Friday, March 30, 2007

Blogging makes you compulsive and weird.

I've only been doing this for a fortnight and already I'm writing about my own vomit. Bitch, please. Nobody wants to read that.

Except apparently some people already are. I had kind of hoped that I would have a few weeks to myself to hit my blogging stride: I shuddered to think that people would unwittingly come across this and think to themselves, "Hmm, clearly this person is rather incoherent. Perhaps she hasn't hit her blogging stride." But perhaps that was an unrealistic expectation.

Actually, I'm still rather ambivalent about writing what is basically a play-by-play account of my life for public consumption. Partly, it's because I think my life is not that interesting. I mean, I run a student paper; I don't excercise frequently enough; I rarely go to wild parties; and I watch far too much Law and Order:SVU. I'm overly fond of footnotes. I drink. In the office. Sometimes alone.

But I do find it so far to be a nice challenge to go through my day and notice everything extra hard, hoping to glean some material to shape into a post later on. It wakes you up a little bit. And here I'm reminded of a very nice artist/blogger named Lucas that I met at last year's TINA festival. After doing an artist-in-residence stint in the WA town of Kellerberrin, he decided to repeat the experiment in his home suburb of Petersham, doing community-based projects and talking to people who lived and worked there. I like that idea, and while I'm not so sure about the not-leaving-the-'burb-for-two-months part, the notion that there is beauty and art to be found in everyday life - even if everyday life is fairly banal - is appealing.

SO, without further agonisingly self-conscious ado, here is a list of things that have amused or otherwise pleased me today.

1) I crashed at Helen's house last night, after a French film and Greek food with my mum, and blearily took the train home this morning. The connection was seamless. The train was clean. And when I stepped off onto home soil at Moreland Station, I was serenaded in a deep Irish brogue by a gentleman standing in the middle of the footpath with his arms flung wide. I tried to keep a straight face as I passed him but dissolved into giggles instead. He grinned at me and sang another line. The song was 'You are always on my mind'.

2) I picked some flowers from the back garden and put them in a vase on the kitchen table with a candle and a wooden camel. The temporary tidiness of the kitchen was nice (as nice as it was fleeting), as was the red of the flowers against the pale yellow of the walls. The floor still needs mopping but I am choosing to ignore that.

3) A perfect, perfect hipster got on the tram today at the corner of Sydney and Glenlyon roads. He was tall and rangy, and impeccibly turned out, in skinny jeans, a stripey T-shirt, a grey vest, navy sea-shanty blazer, and silk scarf. He had sunglasses on over a very girlish bob and was clearly cultivating some insouciant facial hair. He was also carrying an old-fashioned suitcase, the type that snaps closed, and probably couldn't see because the weather was cloudy. But I don't think he could bear to be without his accessories. It was as though some glamourous water-bird had alighted upon the tram. He kept glancing back at me as if to determine whether I appreciated the effort he had gone to. I did, my friend. I did.

4) The weather. I've been wearing jumpers and scarves and stockings for the last three days and I love it. I tried to express my joy at the grey, windswept sky the other night to my friend Geoff and he just looked at me in disgust and said, "It's people like you..." He may have shaken his head. I don't care - I think summer is overrated and now that the air is finally crisp and clean it feels like things are starting afresh. What things, I don't know.

5) I am now represented on the Farrago website by an adorable dinosaur. Thanks, Jono! Email me with story ideas concerning "the arts, robots and dinosaurs". No really, that's what the website told me to tell you.

6) When I got home, the kitchen was flooded with light. No more making dinner in the darkness! Thanks for replacing the light-bulb, Georgia and Pat!

7) I had an idea about a brooch made out of Harma Beads, comprised of a Harma Bead milkshake, Harma Bead hamburger and Harma Bead french fries. I just realised that this idea was probably sub-consciously inspired my that McDonalds "we're healthy! we swear!" ad that is running where the people make said foodstuffs with their bodies but look like little Harma Beads. Oh well, I am still going to make that brooch.

8) Also, I have laid out the materials for and started making a necklace representing a dementedly amorphous monkey swinging off two ropes of plaited kimono fabric. If I have it finished by tomorrow I wear it into the city while shopping for bras. Because you always need to check how a new bra looks with an amorphous monkey necklace.

All in all? A thoroughly enjoyable day. And although everything stayed in my stomach, I still find the idea of a concept Abject Japanese Restaurant charming and funny instead of gross. That is because I am sick. And I am compulsive, and I am weird. And I am going to go make that necklace now.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Milk was a bad choice.

As I bit into a piece of squid tempura this evening, I had a momentary flashback to my last bad battered sea-food experience, referred to variously by my friends as "the time you ate those prawns", "the time you got really trashed" and "the time Paulina gave you that concussion". It was all three, but I think the honey prawns were the main contributing factor. God, that was spectacular for all the wrong reasons. Then, as I was heading to the party, I got a text message from Helen, saying, in relation to minor indignities suffered during the day, "don't try to drown your sorrows and end up vomiting prawns on some gorgeous guy".

So of course I just spent the last ten minutes hanging over the side of my bed, heaving into a waste paper bin in the darkness. When I turned on the light to go empty it out, I started laughing at the mass of undigested udon noodles at the bottom of the bin. It was Abject Noodle Soup!!





And I'm done.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Karaoke Dokey

I have a long and noble history of chickening out of karaoke, and tonight was no exception. But it was a rather lovely night all the same.

I spent most of the afternoon designing a poster for the Melbourne Model forum that the university is running, and since I am in no way a graphic designer, I needed a drink by the time it was done. So Gillian and Libby and I headed upstairs to an art opening and much free wine. Ah, gallery opening grog: so bad you need another glass. Then Gill and I headed off through the rain into the city and ate so much Japanese food we thoroughly regretted wearing cinch-waisted skirts.

Even though I see Gillian daily, it was nice to spend time with her as a friend - to sit around and eat tempura and chat about non-work-related things. She had to go off to a New Leaf meeting, and since the New Leaf crew were planning on heading down to Miss Libertine for Penny's birthdy afterwards, I figured I would wander the city streets and then go with them as a group. Don't ask me why I couldn't just go alone: I am a chicken. I told you that already.

Anyway, it started to piss down a bit so I took refuge under the arches at the GPO, and watched the rain against the hard city lights. I had my non-Pod with me, so I listened to PJ Harvey and shivered in the light breeze until the battery ran out. I don't know why, but sitting by myself for an hour watching a near-barren streetscape really cheered me up. I think partly it was the feeling of being vulnerable to the elements. It's somehow comforting (...and trite) to realise that whatever is going on in your life, the forces of nature are still at work. Partly it was that the air felt crisp for the first time in months, invigorating, not wilted from hanging around hot concrete all day. And partly it was being almost perfectly dressed for the weather. I don't know why, but that always puts me in a good mood.

Gillian turned up a little later without the rest of the bunch - they'd inexplicably bailed - and we headed towards Miss Lib's. We held a party there at the beginning of the year and because of that Jerry and Steve always greet me with a kiss on the cheek, which I like. The bartender was cute. And Penny, when we found her, was in such good spirits that I felt slightly irresponsible giving her a bottle of tequila. I gave it to her anyway.

And it was fun. I don't know whether it was because I was in a good mood to begin with, but I didn't feel like an impostor the way I usually do at a party where I don't really know anyone. Instead, there was a drunkenly anthropological excitement to watching everyone interact - trying to figure out who knew who how well, figuring out who belonged where by looking at their shoes, trying to predict who would sing what.

And oh, people sang. I have never heard so much good and bad (which is also good) karaoke in my life. I got a bit swept up at one point and leaned over to Gillian and said, "You know, I really feel like tonight is the night I'm going to lose my karaoke virginity!" But then I realised there was only seven minutes until the last tram, and so I piked.

Of course.

On the tram going home, I looked out the window as we were going past the Victoria Markets, and into a long, concrete corridor. Two men were batting around sheep carcasses suspended from the roof - as though the sheep were those metal balls that people have in office building, where the two balls on each end bump the row and set each other in motion. Through the drizzle I got a fleeting glimpse of a long row of carcasses swaying from their butcher hooks, and then the tram pulled away. This has nothing to do with karaoke. I just thought I'd mention it.

Monday, March 26, 2007

What does the sea want, anyway?

Whenever I get a new CD I tend to play it over and over again until I kill it, and then resucitate it a few months down the track. At the moment, I'm slowly leaching the life out of Sarah Blasko's What the sea wants, the sea shall have , an album that Paulina recently nominated for the Worst Album Title of the Year awards. It's a bit clunky, sure, but the title encapsulates something I find intriguing about Sarah Blasko, which is her ability to give lyrics that are fundamentally quite empty the impression great depth and vice versa. Consistantly, they border on the edge of trite, senitmental or glib, only to be pulled back from the brink by some fucking great arrangements and kick-arse vocals.

'Queen of Apology' is a case in point - the lyrics are fundamentally quite cutesy, but they're overlaid with a thumping military beat and some great cymbalic drumrolls* and very restrained strings. 'Hammer' is pretty awesome also, with that same semi-military beat (I appear to have a weakness of military drumlines, which is why I love Edith Piaf's 'L'homme de la motto' and Outkast's 'Pink and blue' in equal measure) and according to iTunes I've been listening to 'The Albatross' and 'Planet New Year' more than the rest of the album. I only downloaded iTunes recently and feel a bit ambivalent about the fact that it is already keeping dibs on me.

Anyway, even though I know I am going to be thoroughly sick of this album in approximately five listens' time, at the moment I am fairly enamoured of it. But as the previous two passages so cogently demonstrate, I'm not a music critic, so what the hell would I know.



*I tried to describe the sound of drums with lots of cymbals and dissonance to Jono recently as "cymbolic". He corrected me, but I really like the notion of symbolic drums and plan to start a concept band around it. We would all wear black turtlenecks and smoke pipes and OMFG!!!1! we could be called THE SIN TAX!! Would there just be a picture of some drums, though? Or would there be a signifying guitar, and a signified bass as well?

Oh my God, I am far too excited about this idea.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

An entire hand!

On an entirely unrelated note, there's a biscuit jar in the kitchen for the first time ever and I just managed to eat five Scotch Finger biscuits without even noticing. This is not good.

I don't wanna be a pop star tooooooo...

When Paulina and I were living together one of our rituals was to dash home from whatever it was we were doing to watch Neighbours. "Watching" Neighbours involved telling each other what our favourite storylines were, evaluating new characters, howling at particularly bad acting or dialogue, developing lame running gags about certain actors, criticising hair, costume and make-up decisions, deciding who should get together and who should break up, and predicting what would happen next. I once got a text message during a date which excitedly read, "I forgot to tell you, Kerry is Dylan's baby!"

So when Seb told me that his dad was directing a video clip for Ian 'Harold Bishop' Smith and needed extras, we were there.

After Paulina arrived an hour early to pick me up (thank you, daylight savings), we headed out for a coffee around the corner, and then onwards and upwards to the Darebin Performing Arts Centre. When we went in, we found ourselves surrounded by... many Christians. Maybe, in a nod to Harold's long association with the Salvos, they had recruited a church group to make up the bulk of the extras? Maybe the single would be a morally hard-core Christian rap song, in the vein of 'Baby's got Bible'!!! Except, it wasn't. We had just wandered in to some sort of post-church get-together. So we wandered out again and sat on the steps in the sun until Seb came over and pointed us to the door around the corner, where a hundred British backpackers were waiting impatiently for to be let near the man himself.

The actual filming, as anyone who has ever being involved with any sort of film production would know, was extremely boring. We sat around while a guy in a green shirt tried to keep us entertained with repeated references to his nipple and many rounds of "meet the staff". One of the staff turned out to be our lighting director friend Katie, who wasn't too impressed with being interrupted in the middle of what she was doing to wave to a theatre of mad keen soap fans.

Then! Go-go girls! Teenage go-go girls in microscopically short skirts, of course. We watched them finish their take, and then they were joined by Ian Smith in a black turtleneck, who put his arms around them in a grandfatherly way and cracked some mildly dirty jokes. The bald rugby-player type next to Paulina nearly started hyperventilating. It was surreal to watch the fans in their room lose their collective shit. Most of them had been trucked in from Neighbours tours and trivia nights, and Ian was quite gracious about the fact that he would probably be seeing half the audience at a pub tomorrow night.

Anyway, Paulina and I decided that if we were going to be there, we might as well make the most of it, and so we screeched and jumped around and pretended to sob when Ian came on stage and clutched each others arms. There were a few glittery signs going around for the 'audience', and we nicked one while people were being herded around and waved in above our heads madly. I mouthed "marry me Ian" at the camera. Paulina jumped up and down in the 'mosh pit' like a schoolgirl.

In between takes of the 'audience' going wild, there were shots of Ian dressed as four different women in the crowd, who the real Ian on stage would serenade. The go-go girls writhed around a spot where Ian's gigantic head would be superimposed. Then they disappeared and came back in Pulp Fiction wigs and show-girls feathers, and you could almost smell the collective pheremones rising from the lads behind us as they did some 'show-girl' dancing. We took great delight in impersonating the oaf on Paulina's right - oh yeah! Objectify those schoolgirls! Hey lay-deez, you're UNCOVERED MEAT!! And then we collapsed in a fit of giggles.

Eventually, though, the novelty wore off, and just as Paulina was getting a bit hungry and grumpy* and making motions to leave, Ian Smith came out in a final ludicrous sparkly Elton John number and thanked us all for coming. People wanting photos and autographs could line up to the right of stage. We headed off to the left and ducked over to say thanks and goodbye to Seb, who was standing with his dad, who was chatting to Ian. So we ended up having our photo taken anyway, and while I am NOT a photogenic person, I can honestly say that I looked better that Ian Smith in a teal sparkly jacket, a fright wig and a gold headband. So that, my friends, is truly something.

I'm not sure when 'I don't want to be a pop star too' is coming out, but keep an eye out. I'll be the one in the leopard print scarf whose face is contorted in spasms of delight, overacting my heart out, and putting it all into one last tacky Neighbours hurrah with my best friend.



*Paulina was being a bit short with her mother once, and her mum turned around to her and said, "Are you hungry Pusia? Because Polish people get cranky when they're hungry." And God bless her - it really is true.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Pomegranates!

So that's what type of tree it is! But how do you tell when a pomegranate is ripe?

Finally! Wardrobes and rain...

Ever since my student-cheapo clothes rail broke under the weight of too many op-shop coats, I've been trawling through various Salvos and St Vinnies outlets, looking for an inexpensive wardrobe to replace it. Since I don't drive, my mum offered to pick me up this morning and take me out for breakfast, and then chauffeur me around to various op-shops and discount furniture warehouses looking for the perfect charming, well-shelved, outwardly-compact-but-internally-spacious piece of furniture. You know, the Supermodel Tardis of wardrobes.

We started at the Salvos furniture warehouse in Abbotsford, and drifted somehow to Richmond, where we jumped from insanely chipped and cheap to insanely beautiful and totally out of my price range. I think my mum couldn't quite get her head around the way everything smelled at the Salvos - eau de mould, cat vomit and lilac air freshener - so she offered to chip in a bit for something a little less pre-unloved. Which was lovely of her, but then I have a lovely mum. After driving around suburbs I didn't even know existed, down many twisty side-streets and to many charming second-hand shops, we ended up not ten minutes from my house in a direct-to-public second-hand furniture place. Ironically, but very pleasingly, we found a not-too-expensive-at-all, lovely, large wardrobe with two hanging spaces and many shelves and the requisite nooks and crannies and adorable feet.

By that point we desperate needed coffee and tiramisu, so we sat in a cafe down the street and chatted while the rain poured down. As it turns out, we could have gotten everything done in Victoria St, but I don't see my mum as often as I'd like and it was nice to spend a day just cruising around, pretending we could afford antique Indian furniture and art deco dining tables and dashing around with not enough time left on the parking metre and gossiping about other family members. And listening to the rain. And eating tiramisu. So, in conclusion, hooray for wardrobes and rainy Saturdays!

Friday, March 23, 2007

The Story of an African Farm

Once upon a time I was taking the number 19 into the city. It was a few days after the new year and a few months into a new relationship. On New Years Eve, at midnight, a pillow fight broke out and I had my first New Years Kiss tm as feathers swirled around a hundred sweaty bodies crammed into an inner city bar. In a few days time I would be spending my birthday alone in an equally humid hotel room in Ho Chi Minh city, eating lychees and crying because I wouldn't be home again for another six weeks.

On the number 19 tram, headed into the city and away from my boyfriend's house for the last time in a good while, I was reeling with excitement and trepidation and clutching a copy of Ulysses I had borrowed, optimistically, for the journey. It was hot and I must have looked melancholy because the man sitting opposite me smiled and gestured to the fat tome on my lap and asked, "A little light reading then?"

Anyway, we started talking and I explained why I was carting James Joyce around, and he got very enthusiastic and pulled a book from his backpack and started talking about how he first read it when he was travelling and how books you discover in a new place take on a special kind of resonance. It was a book I'd never heard of, The Story of an African Farm; he told me it was the first novel published by a woman in South Africa. We chatted for another five stops or so, and then he made to get off the tram. And then he doubled back and gave me his book and told be that I should give it a go if I got bored of Ulysses, and wished me luck with my travels.

I've forgotten that man's name, unfortunately, but I haven't forgotten how much less scary he made it seem to be stepping out into the unknown. I haven't read The Story of an African Farm yet, but when I touched down in Ho Chi Minh and then in Kathmandu and Delhi, it was snuggled in my backpack next to Ulysses and my notebook and a half-empty bottle of sunscreen. It's followed me to two houses since I've got back, and of all the various bits and pieces that get lost during a move, it's the one I would most regret losing. Because on hot, hopeless, no-one-loves-me kind of nights when I'm lamenting the utter indifference of the world (funnily enough, these seem to happen far less frequently since I left my teens), I look over and see it sitting flush and mysterious in a stack of books, all of which have some magical, talismanic power - books I've begun to fetishise over the years through bath-time readings and on-the-porch readings and late night re-readings and carrying-around-the-worldings. And I feel far less alone knowing that a moment of incidental compassion can be captured in a hundred yellowing pages, and transported around as a reminder of the community inherent in the book-reading world.

So thanks, Kindly Stranger. I owe you one. If I ever bump into you again on the tram, let me buy you a beer. Or give you the book that I'm reading. It's the least I can do.


Monday, March 19, 2007

Oh, so lazy.

Spent a very relaxed Sunday by the beach, sketching, making notes, and eating scrambled eggs and grainy bread in the sunshine. Helen and I had a whole lot of painting planned, too, but true to form we both forgot our paints. So it looks like we'll be going back next week to finish what we nearly started.

Actually, it was nice to just hang out and watch DVDs, something I haven't done for a long time, and something I felt I could only justify because I'd spent the previous afternoon cleaning and defrosting the fridge in my pyjamas and some gumboots. The gumboots spent the previous weekend traversing the dusty fields of Golden Plains, and weren't too happy about my scrubbing fish sauce off the bottom shelf. Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

And speaking of the conflation of public and private spaces, I had a weird and confusing experience on public transport the other night*. I was sitting on the tram listening to Antony and the Johnsons and reading The Story of O** when a rather dashing boy got on. There was fleeting eye contact and then he went back to his newspaper and I went back to my ballads and my book and we stayed that way for the next 20 minutes and there were two things I found incredibly frustrating:

1) I couldn't figure out whether I genuinely fancied him or whether it was the combination of some awesome specs and a black leather jacket that got me - I've always loved that rockabilly-nerd look

and 2) much more pertinantly, I realised that we had created so many barriers between us that any sort of contact was pretty much impossible. If it had JUST been the books, there could have been a bit of back-and-forth about what are you reading oh isn't it good and the like. Just the headphones and it would have been harder, but do-able. But by insulating ourselves in alternate visual and aural realities, we'd managed to place ourselves in a position where we weren't sharing a public space any more - rather, we'd created two private spaces in close proximity to each other that were almost impossible for the other to broach.

Well, duh. And maybe that was the point. And maybe he didn't want to be chatted up by some crazy girl reading French erotica and swinging her feet from the tram seat like a child. But it kind of startled me to realise how easy it is to alienate yourself from the world around you, and for the rest of the trip I pulled out my earphones and put away the book and paid attention to everything that was happening on the tram.



*Again, this sounds like something that might potentially be dirty. It's not.
**Nuh, not going anywhere sexy either. I might as well join a fucking convent.

Friday, March 16, 2007

This is your captain, Jason Tessellation.

1. I got my hair cut today, and somehow that inspired me to start a blog.* I think it has something to do with the fresh-startiness of walking out of the salon into the sunlight and feeling the breeze on my shorn and shaven neck. I always forget that my customary curly bob starts out its life looking all sharp and stylised and symmetrical. My fringe, which by the end of its run hangs down into my eyes, gets razored back into something wee and indie. The curls get blown into a Miranda July bowl. No doubt looking uncharacteristically hipsterish has contributed somewhat to the blog-starting – we’ll see where it ends up when I go back to looking like my usual demented art-teacher self.

2. We have an American staying at our house at the moment, and he described hanging out at Federation Square yesterday in the 30-something-degree heat as “feeling like an ant under a magnifying glass”. That is exactly how it felt.

3. I have been a tad obsessed with this recently, and find myself singing it under my breath as I do the dishes. I think I am a little bit warped. "He'll save the children, but not the British children..."

4. I've spent the last week in full-on editing mode, so much so that just getting through 1-3 has felt slightly weird. I suppose one of the reasons to start a web log, as the kids call it, is to just get into the habit of writing every day, a habit which, like flossing and watching Neighbours, I embrace passionately but only periodically. Since I've fallen into the daily editing habit, my inner-writer and my inner-editor are at inner-war with each other. It makes writing light, off-the-cuff comments fiendishly difficult, as every word is scrutinised and revised and despised and terrorised... sorry, scrutinised and revised.

5. As you may have guessed, Jason Tessellation is not my real name.

6. Nor is it my 'blog name'.

7. Huh.

8. I had a whole big spiel here about privacy, MySpazz and the changing nature of media consumption and production, but I got off my high-horse and deleted it. The only relevent bit was that I don't know yet whether it's a violation of someone's privacy to write about them without their knowledge in a public forum. Do the rules change if you use a fake name? How much can people and their lives become public property if you only know them in a private realm?** I don't know whether I want to advertise the fact that I now have A BLOG!!!1! by going up to people and asking, "hey, would you feel violated if I wrote about you without your consent? How about violated in a good way?"

9. Jesus, I was going to try to avoid the big "I'm feeling a bit self-reflexive about starting a blog, so I think I'll write about how a blog is basically a self-reflexive organism anyway" bit. Too bad... I guess I'll just have to leave off here before I get any more convoluted and go and drink some gin.

10. And so it was.




*On thinking about it, there were a few other factors, such as the fact that I have blogged before and enjoyed it. I've been putting off returning to the blogosphere mainly because I feel as though I need to have something wildly interesting happening in my life to justify taking up other people's time and the surely-infinite metaphorical real estate of the internet. But I was lying awake at three this morning, listening to the rain, and I realised that it would be a pity if nothing interesting ever happened in my life and then where would I be and I need to make my own fun etc. I also realised that insomnia is a not uncommon occurance in my life and having something to do in the wee hours of a sleepless morn would be rather a good thing.

**This sounds a bit dirty and fantasy-novel-esque but I'm sure you see what I am getting at.