A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

2012-01-30T15:18:00.000+11:00

The Compleat Stupid Cat Songs. I am actually quite angry with Backupmytweets.com – it claims I've reached my storage limit and is no longer archiving my most recent tweets, but it won't accept my credit card when I try to purchase a 'premium' account. It will only accept credit cards from people in the US, UK and Canada. But then I've noticed that people from the UK are also complaining that they can't upgrade either because the interface will only accept a US state as place of residence, and some of those complaints are a year old.

So clearly I can't rely on it any more to store my tweets. I figure what I'll do is to download the tweets and store them in the cloud myself, then kill my account, then sign up afresh and get it to start archiving them again.

It's a pity, because it's a really easy way to search through your tweets. Hence, before I destroy my account you might as well 'enjoy' all the stupid cat songs I have made up for Graham, as Twitter is where I record them. I've gotta say, my favourite stupid cat song of all time is still one of the dumbest, which I tweeted on 11 September 2010.

14 January 2012
Private Pusscat (to the tune of 'Private Dancer' by Tina Turner)
Annoyed Graham wouldn't sit on my lap, I invented a new #stupidcatsong: "You're my private pusscat/A pusscat for cat food/You'll do what I want you to do…"

6 January 2012
"Grahamy Grahamy
Gimme the mews
I gotta bad case of patting you
No purr's softer than your fur
I gotta bad case of patting you" #stupidcatsongs

17 December 2011
It's not just the #stupidcatsongs but the stupid banter. Just caught myself saying: "It's furry; it's purring; this cat has got the lot!"

17 November 2011
I'm working on a #stupidcatsong to the tune of Curtis Mayfield's 'Pusher Man' – "I'm your pussycat…"

20 October 2011
I blame @elanormcinerney for the fact that I now know a Justin Bieber song for my #stupidcatsongs. "Grahamy, Grahamy, Grahamy-OHHH!"

10 October 2011
"Graham
Feel him on my fingertips
Hear him through my windowpane
My cat's going miaow like
Graham…" #stupidcatsongs #madonna

8 October 2011
Latest #stupidcatsongs: 'In The Catto' to tune of 'In The Ghetto'. It's basically just me crooning in a deep voice, "in the cattoooo…"

6 October 2011
My punch-walking song: 'Cats and Music' by Cat Copy. ("Be my Grahamy one more time…") #stupidcatsongs #stupidwalks

2 October 2011
"Can't feed my, can't feed my
No you can't feed my puffy Graham
He's got to eat no Whiskas…" #stupidcatsongs

21 September 2011
Hello sir, hello ma'am, I'm your f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-FLUFFY GRAHAM! #stupidcatsongs

20 September 2011
New #stupidcatsong - "Oh Graham, let's take some drugs/Drugs will make our lives better".

4 September 2011
Sunday Monday catty Graham
Tuesday Wednesday catty Graham
Thursday Friday catty Graham
The Whiskas comes
The purring hums
I'm ready to give you food
This Graham is ours (Poo on the floor, that catty Graham)
This Graham is ours (Biting our hands, That catty Graham)
This Graham is ours
This catty Graham is yours & mine, catty Graham!

12 August 2011
Made up another #stupidcatsong: "I need a CAT DOOOR/So he can get in and out and in/I need a CAT DOOOR/So I don't have to get up and down again"

17 July 2011
New #stupidcatsongs to the tune Elton John's 'Passengers':
"Deny the fluffy cat, who wanna go out
Wanna come in
He wanna go out…"

6 July 2011
"We're the cats in Australia
We're the cats in Australia
Everybody eat all their food and go miaow" #stupidcatsongs

1 July 2011
"I'm too fluffy for my fur
Too fluffy for my fur
So fluffy I purr
And I'm too fluffy for your party
Too fluffy for your party
No way I'm furniture-scratching…"

30 June 2011
Working on a #stupidcatsong to tune of 'Proud Mary'. So far all I have is "Cat food keep on pourin'/Loud Grahamy keep on miawin'".

30 June 2011
Puff-puffety puff-puffety puff-puff Paree
A Graham is as fluffy as fluffy can be
Puff-puffety puff-puffety puff-puff Peru
His fur will rub off when he sits down on you
Or look at his tail
Cos that's fluffy too

15 June 2011
When I was just a little cat
I asked my owner, "What will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be fat?"
Here's what she said to me:
Puff sera sera
How fluffy you'll be, you'll be
I'll get your fur over me
Puff sera sera
(Fluff you'll be, you'll be)

13 June 2011
Did I ever do any #stupidcatsongs using 'Don't You Want Me' by the Human League?
"You'd better eat it up or we will BOTH BE SORRY
Don't you want it Grahamy
Don't you want your fooood?"

12 June 2011
I've been all around the place
Posting pictures of ya face
Graham I missed you #stupidcatsongs #relievedcatsongs

4 June 2011
I think of tonight's 2 #stupidcatsongs I prefer 'Jellymeat', but I haven't yet explored the potential of 'Don't Stop Til You've Fed A Puff':

Keep going with your Whiskas
Don't stop til you've fed a puff
Keep going with your Whiskas
Don't stop til you've fed a puff

Over and over I feed it
Puss-cat you're alone
You must be out of your mind
Jellymeat, you've really nommed it

2 June 2011
Some of those who buy Whiskas
Are the same that review biscuits
AAAAAAAAAAAARGHH
Feeding in the Graham of
Now you eat what they bought you
Now you eat what they bought you
FUCK YOU I WON'T EAT WHAT YOU BOUGHT ME

26 March 2011
"If your fur's all over my laundry
It don't matter if it's black or white"

20 March 2011
Ooh Grahamy do you know what that's worth
Ooh Whiskas is a food on earth
They say at Whiskas meat comes first
We'll make Whiskas a food on earth… #stupidcatsongs #stupidwhiskasjingles

14 February 2011
"My furry Valentine
Sweet purry Valentine
You make me miaow with my heart…" #stupidcatsongs #corporateloveday

12 February 2011
"Miaow miaow
Grahamooshka Grahamooshka Grahamooshka miaow-yow…" #stupidcatsongs #tipsycatsongs

14 January 2011
"I dreamed a dream in the backyard
That birds were there, and I could catch them
But catching birds is very hard
They fly so fast I cannot match them"

23 December 2010
"I gotta Furball Formula™ for you!
You will not cough 'em up if I feed you this food…" #stupidcatsongs #goodthingidontworkinadvertising

15 December 2010
Miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow
Graham is pretty great
Miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow
He is my little mate

13 December 2010
Ebony and ivory
Live together in furry harmony
Side by side on my pusscat Graham
He is so fluffy!

3 December 2010
Shit on the floor and you're to blame
You give cats a bad name
You do that poo and I cry out "Graham!"
You give cats a bad name

30 November 2010
"Everybody's got a hungry cat
Everybody's got a hungry cat
You feed him cat food and he won't eat that
Everybody's got a hu-u-ungry cat…"

8 November 2010
Who's the black and white cat that's a poo machine upon the mat
GRAHAM!
You're daaaamn right
Who is the cat that would eat his meal then another meal?
GRAHAM!
Can you dig it?
Who's the cat that won't go out
Even though he wanted to go out?
GRAHAM!
Right on!
They say this cat Graham is a bad mother–
SHUT YOUR MOUTH!
Well I'm talkin' 'bout Graham
Then we can dig it!
He's a complicated cat
But no one understands him but his owner
MIAOWIN' Graham!

30 October 2010
In Aberdeen I used to know
A cat with a miaow and his name was Joe
And every night at 10 I'd pat him in the glen
But I won't be patting this cat again
Especially not in the glen at 10
For now across the lane
I'll go home with bonny Graham.
GO HOME! GO HOME! Go home with bonny Graham!
Go home! Go home, IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'LL… go home with bonny Graham!

29 October 2010
It also turned into a tender slowjam 'Graham Smile' to the tune of 'Sara Smile' night. #stupidcatsongs

24 October 2010
"Psycho kitteh, qu'est-ce que c'est?
Fluff-fluffa-fluff-fluffa-fluffa-fluffa!
Better meow meow meow, meow meow meow away!"

23 October 2010
Working on a new #stupidcatsong along lines of "That's why the Grahamy is a cat…"

20 October 2010
Give you just a taste and you want more
Now yr tail is shaky and you use the claws
Now you go a pooin' pooin' on the floor
And I've never known a cat like you before
And now you come along (MIAAAAAAOW)
Yes you come along (MIAAAAAOW)
And I've never known a cat like you before #miaowsolo #stupidcatsongs

8 October 2010
Miaowing hard to make his owner
Leave her shelter from the rain
A hungry one left to carry on
Brown Whiskas in his veins
Whoaaa, he's a fluffy fat cat
Yes he is
I TELL YA HE'S A FLUFFY FAT CAT!

22 September 2010
You got the right puff Grahamy
Love the way you purr and miaow
You got the right puff Grahamy
You're the reason why I sing this #stupidcatsong

11 September 2010
My favourite of all my #stupidcatsongs is pure in its inanity:
"Oh my cat
He's puffy puffy puffy
Oh his fur
Is fluffy fluffy fluffy…"

8 September 2010
"I see you sittin' on my bed on the blanket that's red
And I'm like
Puff you
I guess the food in your bowl just wasn't enough
I'm like
Puff you, you're so fluffy too"

24 July 2010
"Oh you fluffy thing
Don't you know you're driving your owner and housemates insane?" (done this one before, but it's a fave) #stupidcatsongs

24 July 2010
The fur is long
With many a whining miaow
That leads to his bowl
His bowl of food
But I'm strong
Strong enough to carry him
He's quite heavy
He's my puffa

22 July 2010
@Lu_Mo I would be happy to make videos of #stupidcatsongs. I thought of another one today 'Fluff Is The Puff' to tune of 'Love Is The Drug'.

5 July 2010
It's only my hatred of Lady Gaga that stops me mining the rich vein of 'Gra-Gra' possibilities for #stupidcatsongs.

30 June 2010
'Like A Puff' (to 'Like A Boss' by Slim Thug) "Who the puff, kitteh, who the muthafuckin' puff?" #stupidcatsongs

26 June 2010
A real low for #stupidcatsongs - 'Melly's Cat' to the tune of 'Jessie's Girl'. "Where can I find a kitteh like that?"

6 June 2010
"I fed a cat and I liked it
The smell of his Whiskas Jellymeat…" #stupidcatsongs

26 May 2010
My own shame is that I've just been singing ['Baby Baby' by Amy Grant] as a #stupidcatsong - "Grahamy, Grahamy".

25 May 2010: Theme From Karate Cat II
I am a cat who would miaow for your Whiskas
I'll be the nuisance that you're dreaming of
We'll eat together
Knowing forever
That we did it all for the furry of puff
(We did it all for puff)
Like a cat in shining collar
With a long tail below
Just in time I will save the day
Take you to my food bowl far away

18 May 2010
To the tune of 'Hangin' Tough':
"Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh
Hangin' puff
Are you puff enough?

14 May 2010
To tune of 'I Got A Girl' by Tripping Daisy: "I got a cat who lives with me/I got a cat who miaows so sweetly…"

30 April 2010
To tune of 'Kickstart My Heart' - 'Quick, Pat My Cat'.

12 April 2010
"All the cats in da house, c'mon, lemme hear ya say miaaaaow!" *silence, cat looks dully at me* #stupidcatsongs

8 April 2010
"Bye bye Graaaaaaahamy!" Sadly, Graham doesn't appreciate my Ann-Margret impression. #stupidcatsongs

1 April 2010
#stupidcatsong shame, to the tune of '9 To 5':
"He's got tufts of puff
He's very very fluffy
He's got just enough
To be all soft and cuddly"

15 March 2010
Workshopping a new #stupidcatsong: we are Mel and Grahamfunkel! So far: "Hello pusscat, why ya miaowin'" and "Doo-do doo-do, feelin' hungry".

1 March 2010
"Jump down turn around, eat a bowl of chicken
Jump down turn around, eat a bowl a day!
Oh Graham! eat a bowl of chicken
Oh Graham! Eat a bowl a day!"

1 March 2010
D'oh, Simon just busted me serenading Graham with my Frankie Vallee #stupidcatsong "Grahamy baby/Grahamy can you come in tonight…"

25 February 2010
@tashludowyk Great minds clearly think alike, as I'd already done "Don't stop miaowing/keep on with that howling…"

25 February 2010
Can't believe it has taken me over a year to think of a #stupidcatsong to the tune of 'Fame' by Irene Cara.

14 February 2010
"Grahamy, Grahamy
Where did my puff go?
Leaving just his fur behind
And I've vacuumed a thousand times" #supremes #stupidcatsongs

Haha, just realised that #stupidcatsong is a mashup of 'Where Did Our Love Go' and 'I Can't Help Myself'. Both Holland/Dozier/Holland songs.

28 January 2010
To the tune of the David Bowie Extras song: "See his rabbit fur/Puff puff/puff puff" #stupidcatsongs

9 January 2010
Embarrassingly, I'm pretty sure Paul overheard my 'Copacabana'-inspired #stupidcatsong - "His name was Graham, he was a pusscat…"

17 December 2009
A Fantail original composition: "Oh kitten I gotcha/Gotcha gotcha Graham/Oh kitten I gotcha/Gotcha gotcha Graham" #stupidcatsongs

21 October 2009
To the tune of Boney M's 'Rasputin':
"Gra-Gra, fluffy cat
Lover of scratching the mat
He was a cat that really could shed…" #stupidcatsongs

5 October 2009
Worst #stupidcatsong ever: "Oh little cat, you are a small cat, I find you very fluffy." This is the stuff I hope housemates never overhear.

4 October 2009
Pon de couch, singing along to the Rolling Stones: "Grahaaaaaaam is by my side, yes he is!" #stupidcatsongs

19 August 2009
"The cream is a wish your cat makes, when you're fast asleep
With cream he will wake your flatmates…" #stupidcatsongs

29 July 2009
To the tune of 'My Name Is Prince': "My name is Graham/And I am fluffy!" #stupidcatsongs

29 July 2009
To the tune of 'Superfreak': "He's a supercat, supercat, he's super-fluffeh, MIAOW!" #stupidcatsongs

24 July 2009
Oh! So puffy! Oh-oh! Tail so puffy! Oh! So puffy! Me love you long time! #stupidcatsongs

21 July 2009
Have reached a delirious state in which #stupidcatsongs have degenerated into a single repeated line: "Puffy puffy tail, puff-puff!"

3 July 2009
New #stupidcatsongs band: Cat Copy! With song 'Caturdays': "When I'm looking for you/I call your name but you don't want food"

26 June 2009
"If you're thinkin' of being mah kitteh, it don't matter if you're black or white" #stupidcatsongsmichaeljacksonmemorialedition

12 June 2009
To the tune of Nick Cave 'Do You Love Me?' "And the bells on his collar went jingle! jangle!" #stupidcatsongs

12 June 2009
To the tune of 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart' - "Owner of a fluffy cat". #stupidcatsongs

10 June 2009
This cat is
this cat is
this cat is squeaknotronic
this cat is squeaknotronic
and Mel has
got Whiskas
for him

23 March 2009
"His name was Graham
he was a kitten
he liked to scratch me with his claws
and kick his litter on the floor"

2012-01-29T14:30:00.000+11:00

Finding my daemon. This is so dumb, but I've been interested in the idea of a daemon, as in His Dark Materials. I've also been reading Gregory Maguire's 'Wicked Years' books which feature talking Animals, some of whom bond closely with humans.

I've been looking at websites that are very serious about the concept of identifying and speaking to a part of yourself that manifests as an imaginary animal companion. The advice they give you is to start listening for an inner voice commenting on your activities.

I have actually found it consoling lately to have silent conversations with myself, imagining that the other person is sympathetic and an ally. Someone who's always on my side and can help me figure out what to do. I think in psychology they call this 'self-soothing'.

They advise that you start imagining a different voice for this part of you, and then you try on different genders and animal forms to see which ones feel 'right'. I can't yet imagine a different voice apart from my voice but they say it can take time.

I did a stupid test which basically interpreted me as being very shy and withdrawn and suggested my daemon would be a rabbit or dormouse. This made me sad, because I remember being a confident, outgoing child, a leader among my friends; what has happened to me?

It would be good to have a daemon that would nestle in your lap and that you could pat, but I envisaged something larger and fiercer than a rabbit. Something that could defend you when you felt under attack.

The weird thing is that I look at Graham and go, "Is he my daemon? My familiar?" then I realise he isn't. That a pet is not the same as a daemon. I can't even get him to sit in my lap half the time, and I get the feeling he doesn't really give a shit about me except as a source of food. Although sometimes I worry that he is actually a Cat who chooses not to talk, and he has just been quietly judging me for my stupid cat songs and ridiculous cat-lady chatter.

Am I going crazy? Is this the start of being a proper Crazy Cat Lady?

2012-01-28T23:26:00.002+11:00

This shit is my shit. It's somewhat of a blogging genre, the "cop this, I suffer from depression" blog post. I've always held off from writing one because I worry that what I have isn't severe enough to be called 'depression' and so it's narcissistic of me to talk about it. Also, a while back I decided to maintain a more transparent online presence and some people link my name, in a professional capacity, to this blog, which makes me reluctant to discuss personal weaknesses here.

I've never self-harmed or attempted suicide. I've never been hospitalised or been prescribed antidepressants. Mostly I have no trouble sleeping and can get out of bed okay and get through my day, and I still find ordinary things funny and delightful.

However, I just did a self-test at the Black Dog Institute and scored 24. They say anyone who scores higher than 9 should seek professional help. I'm able to look back and identify certain bad years in my life as periods of depressive breakdown, and I realise that not everyone lives with constant, crushing self-criticism, or obsessively weighs their achievements against those of their peers, or dwells wretchedly on humiliations large and small, ancient and recent.

I always have a constant background hum of panic in my head that goes, "DO WORK DO WORK WHY AREN'T YOU WORKING STOP SLACKING OFF GET BACK TO WORK WHY ARE YOU STILL SITTING HERE DO SOME WORK DO WORK THEY KNOW YOU'RE NOT WORKING GET BACK TO WORK EVERYONE ELSE IS WORKING WHY AREN'T YOU…" and so on. A sample:

"So many people I know have got book deals; I'm falling behind! It's not because they're better writers, I'm just lazier. Some people get up at 6am and get a few thousand words down before they go to work. There's no way around it; if I'd worked harder and used my time better I could have got a book deal by now."

"Get up, get UP – why am I lazing around in bed until 10am when everyone else is up at 6am? Why did I go back to bed after I let the cat out – I just wasted three hours of working time."

"Look at X and Y and Z – they can juggle lots of different freelance gigs successfully; I should be able to do it too. The only reason I'm so stressed is because I'm lazy and disorganised. Stop making excuses for yourself all the time Mel – get off your arse and actually do work like X and Y and Z. You don't see them whingeing on the internet. Less whingeing, more working."

"Oh my god I can't believe X achieved so much in 2011 – what did I achieve? Nothing – I just wrote some stupid stories and reviews that nobody even read anyway. I only saw half the films other reviewers did; I only read a quarter of the books. How does everyone manage to watch so many TV shows? It feels like all I do is work and what do I even have to show for it?"

It gets to the point where I escape to sit in a café and read my book for a couple of hours (usually a review book, because then I can fool myself that it's 'work'), and then I feel guilty that I haven't been working and the voice kicks in again.

Basically I feel that my entire life is work and I feel lonely and loathe myself for loving my cat so much. The voice also tells me how ugly and fat and generally unlovable I am, and compares me unfavourably to my friends, who are all starting to settle down with partners and kids, whereas the only thing of value I have to offer the world is my work, so I'd better get back to it.

I have been seeing a psychologist weekly since 2009, although I had to stop late last year because I could no longer afford it, and since I'm still struggling financially, I don't think I can begin again now. (Yes, yes, I am aware of the rebate.) At times I've felt 'better' and worried that these appointments are just an indulgence, that I'm just an ordinary person with the same problems everyone faces, and here I am paying someone to listen to me rabbit on about my shit.

But then today Desci told me on Twitter that I needed this mug. I was crushed. I felt so alone. This underlined for me that maybe a professional is the best person with whom to talk about my feelings.

The film Young Adult spoke to me in a very personal way; although I was never beautiful or conventionally popular the way Charlize Theron's character Mavis Gary was, I saw myself in the way her life is so empty except for her anonymous, low-status writing, and I thought I understood what motivated her to try to recapture her 'best' days.

I've had that feeling a lot over the last couple of years; that feeling of doors closing when dudes I used to know have kids. Unlike Mavis, I see that as an ending, a sign that here's another guy I'll never have. But there's also the sadness of seeing people fulfilled by more than their work, or – even worse – succeeding at work and succeeding in their personal lives.

Today I also feel I have Mavis's repellent qualities – her narcissism and self-pity. I feel as though nobody likes me, but then I feel ashamed for feeling this way because only a self-pitying narcissist would.

I've always felt that the right place for 'feelings' is on my blog, and oddly enough this is actually the place where the fewest people are likely to see them. This blog gets an average of maybe 30 visitors per day, whereas I have hundreds of Facebook friends and dozens of Twitter followers. I'll probably regret posting this, but since it's taken like four hours at this stage I should just press publish.

2012-01-20T21:17:00.001+11:00

Shit Hair Tutorial: 'Award Ceremony Hair'. My hair has been getting pretty long lately because I have been too poor to get it cut. Anyway, so I have been playing with my hair and watching various YouTube hair tutorials to the point where YouTube's suggested videos on my home page are split between hair tutorials and my other great love, videos of boils being lanced and impacted wax being removed from ear canals.

Anyway, I decided that although I can't be arsed actually photographing or videoing myself, I will give you my shit step-by-step guide to achieving what I call 'Award Ceremony Hair'. This is a style in which your hair is gathered loosely into a chignon behind one ear. It is popular among female celebrities at award ceremonies. Here are some photos:

As you can see, I have chosen some ladies who feature in my Celebrity Ranga Swatch Chart. I feel Nicole's is too messy for my taste; I prefer a sleek version like Diane Kruger's. Also, since I have a fringe, the effect on me looks more like this example of Emma Stone. Also, the bride wears this hairstyle in the shit new Australian 'comedy' A Few Best Men.

So basically, how I do it is I part my hair to one side, and then I twist the hair inwards on both sides – like this video but not as tightly – and fasten in a low ponytail behind one ear. Then I twist that and turn it into a bun.

I have heavy hair and real problems with making it stay, so I have had more success pinning the bun in as I go so it doesn't prolapse into a Nicole Kidman-esque mess. Also, I don't pin straight into the bun; I insert it then twist the pin at a 90-degree angle, which is another tip I got from YouTube. This seems to hold my hair better.

Variations on Award Ceremony hair are to use a hair donut to create a larger, sleeker chignon more like the one Adele wears in her 'Cold Shoulder' video, and to pin the ponytail in several pin curls rather than one bun. I made a hair donut by cutting the toes off an old pair of socks, rolling them up and then covering the resulting donut with old hairbrush hair that I have been hoarding. (It's the old-fashioned way.)

Also, for my cousin's wedding in December I did a reverse bun, where I rolled my hair into a spiral from the outside and tucked the ends into the middle.

2012-01-02T15:33:00.003+11:00

Books I consumed in 2011. Ugh, I know I said I wasn't going to do any more of these posts, but I can't help myself. I'm not going to do those detailed notes that I did for the films, but here's a list, followed by some basic statistical observations.

First, the list – I only managed to finish 46 books, which is pretty pitiful. Even more pitiful is the number I actually got to review or otherwise comment on; I've linked to these. Some of the comments are from The Enthusiast e-newsletter, so you might need to scroll down to find them. I also made some early comments back in May.

Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris

An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

The Apple by Michel Faber

The Guardians Of Ga'Hoole: The Capture by Kathryn Lasky

Things Bogans Like by E Chas McSween et al

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Black Glass by Meg Mundell

August by Bernard Beckett

Little People by Jane Sullivan

True Grit by Charles Portis

The UFO Diaries by Martin Plowman

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

State of Decay by James Knapp

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The President's Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth

Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris

The City and the City by China Miéville

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Impostors by Sarah Burton

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Bareback by Kit Whitfield

A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin

A Storm of Swords by George RR Martin

A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin

A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin

Machine Man by Max Barry

The Map of Time by Felix J Palma

Fenrir by MD Lachlan

House of Sticks by Peggy Frew

Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K Hamilton

The Laughing Corpse by Laurell K Hamilton

Triptych by Krissy Kneen

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

Bossypants by Tina Fey

The Knife Man by Wendy Moore

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

11.22.63 by Stephen King

Without Warning by John Birmingham

The Castlemaine Murders by Kerry Greenwood

Now to the stats:

Fiction: 41 (89.13%)

Non-Fiction: 5 (10.87%)

Literature: 21

Genre fiction: 19

Classics: 6

Young adult: 2
Adapted to film/TV: 12 (not including additional books in series adapted to TV)

Vampires: 4

Werewolves: 2

Zombies: 3

Fantasy/Speculative: 23

Time Travel: 3

Crime/Mystery/Procedural: 16

Period Setting: 16

Dystopian Setting: 7

Male authors: 26 (56.52%)

Female authors: 20 (43.48%)

Australian authors: 9 (19.56%)

International authors: 37 (83.44%)

In addition, here's a shout-out to the books I began but didn't finish in 2011:

Zero History by William Gibson – It's a mystery why I didn't enjoy this, given that I really liked its prequel, Spook Country.

Adelaide by Kerryn Goldsworthy – wonderful, evocative and personal, a great gift for someone from Adelaide living elsewhere, or someone you know moving to Adelaide. But I was reading it to prepare to interview Goldsworthy when I filled in on Triple R's Aural Text with Sophie Cunningham, and without that urgency it got buried under all the other stuff I had to read.

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha – Wonderfully provocative. I loved the ideas it raises, constantly talked about it in social settings, and it has encouraged me to be much more critical of evolutionary psychology, but I had so many books to plough through at the time that I just couldn't finish it.

Animal People by Charlotte Wood – great writing, but a deeply unlikeable protagonist meant I felt too exhausted to find out if he breaks up with his girlfriend by the end of the book.

Soulless by Gail Carriger – aka THE WORST, MOST ANGER-FUELLING BOOK I OPENED IN 2011. I was really looking forward to the promise of a steampunk/vampire/werewolf/detective romance, but seriously, the astounding writerly ineptitude that Carriger displays made me put down the book after only two chapters. I don't think I'm the best writer in the world but honestly, this novel filled me with the conviction that I could write a better one myself, while drunk, having done no research or planning. Like a shit paranormal-romance-genre Kerouac, banging away dully at my keyboard. Thank god I only paid $3 for it at Savers.

And here are some books I'm meaning to read in 2012. I began Amor Towles's The Rules of Civility in 2011 but I only finished it today.

The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony

Dune by Frank Herbert

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Cold Commands by Richard Morgan

To Die For by Lucy Siegle

The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde

Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories by Angela Carter

Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire (but first I'll have to read Son of a Witch and A Lion Among Men)

A Book for All and None by Clare Morgan

I'm also meaning to read the Harry Potter novels at some stage (I've only ever read the first one), and also I have a monster omnibus of Kathy Reichs novels.

2011-12-31T17:19:00.000+11:00

Films I consumed in 2011. I tend to feel frustrated by how thinly I spread my cultural consumption. It seems that all I do is shovel films and books and TV shows and albums and internet memes into my brain, and rarely regurgitate them as thoughtful, considered reviews and essays.

I also feel ashamed of how comparatively few of these I manage to get through compared to other people I know. In some cases I feel philosophical, going, "Well, X is mainly a film person, so of course they'll have got through 300 films this year." But in other cases I feel ashamed, thinking I'm just making excuses for wasting my time on the internet when I could be chewing through popular culture.

But anyway, in lieu of a 'top 10' or whatevz, here are my brief notes on the 123 films I consumed in 2011. I meant to do four blog posts – the films, the books, the music and the comedy – but honestly it feels too much like work. This is mainly for my own reference – this is the first year I've kept such a list. If I've reviewed the film in question, I'll link to my review or paste it in below.

127 Hours
I invariably referred to this film as "CKHHHH", with accompanying karate-chop gesture on my forearm. Poor old Aron Ralston. Recently an Australian lady was trapped under her car and tried to pull a Ralston, but she didn't even have a utility tool so she had to wait to have her leg amputated until she was found. But she only had to wait 70-odd hours.

13 Assassins
Like I said, seven is probably the largest number of samurai any one film can reasonably expect its audience to keep track of.

Abduction
This was one of the most inadvertently hilarious films I saw this year. Taylor Lautner has the charisma of a piece of two-by-four, and Michael Nyqvist, who played Mikael Blomkvist in the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has really joined the ranks of Hollywood Euro-Villains (he's also in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol). He has one of the best lines here: "I'm going to kill all your friends on Facebook!" But perhaps the most explosively funny moment is when baddies break into Taylor's house and tell him, "There's a bomb in the oven!" And Taylor checks! AND THERE IS! And there are like seven seconds left on the clock! Why would you put a bomb in the oven? Whose idea was that? And how did they manage to install it when they've been so busy assassinating Taylor's adoptive parents?

The Adjustment Bureau
I quite liked this, in an old-fashioned (pfft, it's been like 15 years) Matrix or Dark City sort of way. I've always been fascinated by films about predestination versus free will, and this film combined those themes with the idea of a 'city and the city' – the oddly retro Adjustment Bureau within the interstices of New York City. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt don't immediately strike you as a plausible couple, but for me their chemistry was enjoyable enough.

The Adventures Of Tintin
People go on about the 'dead eyes' of the motion-capture, but for me what was more frustrating was that this film made Tintin look like another actor – not Jamie Bell, who portrayed him – but another actor I somehow recognised but could never identify. The action setpieces were vintage Spielberg of the Indiana Jones variety, full of coincidences and witty chains of events, and the sequence in which an uncharacteristically sober Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) is in the desert, recounting the story of his piratical ancestor, is extraordinary, imaginative cinema.

Anonymous
A pretty pompous, stilted effort, including Derek Jacobi's opening and closing monologue that in another film would parody 'Shakespearean acting'. But honestly, did you really expect doomsday king Roland Emmerich to produce something thoughtful and intellectual regarding the Shakespeare authorship question? My favourite bits were the scenes imagining the debut performances of Shakespeare's plays, bringing to life how they might have been staged and received by their first audiences. It didn't help that in this screening I was sitting next to Anthony Morris, who giggled like a schoolboy throughout and ended up ranking this as his worst film of 2011.

The Arbor
Grim doco about a playwright from the grim West Yorkshire housing estates I recognised from the Red Riding telemovie series. It screened at ACMI, so you might've missed it. But it was a bracingly original 'docudrama' approach to the subject, in which actors lipsynched to audio from interviews with those who knew Andrea Dunbar.

Arrietty
This was the last film I saw this year; it isn't out until 12 January next year. The latest work from Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away; Ponyo), its traditional 2D animation is wonderfully impressionistic as it adapts Mary Norton's beloved children's novel The Borrowers (which I loved as a kid) to a Japanese context. I found some of the voice casting quite annoying (the version to be released here uses the British rather than the American dub), but then people have told me that Arrietty's mum Homily was annoying.

Attack The Block
This UK alien-invasion adventure was pretty adorable, crammed with hugely quotable dialogue and unafraid to show us the worst as well as the best natures of its teen hoodie characters. Clem Bastow at The Vine compares it unfavourably to Super 8, but I feel that both films were full of the delight of multiplex cinema, and only incidentally had similar themes.

Bad Teacher
I really enjoyed this film's cynicism, and the way Cameron Diaz's character isn't punished for her badness the way women are in so many Hollywood films. I was just thinking about it the other day, because there's this totally bogus moment when Justin Timberlake explains to Diaz that he can't date her because he's more 'simpatico' with Lucy Punch. It reminded me of all those times when some dude I like has mansplained why he really values my friendship but he won't fuck me.

Battle: Los Angeles
This film did Glenn Dunks's head in, but honestly I didn't find it bad enough either to enjoy or to find repugnant. It was just a bog-standard disaster flick-cum-video game with aliens who were basically pop-up targets for marines to quip about and shoot at. Aaron Eckhart has the perfect chiselled jaw to play the heroic soldier lead, but the script was pretty shit, from "Maybe I can help – I'm a veterinarian" to the rousing, inspirational speech that ends "…but none of that matters right now!"

Beautiful Lies
A strangely insubstantial, crappy French romantic farce. Next time people moan about American remakes, I'll point to this as evidence that not every French comedy is witty and hilarious.

Beauty and the Beast
No, not the Disney version, but the 1946 Jean Cocteau version that screened at MIFF this year. There were some beautifully surreal moments, and Jean Marais was a memorably soulful Beast, but the screening I saw was marred by a guy who was coughing so hard I was afraid he would actually die.

The Beaver
Mel Gibson's mental instability was the elephant in the room in this film about a mentally unstable man. I liked it more than I thought I would, and I appreciated that it went beyond the quirky Sundance gimmick of 'sassy beaver puppet saves sad dad'.

Beginners
Man, I cried in this. Christopher Plummer is extraordinary as a guy who discovers his true joie de vivre late in life. (I also worry that I over-used the phrase 'joie de vivre' in my reviews this year.) However, I hated the hipster love affair between Mélanie Laurent and Ewan McGregor.

Bill Cunningham New York
This guy is just adorable! I was fascinated by his hybrid accent (I adore his podcast-style On The Street videos), and to me there was something melancholy about the way he is a final relic of a vanished New York City. (I'm still mourning the loss of The Mad Men Time.) I felt similarly about Smash His Camera but Ron Galella is a jerk so it didn't bother me so much. Whereas I get the feeling that if I ever met Bill Cunningham, he would be friendly and lovely.

Biutiful
Feels like I saw this film ages ago, but it only came out in March. It felt too long and wallowed in its abjectness, but there's undoubtedly something solemn and mysterious about it – something they felt the need to literalise in the plot as Javier Bardem's character can speak to the dead.

Black Swan
One of my favourites – a film that stayed with me for ages despite coming out this time last year. The review was so hard to distill into 200 words as I had so much I wanted to say. I felt a visceral thrill from the very first scene, when I first heard Tchaikovsky's wonderful music. The sound design was excellent.

Black Venus
Another film that felt over-determinedly abject. Lots of people walked out when I saw it at MIFF, but that could've been because it was so absurdly long. But I felt it was important to bear witness to the sad life of a woman I first encountered in the feminist writings of bell hooks when I was researching my essay about white people's fascination with the booty.

Blame
This WA-made drama about a bungled vigilante murder felt much more like a filmed play than a made-for-cinema excursion. There's something stagey and overly talky about it. In yet another spoilt nymphet role, Sophie Lowe does nothing to ameliorate the dislike I feel for her.

Bridesmaids
I saw this twice at the cinema – once in the review screening and then again with Leith and Tash, and honestly I didn't enjoy it as much the second time. I worry that it's one of those comedies that doesn't improve with repeat viewings and am afraid to watch it again in case this proves to be true. But anyway, it was side-splittingly hilarious that first time, as well as wonderfully honest about female friendship and rivalry. Melissa McCarthy was a revelation, and that Irish dude from The IT Crowd was sweet. He could be my boyfriend if he liked.

Brighton Rock
Firmly fitting into my shameful obsession with book-to-film adaptations, this Graham Greene meditation on Catholicism is (in my opinion) cleverly updated to the '60s to include the mods and rockers riots of the time. I read the book after I saw the film, and I enjoyed the differences between them; the book focuses much more on the dissonances between the 'right and wrong' morality of Ida (a jollier presence than Helen Mirren makes her) and the 'good and evil' morality of Pinkie and Rose.

Buck
I caught this doco at MIFF, but it's coming out next year. It's a wonderful portrait of Buck Brannaman, the wry, stoic horse trainer who consulted on the film The Horse Whisperer, and whose own traumatic past helps him understand that 'troubled horses' are much more likely to be owned by 'troubled people'.

Burlesque
I feel annoyed with myself that I didn't let myself relax into what was one of the most preposterously entertaining cult classics of 2011 and beyond! I could hear Bastow and Dunks hooting their traps off down the back of the cinema, but I only permitted myself to laugh about halfway through, and then I couldn't stop. So many great musical numbers and classic lines, from "I will not be upstaged by some slut with mutant lungs!" to "When you do your makeup, it's like you're an artist, but instead of painting a canvas, you're painting your face."

Burning Man
So annoyed I never got to review this, because it was one of the most moving, memorable films I saw this year, and possibly the best Australian film. Jonathan Teplitsky tells the story of angry English chef Tom's (Matthew Goode) mental breakdown in an intriguingly non-linear way. Each scene is like a little puzzle that's paid off in subsequent scenes. Goode is… well, really good.

Cane Toads: The Conquest
Such a lot of fun! Director Mark Lewis isn't afraid to be really, really ridiculous. The scene with the stoned dog is brilliant.

Captain America: The First Avenger
A disappointing origin story. Chris Evans again demonstrates his superpower of appearing in as many comic-book adaptations as possible. He looks faker as his buffed 'real' self than he does as a painstakingly digitally nerded-up version.

Catfish
This doco was released in January, but I'd seen it at MIFF 2010. What struck me was the generosity and compassion the filmmakers wring from a denouement that could've been a cruel 'gotcha' moment. Debate still rages about how real or fake the set-up was.

Conviction
A really dreary based-on-a-true-legal drama, like the most boring John Grisham movie of all time, in which redneck Hilary Swank is so convinced her brother Sam Rockwell isn't a murderer that she goes to law school as an adult in order to spring him from the slammer. Yawn-a-rama. The worst bit is that in real life the brother died only months after being released, after falling off a wall while drunk.

Cowboys & Aliens
This film had so much going for it – James Bond and Indiana Jones, plus Sam Rockwell and the director of Iron Man – yet it was really tedious, not to mention horribly racist. The 3D conversion was also really terrible – so dark and muddy that at one point I took off my glasses to see what was actually happening on-screen. Basically, it was like when you mix all the colours in a palette and it turns poo-brown.

Crazy, Stupid, Love
The film that made me understand the Ryan Gosling obsession, even though I own The Notebook on DVD. Emma Stone spoke for womankind when she ogled Gosling's naked torso and said, "It's like you're Photoshopped!" I enjoyed the farce-style coming-together of several plot strands, and the film also inspired the most hilariously tenuous promo merch of 2011: the Crazy, Stupid, Love Stealth Gardening Kit. Because Steve Carell's character returns secretly to his ex-wife's house under cover of darkness to do the gardening!

The Debt
Worst casting of 2011. Distractingly bad Israeli accents. But apart from that, I quite enjoyed it.

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark
From the endorsement factory of Guillermo del Toro (that dude will lend his name to anything) comes this genuinely scary kids' adventure that's notable for being filmed in Victoria and hence giving Melburnians drip-feed coverage of Baby Suri Cruise's outfits. Plot-wise, it reminded me a lot of Joe Dante's The Hole.

Drive
One of the most extraordinary films of the year. Definitely one of my favourites, it haunted me for weeks, and I found the review really hard to pack into those pitiful 200 words… and not just because I was groping for words to describe Gosling's general perfection. Incredibly stylish and evocative, it tapped into a certain yearning, swooning fatalism that's the trademark of the most satisfying films noir.

End of Animal
Man, I thought this Korean thriller (screened at MIFF this year) would be a lyrical monster movie in the vein of Monsters. No. It was draggingly pointless and tedious, with a protagonist of alienatingly frustrating passivity. Afterwards I apologised to Tash and Ghita for putting them through it.

The Eye Of The Storm
There was something very grown-up about this Patrick White adaptation – but in that way you think is so sophisticated when you're a kid, yet that seems rather stodgy and old-fashioned when you're an adult yourself. It was nostalgic in that it felt curiously out of its proper time, like it ought to have been made in the early 1980s when Australian cinema was self-consciously sweeping and artsy.

Friends With Benefits
For me, this was the better of the two fuck-buddy comedies of 2011, yet I still found it oddly disappointing. Despite Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake having a sparky chemistry, I didn't laugh very much and nor did I find it very moving. Maybe it was the script? And who thinks flash mobs are cool? Flash mobs are not cool.

The Future
Writing for a hipster media outlet, I have to feign interest in the career of Miranda July. Perhaps because they have figured my lack of enthusiasm out, I can't find my review of this film on the Thousands sites any more, so here it is below:

Miranda July movies cater to a certain disposition. You probably know in advance if you have it. So yeah, if you like watching a couple of 35-year-old babies with matching mop-top hairstyles have adorably stilted conversations and struggle to invent suitably YouTubeable dance moves to Beach House, you’ll eat this up. You will probably also enjoy that the film is narrated by Paw Paw (Miranda July doing an odd, growly voice), the injured cat whose imminent adoption plunges our slacker pair into existential crisis, because now they’ll have to be responsible (read: old).

While those around me chortled, I spent the first half of The Future unable to get especially involved in the travails of Jason (Hamish Linklater) and Sophie (July). But this uneven, self-indulgent film gets better when the weirdness kicks in and the underlying bleakness peeks through. Sophie’s yellow T-shirt crawls in search of her through LA streets, and she dons it in a bizarre dance. Meanwhile, Jason’s claim he can stop time turns out to be more than just a cutesy quip – it literalises that fatal inertia just before everything comes tumbling down.

Get Low
I remain eternally disappointed that Lil Jon was not featured or asked to participate in this film. It would've been much less treacly and sentimental if he had been. To the windoooooow! To the wall! To the sweat drop down my balls! It stars Robert Duvall!

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest
The original Swedish adaptation staggers to a close. I am LOLing as I re-read the last line of my review: "…their final scene here is so perplexingly anticlimactic that it has you longing for the masterful trilogy-ending power of the Ewoks’ “Yub nub” song."

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
David Fincher's new adaptation, however (out in cinemas on 12 January) is slicker and fresher, with the advantage of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's uneasy electronic score. The opening credit sequence is visually startling and abstractedly sexy, like something from a Bond film, and the rest of the film never really lives up to it. I was worried that Rooney Mara would be too pretty as Lisbeth, but I liked her awkwardness, although she's a more ethereal presence than the stockier, more athletic Noomi Rapace.

The Green Hornet
This film, aka The Green Lantern Hornet Man, was lots of fun! Michel Gondry blends his trademark in-camera effects with imaginative use of 3D, and Seth Rogen has a glee that's infectious. Christoph Waltz ably demonstrates his membership of the League of Euro-Villains.

Green Lantern
This film is mainly memorable for the way some fusty, ancient critic sitting next to me in the cinema objected to my raucous laughter during the Abduction trailer that preceded the main feature. He made me feel afraid to laugh during this film… but in the end it felt depressing to even attempt to rescue this plodding superhero flick through supercilious irony. It took itself so seriously.

Griff The Invisible
Some people really liked this Aussie film – and I was ready to – but ultimately I found its stance on mental illness troublingly uncertain. The tone was also really uneven, and not in a way that suggested creative control. For me, this is what happens when writer-directors don't have anyone keeping them on track.

The Hangover Part II
What a revolting, ugly film. I found the first one quite bawdy and charming, but this sequel takes all its worst bits (for instance, the casual racism and the idolisation of convicted rapist Mike Tyson) and amplifies them, while basically repeating the previous plot in a tired, humourless way. These guys don't even really seem to like each other. No wonder they drink to forget.

Hanna
I really liked the fairytale analogies here, and both Saoirse Ronan and Jessica Barden (who played the horrid, meddling teenager in Tamara Drewe) are terrific. Some people have praised the soundtrack, but personally I thought it was pretty corny and late-'90s to use the Chemical Brothers during arse-kicking scenes.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2
My knowledge of the Harry Potter franchise was embarrassingly patchy before I went away for Cup Day weekend and watched all the films in order as a marathon, but I still really enjoyed this film… except for the risible postscript in which the young actors pretend to be 19 years older than they are.

The Help
Sitting in an uneasy spot between Steel Magnolias and The Blind Side is this Southern-fried drama about the put-upon black maids who get treated like shit during The Mad Men Time by the grown-up babies they once nursed… until plucky Emma Stone in a terrible frizzy wig comes to magically free them from their bondage by tellin' theyah storehs… Phew, thank god for whitey! Cynicism aside, there are some lovely, affecting moments. Viola Davis is compelling, Octavia Spencer does some hilarious work with facial expressions, and Jessica Chastain adds charm and pathos to what could've been just a ditsy bimbo character.

Hobo With A Shotgun
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Some marvellously pulpy dialogue and inventive gore.

The Hollywood Complex
Provocative, clear-eyed doco about the wannabe child stars who gather in LA each spring for pilot casting season. The saddest of these was Megan Haun, whose natural flair for comedy is overshadowed by her insane lack of self-insight and vulnerability to Hollywood hucksters. On the advice of one of those, she is now known as Presley Ca$h.

Holy Rollers
This DVD release, based on a true story about an ecstasy-trafficking Orthodox Jew, isn't nearly as funny or action-packed as I'd expected. Rather, its gritty feel, decadent club settings and mood of imminent disaster reminded me of Boogie Nights.

Howl
(You'll have to scroll down to read my review; it doesn't seem to have a page of its own.) While I found the animated sequences pretty literal and embarrassing, James Franco convincingly channels Allen Ginsberg in this inventive docudrama about the creation of Ginsberg's landmark poem. Having seen this film, I had the poem in my head when I came to write this essay on Rebecca Black, which is the thing I wrote in 2011 that I'm most proud of.

Hugo
Out on 12 January next year, this valentine to silent filmmaker Georges Méliès is also a touching fable about a fatherless boy (Asa Butterfield) who applies his fascination with fixing broken things to people as well as clockwork. Martin Scorsese's 3D is possibly the best use of the technology I've seen this year, and the production design is a dream. Sacha Baron Cohen is great in a supporting role that calls for both slapstick and subtlety.

The Hunter
Daniel Nettheim's adaptation of Julia Leigh's novel feels as though it's had trouble conveying some of its nuances from page to screen, which doesn't surprise me, considering the opacity of Leigh's directorial debut Sleeping Beauty. I liked it a great deal, but that didn't stop me having a silly conversation in the foyer with Anthony Morris and Thomas Caldwell about whether it would have been better done in Alien vs Predator style.

I Am Number Four
Deeply ridiculous and incoherent (lots of reviewers couldn't resist jokes about "number two"), but Alex Pettyfer and Timothy Olyphant (aka Team Y-No-Vowels?) were nice to look at. Adapted from a young adult novel by the absurdly pseudonymed Pittacus Lore (author James Frey and creative writing graduate Jobie Hughes) – apparently the two co-authors feuded and ended their partnership after the second book in the series, but the film was shit enough to kill any sequels stone dead anyway.

I Love You Phillip Morris
From the directors of Crazy, Stupid, Love, this was one of the slyest, funniest films I've seen in ages. It has no compunctions about toying with viewer expectations and emotions, but so good-heartedly you don't even care. It's a crime that because it's a gay romance, it took forever to show up outside festivals.

The Ides Of March
George Clooney's political backroom-dealing drama was really nothing special, apart from offering another chance to gaze upon the features of Ryan Gosling. The story felt familiar but I couldn't put my finger on where I'd seen it before. Definitely not The West Wing, because I never got into that show. I know.

The Immortals
After Clash of the Titans I was really expecting very little from this sword-and-sandal flick, but it was solidly entertaining. Not brilliant, but not distractingly bad either… although I giggled immaturely whenever Poseidon was pictured in his ridiculous headgear.

In Time
Well, I feel I've already said what needs to be said about this film in that previous blog post. Oh, the shitty 'time' gags we were making as we left the cinema. Can I just say that I really enjoy seeing films with reviewers around my own age who don't have the stick-up-arse spectatorship (of even the worst cinema) that you find among the old fusty critics.

Incendies
Based on a play, it's the world's most eventful episode of Who Do You Think You Are? Can I just say I picked the twist.

Inside Job
Anticipating the Occupy movement, this documentary forensically lays out how the global financial crisis was allowed to happen, and why nothing has changed since then. I left the cinema feeling incredibly enraged and yet hopeless.

The Iron Lady
The perfect holiday panto! I would actually love to put this on as a proper stage panto. It doesn't deserve to be treated seriously, because to do that would be to contemplate the way it completely whitewashes Thatcher's appalling legacy of social disharmony, economic hardship and the paradoxically simultaneous indifference and brutal interventionism of the state into ordinary Britons' lives.

James Cameron Presents Sanctum
Using the same 3D camera that Cameron developed for Avatar, this caving disaster thriller was one of the most spectacular, immersive uses of 3D I saw this year. But the script was – how shall we say? – abysmal. There were many jokes among the reviewers about its weird predilection for summary euthanasia whenever a character is injured or ill. "With that paper cut, he'll only hold us back!" "Remember, she had McDonald's for lunch. She died doing what she loved."

Jane Eyre
A lovely, impressionistic adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel, which I got especially, ahead of watching this, so I could claim to have 'read the book first'. I liked it a great deal – one of my favourite films of 2011.

Julia's Eyes
Was this thriller about blindness and murder meant to be a Dario Argento homage or was that just accidental? So many things about the film seemed to be. The lurid twists started coming thick and fast in the final act, but they suggested an out-of-control plot rather than any deliberate finale.

Kaboom
Again, another film I only gave myself permission to enjoy about halfway through. At first I found Gregg Araki's cheap VHS aesthetic and quippy dialogue irritating, like an edgy '90s TV series aimed at Gen X. But then I really started to enjoy the silliness. I remember distinctly the line that set me off was "I got your email address from the Explosions In The Sky Facebook page". The ending is an absolute triumph – possibly the best ending of 2011.

The Last Circus
Some reviewers really enjoyed this, but I filed it under WTF? I liked sad clown Javier and mourned when he transformed himself into a twisted villain. From that point on, I was basically watching with a mounting sense of bewilderment.

Like Crazy
This indie romantic drama, which comes out next February, emotionally ravaged several of my fellow film critics, but honestly it left me cold. While I like Anton Yelchin, I disliked the British lady, and there was so much to hate about their hipster courtship. I don't know why it was so important for them to be together; I liked their B-team love interests much better, especially Jennifer Lawrence. Blue Valentine did ill-starred indie romance much, much more affectingly.

The Lion King 3D
I was really looking forward to the cub-thrusting possibilities of the 3D conversion (aka "the Sphere of Life"), but what surprised me (and probably shouldn't have) was how flat the animation still looked. However, it was intriguing how such an old, familiar film was still able to provoke audience reactions – laughter, gasps of fear, etc.

There was a small child in the cinema near us whose father was photographing her – WITH FLASH – as she (and we) watched the film. When Tash took the dad aside to say that was not considerate to other viewers, the dad had a sob story about how the kid's mum was in hospital and the photos were to document the kid's first 3D film. That made us feel like dicks for having a problem with it. But what does this episode tell you about people's inability to: a) experience life in unmediated ways; b) evoke their experiences in conversation rather than just by showing pictures to each other?

Mad Bastards
I was worried this would be one of those didactic, right-on indigenous films, but it was feelgood and funny as well as being unflinching about the troubled masculinities it discusses. The music was especially good, and well integrated in the film. I was also impressed by the performances – most of the actors weren't professionals.

Martha Marcy May Marlene
I saw this at MIFF but it'll be in cinemas next year. Don't miss it – it's almost perfect. Elizabeth Olsen is mesmerising in the central role.

Melancholia
Basically I feel strongly that Lars Von Trier is fucked in the head and has serious problems with women, and I was prepared to hate the shit out of this. But it was strangely, viscerally gorgeous. It was big-R Romantic, in the sense of the sublime – that existential terror of realising one's smallness and insignificance in the face of nature. Delirious dread that edges into euphoria. The key scene is where Charlotte Gainsbourg stumbles across her sister Kirsten Dunst luxuriating, naked, in the night glow of the planet that's about to engulf the world. It's as if she's calling a lover to her. And Wagner's orchestra kicks in like a cold hand clutching Charlotte's heart.

Midnight In Paris
What a lovely film. As I walked home afterwards in the warm spring night, I thought that it would be the perfect date movie, then I felt melancholy that I didn't have anyone to take with me on a date. I'm pretty constantly wallowing in nostalgia, but what I liked about this film was that it showed longing for the past ultimately to be elusive and unsatisfying, instead throwing its lot in with finding magic in the present.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Get this – I had never been to IMAX before I saw this. But it's not so big. (Apparently Melbourne IMAX is not even the IMAXiest IMAX.) I was looking forward to seeing Simon Pegg as the Headset Dude, and he didn't disappoint! I was also very pleased that there was a Cocktail Party With Earpieces, which I regard as one of the best aspects of the spy caper genre. In the screening I sat next to Martyn Pedler and we tittered every time Tom Cruise donned the hoodie in which he looks so ridiculous in the promotional poster for the film.

Moneyball
I couldn't get over how much, as he ages, Brad Pitt is coming to resemble Benicio Del Toro. Also, that chewing tobacco and then spitting it into a cup is a disgusting habit.

Mozart's Sister
Stodgy French biopic covering the teenage years of Nannerl, Wolfgang's elder sister. ("Hey Nannerl, what's wrong with Wolfie? I can hear him barking. Is he okay?""Wolfie's just fine, honey. Wolfie's just fine.") A musical prodigy in her own right, she ended up being a total doormat to her dad's wishes, even giving her son to him to raise in case the kid turned out to be another prodigy. Here, she's played by Marie Féret, the director's daughter (Trivia: Alexandra Schepisi in The Eye of the Storm is another 'director's daughter' of 2011), and given a fictional romance with the Dauphin (Clovis Fouin). The main thing I remember about this film is how loudly the voluminous 18th-century dresses rustled when the wearers moved and sat down.

Mr. Popper's Penguins
I was looking forward to this – another adaptation of a book I loved as a kid – and it was not good. Just meh, really. Anthony Morris's review is pretty memorable, but one thing he fails to mention in an otherwise comprehensive analysis is the supremely irritating personal assistant Pippi (the preposterously Bond girl-named Ophelia Lovibond) who speaks only in words beginning with P.

My Suicide
Cheerful, huh! This teen drama did the festival circuit in 2009 and went straight to DVD here (although it had a limited release in the US under the more palatable title Archie's Final Project). Features David Carradine, who died in suspiciously auto-erotic circumstances; I'm not sure the filmmakers intended this intertextual meaning but it does slot nicely into the general atmosphere of metacommentary and media-saturation.

Never Let Me Go
Again, I read the book before I saw the film, and initially I was disappointed, feeling that my favourite subtexts hadn't made it onscreen, and annoyed at new elements that had been introduced. But I came around to it.

New Year's Eve
I sat down in the cinema feeling surly at the prospect of a saccharine couple of hours, yet somehow by the end I found myself caring whether these stupid, clichéd characters would be shoehorned into love by midnight. Stockholm syndrome! I can't get behind a film that asks me to view Josh Duhamel and Sarah Jessica Parker as star-crossed lovers, but I was struck by the vocal way that the overwhelmingly female audience in my screening reacted to the film, sighing and giggling on cue.

No Strings Attached
The first, not so good, fuck-buddy romcom. Honestly, Natalie Portman is like half Ashton Kutcher's size. It's like Shaquille O'Neal and his Munchkin girlfriend 'Hoopz'. However, I remember laughing a lot at the time, I enjoyed Mindy Kaling's deadpan performance, and I really liked the gag about the period mixtape including 'Bleeding Love' by Leona Lewis.

Norwegian Wood
Oh, man. This film looked lovely, but it was the dreariest, sappiest stuff and seemed to go on forever. I couldn't understand why the dude was agonising over choosing between two women, when one of them was batshit crazy, sobbed all the time and had actually told him to forget about her, and the other one was fun and cute and relatively normal and, more importantly, didn't freak out at the idea of having sex with him.

Oceans
I'd actually forgotten I saw this film until I started compiling this list. It had some really striking nature-doco footage, but nothing you wouldn't see on TV.

One Day
Anne Hathaway's accent moved all over England in this romantic drama focusing on how two people spend St Swithin's Day each year. I get the feeling I was supposed to find this terribly romantic and cry and stuff, but I think perhaps I am a little too young for this to really 'speak to me'. Mainly I enjoyed the awesome '90s soundtrack.

Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times
Since reviewing this doco, I've started following NYT media reporter David Carr on Twitter and he tweets some pretty good stuff. This was self-serving (will newspapers survive! YOU BET THEY WILL!), but Carr is a fascinating character.

Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
After seeing this, I went directly to the supermarket to see if they had any of the title pomegranate juice. They did not.

Project Nim
This doco made me feel profoundly sad about how humans can be blinded by their own best intentions when it comes to animal welfare. We can never be truly empathetic because we're so obsessed with the ways that animals remind us of ourselves. Everyone who encountered Nim Chimpsky seemed to want the best for him, but he just got more and more messed-up.

Puss In Boots
I was dubious about this fairytale western, since Dreamworks films tend to use sight gags and pop-culture references where Pixar films use heart. It's certainly not the greatest animated film ever, or even this year, but it's cheesy fun. And whenever something mildly risqué happens, a cat appears with its paw over its mouth, looking shocked and going "OOOOH…" I laughed at this, every time.

Rabbit Hole
I spent most of this film being pleased to see Nicole Kidman as a redhead again, and trying to see if I could catch her face moving. Grim viewing.

Red Dog
I went to see this the day after Steve's notorious party with the mystery punch. Last night Steve told me another embarrassing fact about that party: he'd put me in a taxi when, at 4am at the Peel, I said to him, "Who am I?" Anyway, I only made myself go to this screening because Koko the dog was going to be there in person. (In dog?) At one stage I had to dash out of the cinema to spew in the Jam Factory toilets.

Red Riding Hood
What a deeply silly film. LOL, I just realised that the actor who plays the blacksmith is called Max Irons. Another ridiculous thing about that film. I could have really hung shit on it as lots of other reviewers did, but instead I talked about "the inarticulate violence and eroticism of the gaze". That week, the Thousands had terrible trouble with spam filters because I also used the phrase "explicitly psychosexual adult fairytale".

Red State
The best film Kevin Smith has made in ages, because it's the least Kevin Smith-like film he's made in ages. I hadn't seen John Goodman in anything for a while and was astounded by how much weight he's lost.

Restless
I thought this was quite sweet at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more it irritated me. But then I swung back the other way and didn't mind it. Also, I couldn't get over how much the lead actor looked like Phil, this guy I know.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
Having recently seen Project Nim affected my viewing of this unexpectedly excellent prequel. I was expecting the mo-cap ape special effects to be distracting and obvious, but they were seamless and natural.

Senna
A truly amazing collage approach, driven (fnar!) by the abundance of archival footage of F1 ace Ayrton Senna, meant that his colourful life and tragic death plays much more like a gripping biopic. 2011 really was a good year for unusual, dramatised documentaries.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
I talked about this on Triple R Breakfasters on Thursday – basically, the problem was that it seemed Ritchie had identified certain aspects of his perfectly entertaining previous film and just done more of them. The slo-mo seemed excessive, the homoeroticism between Holmes and Watson was quite overstated and irritating this time around, and the female characters (largely, Noomi Rapace as a gypsy fortune-teller) didn't have much to do.

The Skin I Live In
Everyone was going on about the twist! Oooh, don't give away the twist! It's okay, I didn't. This was actually much funnier than I was expecting; my only previous experience with Almodovar was Talk To Her, which was pretty grim. Then there was the one with the wheelchair basketballer – was that Live Flesh? Anyway, dude is kind of obsessed with flesh, and the textures were one of the striking things in this film.

Sleeping Beauty
Another entry in the WTF? category. Usually my strategy if I don't understand what's going on is to wait patiently for the payoff. Burning Man rewarded me; Sleeping Beauty did not. Gorgeous film; fearless performance by Emily Browning; but frustratingly opaque.

Smash His Camera
Another ACMI release; a nice contrast with Bill Cunningham New York because Ron Galella isn't interested in photographing the zeitgeist but in penetrating the glamour surrounding celebrity. He lives for the chase. His photos have little artistic value and are mainly interesting because of their subjects.

Snowtown
When watching this, I had a powerful feeling of relief at knowing that when it was over, I could escape from this world, unlike the protagonists. One of the most striking scenes is when lumpen teen Jamie can't take the screams of murder any more and retreats onto the front verandah. In the background, a kid coasts by on a bike – a reminder of the innocence Jamie has lost and of the everyday banality of John Bunting's evil.

Source Code
Basically, this film reminded me of so many other films it was distracting. It was very romantic in its way, and of course, since it dealt with predestination I found it absorbing. An interesting companion piece to The Adjustment Bureau.

Submarine
This was sweet and quite atmospheric, but honestly it's pretty much a cookie-cutter hipster coming-of-age film along the lines of Rushmore. Noah Taylor was great as the depressed dad. It was a big year for crisis dads in cinema, between The Beaver, Crazy Stupid Love, Take Shelter and this.

Sucker Punch
Bombastic and pointless. My eyes feasted on it at the time, but it was so hollow and unsatisfying. And then there's the general objectification-of-women bizzo.

Super
Caught this at MIFF, and it's the best vigilante film I've seen in ages. I enjoyed this much more than the similarly themed Kick-Ass, and it was much darker. Rainn Wilson is terrific as a sensitive dweeb who reacts badly to Kevin Bacon stealing his wife Liv Tyler and starts brutally injuring people with a pipe wrench as the superhero Crimson Bolt. Ellen Page is chilling as his perky comic-book-store-clerk sidekick who has absolutely no moral compass. What I found provocative was that the film made me laugh and then made me feel worried about my sanity that I had. "SHUT UP, CRIME!"

Super 8
Just adorable – this film made me feel like a kid again. It's special when cinema can re-instill such wonder.

Take Shelter
For some reason I kept confusing this film with Higher Ground. Some synapse is broken in my brain. It's one of the most amazing films I saw this year, but its unremitting sense of dread was difficult to sit through. The apocalyptic ending, like that of Melancholia, was oddly comforting. Michael Shannon deserves to win buckets of awards for his incredible performance.

Tamara Drewe
Based on a serialised graphic novel, this underwhelming British satire basically irritated me. I wanted the smug Tamara (Gemma Arterton) to go down. However, Roger Allam and Tamsin Greig were great as the author-and-wife team who run a writers' retreat, and there are some cheap LOLs to be had at the expense of pretentious literary types. (I always like a film set in the literary world – the last one I enjoyed was The Eclipse.)

Tangled
I went to see this with Tash (we never miss a Disney movie) and while I enjoyed it (the horse was particularly funny) and we both cried in different parts of the finale (for me, it was when Rapunzel was reunited with her parents), the musical numbers were severely disappointing. It was as if Alan Menken was just flipping through old notebooks and rehashing his previous work.

The Tempest
Oh, Julie Taymor. They don't call her Julie Tayless, do they – and this film felt very heavy-handed and artsy. Helen Mirren has an inner stolidity that made her Prospera compelling to watch, and I've just realised that the chick who played Miranda was Felicity Jones, the lead actress in Like Crazy. But honestly, I spent most of the time trying to spot Ben Whishaw's wang. (I think they had him in some sort of cricket box so he looked like a Ken doll.)

The Thing
I haven't seen the original John Carpenter horror film to which this is a prequel, but I know enough about it that this felt familiar. Basically, it was an opportunity for me to writhe around in my seat gasping and squealing and generally making a silly sausage of myself. Joel Edgerton's bogan earring kept annoying me, but there's a plot reason why he has it!!

Thor
I have a real soft spot for Kenneth Branagh's directorial entry into the superhero genre. I liked the Shakespearean heft to the scenes in Asgard, and I also liked the mild fish-out-of-water comedy of Thor's presence on earth – for instance, how Natalie Portman and Kat Dennings are just openly ogling beefy Chris Hemsworth, and the dorky hilarity when his Warriors Three mates show up and are really excited to see him.

Tower Heist
Eddie Murphy's role in this was surprisingly small. He didn't even show up until halfway through. Matthew Broderick is perfectly cast as a formerly cocky guy whom life has ground down to the point where his quips are weary rather than cute.

The Tree Of Life
One of the most astounding cinematic achievements of 2011. Immersive, meditative, unafraid to examine life on the largest possible scale. I'd heard about the dinosaur scene but I wasn't prepared for how moving I would find it. I was growing weary by the end, but for most of its running time I was in sheer awe.

Troll Hunter
The Blair Witch Project-style conceit of 'found footage' quickly wore thin, and it doesn't really work as a horror/thriller, but I really enjoyed Troll Hunter as a quirky mockumentary comedy. I just loved the matter-of-fact way that the myths and legends about trolls were incorporated into bureaucratic troll-handling procedures.

True Grit
The gravity of Hailee Steinfeld's debut performance was incredibly impressive. The Coens do good western; they have a great ear for mordantly funny dialogue. But the intriguing thing is how much of the dialogue is lifted directly from the Charles Portis novel (which, predictably, I read after watching the film).

Unstoppable
A cheesy but still unremittingly tense thriller from Tony Scott. I loved the way he shot the trains from below, making them seem like ravening beasts. I also really enjoyed the workaday nature of the film; rather than elite forces, the protagonists are ordinary people doing their jobs.

Waiting For Superman
Phew, I am pretty glad I live in Australia and don't have to have anything to do with the absolutely busted American education system.

Wasted On The Young
A shame this Perth-made film sank almost without a trace, because I felt it was very stylishly made. I really enjoyed the cool, crisp palette, the almost complete absence of adults and the way text messages and IMs appear onscreen as subtitles. Plotwise it felt as though it lost its way in the final act, but Oliver Ackland impressed me as the nerdy hero who becomes a teen white knight.

We Need To Talk About Kevin
I said this a lot at the time, but they need to talk about how they ended up with a child of a different race. (HOSPITAL SWAPSIES.) Probably Taylor Lautner in Abduction could have figured out he was adopted in a similar way, without having to resort to "a site that shows you what missing kids would look like now".

The Whistleblower
Well-meaning Rachel Weisz thriller, based on a true scandal about UN involvement in sex trafficking in Bosnia. Mainly notable for our jocular banter afterwards about a potential exploitation film called Whores of War. I just laughed and laughed when Anthony improvised some dialogue: "I heard there were some whores in that old abandoned warehouse."

X-Men: First Class
I missed this at the cinema and caught it on DVD with Leith and Tash. I enjoyed the casting, especially seeing the adorable James McAvoy using his telepathy to be a sleazy dick in pubs. Kevin Bacon puts in another excellent villain performance. He's becoming a great villain between Super, Crazy Stupid Love and this.

Young Adult
This drama with impeccable hipster credentials (written by Diablo Cody; directed by Jason Reitman; co-stars Patton Oswalt; soundtrack full of '90s alt-rock) has kind of precipitated a crisis in me about how meaningless my life is. I really empathised with Charlize Theron, who has never really grown up, drinks too much and has nothing in life to be proud of but her writing, which is shit and unpopular.

Your Highness
Such a disappointment. I thought this was going to be a hilarious stoner fairytale. It was an incredibly unfunny stoner fairytale. I found myself being annoyed at the anachronisms, which shows I was not really on board. Even James Franco couldn't save it.

2011-12-15T00:48:00.000+11:00

Le problème de la langue française. Ce soir j'étais sur le tram, et j'ai entendu trois hommes parlant en français. Ce qui m'arrive de temps en temps. J'ai savais peut-être un mot de trois, ce qu-'était frustrante parce que je me souviens savoir parler français mieux que j'en parler maintentant.

C'est particulèrement frustratant parce que j'aime la langue française, mais je ne savais pas le parlé depuis presque vingt ans. (C'est probablement pertinente d'écrire ce que j'ai trop bu ce soir, et de ces pensées sont celles sentimentale.)

Mais je souhaite que je pourrais parler français correctement. Comme j'adore cette langue. Je me souviens lire Cyrano de Bergerac en original, et le comparant aux translations anglaises. Je ne me souviens pas de savoir comment l'écrire.

Mon amie Mélanie enseigne cette langue à sa fils (dont le père est québécois), et je me sens jalouse de lui. Il a de cerveau en plastique, mais je lutte pour les mots justes. J'ai lu récemment que les cerveaux des chauffeurs de taxi de Londres changer à mesure qu'ils apprennent de nouvelles informations sur les routes. Ce me rend espoir que peut-être si j'étudier le français, je me souviendrai le vocabulaire que j'ai connu.

Probablement il y a plusieurs erreurs grammaticales dans ce text. Je me sens si humilié. Je suis désolée. Je n'ai plus ma Bescherelle.

2011-12-02T12:48:00.001+11:00

Hooray! Maru is only feline after all. I get so resentful about how Maru is such a funny and awesome cat whereas I have this matted-furred animal that poos on the floor, claws and bites me, won't eat sardines and miaows insistently when I am really stressed trying to meet a deadline.

But then I see a photo of Maru's own triple-threat attack, and I feel better.

2011-11-30T15:57:00.001+11:00

How to remove matted fur from your howling, scratching, biting cat. Last night I was in despair about what to do about Graham's increasingly matted fur. I was afraid people would think I neglected him, whereas the real difficulty was how to keep Graham still for long enough to groom him.

I consulted lots of internet resources, from pet websites to that About.com and eHow rubbish that is cut-and-pasted by some poor sod who earns $5 for 'writing' those things. But here is the technique that is working for me. It also gets a better aesthetic result than the widespread advice to just shave your cat.

1. Clip your cat's claws. IMPORTANT FIRST STEP.

2. Get a fine-toothed comb and a pair of nail scissors or other small, narrow-bladed scissors.

3. Sit the cat on your lap with one arm looped around his chest so he can't escape. Talk nonsense to the cat in that psychotically calm voice you use to soothe him on the way to and from the vet.

4. Isolate a fur mat and put your fingers between the root of the mat and the cat's skin. This is important so you don't accidentally cut the cat.

5. Work one blade of your scissors through the mat close to the bottom and snip vertically, away from the skin. Your aim should be to divide the mat into smaller clumps. Not only does this make them easier to remove, it also hurts the cat less.

6. Gently tease apart the small mats. They should come apart relatively easily.

7. Very gently comb out the cat's fur, being careful not to tug at it. Don't be worried if lots of fur comes out. If you've cut the mat vertically, you minimise the amount of fur the cat loses. I learned this lesson by trial and error, so poor Graham is currently missing a clump of fur because my early approach was to excise the mat by cutting it off close to the skin.

I wouldn't be a bona fide cat lady unless I pondered what to do with all the fur I have removed from Graham – most of it the downy undercoat. There is some nutcase who makes jewellery with cat fur and sells it on Etsy, and I have considered that. But because I am trying to be normal, I regretfully threw away the fur.

2011-11-28T23:45:00.001+11:00

Exorcism flashback. When I was a kid I had a black cat. Her name was Bap, because my brother Lina couldn't say "Black", but she was mainly known as Bappily. She was a great cat and I loved her dearly. She would knock at the front door by flipping the door knocker, and there is a family photo of the pair of us asleep in bed with her head next to mine on the pillow.

In a shameful episode, I once 'exorcised the devil' from her. I did this by sprinkling her with flour so her coat wasn't so 'evil'-coloured. I think I also chanted some stuff and waved a burning sprig of herbs around. I was too young to actually watch The Exorcist to see how it was really done, but on the other hand I had read a lot of fantasy fiction.

Then I shut her in my parents' wardrobe until her growling and hissing died down. When she started to purr again, I considered her exorcised.

I thought about this tonight, because I decided to try to clean Graham's coat by sprinkling cornflour in it.

It started when I petted him earlier tonight and felt that his fur was clumping across his back. This raised the challenge of how I was going to get the clumps out. In yet another instance that Maru is better than my cat, Graham hates being brushed. I keep the brushes near his food, because pretty much the only time he will submit to being brushed is while he is eating. Otherwise he rolls onto his back to avoid the brushing.

I have two cat brushes: a rubber one with nubs for bristles that slips over my hand so I basically brush Graham while petting him, and a more traditional bristle brush. The rubber one I use to get rid of debris in the fur – leaves, sticks, burrs, et cetera. The bristle one I use to get rid of loose fur.

Neither of them really made an impact on the clumps, so I decided to ambush Graham with a fine-toothed comb while he was lying on the couch. He did not care for this, and attacked the comb with his triple-threat attack.

I will do whatever it takes to avoid having to bathe Graham. I have done it twice and the triple-threat attack is like gentle tickles compared to the vicious gouges he takes out of my arms when water is involved. He once ripped a pair of rubber gloves to shreds.

So I read on the internet that you can clean a cat with cornflour. So tonight I got a jar of cornflour, lured Graham over to his food bowl, and while he was distracted with eating, I threw a handful of cornflour across his back.

Of course, Graham immediately flipped over onto his back, releasing most of the flour onto the kitchen floor. I tried to rub what was left into his fur, but you have to imagine me doing this while chasing Graham around the house. Eventually he ran away and hid, and now I have cornflour all down my front and Graham has this grey patch of fur on his back.

Maybe I should have tried burning a sprig of herbs or something.

2011-11-26T13:09:00.001+11:00

Freezer Tetris. Here's how to play this fun game. You arrive home from the shops with a loaf of bread, or a pack of meat, fruit or vegetables, that you'd like to preserve through the magic of ice. But you have no way of knowing what your housemate will have also purchased and put in the freezer in the interim.

So your challenge is to somehow make room for your new purchases in the freezer. However, unlike real Tetris, a row of food doesn't magically vanish when you put it together. You have to make it vanish more slowly, by consuming it.

Sorry about these blurry photos; I have a hard enough time taking in-focus pics with my stupid shaky hands, let alone when one hand is holding the freezer door open.

You can see the immediate problem – the genius who designed our fridge thought it'd be a great idea to waste a shitload of freezer space with this nifty built-in ice dispenser thing. (You fill the upper trays with water and then when they're frozen, you twist the knob and the cubes fall into the lower tray.)

Certain things sit in our freezer forever and never seem to be used. These include my leg of lamb (in that foil container) which is now at least a couple of years old. I bought it with the idea of having people over for dinner, but since I am a Shit Cook™I was worried about embarrassing myself.

Perhaps I should still try to cook it to see if it's okay. In this respect I am my dad's daughter; he has a history of cooking with meat that has been in the freezer an audaciously long time.

Other longstanding tenants of the freezer are Paul's assorted flavoured milks. He must have them in there for a reason, but I am afraid of mentioning them and hence opening up discussion of my frozen lamb leg.

The right-hand drawer is also stuffed with random muffins and bread crusts that I have been hoarding to make into croutons, breadcrumbs or bread and butter pudding. It used to be worse; I recently threw out a bunch of crusts.

And the final thing is that bag of chicken wings. I don't know whose it is, but its irregular shape makes it a frustrating item to play Freezer Tetris with.

My first Freezer Tetris strategy is to stack the relatively flat, rectangular objects up the back. I freed up room for this today by removing some half-used frozen berries from their outer packaging and stuffing them in the door shelf. The right-hand drawer is a good place for also half-used packs of things that are too wide for the door.

The irregular-shaped objects are best right up the front. If you can shut the freezer door and it stays shut, you've won!

2011-11-13T13:48:00.001+11:00

I am the queen of time. Well, that's how I feel with one timepiece around my neck and another one now on the wall in my living room.

Yes, I put Il Modernissimo on the wall. Irritatingly, it seems to have that common problem with cheap quartz clocks: the second hand gets stuck at ten to. Oh well, at least I only paid $4 for it. I can't tell if this problem is because the hands are loose or because it needs a new quartz movement; if I take it off the wall and shake it, it usually starts back up. New movements are available online for about a dollar, plus about three dollars postage, but it does erode the pleasure of a bargain to realise that you will need to spend more money to make it work.

On the other hand, I have never had any trouble from the Beckoning Cat alarm clock that I bought a couple of years ago as a Christmas present for my brother Matt, and then ended up keeping because Matt spent Christmas overseas with his girlfriend. It keeps great time and hasn't even needed a new battery. Of course I haven't used the alarm since it gave me the fright of my life the first time I heard it. It sounds like exuberant J-pop with a cat as the lead vocalist.

Beckoning Cat has brought the soothing sound of a ticking clock back into my life. Il Modernissimo has quite a loud ticking mechanism; Graham noticed the sound straight away when I first put the clock up, and I realised the second hand was getting stuck when the room felt quieter all of a sudden.

It's easy to forget, given that most clocks these days are digital. Perhaps because you can only hear it when the room is very quiet, it always evokes peace for me. This is because I am constantly struggling to stuff work into my days and nights; I remember when a ticking clock meant agonising boredom in school, or the sound of authority being exerted on me in a principal's, boss's or doctor's office. On the other hand, when I catch the very quiet ticking of my necklace, it feels a little unnerving, like I have a time bomb around my neck.

On Friday night I had a pleasant pub dinner with my brother Lina, and we were discussing the Justin Timberlake film In Time. Writer/director Andrew Niccol is trying for more of the speculative magic he made with Gattaca, but the story seemed to replace the human dramas of the earlier film with bombast and cornball dialogue. Gattaca could wring nail-biting thrills from Jude Law dragging himself up a staircase, but Justin Timberlake and Cillian Murphy have to do absurd parkour and car chases.

But what annoyed me was that Niccol filled In Time with dialogue in which money was literally replaced with time in a gimmicky, obvious way. "Have you got a minute?" says a child beggar; "Here, take five…" says good-hearted Timberlake. Later, as he lives it large thanks to a windfall of time, he's asked if he "comes from time" or if he's "fast" – which is this universe's way of policing socioeconomic class.

In Time does seem preoccupied with class divisions, and I was telling Lina about a great review I'd read of the film, which picks up on the way it uses the visual language we associate with the America of the 1920s and 1930s – both periods of class conflict. The glamorous, near-immortal elite of New Greenwich seem to be living in a Roaring Twenties utopia – complete with ladies in gloves, furs and bobbed hair – while in working-class Dayton, where everyone literally lives from day to day, it's more like the Depression. And when rich girl Amanda Seyfried goes on the run with Justin Timberlake, they're like Bonnie and Clyde, or even like Patty Hearst and the SLA – folk heroes who want to overthrow plutocracy.

But really this 'time is money' idea wasn't completely fleshed out. Fur coats, for instance, should only be status symbols if it took ages and ages to produce them. Hand-knitted jumpers ought to be the height of sophisticated chic because of the effort that they use, and crappy Etsy crafters would be venerated as master artists. Diamonds, however, are still a valuable commodity because they are produced over millennia. Anything that reeked of speed would be seriously trashy. The Concorde and the Shinkansen would be the RyanAir of this world, whereas the super-rich would travel by ocean liner and ferry, and boast about getting in traffic jams.

Oh well, lest I fall into another blogging reverie and waste another entire day, I had better eat something. Time, time, time… see what's become of me…

2011-11-12T20:39:00.001+11:00

My fruitful visit to Savers Mill Park. Normally I would write about clothes on Footpath Zeitgeist, but then I would have to write something thoughtful, whereas right now I basically want to be like most fashion bloggers and boast about my latest bargains, amply illustrated with gratuitous photos of me modelling them and posing like an absolute goon.

So get ready because I am about to boast and pose like nobody's business!

I am still in the trough of an appalling months-long streak of poverty, but I did not let that deter me from going to Savers Mill Park. It's the newest Savers in Melbourne. After my first visit there, where I found it practically deserted, full of fantastic stock and absurdly cheap compared to Savers Brunswick, Savers Mill Park has acquired a legendary status in my mind. But I can only go there on weekends because that's when my monthly Metcard allows me to travel in all zones. Mill Park is in zone 2.

Today I wanted to see if they had a small, cheap clock that I could use as a base to DIY into a midcentury-style starburst/sunburst wall clock. I've recently rearranged my kitchen so the microwave is on the bench in the corner, hidden by the fridge, so I can no longer glance at the microwave to tell the time.

This one recently sold on eBay for $147.50. I really like the black and gold (the gold would match my coffee table), and the two lengths of starburst, but as for the price… Get farked!

I like the little balls decorating this one. (That said, I HATE the chunky hands on the George Nelson ball clock.) It's still being auctioned but has already attracted six bids, so I don't expect it will end up being affordable.

So I've been investigating DIY versions online. They mainly involve a small round clock with dowel rods or BBQ skewers hot-glued to the back and spray-painted to the desired colour. I think I could improve on that by using wooden chopsticks, which have the width of dowel but taper to a point. However, I also like the wider, 3D triangular pieces. The ideal material to make these from would be a broken, discarded metal venetian blind – I would cut out the triangle to the desired length, then gently fold it over a ruler to create the centre ridge. Sadly, all my venetian blinds are in working order.

I made a beeline for the Savers clock section and was quite disappointed by the selection. But I did find this clock for $3.99, which I kinda like as is – it's rather Il Modernissimo:

The clock is held together with screws in the back; when I unscrewed it, turns out the face is mounted on the back sheet of perspex. My main problem would be how to cut out the face from the surrounding plastic. Until I can figure that out, I can't proceed any further. But look what else I found at Savers:

These are promotional swizzle sticks for Absolut Mandrin. If I roughed them up a bit with sandpaper then spray-painted them, they are perfect for the clock.

Having procured these clock materials, I turned my attention to the rest of the store, even though I had said to myself earlier, "Just the clock! You don't have the money for anything else…" Well, I was lying to myself… but I made a fresh bargain with myself – I would only buy stuff that looked genuinely awesome and was very good value.

I think this '70s chiffon dress is handmade – I couldn't find a tag on it. It's a little motheaten – I wonder if I could attempt to fix the worst holes – but the dress is so diaphanous you don't really notice. It didn't come with a slip, so I am wearing a pale apricot petticoat I already own (purchased on a previous visit to Mill Park Savers; the gold sandals you can glimpse in the pic also came from that trip).

There is a certain magic when you try on a garment and it not only fits but also flatters and you look genuinely awesome. Boo-hoo, I tried on an amazing handmade Kelly-green '60s wiggle dress – total Joanie Harris stuff – but I couldn't zip it up, and there was another '60s hot-pink dress that I didn't even bother trying on because I could see it was too narrow in the hips.

I also discarded a few other dresses that technically fitted me but didn't look quite right. There was a lovely cotton print dress with sequins sewn to the print (perfect for summer weddings) that was just a little bit too big in the bust, a '70s dress in a gorgeous bright blue that was too baggy and shapeless, and another '70s shirtwaist dress (with matching belt) in an excellent Marimekko-style red poppy print but it had darts and tucks in weird places, and really far-apart buttons that gaped.

But then I put on the yellow dress and it was super-glamorous and some breeze somewhere in Savers puffed out the skirt… and best of all, it was $2.99! I would also like to draw your attention to this excellent watch pendant I also picked up… for $6.99!

The watch winds up (no batteries!) and it's upside down so I can check the time and admire my boobs at once. It's been so long since I owned a mechanical watch (I haven't worn a watch at all since 2005) that I had to look up how to wind it properly.

It's by Swiss watchmaker Buler, which was popular in the '60s and '70s. I can't find the precise one I have online, but judging from its similarity to this model, it might date from the '60s. I'm just so chuffed about this, as just recently I was enviously checking out a pendant watch my book club buddy Helen bought on Etsy.

But as you can tell from the dickhead look on my face, I wasn't done bargain-hunting! I also got this cotton Hawaiian-print shift dress that was actually made in Hawaii… for $5.99! All I need is more height in my hair and a flower behind one ear and I will be the very image of one of those 'retro ladies'.

This is a better indication of the colour. The dress is a little loose, but I figure that in the height of summer I will prefer it that way. The hem sits just above my knees. Look at my hilariously pasty, un-Hawaiian legs.

Also purchased and not photographed:

a leopard-print pleated maxi skirt – vintage Target, judging from the old-school label (I know, "vintage Target", LOL!) for $3.99;
three ruffled pillowcases in hot pink, canary yellow and sky blue for $0.99 each (I am building a mix-and-match collection of block-coloured ruffled pillowcases)
Soulless by Gail Carriger for $3.99, a fairly trashy steampunk/vampire/werewolf novel which I was thrilled to find because when it came out in 2009 I begged Hachette for a review copy as Orbit is their imprint, but they said they weren't releasing it in Australia
The Castlemaine Murders by Kerry Greenwood, the 13th Phryne Fisher book, for $3.99 – as a teenager I avidly read any and all crime fiction and thought Phryne Fisher was really glamorous and sexy. I thought it'd be fun to read another one before the ABC TV series next year.

There were so many other books I was tempted to buy as well. The shithouse novelisation of The Terminator which I felt I ought to buy as a franchise completist, but honestly the writing was just so bad. Both Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith. Various books-that-have-been-turned-into-films-so-people-bought-the-book-then-gave-it-away-because-they-really-preferred-the-film. Chiefly The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. (I know. That one doesn't make me proud.) But honestly, my house is stuffed with books already.

Wow. I sat down to quickly boast about my excellent haul at Savers Mill Park before I made dinner, and now it turns out I have spent most of Saturday night writing this blog post. What a rich life I lead.

2011-11-12T20:18:00.001+11:00

Birds 1: Graham 0. My poor cat. He lusts after the birds in the backyard, crouching ever so still to watch them, and making his little chirruping sounds, but so far in his almost three years living here, he has never caught one. (His Bad Influence Friend Charlie has, though.)

This afternoon he came very close, chasing a bird into the laundry shed. But then the bird's mates swooped to the rescue, squawking loudly, which created the necessary diversion for Graham's quarry to escape. Graham was left to crouch on the ground looking comically bewildered. I have never seen birds be so proactive outside an Alfred Hitchcock film. I wished I had a camera.

While I am talking about my cat, Stupid Cat Songs has reached a new low with the advent of 'Come On Grahamleen' in the style of Dexy's Midnight Runners. Yeah, you heard right. Grahamleen. "Mew-ra mew-ra mew-ra mew-ra-yay…"

Here is a bonus picture of Graham asleep on the couch the other night, looking as if he is dreaming of pew pew pew. He looks very fat but that is partly a combination of fluffiness and foreshortening. Partly.

2011-11-06T13:35:00.002+11:00

Horrible Coughing postscript. Today I heard the unmistakable sounds of coughing down the street and realised that because I hadn't yet gone out to get the paper off the front porch, I had an opportunity to catch and hence deter the Horrible Coughing Man from pausing outside my house.

I went outside all nonchalant, just in time to catch the Horrible Coughing Man walking past. He kept walking but turned to stare at me over his shoulder. He turned several more times to look back at me before he got to the end of the street.

Worse, he was wearing the same colour T-shirt as me (aqua blue), although I do not have my T-shirt tucked into my faded navy tracksuit pants. I am wearing it with a lavender cotton skirt thank you very much.

2011-11-05T11:35:00.000+11:00

My Ryan Gosling dream last night. For some weeks now I have been 'researching' a story about people who dream about Ryan Gosling. But then there's always some more pressing deadline and I never get round to it. I'm basically really sick of my crappy life, earning my living by scrabbling away in a collection of low-stakes, high-turnover gigs for 16 hours a day, and invoicing for $30 or $100 or $200 or $300 at a time. In an all-time lifestyle low, yesterday I bought Home Brand fish fingers.

However, I decided to collect all my Ryan Gosling dream research into a Tumblr – because, where else, LOL? I put it on BuzzFeed and it went voooooooiral.

Last night I had a Ryan Gosling dream of my own. If you know anything about my struggles with a cat who likes to poo on the floor next to his perfectly clean litter box, you will perhaps find it more understandable.

I was in a very fancy hotel suite getting drunk with some of my friends and suddenly there was a knock on the door. My co-worker Kane answered and it was Ryan Gosling!

He sat down at the table and poured himself a scotch like he'd been there all night. I realised he was already very drunk – well, drunker than me, at any rate – and looked very dishevelled.

But what was annoying me was that Kane was clearly trying very hard to impress Gosling because he was acting way more bro-like than usual, cracking jokes, addressing conversation only to Gosling, et cetera. In the dream I found this infuriating.

Then Gosling got up from the table, went into a corner, pulled down his pants and, with zero shame, pooed on the floor. I was disgusted and said to Kane, "You clean that up – you've been brown-nosing him all night."

Kane refused to clean up Gosling's poo, so I had to get some paper towels and do it myself. My feeling of disappointment and resentment was almost intolerable.

2011-10-23T09:59:00.000+11:00

The most convenient power outage. On Friday I got a grovelling letter from the power company.

Dear Sir/Madam

REGARDING A RECENT POWER OUTAGE ON 04.10.2011

…We are aware that your property experienced an unplanned power outage on 04.10.2011 and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused…

I was like, "Really? I didn't even notice!"

Then I checked my calendar. Unusually for someone who works from home, I was out all day – that was the day I went to Bendigo to see the White Wedding Dress exhibition. I'd meant to go see it as research for the book I'm planning to write (part of the proposal is about how clothing from the past is saved, preserved and curated by museums), but since I am super poor right now, the only way I could afford to get to Bendigo was by hitching a lift with my parents, who were going on that Tuesday.

I got home at perhaps 7pm and there was no sign of any power outage. Apology accepted, CitiPower!

2011-10-22T13:45:00.001+11:00

A weedy fringe. Yesterday I was on a bus on Lygon Street and noticed that there are weeds growing out of the guttering at Edward Beale hair salon. They look like a fringe of hair - someone at Edward Beale needs to trim them, and then demand $100 for the privilege.

You can't see it very well in the pic, but I guess that's the nature of camera phone pics snapped from a bus.

2011-10-20T01:11:00.000+11:00

The Horrible Coughing Man. I use a service called Back Up My Tweets to… well, to do just that. Tonight I logged in to work out when I'd tweeted about my Ryan Gosling Dream (it was the morning of 12 September: "Last night I dreamed I was hanging out with Ryan Gosling in McDonald's. He was really nice & normal. We were talking about our Book Deals") and it occurred to me to look up all my references to the Horrible Coughing Man.

This guy lives down the street from me and there's something NQR about him that I can't quite pin down, but I bet you would pick up on it if you saw him. He is relatively young and has fleshy, slack, wet, pink lips, a little like the Guy Who Never Closed His Mouth, and always wears faded tracksuit pants whose gathered ankles are a little too short.

I think he has OCD because I have walked behind him and watched him do weird things such as tapping particular fences and poles as he goes past. Perhaps another compulsive behaviour of his is the trademark cough… but then I have also witnessed him purchasing jumbo packs of cigarettes at Safeway.

This is a very mean speculation, but I wonder if the house he lives in is some kind of assisted living place, as another oddball lives there too – a guy in owlish, non-ironic child predator glasses who's always awkwardly hanging out the front, smoking and wearing headphones, like the younger brother from There's Something About Mary. But maybe I'm wrong and it's just an eccentric all-male share house like in The Young Ones.

The first time I noticed his Horrible Cough was a morning when I happened to be walking behind him on my way to work, and it turned out that we both went to the same tram stop and got on the same tram. I'd noticed that he was coughing and thought – as a reasonable person might! – that he had a cold.

But then on the tram he just kept coughing in a very deliberate, regular way that didn't seem driven by a spasm of any sort, and I found it completely revolting. EUGGH-huh! EUGGH-huh!

He tends to walk past my house at 8am, and I can hear him coming because he's wracked by horrible coughs that echo down the street. I wish I were a better, kinder, more patient and sympathetic person, but the coughing is so loud and visceral, and being a freelancer who works from home I am sometimes still in bed – with my head only a couple of metres away from the footpath outside – when it happens, so it just inspires revulsion, and sometimes paranoia that stopping outside my house to cough is part of his OCD ritual.

Obviously I don't comment on his every approach, but since it bothers me, I have tweeted about him many times. Here they are. Twitter is a constantly flowing stream and it's unusual to view it as an archive, so it's embarrassing to see how often I have repeated myself.

8 June, 2009: "Ugh, that horrible coughing man just walked past my house."

21 July, 2009: "Ugh, that horrible coughing man just walked past my house again. In other news, story still not done after all-nighter. Utterly destroyed."

4 August, 2009: "Oh god, the awful coughing man is in my street again! He's getting closer!"

11 August, 2009: "The Horrible Coughing Man approaches! (Earlier than usual, today.)"

26 August, 2009: "Ugh the Awful Coughing Man approaches!"

16 November, 2009: "Honestly, the Horrible Coughing Man needs to get his cough seen to. Hearing him hacking down my street is a revolting way to start the day."

1 February, 2010: "Oh gawd, the Horrible Coughing Man sounds like he's going to barf up a lung outside my house."

4 February, 2010: "If I find the Horrible Coughing Man this revolting simply walking past my house, imagine his poor family or co-workers."

15 February, 2010: "Oh god, the Horrible Coughing Man is currently menacing my street just as I plan to duck out for lunch! This isn't his usual timetable!"

28 March, 2010: "Today it was as if the Horrible Coughing Man actually paused outside my house to barf up a lung."

5 April, 2010: "Just saw the Horrible Coughing Man in the supermarket... buying 4 packets of Horizon cigarettes."

13 October, 2010: "The horror! Due to lateness I find myself at tram stop with the Horrible Coughing Man"

15 October, 2010: "Even the rain hasn't deterred the Horrible Coughing Man, who's currently hacking his way down my street."

23 January, 2011: "The Horrible Coughing Man just paused outside my house to hack up a lung. In my more paranoid moments I worry he does this deliberately."

27 March, 2011: "Oh goooood the Awful Coughing Man approaches, sounding even more consumptive than usual."

17 October, 2011: "The Horrible Coughing Man just paused for an epic bout of revolting death-rattling outside my house. I swear he does this deliberately."

2011-10-19T15:50:00.000+11:00

MegaClover. Yesterday I noticed that there is MegaClover growing in my back yard. It is very large clover.

In case my fingers don't give you an idea of the impressively large scale of this clover, I saw some ordinary-sized clover in the median strip on Rathdowne Street today and photographed that for comparison.

Graham was also very impressed by the MegaClover and tried to eat it.

Thank you for reading my blog post about MegaClover.

2011-10-18T17:28:00.000+11:00

Possibly my favourite cinematic moment ever. I was Googling something and found the screenplay of Total Recall, by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon (with revisions by Shusett, Steven Pressfield and Gary Goldman). I thought perhaps you might like to see how one of my favourite movie scenes of all time is written.

81 INT. MARS SPACEPORT/IMMIGRATION HALL - DAY

CLOSE ON PASSPORT: BAM! An official seal stamps down on the
document, leaving the circular imprint: MARS FEDERAL
COLONY/CONFEDERATION OF NORTHERN NATIONS.

An IMMIGRATION OFFICER hands the passport back to its OWNER,
who takes it and moves on.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER
Next!

The Immigration Hall is filled with passengers arriving from
Earth, queued up in three long lines. SOLDIERS on a high
state of alert stand guard with AUTOMATIC RIFLES.

QUAID'S SATCHEL sits on the floor behind a white line. A hand
reaches down, picks it up, and carries it forward. FROM THE
BACK, we see that the person carrying the satchel is a tall
FAT LADY in a loose-fitting dress. She steps up to the
Immigration Officer at his desk.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER (CONT'D)
Passport.

As the Fat Lady hands over her passport, SOLDIERS rush
directly towards her from the rear of the hall, shoving people
aside. Richter, Helm, and EVERETT, a stern military officer,
urgently follow in the path cleared by the Soldiers.

They get closer and closer to the Fat Lady...and pass right
behind her without noticing anything in the least suspicious.

EVERETT
Mr. Cohaagen wants to see you right
away.

RICHTER
Any news of Quaid?

EVERETT
Not since you lost him.

RICHTER
Watch your mouth, Captain.

The group walks past the Immigration desks and exits the
frame. HOLD ON the back of the Fat Lady.

The Immigration Officer studies her passport. CLOSE ON her
PHOTO. He looks up. CLOSE ON her FACE.

She bears no resemblance to Quaid.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER
How long do you plan to stay on Mars?

FAT LADY
Two weeks.

HELM
Look at this shit.

RICHTER (O.S.)
What the hell is this?

BEHIND THE DESKS, Richter stops at a wall defaced with
graffiti: "KUATO LIVES!".

EVERETT
The Martians all love Kuato. They think
he's fuckin' George Washington.

HELM
Kill the bastard.

EVERETT
Nobody knows who he is.

The Immigration Officer picks up the seal, ready to stamp the
Fat Lady's passport after one last perfunctory question.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER
Have you brought any fruits or
vegetables onto the planet?

FAT LADY
Two weeks.

He stops himself from hammering down with the seal.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER
Excuse me...?

Fat Lady covers her mouth, embarrassed.

FAT LADY
(loud)
Two weeks.

Richter glances at the Fat Lady but keeps walking toward the
exit.

EVERETT
And things are getting hot around here.
The rebels took over the refinery last
night. No turbinium's going out.

THE FAT LADY is having some kind of fit. She keeps repeating
the same phrase over and over, each time SLOWER and MORE
DISTORTED, like a phonograph record running down. Everybody
stares at the poor woman. She holds her mouth and tries to
shut herself up.

FAT LADY
Twooo weeeks. Twoooooo weeeks.
Twooooooo weeeeeeks.

Richter stops and looks suspiciously at the Fat Lady. The
Fat Lady sees him staring. They lock eyes. Richter knows!
He points!

RICHTER
Quaid! That's Quaid!

EVERETT
Where?

RICHTER
There! The woman!

The Fat Lady edges to the side along a wall.

RICHTER
Get him!

Everett and his men are confused.

RICHTER (CONT'D)
HER!

EVERETT
Arrest that woman!

FAT LADY
Twoooooo! Weeeeeks!

Richter, Helm, Everett and soldiers run over. The Fat Lady
twists her ear. She is shaking radically. Her face splits
down the middle, revealing Quaid inside!

QUAID
Catch!

Quaid throws the split face at a SOLDIER near a window. The
Soldier instinctively catches the face, which snaps together
and addresses him in a normal voice.

FAT LADY FACE
Get ready for a big surprise.

Just as the Soldier reacts, BOOM! The face explodes.

2011-10-17T15:08:00.001+11:00

Inner-city palimpsest. At the moment there's a new complex of Fender Katsalidis "lifestyle apartments" being built on the site of the former walk-up Housing Commission apartments on the block between Elgin Street, Nicholson Street, Canning Street and Palmerston Street, Carlton. The hoardings on the outside of the site boldly trumpet that whoever ends up living here will be "PROUD TO BE LOCAL".

This pisses me off for many reasons. First, it echoes the phrasing of "PROUD TO BE UNION" bumper stickers, and hence harnesses a mildly progressive and rebellious politics that is utterly at odds with the wealth and individualistic ethos that the owners of the apartments will likely possess.

Second, the new residents will be, by virtue of only just moving in, not local at all. If they're empty-nesting bourgie boomers, they'll probably have moved in from the suburbs. And if they're cashed-up international investors buying a pied-à-terre for their student children, they won't be locals either.

But most of all – most of all – I'm annoyed by the way this evocation of 'localism' completely elides the violence with which previous generations of 'locals' have been evicted and the spaces they called 'home' demolished. The Wurundjeri were the first people to call this place 'home'.

And by 1961, Carlton and Fitzroy were inner-city 'slums' targeted by 'slum clearance' programs. Atherton Street, Fitzroy, depicted in this photo, no longer exists: it's now part of the Atherton Gardens Commish.

The boy on the far left of the pic is Tony Birch, who set his novel Shadowboxing in the lost inner-city of his childhood. Birch also wrote a great essay about the duelling imperatives of slum clearance and bourgification that change both the streetscapes and the 'locals'.

The multicultured Commish residents who followed Birch's contemporaries have now been scattered and redistributed. There was a self-consciously therapeutic/rehabilitative public art project that took the form of interviews with the tenants who had to move, and photos of the space, things like: "I had to move my pot plants on the tram to Glenroy, one by one."

I remember being really angry with my mother, who never tires of mentioning in a slightly alarmed voice the proximity of the Commish to my house, and having a fruitless discussion with her that consisted of me going, "Poor people have a right to live close to the city as well, we're creating economic ghettoes," and her going, "Well isn't that what these flats are?"

Also, I was thinking about the death of the local pub and the fierce territorial response when pubs shut down or change, particularly the Champion Hotel which was a pivotal site for the 'Little Bands' scenein the '80s, and is now a post office. Or the Punters Club, or even the Tote.

It seems that people need certain urban spaces to enact their senses of belonging and social capital. And that's why any narrative of 'progress' that focuses on changing or renovating the spaces always seems traumatic and alienating.

But does socioeconomic alterity or displacement confer a kind of authenticity and legitimacy to one's relationship with inner-urban space? Am I being hypocritical in mourning the things that have been lost when my own bourgeois/bohemian tenancy in inner-city Melbourne is part of the problem? And am I over-romanticising 'space' when perhaps urban renewal actually opens up spaces for new and potentially exciting and iconic things to happen there?

It seems like there's a narrative of 'progress' with a counter-narrative of 'nostalgia', but as I argued at Crikey, nostalgia doesn't need to be retrogressive, but can also be progressive, reminding us of the valuable things we've been too short-sighted to remember.

This year at MIFF I watched two programs of short films about Melbourne, and I loved seeing various visions of a vanished Melbourne. But it was The City Speaks (1965) that I found most confronting. Produced by Crawford Productions for the Housing Commission at the height of the reforming moment, it disapprovingly tours various inner-city slum dwellings. Honestly, the cracked walls and back yards full of junk didn't look that bad. They reminded me of my own house.

Then it presents provocatively utopian visions of children playing in the first of Melbourne's new Commish estates. It's easy for a contemporary bourgie audience to ironise such sights, given that we think of Commishes as near-derelict crime traps rather than havens from slum poverty. But just recently, my mum was telling me about a BBC documentary she'd seen called Poor Kids, and how moving it had been to watch a poor family move into a new estate house and marvel at having two toilets, and both a front door and a back door. Perhaps the Commish was transformative for its early residents, even as it was destructive of the older modes of being a 'local'.

In a 2008 email exchange from which I've cribbed large chunks of this post, Ben Gook told me, "There were things involved in public housing -- political or ethical or moral commitments -- that are worth salvaging. The new book by Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher argues that postmodernism has bestowed to both Right and Left a relativism that makes such commitments seem untrustworthy, old-fashioned. So not only is the articulation of these past ideas held to be quaint, the very act of even committing to a position in such a manner is held to be old-fashioned."

Indeed, another short film I saw, the modernist architecture manifesto, Your House and Mine, was a particularly fascinating artefact because of both its savagely satirical attitude to suburban home architecture and, as David Nichols notes, its relentless progressive momentum that comes across like a kind of blank-slate philosophy, never building on the past but aggressively erasing it. Early on, Robin Boyd's narration makes the startlingly shortsighted assertion that the founding of Melbourne in 1835 signified the "last days of the Aborigines”.

At any rate, we must recognise that no one group, at any one time, has the definitive and authoritative claim to be 'local'. Rather, places are palimpsests, constantly being overwritten but leaving tantalising traces of their past iterations behind.

2011-10-06T08:59:00.000+11:00

Just to lift the mood. It is getting rather grim in here, but this made me laugh last night:

2011-10-05T19:04:00.000+11:00

Vale Diana Gribble. This morning I found out that Australian publishing legend Diana Gribble died overnight after a short illness with pancreatic cancer.

I didn't know Di as well as either WH Chong or Sophie Cunningham, who have paid tribute to her today, but she was my boss at Private Media when I worked at The Reader. My memories of her are of her playful, egalitarian manner and intolerance for bullshit. I saw her put her foot down on more than one occasion about aspects of the editorial, in a quiet but emphatic way, and when she did that no amount of cajoling could budge her.

But mainly I remember her laughing at our cheesy headlines, or at Chong's unflattering Photoshop caricatures of politicians and celebrities.

It's a real privilege to have worked with someone so influential – Di's contribution to Australian culture can't be understated. She co-founded McPhee Gribble, one of the most influential publishing houses of the '70s and '80s, kickstarting the careers of many currently prominent writers and thinkers. She then went on to co-found Text, another Australian media company that's shaped the landscape, and when Private Media acquired Crikey, Di helped steer yet another influential outlet for Australian ideas.

Her multiple board roles underline her commitment to working behind the scenes, and she poured the influence she commanded back into Australia's creative community. She wrote me a really nice letter of recommendation when I left Private Media and put me in touch with a 'mate' of hers who was, oh you know, just the director of ABC Radio!

When I found out Di was seriously ill three months ago, I meant to email her but couldn't think what to say and how to say it, although I have thought about her and wondered how she was.

This morning, when Sophie drove me to RRR (we are filling in on Aural Text for two weeks), we drove past Di's house – it turns out she lived just around the corner from me. First Dog On The Moon's cartoon beautifully illustrates how sad I feel that I never told her how much I admire her and her work.

2011-10-04T22:21:00.000+11:00

The saddest show on TV. I know – you're thinking that this probably isn't the actual saddest show on TV, but right now it feels like, well, I was going to say 'a canary in a coal mine' but things have got way past this. It feels more like someone running around holding the cage with the dead bird in it and going "WE'RE FUCKED!"

Presenting: Hardcore Pawn. (8:30pm Wednesdays, 7MATE.)

This is a show that dramatises the disturbing race and gender politics of America's broken economy. I was shocked by how few non-African-American people are customers at this Detroit pawn shop, and how many of the would-be customers are trying to raise money by selling crap shit with little economic value. Emotions bubble up when they are told it won't fly.

Other people are protesting in Wall Street – it's unclear how many, or how united they are, because we get so many conflicting reports and counter-accusations of distorted reports – and they have a pretty reasonable list of demands that will be familiar to those who've read and seen The Corporation and Inside Job.The only thing that troubles me about the Occupy Wall Street movement is that there is a strong 9/11 conspiracy undercurrent.

My brother miT strongly believes it was a conspiracy, but I try never to engage in discussions with him about this, because after the last time I have been really careful to avoid fighting with him because I know how much it upsets my mother.

Besides, it's pointless. He already 'knows the truth' and doesn't accept anything less than agreement from others (he always tells me I'm "ignorant" or "naive" if I dispute what he says), but paradoxically it was miT's own questioning and scepticism – his refusal to believe the official narrative – that led him to his certainty.

As the book Knowledge Goes Pop points out, conspiracies always oscillate between belief and scepticism – people 'want to believe' but are never satisfied with any 'official' explanation of events.I think it dilutes the power of Occupy Wall Street to bring 9/11 conspiracies into it. For me, it's on stronger turf when it agitates for legislative and institutional reform rather than 'true answers' about 'what really happened'.

Meanwhile, back in Detroit, Hardcore Pawn says, "I'll buy that for a dollar!"

2011-10-02T14:24:00.001+11:00

AIDS AIDS AIDS-AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS-AIDS-AIDS! AIDS! Today in the shower I was thinking about how when I was a kid, AIDS was one of the most terrifying things in my life. I fretted a lot about whether I could catch it somehow.

When I was a kid I had a very black-and-white view of health issues generally; I distinguished between minor, common afflictions that always got better, such as broken limbs and chicken pox; more serious things that could have very bad lasting effects, such as snake bites, burns or glandular fever; and things that were invariably fatal. If you had a heart attack, you died. If you broke your neck, you died. If you got cancer, you died.

And if you got AIDS – YOU FUCKING DIED!! You wasted away to a skeleton, and got gross tumours all over your body that made you look like a rotting corpse. And then you died.

Of course, I am probably a generation behind the one that was properly shitscared when AIDS emerged as a global pandemic in the mid-1980s. By the time I was old enough to be sexually active, we'd had the safe-sex message comprehensively drummed into us; magazines, pamphlets and TV told us how it was spread.

But in the '80s, treatment for HIV was not very successful, and there were plenty of misconceptions surrounding the virus. Famous people announced they had it… then died. But since I was a kid, the HIV patients I noticed most were the kids, including Ryan White and Eve van Grafhorst.

And then there was the Grim Reaper TV ad, which I found so terrifying that after one emotionally scarring viewing of it, I would flee the room whenever I saw it beginning. Years later, I couldn't even look at stills of the Grim Reaper character, it was so terrifying.

Now I find its hysterical, panicky tone odd. It's now 30 years since the pandemic was first identified, anti-retroviral therapies are enabling people to live for longer with HIV without developing 'full-blown AIDS', and much of the mystery and stigma surrounding the disease has waned in the West (although there's still an alarmingly mainstream denialist movement in South Africa and wacko conspiracy theories flourishing on the internet).

We've ironised so much about it, from the scary tone of public health campaigns to the community responses to it (for example, making quilts in commemoration of the dead). Thanks to Philadelphia, the public image of the AIDS patient is an effete gay man wasting away in a kimono listening to opera.The Chaser even took the piss out of the Grim Reaper ad, showing the character trying to get work at companies including James Hardie.

And then there's Team America: World Police, which takes the piss out of what must have seemed like a bold and revolutionary revisioning of Puccini's La Boheme – to have the heroine of Rent die of AIDS rather than consumption (although oddly enough, tuberculosis is one of the leading causes of AIDS-related death). The Team America piss-take, Lease, ironises how banal AIDS has come to be – "the Pope has got it, and so do you…"

So basically I was just thinking how odd it is that we've moved from this existential panic and terror to something so blasé.

2011-10-01T18:29:00.002+10:00

Audit of my work priorities. I am tired of feeling like a hamster on a wheel, of always scrabbling to meet my expenses, and of overcommitting myself because I see a complex, intangible benefit to the activity such as "good for building your profile" or "important to give back". Whereas the top priorities in my work should be: money; creative satisfaction; psychological well-being. I feel as if I have been neglecting the first and third at the expense of the second, and in pursuing activities that satisfy other, less important criteria.

Here's a screen shot of my work commitments for September. In my calendar I use green for work-related events and blue for personal events. You can see how few non-work-related appointments I have. And I didn't even go to four of the ones that are listed here.

So yesterday I decided to list all my commitments and activities, and to rate them all out of ten according to these three criteria. Then I will cut back or cut out the 'low value' activities, and devote more time to the ones that will get me more money while simultaneously being the most creative and best for my mental health.

Here's how I imagine the categories.

Money: Pretty simple – how financially rewarding is the activity? Something that earns more money is ranked high. Something that's a secure source of money ranks higher than a one-off activity. Something that pays reliably, but not well, is ranked around the middle of the scale. Something that is currently free but can lead to money-making opportunities is ranked low. Stuff that pays in kind rather than with money is ranked low. Stuff I do for free is ranked zero.

Creative: How well does the activity let me pursue the things I'm good at and love to do? Activities in which I get sole credit or am allowed to make my own creative decisions are ranked high. Activities that prioritise my own interests are ranked high. Activities in which I work creatively but within a preset formula or paradigm are middle-ranked. Activities in which I 'churn out' work, work anonymously or with little autonomy are ranked low.

Psychological: How stressed, relaxed or energised an activity makes me feel. Activities that excite me, that I look forward to when I get up in the morning, are ranked high, as are activities I find soothing, comforting or absorbing. Activities I dread and procrastinate about are ranked low. Activities that make me angry and frustrated are ranked low. Boring, repetitive or routine activities are ranked around the middle of the scale. An activity that makes me so anxious and stressed that it feels as though a fist is squeezing my heart, and I basically want to die, ranks zero.

Okay, so I ranked these activities last night, and here are a few insights. First of all, here are all the activities that scored 0 on the 'money' criterion:

Facebook
Twitter – personal
Twitter – clothes
Hipster Tipster Tumblr
A Wild Young Under-Whimsy
Footpath Zeitgeist
The Dawn Chorus
Google+
The Enthusiast
RRR radio shows
A sekrit activity I can't blog about

Here are the most lucrative things I do:

Monash teaching
Citysearch
Age Life & Style features
triple j magazine
Right Angle custom jobs

Here are my most creatively satisfying projects:

Proposed book
The Enthusiast
Age Life & Style
Monash teaching

And here are the best things for my mental health:

A Wild Young Under-Whimsy
Twitter – personal
Proposed book
Twitter – professional

It's probably not a good idea to list the commitments I'm planning to ditch or cut back on, but one thing I've been doing way too much of lately is guest speaking and panel appearances. Lucy thinks "being on a panel" is prestigious in the same way I idealise "a book deal", but public speaking gigs are not well paid unless you're with an agency. Some don't pay at all, or pay with vouchers or bottles of wine.

Catherine Deveny once told me that she considers the low-paying gigs to be high in goodwill capital – they lead to better opportunities in future. However, someone else pointed out to me that Deveny does some very highly paid corporate gigs and hence can afford to be generous to small-time events organisers.

Whereas it's silly for me to gamble on the likelihood that these kinds of gigs will lead to further professional opportunities for me. In September, I did five of them, and only two paid me in real money. In August I did two, only one of which was paid. In future, I'm going to prioritise the speaking gigs that score highest on the money criterion, then on the psychological criterion, then on the creative criterion.

The other weird thing about public speaking gigs is how most of them involve me giving advice to emerging writers. I feel ill-equipped for this because even though I'm in my thirties, I don't feel established in my career. I feel as though the baby boomers and older Gen-Xers have the secure, lucrative and influential positions locked up, leaving me sandwiched between them and the hungry youngsters who are prettier, bolder and less ashamed of marketing themselves in openly narcissistic ways.

Lefa has pointed out that emerging writers find it encouraging to hear from someone who's relatively close to their age and only a little further down the path than they are. It's a good point, but I don't think I can be that person any more. It's time for me to nurture my career, giving it a forward momentum rather than hustling to stay in the same spot, which is how I currently feel.

2011-09-27T17:17:00.001+10:00

Supermarket musings. Today I went to the supermarket – which I've always loved to do since I was a kid. I can go into a trance there, pondering all the things I could buy.

The other day I went there for dry cat food. This is always an irritating product for me to buy, because I refuse to buy the expensive sort that comes in small foil bags; Graham only gets the good-value 1kg cardboard boxes.

I feel it's important not to spoil a cat with fancy foods because then they'll refuse to eat anything else in future. For instance, Graham's favourite food ever is the super-expensive prescription dental diet you have to get from the vet. But after the sample packet ran out… bad luck Graham, it was back to Whiskas.

He will eat the basic Coles and Woolworths cat foods (not the povvo Home Brand ones, but the slightly more upmarket ones with colourful packets) but he always seems disappointed when all his frantic mewling results only in a bowlful of brown pellets. But he'll eat them eventually. Maybe it's because Coles gave them a real meat injection…

As for Whiskas, he loathes the 'Vita-Bites' that are the pride of Whiskas's dry cat food technology. They are these little square lozenges. He will eat all the other pieces and leave these ones behind in his bowl, and once I spotted Graham using his paw to flick them from his bowl onto the floor. So I am not about to waste my money on a brand that lets my cat engage in this kind of irritating behaviour.

But I do think Graham is more likely to eat the food when it's visually interesting, with different shaped and coloured pieces rather than just kibble. However the only other brand that does this is Friskies, and the pack is too tall to fit on my shelf. This irritates me immensely.

So the other day I decided to divorce the brand issue from the storage issue by purchasing one of those plastic 'cereal saver' containers, and I poured the Friskies and the Coles in there together and shook them up to make CAT MUESLI.

Honestly, this feels like the best idea I've had in ages. CAT MUESLI.

Also, I would like to complain about how expensive Vegemite is. You will realise that Vegemite is a cornerstone of my Freelance Diet. So why does it cost like $8.50 for the largest size (best value) jar? We all know it is basically just brewery scrapings!

The infuriating thing is that no other yeast spread on the market tastes like Vegemite – I don't like the way the other ones taste. Maybe I might like Mighty Mite, but that's a mighty big 'might'. It only comes in the one size and there is no sample or trial size.

They need to encourage sampling in order to lure consumers who are tired of paying big bucks for Vegemite. Honestly I am not that fussed with Vegemite's no longer being Australian-owned as long as it continues to taste the way I like, but I resent having to pay so much in what is essentially a monopoly market. Even the Coles website lists this product category as "Vegemite and yeast spreads".

Hopeless! I just called up Three Threes Condiments, which makes Mighty Mite, to suggest that they offer product samples, and they are not answering either their 1800 number or their office number. Okay, I realise it is 4:57pm, but COME ON!

Other supermarket products that have used up too much of my valuable brainpower this week:

Curry in a can! I noticed in the Asian food section they have laksas and various Asian curries in cans. I wonder if they are like Japanese curry, which is basically just a solidified stock cube that you dissolve in your pan – that is, that these generic products are used in most of the cheap Asian restaurants where I'm used to eating laksas.

Nivea Invisible Black and White deodorant: I saw this advertised on TV and thought, "Wow, I must buy that product!" I wear a lot of black clothing and in the past have suffered from the dreaded 'white marks', so I use Nivea's pre-existing Invisible deodorant. Now there's a version that supposedly also prevents 'yellow marks' on pale clothing. I am definitely going to give it a go.

U by Kotex tampons: I first bought these at a chemist in a desperate moment. They wouldn't have been my choice as I see them as a 'teen' brand, however they're now my favourite brand because they come in colourful individual wrappers that undo with a snap twist. Honestly, it takes something as pitifully small as this to earn my consumer loyalty.

I never keep track of how many boxes of tampons I own – I figure it's better to have too many than too few, amirite ladies? – so when I was doing my usual vague, unnecessary purchase today I noticed a diagram on the packet of a tampon with a blue band around the end closest to the string, with the label "Last line of defence".

This struck me as hilarious. That dastardly blood has almost broken through the tampon's valiant defences, but wait – it's foiled by some mythically absorbent bit on the end of the tampon! "Noooo…" gurgles the blood, "Nooo, you've trapped meeee, what a world, what a world…"

Truly we live in bounteous times.

2011-08-30T15:51:00.004+10:00

Mine, but not mine. Just now I was walking down the street when a stylishly dressed lady who looked to be in her sixties or seventies came out of the milk bar and crossed my path.

I was politely ignoring her as I do most people in the street – I've often mused how clever China Miéville's The City and the City is in broadening this common practice to enable two entire cultures to coexist in the same space, just because each 'unsees' the other.

But then she hailed me and said, "Your hair is a really lovely colour! Is it natural?"

"Sadly, no," I said. "But thank you!"

As I walked away I was thinking how silly it is to be ashamed and guilty of being praised for a hair colour that doesn't grow out of my head, but rather comes from sachets and bottles. After all, this hair colour is mine in a way that my natural blonde isn't, because I chose to look this way. I should be pleased when someone compliments me on it.

Instead, I feel like a fraud. In the past I've been proud to be a natural blonde, scorning all the people who have to achieve the same colour through peroxide. Hairdressers have told me how lucky I am, people have asked in an impressed tone, "Is that your natural hair colour?" and I've been chuffed to say, "Yes."

This is the dismal bird's eye view of my head. The parts where I look bald are actually my real hair growing back. The golden colour is from the henna-tinted shampoo I use to stave off the worst of the regrowth.

Recently I read Max Barry's new novel Machine Man, which I found really horrifying. You can read my review over at The Enthusiast. I feel that review is kind of shapeless and inarticulate, because so was my horror.

What I don't mention in the review is that from a very early age, I have been both fascinated and appalled by the nature of posthuman subjectivity, although when I was a kid I would have called it "being obsessed with Astro Boy and The Bionic Woman", and as a teenager "being obsessed with Terminator". Also, the Cybermen were always the Doctor Who villains I had nightmares about. Fuck the Daleks, they can't even use stairs, although I think it's telling that I found Davros the scariest Dalek because he was the least vestigial.

It has always given me a funny tingly feeling of terror to see an ostensibly human person peel back his or her skin to reveal a mess of electronics, mechanics and wires. Part of my horror at Machine Man is its suggestion that a person could feel that machine parts were theirs, were part of them. I shrink from that idea, I flee it… yet perhaps I would be more at peace with it if I'd read Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto'.

Just now I am reminded of Annalee Newitz's Pretend We're Dead, which I reviewed for Media International Australia a while back. Newitz is interested in the horrors of capitalism, so she presents mad scientists as members of the professional class who are alienated from their own intellectual labours. In horror films, this can be literalised as disembodied brains in jars (or consciousnesses uploaded into cyberspace).

Since I make my living by the efforts of my brain, is my body of work more mine than my biological body? Is something I willed into existence myself – like my hair colour – more a product of my subjectivity than the biological heritage that makes me appear in the world in certain ways without much effort on my part?

2011-08-26T11:17:00.002+10:00

Hello, and welcome to Freelance Food, the TV series where I show you how to prepare authentic freelance cuisine at home. I'm your host, professional freelance writer Mel Campbell, and today we're going to be preparing a traditional freelance breakfast, Crazy Toast and Tea.

First things first: let's put the kettle on. While that's boiling, let's rinse out our signature tea mug. Freelancers prize these mugs. They choose them for their liquid volume capacity and their ugliness. Sometimes they think it's amusing to drink from a mug bearing the logo of a media organisation where they used to work. So today, we'll be making our tea in a News Limited 1Degree carbon neutrality initiative mug.

Traditionally, freelancers rarely wash their mugs between cups, and this one's built up a nice patina of tannins, but let's clean it by rinsing it out, adding a dash of baking soda and then rubbing it well in with the fingers. It really gets the inside of that mug white and sparkling again. My mum taught me that trick.

Now, let's get the loaf of bread out of the freezer, peel off two slices and pop them in the toaster. You can use whatever kind of bread you like, but today I'm using Home Brand multigrain bread. I chose multigrain for its fibre content, to reassure myself that I'm not going to die of colon cancer.

While that's toasting, grab a teabag and pop it in your mug, all ready for infusing. I like to mix things up, tea-wise, to maintain some interest in my day, but Dilmah is my favourite everyday tea. However, for a really authentic cuppa, choose Liptons, because that's what freelancers usually drink in offices where they're on contract.

If your kettle has boiled, now's the time to pour your cup of tea and let it infuse.

Your toast should be popped now, so it's time to start assembling your dish. It's called Crazy Toast because it was what they called it at Pushka, the cafe where I used to eat breakfast every day before starting work. But you don't have to be crazy to recognise these key flavours: Vegemite and avocado.

Grab your avocado and slice it in half vertically. Here's a little freelance kitchen tip: you don't need to use a sharp knife! A regular table knife will work just as well on a ripe avocado, plus it creates less washing up later, which is very important in freelance culture. Twist the two halves in opposite directions to separate your avocado.

Now here's where your knife starts doing some clever double duty. Dip it into your Vegemite jar and spread each piece of toast with a knob of Vegemite about the size of a 10c coin. Some freelancers like only a very thin scraping of Vegemite across their toast; but as I've grown more Australian over time, I like to spread it much more thickly. Also, it's very important to get your daily intake of vitamin B, because you have no sick days when you're a freelancer.

Take the avocado half without the stone and make thin vertical slices in the flesh, lifting out each slice onto the toast in turn. This means you never slice too much and waste any avocado, because those things are really expensive. When you eat avocado toast in cafés, they'll usually plate the avocado slices in a lovely fan-like configuration, but as you're at home you don't have to impress anyone. Just let them plop onto your toast until you judge there's enough.

Now, here's what I like to do: I hold each slice of toast in my hand and chop the avocado slices very finely in two directions with my knife, then use the side of the knife to smoosh the avocado into a delicious paste. Then I smooth it across the toast and it's done.

If I were having just plain avocado on toast, at this stage I might add some salt and pepper, or perhaps some hot sauce, because while avocado has that delicious creamy taste, it can be quite bland as well. But the great thing about Crazy Toast is that the Vegemite adds a delicious savoury quality to the avocado.

Now it's time to give that teabag one final jiggle and throw it in the bin. Some people like to squeeze it out first, but honestly that is too much work, so just make sure you stand right next to the bin when you lift it out of the mug, so you don't get any tea on the floor and have to clean it up later.

Some people have their tea black, but I take my tea with milk, not just because I like the taste but because milk is a great source of calcium, and since I'll be hunched over a computer for the next 12 hours my bones need all the help they can get.

The cleanup from this dish is really easy – just screw the lid back on the Vegemite and put it back on the shelf, and put your two avocado halves back together and put them in the fridge – it's like nature's cling wrap! Clean your knife with very hot water and leave it on the side of the sink for the mythical 'proper wash', but we all know you'll just use it again the next time you want to make toast.

The great thing about Crazy Toast is the number of variations you can create. Really let your imagination go, and you can come up with some delicious freelance cuisine. Substitute some tomato paste and hot sauce for the Vegemite to make Mexican Crazy Toast! And substitute some spreadable cream cheese for the avocado – we like La Vache Qui Rit triangles for their nostalgia value – to make Dirty Sanchez Crazy Toast!

As we always say here on Freelance Food, the wonderful thing about freelance cuisine is its ingenuity. You're only poor if you've got no story ideas! So bon appetit, and I'll see you next week.

2011-08-20T18:21:00.006+10:00

Guess it ran out of ammo. RIP my faithful hairdryer of 20-odd years, Pistol Airo.

I can't even remember how long I've had this hairdryer, but it might be up to 20 years old. It was a Christmas present from my Auntie Libby; she had a great knack for giving presents that thrilled the recipients and this was no exception. I'd never had a hairdryer before – I don't even think I used one. I would just towel dry my hair and wait for it to dry.

I even used to sleep with my damp hair in lots of tiny little plaits so the next day I'd have crimped hair. It was a big deal when I got a crimping iron, which I think happened in early high school – perhaps even at the same time as the Pistol Airo.

So I was pretty excited, but Auntie Libby was mortified when she noticed that the box said: "Pistol Airo: the man's dryer". She had thought it was a nice travel-size dryer – or, alternatively, a small dryer for her young niece.

Personally, it has never bothered me that Pistol Airo is 'manly'. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that its name was some kind of macho gunslinger pun on 'pistolero'. I even paid tribute to Pistol Airo on Crikey, in the comments of a story I wrote about gendered consumer products.

You can see how much I have used it – the silver paint has largely worn off to reveal the grey plastic beneath. There is lint stuck behind the grille and hair wound around the fan – if I let the dryer too close to my head it sucked my hair painfully into the back. It is not very powerful and my hair is quite thick, so if I wanted to get a nice smooth result I had to section off my hair.

I had been thinking about getting rid of Pistol Airo and investing in a proper, powerful hairdryer – whenever I stayed at my parents' house and used my mother's hairdryer, I got lovely, shiny hair in half the time Pistol Airo took. But I couldn't bring myself to throw Pistol Airo away because of its sentimental value.

Here are some of the looks Pistol Airo helped me achieve:

June 2005: dressed as Marsha Queen of Diamonds for the Superheroes Ball.

March 2008: DJ dream team Plump'n'Rosie in action at Penny's 30th at Shit Town.

December 2008: New Year's Eve, with Leanne (left) and Tash (right).

February 2010: Perhaps time to get my fringe cut.

October 2010: Veronica Corningstone hair to go with nylon '70s frock.

July 2011: First time I cut my own fringe.

This morning, while drying my hair with my head tipped upside down, I heard a clunking noise, as if a part had come loose and was rattling around in the blades. The motor slowed down, there was a smell of burning and I could see something glowing red-hot inside the mechanism. I turned Pistol Airo off for the final time. Goodbye, old friend.

2011-08-08T18:41:00.003+10:00

Separated At Birth: The Thin White Dick. I used to do my 'separated at birth' schtick on Facebook, but I can't be bothered logging in so you are getting to enjoy it without having to endure my electronic friendship.

Basically, don't you think Martin Amis looks a bit like David Bowie?

2011-08-02T18:08:00.005+10:00

The depressing terrain of predictive ads. At best, you can find them funny or mystifying; at worst, they reveal the pathetic emptiness of your life. I'm talking, of course, about predictive online ads. Here are the ones I currently have.

My personal email: 6.69% Low Rate Home Loans - FoxSymesHomeLoans.com.au - Banks Said No? We have options for you, Refinance your home Today!

Oh dear. As if I will ever be in a position to own, let alone refinance, a home. To some extent I have been infected by my baby-boomer parents' obsession with property, so I brood on how absurdly unaffordable it is and how, perhaps if I were to live very far away, I could perhaps afford a small shipping container in a paddock somewhere. But first I would have to be able to afford a car. At least where I live, I can walk and catch public transport everywhere.

Enthusiast email: Learn Internet Marketing - www.MarketMotive.com - Online Internet Marketing Courses, Enroll in Courses Now at $299/Month

This is especially depressing as I have spent a large chunk of yesterday and today wrangling the new(ish) Enthusiast mailing list. I just don't know what to do to encourage people to check out our online magazine, apart from slaving my guts out trying to write interesting stories that people might like to read, and then posting about them on Facebook and Twitter, and then putting them in a weekly newsletter along with lots of interesting tidbits that we've come across during the week, and links to interesting stories from our archives. I am not a marketing person – I just don't know what people want, and in any case I feel like I am already at the limit of my resources to deliver what they want.

Professional email: Local Business Removalist - www.yourlocalmovers.com.au - Your Local Business Removalists. Quotes Online or Call 1800 004 065.

This is also hilarious, seeing as I work from home and can be my own removalist.

Right Angle email: Stop Paper Jams For Good - www.DoubleA.com.au - Transform your copier. Runs smoother. Less Paper Jams.

Because god knows that when working for an online network of city guides I am constantly plagued by paper jams. However I am plagued by a cat who loves to eat paper, and who re-enacts this video every time I try to use my printer. Also, he gnaws on the corners of paper and cardboard, so I have to be careful to keep important documents, student assignments, etc, out of his reach, but I have given up trying to stop him from biting cardboard boxes and the packaging that review books come in.

Facebook:

The "you deserve better" dating ads are the worst. There is also another dude in them who looks like a rapist from the Jersey Shore – all shiny walnut skin, threateningly slitted eyes and carefully tended facial hair. I think he might have a backwards baseball cap on, too.

I often get Facebook ads directing my romantic efforts towards single dads, which is basically admitting that most men have already bred with other, more attractive women than me, but that they're willing to settle for me now their previous relationship has broken down.

Also, I tend to get Facebook ads suggesting, preposterously, that an already waif-thin Hollywood star lost vast amounts of weight using "these simple tips".

2011-07-16T15:50:00.002+10:00

Pie July 2011: the halfway point. Perhaps you will recall last year's very important charity event, Pie July – the charity being "me really liking to eat pies". I am doing it again this year, but I'm afraid it has been much more desultory – no home-made pies this time. However, here are some pie-lights:

Friday 1 July – Kicked Pie July off in a depressing fashion with a steak, bacon and cheese traveller pie from the Sev, which I wolfed while walking down the street to a meeting, dusting crumbs off my clothes as I walked in the door. Some people don't like the cheesiness, but I enjoy it.

Monday 4 July – Spinach pie from Big Harvest. They have reformulated their spinach pie since last Pie July. It used to have quite thick, flaky filo pastry and thick chunks of feta visible within. Now it is much thinner, with quite a thin, shortcrust sort of pastry, no visible feta and it is very salty. Also, it is now round as opposed to rectangular, and I feel as though the slices are smaller and not as good value for money. Points go on for the thinner pastry (the thicker pastry made the old version quite dry) but go off for the saltiness.

You are also at the mercy of which side salads they have on a given day. I didn't really want the rice salad but the only other alternatives were a heap of grated carrot, a heap of grated beetroot or a heap of white beans. My favourite Big Harvest salads are the lentil, feta, mint and sundried tomato (shown), the risoni with parsley and a yoghurty dressing, the mega-couscous and the ordinary couscous with tandoori chicken pieces (they never fail to inform me that this is a dollar extra, even though I am in there at least once a week).

Tuesday 5 July – Steak and onion pie from Pie Face on Swanston Street. Pie Face is that chain where the pies are stupidly expensive and have little facial expressions on them; on the plus side, they seem to be open all night. My pie's facial expression was quixotic to say the least; it didn't even look like a face. I got this pie while hurrying to the MIFF program launch at the Toff, because I hadn't eaten all day and couldn't be sure whether they'd have food at the launch.

I ate the pie out the front of Curtin House with scant regard for dignity. It was really tasty, full of nice chunks of beef, but very hot and the gravy was too liquidy and difficult to eat while standing up and using the bag it came in as a plate. I had to suck on it like a Sunny Boy.

Later that night, after free MIFF booze… I had an apple pie from McDonald's. I figured that this would compensate for not having eaten any pies over the weekend.

Thursday 7 July – Chicken and vegetable pie from the bakery at Coles Fitzroy. I brought it back home where I ate it while perusing the MIFF program and planning coverage for the Thousands. It was quite tasty, unexpectedly.

Sunday 10 July – Dinner at parents' house. Dessert was a frozen deep-dish apple pie with a crumble topping. I had it with custard and it was delicious for a frozen mass-manufactured pie. The topping was especially tasty.

Wednesday 13 July – Mexican pie from Williamson's Pies in Chapel Street. Big Harvest had seriously let me down earlier in the week with its terrible lack of spinach pie – I had to have soup instead. However when I went to collect mail from The Enthusiast's PO box in Prahran, I stopped off at Williamson's afterwards and decided on this pie because I was curious about what it might involve.

The filling looked much like a regular beef pie – not especially reddish like chili con carne – but it had extra chilli and capsicum in it and was quite spicy. It tasted good and I enjoyed it, but later it made me burp gross Mexican-flavoured burps, which I didn't like nearly as much.

Thursday 14 July – Beef and burgundy pie from Il Fresco, which is a café in Lygon Court shopping centre. I picked it up on my way home after seeing the French film Beautiful Lies at the Nova, because I knew I had to go straight home and write it up for that day's Thousands. I had forgotten that 'beef and burgundy' implies 'beef bourguignon' which implies mushrooms. It was a nice surprise to find these in the pie.

Later that night, I had several Portuguese tarts. Michael Pham brought a bag of leftover baked goods from his cafe Tiny to the Thousands relaunch drinks, and I couldn't stop at one because they are goddamn delicious!!! Also, I was drunk.

So there you have it – Pie July. I told you it was desultory. I'm thinking next year I'll do "Dry & Dry July" (ie, cocktails made from dry vermouth and dry ginger ale) which is a nicer riposte to Dry July because it actually involves drinking alcohol.

2011-06-22T20:31:00.002+10:00

Nifty exercise in writing and interpretation. I just found this website One Word, where you're given one minute to write whatever you want about one word. It's an exercise in trying not to over-think things (which is how I spend my entire life). Here's what I just wrote.

cells

He tried not to think about his friends – what they were doing right now, pushing through the crowd, the heat. He knew his role and he was going to play it. He felt bulky and ungainly as he made his way up the steps to where the flag snapped in the breeze, his fingers at his waist, feeling for the switch.

Bit naff, I know. Here's what other people wrote about the same word.

2011-06-19T23:41:00.005+10:00

I can count on one hand the things I know about Torchwood. The second post in a series, the first being about Ryan Adams. I'm always inspired to ponder how little I know about a pop-cultural phenomenon when it's something that other people tend to get really excited and obsessive about. Hence, Torchwood. Here are the things I know about it.

1. It is a TV spin-off of Doctor Who.

2. It is set in Cardiff.

3. There is a motley crew of people involved, led by someone called Captain Jack (but not Captain Jack Sparrow).

4. Captain Jack is handsome and wears a dark-coloured military-style overcoat.

5. He sleeps with men and hence is a queer icon.

And there you have it: the sum total of my knowledge of Torchwood. If I stretched my synapses to their limits, I could come up with a bit more:

6. There is something supernatural and/or extraterrestrial about the nature of the motley crew's activities.

7. I think Torchwood is an 'Institute', which implies some kind of official status and/or funding.

Okay: now for the fun part: seeing if I was right! Yes – the Torchwood Institute "deals mainly with incidents involving extraterrestrials". Its authority seems to come straight from the top, having been established by Queen Victoria but yet enjoying a status "beyond the UN".

There is a branch office in Cardiff because there is a space/time rift there. Okay. BUT WHAAA – Wikipedia describes Captain Jack Harkness as "an immortal ex-con man from the distant future who has lived on Earth since the 19th century". So far, it seems to be a bit like Men in Black, but more steampunky.

Here is Captain Jack in his dark-coloured military-style overcoat, with members of his motley crew. He's pretty handsome, all right.

Oh but UGHHH – it was intended to be in the spirit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that inane, self-important show that everyone else likes but me. I think this both explains its popularity among a certain segment of people I know, and also reassures me that it is quite all right to leave my knowledge of Torchwood right there.

2011-06-12T14:54:00.004+10:00

It's okay you guys, Graham is home! Just before, I was doorknocking the neighbourhood. I had made flyers in Microsoft Word because I lost my Photoshop when my computer was stolen over Easter. It is pretty hard to make a two-up flyer in Microsoft Word.

Anyway, so most people are away for the long weekend, but this one lady answers her door and she says, "I think I have your cat!" AND SHE DID IT WAS GRAHAM THAT SHE HAD.

He had jumped into her lightwell garden – the sort that's walled in on all sides but has an open roof – and couldn't get out. He was pressed into a corner and wouldn't come out, but he came out as soon as I called him.

Now he is sitting on my study floor as if nothing had happened and he hadn't caused me this terrible amount of stress and heartache. Also now I feel super embarrassed about being so sad before.

Now I can get on with my uni marking, which has to be done by Tuesday.

2011-06-11T13:43:00.004+10:00

I am totally devastated right now. Graham, my boon companion, pillow-percher and inspiration for my stupid cat songs, went missing on Thursday morning. I let him out shortly before 10am and when I got home at around midday he was nowhere to be seen, and he hasn't come back!

I have walked around the neighbourhood several times, day and night, calling his name and jingling my keys. Graham was classically conditioned to associate that sound with me, as he'd come running when he heard me on the front porch fumbling my keys to find the right one to let myself in.

That's the thing – Graham would always eventually come running when he heard me call his name, or any one of the various shameful nicknames I bestowed on him, which include "Puff" and "McGra". Or even me clicking my tongue like Skippy. It is also really unlike him not to show up to be fed, and he has never stayed away overnight before.

I have put posters all around the neighbourhood, and my kind friends have circulated messages on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Even though well-meaning people tell me that cats always do this, and cite real-life cases where the cat came back after more than a week, or even after months, I can't help thinking I won't see Graham alive again. Ever since I got Graham I have always worried about him dying or going missing, and kept the worry stuffed deep down because of the shame of being seen openly to care about my cat, but that hasn't stopped me from feeling absolutely distraught now that it has actually happened.

Even thinking about him makes me cry. Or seeing the tufts of fur on the carpet, or his bowl, still with dry Whiskas in it that I poured out for him on Thursday morning, or the marks he left by rubbing his cheek on the edge of the shelf where his food is stored. Even his litter box makes me cry. Every morning when I wake up and remember he is gone, I feel so sad and empty.

It is so shameful to be a single woman who loves her cat, but I am so sad I don't care how embarrassing the following recording is, as it's my only record of Graham miaowing. Typically, he interrupted me as I was trying to do some work – in this case, testing the sound levels on my iPhone so I could use it as a dictaphone:

Graham interrupts voice recorder test by incrediblemelk

And here is the last photo I took of him, the other day, as he gnaws on my hand, triple-threat style.

What if these scars are all I have to remember him by?

2011-06-07T23:20:00.007+10:00

Irony and aesthetics (NSFW). I am thinking about former UK politician David Miliband, who invited the media into his home and then became a laughingstock because of an ugly painting on his living-room wall, which it turned out his wife Louise had given him for his 40th birthday.

It seems so English to me to see snobbish newspaper headlines such as "David Miliband's awful painting: what it tells us".

The painting is offensive to aesthetes because it pastiches Matisse's La Danse in a watered-down, middlebrow way, because it is the handiwork of Michelle Dovey, a London yummy mummy, and also because it clearly gives the Milibands pleasure despite this.

I'm thinking about the Miliband Painting because tonight I was browsing on eBay and stumbled across the work of Darling Downs artist Lynne Pickering. I find her work hilariously bad, but also mesmerising.

Enormous Kitten Abstract

Rainy Day Abstract

Enormous Large White Cow

Massive Ned Kelly

Mother and Child in Flowers

And I feel guilty about my own aesthetic snobbery. How come Sidney Nolan's similarly crappy paintings of Ned Kelly get to be national treasures and Lynne Pickering's don't? How come Picasso and Modigliani get to draw wonky heads on people and it's called a bold signature style?

There are lots of issues about gender and professionalism circling around both Dovey and Pickering. You would never find a 'serious' artist selling their works on eBay; the gallery system gives them industry validation. Also, mastery of technique and visual language is constructed as the result of formal artistic training, despite the odd Henri Rousseau slipping into art history.

What's especially poignant about these kinds of bad artworks is how much they cling to and reference venerable (and even anachronistic) artistic traditions. Compare them to the conceptual, minimalist, installation or media art that attract esteem and serious discussion. There's something lovely and honest in Pickering's unambiguous faith in painting as an artform.

The Museum of Bad Art also treads a line between ironic and sincere appreciation: an inclination to laughter and an affection for the artist's effort. Can we hold both ideas in our heads simultaneously? The museum volunteers clearly care about preserving the evidence of artistic ambition, however hilariously failed that ambition is, and they do so in the language of art curatorship. Here is a recent acquisition, Ronan the Pug by Erin Rothgeb:

A while ago I discovered a Tumblr called Fuck Yeah Terrible Art. This plumbs the appalling art posted online, and so most of it is really inept manga, a disturbing amount is erotic fan art, and an even more disturbingly large chunk involves furries.

'Terrible' in this case is about subject matter as well as technique. Somehow, the worst part about this one is that it's not even Donatello – it's Michelangelo! And click through, if you dare, to see an anthropomorphic Nazi alsatian being sucked off, or perhaps Steve Irwin getting a 'death blow' from a stingray.

There is always something poignant about a passionate fan's struggle to accurately capture the physiognomy of his or her favourite celebrity, which leaves the casual observer able to recognise the subject and yet cackle cruelly at the poverty of the likeness.

This is meant to be Hugh Laurie in House!

This is not the original Fuck Yeah Terrible Art blog. Tumblr shut down the previous one because it provided links to the artists who unwittingly contributed their work. FYTA readers then trolled the artists, who complained to Tumblr, who shut down the blog.

So you can see that to maintain even the most appalled, ironically distanced appreciation of bad art, you need to maintain a certain respect for the artists.

2011-05-29T19:43:00.002+10:00

Feeling jaded by social media. First, it's exhausting to try to keep up with the pace of discussion. It's a damn waste of time when I have so much else I should be doing. And that time isn't even well spent. I feel like I give to it and don't get back.

Second, I am on there for professional reasons but I feel like a lame failure in the face of all these people talking about all the very exciting and clever and prestigious things they're doing. I feel very remote from it all, as though everyone else is kicking goals except me, and even if I were to kick a goal myself nobody would notice.

Third, I treat it like a substitute for real interaction because I just sit at my desk by myself for large chunks of each day. But it's not as rewarding. It's so easy to think you're 'conversing' by trading throwaway lines, 'likes', funny links, etc, but you're not. What does it really mean? What kind of lasting connection are you really building? Looking for genuine support and companionship from social media feels like shouting down a well.

Fourth, I feel sad that I am not a peer influencer; that I can't galvanise and enthuse other people, and make events happen. Sometimes I check the stats on the links I tweet, and only one or two or three people have even clicked on the link. For instance, I really wanted to start up a singing group, but only about five people said they'd definitely do it, and they were all women, and I find the idea of being in charge of a 'women's choir' really embarrassing and repellent as this implies chunky amber beads, woollen wraps and cropped wide-legged pants worn with boots. And salt-and-pepper pixie cuts. And red leather jackets.

Fifth, and I guess at the root of all this, is that I am feeling very sad and lonely and exhausted and mediocre, but nobody wants to read about that. Social media really foreground that requirement to 'perform' oneself in a way that's palatable to others. At least here on my own blog I have an excuse to go on about myself.

I am so annoyed with myself that I find it impossible to stay away from social media when it is so hollow and unrewarding.

2011-05-22T18:38:00.003+10:00

Hipster crime. Today I was sitting in the window at North and noticed the girl next to me was working on a MacBook that was the spitting image of mine, which was stolen when my house was burgled over Easter! It was even in a red leather case identical to the one I kept my computer in.

"Excuse me, but how long have you had this computer?" I asked.

"About a year," she said.

She let me examine the computer and the case. My computer had a pinkish smudge on the back of the screen where the case had rubbed on it; this computer didn't. My space bar was worn; this one's wasn't. My N key was wearing off; this one's wasn't. So it wasn't my computer.

But being a paranoid sort, I couldn't help wondering: what if she knew she'd only recently bought it from a friend of a friend at the pub, and here she was now, confronted by someone saying they'd had a computer just like it stolen? Would she own up to it? Would she let me check her computer's serial number against my stolen computer? Or would she lie and say, "Oh, I've had this computer for about a year?"

It's a cliché of hipsterism that while it obsessively mines the past, it doesn't want to put that past in context. (Perhaps this is true of people in general, and not just hipsters.) You shop at vintage stores and op-shops, but you don't like to think about who owned, wore and used those things before you. Instead, you empty them of specific meaning, retaining only their use-value to you, now, or their generic value as representative objects of their type.

So, it isn't that silly a possibility that someone might not want to confront the fact that the computer they just got at a bargain price, while 'new' to them, actually has a history that incorporates a crime in which they, as the 'new user', are implicated.

I was also pondering how hipsters are happy to 'steal' and deal in 'stolen' goods without compunction, when those goods are digital music and video files, software, or anything perceived to be in public space without obvious signs of ownership – for example, things abandoned on the street or left behind in cafés, bars, cinemas, etc.

Those piracy ads saying "You wouldn't steal a handbag!" are idiotic because they don't recognise that hipsters steal when it's easy, casual and opportunistic, when there's a culture of peer acceptance rather than peer shame, when the chances of being caught are low, and when they aren't confronted with actually having to dispossess someone else. Perhaps hipsters would steal a handbag… if that bag were sitting on a chair in a bar, and their friends assured them it didn't belong to anybody.

However, I have another theory about hipster crime: that it can be vindictive. Hipsters don't glass each other in pubs for fun, or on thuggish pretexts like "are you looking at me?!!" Only if they have a history of disliking the glassee.

You can get drunk, throw a television and kill your housemate's cat. You can punish your ex-girlfriend by stabbing her fish. You can vengefully snap the spokes on someone's fixie. You can slash your housemate's finger in fury after he tells you to turn down your music, then he calls the cops on you, and when you get back from jail you find someone has ransacked your room and stolen cash and valuables.

But hipster crime can also encompass fraud and confidence crime (see Hipster Grifter), because hipsterism is built on bullshitting. The same skills of written and verbal persuasion, fluid personal identities and job mobility that serve hipsters so well can be put to work scamming people and then skipping town. Hipster communities are also much the same across the world, and are good at assimilating newcomers with shady backstories.

I got to making a mental list of which crimes hipsters would and wouldn't commit. Street muggings: no (too much premeditation; involves confronting the victim). Shoplifting: yes (cool associations with Winona Ryder; nostalgic associations with teen rebellion; righteous feeling that evil corporations deserve to be robbed). Drugs: yes (necessary for partying; scary original sources obscured in long, complex distribution chain). Vandalism: yes (especially in the course of drunken revelry, as 'street art', or in retaliation to a previous grievance). Rape: yes (offence happens in private and victim can be smeared as not 'chilled', a 'crazy bitch' or a 'slut'). Murder: only accidentally or in moment of anger. Gun crime: no (obtaining a gun legally is too much work; getting one illegally is too scary). Knife crime: only accidentally or in moment of anger (carrying blades is 'too ethnic').

Of course this is all just me stewing in my paranoia over my stolen computer, and has no empirical basis whatsoever.

2011-05-21T19:50:00.002+10:00

Books I've read in 2011. This doesn't seem like nearly as many as I thought I'd read, but it works out to roughly a book a week. I also tried to read Zero History by William Gibson but I found it really tough going, which is odd since I enjoyed its prequel Spook Country so much last year.

You can also pick up the shameful trend of 'books that have been turned into movies'. This is a longstanding weakness of mine as you will see from my bookshelves. In some cases I read the book to prepare for the movie; in other cases I saw the movie first and then was inspired to read the book.

And I have just learned (via looking up Chris O'Dowd, aka, "the Irish guy from The IT Crowd", on IMDB) that they've made a BBC costume-drama miniseries of The Crimson Petal and the White, for which I am absolutely jonesing because I adored that book. It features Shirley Henderson (whom I adored when she played Marie Melmotte in The Way We Live Now – another incredibly satisfying BBC costume miniseries), and Gillian Anderson plays Sugar's mother, the madam Mrs Castaway!!!

I just would like to put it on record, however, that I never saw Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole.

Others on this list are books I pick up from secondhand bookshops and op-shops. One such was State of Decay, which is an SF conspiracy thriller set in a dystopian America in which foreign wars are fought by cybernetically reanimated corpses – 'revivors'. (They reminded me of a combination of the Cauldron-Born in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain and Asimov's robots.) I enjoyed the procedural plot and the richness of the detail with which Knapp sketches class strata and the logistics and metaphysics of revivors. It kind of lost steam at the end, but it was definitely an absorbing read and hence brilliantly fulfilled its purpose, which is to temporarily escape my terrible life by reading books over café meals.

Other books are ones I requested to review. That includes Things Bogans Like, which funnily enough, I did not like. (Can I also just say, while I'm on the topic, that I was absolutely mortified by the way errors were introduced into that review during copy-editing, for which I was then crucified in the comments.) However, most books were intended for The Enthusiast but so far I haven't got to them. I just feel full of despair and self-hatred, well, generally, but also whenever I think about my aspirations for that site and how short I fall of them.

I am especially ashamed that some of these authors are friends of mine and I felt an obligation to them to get word out about their books (which I really enjoyed!). While I was looking through my bookshelves I also saw other books written by friends, published last year, that I meant to review but never got around to, and a fresh wave of shame threatened to swamp me.

Some of the books are also for my book club. Tomorrow we will be discussing Wolf Hall. Judging from early reactions, I think I'll be the only person who enjoyed it (apart from the club member who suggested it). I found it vivid, evocative and startlingly contemporary, even as it narrates familiar, 500-year-old events, and it was a nice contrast with A Man For All Seasons. Thomas Cromwell emerges as an astute, cosmopolitan political operator with a bone-dry wit… but also with a heart.

Anyway, here are the books.

Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris
Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris
An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
The Apple by Michel Faber
The Guardians Of Ga'Hoole: The Capture by Kathryn Lasky
Things Bogans Like by E Chas McSween et al
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Black Glass by Meg Mundell
August by Bernard Beckett
Little People by Jane Sullivan
True Grit by Charles Portis
The UFO Diaries by Martin Plowman
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
State of Decay by James Knapp
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The President's Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth
Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
The City and the City by China Miéville

2011-04-22T17:43:00.004+10:00

Bouquets and brickbats. Today I decided to write some consumer letters. I haven't done this in years.

To Ambra Corporation

Hi there,

Last year I bought a three-pack of your Velvet Matte 80 opaque tights – two pairs in black and one pair in a delightful violet colour somewhere between purple and blue.

These are still the best tights I own. They feel wonderful to wear because they're so soft and stretchy, and the waistband doesn't bisect me cruelly as some other brands do.

They've also maintained their look and feel through many washes. I just love them!

In particular, the violet pair are my favourite tights, but they seem to have been discontinued as I just can't find them in the shops any more.

Please consider offering these tights in a range of colours other than black. There is such a huge untapped market in Australia for plain, excellent-quality opaque tights in a rainbow of colours, and if Ambra's Velvet Matte 80 were available in other colours, I would never buy any other brand, and would encourage all my friends to do the same.

Kind regards,
Mel Campbell.

To Grosby Shoes Australia

Dear Sir/Madam,

In January 2011 I purchased a pair of black leather Grosby women's flats with rubber soles (style 6629922). It's now April, and after JUST THREE MONTHS of average wear, the left shoe has already developed a hole in the sole over the ball of the foot. As you can see from the attached photographs, the leather upper is still in near-new condition, but there is a distinct crease in the inner and the sole is worn so thin it has torn.

This is totally disappointing and unacceptable! You should be ashamed to put an 80-year-old Australian brand name, which Australians trust for quality and comfort, to such a substandard product.

I don't wear these shoes every single day, and nor do I work in an occupation that demands I be on my feet all day, as a teacher, a nurse or a shop assistant might be. In fact, I work from home! The only wear these shoes get is when I walk to and from public transport, or to and from local shops and cafés. It's simply unacceptable that I could have worn a hole in them in just three months!

This is all the more infuriating for me because I'd bought these shoes as part of my New Year's resolution for 2011: "Fewer and better shoes". I was sick of wasting money on adhesives and insoles to try to make poor-quality shoes more comfortable and durable, and of having to buy replacement shoes every few months. So imagine how pleased I was to find that Grosby was making just what I wanted at such a reasonable price.

Now imagine how angry I am that I'll still be faced with spending extra money to have these relatively new shoes fixed. Making shoes that last shouldn't be my job! It's your job!

I'm writing to let you know about my intense disappointment so that perhaps in future you might use sturdier materials or design your shoes better in order to withstand even average amounts of wear.

Kind regards,
Mel Campbell.

2011-04-10T14:59:00.002+10:00

Resting on their quality laurels. The Melbourne media scene is pretty small, and for reasons of continued patronage I should be careful about how pointed my criticism is. However, recently I've been pondering the ways that we determine 'quality' in a newspaper, and how oddly contradictory the perceptions of quality in the Melbourne news media continue to be.

These aren't new preoccupations for me. As far back as 2005 I discussed the absurdity of knee-jerk anti-News Ltd sentiment, which I still observe among my politically progressive peers. The News of the World phone hacking scandal has certainly confirmed a certain evilness in Rupert Murdoch's media empire, but it's still endlessly frustrating to see people imagine the Herald Sun to be staffed solely by cynical Liberal-voting panderers to the lowest common denominator.

In particular, the recent transferral of Melbourne International Comedy Festival media sponsorship from The Age to the Herald Sun has led to a certain amount of snobbery about the discernment of Herald Sun reviewers. A Twitter account has sprung up to ridicule the lamest moments from the Hez's MICF coverage, and I've also heard mutterings to this effect in the bars and on social networks among comedians and journos.

Having worked at HWT Towers in 2007-8, I know that Herald Sun journalists are just as committed as Age journalists to principles of journalistic 'quality'. Or conversely, the two mastheads are equally likely to shamelessly chase cheap pageviews, to publish tendentious, demagogic op-eds, to commission vapid, lazily researched trend pieces and to be full of subeditorial errors.

I believe in pointing crap journalism out wherever I find it. That said, there is definitely an argument to be made that The Age has slipped in quality over the last few years. Fairfax decision-makers are resting on their laurels – those being their history and their tradition of conferring cultural capital – while they're being caught short by all sorts of industry developments.

While Fairfax op-eds continue to be talking points, they're really losing ground to the more active commentary sites by News and the ABC. And Antony Catalano's masterstroke of real-estate advertising thievery, The Weekly Review, boasts some pretty decent writers whose coverage of culture and entertainment rivals that of The Age.

As I've previously argued, quarantining discussions of journalistic 'quality' to public-trust news, and concomitantly redefining 'lifestyle' as inconsequential pap, has had a deleterious effect on the journalistic standards in these sections of the paper. The kinds of fawning celebrity profiles that used to be confined to my favourite intellectual journal Sunday Life are now creeping into Good Weekend and A2 – sorry, Life & Style. Meanwhile, M likes to trumpet supposedly zeitgeisty trends that everyone has already known about for years.

But what really galvanised this blog post was a very thoughtful feature about Brendan Fevola in the Herald Sun. Oh no! you might think. A footy story in the Hez – how insightful could that possibly be? Very, if it's written by Andrew Rule. In February this year, Rule defected from The Age to the Herald Sun, and what's interesting about his professional history, and that of his longtime collaborator John Silvester, is that they've worked for both papers, and never defined their commitment to journalism by the masthead they write under.

2011-03-17T22:10:00.004+11:00

Voyage into the Drafts folder. Inspired – as so many absurd things are – by Adam 1.0's journey into the archives, I have decided to revisit some of my forgotten draft blog posts, most of them justifiably forgotten.

Over the entire life of this blog, there were only 18 drafts. Some are drafts because I ended up publishing them elsewhere. Others I think I might resurrect. Others are just boring, like me noodling on about True Blood in the same vein as my noodlings about Terminator Salvation.

Here are the rest, plus some bonus tweets that I never sent due to my wireless coverage dropping out!!

Unsent tweet:
If you've got a craving to eat pencil erasers, order the mushrooms at Mario's.

Abandoned blog post, 1 December 2010
My Hollywood Babylon dream. I just had this dream before. I was Bret Easton Ellis

Unsent tweet:
Who does Matthew McConaughey think he's fooling in that ad with the tux? We all know he'd rather have been shirtless.

Abandoned blog post, 26 July 2008
On the prom. Last night was the final Is Not Magazine party - Is Not Senior Prom. This theme was my idea. I've often worried about the way we fetishised Americanness at the magazine. Of course, Jeremy has always traded personally and professionally on the cosmopolitan glamour of being from America - and within that, being from New York, and within that, Brooklyn. Even though he is actually from Long Island. (Incidentally, while I know Jeremy is well aware of the cultural capital he possesses simply by an accident of birth, I wonder if he deliberately exploits the beguiling effect of his voice and way of speaking. It was certainly what I always liked best about him, and even now it's still a pleasure to listen to.)

Unsent tweet:
Baby baby baby/You are my voodoo child/My voodoo child

Abandoned blog post, 11 February 2008
Howard's Storage World. It was only because he was not the sort of man to make a fuss that Howard said nothing. Inside, if he cared to scrutinise his feelings - and he didn't really, Howard was not that sort of man - he was filled with impatient rage.

It was the shoes mainly. Maryanne had a habit of leaving her shoes wherever they were kicked off. Work pumps lurking under the kitchen table; slippers hiding coyly under the armchair. But she would also take off a jumper and leave it on the couch - for days and days and days - as though she were happy for it stay there forever. There had been a pair of her earrings sitting on a windowsill for two years now. Sometimes Howard found Maryanne's shucked underpants in the bathroom. That was not cool.

Then there were the plastic food packets on the shelves, folded carelessly over or even left open for moths to get in or the contents to grow stale. Dirty plates piled haphazardly in the sink, filled with scummy water. Random papers - bills, receipts, flyers, mail for previous occupants Howard had never met - littering the table.

When it really started to get to him, Howard liked to go to his shed and sit in an old cane chair. He did not have to move things off it in order to sit down, as he had to do elsewhere in the house.( There was one chair in the bedroom so comprehensively draped with Maryanne's clothes that tidying them away felt almost obscene, like a strip-search.)

Unsent tweet:
I was shopping for a full length mirror, hoping to pay about $20. Got one for $11.40 which is officially a 'nice price'!

Abandoned blog post, 26 July 2007
On shithouse metaphors. It's like I gave him my t-shirt and he's like, "All right, you're awesome, I'll put that in my t-shirt drawer," only I'm like, "Now I'm naked and humiliated, and also, that wasn't a t-shirt, it was my heart."

It occurs to me just now that the t-shirt analogy was a poor one.

Unsent tweet:
Just saw a dude riding a motorbike in the rain wearing shorts and thongs. The definition of not giving a shit.

Abandoned blog post, 4 January 2006
Fashion trends that took me by surprise in 2005.

1. Big wooden beads.

2. The persistence of boho.

3.

2011-03-06T13:33:00.003+11:00

Thoughts on Tumblr. Tumblr is a short-form blogging platform. It's like Twitter in that it enables users to custom-build their online community by 'following' other users. Following doesn't have to be reciprocal. All these blog posts appear in a central stream on the 'dashboard', but rather than prioritising text, Tumblr emphasises images (especially memes and animated GIFs), videos, streaming mp3s and quotes.

Unlike older blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress, and even social networks including MySpace and Facebook, interactivity on Tumblr doesn't take the form of commenting on individual posts. Instead, Tumblr users invite, and will answer, 'questions' from their followers or even from anonymous readers. Posts also build debate and commentary when they're 'reblogged' by other Tumblr users, who can add their own remarks. Finally, Tumblr enables posts to be 'liked'. All this interactivity is catalogued on the original post in the form of 'notes'.

There are all sorts of ways to use Tumblr. I didn't really see the point of it and only got on board because I decided to start a hipster-related blog, and I figured that Tumblr is where hipsters blog. But it's interesting in the way it combines a blogroll and a real-time RSS feed, and cross-pollinates content that you mightn't have stumbled across yourself.

I can see that some people like to use it as a scrapbook of the little things they encounter in their online life, or as a way to bookmark interesting things to come back to later. As I've mentioned, there are also lots of meme Tumblrs, many of them using the "Fuck Yeah [insert very specific topic]" formula. There's also lots of TV and movie fan culture.

I'm still not a Tumblr native, because I mostly post text. I'm also constantly frustrated that I want to comment directly on another post but don't want to post that commentary as a question or an item on my own Tumblr.

I'm realising that the point of Tumblr really isn't to generate and display original content, but rather to assemble and recontextualise pre-existing material. I am trying really hard to view this as creative, but it's a struggle. I mainly get followed by people in their late teens, whose Tumblrs are a stream of vague, angsty images, like this:

Also, a lot of the imagery I see there is of skinny, listless, half-naked alt-model types:

It can get quite depressing to see this kind of imagery posted repeatedly without commentary. It leaves you wondering about the Tumblr user's affective relation to the image. Do they find it erotic? Funny? Romantic? Cool? Aspirational?

My overall impression is that Tumblr is about expressing yourself without being articulate. There's a value to this, I suppose, if you feel that an image, a quote or a song expresses something better than you can yourself, but personally I find it quite boring and alienating to silently accumulate aphoristic imagery as a performance of self.

Oh well, guess that's why I'm writing lots of words using another blogging platform.

2011-03-01T22:52:00.003+11:00

Growing up with a Car Dad. In retrospect I'm glad I grew up with a Car Dad, even though at times my mother has been very angry to have married a Car Man. When you have a Car Dad, you don't go to car dealerships to get your next family car. One just mysteriously shows up in your driveway. Then after a while it vanishes, and another one shows up in its place.

Actually, when the film The Castle came out with that line about moving the Camira, the Torana and the Commodore around in the driveway, we laughed in recognition. Except, rather than Holdens, ours were mostly European and mostly old. How many non-French kids know how "Renault" and "Citroën" are pronounced?

Let me see if I can remember all the cars we had. There was the little yellow Renault that had been my dad's sister's car (I think it was a Renault 7). The khaki Suzuki with the soft top that looked just like an army jeep, and which crashed once, scarily, because its wheelbase was so narrow it didn't handle sharp turns very well. The dark red Citroën with the vinyl seats (maybe a GS, or perhaps it was another Renault 7). The egg-yolk yellow hatchback that could have been a Renault 16 or a Triumph 2000.

Dad has always loved Triumphs; when I was a baby apparently the only time I would stop crying was when he would drive me around in his cherry-red Stag. I am sure we had more than one 1500 or 2000/2500 – I distinctly remember a bright red one, and perhaps I am imagining this, but there might have been either a white or a silver one too.

Then it was onto the Volvo era, because with four kids we could no longer all fit into a sedan. First we had a white 200-series Volvo station wagon with jump seats in the boot. These seats were very hard and there was a lot of squabbling about who had to sit there on long car trips. I often drew the short straw because I didn't get carsick travelling backwards.

It was very hot in there too. I don't remember if the white Volvo or the subsequent silver Volvo had the little fan mounted in the back corner. Maybe they both did. The silver Volvo had slightly more comfortable jump seats. More importantly, it had a hilarious number plate that began with FKQ. My mother didn't get the joke until someone at her work filled her in.

By this stage I was learning to drive, and the car I drove first was also a 200-series Volvo. My friends will recall it as "the Volvo that didn't go backwards". The transmission was busted, so reverse only worked when the engine was cold. But that car was my first bit of freedom. I used to drive to my exploitative job at Carousel Ice Cream in South Yarra and tool along Alexandra Avenue playing my "Top 96 of '96" cassette that I'd taped off the radio, singing along with 'Sexy Eyes' by Whigfield or 'Break My Stride' by Unique II.

Sometimes I also drove the silver Volvo, which by then had shrieking brakes. In that car, I was pulled up by the cops on Valentine's Day 1997 and told my driving was "ordinary". I don't know if I've ever told that story on the blog, but basically someone else had driven off in the red Volvo with my P-plates in it, so to appease my parents I had made my own P-plates using paper and a hot-pink texta.

But anyway. There were more cars on top of this. Recently when I was looking through some old photo albums, I found a picture of my brother miT sitting in the driver's seat of a sporty little black convertible that looks more than a little like KITT from Knight Rider. I think it was actually a kit car. (There were certainly many, many issues of Kit Car, Unique Cars and other such magazines cluttering the house. These were a frequent bone of contention between my parents.)

But the one I was most excited about was an old-fashioned-looking cream-coloured car from perhaps the 1940s. I can't remember the make. I remember being quite awed at how glamorous it was, and imagining how great it would be to be driven places in it. But it never became our family car. For a fair while it was parked in the middle of the back yard and miT used to leap off the roof onto the trampoline.

Once my other brother Lina, who was just a baby, was sitting on the trampoline during one of miT's epic jumps and bounced right off it, landing on the ground and breaking his wrist. He was just at crawling age, so rather than crawling he developed a technique of dragging himself along on his arse using his good arm.

The reason I am even reminiscing about this stuff is that today I saw an old van turn the corner of Lonsdale and Exhibition Streets and I noticed it was the sort with sliding doors, and the driver was driving with the doors slid open. I instantly remembered one of our cars that I hadn't thought about for years – the campervan.

Us kids were all thrilled by the campervan, imagining all the awesome holidays we would go on. We loved when Dad drove us in it with the doors open, the road rushing past our feet and the wind blowing in. We didn't have it for long, though, and I was bitterly disappointed when it vanished. I can't remember if we ever took it on holiday.

Today when I saw the van, all I could think was that it must be so illegal to drive around with the doors open like that.

2011-02-28T16:32:00.003+11:00

Loss-making in internet jokes. Honestly – do you recall all the things that make you laugh on the internet? The vast majority of them would give you just a few seconds of enjoyment before you close the browser tab and move on. Perhaps you'll play them again, joke about them in person, and perhaps you'll pass them on to your friends, but after a week? A month? A year?

The other day, someone on Twitter urged someone else to make a mashup trailer for the imaginary film Uncle Buck Who Can Recall His Past Lives. But the trouble with this request is that the capital of this joke has already been spent. You've had your few seconds of enjoyment at the incongruous juxtaposition of a lyrical Thai drama and a slapstick family comedy starring John Candy.

Why would you spend your time downloading footage of the two films, snipping bits out and editing them back together again, and putting intertitles and a soundtrack on? Even if you're a really experienced editor, it'd still take you a minimum of, say, an hour to do it, upload it, and tell your online mates about it. The finished trailer might get that extra few moments of enjoyment that someone has actually made it happen, but not that many more moments than you might have got from pondering the original idea.

A mashup trailer is a relatively simple internet joke. But think about the ones that are more time-consuming and elaborate – stop-motion recreations of music videos in Lego; recreating iconic music videos using TV cartoon characters; combing an old TV series for moments of sexual innuendo; live-action recreations of the game Guitar Hero; even putting a T-shirt on your cat and manipulating its front paws so it appears to be playing a keyboard.

Many of these come about because people just think, "Wouldn't it be funny to do this?" and then they do it. That's an attitude I can respect, because I have always tried to follow through on stupid ideas wherever possible, and I am always annoyed at people whose dismissive response to these things is, "Boy, you must have had a lot of time on your hands."

But I do feel sad about the amount of effort that goes into producing a nibblet of pop-culture that is quickly superseded by the next little nibblet. All your effort – your cost of time, skills and imagination – for very little payoff.

Also, I am increasingly weary of meme-driven cultural production. If you are a major producer of online jokes, such as the Gregory Brothers, then you can actually create memes and make things 'go viral'. But even advertising agencies – people whose job it is to create cultural nibblets that take root in your head – can find it difficult to catch a genuine online spark.

Otherwise, there's the sub-meme industry in which ordinary (non-professional) cultural producers tumble over each other to get to the same punchline first, to riff a new joke and an old one to create something just a little bit more original. This strikes me as an impoverished kind of cultural expression.

The memes drawn from existing footage – home video snippets; things from the news; bits of archival gold – perhaps provide the most value. They cost nothing to produce; they're already there. Instead they are just curated. They seem to match the transience of the jokes they encapsulate.

2011-02-26T20:21:00.004+11:00

The thing that annoys me most about Terminator Salvation. My fandom demands that I am a Terminator completist, although I have never gone as far as to collect action figures, T-800 endoskulls or a full-size endoskeleton standing on a plinth of crushed human skulls. I content myself with owning all the DVDs, including the Sarah Chronnor Conicles box set… and including last year's disappointing Batman vs Jake Sully.

Watching it again last night, I think McG unfairly took the fall for making a bad film. He's actually made a pretty exciting war film, with some spectacular, tension-filled action setpieces. There's a great shot near the start where we stay with Connor's perspective as he struggles to control a helicopter caught in a large-scale bomb blast… when finally he drops to the 'ceiling' we realise the helicopter has crashed upside-down.

The other thing I really liked about it on reflection is the way it constantly makes little gestures to the franchise's history. The way there's always a close-up of a Terminator crunching a human skull underfoot. The petrol station in the desert. Motorbike-vs-truck chase scenes. The way John Connor uses a plug-in hacking device to get into a Skynet installation much as he did in T2 to get into Cyberdyne Systems. (No "easy money" line, however.)

The way Marcus Wright asks the teenage Kyle Reese, "What day is it? What year?" – which Kyle asked in the original film. Marcus gives his birthday as August 29, 1975 – we know August 29 as the date for which Judgment Day was scheduled in 1997. Anton Yelchin also says the iconic line "Come with me if you want to live", while Christian Bale gets to say, "I'll be back."

The way the T-600s totally resemble Kyle's description of them in The Terminator. ("The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy.") And the way they are larger and bulkier than the T-800s, which I liked because technological advances tend to be expressed through miniaturisation. The technique of freezing the Terminator with liquid nitrogen then melting it with molten metal.

Rewatching it, I also noticed McG and Sam Worthington explicitly using Arnie's old tropes to flag that Marcus is a terminator. Worthington's performance seemed more ambivalent and menacing to me this time, whereas I saw him as an unambiguous 'good guy' when I saw this in cinemas.

The way he emerges naked and scavenges clothing; the methodical way he scans the terrain, especially against a background of flames; the way he grabs a shotgun; an assailant punches his face to one side, then he methodically turns it back again. Even in the climactic fight scene in an industrial setting (another series trademark) the style of the beating dished out to Marcus reminds me of the way the T-1000 beat up Arnie.

Whereas the real problem was fucking Christian Bale wanting to be (Edward Furlong voice) "this great military leader" when he'd actually been approached to star as Marcus. Thus he forced radical script rewrites that gave Connor more action, more screen time, a nice happy ending, and more hoarse, barking self-identifications as "JOHN CONNOR!" Bale was utterly miscast and basically ruins the movie. Him and me – we're done professionally. I haven't even seen The Fighter, in which he is meant to be quite good.

I was kind of horrified when I heard the early reports that the script would reveal that John Connor himself was a terminator. That seemed like a profound betrayal of everything that the main characters of the franchise had striven for, but the actual original script was much more Marcus's story. In it, John Connor was an enigmatic figure known only via his radio broadcasts. He appears in person only towards the end of the film, then he gets killed by a terminator and Marcus steps in to 'become' John Connor.

This is a much more resonant 'second chance' than the silly, anticlimactic skirmish that the final film offers him. In an epic fuck-you to Skynet, Marcus gets to be the saviour of the entire human race! It doesn't matter that the real John Connor is dead because the idea of John Connor is what sustains people. ("You trust him. He's got a strength. I'd die for John Connor." – Kyle Reese, The Terminator.) Plus, he can listen to Sarah Connor's tapes to teach him about his 'past', and he's got her picture to inspire Kyle.

But none of this is what I promised in this post title – the single thing that annoyed me most about this movie. Here it is: the plot hinges on the destruction of a Skynet facility that everyone in the human resistance calls "Skynet Central". But THERE IS NO 'CENTRAL' ON A NETWORK!!! They are acting like blowing this place up will be a major disaster for the machines BUT IT JUST WILL NOT! The entire purpose of a network is to survive the destruction of any one point on the network by re-routing through the surviving points. All they have done is set the prototype T-800 development schedule back a little while. NO WONDER THE WAR LASTS ELEVEN MORE YEARS!!!

Ahh, it felt very good to write that.

2011-02-26T19:02:00.000+11:00

Unselfconsciousness in writing. I'm in the middle of copy-editing a PhD thesis, and I just stopped for a quick procrasto-break to read some blogs. And there was this one blog post that seemed so mannered and self-conscious in a way I have really come to dislike. (Don't worry; it wasn't one of yours.)

It's so hard to explain this particular writing style I dislike without feeling vulnerable to being accused of my own pretentious stylings, but here goes: it's heavily first-person, highly aestheticised (lots of adjectives, especially voluptuous ones), self-consciously wry and arch, and balanced precariously between the retro and the right-now. It jumbles up deliberately anachronistic expressions and admiring evocations of old-fashioned pleasures with subcultural argot, pop-cultural references and jocular, internet-tinged slang. You dig, gentlepeeps? Totes!

Also, to me it's a feminine blogging style. The best American lady-bloggers can do it quite naturally, and I blame Australian writers' fawning adoption of American literary styles for its insidious spread here. Personally, I think it fails when it no longer seems like the writer's own voice but rather a 'voice'. You can see the effort it's costing the writer to make it work – like when the water goes clear and you can see the little duck-legs frantically paddling away to create the serene glide across the surface.

Take, for instance, this history of the death ray from The Awl. The writer, Becky Ferreira, has an entertaining style at first, but to me she seems to lose her authority over the material and resorts to making silly, unconvincing jokes. Here's a sampler:

So, yikes! The Allies began to catch wind of all these proto-fascist countries using their geniuses to build electromagnetic warfare, and that wind sure smelled like scary World War Two farts.

But never fear, Allies, because as it turned out, you’re had one hell of a coil yet to shuffle off: Nikola motherfracking Tesla.
Tesla was the bestla. He just was. If you disagree, you are wrong and stupid.

What bothers me about this writing style is that the writer seems deliberately out to impress. A quick glance through these blog archives will tell you I've written some pretty tryhard things in my time (and I know I have a problem with being longwinded and parenthetical, with crappy metaphors, and with stringing together long, involved necklaces of adjectives), but as an editor – and also as a writer – what I aspire to now is the clear, compelling expression of ideas.

I see serious, unselfconscious writing as the definition of elegance. When I say 'seriousness', I don't necessarily mean density, pomposity or humourlessness; seriousness emphasises the act of communication and displays a certain assurance that one's ideas will be respected.

And when I say 'unselfconscious', I mean eschewing the act of performing oneself as a writer. Not pre-empting an imagined reader's criticisms; not using clichés, memes and stylistic quirks for rhetorical effect; and most of all, not refracting everything you write about through the prism of your own experience.

It seems as though many writers believe that once they develop a distinctive 'voice' they will be hired for that voice, rather than for what they write about. Dispiritingly, this often turns out to be true – but I am endlessly frustrated to see writers mistaking self-consciousness for elegance, when I think elegance lies in unselfconscious clarity of expression.

Of course, there are writing gigs where the house style is 'young', or 'ironic', or 'persuasive', and you bend your own style to that. I respect the challenge of working within these constraints. One of the toughest stories I've ever written, tone-wise, was an exegesis of hipsterism and hipster-hating for an audience of 18-25-year-old music magazine readers.

And let me be explicit that I don't seek to iron out the lyrical possibilities of language. I'd be alarmed to find myself in the joyless corner of people who protest that good writing 'shouldn't call attention to itself'.

I've been reading with interest the reaction to Stanley Fish's new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. Fish's book urges us once again to delight in a perfectly crafted sentence, and to develop a feel for the wildly different ways in which a sentence's form and rhythm – not just its content – can speak to us.

As Adam Haslett notes in his Financial Times review of the book, the "vigour" and "brevity" prescribed by influential American editing bible The Elements of Style had the effect of making the terse style of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver (whose prose was notoriously pruned to the point of ghostwriting by editor Gordon Lish) come to define 20th-century 'realism'.

"This is a real loss," Haslett argues, "not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction to “omit needless words” (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem."

It seems ironic to me that what began as an urge for bold, muscular prose should now inspire limp dullness; and as Zsuzsi Gartner writes in Canada's Globe & Mail:

…there are so many 'literary' authors who take no evident joy in the sentence, whose assemblages of subject, verb and predicate are barely living things. Their sentences are drones on a death march, ankles shackled together, one plodding foot in front of the other. Or their drones are perfumed nightmares. Or their drones have a tin ear and, like white men, can’t jump.

My feelings on poetry are not especially generous; however this week I watched the movie Howl and was struck by the way that Allen Ginsberg's poetry depended so much on its rhythms, and on the startling incongruity of his word choices. In the film – which was scripted from interviews with Ginsberg and transcripts from the work's obscenity trial – the poet explains how he came up with some key phrases, notably "Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows".

I am getting off course here, but I mention Howl to bring up that I do appreciate the glamour of the phrase, and that whatever you think of Ginsberg's style, it has a confidence – an energetic, urgent quality – that you just don't find in certain simpering blog prose.

2011-02-21T17:57:00.002+11:00

Getting dangerously close to actual cooking skills. So on Saturdays I like to eat huevos rancheros at North and read the A2. Well, it's not the A2 any more, is it – it's the Life & Style. But since I still contribute to it, I had better not say any more on that front.

Last weekend I was away and would not be able to eat my traditional brunch, so I decided I would cook huevos rancheros for my friends. There were only five of us, so I figured it was doable. Because I am a Shit Cook™ and didn't really time my cooking well, the results were not as piping hot as I would have liked, plus I forgot to cook the chorizo, but it was still pretty delicious!

Here's how I did it.

Mel's Huevos Rancheros

tortillas
eggs
grated cheese
salsa fresca (see recipe below)
bean salsa (see recipe below)
chorizo sausages, chopped on the diagonal into rounds

Grill tortillas until they look toasted and kind of puff up. Put on plates and sprinkle generously with grated cheese. Top with a generous dollop of bean salsa. Fry two eggs per person and nestle them, sunny side up, on the bean salsa. Top with salsa fresca. Garnish with coriander leaves and serve with fried chorizo pieces, hot sauce, and extra cheese and salsa.

Salsa fresca/pico de gallo
1 tomato
1 avocado
1 red capsicum
1/2 red onion
Lazy-man chilli to taste
coriander
squeeze of lemon juice

Chop all ingredients finely (except for the chilli, which has already been helpfully minced by the jar people) and combine in a bowl.

Bean salsa
1 can refried beans
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 brown onion
Lazy-man chilli
Lazy-man garlic
ground cumin

Fry up the onion, chilli and garlic in a saucepan. Add generous shake of cumin. Add the beans and tomatoes and mix until consistency is smooth and even, and the mixture is heated through.

2011-02-21T13:56:00.002+11:00

This is an outrage! For years it was my custom to visit my parents for Sunday night dinner. Then we would all sit down and watch whatever was on the ABC.

And I got into the ridiculous habit of singing along to the theme song from Compass. I think I did it once and made my mother laugh, so I started doing it every week. I would feel such joy when I knew that it was coming up, because I would have two chances (three, if you count the end credits) to nail that faintly Islamic-sounding wail.

So last night I was over there and was all ready for my solo, when I discovered that they have done away with the old theme!

I sat speechless and bewildered through about two seconds of bullshit, before Geraldine Doogue came on and said, "Welcome to the new-look Compass."

As if that wasn't appalling enough, then there was some indulgent, poor-cousin-of-Enough-Rope special where we have to sit back and find out what various Australian celebrities think about the meaning of life. Bah! They get enough airtime as it is! What has happened to the interesting investigations into ethical and religious matters that Compass used to present?

Appalling! I went into the Wild West of the Compass messageboards to see if anyone had complained about this, and was rewarded by a rich feeling of righteousness as I read the following:

On the down side, sorry guys, but I don't like the new music at all. Compass' original theme music is iconic. It is in the same category as the theme music of 4 Corners. You don't change something that good just for a change. I have always loved hearing the Compass music as it felt like a call to soemthing worthwhile to watch on a television landscape that is pretty barren these days. Please bring back the old music! The new sounds like 'dashing through the snow.'

AAAAAEEEOOOAEEEAAAEOHHHH!

2011-02-14T16:37:00.002+11:00

I know, right? There are few things more gratifying than sharing that fierce, bright spark of connection implied in the phrase, "I know, right?"

It can happen when you tell someone an idea or opinion and they fire back, "I know, right?" You get an instant shot of being on the same team. The pair of you both know this thing, together.

This is why I love the moment at 2:08 in the trailer to the forthcoming Green Lantern film, starring Ryan Reynolds. He is just giddy with exhilaration.

Having this knowledge that you have truly communicated – been witnessed and understood – is a powerful feeling. In this world, it's so easy to feel that your thoughts – the markers of your Cartesian identity, your total selfhood – simply vanish unheard or are frustratingly misunderstood. When you can't communicate, you can't feel valued.

2011-01-27T22:33:00.004+11:00

Possibly the nerdiest thing I have ever done. So I was into music when I was at school. I played clarinet in the orchestra and the wind symphony, sang in three different a capella choirs, and played piano in a shit jazz band called Thingy. (I feel entitled to call it shit, seeing as I wrote most of our repertoire.)

So when I hit university and there were various clubs you could join, I innocently thought I'd join a music club. Nobody had taken me aside, you see, and told me that only the nerdiest nerds joined interest-based clubs at university. I forget what the actual club was called, but we were basically the RMIT band. Most of the students were utter nerds – computer science and electronic engineering students, etc.

Now in musical terms, a 'band' basically means a symphonic band or a brass band – ie, made up of wind, brass and percussion instruments. However, we had to make do with whatever the people who'd signed up at the start of the year played. We had some traditional orchestral instruments, some brass, some woodwind – I seem to recall we had a surfeit of flutes – and so we had to sort of assign certain parts to whichever players we happened to have.

We used to rehearse once a week in a sort of multifunction room. I remember that one lady was in charge; she would bring the sheet music and we would practise several different pieces. I don't think I lasted more than a semester in this group, and we only performed once that I remember. It was at lunchtime in the RMIT caf. I seem to recall feeling very ashamed to tell my coolsie advertising mates about this gig, but they showed up anyway and stood in front of us, smirking.

I was just thinking about this tonight because I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the theme song was familar. This reminded me… are you ready, this is the nerdiest thing I have ever done… that one of the pieces we played was a medley of various Star Trek theme songs!

Not being an intense nerd, not all of them were familiar to me. My favourite was Voyager, which has a great trumpet solo and I seem to recall we actually had a trumpet player. This was his/her time to shine.

I think this might be the actual medley we played. We probably sounded as hilariously bad as this poor old community choir – and they had all the instruments! (In my opinion they were better at the Star Wars medley.)

2011-01-16T12:47:00.003+11:00

My day on a plate. It sometimes amuses me to imagine how my lifestyle would be portrayed in those ridiculous magazine segments that are designed for people to show off about how virtuous their lives are. It's the same enjoyment I get from defying 'foodie culture' by blogging my Shit Cooking™ recipes.

Back when my favourite intellectual journal, Sunday Life, ran a fitness test for 'ordinary people', I would fantasise enjoyably about how abjectly, hilariously low I would score on such a test. Sometimes I debate whether I should photograph my entire house, in all its banality and messiness, then blog it as a parody of those Apartment Therapy/Design Files tours through the homes of 'creative people'. (But then I feel uncomfortable about offering randoms off the internet a comprehensive picture of my personal space.)

Today I have decided to offer you an insight into my life by completing the Sunday Life "My Day On A Plate" segment. This is what I ate yesterday.

3pm I meant to get to my favourite cafe, North, much earlier than this, but I sat down at my computer to 'check on my eBay auction' and ended up doing some blogging. I had huevos rancheros – otherwise known as black beans, cheese, fried eggs and salsa on tortillas with some corn, chopped-up chorizo and avocado. I also had two glasses of water and two lattes – one before the meal and one afterwards.

6pm I went to check the Enthusiast post office box in Prahran and it was disgustingly hot, so while I was waiting for the tram home, I bought a medium-size Slurpee from the Sev – half cola and half 'mixed berries' flavour.

7pm Got home, destroyed from the heat. Had a large glass of iced water and a glass of verdelho from the Meredith goon bag in the fridge. Fell into more blogging.

9pm Holy shit, I have forgotten to eat dinner. Made a salad: lettuce grown in the school garden where my mother teaches; cherry tomatoes; avocado; cucumber; artichokes; crumbled Mersey Valley cheese; vinaigrette dressing. Had another glass of verdelho while I started to watch Misfits, the British TV series everyone has been raving about.

2am Have now watched four episodes of Misfits and got through another two glasses of verdelho. Was saved from further eating only by the fact that McDonald's does not do home delivery.

Humourless nutritionist says:*

Mel should definitely be eating breakfast and lunch. It is ridiculous that she didn't eat or drink anything until mid-afternoon – no wonder she was tired and thirsty later on! She should steer clear of coffee as it will also dehydrate her. The beans are a good source of energy and the tortillas are low GI, but the chorizo is too fatty and Mel should consider poached rather than fried eggs. Slurpees are really just sugar and Mel should choose water instead. A salad was a good dinner option, but it was eaten too late at night – Mel should have eaten it at 7pm when she got home. Cheese and avocado are fatty and Mel should put some quinoa in her salad, because I always advocate adding quinoa to just about any dish. It is a whole grain and has a low GI, even though it is as tasteless as horse oats. Mel should also cut down on her wine intake – one glass is the recommended daily alcohol intake for women. By drinking wine at home, Mel may also have been drinking more than one standard drink per glass.

* This is probably bullshit. My knowledge of nutrition is largely gained from reading various trend-based stories in newspapers, Sunday Life, women's magazines, and that time I was made to study responsible drinking at the Australian Drug Foundation.

2011-01-12T15:53:00.004+11:00

The maiden voyage of the All Terrain Cat Vehicle. You may recall that last August, I did some crap domestic hackwork. Among my proudest hacks was when I found a wheelframe on the street and decided to turn it into the base for an All Terrain Cat Vehicle.

The project languished at this point because I was always on the lookout for a long handle from a child's toy to steer the damn thing with, but I never found one (probably because the places I was looking were 'op shops' and 'hard rubbish').

But matters came to a head! Over Christmas I had custody of my brother Matt's car, and I decided to use this opportunity to finally get Graham up to date with all his vaccinations. On the bright side, Graham turns out not to have cat AIDS. But on the dark side, the FIV vaccination procedure requires a course of three shots, so I would need to bring Graham back to the vet twice more in a month.

Last week I had to give Matt's car back, so I was not looking forward to lugging five kilos of cat, plus the weight of the carrier. I only live 600m away from the vet, but it feels much further when you're as unfit as I am, and in this disgusting humidity. So today was the day! The fateful day when I would debut the ATCV!

Here it is, sitting on my front verandah after its first outing – I was too wrecked to bring it inside.

I went to the local hardware store and picked up three octopus straps – two 60cm ones and one 75cm one. The smaller ones I used to lash the cat carrier to the frame, although I decided to turn it backwards to the way it is displayed in the earlier pic. This was so I could attach the steering strap to the rail on the wheelbase.

The unforeseen consequence of this, however, was that once the carrier was lashed in place, the wheelbase rail prevented the door from opening completely. However, Graham could still get in – and be dragged out, scruff-first, by the vet.

I had gaffer-taped the steering strap in place to offer more stability, but I quickly discovered when I tried to steer that what I really need is a rigid stick that can twist and turn at one end, not a cord that's flexible all the way along. The vehicle moved beautifully in a straight line, but it was hard to turn or alter course quickly, and sometimes it moved faster than I did, bumping into the backs of my legs. I found myself trotting along beside it rather than leading it sedately from the front, as I had imagined doing.

For the unsecured occupant, traversing the ordinary footpaths and cobbled lanes of my neighbourhood, and occasionally bumping into me, must have been like four-wheel-driving through rough woodland terrain. When I got to the vet, I was very contrite to observe a scratch on Graham's nose. However, he was relatively quiet compared to the hysterical miaowing display he puts on in a car.

On the whole, it was far easier and more enjoyable than carrying Graham there. I was worried about looking like an absolute lunatic to any passers-by, but they seemed impressed, if anything. "Hello, kitty!" said a passing child, and an old man commented genially, "I should be getting around like that." The vet told me that it was the most impressive cat vehicle he's seen, but he is no doubt skilled in the arts of pandering to crazy cat ladies.

However, I still ended up back home feeling exhausted and putting on the kettle for a soothing cup of tea, because about halfway home the rain decided to hammer down. Alarmed, Graham mewled within the carrier, but he was relatively dry when we got home. Not me. I just had to cop the downpour – on my freshly washed hair! my white T-shirt! – because I had no hand free to manage an umbrella as well as the vehicle.

2011-01-05T11:53:00.005+11:00

Unfortunate business names. I have never kept an official list of these, but from time to time a business name strikes me as really counterproductive for the sort of image the business is trying to project.

Now, it seems to me that businesses are very confused about the connotations of rustic words such as 'shack' and 'hut'. It's appropriate to pick up a drink from Shake Shack or a pizza from Pizza Hut, because convenience foods and drinks have traditionally been purveyed from ramshackle stalls.

However, the business that provoked this blog post was an establishment called Kitchen Shack. Why would you ever seek out a durable, well built kitchen from a building that isn't even durable or well built? Also, Sunglass Hut. Why would you shell out hundreds of dollars for eyewear from a dodgy-sounding 'hut'? You'd only spend $5 on such eyewear in a similar hut in Bali or Phuket.

Some of the worst offenders are women's body hair removal products. We all know (and chortle about) Nad's – to remove the hair from your nads – but how about Julienne? Jesus Christ, when I'm ripping hair from delicate areas of my body, I do not want to be reminded of finely sliced vegetables.

Other random inappropriately named brands: Nitsa hairdressers on Nicholson St North Carlton; Bambi Leathergoods on Swanston St Carlton; hawker-style Asian restaurant Norsiah's Kitchen; CBD Indian restaurant Funky Curry; Be Yourself makeup and fake fingernails.

2010-12-28T22:10:00.002+11:00

Quiz questions. Over Christmas dinner my mother casually mentioned how family board games always ended badly when I was a kid because I hated losing. This is true. Oh the tantrums I would throw. I still feel very ashamed of a tantrum I threw only in 2007 or so, over a loss at Scrabble to journalist Craig Mathieson.

These days, I try not to enter into competitions I'm not confident of being able to win. As that great sage Homer Simpson once said, "Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try."

I've recently got into an iPhone quiz app called QRANK. As the name implies, it's explicitly about ranking your quiz-answering abilities with those of your friends, people in your area, etc. Since I'm generally pretty good at trivia, I was looking forward to it, but I'm fast getting disillusioned because the questions are so specific to American culture.

There's a difference between possessing the general knowledge about American history, politics and culture that comes with US cultural imperialism, and being familiar with specific players and incidents in US pro football and hockey, or the senators who proposed particular pieces of legislation.

But anyway. The standard riposte to whinges such as mine is, "Well why don't YOU write some quiz questions?" Reader, I did. I wrote a round of trivia questions for the New Matilda fundraising quiz night, under the theme "Pop Tragedies". I thought it might be fun to post them here – answers are at the end. Online quizzing hasn't been this much fun since Which Poo Are You?

1. Which former teen idol, known for his work in The NeverEnding Story II and the TV series SeaQuest DSV, committed suicide by hanging in 2003, at the age of 27?
A: Jonathan Taylor Thomas
B: Casper Van Dien
C: Jonathan Brandis
D: Brad Renfro

2. Which Judd Apatow-produced TV series, which followed a group of teenage misfits, was cancelled after only one season and now has a cult following?
A: Parker Lewis Can’t Lose
B: Freaks And Geeks
C: Popular
D: My So-Called Life

3. The lyrics “It’s a tragedy for me to see the dream is over” were strangely prophetic for the group in question, who were stripped of their Grammy Award after revealing they had not sung any of their hits. Who are they, and which of their hits are these lyrics from?
A: ‘I'll Be Loving You (Forever)’ by New Kids On The Block
B: ‘All 4 Love’ by Color Me Badd
C: ‘Girl, I'm Gonna Miss You’ by Milli Vanilli
D: ‘I’ve Been Thinking About You’ by Londonbeat

4. Which of these musicians was not killed in the plane crash that Don McLean would later dub “the day the music died”?
A: Buddy Holly
B: Otis Redding
C: Ritchie Valens
D: The Big Bopper

5: Which portly comedian and Saturday Night Live alumnus died from an accidental overdose of combined cocaine and heroin?
A: John Belushi
B: Chris Farley
C: Both A and B
D: John Candy

6. Which song did the Bee Gees’ ‘Tragedy’ knock from its number-one perch on the Billboard Hot 100 charts in 1979?
A: ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor
B: ‘My Sharona’ by the Knack
C: ‘Bad Girls’ by Donna Summer
D: ‘What A Fool Believes’ by the Doobie Brothers

7. Which Old Hollywood star, name-checked in Madonna’s song ‘Vogue’, died of kidney failure aged only 26?
A: Marilyn Monroe
B: Grace Kelly
C: Jean Harlow
D: Rita Hayworth

8. And which star, also mentioned in ‘Vogue’, was caught up in a major scandal in 1958 when her boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, who had ties to the LA mob, was stabbed to death by her 14-year-old daughter?
A: Greta Garbo
B: Bette Davis
C: Lana Turner
D: Lauren Bacall

9. Which of these famous women did not die of breast cancer?
A: Dusty Springfield
B: Linda McCartney
C: Belinda Emmett
D: Gilda Radner

10. Which veteran American comedienne is the only star of The Golden Girls still living?
A: Rue McClanahan
B: Betty White
C: Estelle Getty
D: Bea Arthur

11. When this pop star was revealed to be lip-syncing her performance on Saturday Night Live in October 2004, she reacted with a bizarre impromptu jig before fleeing the stage. Who is she?
A: Ashlee Simpson
B: Betty Boo
B: Britney Spears
C: Jessica Simpson

12. The “Jr” after which celebrity’s name has a tragic backstory, because his stand-up comedian dad died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound when he was just a baby?
A: Harry Connick, Jr
B: Robert Downey, Jr
C: Sammy Davis, Jr
D: Freddie Prinze, Jr

13. Which Australian soap star once infamously got trashed at the Logies and waved her underpants over her head at the after party?
A: Holly Valance
B: Emma Harrison
C: Kimberley Davies
D: Stephanie McIntosh

14. What was the filling of the partly eaten sandwich that was found in the hotel room where Mama Cass Elliot died, leading to the urban myth that she had choked to death on it?
A: Ham
B: Vegemite
C: Peanut butter and jelly
D: Salad

15. Which of these mismatched celebrity marriages is still going strong?
A: 23-year-old actress Evan Rachel Wood and 41-year-old weirdo goth-rocker Marilyn Manson
B: Hollywood superstar Sandra Bullock and tattooed motorbike mechanic Jesse James
C: Buxom Mad Men star Christina Hendricks and dweeby indie bit-player Jeffrey Arend
D: Big-voiced pop strumpet Christina Aguilera and simian music producer Jordan Bratman

16. Which of these near-death episodes involving a Neighbours starlet is false?
A: Kym Valentine, who played Libby Kennedy, was rushed to hospital in 2008 after contracting severe pneumonia on a flight from New York.
B: Madeleine West, who played Dione Bliss, was hit by a bus in Oxford Street, Sydney in 2002, then robbed as she lay unconscious.
C: Delta Goodrem, who played Nina Tucker, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2003.
D: Kym Valentine, who played Libby Kennedy, was rushed to hospital in July this year after doctors discovered a blood clot on her lung.
E: None – they’re all true

17. Which controversial British singer has now suffered two miscarriages: in January 2008 and November 2010?
A: Amy Winehouse
B: Lily Allen
C: M.I.A.
D: Posh Spice

18: What’s the name of the truly tragic, deservedly short-lived Australian sitcom from 1994 about a talking dog?
A: The Rob Emerson Show
B: The Andy Anderson Show
C: The Greg Harrison Show
D: The Bob Morrison Show

19. The treacly 1975 easy listening song ‘Wildfire’ is about a girl who goes looking for her lost pet “on a cold Nebraska night” and dies of exposure. What kind of animal was Wildfire?
A: A kitten
B: A tortoise
C: A horse
D: A dog

20. Interviewed immediately after 9/11, boy-band member Lee Ryan said, “Who gives a fuck about New York when elephants are being killed?” What was the name of Lee’s band, whose career he instantly doomed?
A: A1
B: Blue
C: Five
D: East 17

Answers:
1: C. 2: B. 3: C. 4: B (although he also died in a plane crash). 5: C. 6: A. 7: C. 8: C. 9: D (she died of ovarian cancer). 10: B. 11: A. 12: D. 13: B. 14: A. 15: C. 16: E. 17: B. 18: D. 19: C. 20: B.

2010-12-05T17:03:00.011+11:00

4 non-blondes. Quite a few people have told me recently that my hair is 'strawberry blonde'. I find this weird, because I consider my hair colour at the moment to be 'red', whereas my real hair colour is closer to what I understand strawberry blonde to be.

Here I am this afternoon, looking like Chopper Read:

And here is my 'real' hair:

Clearly these pics have been chosen purely because of the hair. The second one actually depicts me attempting to demonstrate 'emo hair' on a humid summer night.

I am quite happy with my hair colour right now. Regular readers of this blog will recall the lurid pinkish shade I achieved back in May with LiveColour Red Embers.

Worst of all, it was very badly applied, as this outtake from my jmag photo shoot reveals.

So I threw myself upon the mercy of Stanley, my hairdresser – or, rather, his colourist – back in August. I requested the illusion of being a real ranga, which I've topped up with Aztec Copper when my roots were starting to show. The colour I most recently requested was 'summery real ranga', which is slightly lighter. Perhaps this is the source of the 'strawberry blonde' comparisons.

My dictionary defines strawberry blonde as "a light reddish-blonde colour". Apparently it's also known as "Venetian blonde". I think of it as the colour that you sometimes see on redheads when they get bored of being redheads and want to go blonde (although apparently Cynthia Nixon is a fake ranga like me).

(As an aside, the glassy, posed quality of that Nicole Kidman pic inescapably reminds me of those glamour pics you sometimes see of pedigree cats.)

Perhaps people's idea of hair colour has been confused by the hair-colouring industry. When you look at the names of the packet dye colours, I am surprised by how dark a colour they will refer to as 'blonde'. For instance, this is "Golden Copper Blonde":

Whereas I would call it "pale red". I think it looks more natural, because in my obsessive, participant-observer field study of rangas, I've noticed that not many people with naturally red hair have a bright carroty colour or a coppery auburn, much less the fire-engine colour that is also thought of as 'red'. Rather, they have amber or pale copper-coloured hair.

For instance, check out these two pictures of Ann-Margret. On the left, I'd definitely say she's strawberry blonde. In the pic on the right, she looks much more like a redhead.

I have taken the liberty of drafting a Celebrity Ranga Swatch Chart. Click on it to see it in its full-size glory. Note that I've included the celebrity's eye so that you see how different eye colours, eyebrow colours and skin colours work with the red hair.

Of course, there is no one definitive colour swatch for people's hair. It will show up different colours if they tinker with the colour, have washed it or put products in it, or are in different lights that bring out different tones in their hair. But some things I'd like to point out are Lily Cole's relatively yellow skin tone and Amy Adams's relatively peachy one, and the almost rose-gold tones in Deborah Ann Woll's hair, compared to the more auburn tones in Lauren Ambrose's.

I still think Christina Hendricks has the hair colour I'm after, but I really do admire Rupert Grint's hair. No wonder he grew it.

2010-11-20T15:58:00.003+11:00

Sobbing syllables. Today I was in North, desultorily eating my huevos rancheros with a hangover, and there was a small child at the next table who was swinging around in one of the Saarinen Tulip chairs while her dad sat opposite. She was making it twirl round and round like playground equipment. Which it isn't, so eventually it tipped over, taking her with it.

"Oh god, here we go!" I thought, anticipating the inevitable crying. Although sometimes the kid doesn't cry until the adult makes a fuss. Unfortunately, this kid did start crying, and I found the syllable she was using for her sobs unbelievably irritating.

"Heeeee!" she sobbed. "Heeeeeee! Heeeeee! Heeeeeee!"

This made me ponder the most annoying syllables that you can use to sob with. Last time I sobbed (yesterday), I don't think I used syllables – I just kind of gasped for breath. But you can go "Hoo hoo hoooo," "Aaah haaa haaaa," or, as memorably recounted in Sonya Hartnett's Butterfly, "Her her her."

I consulted world-champion crier, Julianne Moore, and she mainly sobs without syllables except for a truly abject "Aaaaaah" right at the end of this montage:

I still think that for sheer irritation value, this child wins.

2010-11-11T23:43:00.003+11:00

It's because of you that we can't have nice things. A while ago we got the handyman to come around and chisel free the front bedroom windows, which had been painted shut. I have spent five miserably hot summers in this room thinking the window just didn't open, and I had been looking forward to finally getting some cool breeze.

And of course Graham has to fuck everything up.

Because I don't want to be stuck with thousands of dollars in vet fees if Graham gets into a cat fight, I don't let him outside after dark. This means that I can't keep the house open at night in summer, when the temperature drops and I desperately want to let the hot air out.

I asked the real estate agent if we could get screen doors. She said we could on the back door, but not on the front as it would "ruin the period facade". We are also about the only house in the street without bars on the windows. Instead we have flywire screens that don't fit the windows and are attached to the frame solely by a little clip on each side.

So the little bastard has spent the last few hours sitting in my bedroom window, scratching at the ill-fitting flywire and trying to burrow out underneath it while I was trying to finish off my marking. He just wouldn't leave the damn window alone, so I have had to close it just to get some motherfucking peace and quiet.

You can tell from my language that I am what my mother used to call 'overtired'.

Other nice things I can't have because of Graham:

Couches!

Flowers! He burrows his head into the bouquet and knocks it over, bruising the flowers and drenching and ruining any nearby books, magazines or newspapers.

Porcelain and glass vases! Because he is always knocking the vase over and has already broken one, I had to invest in some metal vases.

Apartments! Graham needs outdoor space because sometimes he refuses to use his litter tray for mysterious reasons.

Houses on main roads! Because he is an idiot who likes to crawl under parked cars and lie in the middle of the road. This is all right in my cul-de-sac. But basically I don't trust him not to kill himself anywhere else.

Holidays! I guess I could put him in a cattery, which is basically like cat jail. But at least it's secure. Any other catsitting option leaves me sick with worry and unable to enjoy my time away.

Christmas decorations! I got my own tree for the first time last year, but basically I ended up decorating it with a selection of cat toys. Balls. Shiny things. String things. Bird things.

Every time I left the house I would come home and there would be decorations strewn across the floor.

He was onto the damn thing the second I started to put it up. Look at the little bastard. He knows he's doing something bad.

My mother says, "When he does something bad, just spray him with a spray bottle!" She says this as if I am some kind of godlike creature who can be everywhere at once, like Vishnu with a spray bottle in all four hands.

2010-11-07T23:26:00.003+11:00

Clean nylon. Today I did some domestic labour. I changed the sheets on my bed, vacuumed the whole house (which includes the tedious task of shaking the dust from the fuckurri rug), wiped down the benches and tables, and loaded, hung out and brought in a load of washing.

Because I wanted to wash my black towel without getting black lint everywhere, I did a load of dark-coloured clothes. This included two of my slips – a black one and a dark blue one. They are the old-fashioned kind of petticoat in slippery nylon, trimmed with lace. When I wear them, I feel like Elizabeth Taylor in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

(Obviously I do not look like Elizabeth Taylor.)

Anyway, as I was folding them to put them away again, I caught a whiff of a clean nylon smell, and more than anything else it reminded me of ballet tutus – that crisp tulle smell.

Since I am like a Proust Machine™, even the most unlikely scents can trigger long, indulgent wallows in childhood nostalgia. So of course, I started to think about my childhood ballet concerts. Certain other scents can do that – hairspray; the smell of a particular frosted pale pink lipstick that my mother would always put on me; and, of course, the smell of tutus.

I both adored and slightly dreaded ballet concerts. On one hand, I loved learning actual dances rather than just the technical steps necessary to pass each grade. I loved the pageantry of the dances, the music and costumes, being on stage and performing under hot lights, and the glamour of being in the theatre with a throng of dancers bustling in and out of costume.

I loved dress rehearsal day, sitting in the darkened theatre to watch the other classes' dances (my ballet school taught classical, jazz, folkdance, tap and 'contemporary', at junior, intermediate and senior levels). I was just as fanciful as a kid as I am now, and I wish I could explain how magical some of the music sounded when heard from backstage. There was one routine set to the Waltz from Aram Khachaturian's Masquerade, a piece of music I found absolutely thrilling.

Also, I used to collect sequins that I found backstage and in the dressing rooms. I am quite embarrassed admitting this now. I used to keep the sequins in a tiny plastic heart-shaped box I had acquired somehow, and from time to time I would spread them out on a flat surface and admire them.

The grand finale of each year's concert was always the Senior Jazz routine. The jazz dancers seemed impossibly glamorous to me in their beige fishnets, T-bar stiletto sandals and absurdly high-cut leotards. I longed to study jazz because this was the '80s – the time of Solid Gold and the Swagman restaurant's famous floor show.

I was not allowed. I'm not sure if this was a financial thing or a snobbery thing. Jazz ballet was certainly on my mother's long list of things I was not allowed to have because they were 'trashy', which also included jelly sandals, just about every zeitgeisty toy of the decade, and those pencilcases with the little windows into which you inserted letters that spelled out your name.

For me, clean nylon also smells of my mother's anxiety. Parents made all the costumes (I don't know what you did if you couldn't sew) and I would be dragged from my bed on the nights before the concert and made to stand sleepily on the kitchen table as my mother jabbed me with pins and hissed, "BE STILL!" in the kind of voice you would use on a disobedient dog.

I would also have my hair roughly brushed, pulled into a painfully tight bun that was secured with a hairnet and bobby pins, and then sprayed to within an inch of its life. When I look at photos of my ballet concerts, everyone else's bun is on the back of their head or, at most, at the back of the crown, whereas mine is always right on top of my head, like a dumpling.

My mother would also find plenty else to yell at me about – for instance, my inability to avoid blinking during an application of mascara – and we would inevitably be running late for the concert, which resulted in a tense drive to the theatre.

But of course, after the concert all the stress would have evaporated and my parents would meet me in the foyer after my performance. Dad would be jolly and buy me a Peppermint Crisp bar, and my mother, smelling of Tea Rose perfume, would say my port de bras was much better than the other students'.

2010-10-25T23:20:00.002+11:00

Quietness of the mind. You often hear about how struggling first-time authors managed to fit in writing their books around their jobs, or raising kids, or both. They get up super-early to do some writing in the morning, before anyone else is awake. They write late into the night, after everyone is asleep.

You also hear about writers' retreats. Hannah Kent recently wrote a two-part essay for the Killings blog about her experience with these. I've been on two – last year's organised by Leanne, and this year's, which I organised. I enjoyed them very much and found them very productive. They are as close as I've come to a holiday in years.

What these things are really about is finding a time and/or place to cultivate quietness of the mind.

Perhaps some people are brilliant enough to write lucidly and intelligently during their ordinary working days, even as they juggle various other work projects, domestic responsibilities, social interactions and administrative tasks. I am not one of those people. When I feel overwhelmed I yearn for absolute stillness and quietness.

I know that it's unrealistic to stage a retreat from the everyday; I have to find pockets of quietness in ordinary life. But it's just so hard. I feel so incredibly wearied and weighed down by all my day-t0-day work – not to mention all the admin it necessitates – that I never seem to achieve the necessary mental quietness to consider an essay question.

It's so frustrating, because I have all these essay ideas and am always too busy or full of mental cacophony to follow through on them, yet essay-writing is what I really love to do. I feel so annoyed at the terrible, dashed-off crap that's all I'm able to bang out with the mental resources at my disposal. (Apologies to any readers who may have commissioned/enjoyed said crap.) I know I'm capable of so much better. I feel like a high-performance car stuck in traffic.

I feel that it's up to me to find the quiet in my mind, and I feel angry at myself for not being able to do it. I know other people manage far heavier workloads than mine. And it shouldn't be this hard, because I have pretty much pared my life down to work. I don't have any children or love life. I find socialising increasingly exhausting. I do domestic chores such as cleaning, shopping, cooking and bill-paying as infrequently as I can get away with. Work always seems more important.

The only times I feel any real peace are when I take a book (or the A2) to a café. It's just me, some food, some coffee and my reading. I seem to recall that was the fantasy of Julianne Moore's character in The Hours – she who booked a hotel room to sit and read her book. I can see the book from here but it's pretty far down the stack and I can't be bothered trying to get it out, Jenga-style.

2010-10-24T19:11:00.003+11:00

Wholesome, strollsome Sunday. Last weekend, when I probably should have been doing work, I created an iPod playlist of songs at walking pace. Or, more precisely, I enlarged and organised this playlist. Today, I had my first go of using it.

I pretty much always have my iPod on shuffle. Whenever I'm walking somewhere, listening to my iPod, and I notice that the current song suits my walking pace, I'll add it to my 'On-The-Go' playlist, then every time I plug the iPod into my computer I transfer these songs to my 'Walking Pace' playlist.

I downloaded a BPM counter so I could organise the songs into an arc of gradually increasing, then decreasing BPM. The slowest song is my 'cool-down' song, 'The Things We Do For Love', at 106 BPM. My sweet spot is between 110 and 115 BPM, which gets me into a jaunty, Leonardo DiCaprio-esque strut. The fastest song used to be 'How Will I Know' by Whitney Houston, but today when I tried walking to it, at 118 BPM I found it a bit too much like a workout for my liking.

The playlist is a work in progress; at the moment it goes for 1.4 hours and consists of:

Black Sweat – Prince
Life In The Fast Lane – The Eagles
Hungry Eyes – Eric Carmen
Kim & Jessie – M83
Lovefool – The Cardigans
There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) – Eurythmics
Never Gonna Give You Up – Rick Astley
Say It Isn't So – Hall & Oates
Rock With You – Michael Jackson
Promised You A Miracle – Simple Minds
Hella Good – No Doubt
Black Or White – Michael Jackson
Fences – Phoenix
What Have You Done For Me Lately – Janet Jackson
Caribbean Queen – Billy Ocean
Under Pressure – David Bowie and Queen
House Of Cards – Radiohead
Flashback – Kelis
Who's Johnny – El DeBarge
Damn Girl – Justin Timberlake
The Things We Do For Love – 10CC

Clearly the '80s were a prime decade for my walking pace.

Given it's a lovely day today, and that yesterday I hacked a pair of pancake-soled Rubi Shoes by gluing the soles from a pair of rubber thongs to them, I decided to test out my newly comfortable shoes on an epic walk.

Walking without any particular destination in mind is not a regular habit for me. I was actually quite bewildered about where I would walk to. I had already gone to North yesterday, and thanks to the fug of shame in which I live my life, I try not to frequent the same venue more than once a week in order to mitigate my paranoia that the staff think I'm a loser.

Anyway, I'd heard there were some new cafés up towards the end of the 96 tram line, and even though I am a creature of habit and the prospect of going somewhere new made me deeply uneasy, I decided to walk to one of them.

I started the playlist at 'There Must Be An Angel', and it took me until 'Hella Good' to reach Pope Joan. The food and coffee was quite good – I had "The Cornish", a delicious chicken sandwich, and then I also had a slice of hummingbird cake, which came with an intriguing pink cream that turned out to have strawberries in it. While eating I read my book, The Half-Child, which was my share of our second-prize haul at the Kill Your Darlings literary trivia night.

Then I walked back down Nicholson Street to the (now deleted) strains of 'How Will I Know', and by the time 'Black Or White' was beginning, I'd decided to pop into Second Hand Lane Way, a vintage shop much frequented by Gemma and Renée when they lived in Canning Street. I spent $5 on a pair of pearl and diamante clip-on earrings, to which I plan to attach a chain and turn them into sweater clips, seeing as I own 16 cardigans and like to wear them unbuttoned.

Then I walked home. It took me until 'House Of Cards'. Then I sat in the back yard and finished off my book. It was a pleasant day, and I can virtuously claim to have got some exercise, too.

2010-10-20T23:32:00.002+11:00

Remembering The Man From Snowy River. When I was a kid we taped this movie off the TV and I would have watched it dozens of times.

It seems like such a freakish production for the Australian film industry because it was so unashamedly epic and mainstream. I can't believe they enticed Kirk Douglas to be in it.

When we watched it as kids, there were certain moments we always loved and anticipated every time:

During the colt-taming montage, there is a hilarious close-up of Jim's (Tom Burlinson) arse sinking delicately into the saddle for the first time.
Harrison (Douglas) is threatening to send his daughter Jessica (Sigrid Thornton) away to boarding school. "The Presbyterian Ladies' College? I won't go!" she retorts, earning a fatherly slap across the face. We liked this because PLC was my school.
During the climactic muster at the end, Jim pauses his horse for a while, then spurs it on with a noise like "Ha! Tsss!" We always used to find this exquisitely hilarious.
In the same sequence, there was a scene where the horsemen splash across a river. I seem to recall that some of them fell off at that point.

This never occurred to me at the time, but there is a fairly obvious and obnoxious parallel between Jessica and the colt. Both are 'spirited', and there are men who want to crush the spirit of both, but Jim understands and is attracted to the value of 'spiritedness' in both woman and horse.

At the end of the film, Jim brings the entire mob of brumbies to Harrison (Douglas), telling him he'll be back to claim some brood mares, "and whatever else is mine [meaningful gaze at Jessica]."

How about get fucked? Instead, we got The Man From Snowy River II.

Don't even get me started on The Silver Brumby, another high-country brumby movie that our family loved, and possibly still the crowning glory of Russell Crowe's career. Hilariously, some genius on the internet has made audio grabs of the lines that we used to love quoting to each other, so you can now join in this proud tradition:

"I've got your daughter now, silver devil!"

"Monday is washing day, is every doggie happy"

"She came back to me, silver horse! Hahahahahahaha!"

2010-10-17T12:18:00.002+11:00

One Hundred And One Persians. I read this story in the paper this morning about how the Cat Protection Society of Victoria is trying to oust one of its directors, Jasmine Alexandra, because she had the temerity to think that the fact the society euthanased 90 per cent of the cats left in its care in 2009 was, maybe, an alarming statistic.

Less than 9 per cent of the cats received were adopted; the rest were reclaimed by their owners.

In the same year, the RSPCA adopted out 30 per cent of the cats and kittens it received, and euthanased 56 per cent of them.

The previous year, 2008, the Cat Protection Society's Greensborough shelter also managed to adopt out more than 30 per cent of the cats it received, and had only killed 63 per cent.

So, as a concerned cat lady who is also fond of satire (SATIRE!), I don't think The Age is looking for answers in the right place. Is there, perhaps, a larger-than-life fashion designer whose use of fur is controversial?

You know those Adriatic Furniture ads with Lillian Frank? I am kind of picturing a similar, cartoonish scenario in which our Cruella de Vil picks up handfuls of fluffy kittens… "You'll stay with me… you're the pick of the litter!"

2010-10-17T11:56:00.003+11:00

Raisin toast. What, you thought my only stupid songs were directed at my cat? Well check this little rhyme that I like to call 'Raisin Toast', in honour of some toast that I just made.

Raisin toast
It's what I want most
Raisin toast
It's the toast I like most
I've got a cravin'
For plump, juicy raisins

That's pretty much as far as I got. Mainly it was gleefully buttering my toast while muttering to myself, "Raisin toast, it's what I want most…"

Well, I don't call them 'intelligent' songs.

However, while I'm here, I am rather proud of a Stupid Cat Song I came up with a week or so ago. Usually I just sing them a couple of times and then forget all about them, but this one I've even sung in the shower. There are a couple of verses missing – this is all I made up.

Fluffy Fat Cat (in the style of Jimmy Barnes)

Miaowing hard to make his owner
Leave her shelter from the rain
A hungry one left to carry on
Brown Whiskas in his veins
Whoa, he's a fluffy fat cat

Well he loves a little sofa
On which he sheds his fur
And when his owner sits on it
Sometimes he sits on her
Whoa, he's a fluffy fat cat

HE'S A FLUFFY FAT CAT!
YES HE IS!
NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
I TELL YA HE'S A FLUFFY FAT CAT!

2010-10-10T01:49:00.003+11:00

Ode to North Melbourne.

North Melbourne!
Worst suburb in Melbourne
Fuck I hate you!
The only good thing you have ever offered me
is Graham
Who, of course, I rescued from you
I used to live in you
and it was inconvenient and awful
It was the unhappiest time of my life
I didn't even live in the bit of you with the supermarket
I had to trudge up and down a fucking hill to get groceries

North Melbourne!
When I wanted to meet my friends
in Brunswick: I had to trudge through Royal Park
in Carlton: I had to trudge through Royal Park and then through Melbourne University
in Fitzroy or Collingwood or Northcote:
Well, I had to get a tram into the city and then another tram
Basically, North Melbourne, you are not on the way to anywhere I want to go
except the city
You are an absolute fag-end of a suburb

Just as I moved out and thought I could pretend you never existed
Seeing as I didn't have to go anywhere near you in my day-to-day life
We got an office in an Arts Precinct and I had to work in you
and it was inconvenient and awful
The quickest way to get to work
was to walk for 35 minutes
and there were no decent lunch venues
within easy walking distance
I had to trudge up a fucking hill to get lunch
which was shit anyway
Seeing as half the food venues are closed at any given time of day or night

North Melbourne!
The tram that runs through you is the second worst tram in Melbourne
The 57
(The worst tram being the 78)
Your 'main street' exists away from through traffic
in a Bermuda Triangle
It is like a main street bizarrely cut-and-pasted in from a country town
The shops don't sell anything I would possibly want to buy

North Melbourne!
It is impossible to find a taxi in you at 1am
At these times I don't have words for how much I fucking loathe you
Taxi drivers are sensible men
who would never voluntarily visit you
although sometimes they drive down Curzon Street
fast enough for me to see their lights but not be able to run and catch them
When I finally manage to find a taxi
And it drives across that blessed Swanston Street frontier
Sheer relief floods me

View I Hate Walking in a larger map

Once I tried to catch a taxi home from your equally awful neighbour
West Melbourne
In broad daylight
There were no taxis, of course
Which is the way in these parts
I decided to start walking until a taxi came past
I walked and walked and there were no taxis
Despite the fact I know the taxi depot is right around the corner
I walked 1.6km before I gave up and caught the tram

North Melbourne!
If you were bombed from the face of this town
It would make no difference
It would possibly even improve the place
I cannot describe how much I despise the fact
that people insist on having gigs and parties and shows in you
which I attend under sufferance
Purely for professional reasons
And if I ever manage to find a taxi home
I will write it off on my tax.

2010-10-08T10:39:00.005+11:00

The milkman has delivered again. Hilariously, upon seeing Laura's Melbourne Milk cover mockups, Tim realised that in an idle hour, he'd had a go as well!

The mastheads are all the same (oddly, I had considered Cooper Black at one stage – its rounded serifs are comfortingly milky). I'm not so sure about the milky band behind the mastheads – I'd pictured it as a 'floating' masthead – but the cover images… Oh, the cover images!

Tim says: "I like the woman drinking one the best – could easily pop the mag next to Zoo magazine on the rack."

I'm not so sure… I don't like the uriney way the milk is pooling between her thighs. But then, maybe that would sit nicely next to Zoo.

We are definitely well on the way to a prospectus for Melbourne Milk investors.

2010-10-07T23:17:00.007+11:00

The best thing since sliced milk. So, when I wondered if some procrastinating designers wanted to mock up some covers for Melbourne Milk, I did not realise my clever friend Laura, who works as a publishing designer, would actually follow through! Awesome!

I am kind of embarrassed about these, because they make my own design skillz look so bad. However, if they entice some angel investor to pour ("LOL") money into this absurd magazine, then well, full-cream ahead!

This is bukkake-tastic! I guess Laura has access to a better calibre of absurd images that I do.

I think I like this masthead best, but it will never properly woo the hipster crowd unless there is an attractive person with milk smeared over his/her face in a semeny way.

An edgier design, with more abstract imagery. Although it uses Helvetica, I feel a little uneasy about this one. Maybe I am just not cool enough.

Each of these has its merits. Melbourne Milk. You know you're thirsty for it.

2010-10-04T00:00:00.002+11:00

Old songs: generational pedagogy and cultural memory. The other day, a daggy old song that I'd been taught in primary school popped back into my head. It was 'By The Light Of The Silvery Moon'. First published in 1909, it was one of those Tin Pan Alley songs that pandered to the craze for 'moon, spoon, June' type lyrics.

It was always a popular song and has been performed and recorded many times, but it enjoyed a new vogue in 1953 when Doris Day performed it in the movie of the same name.

Doris Day made lots of '50s movies that used these old songs as titles. This continues to be a popular practice in Hollywood. It seems to me it happened a lot in the '80s, because the ones that come to my mind include Dream A Little Dream, Can't Buy Me Love, Peggy Sue Got Married, Blue Velvet, Jumpin' Jack Flash, My Girl, Stand By Me and Sixteen Candles.

Or perhaps the 1980s were just enjoying a total romance with the 1950s and 1960s, as baby boomers got into positions of creative authority and were in a position to impose their childhood nostalgia on Generation X. This would certainly explain why, as a child in the 1980s, I was taught a song from the 1900s that was last popular in the 1950s.

The other day I was walking down the street and a mum was pushing a stroller and humming a song to herself and her kids. I've forgotten what the song is now, but at the time I recognised it and started singing it to myself. It was from the '70s or '80s.

I'd be interested to hear parents and teachers my age explain the songs they play and sing to the kids. Of course, this would largely be dependent on personal taste.

Unlike other people my age who had cool boomer parents who loved Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac and Roxy Music, I have really dorky parents whose record collection included Harry Secombe, John Denver, Anne Murray, Joan Armatrading and Cliff Richard singing in Italian. I spent my formative years listening to 1377: Easy Listening 3MP, which is why I still have a fondness for the MOR hits of the '70s and '80s.

But elsewhere, there were three different influences on my primary-school song knowledge:
1. our music teachers' and choir coordinators' favourite songs;
2. the campfire songs I learned at Girl Guides and through Whitehorse Showtime;
3. the songs in the ABC's Sing! series.

The hippest songs were 'Down On The Corner' and 'Space Oddity', which I sang in grade six. I'm pretty sure that was due to having a 'cool' teacher. Other songs I remember singing in primary school include 'Downtown', 'The Rainbow Connection', 'When I'm 64', 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo', 'Edelweiss' and the theme song for the International Year Of The Child, 'Care For Kids'. I'm not even counting all the dinkum folk songs that it's apparently vital for all Australian kids to know: stuff like 'Botany Bay', 'Waltzing Matilda', 'And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda', 'Click Go The Shears' and 'The Road To Gundagai'.

Meanwhile, we had an official Girl Guide camp songbook that was kind of divided between "jolly songs to sing on the bus on the way to camp" and "contemplative songs to sing around the fire". One of these latter songs, 'Land Of The Silver Birch', was my favourite.

Actually, that song makes me think about how cringey it was for white kids to sing this and other 'ethnic' songs, like 'The Banana Boat Song', 'Pick A Bale Of Cotton' and 'Jamaica Farewell', which, by the way, aged eight, I took for definitive documentary reports of the Black Atlantic experience.

But as usual, I'm getting off topic; 'topic' in this case being the way I can still sing some pretty old songs, having been taught them in primary school:

'Daisy Bell' (1892) – "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do…"
'I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside' (1907) – "I do like to stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom!"
'In My Merry Oldsmobile' (1905) – "Come away with me, Lucille, in my merry Oldsmobile…"
'Molly Malone' (1883) – "Alive alive-o, alive alive-0, singing, 'Cockles and mussels alive, alive-o!'"
'Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag' (1915) – "And smile, smile smile" (Hilariously, I have only just realised that they bowdlerised the lyrics to teach it to us – the original lyric was "While you've a lucifer to light your fag", but we were taught "to light your way")

Interestingly, I also sang 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines', which was written for a 1965 movie that was set in 1910. So it was a pastiche of Edwardian popular song. Likewise, 'My Little Buttercup' sounds like a real Tin Pan Alley song, but Randy Newman wrote it in 1986 for the film Three Amigos, which was set in 1916.

I wonder if I am weird in still remembering these songs. Will future generations of kids ever know 'By The Light Of The Silvery Moon', and thus maintain a gossamer-thin connection to an era when cars and planes were strictly for rakes and daredevils, or will old baby-boomer songs become their barometer of 'impossibly ancient' songs?

2010-09-26T22:08:00.004+10:00

Got dream? Last night I dreamed I worked at a magazine called Melbourne Milk. In my dream it was a local franchise of an edgy, London-based dairy lifestyle magazine called Milk (pronounced "Miwk").

It had all sorts of stories relating to milks of all kinds – not just animal milk but vegan and lactose-free milks. I can't remember much else about the dream, but I thought maybe there is a gap in the magazine market for this publication.

I am annoyed that the cover doesn't look as cool as I dreamed it. I'm sure a real designer could have done a better job than I have here. (If any real designers are reading this and would like to take some time out of their designerly day to mock up and send me their own Melbourne Milk cover designs, please do.)

That is not me or anyone I know on the cover, by the way. I got the pic from Flickr user christy jean via a Google Image search for "sexy milk bottle".

There are actually several different magazines called Milk. One is a poetry magazine. One is an upmarket French baby magazine. One is a Hong Kong lifestyle and trends magazine. One looks like a defunct art and literature magazine. One is published by a London-based trend forecasting and branding agency.

I kind of like the idea of publishing this ridiculous magazine, and imagining the content I would put in it. I picture its original London iteration as a cross between Dazed and Confused, Apartamento and Wallpaper*, but the local version would be more like a cross between Frankie, Dumbo Feather and theage(melbourne)magazine.

Melbourne Milk would see milk as an emblem of wholesomeness, authenticity and nostalgia as well as an actual foodstuff. There would be lots of profiles of 'creative people' talking about how they relate to milk. There would be gonzo dairy-themed odysseys, stories on milk bars, cafes and milk-related small businesses, milky recipes and milk-related interiors, fashion and crafts.

The magazine's audience would be the milk consumer who is interested in style, design and 'simple', 'authentic' living. A large chunk of the audience would be locavore foodies who want to feel bucolic and connected to the land even though they live technologically enabled, industrial lives.

The Melbourne Milk reader would be the sort to imagine that his/her milk comes from the kinds of cows whose udders are massaged daily with organic L'Occitane udder cream… or at least that his/her milk is sold at local farmers' markets rather than in cartons at supermarkets. Actually, there would probably be a calendar in the front with local farmers' market dates marked on it.

Oh, I can't keep a straight face any more. A magazine about milk. It is totally stupid.

Update: 8 October! More cover mockups from Laura and Tim!

2010-09-19T19:09:00.003+10:00

Post-conference letdown. Today I participated in an Unconference about online criticism at the Wheeler Centre. It was the culmination of the Critical Failure program about arts criticism, which has raised some intriguing issues. The unstructured day of discussion and debate was an invitation-only event – I was invited because I'd spoken at the panel on film criticism. (I am still too embarrassed to watch that video – I feel I have a face and body for radio – but you can if you want.)

The setup – an informal ring of chairs – reminded several participants of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and there were indeed certain similarities. The feeling of seeking temporary refuge from a demanding, stressful world with like-minded individuals who understand your problems. The anecdotal atmosphere, in which people felt free to share war stories.

There was also the same feeling I've got from conferences in the past – a feeling of collegiality, that I was among other professionals in my field whose intellectual projects were similar to my own. And now it's over I feel the same letdown as I have done from returning from a conference.

Much as it used to be terrible to return to my hostile, stressful university department after several days out of my ordinary routine, enjoying the company of my intellectual peers, I feel terribly flat now that I am at home again, in front of my computer, with two different jobs to get through tonight in order to be ahead for this week.