Lad Litter

Here In My Car Again

2011-12-28T09:00:00.007+11:00

This is what's going around on the 6-stack CD-player in the car at the moment.

Let It Bleed (1969) Rolling Stones
Let It Bleed is generally held to be one of THE quintessential late-60s albums. And this despite the fact that its 5th December 1969 release date meant that it was only available for the last 26 days of that decade. But never mind that. The album has a dark, brooding vibe to it that very much fitted the mood of the times.
I first heard this album when I was 14, in the middle of 1974, and it quite simply floored me. The intriguingly spooky introduction to Gimme Shelter, the country-flavoured Country Honk - a Hank Williams-inspired version of their earlier hit Honky Tonk Women, some more dark atmospherics on Live With Me and Midnight Rambler and one unsung track, Monkey Man that should be as well known as the song that follows it to close the album, You Can't Always Get What You Want. It has bright production values at odds with the slightly muddy sound of most Stones' albums up to that point, driving rhythm section and a track listing that would cover all of the Rolling Stones' major influences and directions.

This album marked the period of transition when Keith Richard was playing almost all of the guitar parts - the dearly-departed Brian Jones features on just two tracks, on neither of which he plays guitar. Likewise, there are only two songs featuring the incoming Mick Taylor.

The album is coloured throughout by some very rootsy instrumentation like violin, mandolin, and slide guitars and heralded the Stones' intention to make increased use of outstanding session musicians like Leon Russell, Al Kooper, Ry Cooder, Merry Clayton and Bobby Keys.

Never A Dull Moment (1972) Rod Stewart
Hey, where are you going? Come back here. Now look, Rod Stewart made some really good music prior to his 1976 departure from the Faces. Before he seemed to become, well, a bit of a tosser. But in reality, most of us would have seized the same opportunities that Rod did if they were presented to us. Would we be yelling "No, get away Britt Ekland, leave me alone..."? I don't think so. The guy's allowed to make a good living. Besides, to those in the know, everything up to that execrable Atlantic Crossing (1976) jumping off point is good enough to still regard Rod Stewart very highly.
Rod's previous effort, Every Picture Tells A Story (1971) is a rolled-gold classic, and Never A Dull Moment would be the follow-up that stopped just a little short of that. It employs the same personnel as Every Picture, from his Faces bandmates keyboardist Ian McLagan, bassist Ronnie Lane and the ubiquitous Ron Wood on guitar as well as hand-picked mates like ex-Jeff Beck Group bandmate Mickey Waller on drums and classical guitarist Martin Quittenton.

The catalogue of Rod's great cover versions grows with the inclusion of Jimi Hendrix's Angel featuring knockout open-tuned guitar by Ron Wood, and Dylan's Mama You Been On My Mind. The songwriting synergy between Stewart and Martin Quittenton follows on from their earlier collaboration Maggie May to this album's hit single You Wear It Well.

Mystery To Me (1973) Fleetwood Mac
Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were still two years in the future when this album, featuring singer-guitarist Bob Welch and guitarist Bob Weston, was released. The group had reached something of an impasse with internal harmony disintegrating and sales nowhere near record company expectations.
Apparently Bob Weston was having a fling with Mick Fleetwood's wife Jenny, younger sister of George Harrison's wife Patty Boyd, and that led to understandable tensions and Weston's departure soon after this album made it into the shops. It's got a lot of soft-rock on it, not an indictment if it's done well, and mainly funk-influenced songs from Bob Welch, but there are a few outstanding Christine McVie sad-girl-in-love piano ballads with that exquisite contralto voice of hers up front. Bob Weston is an amazingly versatile guitar player and the unsung rhythm section that gave the band its name, (ie Mick Fleetwood and John McVie) fattens the sound.

Stand out tracks are: The City, a Bob Welch composition on which Weston plays slide guitar through a wah-wah pedal and gets a sound too good to have been heard neither before nor since; a Bob Welch-led cover of the Yardirds' For Your Love; and any of Christine McVie's.

Teaser (1975) Tommy Bolin
I'm inclined to be a bit evangelical about this James Gang and Deep Purple guitarist who died of a heroin overdose in 1976. Being into him is like being a member of a secret society of guitar-players. Hardcore Deep Purple fans tend to snort when his name is mentioned.
For Bolin's only Deep Purple album, Come Taste The Band, no homage was paid to Richie Blackmore. Make no mistake, that was a Tommy Bolin album that one, and damn good because of it. This contemporaneous solo effort, his first of two, mixes funk, hard rock, reggae, jazz and even a dash of glam in its song structures.

Bolin's voice is subdued and languid but it's his guitar-playing that permaeates the whole album so richly. He is an exceedingly distinctive player with a wide range of great signature licks, many of which are repeated, but why not? They sound great. He seems to use slide more as an effect but Wild Dogs showcases his capacity in this area.

Standout songs on the album include; the slightly campy title track; the glam album opener The Crunch; the jazz-flavoured Savannah Woman; and Wild Dogs, but the song-quality is even right across the album from an artist who was just starting to achieve his considerable potential.

Robin Trower Live (1976) Robin Trower
You could say, as many have, that Robin Trower is a Hendrix imitator. However, if you did, my response would be, "Yes. And did you also have a point?" If rock music's history isn't one of musicians borrowing from their major influences and extending them, then good evening, I'm Jimmy Page. This is one of the best live albums ever made, and captures the essence of Trower's power trio and its material.

If anything, they have a sound and style similar to Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Trower is a brilliant player and gets that extraordinarily bluesy front pick-up sound from his ever-present Stratocaster. Too Rolling Stoned, Living in a Daydream and the best-ever version of Rock Me Baby will make you sit up and take notice and it's one of the few live albums from the 70s full of very lengthy tracks that just never wear out their welcome.

Front Page News (1977) Wishbone Ash
The first I heard of this group was awareness of their 1975 tour of Australia. A couple of years later, a mate dragged me over to the speakers at his 18th birthday party and insisted that I listen closely to their 1974 double-live album Live Dates. I had to acknowledge they were pretty good, with two, count 'em, two, hot guitar players.
Their 1973 album Argus had gained a lot of attention and that would be their zenith in record sales. But that doesn't mean they weren't producing good music. This album has a great selection of tracks where the two guitars of Andy Powell and Laurie Wisefield intertwine beautifully. All of the band-members of this English group were superb musicians and bass-player Martin Turner's voice is a little reminiscent of Jack Bruce, only more restrained.

They can be heavy enough but also demonstrate English folk influences on a great many songs. Diamond Jack is my all-time favourite Ash song and there are ballads and flat-out rockers on this album that proceed without a wasted minute anywhere.

It's a great album from a band that I expected to view as a youthful infulgence when I took the record out of the rack for the first time in many years but in music at least, youth wasn't wasted on the young.

Out of the Past I

2011-07-29T18:30:00.011+10:00

I wondered whether this was too pissy to post about. Then I had a look through the Lad Litter archives. And came to the conclusion that this might just be the equivalent of a Foreign Policy White Paper by comparison with some of the complete piffle I've churned out on this blog. Plus, it gave me a pretty good excuse to use the title of my all-time favourite film to head up a post. Evocative, no?

I'm on Facebook. I have the security settings on Friends Only, but my name and profile image are searchable. I'm not on it all the time like some, but I do attend to it by putting up the odd smart-aleck comment on my wall and the occasional patronizing and by-no-means-heartfelt "like" on friends' wall posts. It's the nature of the medium, boys and girls. Facebook, where the shallowness glows wanly through even the densest layers of mock-sincerity.

But I'm not really as cynical about Facebook as all that. No, if used for niceness and goodness instead of meanness and rottenness, it works pretty well. Except for the people who seem to think you're important enough to send a friend request to, but that you lack the critical cachet needed for them to actually reply to any message you might send them.

But as I said, it's not like I check in on Facebook all that often, just now and then. So it was something of a surprise to find about a month ago that I'd received a message from someone whose name I didn't recognize. The message wanted to know if I was the same tall Lad Litter with long blond hair who'd gone to a particular inner suburban high school. She identified herself by mentioning that she'd dated a mate of mine from those days. I told her I remembered her well, but not to leave the porch light on for any long blond hair.

I also let her know that I hadn't maintained contact with her old boyfriend for long after school had finished and had no idea where he might be. That didn't seem to faze her, so we exchanged messages about current events and figures in our lives and briefly and superficially discussed my reluctance to engage in any cavalacade of reminiscence about that time. It's been quite a lovely correspondence.

But back in 1976, she used to wait in the mornings at the Mt Rd tram stop at the top of my street. I'd cycle past on the footpath on the other side of that busy road. She was on her way to the Catholic girls' school in North Melbourne and used to wait there with a friend. We'd be looking at each other as I rode past, the two girls and I, but without any interest, just awareness. Some mornings I'd wave to them, but I can't remember if they ever waved back, or just rolled their eyes. If it was eye-rolling, someone had given them sound advice.

It was such a small part of all our days that I'm sure none of us gave it much thought at all. Besides, they looked a couple of years younger than me too.

Late December of that year seemed replete with balmy, well-lit evenings and it was my ritual to walk our dog across the park out the back of our place, south along the Moonee Ponds Creek valley, and have a cigarette in one of our kitchen window’s blind spots. Once I'd crested the low hill that put me in Travancore, walking through the naturalized aniseed, I met a bloke I knew on his way to see a mutual friend and neighbour of mine. We smoked and then headed back in the direction of my place. As soon as we'd retraced my steps over the hill, we saw two girls sitting having a chat right in the middle of the park.

Our path was going to take us close by them, but before any awkward encounter could take place, my dog Tiger had sidled over to make friends. The ol’ tail-wagging icebreaker was in top form and seemed to be demonstrating an aptitude for social graces that would elude me for quite a few years more. It was about then I realized it was the two girls from the tram stop. And they’d both turned out to be very attractive.

My Facebook correspondent, Leslie, was tall and with long straight brown hair parted in the middle. It’s a look that just always seems to work. As well, she seemed graceful and smart. Her friend Lisa was a stunner. Maybe a bit Mia Freedman-ish with a dash of Sigourney Weaver, although both were unknown in 1976.

I can’t remember much of what was said and it’s probably just as well. Because I’d be guessing that the other guy and I would have been talking a whole load of complete rubbish, trying all-too-desperately to be funny and probably not succeeding. Somewhere during the conversation they worked out that I was the guy on the bike and that sent them into hysterics. I just had to giggle along nervously in the hope they were laughing with me, not at me. You can never be completely sure about that.

But they seemed okay with our gormlessness. So it was nice to learn a couple of weeks later that Lisa had met this guy she really liked. Yeah? It was my neighbour, whose girlfriend lived in Lisa’s nearby street who told me this. He’d heard it from his girlfriend. And his girlfriend reckoned the guy was me.

The ICE Queen Cometh

2011-07-01T12:42:00.002+10:00

I sometimes get text messages from TLOML at work. No, not the Liz Hurley-Shane Warne type. Just mundane family stuff like, would I pick something up from the supermarket on the way home? Did I remember to call our accountant? That sort of thing. Alright, usually there'll be one of those cheesy little emoticons attached, but nothing salacious. Certainly nothing in the kick-arse department, that's for sure. No, if I need a bollocking, that can wait till I get home.

Except for the text I received one morning this week. It was from a newly-created contact, Your Wife, which I hadn't entered myself, and went something like this:

The name is TLOML, you smartarse bastard! And don't you forget it.

I don't mind admitting I went immediately into kangaroo-caught-in-the-headlights mode. What was going on? Had some psychopath tapped into my phone? Wait. Wait a minute, that would represent an obvious but highly plausible and dramatic segue from a couple of previous posts. And would mean that the author of this blog actually has something really interesting and continuity-friendly happen to him from time to time. No, that couldn't be it.I thought I'd better give TLOML a ring to see if she knew anything. I'm pretty sure I gulped audibly just before calling her.

"Hi. Um, did you send me a text message a little earlier?"

"Yes, I did."

"Alright. So, what was it all about?"

"Well, see if you can work it out."

"Don't be stupid. I have no idea what it's about."

"Alright then."

She hung up. I had some serious thinking to do. What could I have done to have made her so angry, for chrissakes? And no, I can't write "and then it dawned on me" because bugger me it just didn't. I went on with work for about another couple of hours. Alright, and THEN it dawned on me. I'd heard on the radio just before Christmas that emergency services authorities were recommending people save the phone number of their next of kin in their mobile phone address books so that if anyone was ever injured and unconscious, direct contact with their next of kin could be easily effected. The suggested universal acronym was ICE, for In Case of Emergency.

Was it possible that TLOML had been looking for a contact in my phone's address book, seen her number under ICE, and taken offence? Yes, it was. So I called her back.

"TLOML, listen don't hang up - I think I know what's happened."

"Really? Go on."

"Well, do you remember when I told you how I was listening to the radio and someone from one of the Emergency Services was talking about how difficult it was to to contact the next-of-kin of people who had undergone significant trauma like in an accident and might be unconscious or in shock? And how everyone was being urged to save their next-of-kin's phone number under ICE for In Case of Emergency? Do you remember that?

"Oooohhhhhh, yes I do."

"So you saw that your mobile number was saved as ICE and jumped to what conclusion exactly?

"Um, that you had me saved under ICE in your phone so that when I called you to get you home from the cricket club you could show everyone that The Ice Queen was after you and everyone could have a good old blokey laugh at my expense."

"What?! How's that going to be funny? If I was going for that sort of cheap laugh you'd be saved as Party Pooper Central, Leader of the Opposition or The Handbrake. At least give me some credit."

"Alright, I'm sorry then."

And then we got the giggles. We're still laughing about it.

My Favourite Psychopaths

2011-06-30T16:51:00.003+10:00

I wrote this letter to one of the higher-ups in the Victorian Education Department late last year.

Dear Phillip,

I have an issue I would like to discuss with you concerning Solar Hills PS, where I was Leading Teacher (ICT-Middle Years) between January 2004 and May 2005.

I left SHPS to go on WorkCover after suffering a stress-related illness due to workplace bullying by the Principal Min Worland and then acting A-P Gavroula Parageorgiou. My subsequent WorkCover claim detailed the harassment I had been subjected to and was accepted by the insurer CGU without proceeding to a Conciliation Hearing. I have been led to believe that claims must have an uncommonly strong basis for this to occur. I learned at around this time that I had become the fifth Leading Teacher or above to leave Solar Hills PS in six years. Two of these senior staff had transferred out, one had re-graded to speed his exit and one had, like myself, gone onto WorkCover, never to return.

The formal complaint I made against Gavroula was upheld and the investigator, then acting Western Metropolitan Region Director Noel Downs informed me that she had been given a warning. The claims I made against Min could not be substantiated as some incidents I described in the complaint had occurred while no-one else was present. I also believe there was a reluctance on the part of SHPS staff members who had witnessed Min’s harassment to put themselves in a situation where they might become the next target. I have the letters from WMR on file.

Having maintained semi-regular contact with a couple of staff members from SHPS I have been very disheartened to learn that there has been no leavening of the situation. I have heard that WorkCover claims for stress-related illnesses by SHPS staff members have continued and compassionate transfers have been granted to some teachers. Others have managed to transfer or find employment elsewhere via fortuitous natural attrition. Still others remain at SHPS.

Some weeks ago, I visited a staff member, Desi Simonidis, in the Mercy Mental Health Unit. Desi is an Education Support Officer of some 30 years standing at SHPS and is much-loved by the whole community. That wasn’t enough to protect her from being targeted by Min & Gavroula. She’s home now, but very unwell. Seeing Desi brought it home to me that something needs to be done.

Min & Gavroula habitually create conflict where none is necessary, construct adversaries out of thin air and simply must have a target. I wonder as I write this exactly who among the current staff has found themselves in Min and Gavroula’s cross-hairs because they: came up with a good idea before Min & Gavroula did; asked a question thought innocuous by everyone except those two; received praise from a staff-member that Min or Gavroula don’t like; noticed that the staff consultation provisions fall well short of those in the Agreement; or shown interest in AEU involvement. Or for no particular reason that anyone can discern.

These people have subjected teachers and ESOs to some terrible treatment over the past ten years. Unfortunately, many staff have not felt confident enough to make a formal complaint, so to be fair, neither WMR nor DEECD may have seen the accumulation of evidence necessary for them to be in a position to take firm action.

When I put it to the acting WMR Director at a 2006 interview that the school deserved better and could WMR not see a pattern in WorkCover claims emanating from SHPS, he told me that WMR were well aware of the situation. I don’t know if it’s a case of just waiting for the 60+years-old Min to retire and hope that the situation is resolved that way but Gavroula recently became the successful applicant for the A-P position and if anything, she has been a baleful influence on the gullible Min. The point being that no improvement should be expected while Gavroula is A-P, let alone if she was to become Prin.

When I left SHPS I felt that I had to forge ahead. I’d made a formal complaint after all, so I’d done my bit and to pursue the matter further might have appeared vexatious. I am satisfied with the way WMR investigated and acted upon my complaint back in 2005. But I had hoped that the warning to Gavroula might bring about some change. That is not the case. I want to emphasize that I am not seeking to have that matter re-opened, unless as part of an accumulation of evidence against Min and Gavroula.

The problem is that once clear of that very toxic work environment most people don’t want to be reminded of it, despite feeling greatly aggrieved and concerned for those who remain. I feel a bit guilty about not having followed things up and wish to see something tangible done about these very real threats to the health and well-being of hard-working, committed staff-members in a good school. One that is long overdue for some positive leadership.

I would appreciate any opportunity to discuss this matter with you and be grateful for any advice you could give me as to how to proceed with this.

Cheers

You Can Run But You Can't Hide IV

2011-01-13T13:45:00.002+11:00

You might remember a tale of some minor work-related travails of mine from a while ago, related here, here and here.

It seems the object of my disaffection is acting on the unofficial advice given to her - she returned from Family Leave for about six months and now she's back on it again. During her return we neither spoke to, looked at, nor acknowledged each other in any way. We also went to some lengths to avoid being in the same vicinity.

That's a perfect resolution no amount of mediation could have produced.

Classic Albums Augmented II

2011-01-08T18:30:00.004+11:00

Bob Dylan:

Highway 61 Revisited - Positively 4th Street

This post is part of a series where I piss-fart about, quite gratuitously, with the track-listing of some great albums.Although this is the album that is often perceived as Dylan's breakthrough electric opus, he'd already gone electric on the previous LP Bringing It All Back Home, his fifth, where side one opens with Subterranean Homesick Blues. But then, there are so many misconceptions about ol' Bob it's no wonder he seems to hate his fans at times and doesn't mind showing it.

It starts with the hard snap of a snare drum - the instantly recognizable opening of Like A Rolling Stone. Al Kooper was just there to observe the sessions but ended up playing the distinctive organ riff that makes the song so special. The lyric is a denunciation of a woman Dylan knew, and both Joan Baez and Marianne Faithfull have been suggested as the song's subject.

Dylan would continue the sneering with the similarly-themed Ballad of a Thin Man to close Side One of the original LP release but before then gives his characteristic black humour a run with Tombstone Blues, reminiscent of Subterranean Homesick Blues and much of his subsequent album Blonde On Blonde.

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry is the album's only ballad but Queen Jane Approximately is a song of caustic yearning, the humour returns in laugh-out-loud proportions with Highway 61 Revisited and then there's the edgy but still poignant Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.

I won't argue with Rolling Stone, who ranked this LP at 4 on their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It's a pretty sensational collection, after all.

So could it be improved? I think so, yes. And including the single Positively 4th Street would do just that. This song is almost a fraternal twin to Like A Rolling Stone: there's organ here too and the same kinds of lyrical and musical tones and themes which would enable it to fit very nicely on this album.

If you'd bought Highway 61 Revisited on its first release and thought highly of Like A Rolling Stone, then Positively 4th Street would have seemed like an almost perfect follow-up single. The two songs seem to go together in the same way that the Kinks' You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night do.

Positively 4th Street is generally held to be disparaging the Greenwich Village folk crowd who accused Dylan of selling out when he went electric and eschewed the folkiness of his earlier output. The main subject has been postulated as Bob's ex-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, the beautiful young woman on the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, but like much Dylanology, this remains unverified.

There you have it: a great album just got even greater. Thanks to me.

So Which Tracks Would Miss Out?
None, just shorten Desolation Row a little - there's no need for a song to run for 11 minutes for chrissakes.

Here In My Car...

2010-12-29T13:15:00.009+11:00

This is what I've got on the 6-stacker CD player in the car at the moment. Not a bad sequence of albums.

Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan
why it was initially disappointing but is now growing on me

Look closely at the front cover. Let your eyes go out of focus a little bit. Could you do what the young woman in the record shop did when she saw me purchasing this album? Could you exclaim "Oohhhh, that old Dr Who has a CD out?" I suppose not.

This 1967 double album, the first two-record set release by a major rock artist, is something of a wine-dark sea, running a disappointing gamut from the dirge-like ragtime of Rainy Day Women to the novelty-song-only Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat. In between, there are some good, but not great songs, like Stuck Inside of Mobile and Maggie's Farm. But even the pretty good songs like Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands are ponderous and overlong.

So even though it's regarded as a classic, and is 9th on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of all Time list, don't let that fool you. It's really for fans only. I suppose you'll have to count me in with that lot because bugger me but it hangs together quite well after a few listens.

Led Zeppelin II: Led Zeppelin
how I'd forgotten what a great album this was

Alright, I'm still a rock snob. But not nearly as much as I used to be. Back then, I'd go out of my way to downplay this album, and the even more popular Led Zeppelin IV. The true rock snob, you see, will inevitably elevate the lesser works of great artists over their better-known classics. So where Led Zeppelin are concerned, it's their eponymous debut album and Led Zeppelin III that get all the rock-snob praise.
And after not having listened to this album in its entirety for well over thirty years, my vestigial rock snobbery had convinced me that it wasn't any good. Wrong. Dead wrong. This 1969 release is a great album that combines Led Zeppelin's blues credentials with the heavier spheres they were taking rock into on the ubiquitous Whole Lotta Love, Heartbreaker, Living Loving Maid, The Lemon Song and Bring It On Home. And just a dash of English-folk-inspired balladry as well on What Is And What Should Never Be, Thank You and Ramble On.

And here's a tip - try to imagine the impact it would have had if you were hearing it for the first time back when it was first released. That makes it even more mind-blowing.

American Beauty: Grateful Dead
how you can like an album a lot, even in spite of itself

They're an elusive lot, the Grateful Dead. Their archetypal psychedelic album, Anthem of the Sun (1967), is something of a stinker but this 1970 release seemed to be pretty highly regarded. So I bought it and immediately felt I'd been taken to the cleaners. It's country rock of the type that all of the old psychedelic acts seemed to be making around the 1969-70 period.
But on first listen, it was just too cornpone, and at the same time phoney, like they were cashing in on a fad. And then I kept listening. And grew to appreciate it.

During the recording of American Beauty, Jefferson Airplane, CSNY and the New Riders of the Purple Sage were all using Wally Heider's studio complex and the Dead took a little comfort from all of them to infuse this album with its unmistakeable feel.

The opening track, Robert Hunter and Phil Lesh's Box of Rain is just a beautiful song. And the rest of the album flows nicely from there. With plenty of pedal-steel and mandolin. The country-rock flavour is more rootsy than what other acts in that pantheon like say, Neil Young were producing at that time, so I think it's probably a bit less accessible.

The cover contains an ambigram - you can read the title lettering as American Beauty or American Reality - wow!

Burn: Deep Purple
I am nothing if not self- indulgent

I would probably not like this 1974 album, the first from a new Purple lineup, all that much if not for one thing: the singing of the new guys - vocalist David Coverdale and bassist Glenn Hughes. There are a number of songs where they share lines in a call-and-answer type way and the counterpoint their two very complementary voices provides is quite thrilling.
The title track is a riff-driven, first-growling, then screaming classic. Might Just Take Your Life and Lay Down Stay Down both rock right out, putting Hughes up front with Coverdale. And let's not forget Mistreated, another Blackmore masterwork.

I don't think this album will do for everyone, though - it's an indulgence of mine, or at least the part of me that still thinks tight pants and shoulder length hair and the music that tends to go with them, are really cool. Funny thing, the mastering makes this a very loud album. I usually have to turn the volume down a couple of notches when it comes on. But not always.

So What: Joe Walsh
I didn't think he'd be a "Best of only" guy, and he's not

I bought The Best of Joe Walsh when I was about 17 and thought it might be about all I'd need from this guitar slinger. Look how wrong you can be.
I've always been an admirer of Joe's guitar playing (a languid-sounding kind of pyrotechnics) and his singing grows on you in a Dylanesque kind of way. The definitive version of the classic Turn To Stone appears here, as do other Walsh live staples as Time Out and Help Me Through The Night.

A few of his soon-to-be bandmates from the Eagles sing backup, and the album showcases the variety of influences Joe Walsh has always brought into play.

But if you skip the drunken All Night Laundromat Blues, I'll understand.

Stripped: Rolling Stones
why I wouldn't ever dare disparage these guys

This 1995 album is just superb, and I'm the kind of Rolling Stones fan who still refers to Ronnie Wood as "the new guy" after 35 years. There should also be a DVD - bugger me it was shown on TV in about 1996 - but the Stones are nothing if not enigmatic about DVD releases - the 1968 Rock 'n' Roll Circus wasn't released until 1996 and 1974's Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones has only just made it into the shops.
The title is a play on the "unplugged" phenomenon, which was just about running its race by this time. But it isn't The Stones Unplugged, or even playing stripped-down versions of their hits at all. No, this is very much a beefed-up Stones from what live audiences had come to expect from them.

You see, the Rolling Stones have always stripped down many of their songs into loose arragements of the original for their concerts. Mick Jagger sometimes seems to be phoning it in, slurring further his already slurred drawl. And then they're also the kind of band you need to be hearing on a good night, too. During the same Voodoo Lounge Tour that produced this offering, I saw their second show at the MCG and was very pleasantly surprised at how good they were.

But for this album, they revamped the setlist for boutique live shows and recorded some less well-known early songs like Spider And The Fly and I'm Free live in the studio. The result is, put simply, the Stones as you've probably always wanted them to be.

The opening Street Fighting Man has much of the feel of the original studio recording restored and on Angie and Wild Horses they've gone to some lengths to come up with exciting guitar arrangements that are faithful but still varied enough to make you sit up and take notice of what Keith Richard and Ron Wood are doing. This applies across the whole album as they take a lot of care over Let It Bleed and Sweet Virginia.

But there's a standout - they do a sensational cover of Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone!

I won't kid you - this is the kind of album sequence that makes me look forward to driving. And has me jumping in the car on the slightest pretext.

Repartee

2010-11-16T23:30:00.001+11:00

TLOML's maiden name is Italian. In the Sicilian dialect from the area her dad comes from, it translates as box, or casket. But over most of the Italian peninsula it means protective head covering. This includes hoods, welding masks and helmets, particularly bicycle helmets.

She gets annoyed when I mention this. And if the three stooges want to have a little fun at her expense, they'll use her maiden name when talking about helmets or any kind of safety headgear.

Now, my family name is Scottish and Irish, and translates as someone engaged to establish or maintain a garden.

So when Curly informed us this morning that he needed a new bicycle helmet, TLOML thought for a moment and decided they'd better go get one tonight after school.

So I told Curly, "You couldn't be in better hands, y'know. If anyone's going to know how to get you a great bike helmet, it's the former TLOML Bike Helmet herself."

This got three big laughs. And a fourth, if you also count me laughing at my own wit.

"Yes, and it's lucky I actually live up to my name, as opposed to dad, who is useless in the garden despite having the near-perfect name for it."

This got even louder laughs. I didn't feel disposed towards helping the cackfest along any.

"You nailed me", was the best I could come up with as I slunk out the front door.

Things I Just Never Took To I: Horse Racing

2010-11-08T22:25:00.003+11:00

Over at The Scrivener's Fancy a while ago, Tony Martin wrote a piece covering ‘Things That Everyone Else Is Into, But Which I Have No Interest In’. Have a read of it, sure. Just don't go on and on about how much funnier his article was than this one, alright?

This series is not one of those Grumpy Old Men-style rants about all of the things that piss me off. Fucking hell, you'd be here all night! No, this is more a list of things I just never took to. Things I feel a barely-disguised, hostile neutrality towards. Like Sweden's approach to Germany during WWII. Like every first date looked at me. I think we've gone about as far as we can go with the metaphors.
Horse Racing:
It used to annoy the absolute bejesus out of my 13-year old self that I had to endure every race form the Saturday Melbourne race meetings while I was waiting for the World of Sport Football Panel to come onto our black and white TV. Racing was a blocker. I'd made a half-arsed attempt to convince myself that I could get into it when the 50c mum put on Rain Lover for the 1969 Melbourne Cup paid $1.65 for a place.

But later that year, joining schoolmates from St Brendan's PS helping out at local stables in Flemington made me aware that horses put out a lot of shit. And the universal method of cleaning out their stalls was to do it with your bare hands and not complain. I wondered if a lot of horsy girls didn't have that piss-their-pants fixation with horses drop away completely at about the same point in the journey.

And it's not like there was any tyranny of distance, either. I grew up close to Moonee Valley, played football and cricket for the clubs that also bear that name, and include among my contemporaries many with a keen appreciation and significant weekly investments in the Sport of Kings. And for the last 22 years, Flemington Racecourse has been at the end of my street, for fuck's sake. Spring Racing Carnival? I'm almost oblivious to it. Hell, a lot of people who go are oblivious to it.But do I actively dislike it? Well, no. But I do have one issue. It bothers me not a jot that rich, famous people have it so much better than everyone else. There's an extent to which I even think that's as it should be. Just in case I'm ever rich and famous. But I don't like the way the Spring Racing Carnival, and its press coverage, is so insistent about rubbing our noses in it. That's all.

All Roads Lead To Rome - Eventually

2010-09-25T21:27:00.011+10:00

As most of you know, I work in the city. And I don't mind the daily train trip in and out, going from Newmarket inbound on the Craigieburn Line, to Flagstaff Station on the Underground Loop in the morning, and then out the same way in the afternoon.
I leave work at around 5pm, which puts me on time for the 5:14 to Craigieburn. And if the 5:14 is too jam-packed to get on, which happens around once a week, the 5:22 is usually okay. But not always. Sometimes the 5:22 is just as crowded and then I'm stuffed. Because the next two Craigieburn trains run express between Kensington and Moonee Ponds, which means Newmarket is by-passed so those trains are effectively no good to me.

And it shits me. There must be a solution... wait! I think I've got it!

Craigieburn trains are interspersed with Sydenham and Upfield Line trains, all of which stop at North Melbourne. So if I get on a Sydenham or Upfield train arriving at Flagstaff before the next Crigieburn train, I can get out at North Melbourne and walk up and then down the ramps to the Craigieburn Line platform. Even if that train is jam-packed, there are stacks of people who disembark at North Melbourne to hook up with Williamstown and Werribee Line Trains. So no matter how chocka that Craigieburn line train was to begin with, I can always get on at North Melbourne.

I never have to miss a train home again! Ever!

Period of daily train travel taken to arrive at this stunningly simple course of action? 2.25 years.

Draw your own conclusions. But I'm on the verge of working out where babies come from too.

Classic Albums Augmented I

2010-09-21T18:17:00.002+10:00

Over at The Rising Storm, Len Liechti compared the varied track listing of the two versions (UK & US) of the Rolling Stones' 1966 Aftermath album and concluded that "it’s always fun, if ultimately pointless, trying retrospectively to construct the perfect album by arguing what should have been added or left off".

Pointless fun? Sounds like a great idea. Let's do it.

But pardon me if what I'm about to say appears sacreligious. This series of posts is just a matter of having a look at a few notable albums and how they might have differed via the addition of contemporaneous singles. Some would have been enhanced, others would have been left with their status unchanged. And in one case, a less-than-ideal album just might have gone from self-indulgent failure to near-classic.

The Beatles:
Rubber Soul - Day Tripper; We Can Work It Out;

Rubber Soul has long been regarded as a fine album. It is often cited as the first album that was more than just a collection of songs. And Rolling Stone put it at Number 5, if you don't mind, on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. So I'm not saying it's deficient in any way, just that it could have been even better.

The opening track, Paul McCartney's Drive My Car, has a contemporary feel even today with its sinewy guitar lines and urgent vocals. Three of the most poignant ballads you'll ever hear in Norwegian Wood; Michelle; and Girl are interspersed throughout the track listing. It's a litany of great Beatles' songs and you could imagine the four songs already mentioned plus probably I'm Looking Through You; In My Life; and Wait all being hit singles instead of album tracks.

There was a lot of experimentation on Rubber Soul by contemporary standards. Backwards guitar solos, the sitar on Norwegian Wood, pianos sped up to sound like harpsichords, and clear influences from India to the US West Coast. The overwhelming majority of it sounded good, which is not always the case with experimentation. There would be a lot more of this on the next two albums from the fab four, Revolver and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band but Rubber Soul laid the bedrock for it.

And if you were listening to this on its first release, you might have pondered for a moment why the almost simultaneous December 1965 double-A side single release Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out didn't make it onto the album. But back in 1965, it's likely you would have bought the single anyway.

Day Tripper opens with one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in rock music and is a beautifully structured song. It's mainly a John Lennon-composed song, but one where Paul McCartney contributed the verses and sings lead vocal during the verse. Essentially a 12-bar, the Beatles had to do something to make their contribution to that form stand out. They do it by transferring the riff to the much-higher sub-dominant for a BIG key-change. This is held in a jam-like middle-8 while the vocals and guitars ascend to a crescendo that leads very deftly back to the riff.

McCartney's singing is a pure throat-shredding scream (lots of luck nailing that one, cover bands) and as with their very best songs, all vocalists can be heard distinctly through the harmonizing. This was one of those great times when a huge hit was also a seminal moment in rock history.

We Can Work It Out shifts in and out of 4/4 and 3/4 time, and sounds quaint with John Lennon's harmonium being a distinctive feature of the song. Like Day Tripper, this is another rare collaboration, with verses by McCartney and a chorus and middle-8 by John Lennon. The vocals are earnest and convincing, and switch back and forth between optimisim and pessimism. The Beatles had argued over which of the two songs on the single should be the A-side and so this record became the first-ever double A-side. However, it was We Can Work It Out which proved the more popular in airplay.

So Which Tracks Would Miss Out?
On an album with 14 tracks? None, not even the Ringo song, What Goes On. And the length of the album would stay under the LP limit of 45 min, with two great additions to the track listing.

Voices From The Blogroll II

2010-08-17T17:00:00.002+10:00

I only just noticed the other day that one of my earlier posts, Voices From The Blogroll, had the Roman numeral I appended to it, indicating the eventual arrival of a sequel. I had no such intentions, but my blogroll's been made over a bit since that post so I really should introduce you to a few very interesting people.

Audrey
The author of Audrey & The Bad Apples is Clementine Ford, an Adelaide-based writer and broadcaster. If you thought there were some right-wing nutters in the Melbourne tabloid media, the City of Churches has a cast of regulars to make them look like the Oxford Union. So it's a tough town in which to be one of the voices of reason. Writes warmly and honestly about personal matters too.

DK Presents
This music-based blog provides a really eclectic mix of album and artist reviews, much more so than what's usually found within the narrow confines of this blog. Delves into jazz and blues and manages to encapsulate what would normally be lengthy back-stories. Can cause you to reappraise your views (read prejudices!) about certain artists and their output.

Ears On Stalks
Boo had already made a name for herself with her other still-extant blog, The Galloping Skirt. A keen observer of the extraordinary in the everyday. Makes the personal universal.

Fifi Dangerfield
The Perth-based Frankie writes poignantly and yet matter of factly about her life there. I like the kick-arse iconography too.

Grog's Gamut
A political blog of some note. The best of his high-quality posts are those that deconstruct wrong-headed spin.

Happy Endings
Want to hear the viewpoint of a sex-worker? You've come to the right place. CJ works as a masseuse in a parlor in south-east Pennsylvania. A unique perspective with a clear leaning towards witty myth-busting.

Lady Pants
My only worry is Sydney might not be big enough for this 28-year old. She has a nice way with a snappy comeback and writes perceptively about her life in a vibrant metropolis. Maybe it is the Emerald City after all.

Lexicon Harlot
Interesting aspects of the English language are covered by this talented writer and knowledgeable linguist. Never pedantic, she always relates her arguments to meaning.

Lorna Lino
You could spend hours on her iconography alone. Fantastic images of women from the past, many juxtaposed ironically. And then there's her writing - always entertaining, she segues back and forth from the topical to the personal.

Man At The Pub
No, not the nasty drunk you try to avoid at all costs. This personal blog is always a little on the wry side and downright hilarious for it. You sometimes need to look very closely at the images.

Mike Fitz
Lean and Green. And why not? Somebody's gotta hang onto their principles. This activist is also a software architect. Work, life and community. Not a bad mix.

Much Ado About Sumthin'
Alternately prolific and dormant, Steph is one of the doyennes of blogging. Hilarious and not a little titillating, she also manages to make her legions of blogfans (I'm not kidding: 120+ comments per post, for chrissakes) feel special. Gives all comments a personal, and personable, response.

Penguin Hunter
Geoff is a comedian based in regional Victoria. The Penguin Hunter Diaries used to be wide-ranging but are now devoted largely to Geoff's passion for golf. Available for product endorsement contracts.

Phishez
This was one of the first blogs I ever followed. She's twenty-something and lives and works in Sydney. Quite a stylish writer whose voice is unique. Another blogger who takes great travel photos.

Sixth In Line
Writes about writing. Always thought-provoking. Great interplay in the well-stocked comments section too.

Veni, Vidi, Blogi
Ah, Latin. There's no other language does it quite as well. This guy says he's trying to be wry. And I reckon he succeeds. Another clever linguist.

Some Classic Albums: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly III: The Ugly

2010-08-15T16:30:00.011+10:00

Anthem of the Sun - The Grateful Dead:

I gave a curious workmate a lend of this album not so long ago. He didn't think much of it. Me either. I told him I didn't know if I'd ever bother to play it again. This was the Grateful Dead's "psychedelic album". Back in 1967, everyone was doing it. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; Their Satanic Majesties Request; After Bathing At Baxter's. Y'know, months in the studio, plenty of drugs, finally free to express themselves meaningfully, music would never be the same again, etc etc.

And psychedelic rock is a sub-genre that I have a considerable soft spot for. Because at worst, even the ordinary psychedelic LPs still had at least two or sometimes three really good songs on them. But not Anthem of the Sun.

The Grateful Dead were unable to settle on a studio after finding facilities in New York and LA unsatisfactory and ended up completing the album in their hometown San Fancisco. Warner Records got very antsy about the time and expense the album was devouring. So the fractured nature of Anthem of the Sun's genesis is writ large in the quality of the material. Aimless, overlong jams pad out the album and I honestly couldn't think of one good song.

There are also a number of live tracks. I'm inclined to the view (and you can shoot me down for this if you like) that live tracks belong on live albums. The Grateful Dead's reputation as a great live band might take something of a tumble with a few listens to these tracks. And they sound like padding. I've always thought Goodbye Cream a terrible album due to its live-tracks padding.

Finally, after a few recent listens to this album, I was left with one huge unanswered question: where do you find the real Grateful Dead? They made their name during the psychedelic era, but this, their signature psychedelic album, is lousy. Their two most highly-regarded albums are Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, but these belong in the country-rock firmament and so their best stuff is actually a departure for them. I know, it doesn't make sense.

So I still think of the Dead as something of an enigma, one I haven't yet been able to unravel.

Anthem of the Sun at amazon.com - MP3 files and reviews

Forever Changes - Love:

I normally try to steer clear of absolutism. So okay, I might like Bob Dylan a lot, but I can understand someone else not liking Dylan. The same goes for the Rolling Stones, the Who, Eric Clapton, you name it. If people just aren't that into them, I believe I can see where they're coming from. I really do. But not only do I not like the mid-60's Los Angeles-based Love's second album, I don't see how anyone could.

This is a stinking, steaming pile of complete shit. It sounds like a parody of self-indulgent, flighty, whimsical 60s music. I kept seeing it on those lists of the 20 Greatest Albums of All Time that kept appearing in the press during the 90s. And then, I shit you not, it came in at 40 on the Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time!

I'm sure you can imagine that I bought this album expecting exciting new worlds to open up for me, as they did when I explored albums by The Byrds and The Doors. And it was a reasonable expectation, considering Love were one of the top bands on the LA scene during that seminal period from 1964-1966 that also gave rise to the Byrds, the Doors and Buffalo Springfield.

And like much of the output of that LA scene, Forever Changes is folk-oriented more than anything - but this isn't the kind of folk that Dylan might have generated. Nope, this is more the earnest undergraduate Poetry Major type folk, with mincing vocal stylings by Arthur Lee. Think Johnny Mathis. And then the lyrics are laid over atrociously annoying melodies and there's far too much in the way of strings and brass.

Redeming features? In short supply, but they include high production values - it's a much clearer, vibrant sound than anything Buffalo Springfield or The Byrds were getting on their records. Some songs display similarities to the kind of innocent trippiness that would be better realized a little later by star-studded British psychedelic band Traffic, so Love might even have been a little prescient. But they still sound like phonies.

So why is it regarded highly in some circles? Well, back in 1966, Love had the almost irresistable ultra-cool mix of black and white guys in the band. And they had two prolific and, it must be said, original, songwriters in Arthur Lee and Bryan McLean. I also think there were a lot of people making bets on the future of what would become rock music, and Love had all the trappings of the very now.

John Densmore said in his autobiography Riders On The Storm that he would rather have been playing drums with Love than the Doors. I had to reread this to be sure. Rather be with Love than The Doors?!? You've got to be kidding. He wasn't.

But look, it might well be that Love had a lot of fleeting LA street cred, but their music just wasn't substantial enough to make them sound like anything better than a fad.

Forever Changes at amazon.com - MP3 files and reviews

Some Classic Albums: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly II: The Bad

2010-08-11T23:30:00.004+10:00

Blue - Joni Mitchell:

I hadn't heard much of Joni Mitchell's music. Just the 1971 hit Big Yellow Taxi and her version of Woodstock, which she wrote. Neither of which I was particularly enamoured of, but people raved about her, so I figured there must be something going on. Maybe there is, but I didn't find it with this album. Its formless and whimsical, like she's just piss-farting about. Don't get me wrong - whimsy can produce really good music. Just not in this case.

And yet, Blue was an almost instant critical and commercial success, peaking in the top 20 in the Billboard Album Charts in September 1971 and also getting to 3 in the British charts.What I do understand about Joni Mitchell is that it might well be a case of some people getting her and some people not, with me firmly in the latter category. What I hear as shapeless, meandering quasi-melodies with what seems like two octave shifts in every line, others undoubtedly hear as well crafted, tantalizingly-structured, not easily accessible songwriting and unique singing from deep inside a beautiful soul.

But put it this way: if I was in charge of security at my local shopping mall and had to find a way to stop teenagers from hanging around, I'd be piping this album through the PA.

Sailin' Shoes - Little Feat:
So many people I admired sang the praises of this outfit that I probably had unrealistic expectations. I thought maybe they might sound a bit like the Allman Brothers, or Atlanta Rhythm Section, or maybe Lynyrd Skynyrd. Or possibly even the Rolling Stones.

Little Feat recorded this album at Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles, where the Stones' Exile On Main Street was being finalized in 1972, and apparently the two bands got along like a house on fire and traded a few licks during whatever down time the Stones' had. It was even rumoured that listening to Little Feat had influenced the songs on the "country side" of the Stones' double album, but this is very much unconfirmed.

What Sailin' Shoes sounds like to me is like an album of sub-standard outtakes from the Grateful Dead's country-rock period in 1969-70. I can't think of a single song that stands out as a really good track. The songs are lacklustre and unmemorable. Neither the country nor the rock really works and they certainly don't blend very well on this album.

But there's one thing about Little Feat that makes me not want to give up on them completely: the guitar playing of Lowell George. He is one of the greats of the slide guitar with a uniquely fluent, bluesy style. It's difficult to understand why he wasn't given more prominence on Sailin' Shoes. It might have made a few songs passable. His playing on a 1979 cover version of I Can't Stand The Rain from Thanks, I'll Eat It Here, his only solo album, is terrific. And on a cover of a disco song, for fuck's sake!
A great many players have cited George as an influence, particularly Mick Taylor, who started using a heavy spark-plug spanner after he saw Lowell playing slide with one.

I don't normally use this expression, but for Sailin' Shoes, it's the most apt description I can think of:

meh

Brushes With Fame IV: Sophie Lee

2010-08-09T11:41:00.012+10:00

It was twenty years ago, today. I was sitting in the Sale of the Century contestants' dressing room, one of many opening off a narrow corridor, waiting for shooting to start. Five episodes, a whole week's worth, were due to be shot that day, in Monday-to-Friday order one after the other, with just a brief interlude for costume and set changes in between.

The other contestants had all gone off on the introductory tour of the studio. I was sitting watching daytime television. As this was taking place at Channel Nine's Richmond studios, it kinda figured that there was only one channel available. I was leaning back in my chair with my back to the dressing room door when I heard a long, languid sigh from the open doorway behind me.

"This is sooo boring."

I turned around and it was Sophie Lee, then host of the linking segments between Bugs Bunny cartoons shown during kids' viewing time. The joke around at the time was that as much as the cartoons had universal appeal, Sophie had her own male-dominated fan-base too, and was dressed to keep them interested.
"What are you here for?"

"Oh, I'm one of the contestants on Sale of the Century today."
"Well, why aren't you taking the tour with the rest of them?"

"Um, I - I did it last week and they said I didn't have to do it again, so I'm here watching TV."

"Ohhhh, so you're the champ," she said, one eyebrow arched rather, um, archly.

"Yes, well," I stammered, "I - I had a bit of luck during the final episode last week and..."

But she'd already turned around and walked away.

We're still in contact though.

Great Gigs IV: Mick Taylor at the Lone Star Cafe

2010-08-02T19:59:00.011+10:00

We were at a loose end in New York City, my two mates and I. It was late December 1986, and we'd been in The Big Apple just a few days. We'd seen the hit novelty movie Crocodile Dundee at a cinema just off Times Square the previous night. Thought it might be an idea to check out a band. So I went downstairs from our hotel room to a chilled-to-the-bone December afternoon on 47th St in Midtown Manhattan. I walked past steaming manholes and walk-up brownstones until I found a newstand and grabbed a copy of the Village Voice.

The gig guide at the back contained some good news for me. Well, actually it was sensational news. The Lone Star Cafe in Greenwich Village had the Mick Taylor Band playing that night. Ex-Rolling Stone Mick Taylor is one of my all-time favourite guitar players. And I'm not alone in that.

But first I had to be certain. Mick Taylor can be a fairly common name. I've known three of them in Melbourne alone. Plus there was a Michael Taylor who played football for Collingwood and another who played cricket for Victoria. That's five all up. And the Lone Star Cafe sounded a bit country to me. What if the Mick Taylor playing there was some good ol' boy from Lubbock, Texas and not the ex-Rolling Stones guitar player? A simple phone call to the venue sorted out any possible mistaken identity and we were off to check out the guy who replaced Brian Jones in the Stones in 1969 and Ronnie Wood's predecessor.

I'd seen Mick Taylor once before at the Chevron in Melbourne in 1982. If that was the realization of a dream, this took it up a notch. I was going to see Mick Taylor. In New York, for fuck's sake!

We caught a cab downtown and ate at a cheap Mexican restaurant in the East Village. But still got to the Lone Star Cafe just in time to snag one of the last available tables. The joint was starting to fill up as the support band, a blues outfit from Chicago, went through its final set. Our waitress reluctantly introduced herself. She didn't seem to like the look of us and it soon got to the mutual stage. My experience of the Big Apple is that it is NOT a friendly town. But we were prepared to peacefully co-exist with her. The Japanese couple sitting opposite were nice though, and we exchanged pleasantries with them until Mick hit the stage. Just as the guy was assuring me that "Everrywun rrliike Rorrrling Stonez."

Mick kept things pretty bluesy throughout his two excellent sets. And there were no complaints. The audience were way too cool to call out the names of Stones numbers. He played a couple of songs from his excellent eponymous 1979 debut solo album and I was rapt that the knowledgeable crowd reacted to these little-known gems. He even dipped into the Clapton catalogue with Key To The Highway. His singing was fine. Nothing to write home about but well-suited to the material.

And Mick Taylor played great guitar. His sound and his style were just beautiful. He's a really sweet blues guitarist and I suppose I'd rather listen to him cut loose than anyone. I heard recently that Slash rates him as a major influence (I'll update as soon as I track down a link for it) One thing that's always struck me about his slide guitar playing was that he seemed to do a fair bit of it in standard tuning, unlike Keith Richard who wouldn't use a standard tuning if his life depended on it. So it was tempting for rank amateurs like me to think they could go home and just churn it out like Mick. Fat chance.

When it was over, our waitress gave us the bill as perfunctorily as her service throughout the evening and we argued amongst ourselves about the tip. Suitably warmed by the drinks and the fact that I'd just spent an evening with one of my idols, I argued for ten percent, what I thought would be the base rate for tipping based on what I'd gleaned form the last few days in New York. They were either a cheapskate regular crowd at the Lone Star or she hadn't been making much in tips because she whooped and high-fived. She might have been taking the piss, but it was the first time she'd looked happy all night. Not like me.

During a break earlier in the evening, the guy next to me at the urinal said something that still haunts me. Nothing to do with size, you sillies. No, he mentioned that if I'd been there the night before, I would have seen Keith Richard on stage with Mick and his band. According to this bloke, Keith had strolled around from his nearby Greenwich Village home and got up and had a blast with his ol' Stones offsider. I thought the guy might have been mouthing off and didn't give his info much credence but bugger me if I haven't read of exactly what he described referred to in separate interviews with both Mick Taylor AND Keith Richard a couple of times since. Missed it by THAT much!

Update!

Mick Taylor performing with the band at around the same time as this gig occurred.

Chandleresque

2010-07-29T20:10:00.040+10:00

Introduction:

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I'm an ex-teacher. I now work at the office of the Victorian state authority in charge of regulating the teaching profession. It's not a bad spot.Teachers have to pay $70 per year to be registered so to say we're about as popular as a Jap on ANZAC Day with some of our constituents is putting it mildly.

Every so often, staff organize lunchtime seminars on topics of general interest. A guest speaker will come in and talk and answer quesions for about 45 minutes. They've all been very entertaining. At one of these lunchtime seminars earlier this year, the guest speaker was writer Shane Maloney. He's published quite a bit of crime fiction and it's very good. He told us that he'd been influenced by writers like Hammett, and Chandler and Peter Corris in building a distinctive style that was of Melbourne's milieu, and he's right, you do get that feeling from his books.

What happened was, Shane Maloney arrived a little late on this particularly hot day. He apologised and then told us a bit about himself. His wife was a teacher so he understood us. We were in the extortion racket, he said. Pretty funny guy. And he'd been Cultural Director of Melbourne's 1996 Olympic bid. Somebody may have organized hookers, but it certainly wasn't him.

Anyway, there's a staff newsletter that goes out once a week and I put together a review of Shane's visit. Being something of a Chandler afficionado I thought I'd have some fun with it. But the Communications Manager couldn't publish it and I was inclined to agree with her. One of the characters was based on a colleague, you see. And there was just the one key phrase that made it inappropriate. See if you can figure out which one it was.

The Writer Who Arrived Late

I wasn’t doing much that day. The frosty blonde who walked into my downtown office looked like she might change that. She eyed me slowly and carefully, like I was something she’d just stepped in, and arched a manicured eyebrow at the Clayton’s bottle on the desk. I shrugged. All class, she raised the bottle to her mouth and uncorked it using her teeth.

She took a long, slow swig and shuddered. Giving her the once over, I could see she was a little on the short side, but with the kind of upholstery that could make a bishop want to kick a hole in a stained glass window.

“Call me Bridget,” she said. “I know a guy wants to meet you. Name’s Maloney. He’s waiting outside.”

“I bet you know a lot of guys, Bridget. Can’t think why any of them would want to meet me. What’s his angle?”

“His bio’ll say he’s a crime writer. The funny stuff. Booked him to crack gags at a lunchtime seminar and he didn’t show. I found him impersonating a foetus in a lane outside. The guy’s a mess.”

“Suppose you tell me how else you’re mixed up in this.”

“Me? I’m a fan of his. Least, I used to be.”

“Okay, show the comedian in. And then scram. Floozies like you I can get wholesale."

He was the kind of tall, stoop-shouldered streak of misery who looked like he’d been slapped around. By a dame. All his life. His oversized glasses sat crookedly on his sallow face. Plenty of laughs so far.

“What do you want, Maloney?”

“I need some protection. The tough guy kind. I think my wife’s trying to get rid of me.”

“What makes you think she’s not on the level?”

“She’s gone and got herself registered with VIT. Then I get this phone call from some dame in the VIT office asking me to come in and shoot the breeze. I’m supposed to be there now.”

“Can’t help you, Maloney. I don’t do matrimonials. But that’s not the whole story either. In my line of work, you get used to taking slaps from guys the size of beer trucks. Or the occasional slug from a pearl-handled .22 straight out of an alligator purse. But if there was any sort of law in this town, it’d say don’t tangle with VIT. I don’t like ‘em. Nobody does. And I don’t like the racket they’ve been running shaking down teachers these last eight years. But we both know a bankroll fed by a guaranteed $70pa from 110,000 chalk-jockeys can buy a lot of nasty friends. So far, only the ambulance chasers and yellow press have had the guts to try to put a kink in their hose. I figure if your wife’s mixed up with them, you’re already near the top of the coroner’s dance card. And I’m not going to be the sucker wiping up the grease stain left behind once they’re through with you.”

His bottom lip trembled like a Liberal leader making a concession speech. He was drenched in sweat. Sure it was hot, but not enough to explain that amount of perspiration. It was starting to spread out across the carpet like ink on blotting paper. And I was almost starting to feel sorry for him. Almost.

“Tell you what, Maloney: I’m not taking your case, but I’m damned if I can let a string-bean like you go in there without some kind of cover story. I’d feel like an accessory. So listen and listen good. This may be your only chance. Walk in all hot and bothered like you are now. That way, it’ll look like you at least tried to be there on time. Make all the right apologetic noises but don’t labour it. Nobody likes a milquetoast.

Turn on the charm. Start with a slow smile. And let ‘em know you’re onto ‘em. That you’ve got a make on their racket. Hell, even show a little knowing admiration for the kind of cunning needed to get a stranglehold on the teaching caper in this town. Do that, and they’ll be grinning at you through their shark-teeth like you’re one of them, a co-conspirator.

Once they’re hooked, you can take ‘em through the reading process from their point of view and then hit ‘em with an insightful history of your writing. Why it reads the way it does. How your main character, ALP drone Murray Whelan, came into the world and how he makes his way down its mean streets. Then give ‘em the inside dope on the crime-writing schtick: how you gotta play the game the way other crime writers have, but with your own angle, not following a recipe.

Throw in a few celebrity name-drops whenever you can too. Everybody loves insider gossip. That kind of stuff’s been filling seats since before Vesuvius gave Pompeii a makeover. And don’t back off on the zingers, either. They’ll get restless if the wisecracks slow down to Monash Freeway speed.”

He was nodding like one of those toy dogs all the Sunday drivers used to have in their back windows.

“Have you got all that?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Just one more thing Maloney: if you had anything to do with that failed cheapskate Olympic bid all those years ago, don’t mention it. There’s a lot of people still sore about that.”

“Thanks. You’ve probably saved my life.”

“Think so? You’re wife’s a registered teacher. They don’t let go easily…“

Epilogue:

Maybe you had to be there. But I've read a couple of Shane Maloney's books and they stack up pretty well. During his talk, he explained how he'd worked out who his protagonist was going to be. He thought Peter Corris' private investigator Cliff Hardy was a good fit for Sydney, and Bondi in particular, but he couldn't see a shamus quite suiting Melbourne. So his protagonist Murray Whelan is an ALP staffer whose chief domain is Melbourne's northern suburbs. Two of his novels have been adapted into a couple of pretty good films, Stiff and The Brush Off starring David Wenham as Murray Whelan.

So, did you work out which bit rendered it unsuitable?

Some Classic Albums: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly I: The Good

2010-07-25T18:35:00.013+10:00

I was almost resigned to a relatively music-free existence. We had nothing at home even remotely up to date in the way of a sound system and I'd been reduced to playing CDs through our less-than adequate desktop PC, and even then only when home alone. Too many complaints about my "weirdo music" y'see. It was like being in my early teens again, only with a lot less hair and fewer pimples.

My CD catalogue was limited, and overshadowed by my vinyl collection and my most recent el cheapo turntable had given up the ghost years ago. No matter, I wasn't listening to much music anyway.

But as luck would have it, we needed a new car. And the one we settled on came with a six-stacker CD player. I was back in town!

So I decided to get all systematic. That's anal retentive to you. I was going to buy classic or near-classic albums. The kind that I'd heard of, but never got around to listening to. That way I'd be broadening my horizons. A noble imperative. This is pretty much how it turned out:

Liege & Lief - Fairport Convention - 1969:

This is just a superb album. On first listen, I immediately regretted not getting into Fairport Convention about thirty years earlier when a drummer I knew couldn't shut up about this seminal English folk-rock outfit. The drummer had been into Led Zeppelin, and because Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny had sung so beautifully on their song Battle of Evermore from the album Led Zeppelin IV, it made sense to him to explore her regular band. And become a big fan.

I'd listened to a few bands that had accommodated the English folk influence. Bands like Wishbone Ash and Led Zeppelin. I'd also listened to a bit of Steeleye Span as well, who had formed late in 1969 by way of a breakaway from Fairport Convention.

Liege and Lief represents the realization of a group decision to concentrate solely on English folk-derived rock music in the wake of a terrible accident. Their drummer, Martin Lamble, and guitarist Richard Thompson's girlfriend had been killed in a motorway accident in the band's van early in 1969 and the surviving Fairport members were unsure whether to wind things up or keep going. They decided to continue, but to make themselves stand out from the folk-rock crowd by delving into English folk. Their previous album, Unhalfbricking, had been a success with some of that influence present among some more contemporary folk stylings and a couple of Dylan covers.

Pleasingly, for those among you who might be a little skeptical about English folk, there's not too much "diddly-diddly" on this album. It kicks off with the rollicking Come All Ye, where Sandy Denny's pure as snow singing is beautifully complemented by some earnest backing vocals and Dave Swarbrick's rich, melodic violin. While some might find the unwavering intensity of Denny's voice across this album a little too much of a good thing, it somehow manages to fit the character voices in the traditional Matty Groves, perhaps Fairport's signature tune, without changing at all.

She continues with Richard Thompson's poignant Farewell, Farewell, and the anti-war ballad The Deserter. The instrumentation is arranged especially handsomely for the urgent, halting Tam Lin, and further augments Denny's voice without ever overpowering it on the last track, the despairing murder-ballad Crazy Man Michael.

Both Denny and drummer Dave Mattacks would depart soon after this album to form Fotheringay and Steeleye Span respectively, thus expanding the English folk rock universe. But while Fairport Convention would continue for the next three decades, Denny was to die tragically after a fall at home in 1978 at the age of 31. Thankfully, her beautiful voice lives forever.

UPDATE!:
This clip is a slideshow backing the song Farewell, Farewell from the album.

Still Alive & Well - Johnny Winter - 1974:

Guys I knew when I was a teenager back in the 70s were into Johnny Winter. Guys who were, like me, right into the blues. So I knew he was a Texas born-and-raised albino with a similarly pigmented keyboard-playing brother named Edgar, that he was famous for slide guitar, that many great players rated him highly, that he had a long association with Rick Derringer, and that he liked to do Rolling Stones covers. But somehow, I just never got around to checking him out at all.

And as with Liege and Lief, here was another album to evoke the question "How Long Has This Been Going On?". In Johnny Winter's case, since his childhood: he and brother Edgar were a popular duo on Texas country radio during the late 50s. They were also one of the acts at Woodstock but didn't make it onto the original film, only the 40th Anniversary Edition.

1974's Still Alive and Well was titled in response to a rumour that Johnny had died, as his hard-living, abusive lifestyle was common knowledge. Produced by Rick Derringer, the album features an affecting version of his almost-misogynistic Cheap Tequila. Winter adds a stinging rendition of the ubiquitous blues Rock Me Baby and the authentic soulful country ballad Aint Nothing To Me. The title track and covers of the Stones' Silver Train and Let It Bleed are great blues flavoured rock tunes, the way he does them.

This is a fine album, well worth purchasing and if you're anything like me, you'll feel a pang of regret that your older sisters' boyfriends didn't get you into Johnny Winter sooner.

UPDATE!:

This clip is from a Johnny Winter live appearance on German television in 1970. The Song is Mean Town Blues.

Voices From The Blogroll I

2010-03-02T22:07:00.004+11:00

Enough about me. Let's talk about you.

My blog might not be much more than a small and insignificant grease-stain on the blogosphere's linen, but I've made the acquaintance of a few bloggers here and there. And so, like in a bad 70s telemovie, here they are, Starring in Alphabetical Order:

After Grog Blog
Now here's a bloke who knows how to put together a pithy phrase or two. AGB tends to have a dual focus: sport, mainly football and cricket. And deflating the pompous. Always a good read, when these two themes are combined, it's priceless. Newspaper sub-editors would do well to match the wit of his post titles. The only Melbourne supporter I know who can carry off smug superiority.

Anonymous Lefty
Not so anonymous anymore but still fighting the good fight. Brilliant rebuttals of specious neo-conservative reasoning.

Blakkat
If you can get past the very appealing iconography, and it took me a little while, you'll find a versatile writer who makes the personal universal and the odd op-ed piece that would sit better in a newspaper than most of the lightweights and polemicists who reside there.

Blog Voyeur Meghan's blog is open and honest about her life in British Columbia. She writes perceptively about the minefield that is the single girl's life and times. Infuses most pieces with disarmingly funny self-deprecation.

BWCA A dear blog friend, Helena covers a wide range of topics in her unique style. Hints at a breath-takingly interesting life. She could make this blog an ongoing episodic autobiography and no-one would complain.

Copper Witch
Fabulously informative, Jahteh frequently posts fascinating material of a science-related nature complete with beautiful images.

Daniel Bowen
Incumbent Public Transport Users Association President, Daniel's blog focuses on transport issues mainly but there's invariably a little more to it than that. Always a good read.

Dating Diaries
Aint she sweet? Miss D is her second blog persona and her warmth and wit has glowed through both of them. Not posting as often as her fan-base would like these days. She once theorized about female bloggers dropping off the perch once they hook up with Mr Right. Say it aint so. Please.

Eleanor Bloom
Perth-based Eleanor adores Vivien Leigh. Frankly m'dear, I don't give a.... nah, just kidding. She's forthright and honest and tomorrow is always another day.

High Riser
Andrew is prolific and invariably stimulating. His blog abounds with local historic information and he's very erudite about public transport history. His friends and family make up a cast of intriguingly-drawn chacters.

Legal Eagle
Mixing the legal and the personal, she shines at both and combines the two beautifully. She writes warmly and doesn't lose that when debating firmly. Probably the sort of writer Miranda Devine wishes she was.

Madame Z
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her travel pieces about Italy were lovely.

FG Marshall Stacks
Rock-based blog combines the personal, but never overdoes it. And with good reason. Because I'm convinced Helena was present at all of the seminal moments in Australia's rock history. Also authors BWCA.

Mooiness
This Perth guy is really entertaining, in a really thoughtful way. He gets right into the essence of being a single bloke. Some of us have dim memories of such a life, lived long, long ago. His descriptive writing illuminates them.

The Orstrayhun Prolific poster on politics and society. Crikey should engage his blog. But why would he take the pay cut? ;-)

The Rising Storm
This is a dead-set goldmine for 60s-70s music aficionadoes. A goldmine that nevertheless gives up the odd chunk of iron pyrites. He mixes it up a bit with reviews of classic albums by big name bands to unheralded gems from near-unknowns. He also features the unfamiliar work of the familiar artist and vice-versa.

Some Chilean Woman
Utah-based young married woman who's in touch with her emotions and sexuality. And puts her readers in touch with them too. Takes great photos of beautiful landscapes.

Ms Smack
Adelaide thirtysomething mum Catherine works in the very demanding child-protection area. Between her job, parenting, study and a social life, I don't know where she finds the time to blog but I'm glad she does.

Lord Sedgewick
Australia's rightful vice-regal representative. A sort of Bonnie Prince Sedgewick. Writes and illustrates.

Wells Of Fancy
Edward Yates lives not far from me but we've never met. He's not been posting much lately, but it's always worthwhile when he does.

So there they are. None of them need my endorsement. But go and have a look. You won't be disappointed. Not like on this blog.

Good Lord, Is That The Time?

2009-12-17T00:01:00.003+11:00

I know I've been absent for some time now. Four months or something. And unlike some of my blogging contemporaries who drop out from time to time, I can't claim a new love-interest as the reason I haven't got around to putting anything up here lately. So I'll put it down to a combination of work; cricket; family; my 50th birthday extravaganza (I'll post about this just as soon as I get the photos back from the chemist shop - hokey nostalgia alert!) and indolence.

I still have about twelve posts in draft form almost raring to go but haven't got around to doing anything with them. And would you believe they are some of the most gripping; side-splitting; witty; prescient; and incisive blog posts you're ever likely to read? I didn't think so.

So talk amongst yourselves. Relax. I'll be with you in a jiffy.

The Day Before Yesterday

2009-08-07T22:29:00.006+10:00

I gathered some inspiration for this from a recent post over at one of my favourite blogs: Mooiness. Marcus was musing about whether tolerance for other peoples' idiosyncracies was the key factor in determining whther a newly-formed relationship could last. And wondered if the too-quick identification of a "character flaw" in a potential partner was a subconscious escape clause. I'm paraphrasing, and I'm not sure if I've done justice to Moo's excellent post, so you can read exactly what he had to say here.

But in my case, it was 1985 and I was 26 and about as single as you could get. A colleague was having a fancy dress party and when I arrived early as Angus Young, there was only one other guest there: this beautiful Asian girl who was wearing an I Dream of Jeannie outfit that came very close to making me forget all about Barbara Eden. We spent a fair proportion of the evening talking together and somehow ended up getting in touch shortly afterwards to organize a date. I was through to the semis.

She lived out in Keilor Downs and when I got there she was not quite ready so I chatted with her sister, also a stunner, and then we went next door so I could meet her folks. That's right, her folks lived next door to the house where the two sisters lived. Dad was of Malaysian Chinese origin, and had worked for the RAAF in Malaysia and then emigrated. Mum was English. They were really nice people. We spent quite a long time talking with her folks and they made it clear in a subtle way that Helen, the younger of their two daughters, was unaccustomed to going out with blokes and that I was being afforded quite a privilege. None of which bothered me. It was a first date, so it was bound to be something of an exploratory expedition for all concerned.

We had dinner at a restaurant in Fitzroy and she was really lovely. But very shy, and although obviously intelligent, not terribly worldly. Like she'd been a bit sheltered. All of this was okay. I wasn't exactly the playboy of the western world myself, and although clueless in a great many ways, flattered myself that I understood how we don't all march to the beat of the same drum.

I dropped her off back at her place, had a quick cup of coffee with her and her sister and went home. It had gone well, (albeit a bit more G-rated than I'd have liked), and I was keen to continue.

So I thought it was great when she rang me the following Friday to see if I wanted to go out to the pictures with some friends of hers. We met up at the house in Pacoe Vale where the three friends lived, two guys and a girl. This particular evening did not go well.

There was far too much umming and ahhing about what film to see. I kept quiet and left them to it. Threw in a suggestion or two but these were not taken up. The debate dragged on and on until finally they settled on The Breakfast Club. I'd never heard of it and asked who was in it. Turned out it was a Brat Pack movie. Fuck. Oh well, it was a night out.

We arrived at the Greater Union cinemas in Russell St in the city with a bit of time to kill. I suggested we pop around to the Carlton Hotel in Bourke St for a couple of drinks. More debate. I found their dithering frustrating, and I think it showed. And the film was shit. I know director John Hughes passed away yesterday, but I didn't think much of this film at all, so I'm taking his many eulogies with a grain of salt.

There was more indecisiveness about what to do after the movie so it ended up being a date-that-pretty-much-wasn't. And I decided not to pursue things with Helen. We were heading in different directions. As much as I liked her, as lovely as she was, (and she was lovely on all levels), I couldn't imagine hanging around with her friends and she was clearly very family-oriented. The prospect of spending long nights in front of the TV at her folks' place (at anyone's folks' place, including my own!) was one I didn't relish. There was just the matter of the party I was having at my place in a couple of weeks that I'd told her about.

During the leadup to this party, I didn't contact her. She resolved everything when her phone call got me out of the shower before work one morning to tell me announcement-style that she wouldn't be coming along. I said that was fine, but asked her why. Because she didn't want to go out with me anymore. I told her that was fine too, and wished her well. Quite a nice, mutually satisfactory ending. Rare? In my experience, yes.

It was a shame, but it was looking too much like I'd be dating a shy teenager, and that just didn't suit me. And I'd also say there was probably a good deal of me not suiting her involved too.

But the funny thing was that a couple of years later, when TLOML and I started dating, I found a lot of similarities between the two of them. Some differences too. However, on reflection the big difference was to do with me. Because for TLOML, I was ready to make some kind of commitment. I think also by that time, I was thinking it was more about her than her surroundings.

The rest is history.

But just by way of a coda: some seven years later, TLOML arrived home from work one afternoon after we'd been married about a year wanting to know who this Helen was. I didn't connect initially, but it turned out Helen was this beautiful Asian replacement teacher who'd filled in for her the day before and in the note she'd left TLOML, mentioned that we'd dated and asked to be remembered to me. Helen was doing replacement teaching while she was on family leave, and I managed to piece together that she'd married a pretty cool bloke I'd once worked with briefly and they'd had a baby.

I think that makes four happy endings, all up.

I Snore, Therefore I Am

2009-08-01T00:57:00.012+10:00

She thought it was funny. But it made her worry a little too. The way I'd just stop breathing while I was lying there asleep next to her. Naturally, I was unaware I was doing it, but was pleased I'd come up with something endearing without having to contrive it. A few years later, when I met up with TLOML, she remarked on it too. The condition is called sleep apnoea.

And it's expanded since then. Not only do I stop breathing periodically when asleep, I snore. TLOML reckons she gets not just the buzz-saw but the adjacent timber yard complete with trucks grinding up and down through the gears as they go in and out. I was determined to do something about it. And that something was to deny it completely and counter-accuse her of providing the odd somnolent symphony of industrial music herself. Not an ideal solution.

So just a couple of months ago, I asked a dental technician if he could make one of those special mouthguards up for me. No, I'd have to see my GP. It was a medical issue. The GP referred me to the Sleep Disorder Clinic at Royal Melbourne Hospital. The honest information I gave on the questionnaire suggested to the specialist there that it wasn't a big problem.

And TLOML had provided reassurance by reminding me that she was a pretty light sleeper anyway and maybe my snoring wasn't really all that bad. Not a deal-breaker, anyway. But she'd still prefer that it stopped, though.

The doctor told me the main cause of sleep apnoea was obesity. Not in my case. For me, it's because I have a funny-shaped palate-throat cavity combination. So next week, I'm taking home a machine to monitor what goes on when I sleep.

The most likely outcome is I'll need to go off to the dentist and fork out a grand for a clear plastic jaw clamp that'll make me look a bit like that big bloke who turned up in a few of the Roger Moore James Bond movies.

If I can be arsed, I'll record and post a little night music for the purpose of verification.

What Would You Have Done?

2009-07-26T19:53:00.004+10:00

I went to a local pub on Friday night to catch up with the dads from the primary school my sons attended. We get together about once a month and there's a lot of local football and cricket crossover so it's a long-standing friendship group and all very convivial. The pub even has a nightclub attached to it, so it's occasionally squirmingly funny if we step out the front door of the bar for a smoke and somebody spots their underage daughter in the queue.

I'd arrived late and had to park a fair way away. I was walking head down into a chilly northerly when I saw a late model Holden accelerate hard into a left turn off the main road I was walking along. The bang followed quickly. The driver had lost control of the car when he'd hit the cobbled bluestone guttering between the main road and the street he'd just turned into. I didn't actually see the impact but when I drew level with him I could see he'd T-boned a parked car. No-one was in it but if someone had been they might have suffered an injury. If anyone had been crossing the street it might have been worse.

He walked towards the main road shaking his head, swearing loudly and exaggerating his reaction in that way the young, drunk and attention-seeking seem to always do. Some of his nightclub contemporaries were starting to gather.

I walked just close enough to get his registration number and that of the car he'd hit, dialled 000 and asked for police. I gave them all the details. I was about half way through my description of the event when they asked me what state I was calling from. This threw me out a little as I'd assumed I was talking to someone in Victoria.

I thought the young bloke had done something pretty stupid and that if he'd ended up reversing and pissing off, the owner of the parked car would be out of pocket. So I rang to make sure there was a record of what happened. And also in the hope that whatever consequences were visited upon the driver, they might act as a deterrent against any future behaviour of a similarly stupid nature.

I continued on to the pub but only stayed about an hour. When I left, the Holden was just being taken away by tow-truck and the young driver was helping police with their enquiries.

Look, as dilemmas go this is fairly pissy but I think I would have felt pretty bad afterward if I'd just kept walking and left it up to someone else. So what would you have done?

The Dream

2009-07-20T22:46:00.007+10:00

I had this dream about two years ago and remembered it really clearly the next morning. And described it to TLOML that day. It had a clarity to it that most of my dreams don't usually seem to have and very little of the whacky surrealism that permeates so many really interesting, exciting dreams, but makes them more like arty European films rather than any of the more familiar Hollywood narrative types.This dream was set in an alternative reality, but not the kind that has you waking up screaming. Nor was it the sort of dream where your real life comes up way short by comparison. It was just a really enjoyable story to be a part of and quite thought-provoking.

The dream took place in a present that might have been.

Okay, so in this dream I'm still single. Still. I'm at a party where I know quite a few people, but not everyone. There's a nice, sociable vibe. I'm having a bit of a drink, a bit of a chat, and then I see her. TLOML. But it's different. You see in this dream, we never ended up together. We dated a few times and then I got the impression she wasn't all that interested and so stopped calling her and it just fizzled out. No-one broke up, no-one got dumped, no-one got hurt. Probably not even substantial enough to be describing her as an ex.

But seeing her again made me feel really uncomfortable. I instantly dreaded that she might be mortified about bumping into me after all this time and would feel the need to avoid me, possibly even in an excruciatingly exaggerated way, making a big deal of her embarrassment. Come on, I know that's how it works sometimes. And that her feeling the need to theatrically avoid me would in turn, be a source of some considerable embarrassment for me. Of the Earth-please-open-up-and-swallow-me variety. So I made plans for a quick exit.

But I was on the wrong tram. There was no need to worry. She looked straight at me and came right over. "Hi Lad! How are you?" Big smile. Really nice, really natural, friendly. This wasn't going to be awkward at all.

Turned out she was married to some terrific, successful bloke who was also at the party but never appeared in the dream. Married with a couple of kids. Clearly happy. Me? I was doing okay. Or made out I was to the extent that I at least convinced myself.

We spent some time chatting and it was really pleasant, bringing back memories of why I'd liked her so much in the first place all those years ago. The views in common, the sustained eye contact, the occasional big laugh at something I'd said. It was all there from when we'd briefly dated.

Later on, I went outside for a cigarette. She came outside not long after me. It was a languid, balmy evening with just the two of us in the backyard. She brought up the subject of how we'd broken up. Wanted to know why I'd stopped calling her. At first, I pretended to be struggling to remember, and then told her the truth as it was at the time. That I'd determined she wasn't all that keen and I was probably doing her a favour by disappearing. So I couldn't become a pest. Wouldn't become someone she’d need to avoid if she ever bumped into me again later on. Like I'd feared might happen earlier. She was not impressed.

I was trying to explain that we were younger and that it was so long ago, lacing the lame near-apology with countless shrugs and sentences that trailed off into nothing, when she cut me off and leaned close, slightly annoyed.

"Look, I didn't come out here to talk," she said.

Then we kissed. And I woke up.

How's that for a storyline? Hangs together pretty well, doesn't it?

When I told TLOML, she thought it was really romantic that my subconscious would come up with something like that.

Spewing I didn't tape it.

Why I Play Cricket

2009-07-14T22:23:00.007+10:00

I'm going to try not to sound too defensive about this. But I have to concede it's pathetic really. Playing cricket at my age. Sure, I can rationalize it in any number of ways: important exercise for a bloke in a high-risk age group; worthy community involvement; the opportunity to coach and mentor junior and less exprienced players; making some kind of contribution to the club's on and off-field fortunes. All very altruistic. But it's far simpler than that. And much more selfish.

I'm really only there to play. Deep down. All the rest of the involvement, from Junior Co-ordinator and U12 Coach, through Committee membership to part-time barman, bin emptier, sausage-sizzler and raffle organizer is just what you get caught up in when you play, and I would have a whole lot less interest in any of it if I couldn't take to the field myself.

I'd been toying with the idea of giving it another go for a couple of years but when I had a disc removed at the age of 37, (L1-S5: right down at the base) I could feel the curtain coming down. Surely you can't bowl with a fragile back? Jesus, I could hardly run. Anything could go wrong and probably would. So I forgot about it. A few years later, Moe and Larry were enjoying little kids Milo cricket and I rolled the arm over at them in the park and the backyard. Shit! That felt alright! Maybe next year I could give it a go. Just a couple more seasons, enough to bring up the 100 games - 100 wickets double that I was close to when I stopped playing at the age of 25. Then I'd have it all out of my system.

The 2004-05 season approached, but as it turned out, my youngsters weren't interested in playing. Well bugger the pair of you then. I'll play. TLOML was not impressed. She hates cricket. Finds it boring, pointless and can't for the life of her understand why everything has to take so long. I was accused of having an idiotic mid-life crisis, trying to recapture lost youth, being pathetic. It was ridiculous. And didn't I used to make duckies or whatever you called them all the time? Well, yes. But I had a significant debating point ready to launch.

"Alright then, it's either the kind of mid-life crisis where I want to play cricket again, or some other kind where I want to buy a sportscar or try to pick up women on the internet. You decide."

We both had a good laugh about that, especially when the frypan she threw bounced off my head at a funny angle. I figured with that kind of support, I'd be mad not to pull on the whites again.

And so at the age of 44, with only two blokes remaining at my old Moonee Valley Cricket Club from the fellows I'd played with previously, I turned up for pre-season training. And I don't mind telling you I thought picking up where I left off would be a mere formality, thank you very much. I would bowl accurately and decisively, field competently, and put together the occasional defiant tail-end innings when the team needed it most. But cricket had news for me.
Most of what few skills I'd originally possessed had evaporated. I couldn't withstand opposition bowling long enough to make many runs. Sometimes any runs. And just about every opposition batsman delighted in belting me back over my head for six. At least I could still hold catches, thank Christ. All of this should have been devastating for me, but I was able to rationalize it thus: we're getting shitted on; I'm not having much impact or success at all; but it's a nice warm day; there's a gentle breeze blowing; and I love cricket just enough to feel happy about being a small, spectacularly unsuccessful part of it.

I spent the next two seasons captaining the Fifths, a development XI consisting almost entirely of junior players wanting to get a taste of senior cricket. Pete, a bloke of similar vintage to myself, joined me on mentoring duties.The development XI was an interesting idea and Pete and I were really committed to it, but it didn't quite come off. We were thrashed just about every week and no-one played up to their potential. That led to a lot of the young fellows piss-farting about. In the end, the club decided to discontinue the concept after two seasons and just spread the juniors out where they would be of most benefit. I was actually glad of this, as I have never really enjoyed captaincy. It tends to make a complex game that bit more complicated.

But despite lack of team success, my own form had seen small incremental improvements. A few more runs here, a few more wickets there. So I hoped to stay in the Fifths and concentrate solely on batting. Let the young tearaways have the ball. But the new Fifths captain had other ideas. He wanted me to concentrate on bowling. Alright, if you insist. Taking my run-up back to its original length gave me a refreshingly balanced approach to the wicket, and I just tried to keep the seam upright and let the oncoming breeze and the shiny side of the ball do the rest. And it worked. I found myself in the unfamiliar position of being afforded something that seemed awfully like respect for chrissakes, by opposition batsmen. I took wickets in every innings bar one that season to win the 5th XI Bowling Award. And played a couple of decisive innings with the bat too. So I fronted up at the start of this season just gone in better touch than ever. Shit, they even promoted me! All the way up to the 4ths, where I was going to be captained by a bloke I'd taught at Moonee Ponds Central School. The slightly higher standard was going to be a bit of an acid test for me, but I was able to bowl accurately for long spells (thanks skipper!) and took out the 4th XI Bowling Award to cap it off. I'd also made the backward squareleg position something like my own and held onto some hot chances from the heavy traffic that tends to go through that neck of the woods.
Sure, my batting had gone to seed but I was an automatic selection in the 4ths once I was established and am looking forward to next season. And I seemed to have gathered a little respect from my club mates that had everything to do with my capacity to put the ball on the stumps regularly and throw in the odd unplayable outswinger.

The 2009-2010 season is approaching and there's a chance that our 4ths will be going up a grade to play on turf. I'm very keen to be a part of it, even though it means shelling out for my first set of sprig-studded cricket shoes. The Selection Committee might decree otherwise, but I'll take my chances.

With both the 5ths and the 4ths narrowly finishing just out of the finals over the past two seasons, my tally of finals games has remained at a measly 4. And my only flag was in the 2nds back in 1977-78 where I batted last, didn't bowl and fielded behind whatever trees encroached on the ground. So I'm very keen to make just one last addition to the trophy cabinet.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it. I always have.

Great Moments In Sport I: 1984 VFL Preliminary Final

2009-07-13T21:02:00.031+10:00

I had to drive over to a house in Nth Sunshine to pay $50 for 2 tickets to the 1984 Preliminary Final. Retail for two tickets was $30 in 1984. Essendon were playing Collingwood and, needless to say, both camps were confident, general interest in the match was high and a place in the Grand Final against the formidable Hawthorn was up for grabs. So tickets were hard to come by.

My Collingwood mate Frank and I had despaired of finding any luck in an exorbitant scalping environment. We'd even resolved to drive to Albury in the hope of picking up the game live on TV in a pub. But then on the Thursday before the match I decided to give the Age classifieds one more try and hit pay dirt with two tickets only $10 over the retail price. So we were off to VFL Park, Waverley.

Collingwood had defeated arch-foe Carlton in the 1st Semi-Final while Essendon had fallen just 8 points short of Hawthorn in the 2nd Semi, a game which many commentators were describing as one of the best they'd ever seen. In the two previous Bomber vs Magpie encounters that season, Essendon had recorded comprehensive 10 and 6 goal wins. But Collingwood were not to be denied. On their day, they were tenacious and determined. Deep down, no-one gave the Magpies even a ghost of a chance. But as is the way with the football media, everyone seemed to be doing their darndest to talk the mismatch up.

Essendon would go into the game with a full-strength lineup and stars Madden, Watson, Daniher, Baker and Neagle all at the peak of their considerable powers. By contrast, Collingwood were weakened by the absence of the injured Cloke and Taylor and then suffered a further blow when David Twomey was a late withdrawal.

Ex-Essendon champ Ron Andrews kicked the first goal of the game for the Pies but that was where the fun ended for Collingwood. Because Essendon recovered from this early aberration to lead by 84 points at half time. That is a whopping big margin. Even for the end of a game, let alone half-time. 14 goals. There's no comeback from that far down. All hope is lost.

And so during the main break, the aisles were just awash with departing Collingwood supporters, retreating from an ignominious defeat. It looked a little like one of those mouse plagues in the Mallee, an almost liquid movement of masses of people. And it seemed as though in every section, there was at least one drunken scumbag Essendon barracker standing up on his seat and pointedly jeering them off with gales of theatrical laughter. I confess I had a bit of a giggle too. Especially after one wag started calling for all of the Collingwood bus drivers to return to their vehicles.

Whadda you reckon: time to light up a joint fellas? Experience a glorious Bomber victory under the influence? There was no dissent. Even staunch Magpie Frank adopted an air of insouciant resignation and had a few choofs.

The slaughter continued in the second half until siren time when the final margin was 133 points. Baker had kicked six classy goals and Van der Haar with five managed to feature in the votes from many commentators even though he was off injured just before half-time and didn't reappear. So big was his impact. Check out what a spectacular player he was in this career highlights montage:

But I had to take my hat off to Frank. He'd stuck it out. The greatest humiliation in finals history. And more was to follow. Because no-one was going anywhere in a hurry.

We had Waverley down to a fine art in those days. The ground was famous for its post-match traffic snarls but we'd worked out a pretty good way to circumvent the problem. After the final siren, we'd make a leisurely stroll across the oval dodging ill-directed footies from the hundreds enjoying kick-to-kick. Through the gate on the other side of the ground and into the members, making a bee-line for the Brownlow Bar. It was always crowded but you could usually find some space and watch the replay which started about five. Then at around 7, you could wander out and have no trouble whatsoever finding your car, even in the pitch dark.

That was the plan and we stuck to it. The crowd in the bar started to thin out around 6. But we were in no hurry. Numerous rounds of drinks punctuated by loads of laughter and back-slapping provided an exultant backdrop for the TV review of Essendon's massacre. By 7, we were the only ones left and thought the bar staff would be asking us to call it a night. But they kept serving us, so we fell into line with this welcome new policy.

A little while later, all these people started to come in. Collingwood people. Collingwood players and officials. All filing gloomily in for their post-match meal. In 1984 the quarantining of players from mug supporters was a little more haphazard than it is today.

It was my round next so I asked the bloke behind the bar if he wanted us to make tracks, seeing as how we were almost gate-crashing an official Collingwood function. Not at all, according to him. We'd be welcome to stay a bit longer. So we went through a few more rounds. David Cloke walked past with his arm in a sling. General Manager Peter Bahen tried to put a a brave face on things, but there just wasn't anything at all for them to be upbeat about. Seated between the official party and the bar, we weren't exactly sure how to conduct ourselves so we toned down the celebrations a bit.

But only a little. The Collingwood mood was in such stark contrast to ours that you just couldn't help but see the humour in it.

One bloke who looked like ex-Magpie hard man Kevin Grose seemed keen to make lingering eye-contact with me. I'd look away, have a bit of a chat and then steal a glance back at him and blow me down, his intent gaze in my direction never wavered. And I don't think it was because he fancied me. What to do? I know, I'll make friends! So I raised my glass to him, and winked and smiled a salutation. He started to get up and I was already mentally phrasing a suitably contrite apology for my clumsy social skills but I wasn't confident of avoiding some expensive dental repair work when someone at his table shook their head at him and he figured I wasn't worth it and stayed where he was. I've since thought seriously about having it registered as a near-death experience.

But eventually, there came a lull. It was caused by us all getting the giggles at the same time and trying desprately to hold it in. You could hear a few of those high pitched snorting sounds where the air gets caught in between nose and mouth while you're trying desperately to stave off a guffaw. It was no use. Someone spoke without saying anything particularly funny and the floodgates opened. Huge squalls of laughter erupted and we just couldn't stop. Some of the blokes had tears running down their faces. A Collingwood official signalled to the barman that it was about time we made our way out of there and so we bid the friendly and tolerant bar staff a warm farewell and went off into a cold night that somehow didn't chill us at all.

The following week, Essendon would kick nine goals in the last quarter of a hard fought Grand Final against Hawthorn to record a come-from-behind-win and claim their first flag in nineteen years.

Malapropisms I

2009-07-12T10:09:00.004+10:00

What's inspired this post is one of the funniest malapropisms I've heard in a long time.

We were at our local footy club's annual ball and the fellow who runs the junior section was making a speech. He's a great bloke, does a terrific job heading up the club's under-age section and is well-liked by all. But he's a bit of a mangler of the English language. To give you an example: "...and so without any further to do..." is a common phrase in his speeches.

Last night he was praising the verve and enthusiasm of one of the junior coaches and the word he meant to use to describe this bloke's vigor was gusto. What came out was "gutso". And what made it funny for me was that it kind of fitted in with footy-speak as there's often a lot of talk about guts.

Do you have any favourites of your own?

Outraged of Ascot Vale Writes...

2009-06-15T20:10:00.004+10:00

Des "Tuppence" Moran was shot dead today outside a cafe in Union Rd. Details here. The coverage of this tragic event on TV and radio has been disgraceful. Just as the coverage of the earlier attempt on his life outside his home in Langs Rd was also very ordinary. And raises important questions about the calibre of Melbourne-based electronic media outlets:
Exactly how difficult is it to pronounce Ascot Vale correctly? Give up? It's pronounced A-scert Vale, not A-SCOT Vale.

And while we're on this topic, once and for all that outer north western suburb that was still a country town when I was a young lad is pronounced Kei-la, not Kei-LORE.

And for all those out there who would dare to take issue with this pronouncement (as puns go, not too excruciating) just consider what your reaction would be to someone deciding that that well-known bayside suburb should be rendered Brigh-TON instead of Brigh-tern.
So just try that little bit harder to avoid sounding like a bunch of ignorant bogans as a matter of deliberate policy, will you?

Thanks everyone. I just know you'll do better from now on.

Oh, and of course my condolences to the Moran family.

Great Gigs III: Jeff Beck At the Palais; January 2009; Finally He Gets To The Actual Concert

2009-05-25T00:45:00.010+10:00

It was Australia Day and I'd spent the warm summer afternoon with the bands at the nearby Big Day Out concert providing a droning sonic backdrop to a bit of incompetent gardening. I headed over to Pete's place in West Brunswick but I was a little late so we had to sneak a hurried choof at the tram stop in Dawson St on the way in to the Palais for the Jeff Beck concert. You can do it in public if you're smart about it. We'd rolled the tobacco out of a couple of Stuyvos and packed in a fairly potent mix so that to the casual observer, it's just two baby-boomers smoking cigarettes.

I love the Palais. I saw Joe Cocker there in 1977 and Rory Gallagher in 1980 and both times the sound was excellent. It's a great acoustic venue, so I was looking forward to getting the best of Jeff and his band. They would be Tal Wilkenfeld, a 22-yo Sydney bass player about whom it's often mistakenly asumed that she's Beck's daughter. Her resume includes the Allman Brothers Band, Chick Corea, Steve Vai, Susan Tedeschi and Herbie Hancock. Vinnie Colaiuta, ex-Frank Zappa band, would be on drums and David Sancious from the E Street Band was to be on keyboards. No singer.

And that's what made me a little apprehensive. As I mentioned earlier, the stuff I was most looking forward to hearing him play was from his Yardbirds'; Jeff Beck Group; and Flash periods. If he was just going to do what he's into right now, that could be anything. And that's exactly what he indicated to Kerry O'Brien in this interview on the 7:30 Report.

So the concert would only be a limited retrospective of Beck' career. Nothing with vocals. This was disappointing. I like Beck's jazz-rock stuff, but I don't love it. Still it would be good to see him, even if he wasn't playing any of my faves. As an artist who has always prided himself on progressing, his playing was bound to be top class.

With sniffer dog resources otherwise occupied at the Big Day Out (thanks for taking the heat off us, youngsters!), Pete and I were free to have another quick choof outside just before Jeff was due to take to the stage. We stood apart from a relaxed crowd that were mostly male and from our age bracket but there were some refreshingly young and decidedly female concert-goers scattered through the ranks as well.

He opened with Beck's Bolero and all apprehension just melted away. He sounded sensational, as completely in control as any player I've ever heard. He used that big thumb of his (having eschewed picks since 1980) on a white strat and worked the wang bar and volume control on just about every note. He was faithful to the original, but showed how far he'd come since the original recording in 1968 by varying it just a little too. By the time he'd finished that opening number, my misgivings had shifted to whether we as an audience would be good enough to do him justice.

Have a look at this clip to get an idea of just how beautiful his playing of this signature tune was:

And I realized he really didn't need to trawl through his history to produce a completely satisfying performance. As the review in Undercover would very aptly summarize, it was "Jeff Beck displaying his craft, not his catalogue" And display it he did.

From Beck's Bolero he took us through all of his best instrumental work, from the 1975 Blow By Blow album to more recent efforts. And he was magnificent on all of them. From the haunting Cause We've Ended As Lovers all the way to his take on the Beatles' A Day In The Life for his second encore.

He seemed to be having a great time too. When someone called out "Go Jeffrey!" during a beautifully rendered piece of delicate slide guitar high up on the neck, he looked up in theatrically affected outrage.

He'd said not a word till right at the end when he introduced the band. They'd proved themselves terrific musos, a really hot outfit, and drew sincere applause from the crowd. And then when it was all finally over, a simple "Thank you. Bless your hearts."

No, bless you Jeff. I felt like I’d been privileged to have been there. Readers, this series isn’t called Great Gigs for nothing.

You can check out other peoples' take on the tour here, here, here and here.

But it didn't end there for me. His new live album, Performing This Week...Live At Ronnie Scott's is a complete record of the concert, right down to the same songs in the same order. I bought it almost straight away and it’s been on high rotation in the car ever since.

Great Gigs III: Jeff Beck at the Palais 2009; Backstory

2009-05-16T14:53:00.009+10:00

A bloke at work forwarded an email from Ticketek to me last December. Jeff Beck would be touring Australia. The 26th January Melbourne concert, and the second concert added a short time after, would both be at the Palais in St Kilda. I snapped up two tickets at around $100 each and fired off an email to Pete, a bloke I play cricket with, choof with, and have the occasional jam with. Not surprisingly, he was up for it.

Alright, I was keen, but I had to do some investigating too. I was desperate to find out just which Jeff Beck would be touring Australia. You see, he's been through some changes in a career that began when he replaced Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds in 1965.
Beck was a major influence on guitar playing through his early pyrotechnic style. Controlled feedback, string muting, manipulating guitar volume, aggressive slide guitar, extraordinary use of the wang bar, and all those waow and whoo punctuations that later players like Jimi Hendrix and Joe Walsh would also use to great effect. And melodic. Beautifully so.

You can hear him at his best on a 1966 album called Roger the Engineer, which features some great guitar tracks like Over Under Sideways Down, The Nazz Are Blue and the instrumental Jeff's Boogie.

But just after this album Beck suffered burnout from the conditions on a hastily arranged and gruelling 1966 US tour and was dismissed from the Yardbirds after leaving the party to go to California. By this time Jimmy Page was alongside him on guitar and a few gigs and three songs that were recorded during their short-lived pairing were only promising, rather than what they might have been.

Beck's career has probably suffered by comparison with Clapton and Page. He has certainly not produced the great songs of his fellow Yardbirds guitarists. But his playing has been on an upward curve throughout. Clapton is now as good as ever but he's only got back to his best in relatively recent years after a long period as a pale shadow of the player he was with Cream. Page too, has had ups and downs but appears to be almost where he was with Led Zeppelin in the mid-70s, no mean feat.

Post-Yardbirds, Beck teamed up with producer Mickie Most for a series of largely forgettable singles, the exception being a dynamite instrumental called Beck's Bolero featuring Jimmy Page, Nicky Hopkins, John-Paul Jones and Keith Moon. Hopkins would join him for his next two solo albums, the 1968 Truth and Beck-Ola (1969). Also on board would be Rod Stewart on vocals, Ron Wood on bass and Micky Waller on drums.

The lineup gelled beautifully on Truth and the newly re-mastered CD release showcases Beck's talent and growth. There is sensationally innovative playing across a range of styles, mostly blues-rock, on such songs as Shapes of Things, Let Me Love You, I Aint Superstitious and the acoustic Greensleeves. However, Beck-Ola was something of a disappointment, precipitating the departure of Stewart and Wood, off to join the Faces. This downturn would carry through into subsequent Jeff Beck Group lineups over the next three years and also the one album produced by his teaming up with Vanilla Fudge departees Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice in 1973's short-lived power-trio Beck, Bogert and Appice.

Along with Eric Clapton, Harvey Mandel, Wayne Perkins and Ron Wood, he was in the running to replace Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones but didn't fancy spending half his life waiting for Mick Jagger and Keith Richard to turn up and so concentrated on a solo project to be produced by Beatles' recording overseer, George Martin. When Blow By Blow was released in 1975, Beck had heralded the arrival of jazz-rock. His haunting instrumental cover of the Beatles' She's A Woman, replete with talk-box, even got airplay on Top 40 radio, and the album's evocative ambience made it a surprise hit, and not just with guitar enthusiasts.

Beck would team up with keyboard player Jan Hammer to further explore the potential of jazz-rock and fusion for the next few albums and almost incessant touring. But it was just like old times in 1984 when Beck played on and appeared in the video for the Rod Stewart single Infatuation.

This might have convinced him he could tolerate having a vocalist in the band again because his 1985 release, Flash, saw him once more showing that he is a master of a range of styles. Closing off a five-year period without an album release, this unashamed rock album demonstrated Beck's playing was still cutting edge, easily matching the innovative quality of such latter-day luminaries as Eddie Van Halen and Michael Schenker.

This was Beck at his very best: beautiful, soulful blues on the hit single People Get Ready, with Rod Stewart on vocals; and a powerfully modern rock approach infusing songs like Ambitious and It Gets Us All In The End. Beck was back. And the homecoming was spectacular, but ultimately short-lived.

Make sure you watch this clip. It's sensational. Funny too.

There would be no follow up to Flash as Beck experimented with industrial music and returned to jazz-rock and fusion over the next few years. And that's why I was apprehensive about the concert: my favourite Jeff Beck stuff was from the Yardbirds; the first Jeff Beck Group; and Flash.

So, would he be playing a complete career retrospective, or just what he's up to right now, another of his many progressions?

You Can Run But You Can't Hide III

2009-05-03T22:26:00.001+10:00

Interested readers might need to refer to the two previous posts on this matter just to refresh the memory.

The union rep at work is one of those people you just instantly warm to. For me, it was because she reminded me in looks and manner of a former colleague I liked a lot. But beyond that, she's a voluble, witty and clearly caring person who is passionate about what she believes in without beating anyone over the head with it or taking herself too seriously. I needed advice about what to do after the incident with Michelle so we went into one of the interview rooms and I went through it all with her.

She was sympathetic, but rational at the same time. She warned me against catastrophizing. I could see her point, but I felt like I'd stumbled onto something considerably ugly about my workplace to which there didn't appear to be an easy remedy. We consulted the staff handbook and it didn't have much to offer so she advised me to take it to my manager and see what could be done via the organization's structure.

When I told my boss about the incident she was typically forthright: "Why didn't you just tell her to get fucked? I would have." I had to laugh at that but pointed out that it might then have degenerated into an ugly scene for which I would have had to shoulder some of the blame. She told me we'd need to consult the CEO, who I have every confidence in. He's a bloke who knows all of the legislation and regulations back to front and is pretty good at explaining it all.

He gave me two options: one, to approach Michelle and try to sort it out myself; or two, to make a formal complaint, which would mean an investigation. I chose the latter because I didn't want to run the risk of making a mess of any approach to Michelle.

Unforunately the investigation was unable to verify my claim. Colin had taken the safe option of not remembering and Michelle denied that there'd been anything untoward, adding that she was prepared to apologise if she'd said anything offensive. Qualified apologies aren't worth a pinch of shit but the manager in charge of the investigation had organized mediation if I was interested. I wasn't.

Both the CEO and the manager confided that Michelle had come under notice for similar incidents but no-one had put in a formal complaint. They both indicated that they believed my version and were sorry that it had happened and also apologised that the investigation had been inconclusive.

I rejected mediation because I wasn't prepared to give Michelle any opportunities to save face or manipulate the situation any further. What if she was to say something that pissed me off during the session and I reacted, or worse, overreacted? Then I'd come out of it looking like a ratbag. So I politely declined, but added that if Michelle could be quietly advised to give me as wide a berth as possible from here on, I'd consider that a good outcome.

So that's where it stands. Her husband Jeremy and I get along just fine, Colin too. I don't have any ill-feelings towards them. They were both stuck in the middle.

Michelle's still on Family Leave but will be returning. When she does, I intend to avoid her like the plague. I hope she's got the good sense to do likewise. That might just make the situation manageable.

Procrastination Update

2009-04-29T22:53:00.005+10:00

What I've been doing:
Procrastinating. Getting by on the bare minimum on just about every level in all areas. Except for blogging. There, I haven't been getting by at all. But work's been okay though.

What I'm listening to:
Jeff Beck, mostly. Went to his concert in January. Yeah, yeah yeah, I know, I was supposed to post a review. It's coming. His first solo album, Truth from 1968 to be precise, with a group that boasted Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, Nicky Hopkins and Mickey Waller. Re-mastered (beautifully!) and with rare bonus tracks.

What I'm reading:
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. For about the sixth time. Just finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. So I'm not completely stagnant. Lucky reading is a pure pleasure that takes no effort to immerse myself in.

What's made me feel good:
1. Essendon's victories over Carlton and Collingwood. They showed real flair in those close, desperate matches. Their best football is very, very good. I would love them to play their best football more often. And I believe they can.

2. Winning the bowling average for my local club's fourths this last season. My medium-pacers took 16 wickets at 17, which isn't outstanding and I bowled us to victory in only a couple of matches. But I was consistent I suppose, and haven't bowled poorly in a match or at training for over two years. I bowl outswingers mainly and most of my wickets are from slips catches or caught behind.

3. Sex. That's probably too much information for you. I usually try to be witty and subtle about it. But let's face it, I love it. Pure pleasure. And all within the sanctity of marriage, I hasten to assure you.

4. Having a choof. Got some pretty good stuff at the moment. Giving it a bit of a nudge.

5. Watching my three young fellows play cricket and football. I shudder to think how excruciating it must have been for dad to sit through my feeble efforts. I just hoped my lot could hold their own and they've exceeded that brief.

What's made me feel bad:
Nothing really. Just the odd bit of self-loathing for my lethargy. I can't even be stuffed hyper-linking or adding images. There's also the draft blog posts that I'm really looking forward to posting, but just can't get around to writing. And your blogs, from where I've been absent.

I've also worked out I have a bit of a tendency to catastrophize. And I swing back and forth from feeling great about myself to feeling like I'm the world's greatest fool and always have been. But I'm self-aware while it's going on and don't give too much away.

What I'm watching:
Australian Story (Did you see the one about Keith Miller? Fabulous, wasn't it?), Underbelly 2, The Office, Madmen. Pretty good shows.

Most recent movie:
M Night Shymalan's The Happening. It stood out because there have been so many really good science fiction films in recent years, that coming across a bad one has rocked me back on my heels a bit. I expected it to be pretty good and it was crap.

What I'm going to do about it:
Small steps. Just try to do a little each night, then gradually increase it until I'm on top of a few things. That should do it.

I hope this is my last whimsical, stream of consciousness, churn-something-out-for-chrissakes post. I can do better and enjoy it more.

Well, I'd Just Like To Thank...

2009-03-06T21:14:00.003+11:00

The delightful Miss Diarist from Dating Diaries has recently bestowed a couple of awards on this humble blog. I just wish I'd posted a bit more often and actually, you know, deserved them. But I'm not one to be churlish in the face of a compliment so, Miss D, I acknowledge your good taste. And thank you from the bottom of my hard drive for thinking highly enough of ol' Lad to deem him worthy of a mention in dispatches.

The citations read:

One Lovely Blog:
Lad Litter, because he's seen me through two blogs now and is smart, funny and adores his wife to boot.

The Proximidade Award:
‘This blog invests and believes in PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes for self-aggrandizement! Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers!’

Awwwww....

Isn't she lovely? I'll be putting the awards onto my sidebar just as soon as I figure out how to.

Lad Litter and I

2009-02-24T23:36:00.014+11:00

Would it be presumptuous to apologise? For the nearly two months spent without a post here? Yes, I think it would, but I'm going to anyway. I'm going to assume that you, y'know, like me as a friend.
And alright, taking it as a given that you'd probably rather I put the odd piece up a little more frequently, I'm sorry. And I also apologise for neglecting all of your fine blogs. Okay, I have been a bit busy elsewhere. But I don't think you'll be consoled by the fact that there are seven posts saved into drafts that consist entirely of titles and labels and not much else.

This blog is having something of an identity crisis. It's become a whole lot less anonymous than you'd think. Or rather, it's author has.

Lad Litter is a construct. No, really. Based on me. Based on the writing of people like Nick Hornby. An attempt to write, or post rather, in an approximation of that style commonly known as "lad lit". Hopefully, stopping short of the bad case of the cutes some efforts of this type in literature and the cinema seem unable to avoid. But probably not.

Everything here is true to me, though. No factual inventions. Just a few minor rewrites of the actual dialogue that don't change the intent. It's a construct alright, but it's one I feel is of my own making and reflects me.

And I think it's at the very least remarkable that my Facebook page, by comparison, looks and feels like more of an invention than what you read here. There's a kind of high school hierarchy about Facebook that I don't think is terribly evident across the blogosphere. And wouldn't you know it? Everyone seems so much cooler than I am.

I'd completely forgotten what a fucking nightmare being a teenager was. Facebook brings a bit of it back. And I feel a little uncomfortable about it.

So I'm wondering if it was a mistake to get into it. Okay, maybe not. You can ignore the popularity contest aspect of it and just do what you want to do. And don't do what you don't want to do.

But I used the Friend Finder and became Facebook friends with a couple of bloggers. And it's unexpectedly a little discomfiting. No reflection on these bloggers. They seem pretty self-assured and comfortable with who they are both in and out of the blogosphere. And with good reason too. But to be combining Lad Litter with my Facebook persona (because that's what it is, a construct or a perception, only using real, or realistic, names and details) just feels a bit funny.

I think what's happened is, Lad Litter and I have collided, like a future self meeting up with a past self in a really good time travel scenario. Or that Simpsons episode where Bart and the other kids go to Shelbyville and come across their equivalents. Okay, probably not nearly as exciting, interesting or amusing but, you know what I mean.

So there are two issues with this: oh, and it's not a fucking identity crisis, by the way. I do exaggerate.

No, there are two issues here: the nature of Facebook and the persona you create there; and Lad Litter getting mixed up in it.

Should be worth another draft post. First the title....there. Now a label. That should be okay. Whew! I'm knackered. But I think I might be onto something. Yeah. I'll come back to this soon....

You Can Run But You Can't Hide II

2009-01-01T15:04:00.015+11:00

The investigation into the complaint I made against Michelle has concluded. Her response to the complaint consisted of a denial of the allegations I made in the previous post on this. The statement fom Colin, the only other person present, apparently doesn't confirm the allegation. In Michelle's case, it's downright dishonest, and to be fair to Colin, he might not have been able to hear her clearly, so quietly was she speaking, and his memory was probably drink-affected. So that's that, although I have been offered mediation, something I'm sort of half considering.

But only half considering. Mediation implies that there is middle ground here. I don't believe there is. Michelle deliberately set out to attack me and I'm not interested in having that watered down. I certainly don't feel like compromising or adopting a let's-agree-to-disagree-stance on the matter.

Let's back up a bit. Bring you into the picture. It was a fairly warm night at the end of year function and the Federation Square locale lent itself to making everyone feel pretty relaxed and comfortable. I'd managed to MC the awards part of the evening on behalf of the social committee without drowning in flop sweat and even got a few laughs out of the crowd. Everyone was pretty pleased with how things had gone. And I'd enjoyed it too.

What I'd feared might be something of an ordeal had actually gone over pretty well, so I could relax. And I think you all understand the state ol' Lad prefers to be in to do that. I smoked a couple of little spliffs in quick succession and felt great. Self-contained and comfortable, I stayed outside for most of the night and engaged with a passing parade of colleagues as they took in the fresh air and smokers and non-smokers alike botted cigarettes.

The actual incident has already been described in detail so I won't go over it again. As I extricated myself and headed off to meet up with some of the cricket dads at a pub near home, I thought briefly how fucking weird the whole encounter had been. I returned to it at different times over the weekend and it had me a bit worried. Was my workplace a bitch colony? Had a whole squadron of nasty types been bitching about me to Michelle during her family leave or was it something she'd come up with all on her own?

I thought Colin might bring the subject up on Monday but he didn't so I asked to speak to him on Tuesday. We went into one of the interview rooms and I had to jog his memory. I thought it was pretty clear on the night that Michelle was giving me the shits. He'd at least seemed to pick up on it while she was going through her character assessment of me, even if he might not have heard her exact words. I probably said way too much to him as he is a particular friend of Michelle's husband Jeremy, a lovely bloke who works there too.

I told him:
1) I'd had experience with outright bitchery at a previous school and it had driven me out of there;
2) I was worried that Michelle might be representative of an unhealthy workplace culture;
3) That I might now appear to be wearing a bullseye for nasty treatment, from either Michelle or like-minded others;
4) That I now had prior knowledge of Michelle's nature, something that I would not be able to forget easily if Michelle applied for a higher position and I was on the selection panel;
5) That people who' had formal complaints against them upheld tend to spend whole afternoons crying in the toilets;
6) And that Michelle was fortunate I had been unaccompanied that night. TLOML might well have torn the tacky tattoo off her chest and shoved it down her trailer-trash throat.

Colin said he understood how shitted off I was and that he would, if I lodged a complaint, make a statement that would support my version of events. So much for that.

I needed to consider this carefully. So I asked the union rep if she had a minute for a quick chat.

5 - Questions Interview Meme

2008-12-28T18:40:00.014+11:00

I don't disparage memes. They sometimes take you into areas that your posts might not. This one is from the delightful Vancouver BC blogger Meghan, over at Blog Voyeur. I'd say here's lookin' at you kid but I get the impression she's the sort of standout person everyone would be looking at anyway.
1.) A lot of your blog posts have large gaps of time in between them throughout the year. Do you have any particular reason for that or just times when you're not feeling very 'bloggy'?

Not feeling very bloggy is priobably the best way to describe it, now that you mention it. Nothing noble about it. I'm not prevented from blogging because I'm busy manning a volunteer refugee support line or collecting for Greenpeace or any of the other things I should be doing. No, it's mostly explained in the profile: "Just a lazy Melbourne bloke..."

Although, I can be a bit pedantic about posts, and so tend to keep it to just a few, because they take a bit of time for me. You see, I proofread over and over and keep changing a word here and there until I think it's just right. Not that you'd know it from the quality of posts here.

2.) Are you closer to the goal you set of having your band reunite for your 50's birthday?

Shouldn't be too much drama about getting the guys back together again. The other guitar player works in my building, I'm in regular contact with the bass player and even though I haven't seen the drummer in ages I know he loves a gig and would jump at it. As would we all. I'll start moving on it in about April for the November party and work on a song list.

One thing I've learned from doing this ensemble at work is that you can't just pick up your instrument and do it. Plenty of practice and rehearsals needed. I'd like to do around 15 songs to make it really worthwhile. We did 12 at my fortieth.

3.) Since you're a man with amazing taste in music (and a self-proclaimed rock snob!), what music would your perfect road trip cd include?

Oooohh, I love this question. It's a little like Desert Island Discs. The two albums I reckon I could listen to over and over again would fit on one CD so here they are:

Who's Next (1972) by The Who - Just a simply amazing album and an LP I've known intimately since one of my older sisters bought it when I was about twelve. Pete Townsend had originally conceived it as another rock opera a la Tommy but when that project proved unworkable the Who were left with just ten great songs.

Let It Bleed (1969) by The Rolling Stones - this arrived when I was about fourteen and it was my other older sister's boyfriend who gave it to us to mind, along with a whole lot of other great albums while he went overseas. The intro to Gimme Shelter had me hooked right from the word go and I've been a Rolling Stones fan ever since.

Any road trip would be enhanced by the presence of these two classic albums.

4.) At the risk of flogging a dead horse, did your crush on Siobhan die or are you just better at handling it now?

Just a mild crush, that one. I suppose three blog posts was overstating the case somewhat but I wanted to articulate strange new feelings and behaviours.

Not much change in the situation. She's just as charming as ever. We're getting along okay and the ensemble is giving us plenty to do and talk about. It seems like quite a healthy friendship.

5.) Any New Years resolutions you've made and would like to share?

Yeah, I'll be visting a hypnotherapist in the New Year to have a go at giving up smoking. Just cigarettes. I'll still be having regular spliffs, but I'll be cutting back on that too. Reserved for when I'm in good company, or lack inspiration.

I just hope I don't come out of the hypnotherapy believing I'm the reincarnation of the Emperor Tiberius or anything.

Thanks again, Meghan!

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide I

2008-12-24T20:35:00.007+11:00

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the new year to everyone.

This is a letter I had to write to the CEO of the organization I work for:

Dear Anthony,

I’m bringing an incident involving myself and Michelle McClennan to your attention I informed my Manager, Rae Newcombe, of this incident on Wednesday 10th December after some careful consideration. I ask for your assistance to resolve this issue locally.

The incident took place at our end of year staff function on Fri 5th December:

At around 11pm I returned inside the venue to say a few goodbyes to people and approached Colin Ginty, who was in conversation with Michelle McClennan. I shook hands with Colin and thanked him for his efforts on the Social Committee. Colin returned the thanks for my agreeing to MC the awards segment of the evening.

It was around this point that Michelle began speaking to me and went into some detail as to her assessment of my character. Her conclusion was that I was an attention-seeker of little substance with a poor work ethic who tries to get by on personality in order to mask these shortcomings. I was quite shocked by this and tried to deflect her by thanking her for the career advice and turned away towards Colin.

She then commenced a monologue that seemed to be outlining my psychological profile, positing deeper problems she felt I may have which cause what she had described earlier. Again, I attempted to deflect rather than confront her by complimenting her on her grasp of psychoanalytic theory and turned away towards Colin once more.

I am unable to give precise details of what she actually said because I was a bit shocked by what I took to be an unprovoked attack on me. I was also somewhat transfixed during the conversation by the tone of voice she used, which I can only describe as very nasty, cat-like and reminiscent of that used by upper-primary school girls when they’re being particularly cruel to each other.

With a little help from Colin, I was able to cut her off by turning the conversation to another function I would be on my way to afterwards and said a final goodbye to both Colin and Michelle and left. I noticed what I interpreted as a fairly smug, self-satisfied look on her face as I turned away.

I hardly know Michelle at all, beyond the type of greetings and small talk I might engage in with any staff member with whom I don’t work directly, and she also took family leave not long after I commenced in mid-July, so there’s been very little interaction between us. I have neither said nor done anything that could possibly have generated any personal animosity between us, nor had she, up until this incident occurred.

I believe we have a very healthy workplace culture here with, from my observations, almost exclusively positive interactions between staff, so I’m still somewhat shocked by the nastiness involved in this. I’d like to be confident that this incident is a result of a series of poor choices made by a single individual and is not representative of tendencies to be found in other staff members.

I assert that this incident constitutes action taken within a work location that directly affects an employee that the employee considers is otherwise unfair or unreasonable and ask that it be investigated and, if proven, action be taken to ensure that it does not occur again, either to me or anyone else.

Yours Sincerely,
Lad Litter

More to come on this one. That's for sure.

Either Nothing, Or Nothing At All...

2008-11-23T20:37:00.009+11:00

At the risk of labouring a point, I intend to squeeze just one more post out of the situation with Siobhan. Hopefully, before you tire of reading about it. That droning sound you hear is me.

There hasn't been much change in the past couple of weeks. We've practiced with the ensemble twice now and it's slowly starting to come together. The two women who sing are just brilliant. Sandra, at her first session, hit all of the notes and even made it easier to keep time. And she said she was nervous! Yvonne has a lovely voice. Jim knows his way around the fretboard and fitted right in. I'm wading through the songs as if through treacle and I've only completely nailed just Dear Prudence of the five. The others are on the way and I'm hopeful they'll follow suit soon.

Siobhan is coping well with a new type of guitar and new songs. Did I tell you I loaned her my acoustic guitar so it'd be louder than the classical guitar she has? No? Look, it's no big deal, really, not like sharing a toothbrush. I was apprehensive about offering it to her, suspecting she might shoot back with "What's wrong with my guitar?"causing me to beat a hasty retreat. But she was really good about it, thanking me for the opportunity and telling me repeatedly how much she likes my Ovation Celebrity DeLuxe.

Every time I think there might be a problem, there just isn't. When I wanted photos of the band for a slideshow, she came straight over and sat for me so it took only three clicks and I had all I needed. No "How's my hair?" or "Ooh, not today" or anything.

I'm anticipating she'll be well-practiced for tomorrow night's session. Sandra and Yvonne can't make it so I'm hoping like hell Jim doesn't bail out as that will leave us with the two's company dilemma. We really need to get together and play, but Siobhan might be apprehensive about it being just us. I hope not, she's been great about everything else with the band.

Just the other week, she gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and a gentle rub up and down my back to wish me a happy birthday as I was cutting the cake in the lunchroom (49. Shit. I feel 17 but mirrors keep giving me away). In Australia, if the knife touches the dish you don't get your wish and you have to kiss the nearest girl. A colleague called out to Siobhan in a louder-than-she-probably-meant-it voice that this had indeed happened and Siobhan needed to make tracks. Possibly because there's been some talk, or possibly because Siobhan happened to be the closest girl, I don't know.

I ignored it and didn't look left to where Siobhan was standing next to me but I didn't see her move at all, which if I'm correct, was quite lovely of her. Afterwards, we chatted for a few minutes and once again everyone else just faded into the background. Wallpaper, all of them. Can't seem to help doing that. I know I shouldn't but....

On Friday she came over to return my pen-drive again and I got the breathless "See you soon," with the big smile and the dimples. I smiled back but I think what she got was my best Milhous-pathetically-and-vainly-courting-Lisa look.

So I've decided to lay down a few guiding principles to keep things ticking along just as they are. To enable us to keep doing what we're doing. And not doing what we're not doing. To stay as friends. And limit the potential for causing discomfiture or embarassment to either of us.

1) No drinking anything stronger than light beer at work things. Not because I might do anything rash, but in case I say something stupid to Siobhan or let my guard down and enter into discussions about her with anyone else. To date, I've confided in no-one. Just to you invited members of my now-restricted blogosphere, where I'm an entirely separate non-entity. Entirely separate entity, I meant to say;

2) No seeking her out. That means no beating a path to or hanging around the lunchroom if she's there - just breeze on through and if she comes in afterwards, don't linger. Avoid going to her desk to drop disks or things off. I can feel a few eyes on me when I'm talking to her around there. And she tends to turn on the dazzle for me when I go over to her desk;

3) Include others when we talk. I'm far too focused on her. With a little luck, I'll be able to recognize that there actually are other people present. This is going to be difficult. She seems to exert a considerable gravitational pull on all of my attention;

4) Never touch her, not even fumbling for spoons in the drawer;

5) No lingering eye contact. There's also something of a gravitational pull there. Strong too. I'm sure it could dilate time;

6) Definitely no flirting with her - I don't think I have so far - absolutely nothing suggestive or cute. Here are a couple of things I stopped just short of blurting out: when she mentioned for the first time that she had a boyfriend, I nearly asked "So, who is this fellow you've been seeing behind my back?" Funny line maybe, but could easily have come out wrong; and when she gave me the birthday kiss, "Hey, there is a God." Again, overstepping the mark. "Aww, thanks Siobhan," was a better fit;

7) Don't be so quickfire about replying to her emails - shit, we do have to communicate but keep to the point. Don't try to write a cackfest of gags every time. Save something for the blog readership;

8) Don't try too hard to make her laugh, generally; she's got a good sense of humour and she's made me chuckle a few times. Let things flow naturally;

9) Don't be drawn into or initiate serious personal conversations with her about life, relationships, anything. You're bound to say too much;

10) Don't deconstruct your "relationship" with her. Don't talk about how well we get along or re-enact things that have happened. She's shown no inclination towards initiating this sort of thing so far;

11) Just basically, make things as fuck up-proof as possible, I suppose. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? I couldn't possibly be aware of the right thing to do and then not do the right thing, surely?

12) Don't write another blog entry on this topic unless things change. Hopefully, they won't.

She's Not A Girl Who Misses Much...

2008-11-05T23:31:00.008+11:00

Well, blow me down if I didn't get some great advice from the comments placed at the previous post. Really insightful, warm-hearted and understanding. I was heading towards similar conclusions all on my own, would you believe?

I didn't think so.

But this is what's happening: firstly me;
1) I do like her. Siobhan is graceful. And charming. The whole office seems to think highly of her. I'm drawn to her the way lots of people are. And we have common ground. The music ensemble we're playing in. There is something of an affinity;
2) Alright, yes, she is very attractive. A young 35. Not overly tall, but both slender and curvaceous at the same time and with dark brown hair and big brown eyes;
3) What am I doing? Just two things, I maintain:
a) Her emails get answered first. And I spend more time composing an email reply to her than I would to the CEO. I think he's starting to get jealous;
b) And focusing intently when we talk. She's in vivid technicolour while everyone else languishes in low-contrast black and white. She seems almost equally attentive, but I'm a bit concerned it might also be kind of obvious to eyewitnesses;
4) What aren't I doing? Well, I'm not seeking her out. I just breeze through the lunchroom when she's there and don't hang around if she comes in after me. She's equally perfunctory. But we just bump into each other and have a chat - almost exclusively about the ensemble these days;
5) I'm aware of her. It doesn't matter if we're in the same space with plenty of other people around, everyone heading in different directions, we always seem to greet each other. I quite like that about her. I think anyone would;

Now to Siobhan:
1) See above;
2) She has this almost teenage-girl way about her that shows off a fairly dazzling array of weaponry - head tilted; eyes up through lashes; slight blush; big smile; dimples at full compression; my name elongated, "Hi La-aad." I'm sure it's been used to devastating effect on far better men than I. I've seen this a few times now. And I'm not getting sick of it;

So, ready for some conclusions?

Well, I don't think Siobhan has a crush on me. I believe 2) above is just her way. Part of her charm and means nothing. She might not be fully aware she's doing it. I thought at one stage she might even be making fun of me a little, "Here he comes. Let's see what shade of red I can turn him today. Need to be careful, though. He nearly crossed over into purple on Tuesday. I had to switch all my dimples off!" This is unlikely. But I'd think it was funny, just the same.

She has a knack for making me feel comfortable and appreciated. I'm very lucky in that.

And me? All of the above, really. I don't feel lustful towards her. There's no phwoar. If anything, it feels like one of those pure and noble teenage crushes, the kind you might have had on your older sisters' girlfriends who seemed wonderful to your early teen eyes.

And folks, this has never been a fidelity issue. Most of you would know that I passionately and romantically love TLOML, on all levels. I look at her like she's my exciting new girlfriend. You know, "Wait till my mates see who I'm going out with."

She's fabulous. Wife and mother. Great to watch walking towards you. Great to be with.

On Monday, she delivered one of the eulogies at her cousin's funeral. She was a woman the same age as TLOML, killed in a car accident last Sunday week. They'd been good friends as kids. A terrible loss of a much-loved and striking woman. TLOML would normally be apprehensive about public speaking, and she was nervous. But she looked beautiful and graceful and sounded clear, confident and warm. Got a few laughs too. There are many reasons why she is TLOML.

And so what will I do about Siobhan? Nothing, really. And she won't need to do anything about me. I'll back off on the emails, and try to include others when Siobhan and I do talk. Nothing else needs to change. I can enjoy the friendship and the music for what it is. Shit, it kind of means I'm okay.

And maybe get a little bit of a kick out of it too. I am only a bloke, after all.

An' What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear...

2008-10-23T00:44:00.011+11:00

Blokes are stupid. I can see you nodding your heads. And although their stupidity can come in a wide variety of forms, you'll probably be able to discern a particular type of blokey gormlessness running through this post. I'm starting to think it's the one where a woman is friendly towards a bloke and he just can't help but read something more into it. I'm inclined to think that's what's happening in my world at the moment. Have a glance at what follows and say it aint so.

She works in a section unrelated to mine, so I didn't see much of her to begin with. Just in and out of the lunch room and around the office sometimes. Wondered who she was.

We were in the lift area together and she said hello, so I said:
"Hi, I'm Lad, I've just been here a couple of weeks."
"Oh we've been introduced already. On your first day."
"Oh yes, silly me. Sorry, I met a few people early on and I've forgotten quite a few names."
I waited momentarily for her to help me out and tell me her name but she didn't, so I asked her what it was. Siobhan.

Not long after, one of the other blokes and I were talking about classic albums and how I went on a bit of a spree buying up big-name albums and how I'd bought Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin. Siobhan was there and she said it was one of her favourites and proceeded to rattle off other Led Zeppelin titles she was familiar with. Common ground. So we could say hello and talk easily from there on.

Just brief encounters, the occasional hello, smile or nod. Then someone was talking about the TV show The Einstein Factor. I couldn't help myself so I blurted out a little too quickly that I'd been on it. Siobhan asked what my specialist subject had been and when I told her the Nuremberg Trials she was certain she'd seen it. "Wow." she said. Regular readers of this blog will no doubt understand I haven't had attractive women look at me and say wow all that often. Halley's Comet is a more frequent visitor. It was pleasantly disconcerting. She asked me why I'd chosen that topic so I stammered my way through an explanation of why I thought it was interesting and she seemed to think it was fine. Not weird at all.

The day before the AFL Grand Final, we were having a special morning tea and I was running the staff handball competition. As I was setting up, Karen from Siobhan's section told me Siobhan was very keen to do well and that she was the sort who was pretty good at anything she tried her hand at. "You'll have to send her out on a fool's errand just as the competition's about to start, ha ha ha." She thought that was funny and headed back to work. Next thing, the door opens and Siobhan walks in.

"Hi Lad. Karen said you wanted to see me."

"Um, no ... oh wait I think she's misunderstood what I said. She said you were a big chance to win and I said well, send her out on an errand just before the start. As a joke, you know, and she's misinterpreted it as... you know, go and see Lad." I realized it sounded lame as I was saying it, never a good sign, and would instantly convince any woman that I'm a complete idiot. I expected her to roll her eyes and walk out but she smiled and shook her head and leaned over the counter.

"I'm sorry about that, Siobhan. Your time being wasted, I mean."
"Oh that's fine. Do you need a hand?"
"No, no thanks, it's all pretty much ready to go I think ," so I busied myself with the final setting up of the target and score chart. She seemed to want to talk and told me all about how she'd played football herself for a couple of seasons with a womens' team. My turn to go wow. She explained how she loved footy so much she thought why the hell not have a go, an attitude I found admirable. She told me how as her three brothers had never played, it was the only time her dad got to watch one of his offspring chase a kick. There were just the two of us there and with her opening up, almost shyly, I had a funny feeling about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Later, I wondered if it hadn't almost had the vibe of like, well, a date, of all things.

Three or four weeks ago a whole crowd of us went out for lunch at a local CBD pub for someone's birthday. I got lost and arrrived a bit late so sat at one end of our table. Siobhan was down the other end on the same side so I couldn't see her through all the heads. Probably just as well. The last thing I'd want to be doing is seeking her out.

A little while into the lunch, I went up to the bar to get another round of drinks for my section. There were a few people ahead of me so I waited and watched the cricket on the big screen.
"Hi Lad." Siobhan had materialized next to me. That's what it seemed like. My peripheral vision is probably shot to the shithouse and I was intent on the First Test from India up on the big TV anyway so it's probably likely she just walked over. We'd chatted for a couple of minutes when the barman nodded in my direction.

She called out her order with mine and I paid so she wouldn't be queue-jumping. She was adamant I was going to be repaid. Next time, I shrugged, meaning there'd be other such lunches and she could buy me a drink then, or forget all about it and I'd never remind her. Siobhan wasn't having any of that and went over to get some change.
"Look, Siobhan, it's no big deal and I don't want a whole heap of coins jangling around in my pocket. Leave it till next time. It's fine, really."
She put the coins down in front of me and said "End of discussion," with a not unpleasant finality and headed back to the office. I did turn to steal a wee glimpse of her as she walked away, something I'd been trying to avoid doing.

Later, I wondered if she'd been keen to pay me back so I wouldn't have anything over her, in case I might later pester her to buy me a drink and believe it entitled me to some kind of proprietary interest in her. Okay, there are a lot of deluded sleazebags around and if she's guarded, good on her.

And then just last week there was a staff meeting. Without any contrivance on anyone's part, Siobhan and I were sitting directly opposite each other. I was listening to one of the blokes, standing behind and to Siobhan's right explaining something when I thought I could glimpse her looking at me. I kept my eyes on the speaker for quite a few seconds and then stole a glance across at her. Still looking at me. I couldn't think what to do because we were looking right at each other so I just smiled at her. Probably more of a lop-sided grin. She smiled back and then cast her eyes down, like she was a bit embarassed at being caught looking at me. Or wondering what the fuck a middle-aged loser is doing smiling at her during a fucking staff meeting. Only one of these is really plausible.

Later that afternoon she again seemed to just appear when she came over to my section to return the pen drive that I'd loaned her earlier.

"Oh, here it is. Sorry I didn't return it earlier, Lad."
"No, that's fine Siobhan, thanks for bringing it over."
She half-turned and then gave me a big smile and said almost breathlessly "Bye. See you soon."

It was like we were a couple of nervous teenagers at a third-form social.

Tomorrow night we're playing for the first time in a little work ensemble group that's just starting up. I was in one of these before at a previous school and they're great fun. I had no idea she played anything but when I sent the expression of interest around the office email she responded with an offer to play guitar and flute. She'll be finger-picking her way through Dear Prudence and Wish You Were Here on her classical guitar while I try to keep up on electric guitar. Another bloke will play acoustic guitar and two women will fill things out with vocals and percussion. Musically, I'm quite looking forward to it.

So that's where we are. Just the facts, ma'am. I'll try to do a deeper analysis of what I really think is happening in my next post. You'll probably do a better analysis in the comments.

There's Somethin' Happenin' Here...

2008-10-22T11:30:00.005+11:00

Jesus. I think I might be developing something almost like a crush on someone at work. Fuck. I think she's sort of acting like she has a crush on me too. Christ.

Gone...

2008-09-08T13:10:00.004+10:00

You might remember I was having virus-generated PC problems at home. And that I was trying to get a solution via the http://www.techguy.org/ forums. This is a great way to solve problems and I highly recommend the website.

Alas, I had to have a problem that resisted even the good folk who trawl those forums dispensing sound advice. Okay, fora for those of you who insist on correct Latin plurals.

For some reason, the WinXP disk's recovery mode just wouldn't fix things so after a couple of luckless weeks, I rashly went for the reinstall option. After all, it only warned that I MIGHT lose the contents of the My Documents folder. Any chance is better than no chance at all. So I did it.

And lost everything. Family photos and video, family history research, personal stuff, everything. And 28 nearly-completed posts for this pathetic blog. When I say that they were all brilliant, witty, cutting-edge pieces of fine writing that could change your whole outlook on life, please take my word for it.

It's my own stupid fault. Mea culpa. Again with the Latin. I should have had virus protection in the first place. And even failing that, I should have waited until I came across someone who could help me recover Win XP without causing loss of data.

And then last week, TLOML's laptop surrendered its internet capability. And I got knocked back for one of those Virtual Community personal PC loans. Something about me only being in the new job for less than six months. So we're technologically-challenged at home.

Luckily, I'm now semi-comfortable at the new workplace and have girded my loins and posted this from work.

I'm not back in town as such, but I'm entering Kalkallo.

Kalkallo - small town on the northern outskirts of Melbourne

At A Standstill...

2008-07-29T21:27:00.004+10:00

There are 27 files in the PendingPosts folder on the hard drive of my PC. There are 28 viruses, trojans and spyware gremlins infecting that PC. Just as soon as the new ADSL was connected, they flooded up the cable like sperm swimming towards an egg. But unlike fertilization, they all got through.

Now I'm waiting for our good friends at MicroSoft to deliver the Win XP disk I need to fix the damned registry problem the spyware has caused. And then I'll need to get some anti-virus software on. Last fucking time I ride bareback.

The battery on this laptop is getting low and TLOML has left the power cable at school, the darling. My blog and web access might be in tatters at the moment but life is not. I'm enjoying the change provided by my new job and funnily enough, I think I'm a bit more pleasant to be around for my loved ones. The Bombers playing great footy also helps.

I've been neglecting all of your blogs too as I'm not quite bold enough to run through them at work. Being new and all.

But guess what? One of my new colleagues is the partner of a blogger who I've been reading and commenting on for the past two years. Small world. Delightfully so, sometimes.

It's Up To You, New York, New-ew Yooorrrrk!

2008-07-03T22:45:00.005+10:00

You’ve probably seen the footage on the news. The CCTV from the Kings County Hospital in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York City, which shows a 49-year old black American woman dying on the floor of the waiting room. It’s here. The TV News in Australia described her as a psychiatric patient who had already waited 24 hours for unspecified treatment and that the other patients in the waiting room, who ignored her for the whole hour she was dying unattended, were also psychiatric patents.

You would also have seen how she was observed and successively ignored by: a security guard; a doctor; another security guard – that’s right, the one who rolled his chair back to have a look and then rolled it back out of frame. And of the nurses who finally did come to her aid, one gave her a bit of a kick before bending to check on her.

The news you saw probably also had a New York public official saying something like:

“You might expect something like this to happen in a Third World country. You do not expect this sort of thing to happen in New York City.”

I disagreed with her. I’m not totally surprised that something like that happened. And I’m also not surprised that it happened in New York. I thought that the American cities I visited in the mid-80s all looked a lot more like Third World countries than I was comfortable with, including New York. I think there might also be quite a few Americans who are similarly unsettled by the nature of American cities.

And if there are any of you out there who’ve also been to New York City, you might just have picked up the same vibe from many of its inhabitants that I did.

That people seemed to be predisposed towards being deliberately unhelpful. And further, would even appear to take some deadpan pleasure in you being disadvantaged by this unhelpfulness. Always politely, of course.

Some of it was epitomized in the TV show Seinfeld: In scenes where the main or other characters would delight in or be dismissively uninterested in someone else’s misfortune. And then when the plot resolved and some disaster had overtaken the indifferent, their despair and pathetic pleading for assistance. I picked that recurring motif as very much a New York thing. In Australia, it appeared to be perceived as a combination yuppie Gen-X thing. The final two-hour episode was probably the quintessential example of what I’m talking about here.

Now, I’m happy to cop a roasting on this, particularly from any Americans who don’t see it as an indictment on New York or America anymore than backpacker murderer Ivan Milat reflects Australia. But that’s just it. He does reflect Australia. If you’re able to, check out some of the statements attributed to him by people who encountered him and tell me they’re not (admittedly) extreme examples of attitudes to women and crime that are not entirely rare in Australian males.

The indifference and deliberate inaction of those officials in the CCTV footage towards the dying woman is an (again admittedly) extreme example of attitudes you would not find altogether uncommon among New Yorkers.

We should be shocked, but not surprised.

New Job

2008-06-30T15:56:00.000+10:00

My Long Service Leave ended just last Thursday. Counting the Christmas school holidays, I haven’t worked since December last year. On Friday, I commenced Leave Without Pay. And as this juncture approached, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Job-wise I mean.

This is not a wolf-at-the-door situation. I can do Casual Replacement Teaching if nothing falls into my lap. And if that’s unbearable, I can always go crawling back to my teaching job. So I’m not in the same situation as some poor bastard who’s been retrenched. I’ve jumped, but with a parachute securely strapped on.

I’ve been half-heartedly checking employment opportunities since about April. Something in training, perhaps. I have a B Ed and a Post Grad Diploma in Educational Computing. Neither of which makes me an appealing prospect for training firms. Certificate 4 is the preferred qualification there.

But just last Friday afternoon, I found out I have a new job, starting on 14th July. I’m pretty relieved, as you can imagine. I’d been feeling a bit guilty about making my family hostages to fortune.

The interview was on Friday morning in the city. With a State govt statutory authority. Being a qualified teacher was one of the selection criteria for the job. So I wouldn’t have to bluff my way through, too-hopefully claiming that skills I’d picked up during 25 years as a primary school teacher were transferable to whatever job I was going for. This was a job for a teacher that fulfilled all my requirements: it didn’t involve actual teaching!

There’s a bit of a pay cut involved. Leaving the profession right after a salary increase to take up a lower-paid job might not appear the smartest move and has generated quite a few interestingly arranged wtf facial expressions. Including from my new boss.

I’ll be working in the city. First time since 1978. Catching public transport. The kitting up will be expensive. For a teacher, the general rule of thumb in the absence of a dress-code is sort of just below smart casual. Or in my case, very casual and not always smart. From now on, I’ll be in shirt and tie territory.

And loving it.

Something Happened To Me Yesterday

2008-06-04T00:31:00.004+10:00

Actually, it wasn’t yesterday but I’ve been dying to use that song title from the Rolling Stones 1967 album Between The Buttons to head up a post. This is about interesting experiences on a few occasions where I’ve been out recently. At night. And why I always feel I’m at the mercy of the naked city whenever I do.

Episode One:
I’ve arranged to go out for a drink on a Friday night with a former colleague, Paul. We both need a night out. At Newmarket’s The Quiet Man. It’s one of those fake Irish pubs, with a warm, friendly atmosphere, and named after a sentimental John Ford film set in a Hollywood faux-Ireland, so there’s a layer or two of irony attached to it.

Populated without being crowded, an acoustic duo plays unobtrusively in the corner. We have a look and a listen and I go to the bar. On the way back, I see this big beefy bloke, maybe early to mid-20s, and with facial features as if designed by the NRL Footy Show, sitting in a booth with a couple of friends and they’re trying to get him to stop punching the wall. Or at least stop punching it so hard.

Clearly someone to give a wide berth to. I tell Paul to keep his eyes peeled for the plaster pugilist. A couple more rounds and I’m waiting at the bar again when someone comes up beside me. It’s the big beefy bloke, still looking a little affected by his earlier anger-management issues. Fuck. I can be a bit of a magnet for these types.

“G’day mate I’m Steve how’s it goin’?”
“Hi Steve. Pleased to meet you, I’m Lad.” Wary without trying to appear wary.
“Geez I fuckin’ love this pub y’know. Good to get out on a Friday night and get pissed in.”
“Yeah, it’s alright isn’t it? Couple of drinks, bit of music, a few people.”
“Few wankers though. I kicked the shit out of a fuckin’ homeless cunt just down from here last week. Reckoned the two buck coin I chucked at him was a bit stingy. Fuckin’ ungrateful cunt. He fuckin’ deserved it.”

Often with these sorts of pricks there’s an inherent challenge to disagree with their scumbag attitudes. You find yourself with a tenuous grip on the tiger’s tail. But he seems to accept my non-committal single-nod Mmm as some kind of endorsement and I let him. Then he insists on buying me a drink, because he reckons I look a bit like a sometime in the future fucking homeless cunt myself. I know this is a fishing expedition, but I take it as a half-matey you-old-bastard-type insult and manage to grin and disentangle myself from him and return to where Paul and I are sitting.

“You looked to have handled that pretty well,” Paul says.
“Yeah. Managed to avoid putting him on an action footing, but he wasn’t pushing hard.”
“What would you have done if he was?”
“Well, and this is only a theory mind you, but with fucking arseholes like him, and there’re plenty around worse than him too, there’s a point where you realize they just want to hit you, and there’s no way to placate them. Anything you say they use to wind themselves up further. So when you feel you’re almost at the point of no return, get in first, I reckon. Start with a quick uppercut into the very soft bit just under the sternum. They’ll be winded by that and it might be all you need to do, but if you’re not confident about hitting the right spot, a couple of straight jabs right into their Adam’s apple should make them lose interest.”
“Shit, have a listen to Mr Fucking Natural-Born Killer here. Hahaha! Can’t understand why you’re not in Special Forces.”
“Now, you know perfectly well that we covert op types can neither confirm nor deny.”

Thankfully, Steve found other people at the pub to earbash (I hope that’s all he ended up doing) and we were left to chat and drink too-many Black Russians unmolested.

Episode Two:
This time it was a regular monthly get-together of old schoolmates. Usually referred to as “the boyos”, for no good reason other than it gives us a chance to put on a piss-weak Welsh accent. I don’t get to go along all that often anymore, but this time I’m keen as mustard to make an effort. It’s in Preston, in a Chinese restaurant near the market.

After picking up a nearby mate, I’m waiting to turn right into Cramer St from Gilbert Rd. The lights change to green but I’m not in a hurry, so there’s a beat before I ease my foot off the brake. And just as well. Because as I do that, some kind of hoon-mobile comes streaking through the intersection to my right, doing what my companion and I estimate to be between 80-100kmph. We also estimate that if I’d taken off a little more quickly we might just have made the 7:30 news update as a diverting tsk-tsk item about two middle-aged blokes being killed in a horror smash. So far so good.

At the restaurant, one of the boyos is a regular and keen to order on our behalf so we let him concoct a set menu that is pretty good. Some of the guys are a bit dubious but I trust his judgment and we are vindicated. The meal is excellent if a little pricey, and we have a fun night catching up with good friends.

We get out of the restaurant at about 11:30 and walk over to where I’m parked in the market. We get in. Over to my right, a police car cruises up to a nightclub entrance about 50m away when I see a car being driven at speed from in front and to the left heading straight for us. This bloke is howling across the car park, swerving between cars parked in marked bays. Just as I start bracing myself for a significant impact he manages to yank the wheel over and flies past us leaving just a few inches to spare. We both say “Let’s get the fuck out of here” together.

Of course, we remember to link our little fingers for luck. We figure we’re going to need it if we’re to have an incident-free trip home.

Episode Three:
Collingwood have easily beaten Essendon in the annual ANZAC Day match at the MCG, but back at a mate’s cozy place in Richmond afterwards, a few drinks and a few more joints take the edge off a terrible result for the Bombers.

I start heading home around midnight. Richmond West station is down the end of the street and I just need to hop on a train to Flinders St Station and then change there for another that will take me home to Flemington. But I’m disoriented, and catch an outbound train by mistake. I realize this when the next station is Collingwood.

No worries, I’ll get out at the next station, walk around to the city-bound platform and everything will be just tickety-boo. At Victoria Park, there are teenage kids saying goodbye to some mates and they’re good-naturedly rubbishing each other across the platforms.

A couple enters the platform opposite me. She’s tall and thin with long lank hair and he’s short and agitated, wearing a tracksuit and baseball cap. He walks quickly up and down the platform tapping on the walls, seats and signs with something and then jumps down on the tracks opposite the kids. They go quiet.

“Give me a fuckin’ cigarette. No, two,” he tells them. He’s wound up. The kids hand over the cigarettes. Hmmm, I think. A nasty piece of work. He turns to go back over to the platform opposite but then stops and looks directly at me, where I’m leaning against the station wall. It’s about this time I notice that he’s carrying a knife.

Fuck. I push off from the wall and walk out to the edge of the platform, so I can have a go at kicking his head off if he tries to climb up. He’s still looking at me, but it’s just a pause and he returns to the other side and he and his girlfriend leave the station. I go back to the wall, and turn so I can see anyone coming up the entrance ramp, just in case he’s decided to pay me a follow-up visit, but my train arrives and I’m on it and away.

Every night, there are four million stories in the naked city. I'm just paranoid enough to see it that way too.

Great Gigs II: Joe Walsh at the Prospect Hill, 1985

2008-05-29T09:02:00.005+10:00

You can’t go past a guitar player who tries to do something a bit special with almost every note. You know the type. They’re said to play like it’s an attack on both the notes and the instrument. Think Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix. But I’m not so sure the metaphor fits. I think it’s more about an individual player’s feel. Intangible, I know, but what did you expect me to say? Je ne sais qua?

I’d first heard of Joe Walsh in early 1973 when his hit Rocky Mountain Way got airplay on 3XY. The talk-box was a strange new effect and his slide guitar playing was outstanding, with a delightfully dirty sound and plenty of sustain, artfully combining country and blues influences.

His album titles were witty (eg So What?; But Seriously, Folks; There Goes The Neighbourhood) and tracks from the live You Can’t Argue With A Sick Mind were regularly shown on rock clip TV shows like Flashez and WROK in the mid-70s. It was here that I was able to see Walsh in full flight.I mentioned that he’s the kind of player who puts everything into just about every note (by that I mean slight bends and the odd harmonic scream) but between notes he slid along the fretboard, going waow and whoo to punctuate his solos that really made my hair stand up on end. Here was a player who knew how to use the more “noisy” elements of rock guitar technique beautifully.

When I heard early in 1976 that he was to replace Bernie Leadon in the Eagles, I immediately thought their share price was raised considerably. No disrespect to Leadon, who was a fine singer-songwriter-guitarist, but up until Hotel California the Eagles had struck me as a group manipulating the easily-impressed (and easily depressed!) sensitive teenager market with contrived country-rock she-done-me-wrong songs. They still retained this element of their persona after Walsh joined, but it was just, I don’t know, better? And he and Don Felder really knew how to blend their similar styles. More fraternal guitar twins than identical. Kinda like Keith Richard and Ron Wood, but more accomplished.

At Kew’s Prospect Hill Hotel in 1985, legendary journeyman guitarist Waddy Wachtel supplied the counterpoint that Felder had provided on the Eagles recordings. Wachtel could play too. This was a Joe Walsh solo gig, but this American band (he had toured with the Party Boys* earlier that year. I saw them at Billboard) were just a hot outfit. Don’t you just love an eminent artist who doesn’t feel the need to be the big shot on stage?

They did all of his classic songs, from the early James Gang days, his solo career, and the Eagles. One particular highlight was a pumped-up Life In The Fast Lane, not an easy song to do live and believe me I would have understood if they’d left that one off the set list.

But for this admitted worshipper, Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl was the sour cream on the burrito. The original is the kick-ass opening song on Young’s 1968 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere album, but Walsh and his hired guns took it to a new level while still remaining faithful to the original.

It was a pretty blokey crowd of unashamed Joe Walsh fans that night as I recall and we were all just transfixed.

Isn’t it great when you see an admired artist perform and expectations are both matched and exceeded?

*The Party Boys were a band that served as a perpetual fun side-project for prominent Australian rock musicians and the occasional overseas guest artist. Their membership was fluid and if memory serves, at different times included: John Swann; Marc Hunter; Kevin Borich; David Briggs; Shirley Strachan; and many others.

Classic TV I: Flight of the Conchords

2008-05-18T21:50:00.007+10:00

Last Sunday, I read a fairly tepid review of Flight of the Conchords in the Sunday Age. Thinking it might be okay but not really expecting a cack-fest of any great magnitude, I tuned in about ten minutes into the first episode and laughed helplessly for the remainder.

Flight of the Conchords stars New Zealand musical-comedy duo Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement as a New Zealand folk duo trying to hit the big time in the Big Apple. They have an unbelievably incompetent manager, desperately sell possessions to a pawnbroker who doesn’t like them but who is still their best friend in New York, and a lone female fan who they find repulsive.Inner monologues and dialogue between characters are often rendered in songs, frequently in the form of full-on music videos, a little bit like the Monkees TV show. There’re also many funny references to the Aussie-Kiwi dichotomy, which probably parallels the US-Canada relationship in some ways, I’d imagine. Read an interview with Bret McKenzie here.

Anyway, I’m about to watch episode two of this terrific 12 episode HBO series in just a few minutes. It screens on Channel 10 at 10:10pm. In Melbourne, anyway. Check local guides for details.

You can visit the official HBO website here; check out the BBC take on it here; and read a few slabs of dialogue here.

I found it piss-your-pants funny and littered with brilliant musical and visual gags.

So much of commercial TV is a complete fucking wasteland. And no, I’m not going to add the almost-obligatory “these days” to that assessment. Because let's face it, it’s ever been thus. But Flight of the Conchords is great TV, not just a cut above most of everything else that’s on at the moment.

Five Weird or Random Things About Me Meme

2008-04-22T00:12:00.013+10:00

I’ve been tagged for this meme by the delightful Blakkat, whose gem of a response can be read here.

1. When I was 16, I somehow managed to get a school holiday job working for a toy company. The job involved making personal appearances at K-Mart stores in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. As Spiderman. These stores were selling a new range of Spiderman toys to coincide with an upsurge in interest in the web-slinger.

I’d like to think I brought a certain dark, brooding, teenage angst-ridden presence to the role. I’d like to think that, but the facts don’t quite accord with that alternate reality. For starters, I was painfully self-conscious: not a terribly helpful trait for one embarking on acting. And the costume was made of some kind of pre-lycra type stretch fabric that itched like buggery and threw my puny physique into fairly sharp relief, adding to my discomfort. 13 Ribs! Count ‘Em, 13!

What a trouper I was. Anyway, three times a day the company car would pull up at a K-Mart entrance and I would sit and wait while my boss got the shop PA system working and could announce my presence and the location of my show.

“Ladies and gentlemen, give Peter Parker, Spiderman in person, a big welcome as he makes his way to Aisle 5. You can have a Polaroid photo taken with your friendly neighbourhood Marvel superhero and he will also be demonstrating the new range of brilliant Spiderman toys and merchandise.”

I lapped up the applause and cringed at the odd giggle and guffaw that greeted my awkward entrance. I did it because it paid a princely (at 1976 value) $20 a day and I was keen to use the money to buy ugh boots and a lumberjacket.

The worst day was a one-off at Myer in the city, where for some reason that now escapes me my boss couldn’t drop me right out the front so I had to walk half a city block in costume. To make it fun, I walked in character too. But even a superhero has to obey traffic signals and I had to stand and wait at the crossings with all of the lunchtime shoppers, some of whom thought I was some kind of pervert, and said so.

But I still have my pride. If one of my mates mentions that I was once Spiderman I strike a pose, hopefully a relevant one, and tell them, “That’s The AMAZING Spiderman, thank you.”

2. I was on Sale of the Century in 1990. I went in to Channel 9 in Richmond as a standby contestant and squeezed in to the Friday episode where I finished ahead of a very popular, attractive, long-running female champ. So I imagine for that weekend, in many households I was that-bastard-who beat-that-lovely-what-was-her-name-again-oh-and-she’d-just-had-a-baby.
Anyway, I managed to convince myself that I couldn’t give a fuck whether I was popular or not. And the plan was to buy at any cost so I could at least maybe come away with something half way decent. I bought everything, but then kept winning anyway. One more show and I’d have the prize showcase. Two more shows and I could add the $234,000 cash jackpot. The show for the prizes was the last of the day, the one to be screened on a Friday night.

After being 30 down, going into the last sweaty commercial break, scores were tied at the end of the final round. Oh, and thanks to the Dixons, our next door neighbours growing up, who gave the nine year old Lad a book about pirates for Christmas. I managed to nail the final answer, Captain Kidd, right on the buzzer. So there was a tie-breaker question. After Tony Barber read just the one clue, the other contestant buzzed in and got it wrong.

So one more episode for $234,000. During the ten seconds of background muzak, all I could hear was, “You’ gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em…..”

I took the prizes and ran for the hills!

3. The Monday after my son Larry’s team won last season’s U12 footy premiership was Mad Monday. Not for the boys. Don’t be stupid. They had school. For the dads. The boys had a brilliant season, going through undefeated, although they only won the last home and away game by one point and were behind at half time in one match and behind at quarter-time in the 2nd Semi-Final. Every other game was a massacre.

In the Grand Final, Larry was selected at full-back for the first time that season and kept the competition’s leading goal-kicker to just the one touch, and that from a dubious free kick. So Mad Monday was a fitting way to celebrate a sensational season.

We kicked off triumphantly at 11am at Ascot Vale’s Prince of Wales Hotel and then walked up Mt Alexander Rd (Mt Rd in our local dialect) to the now-defunct Chung On Chinese restaurant for a long lunch. There was only heavy beer at the restaurant for some reason so ol’ Lad Litter shrugged and joined in the serious drinking with predictable results. Stinko. But leavened somewhat by the three or four joints I’d brought along.

Back at the pub, wives and even whole families started arriving at about 10pm and quite a few tired and emotional dads were embraced and then bundled into waiting family vehicles. “Are you coming back a bit later?” I called to one staggering escapee whose charming wife giggled and shook her head resignedly.

Resisting exhortations to kick on elsewhere, the walk home was like live action pinball as I staggered and bounced off trees, fences and then eventually the interior of our house. I might have binged, but I’d binged responsibly, I maintain.

4. I have never had sex. I’ll just let that sink in first before I qualify it. In a dream I mean, silly. I don’t think there’ve been all that many erotic dreams for me, but I always seem to wake up just before actually consummating. Does it mean that my life is destined to always fall short of true fulfillment? Am I unable to meaningfully follow through on commitments? Or does it mean that someday I am destined to lead the Jews out of Egypt? I don’t know.

However, in a similar way, I always regain consciousness during particularly frightening nightmares when I am just about to be killed.

5. Barracking for Essendon means I have reason to be antipathetic towards Carlton. And just so you don’t think I’m understating the case here, I don’t hate them. Not at all. I despise them. So many of their supporters are loud-mouthed, boastful, bragging, solipsistic, gloating, skiting baboons who insist on deliberately arguing from an extremely illogical position What lovable larrikins they are. Larrikin is actually Australian for fuckwit, but there are enormous sections of the media industry devoted to convincing Australians that it isn't.

So you can imagine what sort of revelation it was when some family history research turned up that my great-great uncle had been Carlton’s captain back in the 1870s and was even club President from 1914-1921. And that a grandstand at Carlton’s home ground Princes Park is named after him. And that his two sons had also played quite a bit of footy at Carlton, one even going so far as to play 150 games, kick 330 goals, lead their goal-kicking in several seasons and feature in two Carlton Premierships.

Our second son Larry, just by coincidence, shares Mr President’s name and probably also coincidentally, some measure of football prowess.

Of course none of this makes me go around with a paper bag over my head. I am, actually, a little bit proud of my antecedents having been such high-achievers. And the many ex-Carlton players I have spoken to and corresponded with during further research have all been wonderful, charming, generous people. And it is a club with a rich, grand history. Quelle contradiction? Hypocrisy anyone? I beg to differ.

It’s the narrative I’m into and I rationalize it thus: you don’t have to agree with the policies of Nazi Germany in order to be fascinated by its history.

Carlton supporters I know have derided me for the forsaking of my family tradition. But I believe my relatives’ stewardship of Carlton was a lost Golden Age, before they let all the spivs take over.

So there it is and I’m tagging Ann O’Dyne; Lord Sedgewick; Jahteh; Edward Yates; and Geoff Dening. If they haven't been tagged already, that is. Should be some good reading with that lot.

Lygon St Purgatory II

2008-04-13T23:38:00.002+10:00

“You need to see the manager,” the waiter told me, raising his eyebrows and shrugging to show me it was out of his hands.
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary. All I’ve asked is for you to bring me one of the stubbies I handed over to you earlier. Just bring one of them with you when you come back please.”
“You go see the manager.”

I had absolutely no fucking idea why I would need to talk to the manager but I was given the distinct impression that it was because I’d done something wrong, and it had something to do with my asking for one of the stubbies. Maybe they’d lost them and the manager was going to apologise and offer me some other bottles of beer. That was about as much as I could come up with and judged it pretty unlikely as soon as it occurred to me.

No, it looked like I was going to be hassled. And I was a bit irritated by that prospect as I dragged myself up from my seat and walked through an arch to where the manager was standing behind a bar. I’d already heard from the colleague who organized the night out that this manager had a long and proud history of rubbing people up the wrong way. He was thirtieish; smooth of skin and hair; and ginger-fair in that northern Italian way. Southern Italians reckon northern Italians are all up themselves. I’m not sure if that’s one of the great truths, but this bloke might have had his own colonoscopy footage playing over and over in his mind.

Like the waiter, he looked like he wanted to impose himself on the ambience. And he was going to do that by being a pain in the arse. And I picked up that he thought I was not the kind of customer he really wanted in his restaurant. So he and the waiter probably felt some kind of entitlement about treating our group like shit. I wanted to help him understand that the unpleasant customer he was dealing with was entirely his own creation.

“The waiter told me I had to come and see you to get one of my stubbies.”
“Well, there’s a problem with the stubbies you’ve brought into the restaurant. We are BYO, but wine only.”
“Really. That sounds like a very uncommon arrangement.” This is a few years ago now, probably 1998, when this sort of drink-specific BYO, now widespread, was still very much in its infancy. “There’d be quite a few of your patrons caught out by that, I’d imagine.”
“No, not at all. It’s printed on all of our menus.”
“Menus that aren’t sighted till after everyone’s sat down. I said g’day and went off to get some beer. This is the first time that’s ever been something to be hassled over. What’s the reasoning behind the restriction?”
“People come in, and I’m sure you can imagine, they have eskies loaded up with beer and it’s not the sort of dining experience we want for this restaurant.”
“My dining experience has been getting hassled for bringing in six stubbies. Of light beer. You’ve created a problem where there wasn’t one.”
“You’ll find most of the restaurants in Lygon St are now BYO wine only.”
“I don’t go to Lygon St much anymore. Too many people who just want to give you a hard time. I’ll grab those stubbies thanks. All of them. I don’t want to have to ask your waiter to bring me one and have to go through this all over again.”
“Do you intend to drink them here?”
“Yeah I do. And I don’t expect to be persecuted for it either.”

He handed them over and the rest of the evening was spent pleasantly. We’d finished the main course by this time and didn’t need to have as much contact with the waiter and didn’t see the manager again.

One wit back at the table referred to my stubbies as the Carlton Six. The next day, I was to hear a view of the evening and the incident that seemed to come from a strange parallel universe.

Update: Well, not really an update, but does anyone know how to make my sidebar appear at the side of my posts and not all the way down the bottom? If there are any kind souls out there who can help, I'd really appreciate it. And feel free to patronize me for my stupidity.

WorkCover Blues I

2008-03-15T19:14:00.003+11:00

Sorry about the long absence. I ran out of dope.

This is a true story. The names have been altered, but not the initials. In a kind of homage to Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, if you like. Criminal libel, come and get me. Just over two years ago, I entered the twilight world of the WorkCover claimant. This is what happened. Needless to say, I hadn’t thought I’d ever be in a situation like that.

I’d been teaching at Oxford Primary School in Melbourne’s far outer west for ten relatively happy years. And I had it pretty good, being the Information and Communications Technology specialist teacher and all. I mean, kids want to stay on the good side of the computer bloke. You never know when he’s going to need someone to test out games or let your grade have a bit of free time in the lab at lunchtimes. But I thought I needed a change, just the same. I was keen to move on and also find a spot a little closer to home.

Right before the end of 2003, a job was advertised that would suit me perfectly. It was an ICT specialist teacher position, and the job description was pretty much what I was already doing. In fact, this Solar Hills PS in Melbourne’s west wanted an ICT set up very similar to what I’d helped put in place at Oxford over the previous 5 years or so. So I could swan in, hit ‘em with all of the ideas that were starting to go stale at Oxford, and look like I was some kind of expert.

The Acting Principal, who chaired the interview panel, was someone I’d worked with previously, if briefly, and she seemed okay. TLOML had even worked there about twenty years previously so there were some familiar, if older, faces on the staff.

When I got the job, the techie at Oxford told me that he’d heard there was a lot of friction between the Principal, Min Worland, and the Assistant-Principal, Mary Gajic who was acting in the top job. Oh well, nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t have any trouble staying out of it. And when the job started, Mary was away in Europe on Long Service League, so the catfight potential was reduced.

But according to Min and the Acting A-P, Gavroula Parageorgiou, there were concerns over the job the staff were doing. Shit, I thought. I’d never been in a school where the staff were not well-regarded by the Principal Class people, so I hoped it wasn’t going to be too much of a pain in the arse for me to get them to use computers.

There were some warning signs during that first year. In the beginning, the Principal had seemed okay and I hadn’t seen her do anything too far out of line, but there was a bit of clubbishness about the school leadership group, which I was on, and a lot more denigration of staff-members when issues were being discussed than I was used to. Denigration that looked like it was unwarranted.

And I got the third degree once in a meetingfrom a couple of older female teachers who didn’t like the big changes I’d made to the ITC set-up, which were really pissy to begin with, but these two were threatened by them. Like getting staff using email for instance. You know the type.

Then the PE teacher resigned during my second week there, walking zombie-like into my class from next-door at about 9:30 in the morning, handing me a handwritten note and leaving the school immediately, and me with a double grade. He’d had a confrontation with the Principal over his teaching allotment and told me as he gave me his resignation that he wasn’t going to put up with her abuse anymore.

I didn’t really have a view either way about Min and Gavroula. I hadn’t really seen them do too much wrong up until that stage. But TLOML quickly developed a very firm opinion of them when she met them at a staff do.

“That Principal. I reckon she’s a bit funny.”
“Don’t be silly. She’s alright.”
“And the Assistant Principal or whatever she’s acting as. I can’t STAND her.”
“How can you say that? You hardly know her.”
“Oh, I don’t need to know her, you stupid man. And don’t give me any of that innocent-until-proven-guilty crap. She’s an absolute bitch. I know that.”

The apparently instantly-detestable Gavroula had even told me that she and Min were very disaffected with the Australian Education Union, in which I’d always been active.This was a bad omen for me. People who leave the AEU in high dudgeon, or worse, stay in it so they can obstruct what the AEU might be trying to achieve, and run and tell the Principal what people say at meetings, are impossible. They usually take that disaffection, and the petty bigotry that goes with it, out on anyone who is still active. They are without exception, unreasonable, spiteful, vindictive, and always behave atrociously. I wouldn’t have described it thus if it weren’t true in every case in my experience. And it is.

Gavroula showed her hand early when she confided in me that our AEU meetings should be held on a Tuesday, so that she could meet with Min straight after, because Min liked to be kept informed, you know. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. You’re going to get sick of me telling you that. I told her the AEU couldn’t let its meeting dates be determined by the convenience of a non-member and left it at that. The relaying of sometimes sensitive AEU information I’d have to think about and leave till later.

Mary returned from LSL and disappeared a short time later. Actually, she went on sick leave never to return, but there was a story behind it that I didn’t hear till much later.

It was starting to get curiouser and curiouser.

Lygon St Purgatory I

2008-01-31T23:19:00.000+11:00

*I’m kidding myself that I get a whole heap of hits from beyond this fatal shore and so feel it necessary to give some background to this three-post series. Humour me.
Lygon St is the main thoroughfare in a restaurant-entertainment precinct in Carlton, an inner-Melbourne suburb. Historically, Carlton has always retained its essential cosmopolitan feel through many influxes and evolutions. Probably the most significant of these influxes was that of large numbers of post-war Italian immigrants. They settled and soon opened shops and restaurants to cater for this immigrant market.
Added to this is Lygon St’s proximity to Melbourne University, which means that the area has always had what Paul McCartney might call a “studenty” feel. The bohemian element in Carlton and its neighbouring inner suburbs were very keen on the fine but relatively inexpensive cuisine available there. And as with all such things, word spreads, the mainstream catches up after a few years, and so do the prices. Urban Geography 101.

**“Lygon St Limbo” was a refrain from a song about Carlton by 70’s Melbourne band Skyhooks. The title of this post is a play on that.

I never go to Italian restaurants by choice. It’s always someone else’s idea. It wasn’t always like this, but after a while, you just don’t want to encourage them by going back. Having access to top-class Italian cuisine at home via TLOML’s excellent cooking, and the odd passable effort myself, means a meal at an Italian restaurant has always felt a little like a busman’s holiday anyway.

But there are other reasons: I’ve never felt like I’ve been treated like shit at any Thai; Indian; Mexican; Balinese; Spanish; Turkish; Greek; Lebanese; or French restaurant. Or pub bistro for that matter. Not as a matter of deliberate policy, anyway. But at Italian restaurants, things have been a little different.

Now, I think I’d better qualify my position before anyone gets the wrong idea. My wife’s father was Italian. My longest and deepest friendships are with blokes of Italian descent. I love Italy, its language, its culture, its history and its people. But there is an international stereotype, ie Italians are great in the restaurant trade, that needs debunking; - you know, like Australians are laconic, easy-going and always get behind the underdog. And you can expect a future post on THAT load of codswallop too.

But back to Lygon St. There are restaurants on Lygon St’s east side in converted terrace houses. With waiters out the front touting. You’d reckon a good restaurant wouldn’t need to lower itself to this sort of shit, especially since these blokes have about as much savoir faire as the ones you used to see outside porno cinemas. But it seems to be something of a tradition.

You walk past. They ask if you’re interested in coming in. You say no thanks, or some other polite form of refusal, probably because you’ve already eaten at a decent restaurant, but they have to dish out smart-arse remarks or abuse, sotto voce. Sometimes not so sotto, either. It’s a pretty unpleasant and unnecessary gauntlet to be running, coming from a restaurant of all establishments.

Anyway, here’s a case to better illustrate the total experience: about ten years ago, I went to a work night out at a café-restaurant in a lane off Lygon St. One of our colleagues knew the manager, was a frequent diner there, and recommended it.

And because you’ll often see sickening obsequiousness in Italian restaurants whenever the staff are welcoming someone they know, or a celebrity of any magnitude, or a party that includes one or more attractive women, I thought having two out of those three was bound to give us some protection from the usual off-hand arrogance that I’ve experienced. This time, I thought we might be the recipients of some fawning, instead of observing it in stark contrast to the treatment I've come to expect.

All of which probably made my expectations for a good night out unrealistically high.

After arriving and saying a few hellos, I headed down to a nearby bottle shop to get a half a dozen stubbies of light beer.

When I got back, the waiter was ready to take our order. Some dithered over their choices, as people do. The waiter was impatient, abrupt and sarcastic. He responded to some orders by repeating the choice back to the person face thrust forward, lips in a protruding pursed O and eyes bulging out as if he couldn’t believe the person had finally made up their mind. I couldn’t wait for the arsehole to fuck off. But just before he finally did, he reached over and grabbed my stubbies, sighing histrionically.
The meals were okay I suppose, and offered much nostalgia for any former stamp collectors among us. In terms of the size of the portions, I mean. And during the courses, this waiter was asked politely, when we could get his attention, for the sorts of things that waiters are always asked for during a restaurant meal: you know, more garlic bread; another bottle of wine etc.

And each time he was called, he stopped dead in his tracks on his way somewhere else with raised eyebrows and eyes rolling skyward like it was a big hassle for him. And then he kept making a fuss about the huge favour he was doing everyone each time he returned with something. And we were one of only three occupied tables in the whole fucking joint.

But as big a pain in the arse as he was, we managed to shrug off his idiosyncrasies. It was going to take more than this hunk of shit to spoil a good night out, we reasoned.

And more was exactly what I got when I asked him if I could please have another of my stubbies.

Revenge Is A Kind Of Wild Justice III

2008-01-30T01:09:00.000+11:00

Recap From Previous Posts:
1. I’d been punched and pushed around when I was 13 by a bunch of smart-alecs, in particular one nasty little shit who I was to learn afterwards was called Wog by his mates;
2. Two years later, I was due to play football against this nasty little shit;
3. During the football match, I took advantage of an opportunity to shirt-front Wog and knocked him into next week;
4. I never saw him again.

Okay, it was rather tabloid of me to use only part of Sir Francis Bacon’s quote in my title. The quote reads in full: “Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out”. Bacon was talking about the need for criminal sanctions to be about more than just retribution, and was warning of the need for civilized societies to hold hot-headed vigilantism, official or unofficial, in check.

I don’t believe my actions in cleaning Wog up during a football match approach what Bacon was warning against: I hadn’t gone looking for him in the intervening years. It was just a matter of opportunity knocking and me answering. But then I didn’t go around shirt-fronting opponents willy-nilly. I did purposely dish it out to Wog a bit more severely than I perhaps normally would have. But if it had been any other player, they still would have received a fairly solid bump.

And it wasn’t even a full revenge, when I think about it. There was no humiliation involved in what happened to Wog, unlike the treatment he’d handed out to me. I’d had some justification in making contact with him. Whereas he’d given me a belting at random for no reason and then sought to intimidate me further. No, I think he got off fairly lightly.

I was working with two blokes a couple of years ago who’d played for Wog’s club around that time but in different age groups and they couldn’t recognise him from my description. And this despite his captaincy of the team and being a fairly good player. Two things that tend to make junior footballers memorable to their contemporaries.

It was as if he’d been obliterated.

If you click here, you’ll read briefly about the terrible outcome of another more recent incident of what may turn out to be random violence for its own sake.

Wog writ large.

Revenge Is A Kind Of Wild Justice II

2008-01-21T22:47:00.000+11:00

Recap From Previous Post:
1. I’d been punched and pushed around when I was 13 by a bunch of smart-alecs, in particular one nasty little shit who I was to learn later was called Wog by his mates;
2. Two years later, I was due to play football against this nasty little shit;

The plaster came off my arm after less than four weeks and it felt funny. Smelt funny too. The good people at Royal Melbourne Hospital had used a little circular saw that sounded a lot like a dentist’s drill. I was going to need to exercise to reverse the small amount of wastage that had occurred, and keep it strapped up to hold it steady.

The doctor had given me the all-clear to resume playing football after a further two weeks. This would see me taking the field for my local team a week earlier than anticipated, giving me a game under my belt before we took on the team captained by Wog. Until my dad stepped in and told me I would be waiting an extra week as a precaution.

I did what any fifteen year-old would do: argued; explained; pleaded; whinged; and wheedled, until Dad was just about to blow his top and increase the precautionary recovery period. And then I stopped. There was no weakening Dad’s resolve, and anyway, he came to watch me in every game despite my being borderline-hopeless, so he had some credit with me where footy was concerned.

So I trained hard but carefully for the first two weeks, and then normally for the week leading up to our next game. I don’t mind telling you I was pretty nervous about that match. Firstly, there were the nerves that come in the lead up to any game of football; then apprehension about my possible performance – we’d lost a few games during my absence (but not because I wasn’t playing) and needed the win badly; and finally, the dread of not being gutsy enough to do anything to Wog, leaving me to feel doubly humiliated.

I hadn’t told anyone about any of this: not the original confrontation; nor its possible on-field resumption. There was nothing to tell, really. It was like a dirty secret that needed to be kept hidden, so I never mentioned it.

And I had no plan of action either. I was just going to play, and see what would happen.

Now, we’re going back all the way to 1975 here, when Gough Whitlam was PM; the Post Master General’s Department had just become Telecom; Sweet’s Fox On The Run was the Number 1 single; the Suez Canal had just reopened for the first time since the 1967 Six Day War; Jaws and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest were the big movies; and I was furiously saving too buy a lumber-jacket and a pair of ugg boots. So I think it’s forgiveable if I only have three clear recollections of this match:

1. Our coach moved one of my fellow limited-ability team-mates from his usual wing opposite me, into the ruck-roving position. He played a blinder and made a big contribution to the win with his marking and a timely goal from a long way out. He’d slipped as he kicked it and the ball gained extra distance. The gods only have to love you for a little while to turn your fortunes around;

2. Our rover and Wog had resumed hostilities and went at each other like a pair of Kilkenny Cats, using both fair means and foul. And Wog was coming off second best;

3. Late in the third quarter, Wog was about 20m in the clear but struggling to pick the ball up as he ran, head down and bent over, out of the half-back line. I was about 25m in front of him and he was odds-on to clear the footy downfield unless I did something. Soon.

I made a run at him at about three quarter pace, ready to dip my shoulder and tuck my arm in at my side, curving and quickening slightly ahead of him as he rose in possession of the ball. If I timed it right, a good old-fashioned shirt-front might both hurt and dispossess him, leaving the ball nearby for me to swoop on. Now running at full pace, that was about when my feet left the ground.My right shoulder struck him on the collarbone, but I didn’t cause any damage there because my arm had already impacted on the left side of his chest. He bounced straight off and lay flat out on his back, groaning. He was only winded. No broken collarbone, no neck trauma.

The ball was by his side and the whistle had gone for him to get a free kick. I went over as if to help him up and grabbed two handfuls of the front of his jumper and lifted and jumper-punched him rapidly into the ground a few times. That got us a 15m penalty but he couldn’t take the kick. No-one came to square up for him so I lingered in the area.

When he was helped up he said to me:

“You’ll get yours you fuckin’ cunt.”

I didn’t say anything. We were winning.

Our paths didn’t cross for the rest of the match, possibly because he was taken off, but maybe not, because to give credit where it’s due, he was a pretty gutsy player.

Quite a few nasty little shits are.

Revenge Is A Kind of Wild Justice I

2008-01-13T20:08:00.000+11:00

You may have read recently over at Can You Fly Like You Mean It? and Much Ado About Sumthin', a couple of very well-written posts dealing with the random menace and even violence we might encounter as part of our day to day lives. Both Rowena and Steph hit quite a few nails on the head with what they had to say, as usual. This three-post series simply describes some experiences of mine from quite a few years ago that link thematically with theirs.

I was 13 and very keen on getting along to see Essendon in action every Saturday afternoon. Attending a school where everybody and his dog either followed Carlton* or Collingwood* didn’t furnish me with a whole heap of football companions. So apart from the odd group from my local junior footy team getting together to head off to see the Bombers when they played at our Windy Hill home, I generally went by myself.

(*I won’t link to their websites or articles about them on principle!)

Footy is something that you can go to by yourself without too much difficulty. Much easier than the cinema. And try asking for a table for one in a restaurant without feeling like a loser.

So for the Round 21 1973 away match, I caught a couple of trains solo down to St Kilda to watch the Bombers do battle with Fitzroy. We needed a win to secure a place in that year’s finals. And Fitzroy were close to the bottom of the ladder, so I’d already pencilled it in as a likely comfortable win.

The attendant in charge of keeping undesirables out of the Junction Oval’s Blackie-Ironmonger Stand was distracted by some players’ wives and girlfriends who weren’t sure where they should be sitting, so I was able to sneak in and sit down. Even in those days, the female companions of sporting identities tended to be pretty stunning.

I was able to stick out the whole afternoon in the stand by remaining inconspicuous. This wasn’t very difficult as the Bombers gave me nothing to shout about, putting in a shocker to go down by about five goals.

And so it was a very disappointed Lad Litter who trudged along Fitzroy St towards the station. I lit a cigarette (yes, I was smoking at 13. It was still thought to be cool around that time).

“Give us a smoke mate.”
Walking next to me was a tough looking little shit, with a screwed up facial expression like one of the Lollipop League Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz, also heading towards the station after the footy. Sensing some menace in his approach, I wordlessly handed him a cigarette.
“What are you smokin’ these poofter cigarettes for?”
I shrugged. “Alright, I’ll have it back if you don’t like it.”

And then he punched me in the face, hard. My lips started feeling numb, and I was taken aback by the shock of the blow.
“Keep your fuckin’ poofter cigarette.” And he threw it in my face. Just then his mates who’d been walking behind enjoying the spectacle, caught up with us and a few of them gave me a shove as they walked past. I hung back, and watched them dish out similar treatment to another unsuspecting victim along the way.

I was pretty shaken by the whole business, not the least of which was my having shown cowardice in the face of the enemy. Fear, indignation, shame, all competed feverishly for dominance as I got on the train. At Flinders St Station, they noticed me and jeered as I waited on the platform. I watched them get on before choosing a carriage away from them. Did I mention that these shitheads were Essendon supporters too? Fancy being under threat from your own kind.

Anyway, we did end up making the finals and two weeks later I caught the train at Ascot Vale on the way to the final against St Kilda at Waverley. I pulled back the door of the train to get on, and there they were. “Hey, there’s that..” I heard as I closed the door and headed down the platform to another carriage.

At the match, where the rampant Saints pulled the hapless Dons’ pants down, they were sitting about five rows in front of me. I thought I might have to deal with them again, and decided that I would just start throwing punches if they approached me, so at least I’d have a chance of inflicting some damage and regaining a little self-respect. But I didn’t see them at all after the game, so my resolve went untested.

Two years later, I’d moved up through the age groups to playing U17 football, and the team was going alright. We were definite finals prospects and I was getting the odd kick to hold my place in the side. But a mishap during a tackling drill at training left me with a broken wrist, and I would miss six weeks. I turned up at our ground, arm in plaster, to watch my teammates play their first match for the season without me.

The opposition ran out on the ground and their captain looked very familiar. It was the little shit who’d punched me! We won easily and our rover, a very feisty character, had been involved in a running battle all day with this captain, his opposite number. They had taken an immediate and intense dislike to each other.

In the clubrooms after the match, I checked the draw to see if we’d play them again. We would. In six weeks time, when I’d be playing my first game back after injury.

Tilting At Windmills? Let's Hope Not

2007-12-29T17:12:00.000+11:00

You might have seen the article in this morning’s Age by now. It’s about a group called unChain St Kilda trying to prevent the destruction of the Palais Theatre in a proposed redevelopment of the St Kilda Triangle.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/rock-stars-chip-in-to-restore-palais/2007/12/28/1198778704746.html
The hook for the article is the $5000 pledged to the preservation of the Palais by the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and verified by spokesmen from Sony BMG and Paul Dainty respectively.

I’ve only seen two concerts at the Palais: Joe Cocker in 1977 and Rory Gallagher in 1980. Both were excellent concerts and I remember the comfort, atmosphere and sound quality at the venue as being pretty high. Certainly higher than Festival Hall or the Tennis Centre.

You’d reckon a decent developer would be able to come up with something to include the Palais, wouldn’t you? Not so Citta Properties, a Sydney-based firm. Let’s hope the unChain group are successful in their efforts.

Actor Rachel Griffiths and artist Mirka Mora, among others, have also lent their support to the group. I don’t know Mirka at all, but my family does have a somewhat tenuous connection to her.

Mirka and Me:
We’d been invited to visit my dad’s uncle out in Nth Balwyn. I must have been about three and a bit because I can remember my younger brother being a baby. Uncle Jack was pretty well-to-do. He’d made a decent living running black coal mines near Wonthaggi but was in his 60s and retired by this time. He might even have been one of the bad guys in Richard Lowenstein’s film Strikebound (1984), which depicts a long and bitter industrial dispute in the mines. I’ve got some research to do, I know.

But as we entered Uncle Jack’s house, the first thing we saw was a painting on his lounge room wall. It was of a rooftop landscape, crowded with attic-style windows. Uncle Jack had only recently purchased it and wasn’t too impressed.

My older brother saw it differently and said so. He thought it was pretty good. The rest of the visit passed pleasantly as I remember it. I spent most of the afternoon in the backyard having a conversation with Uncle Jack’s cockatoo. And it worked. I spent the next few days saying "Hello Cocky" and little else.

About a week later, we were surprised by a delivery. Uncle Jack had shipped the painting over to my older brother as a gift. These days, it’d be what you might call a win-win situation.

My brother told me later it was called The Tenements of Paris, and had been painted by Mirka Mora in 1957. Mirka ’57 was her signature at the bottom of the painting. I’ve been unable to find any reference to the work under that title on the web.

The painting hung in his room and the family lounge room for many years. About five years ago, I saw a copy of Mirka’s autobiography in the local library. No mention of the painting, so it’s safe to assume it wasn’t a long-lost masterwork.

I mentioned it to my brother and asked of the painting, but he’d been short of cash about five or six years previously and had sold it to William Mora’s Gallery. I was a bit saddened to think that a painting by such a prominent artist was no longer in the family. But it seemed to have gone to the right place.

Desktop Image Meme

2007-12-26T20:54:00.000+11:00

Go over to Honey Smack to view the image she has on her PC desktop. It's a lovely shot of her and her daughter.

My desktop image is below. It's an image of the covers of all of the Rolling Stones albums released between 1964 and 1981. I've had this as my desktop image since about 1999.When a colleague saw it she said "Wow!"

"Hmm, another Stones fan," I thought immediately. "Yeah, I downloaded the album covers from Amazon, pasted them into MS-Paint and then re-pasted the lot into MS-Photo Editor to convert to a jpeg and there it is," beaming proudly.

"Now there's a bloke with a lot of time on his hands".

But thank heavens for memes. I've got about five major posts in various stages of development waiting to be finalized. Waiting for me to get off my bum and finish them, I mean. So I don't mind memes. They provide a quick and painless no-post remedy. Besides, I like variations on a theme and other bloggers viewpoints on the same topic always make interesting reading.

Carols In The Domain

2007-12-24T13:27:00.000+11:00

Why the fuck would I do a post about Saturday night’s Carols In The Domain?

I was only half watching it while trying to finish up the previous 8 Things Meme post. Moe was lying on the couch letting it flow over him and I was annoying him by asking “Is that Delta Goodrem?” of every female singer. When he became a little weary of the game I said, “Well, they all look alike. How am I supposed to tell them apart?”

“I think The Beatles and the Rolling Stones might have looked a bit alike, Dad.”

That shut me up good and proper.

But then Leo Sayer came on. Wearing a white suit. Singing White Christmas.
I was telling Moe how he actually had considerable credibility back in the mid-70s. Just A Boy was a great album and justifiably huge commercially. Then he went disco. Then he went cabaret. Then he came to live in Australia.

But at Carols In The Domain, singing White Christmas, what does he do? He pulls out a harmonica and does a melodic, blues-wailing solo!

You see, blues was so all-pervasive in Britain in the 60s that no musician could afford to ignore it. No blues licks, far fewer bands you can join.

Even Tom Jones fronted a bluesy outfit (Tommy Scott and The Senators) around 1964 before he made it big as a crooner.

Anyway, it made my night and I’ll have a softer spot for Leo Sayer from now on.

I hope your Christmas is full of pleasant surprises.

8 Things Meme

2007-12-22T21:25:00.000+11:00

This is a long response to the meme. But it made me think. And post. Thanks to Eleanor Bloom, who tagged me.

Eight Things I'm Passionate About:

1) TLOML:
I think about her often. How to chat her up, make her laugh, win her, make her love me. We’ve been married for 18 years. It’s fun. I think it might even be fun for her too.
2) Moe; Larry; & Curly:
My three sons, but I'm not exactly Fred McMurray. They'd cack themselves if they knew they were my sporting heroes.
3) Cricket:
This is a good thing that was formerly a bad thing. It’s now okay for me to be involved up to my eyeballs with the local cricket club because we have three young players in the household.
4) Music:
I’m a reformed rock snob. These days, I even appreciate good pop music outside the narrow confines of my taste. So there’s a lot more tolerance about. But not for you, Johnny Farnham. Get the fuck off my radio with your overproduced cabaret mock-rock for complete morons. Maybe not totally reformed.
5) Movies:
I used to be able to watch anything just for the experience. Now it has to be good.
6) Mates:
Lucky to have them. Enjoy spending easy, relaxed time with them.
7) Dope:
Enjoy this too. Still of the view that things go better with...
8) Football:
Essendon: how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. We shall rise again and wreak a terrible vengeance on all those who have scorned us over the past few years. Which means just about everyone.

Eight Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
1) Play In Another Cricket Premiership:
I was 18, batted last, didn’t bowl and fielded behind the tree when I played in my only flag. The only other Grand Final appearance came seven years later but we lost. We might even do it this year with a late charge at the finals.
2) See The Bombers Win Another Flag:
I’ve seen four of them but want more. Nothing quite like seeing your own mob win one instead of watching a whole heap of nobodies bask in glory.
3) Write A Film Script:
I have an idea that I think is a pretty good one. So does everyone I’ve pitched it to. Just at the outline stage so far. An Australian science-fiction film. Not too many of those about. Should be able to paper at least one wall of the study with rejection letters.
4) Get My Band Back Together:

I’d like to play at my 50th, just two years away. Get the ol’ 60s covers thing happening again. I reckon the blokes would be in it. Might be a bit harder to convince them we’ll need to rehearse! And more than just 12 songs like at my 40th.

5) The Other Four Things:

Can wait until after I die.

Eight Things I Say Often:
1) Alright:
The complete all-purpose word. It’s alright.
2) Dichotomy:
Describes a split without apportioning blame. Handy when you’re trying not to inflame a situation.
3) Running around like a headless chook:
Aptly describes confusion or incompetence and usually gets a laugh so you’re not immediately into a confrontation.
4) Carrying on like a two-bob watch:
Similar to above.
5) You beauty:
Use of this has passed in and out of ironic so many times I forget which is which.
6) Can you NOT do that?
When hints fail.
7) Sorry about that, Chief:
A useful catch-phrase from the Get Smart TV show that doesn’t mean much to post baby boomers.
8) I’ve got the hots for you, big time:
Only to TLOML.

Eight Books I've Read Recently:

1) Caesar’s Legacy: Josiah Osgood

Describes from primary sources the fifteen years of terror that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination in 43BC while Octavian and Antony struggled to seize total power.
2) The First of the Few: Denis Winter
This book about WWI fighter pilots is absolutely brilliant, and I’m not given to superlatives. Accurately describes the open cockpit conditions they experienced, making use of letters, diaries and manuals.
3) Stone Alone: Bill Wyman
He only got invited to join the Rolling Stones because he owned two good amps. His point of view on the band is unique and incisive. Especially about the Jagger-Richard monopoly on song-writing credits.
4) History of Australian Cricket: Jack Pollard
Okay, he got Essex left-armer John Lever mixed up with Lancashire’s right-arm fast bowler Peter Lever but it’s still a good read. All four volumes.
5) Miller’s Luck: Roland Perry
Comprehensive, well-written biography of Keith Miller. A great cricketer who is revealed as not quite the great bloke his eulogists would have had us believe.
6) Slaughterhouse Five: Kurt Vonnegut
A funny book that really resonated with so many. Vonnegut was still turning away pilgrims to his genius even just before his death earlier this year.
7) Players: Tony Wilson
Opens a window into the footy media industry. You’ll have no trouble spotting who’s who. And plenty of laughs.
8) Porno: Irvine Welsh
A sequel of sorts to Trainspotting. I just love the shifting first-person narrative and the way Welsh speaks the Leith idiom making no allowances for the uninitiated. You have to work out what a schemie is for yourselves. Go on. Work it out. Brave and bold writing.

Eight Songs I Could Listen To Over And Over:

1) Jumpin’ Jack Flash: Rolling Stones
Still sends a chill up my spine, so good is this song. Everything the Rolling Stones stood for: blues-based, open-tuned guitars, muddy sound. Many have covered it but never captured it.
2) Midnight Man: The James Gang
Brilliant electric country-rock. What else would you expect from Joe Walsh? Original recording features session singer Mary Sterpka sounding a lot like Linda Ronstadt.
3) For Your Love: The Yardbirds
Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc, wrote this 1965 hit for the London blues tyros. A great song. Eric Clapton left the band right after because it wasn’t bluesy enough.
4) Eight Miles High: The Byrds
Ushered in the psychedelic era and was then banned due to it’s drug-influenced lyrics. It was about a fucking aeroplane flight to England, you Christian fundamentalist fuckwits.
5) While My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Beatles
Harrison wrote and sang, Clapton played the solo and fill-ins. Atmospheric and poignant. Can you believe it was the B-side to O-Bla-Di O-Bla-Da?
6) Hey Joe: The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Their first single and a Joe South cover that took the original and made it something else. He would later do a similar job on Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower.
7) Tequila Sunrise: The Eagles
I don’t care how contrived it might have been, Glenn Frey really knew how to croon a sad she-done-me-wrong song. Despite being a misogynistic arsehole in real life. This one’s just beautiful.
8) High Flyin’ Bird: Jefferson Airplane
This performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival showcased an emerging band with three tremendous singers: Marty Balin; Grace Slick; and Paul Kantner.

Eight Albums That Trigger Memories:

1) After The Goldrush: Neil Young

I found this wide-ranging album with its mournful country-folk-rock ballads and stinging rockers uplifting during a summer of adolescent angst. The songs seemed so much more than just contrivances to make teenaged girls feel depressed, as I suspected The Eagles of doing.
2) Hotel California: The Eagles
Well, it was omnipresent, wasn’t it? The soundtrack to the summer of 1976-77. The whole album was just so chocka with great songs, you couldn’t not appreciate their artistry, even through any reservations you might have had about them. The first single to get airplay in Australia was New Kid In Town. What a song. Supposedly their reaction to a Bruce Springsteen gig.
3) John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan
First Bob Dylan album I ever heard, and only because my sister’s boyfriend left his record collection at our place. I was fourteen and I felt great about “getting” Bob Dylan. I had no idea it was a controversial Dylan album due to its country flavour. I just thought it was good.
4) Let It Bleed: Rolling Stones
Another boyfriend legacy, This was the first Rolling Stones LP I’d listened to and it completely knocked me out. Right from the first notes of Jagger’s harmonica on Midnight Rambler. This album sounded cool. I thought I was cool for liking it. Around when I started to become a rock snob.
5) Every Picture Tells A Story: Rod Stewart
One of five albums purchased for just $5.95 the lot when my other sister joined the World Record Club in 1973. This was his third solo album and it’s great. Terrific production with loads of moving instrumentation, including violin and mandolin. He was only any good before 1976’s Atlantic Crossing saw him more successful, but less interesting.
6) Flight Log: Jefferson Airplane
I was eighteen when I first heard this compilation and they just knocked me out. A patchy band whose best was sensational.
7) Front Page News: Wishbone Ash
English guitar-oriented rock. My out-of-touch purist mind regarded their stuff as rock reaching its zenith in the late 70s. Everyone else my age was listening to punk, which I thought was rock’s nadir.
8) Mud Slide Slim and The Blue Horizon: James Taylor
Now described as easy-listening, Taylor was your lonesome troubadour and this album was his high point. First time I realised I liked country-influenced music.

Eight Movies I've Watched Close to Eight Times:

1) Out of the Past: (1947)
Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas tussle over the ultimate femme noir, Jane Greer: “I didn't, Jeff. Don't you believe me?” “Baby, I don’t care.”
2) The Wizard of Oz: (1939)
How many people love this film unashamedly? The reason why so many people were so sad about the way poor Judy Garland’s life turned out.
3) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: (1962)
One of the greatest of all tributes to the genre, but not too self-consciously so. James Stewart is the hero, Lee Marvin the villain. John Wayne starts in the middle.
4) Murder My Sweet: (1944)
Best Raymond Chandler adaptation. Features terrific hallucinogenic dream sequence.
5) Shane: (1953)
The quintessential western. If I had to show someone what westerns were all about, I’d be starting with this. Pretty violent for a movie that looks like family viewing the rest of the time. Remade as Pale Rider (1983) with Clint Eastwood.
6) Citizen Kane: (1941)
Surely it can’t be THAT good? But it is.
7) Blade Runner: (1982)
At last, science-fiction met film noir! My two favourite genres in one! But I don’t like the Director’s Cut. Why the fuck would you take a voice-over out of a film noir? Also made filmmakers run to Philip K Dick novels and short stories for material. Shame he was to die soon after its release.
8) Psycho: (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense became the master of shock with this one. Transformed the horror genre by making people scarier than monsters.

Eight Bloggers Who Should Do This Meme:
If you’ve read this far, take it on.

Avatar Makeover

2007-12-10T21:57:00.000+11:00

I could do with a change. Couldn't we all? I'd like you to comment on the following images as a possible avatar for myself. Not a big range to choose from, you're probably thinking. Well, I'm not going to put up just any old thing.

Tell me what you think in the comments. If you don't give a fuck, don't be shy.

If you think this is a pathetic, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, look-at-me-please post you might make mention of that too. I can take it.

Why Brian Jones? I suppose there should be a really good reason, but there isn't. However, there'll be a post about this 60s archetype and original line-up Rolling Stone early in the New Year.

Fascinating character. Even if he looks about as much like my true self as the current avatar does.

**UPDATE!! Found another image that might suit.

A Tale of Two Dates III

2007-12-03T00:09:00.000+11:00

It had all turned out very well. Exceptionally so. And we had another date lined up.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’d called Lynette to make arrangements for the Saturday night. My cricket team was playing in the afternoon so I organized for us to meet at my folks’ place just around the corner from the home ground. We’d go to the clubrooms for the Christmas break-up function, and then on to the Prince of Wales Hotel in St Kilda, where a mate’s band were playing a late gig. After that, well, we’d be closer to her place in Hawthorn than my folks’ place in Ascot Vale so we might as well head back there and spend the night. It was going to be so perfect!

That’s one of the reasons why I was pretty upbeat when I arrived at my folks’ to meet her. The other reason was my team had won and I’d done okay, getting a couple of cheap tailender wickets to finish off the match.

She was already there and getting along with my mum like a house on fire. Mum was always very nice to my lady friends as a matter of policy. Anyone silly enough to go out with her idiot son had enough to contend with and didn’t need a difficult mother to complicate matters.

We got to the function and I introduced Lynette to my brother and his then wife and my closest club mates and their partners. One of the women had been at school with Lynette’s sister, so they struck up a conversation. Everything seemed to be running pretty smoothly so I felt relaxed. Laid back enough to join in a shout that involved a group of blokes who were much more seasoned drinkers than I was.

After the first couple of beers, I felt great. And after four beers I felt a little tipsy, merry even. About ready to stop drinking in case I got really drunk. But this was a serious, high-rotation shout I was in. And the beers just kept coming. Destination: near-oblivion; and I’d booked a first-class ticket. Well, so what? Lynette seemed to like me, I drunkenly reasoned. I mean, I’d fucked her for God’s sake, so it wouldn’t hurt if I did a bit of drinking and we had a good time before the guaranteed, ironclad prospect of follow-up sex back at her place. She was driving, so what harm could it do?

Now, this is where the downward spiral begins, because up until then everything had been fine. Lynette had chatted comfortably with the other women there and I'd engaged in blokey conversation with the guys around me. Now and then there'd even been cross-gender exchanges. Everyone seemed happy with the situation. Lynette and I were talking and touching, leaning close to hear each other because there was a band playing. I felt good that she was okay with us being close in public.

And then I swallowed the Absorbo Pill. I was stinko; schickered; wasted; whacked; hammered; plastered; sloshed. You name it. I was F Scott Fitzgerald, only talentless and unattractive . And I talked. The greatest load of rubbish you’ve ever heard. Firstly, mingling with the blokes from my cricket side. Earnest, emotional stream-of consciousness crap. About the team and what I thought we needed to do to win the flag. I got pretty absorbed in it. And I went on, and on, and on. The blokes just put up with it and manfully hid their annoyance. The tolerance of friends. Never take it for granted.

I kept looking over at Lynette and thinking, “Shit. I should be over there talking to her. In a minute. She’ll be okay.”

Next time I glanced over, she appeared to be looking a little neglected. “I’d better get over there,” I thought. But I was apprehensive and hesitant. How could I put things right? I’ll have a think about that while I’m chatting just a little bit more with these great blokes.

I think it was someone’s girlfriend who came over and suggested I rejoin Lynette. I complied, but I was beyond making sense at this point. We got up to dance and about halfway through the first song, I overbalanced and fell against her. That’s about as much as I can remember clearly from the part of the evening spent at the cricket club.

The rest is just a blur: of lights; noise; Lynette dancing with one of the blokes from the First XI; Lynette writing something on a piece of paper and handing it to him; me not being game to ask her what that was all about. But asking her if she wanted to get going. She didn’t. Going to the toilet and having one of our more outspoken players tell me Lynette was a good sort and half-jokingly mention that he thought she was wasted on me.

We must have left eventually. Because the next thing I remember we were in her car arguing about where we were going next. She was adamant that I hadn’t mentioned anything about going to see a band at the Prince of Wales. I was insistent that I had clearly told her about it. She was probably right. Sometimes I make plans in my mind that seem settled. My thought processes then turn to self-congratulation and I forget all about informing affected parties about said plans. I don’t have to be drunk to do this. I also don’t have to be drunk to prolong an argument when I think I’m right. This applies especially when I am in actual fact wrong.

She wanted to call it a night. Seemed to be doing a lot of sighing. But I stupidly thought the situation was salvageable so started pathetically pleading a case for going back to her place. She said she wanted to drop me home at my folks’.

She must have agreed just to shut me the fuck up because the next flash of memory is of driving up Johnston St towards Hawthorn. I fumblingly tried to apologise. She made one of those tongue-clicking noises and exasperated groaning-type sounds. She was past wanting to hear anything from me. I didn’t take the hint. I started talking about that day’s cricket match. She wasn’t interested. In cricket or me. I persisted with clumsy, slurred attempts at conversation.

She must have helped me out of the car and onto the couch. But when I woke up what must have been a short time later it was straight into the bedroom and under the covers alongside her. I fumbled with her until she shook me off. Then I think I might have kept fumbling with her for a little while longer. Only about an hour. Maybe more than an hour. And then I must have fallen asleep.

Early morning and I needed to go to the toilet. Quickly. I remembered where it was from our first date: out the back. So I walked down the passageway, bumping into walls on either side until I arrived at the back door. The key wouldn’t turn. My bladder was bursting. I could feel urine starting to rise up inside my penis. Try the front door and piss in the front yard! A run back down the passage to find the front door deadlocked. Shit. Only seconds left: her bedroom bay windows and pissing out onto the front veranda my last hope.

I pulled the curtains back noisily in the dark, and rattled the casement windows to no avail. Release. I found myself pissing against her bedroom wall under the windows. It was a long piss too. I had the decency to hold back the usual accompanying fart.

“What are you doing?”
Panic. “Oh Lynette, you’re awake. I couldn’t get the back door unlocked. The key wouldn’t turn and then the front door was deadlocked so I tried the windows here.” Still pissing.
“You didn’t need to turn the key. I left the back door unlocked for you in case you needed to go. But what are you doing?”
“Oh look, I’m sorry Lynette but I’ve just gone to the toilet in here….” Should have used present tense there. I was still pissing.
“What!!! Oh Jesus Christ.”
Finished, I politely kept my back turned while I shook the drops off.

She went to get paper towels and disinfectant and I offered to help but she told me to get out of her way. I returned sheepishly to bed. She didn’t. She went to sleep on the couch.

I caught a taxi home the next morning. But only after vainly trying to get her to come back to bed. And then joining her uncomfortably on the couch. For poor Lynette, it was so much more than just a bad date.

I stupidly rang her a couple of days later but her housemate told me she was staying at her folks’ for Christmas. Even more stupidly, I rang her there. There was no exchange of pleasantries. She just wanted to know how I’d got the number, so I assured her that her housemates hadn’t told me, I’d just looked her folks up in the phone book. I asked her if she wanted to do something New Years’ Eve. She didn’t think so.

I spent a couple of days thinking about whether I should call her back again or not. You never know, she might have changed her mind. Jesus Christ, the first date had gone alright.

And then, thankfully for all concerned, I decided not to.

A Tale Of Two Dates II

2007-11-29T21:09:00.000+11:00

I waited a couple of days and then called to ask if she wanted to go out for dinner one night and suggested The Sea-Going Vegetable, a restaurant in Brunswick St Fitzroy. She did. So we picked a convenient night, the night of the first day of my holidays and I told her I’d pick her up at seven.

The die was cast.

The die was cast. I can’t believe I fucking wrote that. Yep, that’s me alright, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon to take Rome and receive the wildest public acclaim. Actually, that’s not too far off what did happen, metaphorically speaking.

I’d chosen the Sea-Going Vegetable for the date because I’d heard a couple of women at work raving about it and a few more expressing almost hysterical interest in going there. I reasoned that it must be intriguing to women and so they’d be keen to get there and might not be all that choosy about the company they kept. I tended to play the percentages.

My work break-up the night before had been a bit of a blast. I’d gotten absolutely stinko, still ten years away from sufficient self-awareness to realize what a dickhead drunk I was. The penny had dropped for everyone else. I slept until mid-afternoon, eliminating about four hours of nervous anticipation before my date with Lynette and so sat in front of the TV at my folks’ place (I’d moved back in there during the last week) before getting ready.

I didn’t dress up too much. Just jeans, elastic-sided desert boots about fifteen years out of fashion, and a tasteful shirt. I drove across the Yarra out to Lynette’s place in Hawthorn in my then car. A 1977 Fiat 132 GLS. I felt good about having a European car. And there’d be another four months of feeling good about it before I was to write it off in a stupid accident. But tonight that was beyond the horizon. The Fiat was smooth and comfortable and people seemed to like riding in it.
Did I mention that I didn’t really go to any trouble with my ensemble for the evening? Yes? Well Lynette certainly did. Leather slacks; soft wool jumper that did wonders for a figure that was already pretty wonderful; and high heels. She looked fantastic. I chatted comfortably in the lounge-room with her two housemates while she put on the finishing touches.

She liked the car. We drove in to Fitzroy and I found a park close to the restaurant. Walking up Brunswick St, a prominent District cricketer of the day whom I’d met a couple of times walked past with his girlfriend and stopped and said hello, even remembering my name. This was good. What with the car and the bumping into someone I knew who didn’t qualify for a homeless allowance, I thought I might have looked like I was sort of, you know, happening just a bit. Almost enough to offset the stench of the loser I felt was shrouding me after having to move back in with my folks.

Both of us must have been famished because we ate up big on seafood. And we enjoyed our meals. I’d inadvertently picked a good, appealing restaurant. I drank some wine and a little beer, but slowly and circumspectly due to the after-effects of excessive consumption the night before. Lynette outpaced me by quite a bit. And she talked.

Voluble and garrulous, she took charge of the conversation, and that was fine by me. I specialize in awkward pauses. She appeared to be out to impress me, which I found very reassuring, if a little unfamiliar. I let her talk and inserted the odd supportive half-sentence whenever it was unobtrusive to do so.

Nice legs. She was telling me how she liked men with nice legs, and wanted to know how mine measured up. I hinted that I’d heard the odd complimentary remark made about them, and cacked myself inwardly. Because it was true. Too easy. I hadn't had to lie about anything yet.

Her taste in music didn’t have much correlation with mine, but I managed to keep my inner rock-snob from coming out and spoiling everything like it usually did. When she mentioned going to two Elton John concerts and seeing Tina Turner at the Hilton, I commented on songs of theirs that I thought were good. I was determined not to ruin the ambience and up to this stage, I wasn’t anywhere near red-lining on the Fuckup Meter.

So later, we caught a few songs from a band I can’t remember anything about at the Faraday in Carlton, and mingled with a couple of mates who happened to be there with a group of friends. My mates mugged appreciation of Lynette to me while her back was turned. Very subtle, they were. I let them flatter me.

Back at Lynette’s place, a cup of coffee and some more chatting in her lounge room appeared to be a nice, tasteful end to a very pleasant date. I quite liked her and thought there might be a few more dates in it for us. We appeared to be wrapping things up, so I told her I’d get going and leaned over to kiss her goodnight.

Now, let’s just pause the action here a bit. I thought I’d done quite well and was looking to get out while I was ahead in order to keep things going into the future. You know, like the next weekend. The plan was to give her a kiss goodnight while I was still persona grata and then call her a couple of days later and try for another date, one where I might again be able to avoid fucking anything up. My plan, such as it was, revolved around not fucking anything up two dates in a row. That was a very cocky plan for me.

Which was about where she put her hand after the goodnight kiss had gathered some momentum. Both of us must have been famished because…. hang on, didn’t I say that before? Recurring Motif Alert.

I felt like Edward Hargraves. I’d hit the mother lode. She led the charge into the bedroom where the rest of the night was spent having very passionate sex with the most enthusiastic partner I’d been with up until that time. And she was very vocal. Equal parts Grace Slick and Sandy Denny, although she’d probably never heard of them. At one point, I looked up to notice an open transom window above her bedroom door, through which quite a bit of sound must have carried. Great. Her housemates might get the impression that I was a super-stud from the appreciation she was giving voice to.
I had to throw my clothes on to go to the toilet midway through a brief period of dozing. I hoped I didn’t run into her housemates. The toilet was out on the back patio and I struggled with the back door lock but made it okay. Back in bed, she was pressed up against me half-asleep until soft grey light crept in.

You’d think it would have been a bit slower and more languid in the morning. Not a chance. We went at it again, hell bent on making up for lost time. Without actually having lost any. Like two people who might have been sexually dormant for some time, or who believe they’re having their last for a while. Or both.

She was going to be late for work so I dressed, casually mentioning my cricket club’s Christmas breakup do on the next Saturday night. I was expecting her to demur but she was all for it. So we kissed and said goodbye.

It had all turned out very well. Exceptionally so. And we had another date lined up.

What could possibly go wrong?