Fashion Killings

This morning afternoon as I ambled down my local street perving on all the hipster young men and ladies who were out catching some daylight and unexpected sunshine along with me, I remembered a girl I had seen the night before. A girl that had filled me with such hatred that I had contemplated declaring myself a Fashion Policeperson and forcing her to remove the offending articles right away

The offending outfit involved a dark blue windsheeter or jumper or fleecie garment of a soft nature, whatever and on it was embroided a clown holding some balloons. Observe:



Yeah, I'd look sad too if I had that on me.

Clearly the above picture in no way conveys the true hideousness of the outfit since the girl last night had chosen to pair it with some awful high pants that gave her saddlebags. In short, she looked like the mothers who used to pick up the other girls from ballet when I was 8.

I am ok with people looking stupid for fashion. At times I'm sure I look incredibly stupid myself. Everyday I try to resign myself just a little bit more to the come back of shorts-with-braces and romper suits for 20 year olds. I am... comfortable... with these images, just:



I mean, I don't know why the girl above wanted to wear a bib-dress over a white t-shirt, maybe she didn't get enough of shit like that the first time round in the 90's, maybe she's subverting the dominant paradigm by doing it in velvet, who am I to judge?

The other day, while out shopping with my friend Hotness, we noted the rise in the enormo-tshirt, 80's revival style. I had an enormo t-shirt of my very own, back in the day. It was pink with black writing and said "summer fun". I was 7. I dont want to be wearing the enormo t-shirt again! I don't want to see girls younger than me "ironically" wearing clothes my friend's mother's wore when they were addled, desperate housewives with huge ash-coloured hair back in the 80's. I don't want it!

If I see that girl again I'm going to whip her out of those clothes and burn them right there in front of her

That'll learn 'em.

Westgarth

Last night JZ, NoLogic and I discovered the incredible hotness that is the new Westgarth cinema in Northcote. Damn that cinema is hot. It makes you want to rub the chairs in a suggestive manner and then make out with anyone sitting next to you in celebration of just how hot the theatre now is. We managed to suppress these wrongtown urges however and settled in to the serious business of watching Thank You For Smoking .



Although the film itself is hilarious (but not enough maria bello. Why did they hold out on me like that?) the bits with katie holmes in them made me... sad. I know it's ridiculous but this was the first film I'd seen where she looked lopsidedly attractive and seemed able to act and now she's all locked up in some Scientologist compound with a plastic baby. Perhaps my feelings of sorrow were tempered by the inordinate amounts of time I've had recently to read Go Fug Yourself and Defamer.

Afterwards I went and met CS and The Wedge in Brunswick St and relived the highs and lows of CS's brief stint in the harsh and pedantic world of lawyer-speak. This naturally opened up the night for a whole lot of "Now when you say he's into dirty ho's what exactly do you mean by dirty? And ho? And "into"?"

My Milkshake Brings All the Boys To the Yard...

If I could marry any beverage it would be this one:



Oh vanilla milkshake, you light up my life. You also make me cough in a vaguely whooping-cough-ish way thus fulfilling my requirement that I love things which are bad for me. Truly, your cold milky goodness is a wonder every time.

Pop Quiz

"How old are you?"

.... er.... what?

Yesterday I ventured into the future and met The Youth. I had forgotten that 19 and 20 year olds are apparently obsessed with how old you are and where you came from ("um....the cabbage patch??")

Luckily some of The Kids are also storkishly tall and not adverse to picking me up and throwing me over their shoulders.

Why do I end up at bar open, why? why??

What's that Skip?

Last night I had dinner with Jumble(sale) who perpetually manages to out late even me. Luckily for him I wasn't overly "zenned" from my preggers-woman-yoga (you can see why I wouldn't be overly zenned by that, no?) and was able to speak both polietly AND in words of greater than monosyllables when I saw him

Anyway, long story short we met at the Union and mere seconds after placing our order realised that the lure of the roo of The Napier was too great to be denied. Jumble was moved to enact a classic piece of "Dining Out Theatre" (the unnamed "engagement") in order to experience the below:



+



=



You have to eat skippy at least once to understand just HOW the earth will move for you. My god. Why did I waste so much of my life over the burgers at that pub?

The point of this post though was that I may have relayed a no-names-no-packdrill version about a certain incident already recorded on this blog to Jumble. He, in kind, responded with a story involving a friend, a first boyfriend, and a cunnilingus session that was apparently so accomplished it resulted in the boy wearing both chocolate and lemonade on his face. Jumble used this incident to moralise about the amazingness of the human body, the way that one can never know how individuals will respond to stimulus and something about "anxiety" that apparently hit too close to Jumble's home. Either way, I was forced to salute Jumble's circumspection and appreciation of, well, the nice-ities of human nakedness and so I am recasting a post that perhaps only three people have ever read. Still. It's the thought that counts, right?

Musings

So to ramble on a bit more about Pandora: now I can't help but wonder, do I only like these songs in the context of the other songs they've been presented in? Would I really want to listen to them if I didn't think of them as being connected, in some way, with a previously established taste? Do I just like them right now or will I still like them in thirty minutes? A month? Five years? Do I love them in a way that secretly means I hate them and sort of want to vomit on them and their catchy strummyness?

Possibly it is not good to listen to Pandora for tooooooo long.

Flat

Last night the ennui hit hard. My utter disdain for Natasha Hentsridge's haircut in the late night badness that was "Caracara... or... The Last Witness" was not great enough to get me to go to sleep. After all, I found myself asking, what was the point? It wasn't like I had anything to do in the morning. Sometimes excessive freedom is like a noose around your neck stopping you from doing anything at all.

Except watch bad t.v. and blog, obviously.

Grey, Ordinary

So yesterday I was jolted awake by a vistor buzzing to be let in at the ungodly hour of... um... 12.30pm. This suprise attack on my sanity meant that I seemed to have been catapulted past feelings of "hobo's remorse" straight into smug self-congratulations that I had spent a blameless night getting utterly trashed at an over-crowded party and had done nothing bad to anybody. OR HAD I?



I was somewhere like this. Only without the lights. I knew too many people. I became paranoid/obsessed with over-share. I shared a cab home with two girls I didn't know and bummed a cigarette when I don't even smoke. It was the greatest cigarette I have ever smoked.

It's ok - I just caught up with NoLogic and she assured me that despite being in imminent danger of sliding off the couch I never actually did it and after burbling crap at her for awhile I left. We both turned angrily on Gynga when he dared suggest that perhaps we had danced at this party. Never!

Pandora

Ok so I know that everyone in the world and their grandma knows about Pandora . I know this because, for godsakes, I remember sneering in borrowed cynicism and ennui when BoyF sent me the link months ago. I vividly recall pulling a face at the screen and muttering "like, ohmygod, I have totally already read the hype on that thing so long ago GOSH you are fifty years too late JEEZ" or something similar.

Well, the joke is on me because it is one thing to know about it and quite another to have the enormous amount of spare time that I currently have and to be able to listen to Pandora all day long. And maybe fall a little bit in love with it. Even if it makes me realise that there actually aren't that many things that sound like M.I.A. apart from, well, M.I.A. And how did it think that "Rythym is a Dancer" is something that links back to M.I.A.? Although it did remind me about fannypack. Which led me to wonder if they were still going out with the boys that they professed their love for in that track. Hmm.

I am starting to suspect that Pandora was put together by woollen-jumper-wearing indie boys though. It has a much higher strike rate for my "belle and sebastian" playlist than it's had for anything else.

Rock Steady

Another morning, another Aretha Franklin track (alright, I admit I cheated - but I just couldn't face having my day defined by one of Pavement's more boring, feedback laden screechathons) and hold the press ladies and gentlemen a Saturday Morning Without A Hangover

Wtf? I hear you ask, is that even possible? It is if you had an alcohol free day the day before. That's right! No alcohol! ON A FRIDAY.



Perversely, given their beginning as Saturday night marathons of drinking and recklessness, cards - particularly poker cards - have now come to symbolise blameless hours of sobriety and occasional dalliances with mathematics. I tried to fight it, I fought it for years but in the end the nerds had the last laugh.

Damn you Sunday Afternoon Ladies and your pink lemonade ways. How else to explain spending a Friday night in, of all places, Monash Clayton in some brightly lit, slightly cold "wine cellar" room playing poker for fun (definitely not for profit)?

This morning I dreamt that I lived in a block of flats with a pond in it that expanded into a pool. I had to swim through it to get to my friend's room. I wonder what that means? And when will it be warm enough to go swimming again?

Excursions in Art

Or: where to drink cheaply on a Thursday night

As I've said before, it's a rare Thursday that doesn't find me in a gallery in the city, somewhere, trying hard not to notice the art around me and swapping bitchy asides with either JZ or Lisel. This Thursday the theme was "so broke right now" which meant that L. and I started at Westspace where you had to pay three whole dollars for a glass of red wine and ended up at Spacement where the booze was free and the people... much prettier.

We weren't the only ones completing the circuit. Half the people at the rather sparsely populated Westspace opening headed back to the more convival side of town ... and the free booze... of spacement. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one who read the invite to westspace and saw pictures like this:



and this:



and was slightly confounded upon walking into the gallery at seeing a giant twig lit up by a lamp in one room and a shopping trolley all twisted up and shoved up the top of a pillar in the other.

Apparently the shopping trolley was meant to convey "the difference [which] is becoming more difficult to define. This installation is an exploration of the anxiety which surrounds prosthetic dependence in the wake of human frailty, whilst stiving to overcome it." Ahhh, my frail desire to convey my groceries home in a shopping cart. Thwarted and violently overcome by my amazing abilities with a blowtorch.

In no way do two of the photos on westspace's page match up with the work on display there last night. Wtf?

Luckily Spacement was like it always is - over heated, over crowded and over supplied (can one be oversupplied?) with free booze.

Panadarosa's work took up the backwall of the main gallery. Iuen and JZ mocked my love of their work by declaring me a lover of graphic design boys with skinny pants who stuck vinyl on walls. I think Panadosa is a bunch of girls actually but that aside - how did JZ & Iuen know? Damnit!

Things I Learnt From Last Night

• Free Booze Hurts



• B totally slept with M and has outed him as a [redacted] (ohmygawd)
  
  
• Tequila is still my enemy and whenever I think "oh, how bad can it be?" I relearn just How Bad It Can Be



• I totally have to stop kissing my friends



• Despite canoodling with a boy in the corner of Misty, Simon is not gay, he is rampantly heterosexual. I should've known - his shoes are always hideous



• I have a crush on an artist who is totally not my type. I predict this is going to end badly/go nowhere.

Hi, I'm A Helmut I Mean "Hairstyle"!

I like hair. I like it a lot . As some of my friends can attest sometimes, rather than being a fool for love I find myself a fool for hair. A good set of folicles blinds me to the short-comings of whatever's underneath. If there's enough on top I can even blind myself to a receding hair-line and an egg like forehead. Damnit!

I am, obviously then, a fan of the current hairstyle for boys which involves plenty o'hair, in a touseled "just got out of bed, hey there!" style and is sometimes charmingly paired with facial hair.



I have never watched the mighty boosh but I love it for the hair alone.

Imagine my horror, however, when watching channel ten the other day and finding out that it was possible to Go Too Far. There was an interview of graphic designers, sundry, where they were mumbling their love of... stuff... and need to roam freely, free to design and be and create cool... stuff. I love graphic designers. I do. They are clever with the making of pretty things but they are not always the most articulate. Well not when it comes to declaring their modus operandi on tv anyway. Anywhoo, there they all were, these smarty pants young men with their ingenious designs and their hipness and... their hair which seemed to be channeling the alien messages beaming in from the planet Xyron, in the fiftyfith galaxy or some such.



This is going TOO FAR people! Cut it back!! Stop before you finally hear the message instructing you to kill, and kill again....

Exploding Cars Don't Solve Everything

Earlier I stated that sometimes all one wanted in a film was a good bit of exploding car action:



In the case of Infernal Affairs II the exploding car reminded me that actually, they can be used to make you appreciate the senseless tragedy of violence and crime and how nothing anyone does will ever make anything better. I hate you Infernal Affairs II .

I should've remembered this before I borrowed the vid:

Hong Kong: The Last Straw?

Eat the Baby!

So Saturday found JZ, NoLogic and myself at something of a loose end. Sure we were at a gallery opening and there was free wine but somehow none of us had it in ourselves to write off the afternoon under the shiny steamer lids of Donna Marcus and her posse of sharply dressed, sharp haircutted late thirty somethings.

JZ had just been told about the gallery owner's favourite memory of him from when he was 8 so none of us were feeling the coolest. NoLogic hadn't showered in days and I was wearing pink and suddenly feeling an affinity for, of all people, Di Morrisey whose whinging in the Good Weekend I had minutes earlier dismissed as self indulgent piffle. Until I found myself and my pink top at the receiving end of several scornful and evaluative looks from some crow-like groups of ladies at the gallery. I had no black on me, none. Clearly I was an imposter on the scene of the worst order...

Staring at all the saucepan lids gave us an idea though. What does one do when one has nothing much to do? Why one goes and buys as much meat as one can and devotes the evening to cooking it.

Years ago, on a particularly hungover Saturday, JZ, Ex and I discovered the magic that was cooking programmes on channel 7. In particular, cooking programmes that celebrated cooking enormous and ridiculous quantities of meat. That day we went and bought ribs and steaks to wear as meat hats. No, to cook. The magic of Meat-As-Hat, though, has always remained.





The spice crusted bits of lamb were a revelation, the meat balls were definately better than anything my mum would make but, upon reflection we agreed that perhaps the thick lamb stew/stock we made using olives and fat from the leg of lamb to pour over the couscous was taking things a bit too far.

Ah, to eat so much meat you start to think you might be breathing it. Fantastic.

Radio Destiny

I haven't played this game in awhile since usually I wake up to the news as told to me by Tinseltone and the rest of the breakfaster crew on RRR but this morning I threw my fate at the feet of my itunes and it threw back at me the awesome 80's classic badness of Aretha Franklin and George Michael



Classic!

Adventures in Temping Part I

Being a receptionist is hardly taxing work. In fact, for the most part it seems that I get to sit behind a desk, write on this blog and look up the same three american gossip sites. In an attempt to add a flavour of surprise to this slightly tasteless existence I decided to follow a link and start reading Fanny Hill, Or, Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure

Who knows why someone descided to place the entire book on the net or why they picked this particular pearler. It was written in 1794 and contains such classic moments as:

"But frequency of use dulling the sensation, I soon began to perceive that this work was but a paltry shallow expedient that went but a little way to relieve me, and rather rais'd more flame than its dry and insignificant titillation could rightly appease.

"Man alone, I almost instinctively knew, as well as by what I had industriously picked up at weddings and christenings, was possess'd of the only remedy that could reduce this rebellious disorder...."

Ah man alone. Nothing like a bit of patriarchial porn to make the afternoons fly by.

Putting aside the endlessly stated supremacy of the penis this story suffers, as with any pornographic text, from the boredom of repetition. It isn't just the characters who get tired of the same three steps repeated over and over again. At the same time it's still interesting to read because it's the same scenario over and over again. No anal sex. No cunnilingus. Barely any hand jobs even! Were people in the 1700's really so unimaginative? If you're going to write a book about fucking surely you may as well try to include as many different types of fucking as possible?

Check Out My Gravel Pit*

Ah Thursdays.

I love Thursday nights. It is a rare Thursday evening that doesn't find me standing in an overheated room somewhere, glass of free wine clutched in one hand, back firmly presented to a wall of art. This Thursday I was actually there to SEE the art for once since my friend Claire was included in a curated show at the city library on Flinders Lane.

As ever, the space was overheated, overcrowded and the wine was terrible but free and the art... was actually really good. Aw.

Another predictable thing happened at the opening. Given that Melbourne is really just a bunch of villages and it is impossible to spend more than a year living here and not to start to devlop a glittering cast of background characters that you will inevitably bump into over and over and over again no matter how many nights/morning's you've spent vervently praying that you Never See Them Again, I bumped into the bestie of BoyX. This reminded me that mere hours earlier I had been gazing over my desk at a man who bore a striking and freakish similarity to BoyX and who had, in turn reminded me of my recently developed and hellaciously indepth and ultraly scientific theory I had started to formulate.

The Theory
While bored on public transport, I often find myself passing the time by working out who on my tram I should give The Eye to. This should not be confused with the Evil or Stink Eye but rather the roving, Hey Baby, I'm Thinking About What's Under Your Shirt (Maybe) Eye. The "maybe" part of this Eye is actually the most important part. You don't want to be one of those naff PT riders who have crossed the line from 'potential' into lewd drooler. But the point, the point... So the point is, I have found myself giving the glad eye to boys who markedly resemble Boys X and Z for no other reason except for the resembalance. I find myself thinking warmly of them and yet - I know nothing about them. Nothing! Why does this vague recollection of nakedness-past make me assume that the man on the tram is going to be nice, more interesting and with a similar music collection to someone else? That he doesn't even know? (although it would be weird if they did all know each other) Am I the only one who does it? What does it all mean.....

Conclusions as they occur



*the title of this entry was meant to relate to the doco I saw last night on the Wu Tang Clan but I can't be arsed changing it now - or writing about the film

The Third Way

Last night me and JZ were going to get down with the myspace kids or touch the zeitegeist or maybe just sit uncomfortably in the cold for a bit and behold the hype that was Lilly Allen at St Jeromes. To the surprise of neither of us by the time we got to Jeromes' at 6.30 there was a queue almost to the end of the laneway. We decided to cop to our uncool/hipness and laugh at the people in the line instead (this was harder than it should've been given the wafts of tear-inducing stench from the garbage bins we picked our way past) on our way back to the tram and the more comfortable proposition of watching dvds and Wednesday night ABC (shut up, the ABC rocks on a Wednesday night).



So we ended up watching The Descent from Neil "Dog Soldiers" Marshall which I wanted to hate but which, upon sober consideration, actually has one of the best endings for a horror/thriller thing that I've seen in ages. Sure, the actual filming of the end sucks arse but the idea behind it is actually awesome.

If you've ever found yourself thinking at the start of one these thriller/horror/zombie things "oh goddamnit, that stupid beefcake is going to defy the odds and emerge attractively ruffled at the end in time to eat icecream in the manly aloneness of space/the apocalyptic future/back of an ambulance" or found yourself sitting vaguely stunned at the end saying "wtf? they all died? really??" and then every other time you've found yourself in the video store holding some dark covered dvd in your hand and you look at the back and you consider the gore and the blood and the killing and then the fact that you pretty much know the ending already and then you start singing "is that all there is?" and move to paris and take up smoking because you so fucking jaded by these movies and you already know everything... Anyway, if you've ever felt like that, The Descent is actually rather cool. I had to yell that it sucked on my way out though - it just wouldn't've been a satisfying night without some level of hatred.

Check It

The other day, realising that I was in danger of never leaving my house except under cover of darkness like some sort of pot bellied, short, crime-indifferent batgirl, I got in touch with my inner senior citizen and took a stroll around my neighbourhood in the dying sunshine of a winter afternoon.

And this is what I saw (I am referring to the car, people, not the skyscraper):



This was a cool sighting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the car. The car is inarguably cool. Currently, I am temping at a large imported-luxury-car-glass-box type place, where I, the lucky receptionist, get to sit in the midst of yea verily a field of slumbering, 100k plus toy cars which are so small and boxy that when grown men sit in them they have to stoop a little. The cars I gaze at, in a vague and desperate fashion, first thing of a morning are not as cool as the car above.

The second, and cooler thing about this sighting was the girl sitting shotgun in this car. She was grinning like a cheshire cat. It was impossible not to grin back at her as she rolled past, driven by some shadowy male figure since she was so clearly Living The Dream.

Thirdly and finally, finding out what car that girl was sitting in has led me to discover that it was a car like one Steve McQueen used to drive. Finally - an answer to the question posed at the end of that Gomez track "sean connery... or steve mcqueen?"

A Weekend in the Country

Meredith for the Cinema Set

So, the other night I trundled off to see my friends on the big screen. Sure, they weren't actually on the big screen (except H - Hi H! Glad to know the blinds match the drapes! I'm never shaking your hand again!) but they were credited on the big screen as being, y'know, integral to the whole process of bringing the big screen entertainment to us, the devout fans of Meredith.

If you've never been to Meredith you obviously:

1) Do not Live in Melbourne

2) Live on the Other Side Of the Yarra (you know who you are)

So for all you poor suckers out there - clearly I am talking about The Meredith Music Festival which happens once a year on a farm just outside of Meredith blah blah blah.

Just for something completely different, I'm not going to critique the film, A Weekend In The Country (which screened at MIFF, people - MIFF! They don't even pay you it's so prestigious).

Instead I offer a salute, ashtanga yoga style, to all the hundreds of people in the cinema who smuggled booze in. Seriously, it nearly brought a tear to my eye.

Here is a picture of all the people in the audience, thinking about booze:



The Age can talk all it wants about the rise in binge drinking and dangerous drinking and YooF Out of CONtroL etc but - the number of people at ACMI who had spent so much time and effort smuggling all sorts of types of booze in.... Well, it was just outstanding.

I particularly liked that the director attributed much of his insipration for the doco at hand to time spent smuggling booze into ACMI with his friend when they were younger. This was touchingly responded to by said friend brandishing forth his very own, recently smuggled in, illicit bottle of liquor

Ah, plus ca change, non?

For the record - I was sitting next to the bestie of the dude who wore the watermelon on his head last year. His cleanliness was unnerving.