It was an afternoon that merited an extra two bike laps around Centennial Park on the way home. The breeze was warm, and alive with the smell of freshly cut grass. It may be autumn now, but there are few smells more summery than sun-warmed expanses of newly shorn lawn.
Best of all though, was how many people were out with their dogs. Big fat woolly dogs, curly-tailed cocker spaniels... loping and lolloping, tongues lolling, down hills and in tail-chasing circles.
Damn I'm jealous of all you people with puppies! I think we're overdue for an update on our blog mascot, Handsome Darling. Reboot? I know it's your birthday tomorrow, maybe you could put a party hat on him and let him blow out your candles?
Sick from work today, I rallied to make a roast pork dinner for eight and was quite gratified by the results. Quite aside from the failsafe strategy for compliments of making guests wait three hours (and numerous bottles of wine) before they see their dinner, there are few foods more immediately satistfying as sizzling, salty pork crackling.
But this post isn't about pork. What is it about? I was going to recount some of the night's more amusing double entendres and malapropisms (and "that's what she said"s), but I fear they were moments you had to be there for. Oh yes - that's it.
At dinner last week with David Finkel he mentioned that at the Perth Writers' Festival someone had described him as "a dag", and asked what it meant. Unbidden, my mother's words surfaced in my mind, but I bit my tongue until I heard my boss, an educated and erudite dude, spout them verbatim. "A dag," he opined, "is the fly-attracting shit clustered around a sheep's arse."
"In America, we call that a 'dingleberry'," said David's daughter Lauren.
Which, we scrambled to say, wasn't the spirit in which the remark was intended. To call someone a dag is to compliment them for the Australian-loved values of simplicity, a lack of pretension and laconic good spirits. Yet another case of lost-in-translation, I guess.
Spent this morning watching the Oscars in my illness. Listening to Martha Wainwright now is making me realise how I conflate her and Maggie Gyllenhaal in my mind. Two beautiful, saucy ladies. But of course - how great is it that Jeff Bridges finally got his Oscar?!
I've been thinking about Australian music from an international perspective lately; what are the songs we want to be known by, by someone who doesn't know us?
I keep coming back to the pop greats, this 80s sound of great Aussie pop/rock. The Church, The Triffids, The Go-Betweens, and above all, Crowded House. There's a certain magic in the production of all these bands around the late 80s, early 90s; all shiny shiny treble guitars, clean and reverberating with all the enormous breadth of the panoramic Australian horizon. Can we even claim Crowded House as definitively Australian? Certainly not as their very NZ incarnation, Split Enz. From this period you can't deny the best song is "Message To My Girl", a very special song to me.
Though I'm frightened by the words Think it's time that it was heard So I'll sing it to the world A simple message to my girl No more empty self-posession Vision swept under the mat It's no new year's resolution It's more than that
Fuck, this song was made the year I was born.
And even from the Crowded House days, god, it's hard to pick a single song from this band. I'm having a great time on YouTube, ogling youthful Neil Finns wailing I'd better be home soon and so on. "Into Temptation", that delicious lyrical tryst of lusty longing.
The most Queensland of them all is, of course, the Go-Betweens. Friends know of my obsession with someday writing the book about Grant McLennan.
And don't the sun look good today? But the rain is on its way Watch the butcher shine his knives And this town is full of battered wives
Had the supreme pleasure of hearing David Finkel talk about his book The Good Soldiers with cheeky foreign correspondent Eric Campbell last night. David's a Pulitzer-winning journalist from the Washington Post who spent eight months embedded with a battalion of US soldiers in Iraq as part of the surge in 2007. His book has been hailed as the definitive account of the Iraq war - some are saying it's one of the best books on war ever.
What seems to make the book special (and I'm still waiting to read it) is that instead of analysing politics and policy, David simply tells the stories of these 800 optimistic 19-year-olds who get blown up, mutilated, killed, disillusioned and sent back home to try to readjust to normal life. And unusually for a book about embedding, it's not in first person - there is no trace of David in the book.
Hearing David speak about the book was moving, and occasionally harrowing; I can't imagine what it must have been like for him. But as he graciously says, he at least had the luxury of taking breaks from the constant tension of East Baghdad, and months of writing a book to try to make sense of the experience. The soldiers had neither of those outlets.
For me the most moving part of David's talk was when he spoke about the responses he's had to the book from the soldiers themselves, and their families. He sent copies of the book to all of them, and the families of the men who didn't make it back. He said there were two general responses. One was from soldiers who would say "Thank you. People ask me what it was like in Iraq and I can't talk about it, I don't want to talk about it, but now I know I can just hand them your book and tell them to read it."
The other response he described was from the father of a soldier that had died, I think his name was Josh Reeves. David had been there when Josh was hit with an EFD (a remotely-triggered, lethal makeshift explosive) and watched with a group of others from the battalion as his shredded remains were rushed to the doctors. Josh had lost a lot of skin and flesh around his legs and bum and all over really, and as someone vigorously performed CPR, bits of him were actually falling off. David became aware of a small object skidding across the floor, landing near his foot. And in the retelling of this scene he struggled with whether or not to include what he said, knowing that somewhere this man's father would read it. He decided to put it in. "That's a toe."
Later he heard from Josh's father. But rather than the "sonofabitch" reaction he was expecting, the father gave him heartfelt thanks. "Because of your book I got to spend the last hours of my son's life in his company."
Damnit, I'm tearing up now just writing this!
Later I hit it off over dinner and lots of wine with David's awesome wife and daughter, while David and Eric traded (literal) war stories. Will write more about the book when our boss brings back the office copy and I can actually read it!
So I'm making a mix tape. A privileged few know that it's only a very privileged few for whom I ply this ancient craft. If eyes are the window to the soul, mixtapes are the equivalent of the soul handing over its diary, uncovering its scars and exchanging whispered secrets all night in the dark. That special.
Making mixtapes is art and science. You want to show off your awesome taste, but also make something they'll love and listen to over and over. How do you balance impressive obscurity and feelgood hits? Do you go with a genre or theme - or let Otis Redding rub shoulders with Royksopp and the Modern Lovers and be damned? Structuring also presents a challenge - you need to allow for light and shade, but every opener and closer must be immaculately chosen. And then there are liner notes and artwork to tangle with. Phew!
It's a pretentious quirk to keep referring to them as mixtapes when no one has the patience, or indeed the equipment, to actually do them on cassette anymore. But I think the best mixtapes, even on CD, retain a kindred spirit with their magnetically spooled ancestors. Respect for the brevity of the format. A desire to be listened to in toto, in sequence, without fast forwarding (in bygone times, such would wear out both the tape and your Walkman batteries). And an invitation to obsessive overanalysis that goes hand in hand with its take-me-everywhere-with-you portability.
Yup, the only thing better than making the perfect mixtape? Is recieving one.
For more on mixtapes and their cultural significance, see:
Hornby, N. (1995) High Fidelity (the film version is also serviceable)
Note: those pictured above aren't mixtapes, but oft-recycled cassettes of band interviews from my salad days as a street press rock journo. Too many great interviews to pick a best one, but I think the worst was being so awed by Paul Kelly I ran out of things to say. And the weirdest was a stoned Daniel Johns talking about putting peas in his iPod. Good times.
Just caught a preview of The Men Who Stare At Goats, it's a movie I recommend highly if you're into screwball comedies with tenuous links to journalism, war and reality. Did I mention the cast? George Clooney, for all the mums out there (though, I must admit I'm coming around to this one). Ewan MacGregor, for all the younger ladies who like their heartthrobs to have done their time in drag, musicals and Star Wars. Anonymous hippie boobs in hot tubs, in a cameo role, for one-track-minded dudes. And, for those who just can't let go of The Dude, my newest burning old man crush, Jeff Bridges.
Popcorn Taxi put on a great event and staged a transcontinental skype Q&A with Jon Ronson, author of the book the film is based on. Ronson said he felt disconnected from the film overall - there's a tendency for those making Hollywood films not to want the author around "making them feel guilty" - but liked it and likened it to "Little Miss Sunshine goes to Iraq".
Synopsis: Ewan MacGregor plays Bob, a cuckolded Michigan journalist who decides to go to Iraq to prove to his wife (and her one-handed suitor) that he's not a wuss. There he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a guy who claims to be a former member of the U.S. Army's New Earth Army, a unit that employs paranormal powers in their missions. For mine the best scenes are the flashbacks to the New Earth Army's creation by Bridges' character.
I was suprised to hear Ronson say that most of the crazier stuff in the film was actually the factual stuff; the outlandish interrogation tactics, the military's research into super powers. Apparently the real person Bridges' character was based on was brought in to consult on the film from its earliest stages, totally bonded with Bridges and was blissfully happy with his performance.
It's a beautifully shot film - all the sweeping panoramas of the Iraqi desert were so immaculately sculptured it was hard to believe they were real. The use of music was ostentatious and joyful. Supergrass' "Alright" intercut with real news footage over the opening credits was a little jarring, but the use of my favourite bike-riding song, Boston's "More Than A Feeling" (Clooney's character found it easiest to tap into his Jedi powers through "drinking, and soft rock") was fantastic.
One of the unexpected pleasures of the film was a sweet, sweet irony that according to Ronson didn't occur to the filmmakers when they were casting. When Clooney's character is teaching MacGregor about the New Earth Army he repeatedly refers to them as "Jedis". Considering MacGregor has played Obi Wan Kenobi it must have been hard for him to keep a straight face while asking what Jedis are and do.
So does Ronson believe it's possible to stop a goat's heart simply by staring at it? Or even a hamster??
"I guess if you stare at any animal long enough, it'll die."
It was an afternoon that merited an extra two bike laps around Centennial Park on the way home. The breeze was warm, and alive with the smell of freshly cut grass. It may be autumn now, but there are few smells more summery than sun-warmed expanses of newly shorn lawn.
