truly great joke I made

We were driving in Bendigo and I didn't have my (Mia's) camera.

Stephen: Why don't you have your camera? Did you run out of memory?
Me: Yes, so I forgot to bring it.

There was actual canned laughter!

(Actually, what I said was 'No, I forgot... er I mean "Yes, so I forgot to bring it" but who needs realism).

Funny, it doesn't seem that funny now.

public records office

Spent the afternoon in the public records office. This is genuinely one of the greatest places to go. Like an op shop you rarely find what you're looking for but you may well find something better. In this case I was a little disappointed; I waded through quite a bit of mid-1980s administrative bumf from Sandringham Council and really didn't get much out of it. That said it's amazing what survives merely by dint of it being in a council archive. I read a bit of municipal archives correspondence from the late 1950s, all these job applications from teenage girls who want to be the person selling the tickets at the pool. Imagine if you were some 19 year old in Spotswood in 1956 writing a job application out on lined paper with a fountain pen all badly spelt and mundane, and some mystical thing appeared in front of you and said, 'You know someone's going to be looking at that page in a huge building in North Melbourne in 50 years', what would you say? Best answer wins the final Ulker Cikolatali Gofret bar out of our fridge, unless we eat it first.

Like the SLV the genies are everywhere or at least I assume that's what they are, loudly dominating the proceedings, I had to leave a table I was sitting at because of these oldies reading loudly from some old register, and most annoyingly there was one name - something like Hamilton or Renton or something ending in 'on', and they both kept pronouncing the 'on' part very prominently, as though it had some significance, 'not Hamilten, not Hamiltin, oh no, it's HamiltON' was the inference (in a Kenneth Williams 'not an asp' voice I reckon). Like people who say condOM although there's no other word like that. Is there? We don't say LondON or randOM... anyway. I do love the PROV. They have so much stuff. And if in this case everyone else's stuff looked a little more interesting than mine well, I'm happy for them.

dappled sunlight nonsense

Never mind your problems, what about the hassles I face trying to read things off my laptop screen while the train is passing through trees and sunlight. I suppose there was a time when people enjoyed this type of thing but let me tell you I have important work to do, work I had a whole week to do and which I now have an hour and a half to get finished, and damn it, I am not going to put up with all this dappled sunlight nonsense.

And for my next meaningless gripe:

I had a particularly nauseating lecturer as an undergraduate who used to rub his/her hands together in faux Dr. Frankenstein style and promise us ‘coffeeee!’ This was the days when an addiction to coffeee was a slightly edgy, terribly cosmopolitan thing to have, a bit like addiction to sex was in the early 70s. I was way up for it then (later clarification: I mean addiction to coffee in the 90s, not addiction to sex in the 70s... OK?) But as long-term readers of this catalogue of complaints and self-flagellation will know, I do occasionally wrestle with this demon.

In consultation with Dr. Clarkey (a user who was once a beacon of hope since she did not drink any coffeee until she was about 45 but not with Dr. Schoen whose general attitude is, one should always do whatever one wishes to do – imagine how society would crumble if we were all like that)(mind you she is not much of a coffee drinker) I have negotiated a significant reduction in my intake and it seems to be working, although of course I drink tea like it was air, and as I am now a nose breather you can imagine how stimulating that is.

The above was written yesterday morning and I admit I succumbed a little to a ‘reverse macchiato’ from Castro’s, the acknowledged gnarliest coffee dump on campus, yesterday and then in the evening before we went to see Children of Men, had a little Turkish coffee at Anatolian, which is the closest thing Broady Plaza has to a restaurant this side of La Porchetta’s (I don’t mean geographically though in fact, it is geographically this side).

We enjoyed CoM a lot. It was really well designed and had a neat story and a bit of good dialogue. I thought the stormtrooper symbolism was a little weak since the Britain of twenty years’ hence as depicted in the film was all about nationality (and nationalism), not race, which for some reason seems – not exactly less sinister, but not quite comparable in a satirical/metaphorical way.

I like it when things are unexplained in films, yet still seem quite plausible. The infertility thing is totally unexplained, as is the fertility thing. The last half hour when the camera (i.e. what we are seeing) gets blood on it is kind of bizarre, because we’ve never been given that documentary sense before, but I guess it works. I sort of half imagine that they got fake blood on the camera lens but couldn’t afford to reshoot, but who knows. It doesn’t detract.

I’d recommend it to anyone who likes to be thoroughly gruelled.

We saw it at Broady Hoyts, with about eight male teens two rows behind us. They were pretty well-behaved throughout the actual film (I think one of them made a loud joke once in an admittedly slightly unconvincing-manipulative-explanatory scene) but as Mia pointed out the time we really heard from them was during the trailers when the second Jackass film was being promoted. Phew! After their excited revelry in the face of that 45-second piece of… stuff… I’m surprised they didn’t want to curl up and go to sleep for a while, or at least have a bowl of nutri-grain.

funny pleb

One of the things that any ongoing user of the State Library of Victoria's research facilities (as opposed, I'm guessing, to the people that go there to take heroin or sit at a table with their schoolfriends) has to get used to is the way that they become de facto staff members. We should all strike for the right to get a little kickback every time we show someone how to use the photocopy card machine or where the domed reading room is, and so on. But yesterday took the cake (and now I think about it perhaps this is where I got on the 'I'm an elitist freak' jag of below) for making a library user feel like a zoo animal.

I was using a microfilm reader to look at the Broadmeadows Observer from 1991 and a young guy about 20 came by and burst out with 'wow - you can just call up anything from the past in there!' I am prone to the worst interpretation of anything I don't understand so I checked myself and said 'what do you mean?' and he said 'You can just look at anything on that!' - he obviously thought it was some kind of history computer. I said, well, no, you have to get microfilms out of there - and I indicated the rows of drawers containing microfilm. And he said, 'Oh so you've got a bit of paper in there?' (he obviously hadn't registered the word 'microfilm' or considered it jargon). I showed him the actual reel of film. He regarded the cabinets and walked away saying 'This place is incredible!'

I know, I know, I should lighten up. Maybe I didn't smoke enough pot in '96.

it's all so nasty

I wonder what it would really be like if Labor won the next election. I seem to recall the Hawkeating government was a little frustrating at times but overall I see it all with a rosy glow. For the first few years of Howard it was almost invigorating, he was so wrong. Now he's been in power for so long there is no particular angsty glee to be had from his wrong, wrong, wrongness. His face still reminds me of the toothless one of those two grumpy old men who provided commentary on The Muppet Show, and his voice - particularly his accent - sounds like a colossal put-on to me. I am sure as soon as he leaves office, if he doesn't do it feet-first which seems increasingly likely, he will revert to talking plummy like he used to. It is quite extraordinary to me that this man who has ruled the country for a quarter of my life seems (am I imagining this?) diametrically opposed to me on almost everything. It reminds me a bit of a young man I was sat next to at a conference dinner in New Zealand; absolutely everything that interested him, or that he believed in (a lot of stuff about immigration etc, and he worked in an abbatoir) was so much the exact opposite of what I know to be right, I started to get paranoid - obviously I've smoked too much pot (in 1996, which was about the last time I smoked pot, and I stopped because it made me paranoid - my present state being proof of this). I started to think, 'this guy's a plant'. With Howard it's much worse, as I have to accept that a significant proportion of the people I see in the street actually voted for him. It's an indictment on me, I suppose, that I simply cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would do such a bizarre thing; I would put it on par with... um... all those other things I'll never understand, like people who abseil or people who practice witchcraft, except in most cases those things don't impact on others negatively. Maybe I'd put people who voted for Howard on a level with people who practice witchcraft and human sacrifice.

Obviously this is why me and politics don't go together. My views are extremist and naive, and I cannot really see room for compromise. I suppose part of this comes from the fact that I see incredibly basic flaws in the way human civillisation is organised, things that will surely never change, I am thinking particularly of the meat industry, or meat eating per se, but I am sure there are many other aspects. (Having said that I don't particularly condemn most of my friends for being carnivores any more than I would condemn them for abseiling. But that's part of it - I see no benefit to irritating people who won't change their ways because I want them to, and for that matter I allow for a 1% possibility that I may be wrong, a 1% that, though small, tugs at my elbow anytime I make the mistake of trying to analyse these things). I have numerous other quirky opinions about what would make the world a better place, and these are all distinguished only by the fact that they will never happen not only my lifetime, but anyone's, ever. This might be just how people come to be in their 40s. I suppose I felt roughly the same way twenty years ago but then I did not feel entirely enfranchised or empowered by dint of my age and inexperience. Now I just realise I am massively out of step with, let's say 90% of the population of earth. That still leaves an extraordinarily huge 10%, but actually the figure is probably under 1%, so I don't know why I generously gave myself ten.

On balance, I have no real idea what most or many people around the world are likely to think. And come to think of it I suppose my ignorance of other cultures and my belief in the value of local culture in part because whatever it is, it's local, puts me on a level of empathy with John Howard. That makes me feel a lot better.

mouth breathing

I read the first sixty or so pages of a book on asthma management written by a man who had been big in a big pharmaceutical company and then went all natural. And he recommended for one thing that asthmatics should not breathe through their mouths but through their noses like normal people as the nose is a filter. There was a bothersome sentence, repeated a few times in this how to breathe chapter, saying something along the lines of 'if your nose is blocked, turn to the chapter about unblocking your nose now!' Anyway I had never thought of myself as a mouth breather, though typically for my snob approach I could readily identify plenty of others who are (and who I have quietly condemned for being so). So today I have been consciously breathing through my nose only and I have to admit it's true: I am - well, I was - a mouth breather. I actually find it quite irritating to close my mouth when breathing but now I have invented this new obsession I also find it irritating to open it when breathing. So you can imagine how I feel.

Meanwhile, drifting from topic above, not a bad weekend at the end of a fairly shitty week, I lost my mobile again (am fostering conspiracy theory) anyway at the end of Friday we went to Heide 1 to see Kim Donaldson's 'Between the Lines' exhibition and then I went home and ate a can of spicy lentil soup, not from the can, then went to the Evelyn to see World's End Press, Aleks and the Ramps, they were all I saw, Talk Show Boy and Seconds also played but I was there too late. Good night really. James and Miranda had a baby (not at the venue, but earlier in the day) and Toby and Suse are getting married... in a couple of years. Then yesterday in the day it was the first New Estate rehearsal for many weeks with all members in good spirits and working on excellent new songs. In the evening Mia and I went to Catherine McCarthy's party. Today I made pancakes and had Ashtray Boy rehearsal. Rupert has chicken pox. Tonight I stir fried many greens.

garry shandling and monty python and I

I must say I do think It's Garry Shandling's Show was the funniest show of the 80s, perhaps even beyond that.

One of those weird things that happens three or four times in anyone's lifetime, but I wish it would happen to me in things of greater consequence, but still: I remember walking home from work when I lived with Amanda in Egan Street thinking how I'd heard about this very funny program called It's Garry Shandling's Show and how it was a show about someone who lived in a show, etc, and I thought 'I wish they'd screen that here'. Then I looked in the tv guide and it was actually starting that night, at about 11pm on Channel 9. Serious!

I have quite a few Garry Shandling tapes, probably of about 7 or 8 episodes. I am amazed to find that there were four seasons - that's a lot of IGSS - and I have only seen bits and pieces, really. According to the Jump the Shark site, though, I seem to have seen many of the best ones - like the Fugitive episode, and the time travel/amnesia episode, and the Name the Schumaker baby contest (and the one where Pete thinks he's not the father of the baby and Garry flies to Chicago to quiz Jackie's old boyfriend and he knocks on the door and the boyfriend doesn't remember any Jackie Schumaker and Garry says 'Oh, what was her maiden name - that's it, Jackie Schunaker, and the guy says, 'Oh, sure I know Jackie Schunaker!' I mean seriously that is quality). (And the Jeff Goldblum one where they get locked in the freezer, I am laughing about that one now).

A few days ago, inspired by a Mojo feature on Monty Python, I was thinking about how I was a very early, young convert to MP - I remember Dad let me stay up to watch it when it was first being shown on the ABC (or, at least, when we were living in Kew, which was pre-1973). Can that be a genuine memory? He thought I would like, and he was right, the Terry Gilliam animations and at first that was all I really wanted to see. By the time we were living in the UK in the mid-70s, I was full on into it and the last series - without John Cleese and coincidentally not as good - was on. By this time no-one in the family but me was interested, I would stay up and watch it by myself. Anyway of course like many MP fans I bought the records and then there was this weird thing of learning sections of dialogue and reciting it with friends ('Your majesty is like a big jam donut with cream on top... your majesty is like a stream of bat's piss'. I'm sure none of us knew who the hell Shaw and Wilde were, or really 'got' the idea them standing around insulting Prince Edward, though I suppose we got some of it by context). Why the hell would anyone do anything so lame as recite bits of this show? I guess it marked you out as part of an esoteric clique back then.

To my shame I recall anyone who got the slightest word wrong was chastised.

I was way grown out of the whole schtick and was able to talk to girls and stuff by the early 80s when I was at a party and I heard a bunch of boys one or two years younger than me doing that same thing - reciting bits of Monty Python sketches - and then one of them said with glee, 'Hey we should write this stuff down!' That was when I knew I had wasted too much of my life already.

I suppose the humour of Monty Python was primarily that kind of humour of inappropriate interjections, social embarrassment, people talking one way and saying something else, etc. There was also a lot of stuff on the shows and records that would have made absolutely no sense to anyone after about 1972 - references to various British journalists, broadcasters (Joan Bakewell) and politicians like Reginald Maudling. (I must admit I smiled when I just recalled the cannibalism-in-the-lifeboat sketch where someone cries 'We're done for! We're done for!' and someone else says 'Shutup, Maudling.' I guess the name 'Maudling' is funny in itself).

Anyway, the reason this ties in to a program I now believe to be about 700 times better than Monty Python, the abovementioned IGSS, is that concepts, phrases and so on will pop into my head all the time from IGSS. I think this is broader than remembering dialogue (no, I didn't try to learn dialogue from IGSS) but it might go back to the same basic principle. A lot of the time things people say trigger songs in my mind, too. (As an example writing that sentence has put the fairly mundane Elvis Costello song 'Little Triggers' into my head - sorry, but it has!!!)

One thing that comes to mind as an example is from the Fugitive episode of IGSS, where Jackie and Garry are running from the cops (it turns out to be a toy helicopter - heh) and they see the teenage Grant Schumaker under a lamplight, smoking a cigarette like Bogart.

Jackie: Look Garry it's little Grant smoking! Aren't you going to say something?
Garry: I don't know... 'He looks really cool' -?

Perhaps it's a sign of a syndrome. Every time someone says, or I read the words, or words approximating, 'Aren't you going to say something?' my mind goes to that joke. Which probably doesn't come out too well in the above but it still makes me laugh.

Garry Shandling's film about being an alien from outer space was so appalling, I wanted to die when I saw it. But everything else he's done has been incredible, and I think he is possibly my favourite comedian ever - though I have to get over the general sexism, etc of some of the material (because I'm so po-faced and right on).

After IGSS he went on to do the second greatest comedy show ever, The Larry Sanders Show, a totally different proposition - totally - but every bit as good in so many different ways. The first season of this show is available on DVD and Annabel was nice enough to get it for me as a present a few years ago, and it's magnificent. It's a different kind of 'show within a show', but whereas IGSS was absolutely surreal, TLSS was very believable. I love them both. Only the first season of Larry Sanders is available on DVD and none of IGSS is available on anything, even YouTube has nothing. Even YouTube!!!

When I was in NY in '96 with the Cannanes we went to Aileen McNally's mother's restaurant (or was this '91? maybe - I think it was the same visit we saw Epic Soundtracks outside the Knitting Factory and Aileen tried to talk to him about Julian Clary who he didn't like) we ate at the table in the window and I got to sit in a chair that Garry Shandling had sat in. Look, it actually was a thrill, he is a hero to me on the level of Robert Crumb and Mayo Thompson... all these American men twenty years my senior, what's it all about?