A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

The Blog Files. You may well have heard that David Duchovny has a blog. In his stream-of-consciousness, poorly paragraphed way, the thinking woman's sex symbol of the 1990s describes his creative processes while directing the film House of D. There is some interesting stuff there.

Here is one of my favourite quotes, when he describes his teenage job as a butcher's delivery boy:

... is there a more embarrassing job for a 13 year old boy than to have to ride a big ugly silver bike around the city saying "here's the meat"?

Errbody in the club gettin' tipss. I am still drunk while writing this. Last night was the last ever trading night for Bourgie. It is closing down. Me and Tash stumbled out at 5am or thereabouts. Tash took a photo of us stumbling down the street as a memento. Ah, I stumbled drunkenly out of that bar many a time, but never as spastically drunk as I was (and still am)...

I got there after my show. As well as Jimbo and T.Mu, who had vanished by the time I got downstairs, Will and his Sydney posse had come along, and I was worried that it might be too Melbourne-centric for them, but gratifyingly they laughed and shook their heads in dismay a lot, and Dylan was my Secret Buff man, although he wasn't particularly secretive in his buffness. So I took the Sydneysiders along to Bourgie.

Bo had completely stripped the place. The booths were all gone, as was the fancy lighting and the partition next to the dance floor. You could see all the way to the back. It looked like a warehouse shell, which I suppose it is. Except I don't think warehouse shells usually have blow-up sex dolls hanging from hooks on the ceiling. Unless of course they are used to store blow-up dolls.

Everyone was also drunk and was in a good mood. Penny was still accusing me of pasting my head onto her tits in that photo from my show, saying "That's my top!" even though she took the photo herself and thus could not have been in it, plus there are heaps of other photos of me taken on the same day wearing the same top. Will was saying proudly how he got into a fight with David Shumway on the cultural studies email list. I was just thinking, "Shumway. Shum. Way. Heh. That is a funny word."

Of course, there was dancing. Jason repeatedly put on "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division and danced like an idiot. I was watching Jason and Bo thrashing about on the dance floor and thinking to myself, "They never dance. You must commit this to memory Mel," but predictably I don't really remember what it looked like. You see, it was the kind of drunkenness where I can recall that things happened, and I can recall what it felt like to witness these things, but I don't have the vivid visual impression in my brain. This is about as close as I get to "not remembering things due to being drunk", but in a way it's more annoying because I might as well not remember things for the haziness with which I do recall them, yet tantalisingly I know they did happen.

(Drunken philosophy 101.)

Like at one stage very late in the proceedings, Tash flashed her tits and Bo flashed his dick. I don't know why they did this, but Tash has been known to flash her tits on occasion, although usually in a car to a busload of teenage boys. But of course I can't remember what they looked like, even though I had groped one of them earlier in the evening when Tash was bemoaning the fact that her tits were shrinking and I was saying, "Well having nice tits is the only upside of being fat". As for Bo's dick, I remember thinking briefly that it looked like a sausage, which made me wonder if there were any sausages left because I was kinda hungry.

I also remember a really intense and pleasurable dancing session to "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News. Who was it I was talking to recently who had a nightmare that Huey Lewis and the News were coming to get them? Oh well. Lost in the alcoholic abyss. I can't really explain, least of all right now, how wonderful it was to dance to that song, playing so loud, with coloured lights and disco-ball fragments bathing the happy faces of everyone on the dance floor and shining in my own eyes to create twinkling silhouettes of my dancing friends. I remember being seized by a fierce love for Tash, who was making that silly dancing face she makes while shaking her arse and mashing her hands into fists, and Stuart, who was helplessly drunk and was shuffling around on the dance floor with his enormous, ridiculous hair. It sounds particularly retarded to say it, but with absolutely no hipster irony, I felt the power of love.

Jason was also playing "The Killing Moon" by Echo and the Bunnymen, which I will always associate with Donnie Darko. I remember being really affected by the way the song was used in the film, because what it signified to me was the poignant intensity of youth - how life can be so sweet and simple and important and seemingly steeped in significance, but yet it's so fleeting and leaves so few traces. I have been thinking about Donnie Darko again since Ben wrote that he had watched it. Last night I was thinking that it was perversely appropriate to be playing "The Killing Moon" as we got drunk and messy in a bar that soon wouldn't exist.

At one stage I went to the toilet and slipped over in a pool of vomit outside the cubicles. Now I think about it, it would have been comical because the pool was so extensive that whenever I tried to get up I just slipped over again. In the end I only got up because someone offered me their hand. But you know when people are so concerned and solicitous when you injure yourself in public and you just want them to go away because their kindness is much more humiliating than the actual injury? Like the time I fell over in Grattan Street and sprained my ankle and limped all the way down the road to the John Medley building, and then when I was in the lift someone behind me said "Are you okay?" and I was utterly humiliated because I realised they must have seen not only the initial fall but the pathetic limping down Grattan Street. So last night Bo was all "Are you okay" and I was brusquely saying "Off you go, off you go."

I rinsed my skirt in the sink but it still smelled like vomit, and the worst part is that even though I was quite drunk at the time, I wasn't drunk enough a) to throw up; b) to fall over of my own accord. I was mad that I looked and smelled like a complete alcoholic spastic because this was misleading. I also think I injured myself because my left wrist is very sore, as is my coccyx. Heh. Coccyx is a funny word, isn't it. That's because it has "cock" in it.

You know, what really strikes me about last night is that I left the place in a good mood, whereas I have usually left that bar feeling angry or depressed. Okay, I have to go now because Tash is hosting lunch. Obviously she arranged this a while ago. I called her today and we were both still drunk and confused about daylight saving. I am running late and so am tempted to drive, but I really shouldn't get behind the wheel of a car. Although I managed it on Christmas Day after the Bourgie Christmas party.

Vale Bourgie.

A couple of reasons you should come and see my Comedy Festival show.

It all starts tomorrow (Wednesday)! The first week is preview week, which means cheap tickets. And if you saw the Fringe Festival run, there will be MORE and SMUTTIER music, wondrous accomplishments in Photoshop, and gossip from when The Incredible Melk went to the MTV Australia Awards. And for your own amusement, you can also check out the Incredible Melk website.

Do you need our stinking badges? Sir yes sir! Atten-shun! Those highly disciplined troops from Is Not Magazine are proud to present the Cake Stall Corps, a market stall taskforce. Choose from a huge range of unique designs from Badge Division. At only $2, they've already been selling hard and fast. Ever envied those cool trendy types with beautiful and obscure designs on their lapels? Now you can be one too!

Meanwhile, our Baked Goods Regiment has been instructed to get down and give us twenty - batches of Commando Cupcakes, that is. For just $3, you get a camouflage-iced cupcake with a free action figure. Collect the whole set.

And our T-shirt Detachment has been busily snipping and silkscreening to bring you Is Not Standard Issue t-shirts. We have a range of designs and styles for only $15. They'll attract the kind of attention that can bring about a dishonourable discharge!

We're having two tours of duty:

SUNDAY 19 MARCH
Kent St Cafe
201 Smith Street, Fitzroy
1500 hours (3pm)

MONDAY 20 MARCH
Union Building
University of Melbourne
0900 hours (9am)

We trust your service will be honourable, and you will leave our stalls highly decorated. Diiiiiiiiis-missed!

Perhaps the most spastic name I've read in ages. You would think that regularly reading the Herald Sun births column, singing "Bogan babies" to the tune of "Allouette", would inure me to the most bizarre made-up names that parents have to inflict on their children. Then there are the dreaded baby naming forums, which Caz has intrepidly infliltrated. If you're hungry to hear about Toolio DeSac and his ilk, then try Baby's Named A Bad, Bad Thing.

But all this pales in comparison with this actor, whose details I found on the front page of IMDB today.

How to raise money. The Love Grenade party was a mitigated success. Tonight we were considering how to make more money before the launch of the first edition. We were all exhausted, so perhaps we weren't thinking straight. Here are some ideas we came up with:

The Beer Carwash - A Crass Event Brought to You by Is Not Magazine
This would involve us washing cars wearing white t-shirts and/or bikinis, occasionally spraying each other with water, squealing and whipping each other with wet cloths. "Car Wash" by Rose Royce, "Pull Up To My Bumper" by Grace Jones, "Any Way You Like It" by Journey, "Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car" by Billy Ocean, "Bad Girls" by Donna Summer, "Pink Cadillac" by Natalie Cole, and other cheesy classics would play. The owners of the cars would look on in deckchairs, drinking beer that we would also sell. We could make some extra money by getting onlookers to pay me to put my clothes back on. But this event was ultimately vetoed by the irresponsibility of combining driving and liquor.

Mel the Breakdancing Carrot - Coming Soon to a Children's Party Near You
I was a house captain at school and at sporting events we had to wear stupid costumes in house colours. I was a carrot. I think my parents still have the costume somewhere. I also took a breakdancing course a few years ago. I was not particularly good at breakdancing, especially at grovelling around on the ground (technically referred to as 'power moves') but I think that in the carrot outfit, I would make a great children's party entertainer. I would bring a DJ (one of the others with stupid enormous headphones on) who would spin songs like "Rockit" by Herbie Hancock, "U Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer and "Parents Just Don't Understand" by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, while I taught the kids moves like the robot, the wave, the running man, the moonwalk and how to brush dirt off their shoulders. They would love it because I was a carrot, and the adults would think it was fucking hilarious. I was quite committed to this idea but the others vetoed it because I wouldn't have enough time to book myself in for enough parties, considering that I have a Comedy Festival show beginning a week from Wednesday.

The Disco Beer Ghost Tour - Spookily Good
This event would begin at ten pm at an undisclosed city location, where we would sell beer and spin party tunes. When the group was well lubricated, we would usher them to another city location where we would earnestly tell them a spooky story about the ghosts that inhabit the place. At the climax of the story, one of us, dressed in a sheet with eyeholes, would leap from the shadows going "Ooooohhh!" This would terrify yet delight the tipsy crowd. Then the music would kick back in and we would dance and they would buy more beer. This process would be repeated some more, with people getting drunker: "A beer please - and one for the ghost!" Although we were crying with laughter at this idea, it would be a logistical and legal nightmare.

So I decided to look to Hollywood, the cradle of crazy madcap money making schemes...

Empire Records (1995)
An independent record store must sell to the Music Town chain unless its wacky employees can raise enough money through a benefit gig.

Let's Do It Again (1975)
Two blue-collar workers in Atlanta have promised to raise funds for their fraternal order, the Brothers and Sisters of Shaka. They travel to New Orleans and rig a boxing match using hypnotism to turn the scrawny underdog into a super-confident fighting machine.

The Blues Brothers (1980)
Jake and Elwood Blues discover that the orphanage where they were raised by nuns is about to be sold. The only way to keep it open is if the $5000 tax on the property is paid within 11 days. The brothers decide to put their blues band back together and raise the the money by staging a big gig.

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1990)
When their mother goes on vacation, a family of kids are left with a horrible babysitter who suddenly dies. They deposit her body at the morgue before realising she had all the money their mother had left them. The eldest daughter, Suellen, bluffs her way into a job at a uniform manufacturing firm, then stages a fashion parade starring her friends as models. (Damn, maybe I've done this scenario before...)

The Goonies (1985)
A bunch of kids are being forcibly relocated by a new development, but they embark on a quest to save their homes when one of them stumbles on a treasure map of the pirate "One-Eyed" Willy's hidden fortune.

All Men Are Liars (1995)
Mick's father, Barry, sells the family piano, causing Mick's mother, Irene to leave. In order to raise enough money to buy the piano back, Mick dresses in his mother's clothes and becomes Michelle to join an all-girl band that has come into town for the annual harvest festival.

Cockfighter (1974)
Frank Mansfield has wanted to win the Cockfighter of the Year medal for ages. After losing a champion bird in a casual hotel room cockfight, he swore never to speak again until he's won that award. Frank has to raise $500 for a new cock, then he can form a partnership with fellow cocksman Omar Baradansky.

Risky Business (1983)
After writing off his dad's Porsche, Joel turns his affluent Chicago-suburb home into a lucrative bordello with the aid of Lana, a hooker with a heart of gold. But the two must avoid the vengeful pimp Guido and keep their customers happy.

Any more bright ideas?

Thank goodness for tenderiser mercies. Lately I have been thinking about peer pressure. Sometimes it seems to me as though blogging is like an online version of high school, with its cliques and its bitch fights. I know Christian has mentioned this in relation to the fraught politics of Livejournal friends lists (although I can't post a direct link cos that man is fucking everywhere and I can't remember where he said it. Also, I mean that he emphatically is everywhere, rather than he is sexually adventurous. Although he might well be. Ah fuck, I'm just digging that hole deeper, aren't I?)

So I bring you the sorry tale of My Year Eight Camp. This satisfies the wishes of a certain little lady who also wanted me to post that photo of myself at World Expo 88 straddling a styracosaurus' snout so it looked like I had an enormous hard-on. But when I tried to find it, it had mysteriously vanished. And it was awkward having to ask my parents about that photo, "you know, the one where I'm clutching my thirty-inch spiked schlong with both hands?"

Now, I went to an all-girls high school which we shall call Our Lady of the Flies. Year 8 was a tough year. This chick from our year level got abducted by a serial killer on the first day of the Easter holidays. I can't adequately convey the culture of fear this instilled in us. Penny had a nightmare about it just the other night. But the school camp predated all that. It was meant to be a kind of self-sufficiency camp where we took our own food and cooking implements, and cooked all our own meals. We went to Lake Eildon.

There was no serenity.

I don't really remember how it happened, but there was so much bad blood at this camp. There was a bitch-fight on the first day that resulted in our class splitting into two factions. I believe (but am still unsure) that this schism occurred when someone was 'accidentally' hit on the head with a frypan. We had this murder-in-the-dark style chasing game after dinner one night, which was genuinely terrifying. Cam fainted in the middle of it and had to be taken to the first aid tent. Everyone blamed each other but I suspect she actually ran into a tree and knocked herself out or something. There was also an unofficial competition to photograph Emah on the toilet, or swimming in her underwear (she had forgotten to bring her bathers).

Me and Hop copped it the worst. At the start of the camp we had been on the cool edge of daggy; but after the fight our borderline cool friends disowned us and sided with the bitchy popular chicks. The real dags - the Asian prodigies, the goody-goodies, the maths and music nerds - left us alone because they didn't want to attract the ire of the trendy chicks. To make matters worse, we had matching stomach bugs on the day of the all-day hike, leading many to speculate that we were faking it to avoid going on the hike. To dispel this theory, the teachers made us go anyway. The teachers basically stood back and watched us attack each other, even though they could see exactly what was going on. I really felt betrayed that they wouldn't referee it. I felt like I was on my own.

The most terrifying moment of the camp occurred late one afternoon. Me and Hop had retreated from the campsite to the lake shore in order to escape our tormentors. We were snivelling to each other about how unfair things were when a posse approached us, led by Sylvie and Tracy, two of the meanest cunts on that camp. Sylvie was holding a meat tenderiser - you know, a square metal mallet with little spikes on each hitting surface.
Did I mention we took our own cooking implements?

"Stop ruining the fucking camp," said Sylvie.
"We're not ruining it - you're the ones making our lives a misery," I said, stung at this outrage.
"Making our lives a misery," mimicked Sylvie. The others laughed.
I looked around. There was nobody there to save us.
Sylvie bashed the meat tenderiser on the ground by way of demonstration. I seem to recall her saying "I'll tenderise you," but perhaps that's just the version that has passed into folklore, like the story about me throwing up on the principal's shoes at the year 10 semi-formal. I'll have you know that was Cam.

After this camp, the factions stuck, and my diaries of the time are full of agonised musings on 'trendies' and 'daggies'. I was in a so-called Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students, which meant that we had all our classes together, except maths, every year from year seven to year ten. So the prospect of spending two more years with this same group of people was almost intolerable for me. Things deteriorated to the point where our entire class had to get group counselling. We killed off the PEGS program for at least a few years - I think Lucy's year level was the next to do it, and she was four years behind me.

I said hey, hack, take a walk on the wild side. Sometimes I really feel as though I am repeating myself. But today, instead of just getting angry at some shoddy journalism, I would like to criticise journalistic urban ethnography. By this, I don't mean the traditional anthropological sense of studying 'tribes' or other foreign communities. I mean a style of reportage that examines aspects of everyday urban life that often evade mainstream discourse (whether because they describe socially marginalised groups, self-articulated subcultures or criminal underworlds). In other words, urban ethnography looks at the collision of strange and familiar. So-called gonzo journalism is perhaps the anti-ethnographic approach to contemporary urban life; but I'll get to that.

It can be well done - see, for example, Maximum City, Suketu Mehta's astonishing and vivid account of contemporary Bombay, which I wrote about yesterday for work. In its review, Publishers Weekly said that Mehta harks back "to such great Victorian urban chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew while introducing the reader to much that is truly new and strange." Henry Mayhew is most famous for the multi-volume London Labour and the London Poor (1851). He is considered the doyen of urban ethnography and the father of subcultural ethnography. Mayhew's work influenced the American sociological tradition, epitomised by Ned Polsky. And in Australia, journalist Marcus Clarke published some interesting work on nineteenth-century Melbourne society.

Many of these works are necessarily products of their time, and can't resist the usual failings of urban ethnography: patronising your subjects; getting personally implicated rather than striving for objective observation; and of course, my biggest bugbear, failing to set observations in the social and moral context of those observed, and instead fetishising and romanticising the Other. Clarke is perhaps the biggest offender on this count. But I think Mayhew (and Dickens, too) displays a real understanding and sympathy for his coster girls, criminals and dosshouse vagrants. 150 years on, they still shine from the page with dignity and personality.

The same cannot be said for thoughtless and ideologically transparent pieces of crap like this article by Craig Scutt. Scutt follows a crew of Melbourne graffiti artists around for one night. It's interesting that the impetus for the article, as anticipated in the precede ("What's daubed on walls has become a hot issue for many councils"), is local councils' attempts to stamp out graffiti. (I've been following this issue in various local papers.) But what actually emerges is a completely cynical attempt to co-opt the writers of graffiti into this issue when they don't particularly appear to care.

Despite its equivocal title, the article is astounding for its naked agenda: that graffiti is a crime and those who do it are criminals. But perhaps even more astounding is the way that Scutt's a priori prejudice is problematised again and again: he's surprised by the careful artistry of the form; he's surprised that Fitzroy residents don't stop the graffers and indeed, actually encourage them. Still, he doggedly pursues the criminality line.

The look of concentration on their faces seems out of kilter with the act. For some reason, I anticipated that people causing damage to public and private property would do so in a more flippant, off-hand manner.

[...]

I forget he is doing something illegal until I hear footsteps behind me. It could be the police, a publican, home-owner, old person, or any one of several stereotyped graffiti-haters. But it is just a young couple who don't bat an eyelid as they stroll past.

[...]

I get the impression that around here no one minds a bit of graffiti. My impression is soon confirmed when Charles gets busted by a home-owner as he is doing another crazy cartoon character on the man's wall. The resident is a young guy in a hooded top. "Nice smell," he says, sniffing the aerosol fumes. "Keep going." Charles obliges.

But the article is at its most irritating when it tries to place graffiti within the hip-hop culture that one of the group, 'Peter', strongly subscribes to. Peter is a DJ and MC but has never tried graffiti. And from the outset, Scutt's 'hack-sense' detects something a little, how you say, fishy:

"I'm lookin' forward to gettin' down with this shit," he says in an accent that sounds familiar but somehow out of place.

I was actually embarrassed for Scutt after reading his account of Peter busting loose with an aerosol:

He goes on the rampage, squeezing the aerosol trigger, firing rounds of paint into the fleshy fabric of society. It feels as if I am watching him purge himself. He is sticking two fingers up at authority, proclaiming his freedom with an act of aerosol defiance.

Oh yeah, that's right - he's one of those hip-hoppers! Because as we all know, hip hop is about defying authority - and shooting stuff. I kind of feel for Peter by the end of the night; but his trial by media isn't over yet. You see, Scutt has finally placed his 'odd' accent:

It's like my brother's, who lives in a satellite town north of London. Like Peter, he has assimilated hip-hop culture to the extent that he now talks and dresses like the mainly American originators of the culture he strives to emulate. I am struck by the notion that American cultural imperialism has been so successful that it even informs the subcultures of its "colonies".

Now, I am well known to disagree with "Yo Check It" Tony Mitchell in many, many ways, especially his emphasis on resistance and indigeneity in hip-hop. But at least Mitchell rejects the stupid idea that hip-hop outside the US is a 'colony' of its American overlords. But predictably, Scutt doesn't have much time to enlarge on his colonialist rhetoric beca Peter "vents" on him:

"Why are you writing about us anyway? You're the only toy here," he snarls. "Why should anyone listen to you? What they need is for people who know about hip-hop to tell them about where it's at."

Scutt does gesture towards why a bunch of graffiti guys would let some dumbarse journalist tag along (pun unintended). But before this idea can really 'breathe', he promptly shuts it down again by underlining that graffiti is a crime:

They want street art to be seen as legitimate, as contributing positively to the urban landscape. They know all too well that an act of wanton vandalism sends their cause backwards. [...] But in the case of graffiti, it seems there aren't very many who are keen to put themselves on a platform for proper public debate. This is hardly surprising, considering it is illegal and they could get in trouble for admitting any involvement in committing art crimes.

Well, if intelligent graffiti artists see ill-considered articles like this that constantly refuse to examine the motivations of the graffiti artist or the reception of his/her work, no wonder they're reluctant to "put themselves on a platform"!

So-called gonzo journalism is perhaps the anti-ethnographic approach to contemporary urban life - it abandons any pretension to objectivity and instead hopes a highly coloured, personally invested account will reveal more 'truth'. "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long," Hunter S Thompson once told the Atlantic Monthly. "You can't be objective about Nixon. How can you be objective about Clinton?"

The Love Grenade - an explosion of good feeling! This Saturday, the Is Not Magazine crew is organising a warehouse party entitled The Love Grenade. The theme is love and we want to share it, Ms Fits-style. Well, perhaps not. I did, however, suggest the creation of a room with a lava lamp and a disco ball called the Action Station. And the idea of the kissing booth came up again - Penny was totally up for it, but the ever-cynical Jeremy said, "Why don't we just have a glory hole?" Americans. Can't please 'em - can't withdraw from Iraq.

We have a pleasing lineup of entertainment. Local band Because of Ghosts, fresh from their tour of Japan, will kick off proceedings. First DJ off the rank is Miss Claire (Corner Hotel) spinning her party mix of rock, soul and hip hop. Manchild and Mu-gen (Hootchie Kootchie @ Alia) and Deltoid (Ghetto Fabulous) will then whip you into a frenzy of hip hop, funk and R&B, along with surprise guest MCs.

Go to the Is Not Magazine website for more info on where and when.

Music for runways. Here is the soundtrack of my fashion show last night. Because I can't deejay, I painstakingly put it together by cutting and pasting in SoundForge using the 'mix' editing function. It took me fucking forever, and some of the transitions were better than others. I was particularly pleased with my intro to Model Run 1, which mixed the refrain from "The Rockafeller Skank" by Fatboy Slim into "Right About Now" by Mousse T.

Playing While People Were Coming In
All I Ask - Rae & Christian featuring Vebal
Love Don't Love Me - Justin Timberlake
Young, Fresh and New - Kelis
Tipsy - J-Kwon
Honey - Jay-Z and R Kelly
All For You - Janet Jackson
Play It Off - Nelly featuring Pharrell
Love Don't Love Me - Eric Benet
Breathe - Blu Cantrell featuring Sean Paul

Model Run 1
Right About Now - Mousse T featuring Emma Banford
Goodies - Ciara featuring Petey Pablo
Keep Giving Your Love to Me - Beyonce
Pass It Pass It - Snoop Dogg
I'm Good - Blaque
Wet!Wet!Wet! - Princess Superstar

The Walk-Off
Elimination Rounds:
Walk This Way - Run DMC and Aerosmith
Final:
Yeah - Usher featuring Ludacris

Model Run 2
Loose Lips - Seiji featuring Lyric L
(Oh No) What You Got - Justin Timberlake
Finest Dreams - Richard X vs Kelis
Smack It Up - Fannypack
Pussy - Lords of Acid
Not Many - Scribe
She's Got That Vibe - R Kelly and Public Announcement

The walk-off was the highlight of the show for me. I got people from the audience to challenge each other, with the winner decided by audience applause. The stand-out was this seven-year-old called Angelica, who was two of the models' younger sister, and she totally got into it. When I was calling for challengers for her, she was shouting "Bring it!" Zac rose to the challenge, putting in an arse-slapping performance that would shame Derek Zoolander. But for the audience, it was all about Angelica. Zac slunk away to my taunts that he "would be lucky to get catalogue work!" When Angelica did her victory strut to "Yeah", she busted out some pop-locking moves. I just can't describe how special it was. It made me nostalgic for my own childhood exhibitionism.

I was also quite chuffed that several Asian student types took photos throughout the show, and afterwards insisted that I pose for more snaps with them. Dontcha know I'm loco?

On the nerd front, Will, Ben and Elanor were among the frenzied crowd. If you weren't there, you totally missed out, because among the hott models was Lily, the much-talked-about "hot bar chick" from Nerdy Blog Night. Oh man, you should have seen her in those Supre short-shorts. Let this be a lesson for you to come to my Comedy Festival show, which starts in about two weeks (eep).