life of the party

Recently on a plane (more about that soon) I had the pleasure of watching the 2018 Melissa McCarthy/Ben Falcone film Life of the Party, a 'college comedy' in which McCarthy plays a mother, in the process of becoming divorced from the most unlikeable nonviolent husband ever (it is made clear that we are not to care about this at all, in the first few minutes) who decides to go back to college and finish her 'archeology degree'. 

I have zero beef with Melissa McCarthy, I think she can really make any tosh seem amusing if not hilarious (sometimes it can be hilarious if it's the right material). She's got that perfect mix of warmth and knowingness - knowing even if the character she's playing is a know-nothing - which suits light comedy pretty nicely. 

The film sidesteps a lot of the easy go-tos. For instance, that McCarthy's character Deanna's presence at university might cause friction with her daughter Maddie. Well, it sort of does very briefly, but then it works out pretty fast, and it's not a major element. That Deanna has a relationship with one of the teen-plus college boys happens, and I wouldn't say it is handled tastefully, but it doesn't go in the ways you'd imagine. That said, while the film does get into (light) drugs and sex, its heart and soul could have been a college comedy of the 1930s as much as the 20teens. It's interesting like that. 

Another way it's interesting is that it arguably wastes so many talented people along the way, probably because it's a Melissa McCarthy film and she's the one audiences are here to see. Presumably McCarthy and Falcone can reasonably surmise that they can afford to bring in the best of the best as supporting cast even if they're in rather dumpy roles, and it won't be to the detriment of the up-and-comers who are in there because apart from anything else they can very legitimately say they were in a huge box office hit and didn't embarrass themselves. So, actors like Heidi Gardner (Leonor), Maya Rudolph (Christine) and Gillian Jacobs (Helen) really don't get enough screen time but maybe it's good to leave everyone wanting more. Molly Gordon as Maddie doesn't really get to do anything funny, which is a shame. Amazing, as it always is when you have this in an American movie of the last 15 years, so see Jacki Weaver in a minor-ish (let's say: small but crucial) role as well. 

So you know I was on a plane and really grasping at what movie to watch and started a few and none of them really worked for me but this was the one I watched all the way through so kudos to all involved. 

Oh, one thing I have seen enough of: that trope of the packed, early C20 lecture theatre. No-one goes to lectures anymore and when they do, it's not in places like that. Oh well. 

delta 5 and helmi

When I was away recently (as I said, more about this soon) I picked up another copy of the Delta 5 album See the Whirl', yes, a naff title as anyone would point out and made even naffer by that apostrophe at the end, but I always liked the band. TBH the album is only a partial success, it makes no sense though - it should be a thorough success after however many (3? 4?) amazing singles. 

Why another copy? Well, I have long had a copy, but it has a big scratch on it, I can't remember where now, the last song on one of the sides. I found it a bit disheartening. This new copy is a Dutch pressing which is nice and so it's on the actual Charisma label, rather than the Pre label.* My Pre copy has a postcard in it (also naff) but my Charisma copy is actually playable and sounds good.

I saw a bit of writing by the late drummer Kelvin who seems to blame the big budget for the album's lack of spontaneity. Actually I suspect it might actually be the sequencing that is the problem, or at least, there is a weird disjunct between the tracks, it all seems so sparse. Maybe Delta 5 just weren't an albums band.

Meanwhile something very bizarre has happened here as Helmi, who has spent the last five or more years cowering under my bed, has suddenly decided it is time to emerge and be present. Not only is she now consistently in the living room out in the open not hiding from anyone, she has even ventured outside, the first time she has voluntarily done such a thing ever as far as I know (obviously there were quite a few years when I didn't know her at all). I can't imagine what would lead to such a change. 

*Pre was Charisma's new wave sub-label, like Mushroom had White and Virgin had DinDisc. I guess these labels did some market research and realised that the consumers of 'alternative' music liked to think that the records they were buying were on some kind of niche, perhaps independent, label, like it made the slightest difference. 

plastic bag

These shopping bags, which before 2019 we would actually get FREE every time we shopped, so you could have three or four of them in your hands when you left the shops and you would not have to pay ANYTHING, are now a rare sight and I found one in my plastic bag collection (a stash of bags used for getting rid of stuff) yesterday. I had a moment's vacillation: could this be rare? Now or sometime? Should I just destroy it? Yeah, I don't know. It's rarer now because it's been filled with junk and thrown in the bin. 
 

karkarook park

 

Perry and I like to go for walks in new places, particularly where there are clumps of plants or bushes that smell good, or grass where you can run round and round. Karkarook Park has both of these things in great quantity.

I have an embarrassing confession to make which leads to a quandary/philosophical question. I am not going to say where it came from but I was carrying a small bag of dog shit with me when we saw a corn can, that is, a can which had once contained corn, by the water (I actually initially assumed that someone had literally sat on the bank of the lake and ate corn out of a can but now I come to think of it - more likely they had emptied the can earlier and put something else in it, like bait, if corn itself isn't bait. There are a lot of people fishing at the lake - you'll note the sign above suggests it as an activity - but you can take the advice of that sign, or of the other signs all around saying the lake has blue-green algae in it and you shouldn't swim in it or fish in it). Anyway I didn't like the idea of a corn can being by the water so I picked it up* and put the dog shit bag in the can and we kept walking. There are signs all round saying, well saying by implication, that there are no bins/no rubbish pick up in the park, you have to leave with your rubbish. So I took the can all the way back to the car and when we go there realised it was empty i.e. I had inadvertantly dropped the dog shit out of the can. 

Now I didn't mean to do it, so I don't feel guilty per se, except I know someone will see that bag of dogshit somewhere and say or at least think 'what the fuck is wrong with people', at least, that's what I do every time I see a bag of dogshit lying around somewhere - it's almost worse than just ordinary unbagged dog shit. Although the bags in question claim to be biodegradable (or the manufacturers claim that for them). No-one's claiming that for a corn can. So, out of the two things, is it better to retrieve a corn can than bag some dog shit and remove it, ie should I have just stuck to my knitting?** 

'I'm implicated! Woof'

*Just to fully neutralise this act I would like to add the information that I knew that I had an alcohol-based hand sanitising towelette in the car, acquired during recent air travel. 

** I pay dogshit tax - I pick up more dog shit than my colleague above produces. Not as much as I should because it's really nasty to pick up some other dog's cold old dogshit but it's what Jesus would do. Dogshit is bad for the environment and Jesus loved the environment. 

21 years of blogging

I've been travelling (more about that in a few weeks) and I noticed my habitual compulsion to diarise to the degree that, when embarking on a walk of some sort (which I have been doing a lot) I frame it with intro pictures and a narrative. I saw some suck write something somewhere, probably a suck meme, about how you should live in the moment instead of always trying to record it, but geez, for me recording it is part of being in the moment. 

When I look back on the early posts, which I don't do often, I certainly seem to be in amongst it - in amongst something. Or quite a few things. Lots of going out to see bands, lots of going out to walk dogs. I guess like a lot of people of my general age, covid killed (basically, essentially) my band seeing, though I will still very occasionally. Maybe covid killed that great time of bands in Melbourne but that's hard to be objective about. 

I think also back then I was proselytising for things I liked, and framing it in a sort of good humoured cajoling way that could as easily be irritating for the reader as anything else, maybe more easily irritating. I still have that aspect to me, that I can't believe people can't get as excited as I am about various things, arguably even things that everyone else has long moved on from, like, I don't know, Neil Sedaka that week I really liked early 70s Neil Sedaka. I can't imagine how I got to be like this. 

'Those nice things you said and thought about me for a brief few days seven or eight years ago made it all worthwhile - sorry but now I have to die - NS'

the end of the mentalist (spoiler)

Yellow John in Swanston St recently
 

OMG the final episode of The Mentalist is just like a... put it this way, in fifty years some geek will say 'That last episode was obviously written by AI' and a geekier geek will say, 'But AI didn't really start until around 2022. So that was just human laziness.' So Patrick and Teresa are going to get married but there is a bit of kerfuffle amongst their FBI colleagues about whether they should be told that the serial killer Patrick thought he blew up in the basement with the old gas+in+the+room+with+chewing+gum+on+the+lightbulb+and+the+bulb+heats+up+and+cracks+and+there's+an+explosion trick (very MacGuyver/Burn Notice) is actually still wandering around like a burned zombie unchallenged by all who see them however grotesque he looks, with a strong impulse to kill presumably Patrick and everyone he cares about. Well, somehow, he gets to the wedding but then the FBI all know he's there and even Teresa has a gun on him, alongside 15 others. I mean it's ridiculously lame (to be fair, I don't quite understand how the FBI knew where he would be, so maybe there's something really cunning in there that I blanked on). 

A-a-a-anyway I'll miss The Mentalist but I'll forget it soon enough. 

the final season of the mentalist

 

So the final season of The Mentalist is a curate's egg. Once Patrick kills his bête noir Red John in a Hitchcockesque park on a Hitchcockesque day the show loses its entire backbone and flails around on the beach. Actually, it's not terrible, and the bit you'd think was really problematic - that Patrick and Teresa become a couple - works. You can see Robin Tunney really embrace a new side of Teresa (new to us) and she and Simon Baker really have a chemistry, I have to say. You could almost imagine the two of them having a show of their own, I mean, not The Mentalist. 

But clearly it was time to finish up the production and as I write I am watching the second-last ever episode. 

The show's producers concocted some kind of weirdo serial killer thing to ramp up the thrills to get us to a finale that approximates some of the same kind of feels we had during the Red John years. It feels weird that Patrick is not a lone wolf anymore, though. 

not very interesting imo, me in the US forty years ago (and a bit)

This is me in Olympia (top) and San Francisco (middle and bottom). It was actually April 1986. I flew into SF just before my 21st birthday, and took a train I think (must have) up to Olympia, or near enough. Yeah, I know, there are train tracks in the Olympia picture but they were just for goods trains. I was kind of captivated by the train line in the road. I don't know why those state buildings (in the middle) were at all interesting to me. Supermarkets kind of thrilled me, with their crazy products (orange cheese etc). I seem apparently happy to just stand in front of things disengagedly. 

I was on my way to Thatcher's Britain which sucked a big turd but at least I saw The Smiths and, er, Stump or whatever. And I got to endure the Chernobyl cloud and be somewhat arguably possibly exposed to mad cow disease. 

the mentalist and the poochies

Series 6 of The Mentalist is madness. I mean, the show was always highly improbably and at some times quite problematically formulaic. But once Patrick kills his bete noir Red John, and he really does, the show is pretty aimless. It needn't have been, but it was. I would so much hate myself if I was, for instance, Joe Adler who played the character of Wiley, this guy, who's the kind of hotshot whiz kid computer boy, brought in to zhouzh up a tired program in its sixth season. We know nothing about him except he sits in a chair all day and can do anything at all in front of a computer. 'According to his credit card activity, he...' 

Meanwhile this season is seeded throughout with not 'will they won't they' but 'when the hell will they' between Patrick and Teresa, where they keep saying minorly dumb things to each other about how they like each other a little bit. 

Nancy of course couldn't give a loose root. 

Can't wait for season 7!!!

the end of the slate culture gabfest

So, I don't really know why this has happened but the Slate Culture Gabfest has come to an end, apparently without acrimony amongst the three hosts who have been doing it for 18 years but also, apparently, in a rather rushed decision (and presumably no will on the part of Slate to experiment with a new team, for instance, though they have had plenty of fill-ins over time, in a way that made me wonder whether they were planning a personnel transition). 

Insert generic nameplate here. Oh, I just did! 

My response when they announced the death of the show, a few weeks ago, was typical denial - I just stopped listening! So there are a couple of recent eps I haven't heard, and that is after loyal listenership since at least 2013, surely earlier. But if they have been tired or uninspired, the team of Steve, Dana and Julia absolutely haven't shown it. The program is as fresh now as ever, IMO. I have long really enjoyed it.

A listener phoned in to say that one of the things they really liked about the Culture Gabfest was that it showed how to educate/enlighten without talking down to someone, and that's really true. I wonder if I can say that the CG has changed my approach in any way. It may have. It's been a bit of a beacon, and certainly most of the things discussed have not really been in my wheelhouse (though more than the films usually talked about in the Filmcast, about which I could not give two shits) but I have enjoyed the way they've been analysed. 

Now, my only Slate podcast is the Political Gabfest (there are other podcasts and they're good but it's impossible to get them on my phone). I think it's time to give up on Slate, cuz the whole thing is a subscription headache every year and it's too American for me, overall. Lots of American things are. 

red rooster outlet soon to be demolished

It's at least 42 years old. Judging by this ad from the Age 30 May 1984p. 66.

Gross, gross, gross. I wonder what will replace this building? 

perry and ferdie a few weeks ago

Ferdie is leading a gay old life. Mia and Emma have chickens now and he breaks in and steals the eggs regularly. He's always himself. 
 

some pictures from my flight a few weeks ago

 

flook in the perth daily news 1 July - 14 July 1952

I think there's one missing here, or rather, there isn't one here that should be. This was Saturday, which doesn't usually have a comics section. 

If you've been following my Flooksploration you'll possibly remember this sequence from earlier because we're back here.  

flook 16-30 june 1952 in the perth daily news

Sorry, I forgot to rustle up your fortnightly Flook. I'm also sorry to say that I've shown you a version of this previously, I'll have to find the time sometime to work out how this was patched together but I'm assuming this was something to do with the syndication of Flook in the USA... anyway, more soon.