Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy.
But here’s my number, so call me in the case of medical emergencies.
I’m not a doctor or anything but I did a first aid course once.
My phone’s usually on.
I heard that they changed the CPR thing?
Apparently you’re not supposed to breathe in their mouth or whatever anymore.
But yeah chuck us a call or whatever if you want to do something.
I’ve got a ute if you want to do, like, a DIY project.
I’m thinking about putting in a herb garden.
I’m feeling weird. It’s all fine, but yesterday I did think I was going to die. No idea why, and so I was a bit surprised when I woke up this morning. Not in an anxious, hypochondriacal way, I just felt like it was the end. So now it’s not the end, and I’ve overcome existential terror through an abrbitrarily precise act of not-dying.
So, comedy.
“It’s like ripping up a bird and feeding it to a loaf of bread.”
Last night I was out at Sam Simmons’ last show of the comedy festival. I don’t think Sam has that huge a profile, so to that end: Sam is an Australian postmodern absurdist comedian. He’s worked for Tripple J for years producing comedy segments for the station. You can listen to some of them in his fantastic podcast “Sounds of Sam”. I first heard his stuff on drivetime radio with Linda & Dools when I was in highschool. At the time he was producing a regular segment called Shitty Trivia:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/q0KHLcCua6M
In his 2010 show ‘Fail’ and this year’s ‘About The Weather’ he rehashes some of his radio work. The narration he employs usually provides sets up for jokes, or surreally describes scenarios, real or imagined. Obviously, I’m a fan.
In the post modern comedy landscape, act’s like Sam or the Boosh are often chalked up to being ‘random’. Sam brought up a similar point on ‘The Little Dum Dum Club’, a Melbourne comedy podcast that’s worth a listen. Before the
word random entered the collective vernacular, it would have been chalked up to Sam being a “Tripper”. Drugs have in formed a lot of great art, but it really gets to me when creativity itself is assumed to be contained in pills. When someone calls someone a tripper, it’s implicitly a statement of misunderstanding. If you can’t tell where something is coming from, or what something means, it doesn’t mean that its creator was on drugs. Writing bits that use language and imagery creatively rely on a complex series of cultural connotations and implicit absurdism to be funny. Regardless of whether a joke is written as an absurd piece, the precise meaning of a word provides flavor to a line that isn’t given by other words, and this style of comedy epitomises that idea.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/CWmNTtJ-OPI
This video kind of makes that point. Sure, it’s a really specific gripe to have, but I’ve made absurd off the cuff comments where I’ve assumed people understand me as such. Then later found out that I was interpreted of as a stoner who says weird shit. I’m not stoned, I have stuff to do.
Actually, if I had stuff to do I probably wouldn’t be writing an unsolicited opinion piece about stand up.
Last night’s show was the first time I’ve seen Sam live. ‘Fail’ is on youtube as a part of the Warehouse comedy series, and it was the first cohesive work I’ve seen of his. After I saw that I couldn’t wait to see him live. It exceeded my expectations. Sam had the audience on edge as some members were pulled into the post modern narrative, and at one point got into a fight with a 17 year old kid that wouldn’t give back one of the shoes he threw into the crowd. It ended with the two of them rolling around on the floor. At one point he brought an audience member on stage to sit on him and spin around in a chair while cradling his head and smelling his hair. It was, as usual, a mixed audience, some of whom had no clue what Sam was doing. Sam made the comment on “Dum Dum’ that he felt that he’s going to polish the show for the Edinburgh fringe, and at times it was a bit disjointed. But, it was fantastic. At the end Sam started handing around props from his show to the audience, and I got given a shoe:
100% Profit.
Sam’s physicality has bypassed my prejudices on physical comedy. I’ve never really been a fan of slapstick, but now I think that was because I’d never really seen modern physical comics. Bill Hicks had a lot of really physically expressive stuff that I just hadn’t noticed when I was younger, and it’s really all on the same spectrum. It just adds to the information present in a joke, so I am a bit ashamed of my bias in the past. I think we all have stuff we regret thinking. It’s usually a causal attribution error, like when I was little I thought that if you chewed mint gum you were a yoga instructor, but then was confused when met a weirdo (read: pedo) that wasn’t a yoga instructor that chewed mint gum. On remembering this years later I realise it’s ridiculous, and it’s entirely possible, or even likely, to be both a yogi and a pedo.
During the comedy festival I saw Simmons, Steve Huges, Simon Amstel, Greg Behrendt, Daniel Kitson, David O’Doherty, FanFiction comedy and two live podcast recordings.
Steve Huges benefits a lot from television editing. He was good, and jet lagged. It felt a bit like talking to a guy in the pub that used to play music. He was rambling, and had some good ideas. He has an interesting perspective, that often seemed contradictory to me. He put forward definitive statements about the entire nature of reality, and then proceeded to judge people for being arrogant. He railed against health and safety legislation, his main argument being that he doesn’t need it.
I know stand up isn’t a dissertation, but I get a bit annoyed when stand ups attempt to apply logic to the real world and don’t finish the job. I see it a lot when some comics talk about religion in a really reductive way, using phrases such as ‘bearded man in the sky’ and such. It just stinks of the strawman thinking that they’re criticising. I’m a staunch atheist, but I really can’t stand people trashing religion in its entirety with regard to its benefits, cultural context or causes. Steve Huges didn’t do that, he pointed out the arrogance of those atheists, in a similarly reductive way.
He also had a bit about the implicit corporate control and capitalism of Starbucks coffee and the people who drink it. Again, that’s fine, but he went about it by insulting the masculinity and credibility of the drink with a series of gay epithets. Calling a mocha-chino a faggoty drink isn’t fine if the only point of it is to describe that drink as bad. It was the only part of the show I couldn’t get on board with at all. It was more insensitive than homophobic. He does some good pro-gay material, so whatever. I’m not going to picket his shows. But I guess I’m a faggot.
Daniel Kitson has done fantastic material using some of the same terms. You can get a few recordings of his off his website, and they’re well worth a listen. I only discovered him by reading on of Stewart Lee’s books about half way through the festival. After hearing some of his stuff he was instantly one of my favorite comics, and his live show “Where Once Was Wonder” is the best live show I’ve ever seen. Here, the comedic logic I talked about before was applied consistently, and referenced the subjectivity and pitfalls of worldviews in a smart, funny way. I can see some people thinking Kitson’s work as smug, but what do they know.
Simon Amstell (hosting Never Mind the Buzzcocks opposite Noel earlier) was pretty great as well. I saw his first show in the country, a preview for the show proper. His material was unpolished, but had some great lines like “When you live alone, you open the blinds when you wake up. And then it just gets darker.”
Fan Fiction comedy was a show by a bunch of young NZ comics, produced by Wil Anderson. I went on a whim, and it was really, really good. They write fanfics for each show with a different guest, so each show is different. They had a bunch of people on stage, my favorite being Stephen Boyce. He operated as a kind of bizarre offsider, a Paul Schafer to the host Rose Matafeo’s Letterman. If you ever get the chance to see these guys while they are in the country, do it because otherwise you’ll be dead and forgotten and won’t have ever seen intellectual property infringing fringe comedy and that’d suck because you’ll be dead and we’ll all remember the time we saw fan fiction comedy and they said the thing about Titanic.
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Anyway, as I was saying, I’m pretty stoked that I woke up alive. So here’s to not being dead everyone.
When I bought this monitor it frustrated me because my eyes were drawn to one black pixel.
A year later and it’s infuriating, because I can’t figure out where the pixel is.
It is, most annoyingly of all, an analogy. The phantasms we’re haunted by follow our every conscious thought and infect each action. They stretch for days and weeks, ripen gradually and fall like the fruit of an overused metaphor. [1]
I can’t see the pixel because I don’t need to. The monitor, that gives my anaemic, pock marked skin it’s peculiar midnight hue, is now a stable fixture in my life. It’s not that I tolerate it, or accept it, I just forgot it. And now I can’t trace the cause of the problem, and not one person on the planet can tell me if the pixel was ever dead. [2]
I used to consider tolerance abhorrent. In primary school ‘Tolerance Week’ taught me that we should refrain from bigotry and xenophobia. The unfortunate side effect was that, in a room full of those that ostensibly shared the same opinions, I was lead to infer that there is the group we’re in, and there’s the group they’re in. The real message of tolerance, acceptance through understanding, was something I then had to figure out later. [3]
Tolerance Week is probably a great thing, don’t get me wrong, but kids will draw their own conclusions. I assume that we were implicitly supposed to realise that every single one of us in the class room had different beliefs and backgrounds. Instead, the message of tolerance led me down the path of assimilationism. [4] I didn’t even register that everyone in that classroom had a different background, and were as such having a different experience. We couldn’t see the bigger picture, but they were foreshadowing a world in which we were expected to be disgusted by one another. We didn’t really get it. [5]
On the topic of multiculturalism, my dad once said off the cuff “Pfft. Multiculturalism. No such thing.”. The smallest of things, like that, have stuck in my head over the years. Probably because I have only ever seen him a few times a year. I don’t think anyone else at the dinner heard him, or if they did it wasn’t challenged. The thought of him saying that stuck in my memory, and it bugged me for years. When I was younger I thought that he was insufferable, but sharp. [6] To have him say something like that, when my mum worked with all sorts of multicultural committees and whatevers. It took me years to realise, I was maybe eight or nine at the time, that I hadn’t understood the nuances and connotations of the term before, just like ‘tolerance’. I now think he was referring to the idea that any culture setting up shop in a new country is never pristine, and will be influenced by and influence its new location. That is something that I do, now, believe. So, it wasn’t a dig at my mum.
But, it’d be kind of fucked up if it was. [7]
Of course it wasn’t, but, the principles of tolerance week had to lead me to find a middle ground. I knew that it wouldn’t be right for him to say something disparaging to a whole group of people, and undercut my mum, but also knew that his opinion must have had some merit. In this case it was conceptual nuance. As this blog seems to reflect my thought process, I seem to slowly progress towards the middle thought. However, the middle way seems infinitely noble and finitely effectual. [8]
It’s one of a long list of off the cuff bits and pieces of embarrassing and perplexing memories I have from childhood, and if that list doesn’t keep me writing to the aether I don’t know what will. These things have stuck with me for a long time, and I hope as I move through them I’ll forget where the pixel was. [9]
[10]
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[1]: This is the first example of what may be considered, in my writing, a joke. I like jokes, they’re the best thing in the world. [1A] While writing this, I really didn’t have the patience to put up with myself, so if you’re reading this, good on you. As such I’ve actually gone the whole pretentious hog and put in footnotes. It’s pretentious because this post had a certain air of whimsy about it that I didn’t want to interrupt with fun. I like the jokes more than the writing, but I can’t just put long form intricate jokes down in punch line form. If I had just wrote down the jokes, they wouldn’t make sense. [1B]
-[1A]: Except for the feeling of awe inspiring wonder, the necessarily self-aggrandising and profound construction of human consciousness or a Bolognese. [1A,a]
—[1A,a]: Rule of threes there, so is that a joke? Or is it just a whimsical juxtaposition? Do I actually think that jokes are better than the entire nature of reality? [1A,b]
—-[1A, b]: Yes.
-[1B]: ”Unfairly judging one another for the atrocities of their ancestors.” See, it doesn’t make sense. [1B,a]
—[1B,a]: “An Englishman an Australian and an Aborigine walk into a bar, …” was the set up, and it’s kind of funny, doing the whole metahumor thing. But I would never write a joke (except I did) like that because it implicitly states that Aboriginals and Australians are different things, which is an offensive distinction to make. And the politically correct term is Indigenous Australians anyway. Or Koori. Depending on where in you’re from. And anyway, that joke is a minefield, because by setting it in a bar it accidentally brings up the Aboriginal drinking issue, and the shameful state of the indigenous population’s health. And if we go down that road, we just end up unfairly judging one another for the atrocities of our ancestors.
[2]: This idea rounds out the metaphor soup that was the ‘problems-are-phantasms-thought-is-a-fruit-tree’ kerfuffle.
[3]: I figured it out on a racially-equitable abacus.
[4]: When you frequently write words like ‘assimilationism’, spell check does a good job of looking at you like a childhood friend, as if to say “Oh, assimilationism [RED LINE], really? You’re too good for the words in the dictionary now? I mean sure, you can point to that google search you did and see the word somewhere else… but does that make it a real word? You used to be real. What even makes a word real? I bet you said why, I bet you said it in your little blog. With all its words.”
[5]: We really didn’t get it. If the others did understand that we were supposed to hate each other, they would have reacted a lot more severely to my 9/11 jokes. [5A]
-[5A]: I finished primary school in 2004, so I obviously was not doing 9/11 jokes. Acceptable targets, you know. And those buildings weren’t acceptable targets. Obviously. Not for me, not for Al Qaida. Around that time I was doing Y2K shtick.
[6]: I was trying to be tactful, the phrase ‘Verbose poofter genius’ was in my head. I both find that the funniest and most offensive way of describing my father.
[7]: My dad did used to take the odd playful dig at my mum, mostly undercutting her and her Mother’s inherited English bourgeoisie tea drinking and sweet-eating habits, and rightly so. I think I’ve heard every member of her family mention that when my nan was young she looked like the queen. Like this was not a piece of trivia, but an addendum to the family crest. I think most of them, like me, are just borderline anglophiles, not monarchophiles. [See, [4] again.] …We don’t have a family crest.
[8]: I’m ashamed of how self indulgent this shit gets. Ashamed.
[9]: This other time he made another comment about ‘The Castle’ being patronising. Then I realised that he wasn’t intellectually infallible. It actually made me realise that supposed or perceived intellectual prowess is based in personal taste and bias. Which then made me realise that a lot of people are supposed, or perceived fuckwits.
[10]: Join me next time on Halal Gallah 2012 for an inevitably unreadable deconstruction of whatever!
Fromage de Meaux is a variety of Brie cheese, and is one of the only two varieties recognised by the French governmental bureau Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée as the genuine article.France was a country created by noted American artist Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) during his surrealist period. After various terraforming and mass hypnosis efforts, Man Ray moved to Le Marais, Paris, to pursue a life of vigorously modernistic bestiality. In his 1948 essay “To Be Continued, Unnoticed”, he wrote ”There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.” While no comprehensive universal set of ethics has yet been reached, nor an acceptance of finality and objectivity in a cosmos ever mysterious and unstable, Man Ray was definitely wrong. Obviously. Man Ray is based on the archenemy of Aquaman ‘Black Manta’, who was, unfortunately, fictional. In the background of the above photo, one may observe a 1.3kg VALUE PACK- edition box of Weet-Bix, the popular breakfast of champions. Weet-Bix compliment almost any other food item, suggesting that they “…must be using a new shampoo or something because your hair looks different, but in a good way, I mean, it’s good. It looks good. Actually… Do you.. uhh. Nothing. But you look good. I mean.. do you want to get a drink sometime? Oh. I didn’t realise you didn’t drink. That’s cool, healthy and all that. Oh? Ohhh.. I uhh. I’m so sorry. It must have been really hard growing up with an alcoholic mother. Fuck. You hear stories ab-. No. Yeah. Of course. I’m sorry I brought it up. It’s just. Yeah, with your hair and your eyes. Wha? Oh, it’s just that they.. uhh. Well they’re beautiful if I’m being honest. Fuck it. Life’s too short, ya’ know? Oh fuck. I’m so sorry. I know, yeah. people must say that. That has to be hard, like, walking around having her eyes… and then having people tell you that all the time. Fuck. Sorry.”
Tips for remaining a boorish introvert:
On social networking sites, Google answers to questions people post and do one of the following:
In public:
Maintain a brisk pace and look in the direction you’re walking, avoiding eye contact with others at all times.
Wear headphones to discourage others from talking to you.
In the event that someone does talk to you, only remove one ear bud.
Look down at your phone to give the illusion of preoccupation when stationary.
If you must wait, break line of sight with the other people whenever possible so you may loiter uninterrupted and unseen.
In social situations:
Remove yourself from group activities by muttering something about a bathroom.
If a physical situation arises which has the potential to cause you to remove clothing, run, jump, or otherwise break an unseemly sweat, pretend that you’re receiving a phone call and leave as soon as possible.
If you can’t relate to those around you (family or loved ones), drink to excess.
As early as possible during proceedings, foreshadow a plausible illness:
Maintain an implied pretentiousness by making reverse elitist statements and being generally reluctant.
If you reply to anything with an emotionally involved statement that hasn’t been internally fact checked, backpedal immediately.
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Above all, one must silently and secretly judge others. Always. You can justify it as a projection of how self-judgmental you are, and as such are predisposed to judging others. In reality, he who is without sin casts the first stone, and you still haven’t signed up for a gym and meant it. Judge not, lest ye be judged. “The saints shall judge the world” - Corinthians 6:2.
I’m saying that Jesus is groovy.
I don’t think that he ever really said anything about the Gays. Even if he did I’m sure it was about their painting, decorating and DIY know-how. The kind of stuff that is still a bit offensive, but said from a place of well meaning naivety. Like the Chinese being good at maths, the Blacks being good at jumping and the Japanese being easy.
And while we’re going down the meta road of ironic detachment:
Understand the reasons behind all of your actions to the best of your ability and exert effort improving yourself equal to the exertion of making a tuna bake with whatever cheese was left in the fridge from the last tuna bake you also didn’t make.
Only if you have something to do. If not, I’ll be in the back yard in about five minutes. You can get a decent vantage point from the neighbor across the lane’s roof, but I’ll be able to see you unless you’re inside. They have dogs, but they sleep a lot. Also I think one of them is a designer or something, so you can have a look at that stuff while you’re in there. It’d probably be interesting, I suppose.
Thanks for asking, you sweet, thoughtful and overwhelmingly right-on lady. Or man. I hope you’re a lady because I’m running with that. If you submit anonymously I reserve the right to designate gender. You’re probably a wunderkind or something anyway. Do you begrudge your parents for starting your violin lessons so young? I know you were obviously talented, but in those situations it can be hard to tell if it’s the kids choice. You know? Like, sometimes you just feel bad for kids like that even though they’re more accomplished than you. I’m sure your parents were fine. Even if you can play Vivaldi in Latin or whatever, it’s nice to know that a lady like yourself is so thoughtful.
And no, I don’t think so. I think these days I feel pretty much the same way every stagnant introspector (read: quasi-intellectual) does, and I’m not dramatic enough to fall off the deep end, fly off the handle, blow a gasket, fall off the wagon, rock the boat or ritualistically execute the smallest of my neighbors animals just to feel something. As Nas so deftly stated: “Life is parallel to hell but I must maintain”.
Thank you.
I’ve had like nine beers, because it’s been a long day and I have problems.
Thank god I’m sticking to my drinking only alone resolution.
My grandmother has never been one to speak directly. Like her homeboy, seminal prophet Jesus Christ, she’s fond of parabolic nonsense. I thank her, every day, for giving me the faculties of unwarranted judgement and passive aggression. Having an extended conversation about her bible study group, she relayed the story she told them last night. Their topic was the question “How do you explain god to a child?”. She explained that, when I was young, when someone said “Thank goodness”, my three year old self would reply “Who’s goodness?”, and every time she would spell out “G.O.D” with a look of loving wisdom in her eyes. Being the relentless cynic that I am, I found this neither loving, nor wise; but awkward. My mother isn’t particularly religious, and although she’s never said it, I know she’s not at all fond of indoctrination. As nan says “A young child’s mind is blank, so you can really guide them where you want”. If I ever looked around, puzzled, by G.O.D, I could rely on mum to start darting her eyes around, the awkward iceberg that let me know that under the surface she was flipping her shit.
This is, however I wouldn’t realise for years, a fairly unobjectionable form of faith. Her assertion of god as goodness is roughly the end of it (NB: god without capitalization, because I’m fucking punk rock). At this point in her life, most of the dogma has been disassembled by the various tests of faith in her life. Leviticus becomes quite hard to defend when your Grandson is born to a gay father, and all your children live in their own brand of sin. I’m quite happy that all I escaped childhood with was a sense that god is in virtue, unless that means without god I’m heedless. Either way.
After dropping her off, I had a fairly bleak ride home. I say home. I mean McDonald’s. I say McDonald’s, I mean to two McDonald’s. The first cheeseburger and coke was so viscerally enjoyable as a part of the hangover ritual that I had to get a second pair - some twenty minutes later. Eating a cheeseburger, drinking coke and listening to an audio book at a traffic light are just some of the reasons why I’m a fantastic driver. Coincidentally, they are also some of the reasons why my life is often pathetic. I’m not saying that eating fast food, with half the fillings falling out on to yellow branded grease proof paper, is pathetic in itself (although it obviously is), but the sadistic pleasure in self loathing that comes with it. It’s the same feeling that motivates drinking, I think. I’ve never had a hangover that wasn’t accompanied by depressed ruminating about some social interaction the night before, usually something that I’ve concocted in my head. The interactions I should actually regret are the ones I don’t pick up on. If I haven’t made some self effacing comment after something I’ve said to you, then I’m sorry, because I genuinely didn’t know I was being a wang. The solution is clear, I need to drink exclusively alone.
This, usually unbearable, self consciousness comes from my dad. I’ve never seen that much of him, but when I do I can count on him to be a pleasant, amicable and friendly wang. I’m quite aware that I’m similar to him in many ways; we probably both think we’re raconteurs, when we are in fact, boring. However, I don’t have the brain for his interests, and I don’t think that the hat he’s wearing is a good idea. I think, this uncomfortable, unendearing but broadly pleasant wang-ism is unfortunately my own fate. Or hopefully. I don’t know. There’s worse ways to be.
Hi there Nancy.
Before I get to your excellent question, can I just say how much I appreciate the overwhelming response I’ve recieved from Nancys (Age 4) from all over the country. It’s nice to know that long time listeners are getting involved, surprising in fact, due to the text based nature of the blog.
Now, down to brass tacks.
The phrase brass tacks is confusing. It sounds like brass tax.
Back to your question.
To quote fictional newscaster Kent Brockman “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords”. While I didn’t vote for them (because they surplannted democracy with energy beams), I’ll take a lepidopteral facist over Godzilla any day.
“Why?” I hear you asking from your good willed, but incorrect mouth. Handing control to Godzilla is a violation of church and state separation. It’s right there in the name. They’ll tell you that his name is a bastardisation of the original Japanese name ‘Gojira’.
Where’s the birth certificate?
If he is really Japanese and his name doesn’t contain the word ‘God’, then why should I let that oriental snake run the country. I don’t mean snake because he’s sneaky. I mean snake because he’s a lizard. I’m not racist, I’m just xenophobic. I don’t like any foreign supernatural lizard monsters.
Mothra is a national defence strategy.
Mothra has plentiful silk reserves.
Mothra has a team of telepathic, telekenetic priestess fairies created by the life force of earth.
We grew here, Mothra flew here. To save us.
