Saturday with The New Pornographers

I had the most amazing weekend. Saturday night’s gig was truly awesome – one of the best nights I’ve had in a really long time.


It started at my best friend’s place, where, after the obligatory hour or so of changing into different outfits and finally ending up back in the first thing I put on, we headed outside only to find that it was pouring with rain. We sprinted to the street, trying futilely to cover our hair to prevent the sudden and unwelcome sprouting of a moisture-induced afro. My friend (who we’ll call Kate for the purposes of this story) waved her arm into the road like a crazy woman, and although the rain was much too heavy to see anything, somehow, only seconds later we were seated in the warmth of a taxi, wiping frantically at our hair to stop the explosion of frizz.


The taxi ride was short, but as we neared the venue my excitement grew to a point where I was literally bouncing up and down in the seat like a little kid who knows her birthday presents are about to be handed to her. I guess I’m dorky like that.

As the taxi pulled up outside I was ready to bounce right out of the door, and my insane excitement levels had me tipping the driver way more than a 5 minute car ride deserves – although to be fair it was partially so that I wouldn’t have to carry a bunch of stupid coins around in my jeans pocket.


We headed for the door, but found two burly bouncers blocking the way.

‘Can we see some ID please girls?’ The one that looked a little like Tony Danza on steroids asked.

Slow smiles crept across both our faces. This was a very pleasant start to the night. I can’t even remember the last time someone checked my ID! It was probably about 9 years ago.

‘Thanks’ said buff Tony Danza as he handed me back my license. He gave me what I can only assume he thought was a winning smile.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘Thank you!’


We wandered downstairs, grabbed a couple of beers at the bar and headed towards the stage. Two steps led down into a lowered section right in front of the stage, which was about 5 ½ feet above the floor level. We took up our place on the very top step so that Kate would be able to see over everyone. She’s pretty short and usually finds herself spending an entire gig staring at the back of someone’s head – or in this case it would have been the wall in front of the stage.

It was a fantastic spot, only about 6 metres or so from the stage with a completely unobstructed view. I would have like to be a bit closer, but I can’t complain since Kate agreed to come along not knowing any of the band’s songs.


It was about 9pm, and we had arrived just in time to see the support band, Little Scout. They played for about 45 mins, but although they were really good and the lead singer was adorable, I was eager for them to finish so that The New Pornographers would come on. After Little Scout finished we had to wait an excruciating 30 minutes before they took the stage.

As they all wandered on you could feel the excitement levels of the crowd rising. Everyone pushed forward and I found myself looking down into the massive, crazy hair of what I thought was a guy – until the man next to him grabbed him on the bum and I realised that the he was actually a very strange looking she.

Neko Case took her place on stage looking like she had just gotten out of bed; hair tousled and fluffy, wearing jeans and a hoodie. It made me love her just a little bit. She’s so normal, and her wild hair made me feel a lot better about my own crazy rain-ruined locks. Aussies generally make fun of rangas, but Neko would be the exception to that rule.

And Carl Newman was a lot bigger than I thought he would be. I don’t mean that he was fat; far from it. He was just taller and less weedy than I had imagined him.


They jumped straight into it, and the next 2 hours were filled with the most amazing live music I think I’ve ever heard. Maybe it was just that I like their stuff so much, or maybe it was all the wine and beer I had drunk, but it was just phenomenal. They mostly played their newer songs, but included the more well known tracks off their older albums too. There wasn’t a single song that didn’t have my foot tapping or my body moving.


Part way through the show, an audience member yelled out for them to play ‘Myriad Harbour’. They said they couldn’t, because they didn’t have Dan Bejar there to sing it. Later, when they came out for their first encore, they offered to play it if someone from the crowd would get up on stage and sing it with them. After a couple of moments of waiting, and it looking like no one would do it, a voice yelled out from somewhere behind me

‘Ah fuck it, I’ll do it!’

A cheer went up in the vicinity of the anonymous voice and spread slowly around the room. A guy pushed through the crowd, too short to be seen until he jumped up on stage. After a quick request that someone film it, he sang the entire song with the band – and pretty well, too. The crowd went wild, and cheered so loud and so long that the band came back out and played a second encore.

After the gig, we went to a bar where Kate’s roommate works and had a couple of drinks. Some random Canadian guy bought me a drink because I managed to guess where he was from and because I’d just come from seeing a Canadian band. A drunken Mexican hugged me repeatedly, and a guy who has been trying to hook up with Kate tried continually (and very obviously) to make a good impression on me. Which was wise, after all - because if the best friend likes you, it goes a very, very long way. Especially when it comes to Kate.


At about 2am the bar closed, and I was absolutely exhausted (you know, like I’ve said before - because I’m old and boring). Kate, on the other hand, pretty much never sleeps (because it gets in the way of all the drinking), so she stayed out while I staggered off home, to fall asleep and relive my awesome night over again in my head.

Bad Day, Good Weekend

You know what? I’m having kind of a bad day today. Not a good sign given it’s only 11am.

Sometimes it would be nice if you could just switch your brain off for a little while. Unfortunately, my brain is switched into overdrive at the moment. And thanks to one of the multitudes of medications I’m taking at the moment, I’m having especially vivid dreams every night as well. I have what feel like indecently vivid dreams most of the time anyway (not to be confused with vivid indecent dreams which are often more fun), but at the moment they’re the kind of dreams that are cutting through all of the random subconscious crap and really getting to the point of how I’m actually really feeling.

I think I prefer the whole skirting around my actual feelings way of dreaming – they hit you less hard and you don’t wake up feeling restless and slightly upset and/or angry.

---

Ok, enough complaining now. I wanted to write about my weekend, because it’s been a month since I’ve been free to write about regular everyday occurrences and it’s been driving me crazy.

Remember Liam from Q is for Queer? I caught up with him on Saturday night for dinner and drinks. He’s just gotten back from the UK where he’s been studying, so I haven’t seen him since we saw Liza Minelli together back in October of last year. This meant that we had a lot of catching up to do – so we caught up over tapas and a number of bottles of wine.

Little plates of food and big bottles of wine are a fun Saturday night combination. This is the first weekend since I got sick in early May that I’ve gone out and really drunk a lot, and honestly it was GOOD. You take a bit of a break from regular life to feel crap for a month or two, and then afterwards everything seems so much more fun. I highly recommend it. Well, not the being ill part, but definitely the taking a break to better appreciate the good things.

It was completely worth the hangover the next day, although to be honest, the hangover wasn’t as bad as it would have been if we were drinking cheap wine. I can definitely testify to the fact that we weren’t drinking cheap wine, because as a drunk I love everyone, which instils in me an overwhelming desire to pay for everything without regard for what it costs. Hence I woke up the next day with an enormous headache and an even more enormous credit card charge.

It was a lot of fun though. We even discussed Tom a little, and how he has plunged himself (metaphorically) into being the stereotypical gay, while Liam has remained the same core person that he always was.

We’ve made plans to catch up again soon, when Liam’s partner is back from the UK for a few months before they move there to live for a few years. I’m looking forward to it, and looking forward to getting back into the swing of regular weekend life as well.

Birthday Enthusiasm

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ve said it before, and I fully admit that this makes me kind of (ok, completely) a loser but I really, really love birthdays. Seriously, what’s not to love? You get to spend time with the people who you love the most, you get to eat cake, you sometimes get gifts – and now that I’m old, I get to drink as much as I want mid-week without getting in too much trouble at work the next day for being hung-over.

I never outgrew my childhood love of birthdays, so I look forward to mine every single year. The problem that I’m faced with now that I’m heading toward my 30's isn’t that my excitement about my birthday is starting to fade, it’s that everyone I know has gotten older too and their enthusiasm for birthdays in general has pretty much disappeared. It’s hard to muster up the same level of excitement as usual when the people you want to celebrate with can’t be bothered.

This situation clearly needs fixing. I can’t let birthday fun end before 30. For me, the day I don’t care that it’s my birthday is the day that I'm officially an old lady. And despite recent old lady-ish tendencies, I’m not ready for old-lady-hood yet.

So. How to make people enthused about birthdays again? I considered just throwing a big party, but not telling people it was a birthday party until they arrived. You know, letting them have fun for a while and then just wandering up and saying “Having fun? Great! Because this is actually a Birthday celebration! See, they are fun after all!”
But that seemed sneaky. And no-one likes a sneaky birthday girl. Besides, I didn’t really want a party. I think that once you’re past 10 years old, birthday parties are reserved for milestone birthdays only.

I thought that maybe if I just wore a party hat around all day, people would be amused enough to get more involved in birthday fun. Then I thought about it some more and realised that if I did that, people wouldn’t think it was because I love birthdays, they’d think that I was having some kind of early mid-life crisis and that I was trying to recapture my youth.
Which I guess I am, to some extent. Birthdays were just so fun when I was little, I’d like to have that kind of birthday fun every year. I suppose this kind of age crisis is better than buying myself a sports car and getting a boob job. This kind has cake.

Australia Day Awesomeness

Soooo.... Australia Day Awesomeness. I promised it, and I shall deliver. I may have been a little bit misleading by calling it that – I don’t mean that I will necessarily deliver awesomeness myself, but I will definitely deliver something about the Australia day awesomeness that I was involved in.


I like to think of myself as quietly patriotic, much like most Aussies. That truly is the Australian way – we love our country so much; but the part we love the most is the laid back attitude, so our patriotism is usually conveyed without moving from the lounge room sofa. Australia Day is generally celebrated as such, mostly involving sitting in the sun all day doing as little as possible while enjoying the things we like to consider the truly Aussie traditions.

We’re only a very young country, so our traditions aren’t quite steeped in history the way traditions of other countries are. Our traditions mostly involve relaxing and enjoying life. BBQ’s, beer drinking, backyard cricket and the hottest 100 form the basis of our Australia Day celebrations and that’s exactly the way I spent my day - minus the cricket, of course. I think I’ve well and truly made my thoughts on sport & exercise in general known by now.


After debating what radio station to listen to, I did end up listening to the Triple J hottest 100 after all. My best friend came around and we sat outside in the sun, listening to the countdown and drinking beer. I chose to drink Crown Lager, because it seemed fitting to drink a beer that was originally only available to visiting dignitaries but after being released to the public has been embraced in truly Australian fashion by being given a good Aussie nickname. So I drank ‘Crownies’ all day.

The countdown was followed by an awesome Paul Kelly tribute concert, which apparently was filmed/recorded back in November of last year somewhere here in Melbourne. It’s a shame because if I’d known about it I definitely would have gone along. I’m not a massive fan of Paul Kelly as such; I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to go to a Paul Kelly concert, but he is an amazing songwriter and hearing some of his songs performed by other artists was pretty cool. There are a few that really need to be sung in his very unique voice, but it was otherwise a great show.

We rounded out the day by watching Aussie Comedian Carl Barron on the Comedy channel. I just about wet myself laughing, which is much better than the traditional ‘wet-yourself-from-drinking-too-much’ that can generally follow an Australia Day celebration.



So that was my Australia day awesomeness. I’ll end by sharing some highlights of my day - the number one song in the hottest 100 countdown, one of my favourite performances from the Paul Kelly Tribute and a bit of Carl Barron.

Happy (belated) Australia Day everyone!

Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve, and while I really have nothing much to share, I felt like I should post something, because it will be a few days before I have time to post again, and I hate to feel like I’ve gotten slack about blogging.

I’ve been up since 7am helping to prepare things for the big family lunch tomorrow. It’s a huge traditional meal, and there are usually about a dozen of us there for lunch and 18 or so for dinner. It’s a big day. We spend a lot of time setting up the table in a kind of explosion of Christmas decorations - green tablecloths, red sparkly placemats, coloured crackers and Christmas confetti everywhere. It’s like Christmas threw up all over the table, and that’s the way it should be – festive to the point of tackiness. It wouldn’t be Christmas otherwise.

Santa has already been, dropping off a new 46” LCD TV (I must have been really, really nice this year!) that I will later crank up carols by candlelight on in a last ditch attempt at maximising my Christmas spirit.

Now all that’s left to do is sit back, put on some carols, open a beer and wait for tomorrow to roll around.

I hope that everyone reading this has a Christmas Day as happy and enjoyable as mine promises to be. Merry Christmas everyone!

Gold Class

On the weekend, we went to the Gold Class Cinemas to see ‘Funny People’. The movie was kind of blah, but I love, love, love, LOVE Gold Class. It’s like watching a movie in your lounge room – if you had a cinema sized screen and waiter to bring you food intermittently throughout the movie. We had a three course meal, plus the mandatory popcorn and coke. The chairs are these big reclining suede seats which you can incline back until they’re almost horizontal.

It’s a pity it’s so bloody expensive, or I would go more often. We pretty much only go when someone gives us vouchers, because it’s a bit hard to justify forking out that much just to see a movie – especially since you have to pay for your food and everything on top of it.


There was only one thing that put a bit of a downer on the experience - I really can’t watch Eric Bana in Hollywood movies. The reason? Poida.

Poida was a comedy character that Eric Bana played years ago, and ever since he made it big in Hollywood, I can’t watch him without thinking of Poida. How can I take him seriously when I keep imagining him with a mullet and a packet of cigarettes up his sleeve?
The character he played in this movie reminded me of Poida even more than usual, firstly because he was playing an Australian, and secondly because he was playing it up quite a bit, so he came across as almost comically Australian, which is very much what Poida is like.

This is the main reason I have never seen movies like ‘Hulk’, ‘Troy’ or ‘Black Hawk Down’ and why I am very upset to find that he is playing Henry DeTamble in ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife' which is being released later this year. I read the book not long ago and loved it, but how can I ever watch the movie when all I will be able to think of is this...?:

Photo5 has arrived!

My Photo5 box arrived last night! Woohoo!

Because I’m a giant dork, I got very excited and did a little dance when I discovered it in the mailbox. It was such a cute little box with a whole bunch of flaps that folded out to tell you what each brief was. You can check out what the box looks like here (not my photo).


There are 5 briefs all up (hence Photo5), each with a focus on a specific aspect of photography.

1. Shutter Speed –Paint Powder – take a photo of liquid in motion
2. Close up - Hundreds and Thousands – all about taking a macro shot
3. Bokeh - Star Lens Hoods – getting awesome star shaped bokeh
4. Portraiture – Spectacles – pretty self-explanatory I think.
5. Open Brief - Low light – taking a photo in a low light situation while still maintaining details.

I can’t wait to get started on it. At the minute I’m just trying to come up with some clever ways of using these things to take some great photos. My biggest issue at the moment is that I don’t really have a proper tripod, which makes the bokeh effect and the low light image difficult to capture. I have a crappy little tripod that is a bit of a hassle to use, so I think I’ll either have to mess around with that or borrow one from somewhere.

From what I can gather, the creativity of the photo idea is equally as important as the quality of the photo, so I think a lot of brainstorming is in order. I’m lucky that the two lenses that I own are pretty well suited to the tasks, one is a super sharp 85mm f/1.8 and the other is a macro lens, so at least I have the versatility to take the low light and macro shots. The 85mm takes an excellent portrait shot as well.

Time to start the brainstorming – butchers paper and textas at the ready!

Photo5

This has been the absolute dullest week I’ve had in a very long time.

The only redeeming thing about this week is the fact that registration for the Canon Photo5 competition opened on Monday.

Without going into too much detail, the general gist of the Photo5 competition is that it’s a photography contest where Canon sends you out a box with 5 mystery items in it and you can take and submit 5 photos, each featuring one item.

I’ve been taking photos for quite a while as a bit of a hobby, and late last year I finally got myself a new camera – a Canon 40D. At that stage I had just missed out on registering for last year’s competition, so I’m pretty happy to be able to give it a go this year.

I should get the box in the next couple of days and hopefully that will kill some of the dullness around here. I can’t wait to get started!!!