A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

I find myself in an awkward position. Today I was at work, minding my own business, writing some story about architecture (after a while they get a bit samey, I mean, how many times can you write "sinuous organic curves" or "bold geometry"?). Anyway, my phone starts to ring and I don't recognise the number. I figure it's my new housemate explaining why my attempt to move house last night was such a cock-up, and I say pleasantly, "Hello, Mel speaking."

And it's this guy who was sleazing onto me at my recent house party. I should add that I was looking fine at that party: was wearing a black singlet top, red ra-ra mini-skirt and black and white striped legwarmers with thongs. This was also the party where I played the booty dancing CD I made to take to the Christchurch CSAA conference (when "Grindin'" came on, one of my friends started howling "Ohhh yeah! listen to that!") and had the Possible Wardrobe Malfunction.

This guy had been making himself so obvious, intruding on all my conversations (including the drunken one where I was bemoaning The Boy who would not love me) and at one point, stroking my bare leg, Harold Bloom-style. Later, I was cleaning my teeth to go to bed and he was standing there watching me, as if imagining my toothbrush was his dick.

Anyway, so it's him on the phone. And he was so sweet; he said "There are only two ways to say this: the American way, and the 12-year-old way, and what have the Americans invented but wrestling, so here's the 12-year-old way: Will you go out with me?"

My awkwardness is this. If I'd found him attractive, this would all have been very exciting, but it was just unpleasant - I'd had to lock my bedroom door from the inside, in case he tried to sneak into my room. But how could I be gracious about it? So I said "Um, in a word, no. But it's so flattering of you to ask." He went, "Oh, okay."

My workmates thought my bluntness was the fairest option in the circumstances, and it's certainly an improvement on "Can I take a raincheck?" and "I just find you really stressful to be around" (neither are my proudest moment). But my awkwardness is this. As you know, I've been agonising over how to tell The Boy that he is my crush, and I really admired the guy who asked me out today for having the guts to do it. But thinking of the horrible position I'll put The Boy in makes me just want to shut up and deal with it myself.

Is there a good way to let someone down gently when you're not interested?

The Headtapes … continued.

Thursday 25 March

Get Along With You - Kelis
Out of Reach - Gabrielle
Outrageous - Britney Spears
Toxic - Britney Spears
Promises - Kylie Minogue
Through the Wire - Kanye West
Give Me the Night - George Benson
We Love Dese Hoes - OutKast

Friday 26 March

(I Got That) Boom Boom - Britney Spears
In the Morning - Kelis
Doggin' Around - Michael Jackson
Angie - Rolling Stones
Flashback - Kelis

Saturday 27 March

Brain - N.E.R.D.
Truth Or Dare - N.E.R.D.
Outrageous - Britney Spears
Early Mornin' - Britney Spears
Plug It In - Basement Jaxx featuring JC Chasez
Too Low For Zero - Elton John

Monday 29 March

Even Flow - Pearl Jam
Rondo Alla Turca
Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word - Elton John
Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz
Big Spender - Shirley Bassey
The Joker - Steve Miller Band
Row Row Row Your Boat
Gimme the Light - Sean Paul
Infiltrate - Sean Paul
Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z - from "Stop the Planet of the Apes: I Want to Get Off" (The Simpsons)
Checkin' In - From "Kickin' It: A Musical Journey Through the Betty Ford Clinic" (The Simpsons)
This Is A Bust - Madonna
Gold - Spandau Ballet
Grab It - L'Trimm

I got a new house! I'm so happy! I think the chicks I'll be living with really share my vision - there will be a dedicated TV room, and they want to turn one of the upstairs bedrooms into a cosy 'salon' where you can entertain people. I'm hoping to get a hold of a liquor cabinet where I can display my extensive alcohol and cocktail glassware collection. And finally get some of my pictures up on the walls.

To continue my analogy of househunting and dating, I knew I wanted to live with these chicks as soon as I saw they had a gossip-mag picture of Courtney Love and Paris Hilton stuck to their fridge. Just like a little thing will tell you whether you're attracted to someone. It can also work the other way. Like, I realised I no longer had a crush on Will when I observed him spluttering after rinsing his post-cocaine nostrils at the kitchen tap.

Musings on Video Hits. Thanks to the end of daylight saving, I was actually up in time to watch not only the entire Video Hits show, but also Tony Abbott (or the Mad Monk as Crikey calls him) being interviewed on Meet the Press. He is generally an abhorrent creature (esp. his views on abortion) but there was one amusing part, when they played a clip from Parliament of him calling Mark Latham a drug pusher, and when they cut back to the studio Abbott was chuckling at his own wit, like Jerry Seinfeld. It made me think that Abbott brightens up his day by remembering all the viteruperative comments he's dished up in the past. But anyway.

I haven't watched an entire Video Hits for ages, and a lot of the clips I hadn't seen before. So I wanna make some observations... First, I totally agree with Guy about the horrific 1982 parallel universe of Shannon Noll's new video "Drive". I just don't know where to start. Okay, Shannon, wearing a blue wife-beater, is supposed to be a motor mechanic, and he 'rescues' this posh city bird from her nasty suit-wearing boyfriend and drives away with her in a black hoon-mobile. She falls over in the mud and Shannon cackles in a menacing Deliverance kind of way that doubtless was intended to be light-hearted but fails miserably because I've seen bits of wood with more personality than Shannon. Meanwhile, the city-slicker boyfriend inexplicably hitches a lift in a semi-trailer and pursues them. Shannon then indulges in a spot of snowdropping to get the city chick some new clothes (the real owner runs out to her clothesline just seconds too late!) Then, ludicrously, they go into a pub where she 'earns' them some money for their journey by writhing about on the bar wearing a cowboy hat. Like you do. Then, in a sequence seemingly inspired by Duel, that early Spielberg film where the guy is pursued by a crazed semi-trailer driver, Shannon and the posh city bird are almost run off the road by the semi-trailer with the boyfriend. Shannon does some serious doughnuts and throws the keys to the hoon-mobile to the boyfriend, saying "Mate, I fixed it". But even in this alternate 1982, there are still lots of questions unanswered. Like, now Shannon's stranded and how is he going to get anywhere? And who got the girl? And why would that city-slicker even have a hoon-mobile or be in the country in the first place?

But the horrors didn't stop there - I also saw Courtney Act's video. I had read about this in Who Weekly or something, and it sounded bad then, but it was truly hideous. Like, I appreciate the ironic gender performance of the drag queen's (and king's) art, and I think Courtney Act is very good at it (especially at tucking her dick away and dancing on incredibly high heels). But on Video Hits I found it deeply troubling that she was pole-dancing in her underwear and pawing some Hugh Hefner-a-like. And I couldn't help thinking regretfully to myself "Man, when she was a guy she was really good-looking." I think this is more a comment on the Video Hits gender and sexuality regime than anything else. More on that later.

But Courtney Act's video was subtle and playful compared to this other one by someone called Sarah Connor, a very appropriate name because I wished I could terminate her. Like, she was wearing all manner of slutty outfits including a visible g-string with a gold metal detail on the back, and her song was like someone got hold of an instrumental version of "Family Affair" by Mary J. Blige and sang another song on top of it, like that Dannii Minogue one from last year that ripped off "Into the Groove". Apart from that it was numbingly generic.

There was a new Human Nature video, which got me thinking about how my favourite boy band members were always the ones who seemed least suited to being in a boy band. Like, that dopey-looking brunette from Blue. Or the aptly named Joey Fatone (does anyone remember John Safran's "anyone is better looking than Joey Fatone" competition in the Bourke St mall?). Anyway, my favourite Human Nature guy is the bogan-looking one who plays the guitar (even though I still have a soft spot for Little Man Big Hair from their ill-fated "She Don't Love You" days). Also, Amanda is so right about that band Betchadupa - it's scary how much the singer sounds like his dad, Neil Finn.

Silliest video-clip accessory - a tie between Jamelia's "J" anklet dangling over the back of her shoe, and Britney's sequinned sunglasses in "Toxic". I mean, can she actually see out of them? Worst outfit - Janet Jackson's weird red tit-wrap - I was afraid that costume would malfunction at any moment. Weirdest moment - start of Anastacia's new song where she sounds like Kate Bush.

But what really struck me about Video Hits was the relentless parade of skinny, half-clad women, all protruding hipbones and taut tanned midriffs and pert arses and puffy cleavage. The main one with the fringed dress in the "She Wants to Move" video was the most worrying - she had this scary intense look on her face like a fembot out of Austin Powers. Now, I've always been rather blasé about moral guardians and cultural commentators' worries about music video's normalisation of unreasonable images of female beauty and sexuality. But faced with that pneumatic bikini babe in "The Way You Move" video, I actually had to take a step back and go "That is not your average female figure," and further "You will never look like that when you dance, and that's a GOOD thing."

Like, I was saying to Shane after we'd seen Honey that I came out of the cinema wishing that I could dance like that. But you know what - I can - the only thing is that I'm carrying about thirty more kilos, so while I'm coordinated and have superior arse-shaking ability, I will always look uncoordinated and clumsy because I'm like twice the size of those video hos. Anyway, I can't be bothered rehearsing all the same arguments, but that occurred to me.

Insane jealousy. I met Penny last night - it was great to talk to her one on one because usually she has Tash or Dan or Saige in tow. Penny thinks I should confront my crush. That's also what Martin said later on at the party, although he also thinks that if The Boy liked me 'in that way', he would have indicated so by now.

But anyway, Penny was telling me about how Stuart (her new boyfriend) tells her that he's "madly in love" with her, plays cheesy Madonna songs for her, and writes her text messages that are so goddamn romantic I wanted to cry when I read them, and they weren't even written to me. Like, one basically went:

xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx

I tried to do some tipsy-shopping after meeting Penny but it just wasn't working for me. I was brooding with insane jealousy because I couldn't be a love goddess like her and send men into spasms of cheesy romantic shit. To paraphrase 50 Cent, I am craving romance like a fat kid craves cake. Actually, I could go some cake, too.

Love haiku. Last night at Emma's party, me and a bunch of my fellow English Department postgrads were drunkenly sitting about talking about haiku - like you do! See, this one friend of Emma's, Heff, had done a great haiku one morning as a note to Emma when he'd crashed on her couch. This (if I remember correctly) is how it went:

I waited for cakes
Of the pan variety
None came, so I'm gone.

Then George came up with a haiku so good that I was convinced he'd read it somewhere:

I am Maximus
I swam in a cold ocean
Now I'm Minimus

Ben was totally trashed; I don't think I've ever seen him quite so drunk. He was talking very loudly and swearing a lot, and revealing just how much of a nerd he really is, despite his schmick clothes (like, talking about fantasy fiction and obscure Japanese video games). Anyway, this was the haiku he and Heff had come up with:

Gandalf, a wizard
Will come and kick your arses
So fuck you all, fucks.

Oh Ben. This is the guy who had never heard Madonna's version of "Like A Virgin" and so said if he went to karaoke he would have to do the campy OTT version from Moulin Rouge, an image that made me laugh spontaneously for days.

Ben was also telling a poignant story about how, back in high school, he'd tried to win over a girl by writing love haiku to her. But in the end, she went for a guy whose opening line to her was "So, do you like getting fingered?" We all laughed, of course, but being English postgrads, it came out that a number of us had written highbrow teenage love poetry - Martin had written a girl a sonnet. I wrote sonnets, too, which fortunately I've lost, cos I'm sure they were really bad and I'd want to destroy them anyway.

Made me toy with the idea of writing love haiku to The Boy. Feel free to give me some ideas...

I used to believe... For ages now I've been a fan of the website I Used To Believe, which lists the crazy and strangely logical ways that kids attempt to make sense of the world. It never fails to make me laugh, and I've signed up for the monthly email bulletin of the best new beliefs. Here are some doozies from this month...

Until I was about 13 (I was a naive and overprotected child) I thought that men got up in the morning and put on their new clean condom everyday just like they put on their underwear. That way they had it on when they were ready to have sex.
S.L.T.

When I was little, we had one of those automatic car washes down the street. This particular one had picture of a donkey next to its name. Being young, I was petrified of sitting in the car as it went through the car wash. So my mother, trying to calm my nerves, told me that there were donkeys in the car wash. I don't think I had ever freaked out so bad in my life! I pictured donkeys lurking up in the machinery, then jumped down and smashing the windows of our car with their hooves!
Anon

when I was little, for some reason I was convinced that Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear because he didn't want to hear the traffic outside because he thought it was distracting. it didn't occur to me until much later that he lived long before cars were invented.
Anon

One of my own is that I convinced my little brother Matt that bagels were a kind of parasitic insect that lived in the hair of little boys like him. These kids were sent to a factory where they would be groomed like chimpanzees, and the harvested bagels could then be puffed up in the oven. For ages afterwards he would beg me to groom him for bagels, and I would have to pick some dirt off his head (he was a grubby child) and claim to have squished the bagel. I would say the bagel factories were much more skilled at getting the bagels out intact than I was.

A good start to the day. Although I still haven't heard back from my final share house, which probably means I haven't got it, I'm feeling quite happy at the moment, largely cos I think I got my clothes right today. Yesterday I did not get my clothes right and I felt uncomfortable all day. I wore a tight baby-pink polo shirt with loose black pants, my pink studded belt and my baby-pink cut-down Dunlop Volleys. The shirt had an unfortunate crease across the waist from when I hung it on the line, and the belt kept slipping down in the front, which I tried to explain to Daniel and he laughed at me and said I sounded like instructions from Ikea.

Today, I'm wearing a kind of 80s Madonna look: my black "Collingwood Boxing Club" t-shirt, the hot pink ra-ra skirt and black punk belt I got tipsy-shopping last week, black 3/4 tights, black thongs, silver crucifix earrings. The glasses kind of upset the apple cart, but I forgot to wear contact lenses. What can you do?

There's heaps of shit to look forward to today. I'm looking forward to meeting Angela and discussing antiTHESIS, and then going to the EPC meeting and explaining that I've been paying for postgrad milk out of my own pocket because Tal the Israeli Cocksucker has been drinking it all. I'm looking forward to seeing Penny tonight, cos since she got together with Stuart I haven't seen her at all and I want to get her opinion on my current house-and-crush-related malaise. (She will probably just recommend a renewed attempt at the Ten Week Plan.) And then there's Emma's birthday party later on at Gemma and Renée's house. They're doing a kid's party theme, there'll be fairy bread and butterfly cakes - and lots of beer.

I went round there last night cos I was feeling sad and lonely and I knew Renée would be up for some alcohol. But she's on her teaching round and wasn't drinking, and I could only drink two stubbies by myself without feeling like a drunken loser. And I called up Emah, to whom I used to refer fondly as The Drunken Slapper, and she's on a health kick and isn't drinking! I felt like my world had turned upside down and I was the only one left on the planet who was prepared to get shitfaced mid-week. I even found myself looking enviously into the beer garden at the Great Northern at the people there. But I still have four beers at Renée's house so I don't have to buy any tonight. Yay!

She got that boom boom. I've been listening to Britney Spears' latest, In the Zone, on the strength of "Outrageous" and "Toxic", which have both spent a lot of time in my head. When it first came out, I was put off by the fact that "Me Against the Music" blows the big one - I get so embarrassed listening to Britney and Madonna's highly intellectual panting conversation: "Are you ready?" "Yeah."

So far my favourite song on the CD is "(I Got That) Boom Boom", chiefly because of the Ying Yang Twins - I deeply loved their commitment to Christmas crunk on "Ho! Ho!" I like the one with the deep growly voice, and I also like the way they shout in unison a lot. For some reason I love the sound of lots of men shouting, especially when they go "Heyyyyyy...." and "Hohhhhh" - so you can imagine I always liked "Hip Hop Hooray"!! But back to Britney. She's singing saccharinely about having that boom boom, almost oblivious to those grubby Ying Yang Twins. And I like the banjo too - like Deep South bhangra.

My second favourite track is "Early Mornin'" because I can relate to passing out on couches and stumbling home in the early morning. If I ever brought anyone home (looking increasingly unlikely these days) I would play them that song. (Oh, who am I kidding, I would probably play "Loose Lips" by Seiji and Lyric L and show them how I shake my arse.) And there's one bit in that song where Britney sounds like Pink, just one line towards the end. It's like in Jamelia's "Superstar", when she gets to the repeat choruses I reckon she sounds like J.Lo, especially on "oo" sounds. Is it just these auto-tuning machines they process everyone through?

Of course I still like "Toxic" and "Outrageous". And "Brave New Girl" sounds so much like a rip-off of Madonna's "Material Girl", it must be deliberate. But - I am almost as embarrassed to listen to "Touch of My Hand" as to that afore-mentioned Madonna atrocity. The lyrics go: "Another day without a lover/The more I come to understand the touch of my hand". Now, I don't mind people singing about masturbation, but it can be done well and poorly. Divinyls "I Touch Myself" - Good. Frankie Goes to Hollywood "Relax" - Good. Britney "Touch of My Hand" - Bad Bad Bad. It's so coy and yet desperate. Now, if you want desperate masturbation songs, you can't go past JC Chasez "Come to Me": "Cos when I'm all alone I lay awake and masturbate." Tell it like it is, JC.

Oh, and apparently Janet Jackson's latest album is full of enough sex references to make her whole family blush. I read a really bad review of it in the Hez yesterday, but I don't know if I trust Cameron Adams' opinion. Cos he was bagging her last album, and I really liked "All For You", which was one of the homie hits I used to dance to at Charlton's between numbers - "Nice package all right/Guess I'm gonna have to ride it tonight." Sigh, if you feel you must, Janet.

Funny graffiti. I've always had an eye out for interesting graffiti. Some of my all-time favourites are "Heterosexuality: now recrui" (on Swanston St near cnr Queensberry St, years ago!), "I am the idiot! Who writing all this stupid thing" (cnr Swanston and Lt Lonsdale St, years ago), "Fuck a punk for charity" (cnr Richardson and Lygon St, North Carlton), and on a stop sign in Fitzroy St, Fitzroy, "Hammer time."

Another recent discovery was "What if the Hokey Pokey is really what it's all about?" (chicks' toilets, Builders' Arms), which I like because of its existential angst. Generally I don't like those political ones which all seem to be in the same handwriting, like at Melbourne Uni: "You are all the same", which Daniel thinks is condemnation of the cloned bourgeois kiddies everywhere; I innocently took it as a message of inclusivity!

Just like I always thought that Bowie song "John, I'm Only Dancing" was about not wanting to piss off the boyfriend of the chick he was dancing with, but Daniel of course sees Bowie reassuring his own boyfriend John that he's not turning into a breeder just cos he's dancing with the girl, even though she turns him on. And then Daniel lambasts me for my oppressive heteronormativity. You really can't win with him. But anyway.

I generally prefer the weird spazzo graffiti to that artful politics stuff. There seems to be a raw, reactionary quality to it that reminds me of the intensity of my own emotions. So today I was walking to uni and I saw this great new piece - it's actually in two places, on a wall and on a parking ticket machine. It says Shane the Preston ho is a retart. Gold! Gold for Australia! Apart from the quixotic nature of writing this in public thinking that this Shane character would be humiliated by other people reading it, I like the idea that a guy is a ho (although it's possible Shane is a girl; there's a female character called Shane in that appalling new lesbo-soft-porn-soap, The L Word.) But my favourite part of all is the "retart", which could be someone who was tarty in the past and has decided to begin their sluttish behaviour again. I wanna call my friends retarts. But I don't think they'd get it. Especially if I called them [insert home suburb] hoes.

A scary dream I had last night. I'm up at the snow, but not skiing, just wandering around rugged up, when I come into a clearing and stop to look around. I spot a group of people and there's one chick that I'm sure is laughing at me. She stops whenever she sees me looking at her. So I go over and say "Have you got a problem?" and she exchanges glances with her friends and starts laughing again, right in front of me. So I get really mad and push her in the chest, and then it's on, this big scrag fight in the snow. Her friends are all standing around chanting "fight, fight," etc and we're grinding each other's faces in the snow and pulling each other's hair but because we're all rugged up in parkas etc we can't really get the blows in. Then I get an idea and I grab her leg and start tugging at her boot, which is this padded waterproof 'moon boot', and after ages I get it off and just hurl it away into the scrub. Who knows where it lands. Now she'll be fucked trying to enjoy her holiday with only one snow boot. Everyone goes silent and I feel this palpable wave of disapproval, like I've overstepped the rules of scrag fighting. And even I know it was a wrong thing to do, but I was so angry I couldn't help myself.

I was quite frightened when I woke up and recalled this dream, because of how full of irrational rage I was in it. I wonder what it means.

Today has not been a good day. By about 7:30pm, I was feeling like Artax sinking into the Swamps of Sadness despite Atreyu's entreaties. (Can I just say also that even as a child I found Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu in The Neverending Story, incredibly attractive. But anyway.) I was feeling like the biggest reject out. Yesterday one house I really wanted to move into rejected me ("Sorry, dude, we got someone else," he said on the phone), and today the second house did the same ("The reason we took so long getting back to you is that we were seriously considering you," he said on the phone). Ice-cold comfort.

Because berating myself perversely makes me feel better as it makes me feel worse, I got to thinking that trying to find a share house is like trying to ask someone out. (I am so sorry if this comes out like one of Carrie's increasingly forced and inane metaphors in Sex and the City. That's not what I intended.) You have to call them up out of the blue. You have to second-guess what they're looking for, yet you try to 'be yourself' in the hope that your honesty will win them over. You have to be funny without being annoying, laid-back without seeming dopey, attentive without seeming desperate. You give them your phone number. They say they'll call you. Mostly, they never do, or they offer platitudes about why they don't want you.

Then I started to feel miserable about my love life. In the last few months I've identified what I was calling an "army of crushes" - six or seven different boys I like for various reasons and to varying degrees. They're mostly keepers - guys I don't see often enough to get truly obsessed with or fret about whether they like me back. I mostly treat them as eye candy - I can look, but the chances of ever touching are so remote they're not even worth thinking about. Except sometimes at parties. Then I brood a lot and can't enjoy myself, or get really really really really drunk and, you know how in booty songs sometimes they say "Touch the ground"? Well that was me at my house party about a month back, aka the Possible Costume Malfunction Incident, aka the Baboon Incident, and certainly aka the Showed My Crush My Arse-Cheeks Incident.

But this one guy I like so much more than the others, it makes my attempts to distract myself seem all the more transparent. It's like trying to inveigle myself into the best house ever, and yet knowing all the time that no matter how great I am, there'll always be someone they like better than me. I have pretty much resigned myself to thinking I won't find a house. And although the optimist in me still wants to believe otherwise, I've also pretty much resigned myself to the idea that this particular guy will never love me the way I love him.

That's why they call it a crush, I guess. I feel totally crushed. I bought two albums today, the first N.E.R.D. album ($10 at HMV- even the sales dude thought it was a major bargain!) and the latest Britney album. But I feel so sad right now that I don't even want to listen to them. That's how bad a day this has been.

I laughed so hard. Today wasn't a very good day - more on that later - but at least work was good. I think Eric, my editor, sees me as the go-to girl for all articles trashy. Not that I'm denying this or complaining, but today my job was to write a story about celebrity websites. So I spent the day feeling like the worst kind of teenager, looking up sites from J.Lo to Ben Affleck, Madonna to Ian Thorpe, John Laws to Robbie Williams, Pauline Hanson to Guy Sebastian. This is reflected somewhat in today's Headtape.

But anyway, by the afternoon I was getting desperate, and I said to Sophie "Do you know any famous animals who'd have their own website?" Without blinking she said "Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey!" I started laughing uncontrollably and she said "Just do a Google search, you'll see!" So I did. Whiplash is a monkey who rides a dog and rounds up sheep. He reminds me a little bit of that pugnacious little fox in Labyrinth who rides on a sheepdog. Except with gold lamé chaps. Apparently you can get Whiplash t-shirts and stuff.

Oh, we were both laughing so hard I was starting to feel sick. The shots of Whiplash in action are perhaps the funniest. Hence the somewhat ungrammatical description on the website: "Although the agility and skill of his canine companion are unmatched, it is the unpredictable antics of this pint size primate, that keeps the onlookers in stitches."

The Headtapes... continued.

Wednesday 24 March

My Place - Tweet
Doo Wop (That Thing) - Lauryn Hill
Everything Is Everything - Lauryn Hill
Drive - The Cars
Secret (Take You Home) - Kylie Minogue
Me & My Llama - from Sesame Street
Finest Dreams - Richard X vs Kelis
Sexed Up - Robbie Williams
Jolene - Dolly Parton
All I Need Is You - Guy Sebastian
Murderer - Skitz/Deadly Hunter

What about us? A while ago, when I was at Extreme Karaoke (which is a whole nother story!), I was bitching to Leanne about how much I hated Shannon Noll's version of "What About Me?" because it was ridiculously faithful to the original. What I like in a cover song is interpretation, because as a singer I value someone's ability to make a song their own. I think Shannon totally fails at this. But anyway.

I proposed to Leanne a compilation album of different versions of "What About Me", similar to that album of versions of "Stairway to Heaven". It would be called What About Us?. Leanne said, "So who'd be on it?" and I said off the top of my head, "Cypress Hill!" Damn, I wish I could have recorded my impression of how that song would go, because it was fucking genius! It would have those patented Cypress Hill bouncing beats and turntable squeals, and that guy with the nasal voice would do the main verses: "Well thezza little boy waitin' at the counter of a corner shop," and when they got to the chorus, the other guy would echo him going "It isn't fair!"

I also did my Dolly Parton country version, and I would also have to do a Benny Benassi-style trance version with a pan-Euro accented female repeating "You just take more than you give" over banging beats and 303. Anyone with further suggestions is welcome to list them in the comment field.

ps: My six hellish years as a market research telephone interviewer have left me with an arcane vocab that nobody else understands, like DK, CB, resp, verbatim, hard refusal, comment field and push quota. I sometimes try to use them in normal life and I'm telling you, it's a total relief to find that "comment field," at least, has some relevance here.

The Headtapes … continued.

Tuesday 23 March

Secret (Take You Home) - Kylie Minogue
Strict Machine - Goldfrapp
Millionaire - Kelis/Andre 3000
E lucevan le stelle - Puccini
That's Amore - Dean Martin
Bring Da Ruckus - Wu-Tang Clan
Pizza Fingers jingle ("Pizza fingers, thatsa the snack for me/Wholesome, natural, witha no MSG")
Shto e Yograyalo - Bulgarian? folksong (from Eastern Europe anyway)
Put Him Out (remix) - Ms Dynamite featuring Bounty Killer
Hello My Baby - ? ("send me a kiss by wire, baby my heart's on fire...")
Whip It - Devo (also the Simpsons version with Smithers as camp cowboy w/chaps)
Oompa-Loompa song - from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
White Flag - Dido

The Headtapes… continued.

Friday 19 March

Mo Money, Mo Problems - Notorious B.I.G.
Through the Wire - Kanye West
Fuck the Pain Away - Peaches
Shiny Shiny - Hayzi Fantayzee (I think that's how you spell it!)

Sunday 21 March

Get Along With You - Kelis
The Hardest Button to Button - White Stripes
Red-Blooded Woman - Kylie Minogue
My Neck, My Back - Khia

Monday 22 March

After Dark - Kylie Minogue
My Neck, My Back - Khia
Ass-n-Titties - DJ Assault
Boogie Tonight - Tweet
Fernando - ABBA
Hoes Get Naked - DJ Assault
Rock With You - Michael Jackson
Tragedy - Bee Gees
I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones
Love Plus One - Haircut 100
Suspended - Kelis
Tonight's the Night - Rod Stewart

My strange former life as a junior botanist. On council orders, my fiftysomething-year-old parents have been spending their weekends working like navvies tearing down our old holiday hovel at Forrest in the Otway hinterland. It was never in particularly good nick even when I was a kid, but it had got so bad even hobos won't squat in it anymore. Anyway, my mother yesterday presented me with something she'd found in a bag of rubbish down there. It was two sheets of yellowed notepaper. The first one said: Botanical Notebook - contains secrets enough to astound Einstein. On the other side was:

Botanist Profile

Name: Prof. M. Campbell
Age: 11 and three-quarters
Rank: [blank]
Speciality: Native Flora
Place of Research: Victoria, Australia
I.Q.: 124007
Achievements: Secondary scholarship, piano and ballet examinations, National Botany cert.
Standard of work: Excellent
Other hobbies: Biology, general science.

Note: this notebook is for scientific purposes only. No silly romanticism is allowed. Botany is the main science in this notebook, although paleontology, archaeology, biology, chemistry etc. are permitted.

Signed [my signature, embarrassingly similar to how it looks now]

The second sheet of paper details a "Field Expedition" I made to the local tip at 9:51am on June 21, 1989. I shall study the plant growth in the adjacent bushland to see if the varied soil and mineral diet has affected their usual pattern of growth, I wrote. I also sketched the soil profiles and tree growth in the area, followed by some more sketches of birds I observed scavenging from the organic scraps in the pit.

I have no recollection of doing this at all, but I must have done. I was obsessed at that age with a guide to Birds of Australia or something, that was kept at my grandmother's house. I also loved Gerald Durrell's book The Amateur Naturalist, which I'd been given for my eleventh birthday.

It's hilarious how little my eleven-year-old ambitions of becoming a natural scientist have to do with my current lifestyle of being a dilettantish journalist, cultural studies researcher, superficial popular culture fiend and party animal. My life is devoted to the kind of "silly romanticism" I scorned. And it blows my mind how articulate I was back then. Maybe my mother is right and all this drinking has blunted my brain, but I was so goddamn smart. What happened???

I am never drinking again. I have that kind of hangover where I'm dizzy and nauseous and headachey and immensely thirsty all at once. And now I'm at work and have to use my brain, when all I want to do is lie on my bed sucking Berocca from a long bendy straw, wistfully contemplating the boy I'm in love with, and listening to Tweet. She is my hangover vocalist of choice.

This happens to me every time there's a bathtub with beer - I can never remember how many I've had. I don't remember how many I had last night. Although I do remember yelling at the taxi driver for going the wrong way ("You're going north! I want to go south!") and then realising that he had been going the right way and I was too drunk to pick up local landmarks. The taxi driver had to recite the streets as we passed them in order to convince me. Very embarrassing, as this was Sydney Rd, Brunswick, just around the corner from where I lived for six years.

The Pleasurable Art of Tipsy-Shopping. Sometimes (usually when hungover) I chastise myself for drinking too much and promise to lead a clean and virtuous life where I exercise a lot, eat properly, get up earlier and drink less. This doesn't ever last long, and I always find myself on the piss again the next night. But just recently, I've discovered a fun new thing to do after having a few drinks - going shopping!

Friday nights are the best time to do this, because I've usually started at 5pm with a few beers at the Deep Shit, followed by more somewhere else, and the shops are open til 9. So far I have made two tipsy-shopping excursions, and here is what I bought:

Tipsy-Shopping Excursion One

One pair black and white striped legwarmers with silver lurex thread in the black bits
One pink belt studded with press-studs (so the belt does up by pressing the studs together)
Two pairs of underpants (one red, one hot pink)
One pair black patent hooker heels (actually, I only tried them on, then went back the next day sober to confirm my judgement. And Mel was pleased with what she saw.)

Tipsy-Shopping Excursion Two (last night)

One hot pink three-tier ra-ra mini-skirt
One hot pink long-sleeved t-shirt with a huge "M" on front, spelled out in silver studs
One black punk belt with three rows of faceted studs (genuine leather! $6!!! Score!!)

I bought the first two things from Deborah K, which since the closure of Studio Girl (Cheapest Price In Town!) has become my favourite El Cheapo Slutto shop in Melbourne. And the belt I got from knock-off perfume and accessory specialists, Carrington Jewellers, at the Bronx End of Swanston St, home of the droning pre-recorded PA announcement ("Carrington Jewellers is on sale Melbourne, if you like Gucci, Fendi, Prada-style watches, come and check out our watches...") Carrington Jewellers is also the source of my $5 flat cap and $25 bag.

Anyway, I highly recommend tipsy-shopping. Shop assistants suddenly become your best friends, your body becomes the last word in sexiness, you're no longer paralysed by burning questions like "Do I need this?" and "Can I afford this?" Do it all you can, people.

I have a horrible confession to make. I was in Thresherman's this morning having breakfast and psyching myself up for another weekend of relentless share house interviews, and they were playing Kylie Minogue's Body Language, and I was digging it big time! This is a very shameful thing to confess, given that her song "Red-Blooded Woman" not only sucks royally, it blows the big one. But there are some other tracks on the album that sounded really good, and made me want to rush onto Lygon St in search of a record shop.

Can I also add that the food at Thresherman's is highly overrated. Every time I go there I choose something different that is merely a new and unwelcome surprise. Today I had a toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich, which was only saved from tasting horrible by the fact that it's nigh-on impossible to make a bad ham, cheese and tomato toastie. This curious fact has occurred to me more than once. McDonald's toasties are perhaps the worst you can buy, but even they're not inedible.

But the coffee at Thresherman's is quite good. My favourite little bro, Matt, for a while was obsessed with making an acidic-tasting smoothie which he called "rat drink". This is because when you try it you have to screw up your face and rapidly click your tongue against the roof of your mouth to rid it of the taste (i.e. you look like a rat). I have taken this on board to refer to any nasty-tasting drink, and especially bad coffee and red wine. I am pleased to report that, despite their total inability to make edible food, Thresherman's do not make rat coffee. It is eminently drinkable.

Band Names. It's been a hobby of mine to collect potential band names. Dan came up with one of my favourites EVER, which was Ape of Steel, a stadium-rock band (so hot right now!). He even did an impression of what it would be like at their concerts: "Hello Cleveland, we are Ape of Steel!" and then an enormous silver fibreglass gorilla would descend from the ceiling, arms groping for the audience amid laser lights and sparks, as if being forged in a foundry.

Some of my other band names are:

Wakarimasen: Japanese noise electronica band
The Crack Babies: punk band
Piss, Shit and Vomit: my beloved pop-funk bodily functions concept band

And today I just came up with another one: the Naked Flames. They would be a garage-electrodisco band fronted by a sexy girl with black satin hotpants and glossy pink lipstick (I am envisaging a Debbie Harry/Wendy James-type chick). Their songs would include "Fly My Pretties" and "Weekend at the Knees".

Fucking in public - to get a room or not get a room? A couple of months ago, I was going home on the tram and out the tram window, I happened to glimpse a couple fucking in a park. The guy was black, the chick was white. She had her knees up, and he was lying on top of her shagging away. I happened to spot them at the exact moment he kind of collapsed onto the chick in that way men do when they've just come. Of course, they could just have been dry-rooting. But anyway.

It was surreal to see. It was a bit like that scene in The Shining where they're running around this haunted hotel and through a doorway, they briefly spot some guy in an animal mask sucking off this other guy. This was in a highly public park, right on a main road, and the couple were in the middle of an open space right near the road.

This disturbed me at the time, but I only really put my finger on why last night, when me and Gemma were walking through the back streets of Carlton on our way to a t-shirt launch. For some reason a lot of streets in Carlton have wide grassy median strips and roundabouts, and there was this couple lying on one of them snogging. There were some other people walking just ahead of us, and they sniggered and made some comment like "Check that out!" and I said ostensibly to Gemma, but really to the couple, "God! Get a room!"

What made me say that? Was it that their 'private' behaviour in a public space made me uncomfortable? Was it that those two were getting some while my own sex life is sadly hypothetical? The answer occurred to me almost straight away - I was repulsed because they were ugly! They reminded me of fantasy fiction aficionados. The guy had glasses and that long curly hair that when pulled back in a ponytail, looks like a squirrel's tail. He was wearing an iron-on logo t-shirt that had once been black, but was now grey. The chick was wearing a daggy long floral skirt. She had long lank dirty-blonde hair.

As I said to Gemma at the time, what does it say about me that public sexual behaviour is acceptable to me as long as the people in question are good-looking? Is it a voyeuristic streak? (Pun unintended, for once!!) That made me realise why the previous couple in the park had disturbed me so much. There was something vaguely erotic about having spotted them, but it was the same kind of contrived, panoptic eroticism that you get on trashy reality TV shows like Paradise Hotel. The people know they could be watched, and that's exactly what turns them on, and there's something unsettling and perverse about your own voyeuristic desires being harnessed for someone else's pleasure.

As a footnote, this incident occurred at around 6:45pm. When we were heading back at around 8pm, it was getting dark and I jokingly wondered to Gemma whether the couple would still be there. She went home another way and when I walked past alone, there they were, still lip-locked! I sent a text message to Gemma. It said "They're still there! Ugly! Ugly!" She replied: "Ewww!"

Turn to the left! Turn to the right! Last night, I spoke at a public fashion forum about "new style icons for the 21st century". It was affiliated with the Melbourne Fashion Festival, which runs until this Saturday. Penny gets to go to all the schmick parades because her boyfriend designed all the promotional material, but I was relegated to this public forum with all these middle-aged women wearing woven wraps and shitloads of jewellery.

Anyway, I was given the unenviable task of speaking about "celebrities and fashion." I mean, what could I say that no schmo with a keyboard had never said before? I ended up talking about:

1. "Slashies" (as in the movie Zoolander: the model/actor/singer). I said that Cate Blanchett for Donna Karan was a good Slashie, but Missy Elliott and Madonna for The Gap were highly alarming Slashies. Actually, I said Missy was a better fit for The Gap than Madonna, because I think there's something deeply suburban about Missy at heart. I mean, just listen to "Fix My Weave"!

2. Integrated brands. I used the example of Givenchy's association with Liv Tyler, which taps into their existing Hollywood mythology surrounding Audrey Hepburn. Some would call Liv the New Millennium Audrey. Not me. But anyway.

3. Celebrities with their own brands. I looked at J.Lo, who attempts to conquer the entire panoply of commodified popular culture - music, acting, fashion, perfumes, restaurants - and doesn't really succeed with any of it. She should pick one thing and try to get good at it. Then I looked at Kylie Minogue, who is an empty signifier, a toy that gay and straight, male and female, adult and child can all play with in their own ways to fulfil their own desires. Ultimately, though, Kylie is insubstantial.

4. Celebrity fashion police. I looked at the phenomenon of Best and Worst Dressed lists, as a way of ranking celebrities and bringing them back down to our level - particularly Worst Dressed. I also looked at celebrities who are only famous for dissing other people's fashion. Funny that nobody ever looked to Carson Kressley for fashion tips before he was on TV.

5. Paparazzi chic. For me, the coolest celeb fashion statements are the ones they make when their stylist has gone home for the day. Those are the ones I like to emulate - the way Kate Moss tucks her jeans into her boots, or Beyoncé wears a gold necklace with her bikini.

6. Those celebrities who totally muddy the waters, because they go to so many fashion events that you think they must be somebody, but then they don't actually do anything. Paris Hilton used to be one of those in the old days. In Australia we have Tara Moss: model/author. And like J.Lo, she's good at neither. Her main function is to wear silly hats and low-cut dresses at the races and hold horses' bridles.

The Headtapes... continued.

Monday 8 March

I Wanna Rock'n'Roll All Night - Kiss
Pussy - Lords of Acid
Toxic - Britney Spears
Surrey with the Fringe On Top - from Oklahoma!
Three Times A Lady - Lionel Richie
Nobody Does It Better - Carly Simon

Tuesday 9 March

Kiss the Bride - Elton John
Crazy - Seal
Toxic - Britney Spears
Walking on the Moon - Sting/The Police
9 to 5 (Morning Train) - Sheena Easton
Never Smile at a Crocodile - ?

Wednesday 10 March

Put Him Out (remix) - Ms Dynamite featuring Bounty Killer
Ass-n-Titties - DJ Assault
Sweet Dreams - Eurythmics
Waltz of the Flowers - Tchaikovsky
Downtown - Petula Clark
Burning Down the House - Talking Heads
Kickstart My Heart - Motley Crüe

Thursday 11 March

My Darlin' Irish Girl - Sean Connery (from a dire Disney telemovie early in his career called Darby O'Gill and the Little People - the producers mustn't have thought it would be much of a stretch for a Scotsman to play an Irishman!)
Weather With You - Crowded House
Attitude - Hardknox
Keys to the Whip - Disco D featuring Lola Damone & Helluva
Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting - Elton John
The Next Episode - Dr Dre/Snoop Dogg

Monday 15 March

Outrageous - Britney Spears
Wot U Call It - Wiley
If You Leave Me Now - Chicago
Snake - R. Kelly
Mmmbop - Hanson
Born to be Alive - Patrick Hernandez
Live and Let Die - Wings
China Girl - David Bowie
Ignition Remix - R. Kelly

Tuesday 16 March

Slow Jamz - Twista/Kanye West
She Wants to Move - N.E.R.D.
On Broadway - The Drifters
How Will I Know - Whitney Houston
Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash

Wednesday 17 March

Get Ur Freak On - Missy Elliott
The Hokey Pokey

Thursday 18 March

Young, Fresh & New - Kelis
Right Here's the Spot - Basement Jaxx
Lucky Star - Basement Jaxx featuring Dizzee Rascal
The Gambler - Kenny Rogers
Jailhouse Rock - Elvis
Red-Blooded Woman - Kylie Minogue

The Headtapes. I have always been obsessed with lists and categories. It was a running joke at high school that I was like the Spanish Inquisition skit in Monty Python's Flying Circus - "There are three main categories... no, there are four main categories..."

I've been interested in writing some academic stuff about how we use lists to store and transfer cultural knowledge. Several weeks ago I had the idea of writing down every song that came into my head, and making a CD or tape of all those songs. That way, listening to the CD would be like having a window into my head. But it would be necessarily cryptic, because songs are put in your head by hearing them, by hearing conversation or reading something that trips them off in your mind, from other people's conversation and from memory alone.

The weakness of the Headtapes would be that nobody would know why I'd had that song in my head. I thought about liner notes, because when I make mixtapes I always go to a lot of trouble to make them look as schmick yet personalised as possible, explaining why I like all the tracks - almost like an audio-zine. But in a way I like the randomness and unknowability of the Headtapes. It will be up to others to make up their own mind on what they mean.

Anyway, given that it bores my friends to hear me recite each day's Headtape, I thought I'd document them all here. So, here are all the Headtapes, as complete as I could make them (sometimes I get a song in my head and I'm not sure what it's called or who it's by).

Friday 20 February

Popular Thug - Kelis featuring Nas
Baby Boy - Beyoncé featuring Sean Paul
Shy Guy - Diana King
Frontin' - Pharrell
(Oh No) What You Got - Justin Timberlake
Good Girl - Vanessa Marquez
Prototype - OutKast
Debra - Beck
Let Me Clear My Throat - DJ Kool
And I Love Her - Beatles
Are You Gonna Go My Way - Lenny Kravitz

Monday 23 February

Here Without You - Three Floors Down
A Whole New World - from Aladdin
Boys Will Be Boys - Choirboys
Boys - Britney Spears
Boys Boys Boys - Sabrina
The Power and the Passion - Midnight Oil
Fraction Too Much Friction - Tim Finn
Careless Whispers - George Michael
1999 - Prince
Shut Up - Black-Eyed Peas
All Things Just Keep Getting Better - from Queer Eye

Tuesday 24 February

Frontin' - Pharrell
Prototype - OutKast
Right Here's The Spot - Basement Jaxx
In The Hall of the Mountain King - Grieg

Wednesday 25 February

Planet Home - Jamiroquai
Hello Hello - The Cat Empire
Anitra's Dance - Grieg
A Whole New World - from Aladdin
Little L - Jamiroquai
The Lonely Goatherd - from The Sound of Music

Thursday 26 February

Red-Blooded Woman - Kylie Minogue
Teardrop - Massive Attack

Friday 27 February

Spread - OutKast
Monsoon - Robbie Williams
Brown Sugar - Rolling Stones
I Try - Macy Gray
Step By Step - New Kids on the Block
She Works Hard for the Money - Donna Summer
Deck the Halls
Rhythm of My Heart - Rod Stewart
Fame - David Bowie
Jet - Wings
Theme from Bonanza
Please Don't Go Girl - New Kids on the Block
Simply Irresistible - Robert Palmer

Monday 1 March

Finest Dreams - Richard X vs Kelis
Dracula's Wedding - OutKast
Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough - Patti Smyth/Don Henley
Freestyler - Bomfunk MCs
Doo Wop (That Thing) - Lauryn Hill
White Lines (Don't Do It) - Grandmaster Flash featuring MC Melle Mel
Summertime - Sarah Vaughan
Kan Tong jingle ("mama's making Kan Tong/doesn't take long/for the word to get around")

Tuesday 2 March

In The Ghetto - Elvis Presley
Rondo Alla Turca - Mozart?
Beautiful - Christina Aguilera
Under Pressure - David Bowie and Queen
Tonight I Celebrate My Love - Peabo Bryson/Roberta Flack
Sara - Starship

Wednesday 3 March

Crazy In Love - Beyoncé
Just Like You - Robbie Nevil
Hey Ya! - OutKast
Toxic - Britney Spears
Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' - Michael Jackson

Thursday 4 March

Young, Fresh & New - Kelis
Flashback - Kelis

Okay, I've had enough typing. I'll get it up to date another day.

I get nostalgic a lot. I've been house-hunting intensively since Thursday, and on Friday I went to see one house in Brunswick Rd, Brunswick. The house itself was pretty ordinary, a scary commune ruled by a scruffy social worker guy. It smelled like incense. Still, it wasn't as bad as the legendary Parkville Cat Death House or West Brunswick Samoan Bonghead House from the last time I house-hunted. But anyway, I knew before I even walked in that I didn't want to live there, but I had to go through the motions to be polite. Why do people jerk each other around like that, in the name of mere politeness?

But after I left in the fresh air and autumn sunshine and waited for the tram on Lygon Street, I started to feel really sad and nostalgic. You see, in the words of Madonna, this used to be my playground. Brunswick was my turf for six years, and that tram stop, all the familiar landmarks I went past, just reminded me of what was happening in my life over those years, the anticipation of travelling down Lygon St to get to Penny's house, or frantically thinking up some shitty concepts on the tram for a copywriting assignment that was due that morning, or tipsily heading to a university ball (the time I sang Ain't There Anyone Here For Love? on the tram in my slinky red velvet dress!), or the Up Top Bar in the Reg Cole days, or to Giles' house on some half-arsed booty call.

Also, of 1999, the worst year of my life, with its gnawing sense of being useless and unemployed, and being in love with a guy who didn't love me, and then having to fight with him and ruin our friendship to make myself feel better. Back then I thought I'd never get over it. But amazingly, I did. I remember one day suddenly realising "Hey! I feel normal!" Now I'm horribly in love with another guy who (presumably; I'm afraid to ask) doesn't love me. Oh my god, it's such bittersweet torture, having him inhabit my thoughts so completely and yet not wanting to freak him out by telling him so. Plus ça change...

Then yesterday I was getting a liquid breakfast at Boost Juice on Elizabeth St, and I was served by this fat kid who was singing along with Guy Sebastian blasting out of the speakers ("All I need is you in my life forever..." ; Lynda's boyfriend Paul cynically thinks Guy is actually singing about his relationship with God!). And then Guy was replaced by Britney Spears' Toxic, which has been boring its catchy way into my brain for the last couple of weeks, and I was seized by a sudden, fervent desire to work at Boost Juice and get paid to sing and dance along with Britney, and wear a kamikaze-style headband and josh around with my perky co-workers.

Of course, that part of me that remains bitter from my experiences in the McWorkforce and from reading No Logo was thinking "You idiot! Think of all the cleaning, all the sticky juice, the shitty pay, the creepy corporate culture that makes you act all perky..." But it was the music that overrode that pragmatism.

I've been reading a lot about the Neptunes for an article I'm writing, and one reviewer said hearing Frontin' made him feel like he was back in high school. That song has a similar effect on me, a kind of boost (the juice bar name was appropriate!) of nostalgia. When it came out I was obsessed with it, I'd hear it out at Oreo parties and before I even knew what it was called or who did it, I loved that line of Jay-Z's - "like you were just another shortie I put the naughty on." I also loved that emphasis on the first beat of every bar, and the breakdown section with the bassline over which you can hear the Neptunes' trademark panting noises and Pharrell doing that sublime Curtis Mayfield "Ooooh-oooh, whoa-whoa." Anyway, hearing that song fills me with a kind of sadness that I just can't explain because it's not as if there's any personal meaning attached to the song. The only way for me to describe how it makes me feel is nostalgia.

Pearls on men - so damn sexy! Now I've been into wearing pearls for years and firmly believe they're not just for nannas. I have seven strands of different-coloured pearls, plus heaps of pearl earrings. I used to have a pearl bracelet but I lost it last year on the night of Dave's birthday when I was really drunk. Today I'm wearing a black t-shirt that says "Collingwood Boxing Club"... and a pearl choker.

Recently I saw this photo spread in The Face featuring a model draped over Pharrell Williams wearing nothing but pearls. There was one shot where Pharrell is blowing a bubble of gum onto the model's nipple, and she has this kick-arse string of enormous pearls hanging between her breasts. Not only do I have a major, embarrassing crush on Pharrell (along with his equally banal, overexposed, omnipresent protegé, Justin Timberlake), but I had this incredibly erotic fantasy once where I'm shagging a guy wearing only a strand of pearls, and he tugs on the pearls and they break and cascade all over the bed.

But to get back to my original point, I think men should wear more pearls. People hang shit on Ian Thorpe for designing "pearl necklaces", and maybe it's just my unfortunate attraction to gay men, but I think he's got it going on. And at his party last Saturday, Ethan was wearing a string of pearls looped round his wrist as a bracelet. Even though he looked and was acting like a real arse, I thought the pearls were just such a good look and more men should do it.

A wild young under-whimsy is happening... It could happen to you! This is a headline from a 1960s lingerie advertisement. It tickled my fancy. Many things tickle my fancy: absurd advertising, pop music, pigeons, fashion, alcohol, television, ugly babies, karaoke, people wearing foolish hats. The list, of course, goes on, but it's often difficult to talk about some of the things that occur to me, because people will think I'm weird. That's why I decided to dedicate a blog to my wild young under-whimsies. Everyone is weird on the internet.