Friday, August 31, 2007

Out and about

There's a plastic bag full of delicious vegetables sitting in the fridge just waiting to be made into soup. I bought them on Tuesday. Soup has not eventuated.

For whatever reason I'm barely home at the moment, and I just want to make some fucking minestrone. It seems churlish, though, to complain, since it's been a pretty good week for being out and about. Jelly has chronicled her version of at her blog, and about two thirds of it overlaps with mine, which is what happens, I guess, when you work and socialise and drink together. I would like to state for the record that our trivia team, Editors and their Bitches, kicked some serious arse the other night, and I think its because as a working unit all of us have developed a kind of hive mind that we are able to tap into at any point. Thus am I able to retrieve information from Jelly's brain, and her from Seb, and so forth, without speaking a word.

It's also been a good week for alternative art/performance spaces, alternative art/performance spaces being I've been thinking about a lot recently. Wednesday night my friend Nicola was in a show at Albert's Basement, which is a temporary gallery/performance space set up in a sharehouse in Albert St. Tonight Seb and I went and ate saganaki pizza and saw this excellent production, the inaugural play of a newly-formed absurdist theatre company, in the carpark of the Collingwood commish. It's a great space, really deep, which allowed for a lot of broad physical comedy, fight scenes, choreographed dance, and the driving of a car through the middle of a scene. The play itself was adapted from Ubu Roi by our friend Paul (who is clearly moving up in the world) and rather pithy and surreal and I recommend that you see it. Cheapest bar in town, too.

Tomorrow is work - hooray etc. - but when I get home I might just make up some minestrone soup. Yeah, motherfucker. Of course, the irony is that a couple of months ago when I was feeling stifled by domesticity, nobody wanted to gallivant around launches, and now that there is something on every night all I want is soup and tea and novels. Yeah, irony. Someone should really write a song about that.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Wax on, wax off...

You know how little kids barely have eyebrows, just soft adorable fluff perched above their eyes? Yeah, that wasn't me. People always used to describe me as striking - "She's such a striking child!" Partly, it's true, that was the pale, pale skin, big eyes, skinny arms and legs, charmingly crooked teeth (now rigorously orthodox, thanks to years of braces), and masses of dark hair, but I've always suspected it was the dark, full brows framing my five-year-old eyes. You can hardly call a child "adorable" when they look like Groucho Marx.

Anyway, I was always self-conscious about my eyebrows, and the first time I had them waxed was a revelation. Suddenly there were two of them - two distinct eyebrows - each thick and sloping like a stroke of follicular calligraphy. I felt old-school glamourous, rather than Old World peasant girl. And ever since then, getting my eyebrows "done" has been a luxury, a very particular craving that I indulge when I want to feel slightly more elegant than usual.

Of course, it's a risky proposition, the eyebrows. Get it wrong - or get the wrong beautician - and you look startled for weeks. I'm looking slightly startled today because the new girl at my salon dumped a whole lot of wax above my eyebrows. What the hell? I thought it was universally acknowledged that you never waxed above the brow line. Startled and vaguely frowny, but if you run into me on the street, please come up and say high, as I am actually very friendly (and not strung out). Oh well. It's a step up from Groucho, and that's all that counts.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Awful quiet

I walked home from uni tonight, beery and full of crisps. I usually catch the tram after midnight, but I was in the mood for a walk. The way my life is at the moment, I only have a vague association with the days of the week. Today is Friday. I had forgotten that, and expected the streets to be empty. They weren't.

Apart from the usual fuckwits leaning out of their windows, yelling obscenities, and the guys loitering in side streets smoking and leering, it was pleasant. The air was cold and clean. Royal Parade is pretty at night, leafy and soft. I always mean to walk to uni, and inevitably run late, jumping whichever tram is closest and bursting into meetings five minutes overdue and looking fairly harassed. It was nice to just amble up to Sydney Rd, wandering past shops with the lights out and reading new graffiti illuminated by streetlights.

Towards the top of Sydney Rd, a couple of guys lurched up to me, a little tipsy, and one of them looked me in the eye and slurred, "Lookin' pretty tonight, baybeee!" And it took all my best efforts not to crack up. I've been having a fairly shitty time these last few weeks - hence the infrequency of posting, and the rambling, emo nature of what I have written - and have felt, for the most part, under some sort of figurative raincloud. I've had a few extravagant freak-outs, culminating in one holy fuck of a crygasm the other night, and suddenly it just felt as if all the shit had lifted. Because one twenty-something kid, with no intention of actually trying to pick me up, and no crude or vulgar follow-through - no show us you tits! or wolf-whistles or jokes about my sexual availability to his friend - had decided to tell me that I looked pretty. How very gangsta.

I know I'll feel better in a couple of weeks, when some of the stresses are magically alleviated. In the meantime, I can always take comfort from stupid, beery absurdities, which in the cold light of day are probably not nearly as amusing as I think they are. Oh well - that's a problem for tomorrow. Right now I'm boiling water for my water-bottle and giggling because some stranger thinks I'm pretty.

Ah, free Heineken and weird public quasi-sexual harassment. What can't they do?

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Putting down roots

You know how sometimes you're walking along, and you see two people in the distance, and something about the way they walk lets you know that they're together? It's as though if you just squint hard enough you might see a piece of telephone wire connecting them. I was walking home from the supermarket today and I saw you in the distance, with a piece of telephone wire connecting you to someone, and even though you were wearing different clothes and an unfamiliar hat I could tell it was you by the way you walked, one hip slightly higher than the other, each step slow and considered and slightly trepiditious.

On the way back I stumbled over George, who was lying on the footpath studying people's ankles. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was observing passers-by, counting how many stopped to help him up, but I think he just wanted to stare at the hard sky for a while. I asked him whether he had seen you and he said that you had passed by at three, trailing telephones behind you and taking slow and considered steps. He said that at four you were planning to turn into a tree.

Sure enough, when I got home, you were standing outside next to the clothes-line, holding your limbs up and shaking cherry blossom like dandruff all over the yard. I could hear the kettle boiling and it seemed shortsighted that you would put it on to boil before ceding the use of opposable thumbs. The dirt at your feet was cold and perturbed, and your soft eyes were fringed in moss. You stared at me sorrowfully, as sorrowfully as is possible for a tree. The kettle whistled, and I took it off the stove. I poured myself a scotch and reached for the axe.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

My week sucked but my friends rock

The other day I was running late for work, trying not to get rained on too much, and generally failing. As I scrambled out the gate I grabbed a lumpy-looking envelope from the mailbox and shoved it in my bag, and forgot about it.

Later that day I was fishing around for some lip balm, when I found the envelope, which turned out to be not an envelope at all but a A4 sheet of paper, printed on one side with diagrams of the brain and folded and taped up around a soft, oddly luminous piece of cloth. The return address was my address. It could only have come from one person.

Inside was a note, hastily scrawled on graph paper, that said, in part, I bet you're not getting your required share of funny, kitsch 1950s Australiana. [...] I only noticed after I had purchased this gem for you that it is a racist scarf. It's silk, antique, and yours.

Sure enough, the cloth the note was wrapped around was a handprinted silk square depicting a map of Australia fringed with postcard scenes of famous landmarks, native flora and fauna - and some naked, ethnographically-inaccurate indigenous children squatting in the dirt, captioned "Aboriginal Children OR 'Piccaninnies'".

Many thanks to Adelaide Jess for providing a perfect moment of joy in an otherwise fraught week. I might not say it enough, but my friends are fucking awesome. Back when Henry and Jess were living in Melbourne, they partook of a very sophisticated program of mail fraud, which saw drawings of Groucho Marx (mine), cocktail recipes and newspaper clipping fraudulently exchanged between various corners of the city. I miss that and might start regularly mailing people, because email is nice, but a racist scarf on an otherwise irredeemable day? Is just about fucking perfect.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Glory of... whatever

I went outside this morning to hang out some washing, and the almond tree was suddenly covered in delicate blossom. Oh, the glory of spring! The majesty of the seasons! etc. If the seasons think I'm going to rhapsodize over them every time they make one fucking grand gesture of a change, they have another think coming. One grand gesture every four months or so, and the rest of the time it's forgetting to call and blowing hot and cold and being fucking unpredictable. As though one day of delicate blossom makes up for months of sulking. I'm sorry, honey! I was just going through a rainy phase...

Sure, I haven't spent much time with the elements recently, but it's not like I can help it. Do you think I'd be in the office six days a week if I had any choice? It's not like I'm ignoring nature, I've just been really busy recently. And it's not like I can live off sunshine and rainbows - girl's gotta pay the bills. But does the weather understand? No. It just hurls itself at my office window weeping frigid, hysterical tears, and then gives me flowers as though that will make everything alright.

Well, it's bullshit, weather. It might have been sweet blossom this morning but you're back to sullen cold tonight. I know you're temperamental, but this is ridiculous. And you know what? I'm going to close the blinds now, and curl up with a cup of tea and a novel, and I might not see you for a while. When you're ready to be sunny and warm all the time, and not just when it suits you, then maybe we can talk.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Public singing face.

I'm going through a public singing phase at the moment. Not in a torch-singing-in-smoky-bars kinda way, or even a karaoke way - just in the sense that when I am walking home with a full bag of groceries or checking the mailbox, I suddenly feel compelled to break into song.

I've been caught out a few times. Walking home in the dark last night, singing under my breath, I passed a couple of people smoking out the front, curled languidly against each other on their shadowy front porch. I didn't see them at first, just had the vague sense that someone was watching me, and quickened my pace. When I realised that no-one was following me, I felt slightly foolish. When I realised that a couple of people had just witnessed me warbling Fiona Apple's "Paper Bag" and swinging my handbag in a vaguely choreographed manner...

I'm not sure where the urge to sing on street corners comes from, but I find I'm indulging this particular whim a lot more these days than I did a couple of years ago. It makes the trip home from the supermarket much less tedious, and sometimes I just want to sing. I don't know. Do other people do this? Is it common?

And if you run into me in the street, will you join me in some sort of ridiculous duet?

Sunday, August 5, 2007

If you only see one film at MIFF

...for the love of God, see this.

Jelly Hands is threatening to review it on her newly established blog, so I won't write it up, only mention that it ticks every box you could possibly expect and then some. Awesome. Come to think of it, it's possible a review of it might pop up here...

I've often wondered about the overlapping communities that exist, those on the net and those in the physical world (my first impulse being to write "in real life", but then it's all real life). Often reading blogs seems to be a matter of teasing out networks, deciphering the friendships and tensions that exist between writers in the physical world. Certain people whose blogs I read I see at launches, or get a drink with occasionally, and often I'm conscious of a disparity between the way I perceive people through their writing and how I react to them in conversation.

Occasionally it feels uncomfortably voyeuristic, knowing the intimate details of someone's life while preserving a distinctly formal relationship with them. It can feel as though you've caught someone undressing by mistake, or overheard them crying in the bathroom, and neither of you want to mention it. Occasionally it breaks the ice. Occasionally, people I didn't realise read my own writing comment on it in passing and I have a moment of panic, scouring my brain desperately to see if I've posted anything too revealing, or improper, or careless.

By the same token, I often wonder how the relationships formed over the internet would work out face to face - whether the people I meet and form word-crushes on would be people I could strike up conversation with in a bar or chat to on the tram. Whether flirting would translate into actual sexual chemistry.

Anyway, despite the occasional coffee with bloggers and the like, I've always felt apart from the main Melbourne blogger networks. Now that Jelly and Jono are writing the two spheres have collapsed somewhat, and I'm trying to dredge up as much Habermas as I can remember to try to make sense of it. Rigid separation of the public and private sphere has always been complicated by confessional literature and the like, but the internet, God bless it, has made the notion seem quaintly obsolete. Sometimes the privacy implications make me nervous. Unreasonably so.

On the other hand, I'm increasingly fascinated by the idea of the internet as a repository of memory, and the collective impulse to spew photos, jokes and journal entries into perpetuity. And since the three of us spend so much time together, it will be interesting to see how we each interpret events - the things we deem worthy of writing about, or how we write about them - and how much we can track our own lives by each other's writing.

Hmm. This is a very confused and meandering post. I'll refrain from babbling on about identity construction through the written word and the subjective memory and the confessional lived experience because I suspect I don't really know what I'm talking about, anyway. But hey!

If you only read one ostensible review of a MIFF film that takes a sharp detour into a ploddingly meta examination of the internet-mediated identity...

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Good lit, bad lit

Good lit: Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

I bought Fear of Flying at a uni sale a while ago, along with a glut of books of similar theme and intent. I've been wary of reading it for a while, partly because so many consider it a seminal work, and partly because some of her later writing really approaches unreadability (Sappho's Leap was turgid, uninsightful and weirdly phallocentric... at least the half I read before abandoning it completely). But Fear of Flying skirts the lethargy that her later work falls into, and I guess following on the heels of the just-released Miller novels, its publication would have been a statement of intent, a ruthless and salty counterpoint to the high "erotic" misogyny of those works. Thirty years on, it feels a bit pointless to review it, rendering this entire paragraph a bit pointless really, but witty, neurotic, slightly desperate (the way every girl after Plath secretly envisages herself?) and it did precipitate this dinner table conversation at my parents' tonight:

Me: So I finally got around to reading Fear of Flying...
Mum: Oh yes! The zipless fuck! You know, your father actually gave that to me to read, years ago - remember, Stephen?
Dad: Yes, I think we had just started dating...
My younger sister: Please pass the salt.



Bad lit: assorted student creative writing projects.

Speaking of unreadable... We've recently been judging entries for the union's creative writing anthology. On the upside, there were a few beautifully-crafted poems and passages of prose, which renewed my faith in the ability of students to produce moving and effective creative work. On the downside/ backside, the lure of sponsored prizes always brings the termites out of the woodwork, and while I tried to scrutinize and consider each piece with equal gravitas, after a while I just deducted points from any piece featuring any of the following:

looming horizons, dewy grass, purple sunsets (really), "her heart sank", "her heart skipped a beat", inability to distinguish between "its" and "it's", any entry in blue/purple/green ink, any entry in Comic Sans/"groovy" font, the smell of spice in a bazaar, staring at the unforgiving horizon, dappled sunlight, grey morning light, cold night sky, gratuitous sex scenes (so edgy!), gratuitous scatological references (so edgy!), unreadable formatting (so edgy!), his strong hand gripped hers, "love had us in its grip", he was my first love and the twist is... he was a cat!, he was my first love, and the twist is... he's dead!, huddling naked beneath thin sheets, our hearts were entwined, totally unconvincing and patronizing use of dialect (it's gritty!), single mothers despairing at their suburban lives, stories written "through the eyes of a child" eschewing basic style and grammar, "consumed by love", "my palms were sweaty".

And so forth. To protect the anonymity and privacy of entrants, a few of these examples are made up, these examples may not correspond to any particular piece, and those which do I did not read aloud to my colleagues in fits of laughter/ silly voices, as this would be unprofessional.

We're thinking of running a Bad Poetry Competition at the magazine, just to have an outlet for some of this stuff. Also, if any of you can find an example of my using any of these phrases previously in this blog, I will eat my hat and also send you a prize of some sort. Umm... bad metaphor? Poor phrasing? Used volume of Erica Jong?