Some Things I Have Seen

Some things I have seen in the last week:

1. I saw the Drones on Saturday night at the Corner. They rock. They shriek. They’re savage. They rage in an early Birthday Party kind of way.
2. I saw a lot of drunk people there.
3. I saw the last ever episode of the Sopranos on Tuesday night and went to bed disappointed and cheated. On reflection the next day I realised I had actually really liked it. It was beautifully shot. The colours were muted and autumnal.
It had a dream-like quality to it. The delivery of lines, looks , gestures and the camera seemed to linger and hang in the air. Maybe this is because of the despair I felt at this being the last episode. It’s like that eerie feeling I used to get as a child when the sun would just start to creep down on a Sunday and I would look out at the horizon and the soft colours of fading light filled me with a sense of dread and doom and finally resignation that the weekend was coming to a close. Every child’s cry would echo around me and I was already nostalgic for the passing of the best weekend ever.
And I would think that this was what old age is going to be like. Such gravitas. Someone should have told me to lighten up.
Anyway who cares if Tony got whacked or not. It was the best series ever.
And all those people with so much time on their hands posting conspiracy theories on the "Cut to Black" final scene should just lighten up.
3. I was walking to the tram stop early in the morning and saw a junky toss his coke can over his shoulder. A middle-aged lady in a suit wearing white joggers on her feet, and carrying a second bag to house her other shoes, was walking or rather striding, behind. (I know you’ve all seen a lady like this.It’s a type that is often spotted on the corner of Brunswick and Victoria Streets near my house. Oh, and the junky was wearing a baggy tracksuit – I swear).
She saw the discarded can, bent down, picked it up and put it in the rubbish bin without a pause in her step. I know she didn’t do it so people would see and think what a good citizen she was, but I wanted her to know that I DID see it and it impressed me. She was so… efficient.
4. I got off the tram in the evening outside Atherton Gardens near my house and saw a junky making a beeline for me as I have that special invisible sign on my head.She was slurping on a Split icecream that she had obviously just bought from the Vietnamese deli a few metres down (that’s where they all go to get their fags and choc milk). She asked me for about $2 saying that’s all she needed to make up the money to buy a packet of fags. Can you imagine the raging debate she was having in her head when she went to the deli the first time to buy that packet of fags and her eyes spied the icecream chest? Fags? Icecream? Fags? Icecream?
5. I was at my favourite shop on Smith Street today. It’s a small fruit & veg & nuts & other stuff shop owned and run by a man and his brother and assorted cousins and nephews and nieces who have migrated from Turkey. We simply refer to it as “The Turk”. We thought we had christened it that, but we have since found out that other people refer to it as “The Turk” – there’s some kind of synchronicity going on in this ‘hood. Anyhoo, I was at the Turk and saw a large Somalian woman draped head to toe in black. Her mobile rang, she answered it, then placed it in her hajib so it nestled over her ear. Then she continued to talk while with her two free hands she could pick over the best vegetables. One cool customer.
6. I didn’t and don’t want to see SAW XXV or whatever number it’s up to.

They Killed Bobby

Last night was the penultimate episode of the final season of The Sopranos and it was shocking. I suppose I felt things were going seriously sour for la famiglia a couple of weeks back when “Cristofeeerrrr” whacked his AA Law & Order scriptwriter confidante in his own apartment in what seemed like a very reasonable argument.

Then last night - BAM! In the final 5 minutes the disgruntled NY mob emptied a few rounds of lead into Robert Baccalieri, Jr. AKA Bobby Baccalà while he was buying a model train, Silvio is in the hospital, unconscious, with a few rounds himself caught in his car outside the Bada Bing, and Tony is in a temporary “safehouse” waiting for the inevitable in a sheetless bed with a shotgun & memories as company. Tony’s looking like a man reconciled to fate now. I don’t think I am yet, though. I refuse to believe this is the last chapter ever, much less coming to a close.

Baccalà means salt cod in Italian. It is also slang for idiot. This fact doesn’t appear in Mark Kurlansky’s excellent “Cod, A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World”, though other cod derived expressions do. The French word for cod, morue, came to mean prostitute, but the Danish word for cod, torsk, also means fool colloquially.
I wonder if the idiot part comes from being a fish out of water and how did the Danish and Italian meaning align rather than the French?

Bobby seemed a bit gormless in the earlier episodes, but he was faithful and sensitive. Bobby didn’t come across as a baccalà in the last couple of seasons – he got his nickname before he even married Janice. He even said wise things, albeit in a quiet & simple way.

I knew many "baccalàs" growing up. There was Johnny “Baccalà” & Tony “The Baccalà”.
This was all through my Pa, of course. With the nickname “Ringo”, this is no surprise.

Magical Drinking Tour

Reading Saturday night’s confusing maiden blog entry, I realise it could be a dangerous habit to drink & type.
We were at the marvellous 50th birthday party of the lovely Frances Gibson at her and Stephen's Cape Cod style house in Bendigo and after a few whiskeys and proclaiming I was going to start a blog before I moved to Macau, Dave Nichols was right on to it and suggested that I do it immediately. Hence all the missed keys...



I drove up in the Jag with the irrepressible Mr Shane Moritz and the charming Ms Olivia Johnson. I love the way Shane says Jaguar. He pronounces it “Jagwaaar” as opposed to the ordinary “Jag- you- ar”. It just sounds so damned suave.
After troubles tuning in to get the itrip working we listened to Fran’s birthday CDs compiled by S+O – the Evens, Lilliput, LCD Sound System, Blue Oyster Cult, Pavement –these CDS rocked and soothed my sore head that had suffered from just “going out for a couple” the night before and ended up with pogoing around a friend’s apartment to Bowie and the Magnetic Fields. I love impromptu discos! They always put me in an excellent frame of mind the next day.


Kiki & Herb






It was my birthday yesterday and I went to see a Festival show at the Meat Market in North Melbourne – what an amazing building and venue – the bluestone floors and intricately patterned steel trusses can really create distraction from the stage. The show was by some New York cabaret terrorists called Kiki and Herb’s Magical Drinking Tour. Kiki is a man in drag as a boozy aging chanteuse with saggy tits accompanied by her trusty sidekick, Herb, on a grand piano. The show is a musical set interspersed with the hilarious monologue of a fictionalised account of their lives. Kiki is like a cross between a sodden aging Judy Garland, and Shirley Maclaine as a thinly disguised Debbie Reynolds in Postcards From the Edge.
The songs are covers of Kate Bush, Jarvis Cocker, The Gossip, Bonnie Tyler, Joy Division, The Spiritualised, Britney Spears….and the list goes on…… and this dame belts them out in true Vegas/cheap nightclub act /Show tune style. It went for 2 hours and I couldn’t stop grinning.


Meow Meow


Then Kristin & I cabbed it over to the Spiegeltent where the door girl looked kindly upon us and let us in to the last half hour of the Meow Meow Beyond Glamour Show free. The extremely talented, vampy and glamorous Meow Meow seduces the audience by purrin’ and caterwauling out numbers from Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, opera ‘brut’ interspersed with comedy, audience terror tactics and on-stage clothing changes full of sequins, fishnets and some serious boning that would have Vivienne Westwood gasping. Move over, Sally Bowles!

Kris and I argued about the Weimar Brechtian style of cabaret versus the American showtune style (no conclusion) and then danced on at the Spiegeltent until 3am on a school night. It WAS my birthday after all, though I feel like I've been on my own magical drinking tour that started two weeks ago with Motorhead, went on to Grinderman and Nick Cave, Laurie Anderson last week, The Lighthouse Keepers and Razzmatazz on Saturday and culminating with last night’s explosive mixture of melancholy and parody.

I’m tired.

I Waany More WHISKEY

okay,.... I wrote a whole lot and realised I was too drunk to write so I'll start agin , I was a t a wonderful party and i feel like i'm missig out, the converdations are floating in. dave helpe dme set up this blog and i'm glad he did + i waany more WHISKEY. I an't believe i was nineteen again and listening to the lighthouse keepers.! I neeed o go outside nd etablish whether a cow lactates whether hey've had a cow or not........ you decide........