April 8, 2011 – 3:00 pm
“The city that never sleeps.”
I recently went for a holiday in New York. My first impression was that it’s also the city that never showers. With a population of eight million, the city’s rubbish collecting infrastructure is weak. There’s no space for alleyway skips, so small mountains of garbage bags line the sidewalk. Garbage-mountain dwellers are known as ‘gleaners’, a consortium of Chinese who sort through the bags for plastics to make into sideshow prizes.
“Take a walk on the wild side.”
I’d never seen an African American in real life, and spent most of my time on the subway admiring their inherent coolness. Having only experienced them through television gave me a unique perspective, and every time I …
April 8, 2011 – 2:58 pm
Relationships are like a river. They’re easy to jump into, but horrid to climb back out of. Nothing in life can prepare you for your own relationship breakdown. Here are five things you should do after a break-up but probably won’t.
Be direct.
When I had to break it off with my first long-term girlfriend I managed to tell her everything apart from how I was actually feeling. This was partly due to juvenile inarticulation and a wimpy bid to avoid any conflict whatsoever. Try and expand on phrases like ‘ummmmmm’, ‘aaaaaaaaaaaah’, ‘I don’t know’ (ask yourself, ‘what would you say if you did know?’) and the classic *stares off into space for ten minutes*. Even though words feel like …
April 8, 2011 – 2:55 pm
The foggy universe of my childhood’s psycho-sexual development was filled with everything from cousin flashing, beanbag humping, Madonna filmclips and vaginal graffiti through to my first official fantasy of the princess from The Never Ending Story lying on top of me, putting her mouth on mine.
At age seven, Mum sat me down to tell me about a thin layer of membrane that went over a girl’s vagina only to be broken the first time she and the man had love. I sat there utterly baffled, trying to fathom how this in any way answered my question about who He-Man was.
I lobbed the experience like a tennis ball and continued about my boyish affairs, happy in the knowledge that …
April 8, 2011 – 2:53 pm
Hundreds of years ago, Mothers would warn their children about getting square eyes from sitting too close to the telly. These days, the old wives tale has updated itself to contracting Oblong Eyes from computer abuse. The average Australian spends 75% of their time in front of a computer screen. (source: poor journalism). Here are some suggestions on how you can hit refresh on your Outlook.
1. Pimp Your Screen. Have the best of both worlds by hooking your laptop up to a data projector and blasting your workstation onto the big screen. Say goodbye to hopelessly anti-social nights hunched over your mouse with squinty eyes, Get some pals around and make it a family occasion. Hit the music and …
April 8, 2011 – 2:21 pm
To the menfolk of Australia.
Quick, we haven’t got much time. While your girl’s in the shower I need to tell you a few things, man to man. Turn off the TV. I DON’T CARE IF FUZZY FROM VH IS TALKING! Right, I want to talk about legs. Namely, yours. Tell me – this summer, what are your leg plans? Have a little think. Stroke that stubble. Wait, lemme guess, you’re gonna wear jeans right? Unless it gets real hot and maybe you’ll wear those ‘sport jeans’ that cut off at the knee. What about down the beach? Probably just your boardies yeah? Good ol’ faithful baggy arse ocean flappers. They’re nice and loose, just like the surfers wear. So, …
April 8, 2011 – 2:20 pm
I was at a friends Jewish wedding recently. During the reception the menfolk gathered for some traditional dancing. They linked themselves, arm over shoulder and began to skip in a circle. Faces flush, they gathered momentum as the congregation urged them along. I hung by the nibblies and watched the disc of men. The usual manly stiffness and concern had vanished, replaced with a disarming grace and lightness. It was so passionate and unselfconscious, suggesting an emotional generosity and clarity of spirit. For a secular Tasmanian from a single mother family, this fanfare of tradition and male expression could not have been more exotic.
The last time I stood arm in arm with a group of men was playing football …
April 8, 2011 – 2:18 pm
At the end of each year, many young Australians make the pilgrimage back to their family homes. Here, they try and assimilate with their parents and grandparents, whom are more or less middle-age frenemies they have nothing in common with. Before entering the weatherboard compound, the subject is forced to undergo a strict quarantine procedure – a sniffer dog hunts down tobacco while a sniffer Dad looks for traces of homosexuality. A Mum operated x-ray evaluates their posture, while senile officials determine whether hairstyle and dress sense match the strict requirements stated in the Backwards Act of 1955.
Many students and artists reach their homes in a poor state. A year of checking emails and talking about their ideas for …
April 8, 2011 – 2:17 pm
Each year, as I become more self conscious and weird, it becomes harder and harder to relax at home. I touchdown in Tasmania a burnt out husk, declare my tears at customs and am bundled into the back of Mum’s Kia feeling like an overgrown teenager with improved vocabulary and fashion. This year, my home time imploded after the ‘Nan VS the gas barbecue’ fiasco left me so tense I changed my flight back to Melbourne three weeks earlier than planned. Sticky fingers clicking around webjet, thoughts as maxed as my credit card, I realised something. Home isn’t a holiday.
It’s a common dilemma for people to tire of their families after a few days. The fuss, the frustration, the …
July 9, 2010 – 5:11 pm
So Thom Yorke has come out and declared the album dead. This isn’t the first time Thom’s been the bearer of bad tidings. In 2004 he cancelled the second Melbourne Radiohead show due to a frail voice. Frail voice? I thought that was the whole point. Not only did I have a ticket but I’d won a competition to meet him by sending in four barcodes from my brand of anti depressants.
Well, if the album isn’t dead it’s certainly lying in intensive care with a cracked case and a terminal cross-hatch of scratches on the disc. Since the advent of iTunes, the trend has been that no-one under twenty buys CD’s any more, and why would they? The things …
July 9, 2010 – 5:07 pm
Did you know that every thirteen minutes a relationship in Australia ends? Statistics tell us that only 5% of these relationships will end cleanly. The majority will haemorrhage into heaving silence with one staring into space and the other in tears. Sentences will get said: “I don’t know what I feel any more. I just don’t think I can give to this relationship.” The carcass of trust shall hang from necks. There will be gazes from the doorway. Beautiful creatures in knee high socks and soft cotton dresses sprawled on the bed, faces buried in pillows. Nervous men out of scripts and drawing on movie memories. Walk out the door. Just walk out that door. There’s no turning back. We’re …
March 18, 2010 – 4:51 pm
Hello. Oh hey Joel how you going? Ya. I’m just on a, uh, tram, just really hungover. Hey, you know that um, band competition we went in, So You Think You Can Copy? Yeah, we won man! Yeah we got a record contract out of it. We’re with like Independent Records, they’re like an off-shoot of Sony. Ya we have to make like one over-hyped album, we get uh, Molly Meldrum kudos, Rage guest programming rights, a memory stick full of Myspace friends and we can write the soundtrack to an ad of our choice. Na man we haven’t sold out, we’ve still got creative control. Oh, our t-shirts, yeah extra smalls have gone. We like changed our name too, …
February 23, 2010 – 7:58 pm
They say dance is the hidden language of the soul – if this is the case then Friday nights are all about learning to say rude words. Is there no greater relief from the cerebral shackles of modern life than cutting some serious lunch on the floor? While girls are so rhythmically infused they could dance to their own heartbeat, for men, like most things, it’s tricky. Strangled by their Straighty 180 collars and Blend It Like Beckham jeans, men love nothing more than to hover on the sides like out of work bodyguards, tapping along sheepishly, demonstrating that a fear of commitment isn’t limited to relationships. It wouldn’t hurt anyone to take dancing more seriously. Menfolk, listen up, put …
January 14, 2010 – 2:49 pm
Throughout the ages man has felt an insatiable desire to self publish. The origins of blog and zine culture can be traced back to the Stone Age. It was here that early man first became aware of his own genitals and was able to draw them on a cave wall (a cromagnadoodle). This is the art worlds equivalent of inventing the wheel. Man then became in touch with his own ego (‘grong woz ere 10000 b.c.’), and published a primitive rant piece (‘mamoth sux.’) These incidents would also provide the well tagged cornerstone for modern day graffiti, which has itself evolved from ‘for a good time call’ binge booty texts, to pseudo-academic philosophies and grammar defying blather.
My first memory …
November 12, 2009 – 3:27 pm
Press stud check shirts and three piece flared suits
Art Deco prints and mod Beatle boots
vintage scrabble with no pieces missing
a few of my favourite second hand things.
Ah yes, like Scrooge McDuck used to flap wildly about in his columns of cash, the modern young thing can interpretive dance around shelves of perishable trinkets and wardrobes laden with long-lost fabrics, basking in the wealth of yesteryear. Boy/Girl, do we love vintage! If we had it our way, the whole world would be one big ‘the 60′s.’ Psychedelic pop art, milk in bottles, mint condition Stones records and no-one would have to go to work. We’d be too busy running barefoot through the sun drenched grass, on our …
November 12, 2009 – 3:25 pm
They say humans spend a third of their lifetime sleeping. Of that time, I spend a third lying in bed swearing, a third sitting in the kitchen eating ham and a third rolling around in a half-awake dream state with the devil playing Pictionary. Rock and roll brain, you god forsaken sponge! Where did it all go wrong? Insomnia. Discusszzzzzzzzzzz.
I’ve always had an overactive imagination, and can’t remember a time when I didn’t spend at least half an hour hurtling through wormholes down the rabbit hole of my mindioli. Through childhood, this tended to be an exciting time, like a fairground for the subconscious. I’d lie there staring up at my glow in the dark stickers (the universe was …
