being anti-social? why did the words 'no respect' keep going through my head like i was some grey-haired old woman muttering to herself at the hooligans on the corner? is that my future?

these are the questions i'm asking myself today. they will probably keep me pondering for a few days yet.

still, i'm going home soon - and i hope they've cleaned up.

introducing ..

2006-07-07T11:24:00.001+10:00

i would like to devote this post to my housemates.

for my amusement (and possibly theirs if they ever read this blog), i will call them squeeky, oyster and splat.

oh what dear, mad women they are. squeeky writes, oyster dances and splat is a social worker.

this is a list of things, written as they occur to me.

splat never only sneezes once - it's at least twice, usually three times, in quick succession
squeeky talks to herself very loudly if she thinks no-one else is home
when we watched the final episode of buffy, oyster folded herself into a corner of the lounge and turned her head when anyone talked to her. she said later she was disassociating
i have more books than the three of them put together
squeeky has nightmares if she reads about war before she goes to sleep
splat is intimidatingly beautiful and likes dressing up
they all said they hated big brother at the start of the season, but they're there with me every sunday for the eviction show, and oyster has cried while watching it
oyster over-identifies with people she sees on tv
i once kissed squeeky in our kitchen and it was one of the nicest kisses i've ever experienced. we were both drunk
they have known each other for years. their belongings are littered with photos of each other and fragments of a shared history
i have known them all for just over a year. sometimes i feel left out
splat has a red dog. he has short legs under a long body. he's like a cross between a fox and a wombat
squeeky has allergies
they can all make me laugh so hard that muscles in my stomach tear (this hasn't actually happened yet)

this list will be continued ...

who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

2006-06-30T10:28:00.000+10:00

the ABC is, that's for sure.

they announced yesterday that they're no longer going to publish jonestown, the book about allan jones that chris masters has been working on for the last 4 years for ABC books.

it's an interesting decision (read controversial and cowardly) that is made more interesting by the fact that it apparently came about after a meeting of the ABC board (the same ABC board that critics have accused the howard government of stacking with the conservative right. ron brunton, janet albrechtsen and keith windschuttle? i mean, really ...)

the monthly had an excellent article by david salter in its may edition about alan jones. in what now seems a depressingly prescient fashion, salter discusses why no-one has yet published a book about jones, which is odd when you consider his public profile.
the reason? jones would sue.

chris masters was interviewed for salter's article, and was confident that his book would be out by the end of the year. the ABC claim their decision is a purely commercial one - that they don't believe jonestown is going to guarantee them a profit.
in other words, alan jones is going to sue them, and even if they won the case, it would cost them a fortune to go to court.

jones is undoubtedly influential. he's also opinionated, inflammatory and racist. he verges on rabid. his role in the cronulla riots (while not legally established) is patently clear. he vomits out venemous bile on air constantly, but never gets prosecuted for it. jonestown is a necessary book. i want to read it, i want it to be out in the public sphere, and i want a public broadcaster that isn't afraid of a legal battle here and there in the name of investigative journalism. i wouldn't mind an unbiased ABC board either. is that too much to ask?

hopefully one of the independents will publish jonestown.

UPDATE: Allen and Unwin say it will be out by the end of the year.

please stop smiling.

2006-06-28T14:45:00.000+10:00

i am experiencing an outrageously passionate hospitality anti-crush right now.*

there is a place near my work that i like to go for lunch. they make great baguettes with different types of soft cheese. they are always busy and until a couple of weeks ago, it was oh so easy to be anonymous. i used to slide in and out again without anyone paying any undue attention.

not that i'm anti-social. but if i just want to get food, then i just want to get food.

then this woman started working there. and fucked if i know why, but from the first moment i saw her she irritated me. when she asked me what i'd like, i wanted to scream. she smiled and my eye started twitching.

and it's just gotten worse. i have to steel myself to walk into the place. also, i think she knows. i'm basically a polite person but i can't always control my facial expressions. the more i dislike her, the friendlier she is to me; the friendlier she is to me, the more i dislike her.

i'm sure she's a lovely person. but i want her to go away and never serve me again. yet she's always there. and she always serves me. and she's always smiling. i think she tries to overcompensate for my surliness. i fear that our interactions will just keep increasing in their respective intensity until i'm huddled, rocking, in a corner and she's looming over me with a smile that has split her face in half.

i find that i think about how i can avoid her just as much, maybe even more, than i think about how i can run into the people i have real crushes on.

and that's a little disturbing really.

*this post inspired by the inimitable ms fits and her hospitality crush post. when i can be bothered teaching myself how to link i will link to it.

we were robbed

2006-06-27T14:14:00.000+10:00

yeah i know, everybody's saying it.
but it's true.
we lost on a penalty that wasn't.

and never have i seen a warehouseful of people simultaneously deflate before.

i really wanted to be at fed square, but got diverted by my friends who wanted a smaller and more personal experience. also, our hosts had built their own grandstand, and such efforts should be rewarded. still, i must admit that for the first time ever, i wanted to be one of the faceless many. i wanted to scream and sigh and clutch at my head with agonised grunts alongside thousands of other people.

maybe in 2010.

hitler was not a cat

2006-06-26T11:33:00.000+10:00

i was recently sent a link to a site dedicated to cats that look like hitler.

people have lots of time on their hands, i guess. and there's this one cat that looks alarmingly like hitler. it has a black patch on its head that gives it an almost perfectly straight-edged cap of hair, it gazes intently and directly out of luminous, yellowish eyes.
oh, and it has the moustache of course.
it's all about the mo.

meanwhile, i'm currently reading hannah arendt's "eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil". this book is a profoundly important piece of journalism, it is wonderfully written and it is deeply disturbing.

i find that when reading about the holocaust i have to pause a lot. force my skittish mind to make connections between the facts and what they mean in real terms. and my mind just can't comprehend so vast a number (six million jews and up to five million gypsies, homosexuals, soviet prisoners of war, mentally handicapped, political dissidents and other groups deemed 'undesirable' by the reich) in human terms.

eleven million? what does that look like?
it's more than half the population of australia. in fact, at the time of WWII, it was more than the population of australia.
that doesn't help.
ok - it was 115 times more people than watched the australia/greece soccer match at the MCG.
i still can't see it. and who can?

what i can understand, what helps me reconcile within myself the sheer extent of it, is the planning -- the framework that supported the concentration camps is absolutely shocking to me. the skeleton underneath the rotting meat was sturdy and robust and can be seen, pale and gleaming, in everything i've ever read.

there was a transport network.
there was an entire language built around the concept of communicating without naming. Sprachregelung = language rule = what in any other language would just be called a lie.
there were thousands of people who made the holocaust happen, not just hitler. not just one evil, insane man. a whole bureacracy supported him and supported the camps. some drew up train timetables, some issued receipts for belongings collected from jews as they entered the camps, others co-ordinated the distribution of food and of clothes to prisoners.
large companies set up factories in close proximity to the camps, in order to draw slave labour from within them.

this isn't news, i know. i'm not claiming to be an expert or a moral authority. but the holocaust is a part of our history that everyone needs to come to terms with in their own time, and it's something i feel obligated, as a human, to explore.
i want to interrogate the individual why and how. i'm not satisfied with explanations that start and stop at "hitler was an evil man, the SS were evil men."
this is about humanity and what all humans are capable of.
i want to give myself the best chance to recognise the next tyrant who comes with 'beautiful words' on his lips.

and ultimately i want to be brave enough to interrogate myself and to be honest enough to accept that i don't know what i would have done if i'd been alive then.

excuse me everybody

2006-06-22T16:18:00.000+10:00

i have a friend who apologises every time i see her for what she's wearing - sometimes even in advance.

me: so, i'll meet you at (insert cafe/pub) in 15?

her: i should warn you, i'm wearing a stripey top.

me: ok ...

her: it matches my underwear.

me: glad to hear it.

her: is that ok?

me: no problems here.

meanwhile, i started this because thought it would reinvigorate my writing (and the last fruitless hours of my working day) but now i'm here i feel apathetic and disillusioned.

ennui, anyone?