Tonight I finished off the last of my three book reviews penned in the last week. The first two were positive but this one was a doozy. It was a perfect storm of book criticism. I’d had a rubbish day at work and I came home and cracked open a bottle of red. After a couple of glasses I was on fire - the frustrations of my day combined with the crapness of the book in question and inspired me to new heights of savagery. The vitriol and bile were flowing and I thought I was soooo damn funny.
Then I stopped and thought about it. Sure, some big shot writer isn’t going to care what an unqualified 26 year old writing for a free webzine thinks about his book. But an Aussie writer carried by a boutique publishing house? Maybe.
So I took out the most gratuitous insults and added some compliments (well, ONE compliment). I’ve still only given it 4/10 because it annoyed me and ruined a perfectly good Monday night. I think the only way to be truly brutal as a critic is to not care what the writer would think, or to convince yourself that your tough love will do them good.
With any luck, tomorrow night I’ll be venturing out for some karaoke action. Who would have thought that I would become such a fiend for the microphone? Not I.
My first experience was at The Laundry’s “Extreme Karaoke” night back in my student days. One night, well-liquored and over-confident, I stepped up to perform Pulp’s “Common People”. At the time I felt it went really well. Hindsight tells me that I was tuneless and encumbered by an appalling fake accent. And I spilled my beer.
Second time was back at The Laundry and the song was Ash’s “Girl From Mars”. Sadly, I couldn’t remember the lyrics or the tune and I didn’t even have the fuzzy distance of beer to delude myself.
I’ve never rated myself as a singer and these inauspcious beginnings made me think my rockstar ambitions might be better served as a guitarist. Or a roadie.
But four years later, I found myself hiring a karaoke booth with a few friends. We drank smuggled-in VBs and took turns on the machine. Maybe it was the smaller group setting, maybe it was a fluke, but I sounded pretty good. Sure, I failed to pull off Babylon Zoo’s “Spaceman”, but in fairness to me half the vocals are at double-speed. You try it sometime.
Then in March I got my Bryan Adams on at a friend’s 30th with “Summer of ‘69″. Not flawless and more enthusiasm than technical skill on display, but it went down a treat.
I think the secret is that I don’t care anymore that I’m not a brilliant singer. I don’t hurt people’s ears and I have a good time doing it. And for a chronic perfectionist, I think that’s a good place to be.
My blogging here has been pretty intermittent, especially in recent months. It occasionally seems it’s because I don’t have things to say - but I do, I just don’t say them here. And yesterday it hit me that I was never really a solo blogger.
In the early days (c. 2005) I blogged as part of a little gang of Canberra people, expanding to include others around Australia and the world whose blogs I interacted with. Looking at my blogroll, it’s depressing to think about how few of my blog friends are still writing regularly. In 2008, it’s mostly just the irrepressible Jen.
So if I want to keep doing this and to feel like my blog is something more than the public face of my inner monologue, I think I need to expand the circle once more.
After over two years of book reviewing for Popmatters and never once getting a free book, I felt it was safe to put my hand up for a massive wishlist, thinking they would never come through. Well, I now have three books to read and review in the next three weeks. Pessimism will be my downfall.
This year I’ve bettered my Sydney Film Festival attendance in one night. Last year all I managed was Hong Sang-Soo’s Woman On A Beach, which was pretty good but a bit too detached to get any real affection from me. Tonight, I saw Roy Andersson’s You, The Living (Du Levande) and Pang Ho-Cheung’s Trivial Matters. Both were classic film festival fare - off-beat, random and kind of sweet.
You, The Living is the one that will probably stick with me. It’s not going to be a lovable film for a lot of people - it’s deeply pessimistic (even for a Swedish film), it’s shot inside some of the ugliest buildings ever, and most of the cast are obese, middle-aged losers. But it’s so funny and true to life in a lot of ways. The characters are constantly experiencing the little humiliations and frustrations and conflicts that we all do - and yet remain completely oblivious to the similar experiences of those around them, exclaiming “No one understands me!”
There’s actually a beautiful moral to the film, or at least there seems to be to me, and that’s be nice to people, because they’ve probably had a shitty day too.
Well it looks like it might be curtains for Hillary by the end of the day - and one bitter, claws-out political battle will be replaced with another. It makes you wonder what kind of person voluntarily puts themselves in a process whereby they endure a year of insults and personal attacks to be briefly in charge of a tanking economy for which they will be personally blamed.
Once upon a time, this here blogger fancied himself as a budding politician. Something about the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate and the mental challenge of policy-making appealled to me. Then I read Mungo MacCallum’s How To Be A Megalomaniac - sort of an Australian political Screwtape Letters - and I had my doubts. And I saw the pissiness and immaturity of Melbourne University student politics and it was all over.
I’ve spent my last four years working around politicians, which is my indirect way of experiencing what I once aspired to be. The more I see of them, the less I want to be in their shoes. And the less I think I would have what it takes. Key attributes I am missing include: total self-belief; a flexible approach to the truth; and the “killer” instinct.
For all my faults, I have been faced with the startling revelation that I’m just not enough of a shit.
Inspired by Jen, who posts a lot of recipes these days over at The Pile I’m Standing In, and by the amazing concoction Andy whipped up tonight, I present the dessert you never asked for but should want to eat - Fuffcakes (that’s “fake muffin pancakes” said really fast).
What do you do when you have over-ripe bananas, a desire to make pancakes and no eggs in the fridge? Answer, make a banana muffin type thing in the frying pan. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
Ingredients
About five bananas
A few cups of flour
A few cups of milk
Half a cup of oil
Cooking
Blend everything up in a mixing bowl. Heat butter in a pan and whack in a good scoop of batter. Flip when underside starts to firm up. Eat while insides are still semi-liquid.
I didn’t actually make these, so maybe Andy can correct me on the details.
