How to win hearts and minds

I'm not sure that there isn't a better way than this.

Three Feet High And Rising

Three best opening chapters:

Martin Amis, "Other People".

Don DeLillo, "Underworld".

Ian McEwan, "Enduring Love".

All I Ever Wanted

... was my morning cup of coffee.

I went to the cupboard.

The cupboard was bare.

I got ready for work early and caught the 8am express bus that drops me off near the National Library, which, until recently, made coffee as good as anywhere in Canberra, but now Jeremy doesn't seem to be working the machine it has gone off somewhat.

I had to wait 10 minutes for the Library's cafe to open.

I sat near a lady with a baby.

The baby made a sound somewhat akin to an elongated "splat".

There arose a smell which overwhelmed the size of the Library foyer and the air conditioning system.

But I wanted coffee.

One of the cafe staff unlocked the door of the cafe and announced that the machine was broken.

There would be no coffee.

I walked to work, a thick black cloud of blackness hovering somewhere above my head.

All I ever wanted was my morning cup of coffee.

The many moods of Yo La Tengo

If you catch a fish, cut it open, and examine its guts, you can tell what it had for dinner. But it is still a fish. If you trawl through the entrails of a Yo La Tengo album, you can tell what music they have been digesting, but what you are listening to is still a Yo La Tengo album.

And so it is with “I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass”, the nicely titled, nicely adorned (cover art by our man Gary Panter) new YLT long player. A cursory first listen, under suboptimal conditions, reveals the following ingredients:

Stereolab circa “Lo Boob Oscillator”

mid-80s Prince

John Cale’s “Paris 1919”

Brian Eno, with and/or without Harold Budd

“Sea Breezes” by Roxy Music

some Ramones

The Byrds of “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” vintage

The Clean, solo David Kilgour and any number of vintage Flying Nun recordings from the late 80s

and I suppose we might as well acknowledge the Velvet Underground, although they are perhaps more in the nature of DNA than influence these days.

Other ears will, no doubt, hear other things.

The other thing about Yo La Tengo is that they care nothing about sequencing their albums, setting and maintaining a mood, and all those other things that lesser beings put effort into. And it works in their favour: YLT records aren’t so much albums as collections of songs, and songs is what they are good at. (Except, their best album, “And then nothing turned itself inside-out”, is in fact an extended mood piece in which all the tracks do hang together and feed off each other - thus does the critic successfully puncture his own argument.)

You want another thing? Song length. Whether it’s two minutes or twelve, a Yo La Tengo song takes just the right amount of time. I’m not sure how they do that. The new album is bookended by 10-minute-plus workouts, and I can’t imagine anyone else being able to get away with this without causing me to look at my watch at least once or twice.

I must admit, I had been developing a sense that Yo La Tengo may have been falling into a kind of elder-statespersons pattern of releasing fairly uniformly “tasteful” albums every couple of years, punctuated by one-off releases as an outlet for their more experimental, uh, experiments, kind of in the way Sonic Youth have latterly operated. I was a fool.

Generals and Majors

We don't know this Macarthur fellow from squididdly, but we are amazed, and delighted, that he has decided to send John Zorn a cheque for $100,000 annually for the next five years (that's American dollars, which these days equates to roughly twenty squidillion of the Australian variety). That is going to put a little excitement into trips to the post office.

What will Zorn do with the money? For one thing, he could put it towards making Tzadik discs a bit less expensive. In Sydney I handed over $110 for three Zorn discs. Admittedly one was a double, but still.

I'm not sure he could put it towards increasing his already phenomenal work rate, but if he did, we would have to mortgage the dog. Wait, we don't have a dog. Can you mortgage children?

(A couple of years ago Macarthur made one of these grants to Ben Katchor. He is obviously a man of good taste and distinction.)

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, Iran may be on the nuclear precipice, George W Bush may be President for two more years, global warming may be almost upon us, Iraq may be in civil war, millions of people the world over may be sick and/or starving, but ...

Seth is in the New York Times.

... and the winner is ...

I have been putting together a weblog entry (albeit entirely in my head) involving Doctor Jim, and specifically how hearing for the first time, recently, the aural assault of the opening bars of "At The Mountains Of Madness", John Zorn's latest Masada-related star vehicle, put me in mind of an afternoon I spent, a long time ago in a batchelorhood far far away, at Jim's pad being bludgeoned by Zorn's "Spy vs Spy" and Big Black's "[sound of impact]" live bootleg.

So there I was thinking about this on Saturday afternoon, and playing around with the idea that for some time Jim and I were able to push each other in the direction of musics we hadn't otherwise considered or been aware of, and why he kept heading towards the outer limits while I turned back, when a familiar yet mysterious voice said to me, over the telephone, "You should watch tonight's 'RocKwiz'".

So I did. "RocKwiz" is SBS's superior music trivia show, hosted by the lovely, sharp and irrepressible Julie Zemiro, and including as contestants two actual musicians and four mugs from the audience. Doctor Jim was one of those mugs on Saturday night. And his was a sterling performance. It is possible that a couple of clangers (no, Jim, Boney M were not, in this or any other alternative universe, responsible for "Take Me To The River") were caused by some errant coaching from his celebrity teammate Kate Ceberano, or by nerves. But for the most part his approach of Hit the Buzzer First, Think Later paid off. His non-verbal communication skills came to the fore when giving the answer "Chris De Burgh".

Jim, you did us proud. In fact, I can say with some certainty that yours was the best (a description in no way diminished by the fact that it is also the only) performance on a television quiz show by someone of my acquaintance since the night that Ian Woolley wiped the floor with all comers on "Sale of the Century", only to do the completely unheard of and take the prizes and run, rather than come back the next night in search of more loot.

The one thing I would like to know, though, is the identity of the Doctor Jim Fan Club who were cheering him on throughout the show. Of course, we were cheering right along with them.

Where Have They Been?

So it's the "9/11" edition of the New Yorker, and they have rolled out most of the heavy hitters. This goes a long way to explaining, and excusing, the unbearable lightness of the bulk of the last few issues (although the recent piece on feudin' mathematicians was a fascinating window into a world most of us never see). Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Goldberg, Lawrence Wright, George Packer: all have valuable insights into everything that has gone wrong in the last five years. (No Jon Lee Anderson, but he is excused, having filed at length recently from both Lebanon and Cuba.)

But the most amazing thing about this issue is the fiction, which is written by Cate Kennedy: man, I know Cate Kennedy. She was at one time the other half of a friend of mine from University, Phil Larwill (who in turn is a cousin of the artist David Larwill, one of whose screenprints hangs on our living room wall). Cate and Phil decamped to Mexico for a couple of years, from where they sent some very funny, and interesting, letters and emails, and Cate eventually wrote a book about those times (something I had tossed around in my mind as a possible publishing venture, although I never communicated that to them). We gave a copy of that book to Adrienne's mum, who herself had spent some time knocking around in Mexico in her youth.

Remarkably, this is the fourth appearance in the New Yorker of someone I know. John Adamson, brother of my very very very good friend Marcelle (who now lives much too far away, in London), was quoted in a profile of the then up-and-coming historian Niall Ferguson. Tim Klingender, whom I also knew at University, featured in a piece on Aboriginal art. And there was once a full-page ad for a book by Angus Trumble (and, as we all knew, if you removed the "GT" from "Angus Trumble" you got "Anus Rumble" - oh those crazy undergraduate days).

So anyway, Cate, wherever you are, very well done. I look forward to your forthcoming book.

"Stealing in the name of the Lord"

If you had an Internet connection, were sentient, and had sufficiently poor grasp on what are the important things in life, you, too, could have constructed the following mix tape (June 2006 edition):

Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”: is this the greatest radio song ever? Well, I can’t think of anything that would best it. It is almost as if the greatest pop moments of the last, what, 40 years had been absorbed into this one definitive three-minute perfect storm. It could have been made at any time over those 40 years and not have seemed out of place. I am not worthy.

Go Home Productions, “Papa Was A Clock (The Temptations vs Coldplay)”: perhaps not so surprising that the only song that could credibly hold its own with “Crazy” is something that doesn’t quite exist. We don’t much care for Coldplay, but by taking out those vocals and replacing them with one of the all-time greats you actually end up with something little short of wonderful.

Devo, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: it’s funny, but the last two songs for some reason make me think of “Bittersweet Symphony”, which makes me think of the Rolling Stones, and how they went the corporate heavy over that song’s use of ... well, you know the story. So why not follow up with this Devolution of the Rolling Stones, featuring the most counterintuitive drumming known to man.

Bobby Bland, “Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City”: and if we’re going to hate, we may as well play a song about no love.

Martin and the Moondogs, “Tropical Loveland”: and if there ain’t no love in the city, we may as well heed the call of Martin Phillips to choof off to his tropical loveland. (If you thought it was the height of “irony” for Abba to record a song about a tropical paradise, how about having that song covered by a bunch of reprobates from Dunedin, which may be as far from paradise as it is possible to get (geographically speaking only).) From an album of Abba songs covered by sundry New Zealand luminaries.

The Gist, “Love At First Sight”: and if you went to a tropical loveland you may find “love at first sight”. This, if I remember rightly, was Stuart Moxham’s first foray into the solo world post-Young Marble Giants. I have the album, “Embrace The Herd”, tucked away somewhere in my collection, unlistened to for many years. I have to say, hearing this song in the early 21st century gives me the odd sensation that I may have obtained my copy 23 years before its actual recording. It sounds in no way dated. Did Richard Thompson play on the album? That is something I will have to look into.

The Marine Girls, “A Place In The Sun”: I think we’ve taken the thematic approach way far enough for now, and it would have been too obvious to connect “a place in the sun” with a “tropical loveland”. So we won’t. What we will do, however, is point out the absurdity that Carl, the eight-year-old, has developed an obsession with this song, and has most likely listened to it more times in the last few weeks than the total number of times it was listened to by the total number of people who listened to it when it first came out. We can’t work out what he hears in it; it has no big air-guitar moments or dancefloor potential. He’s a good boy.

Hydroplane, “We Crossed The Atlantic”: full disclosure - Bart is one of the nicest people we know. And my mum knew Andrew’s mum when they were girls. None of which detracts from the indisputable fact that this song, this beautiful drifting thing, can, and does, more than stand on its own two feet. As featured (if I remember rightly) on John Peel’s Festive Fifty.

Ulrich Schnauss, “Suddenly The Trees Are Giving Way”: shimmering electronic beauty from somewhere in Europe from the recent past; and yet it follows on nicely from Hydroplane, adding to the sense of drift one of those simple drum patterns that Hydroplane used on some of their more (relatively) kinetic numbers.

Ratata, “Liv Utan Spanning”: bring your own umlauts. I bet you didn’t know there was a Scandinavian Ultravox.

Shimura Curves, “I Am Not Afraid”: this slice of gorgeously brittle pop has, buried in it, a nice trace of vintage Flying Nun. (The Dunedin sound is cropping up everywhere these days; viz. the latest Mojave 3 album.) There is a guitar line in here, too, that I’m sure I’ve heard somewhere before, which is driving me nuts.

Seelenluft, “I Come Along (Joakim Dub)”: I’m not quite sure why I chose to single this out from the seemingly endless parade of good electronic music coming out of Europe, but in terms of the sounds employed it cannot be faulted.

The Others, “I Can’t Stand This Love, Goodbye”: from the jungle (heh) to the garage, this comes from the Nuggets school of do-it-yourself proto-punk, and is as infectious as all heck.

Los Impalas, “Love Grows A Flower”: a slower, slightly trippier version of the above, the result, no doubt, of ingestion of the appropriate substances. If songs like this had been better received in their day, there would have been no need for progressive rock to have been invented; but then, there would have been no need for the jams to be kicked out by punkers either, so lets not go there.

The Master’s Apprentices, “Rio De Camero”: and some home-grown homegrown, if you know what I mean.

The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset”: it is too easy to take the existence of a song like this for granted and never really listen to it. I did the same thing with “Ride A White Swan”. My bad. There may be no better evocation of a particular time and place.

Jeremy Warmsley, “5 Verses (demo)”: okay, it may be cheap, but believe me it’s not nasty, to play this after the Kinks, who are an obvious reference point for this gorgeous slice of English pop; fashioned, it seems, by the human voice, understated post-punk-era guitar, cheap keyboards, and a seriously over-amped drum machine.

Mulatu Astatqe, “Mulatu”: fresh from his uncovering by Jim Jarmusch in his beautiful most recent film, “Broken Flowers”. It is easy to understand Jarmusch’s love for this guy: his music is entirely simple, charming and uplifting.

Dandolo, “Fire Breathing (Shit Robot Remix)”: which amounts, in essence, to one goddamn propulsive bass-line repeated ad infinitum or until the bass player’s fingers fall off. But what a bass-line. And with just the right amount of bleeps and washes threading under, around and over the top of it. What will they think of next?


Well, that's it for now. We're off to Sydney, sans kids, for the week to learn how to make our home, and perhaps the world, comfortable and inviting for an eight-year-old on the autism spectrum. Plus, I have a brand new credit card and an expectation of bringing home more than a little John Zorn product.

Trees and Flowers

"Mum, I'm going to sketch the blossoms."

[A few minutes pass.]

"Mum, can you stop the trees from moving?"

climb every mountain

I once made a vow that I would, one day, listen to "Sandinista" in its entirety. Even fans of the Clash told me I was mad. But I never lost sight of my dream.

And now I have done it.

The lesson here is, I think, just because you are in a position to force your record company to let you put out a low-price triple-album set, that doesn't mean it is actually a good idea.

Space-capades

We are, of course, sad for Pluto. It is always difficult to discover that something you took for granted as Immutable Fact is in fact nothing but a human construct, liable to be pulled from under your feet at any moment. Of course, the lump of rock is still there, it is still known as “Pluto”, but apparently it no longer justifies the title of “planet”. The given reasons for the change are entirely understandable (although I did like the idea of having a planet called “Xena”, but that’s another story), but it is going to take some getting used to.

What concerns me most is, how are today’s children going to learn the names of the planets and their order from the sun?

When I was at school, it was this easy:

My (Mercury)
Very (Venus)
Easy (Earth)
Method (Mars)
Says (Saturn)
Just (Jupiter)
Use (Uranus)
Nine (Neptune)
Planets (Pluto)

But now we find ourselves in a galaxy that is mnemonically challenged. You can’t just omit the “P” because the “Nine” makes no sense now there are only eight. Unless they change Neptune to a name beginning with “E”, which ain’t gonna happen, I fear we are doomed.

I suppose you could change it to, say, “My Very Evil Mother Says Jump Up Now”, but the beauty of the one I knew was that the mnemonic itself, in a kind of pre-post-modern way, contained the answer to the problem; I think it would be a struggle to come up with something that isn’t just completely random nonsense.

Oh the times we live in.

This Goes With That

The latest in a hitherto dormant, but continuing, series.

A few days ago 1,618 offered up "Genetic Engineering" by Orchestral Manouvres In The Dark, a song I haven't heard since at some point in my extended youth. What strikes me now, and didn't then, is the debt this song owed to the first two "pop" albums by Brian Eno, right down to the rhythmic structure, the crunching guitars, even the vocal delivery. And all cunningly disguised as an electro-pop frippery.

The listening post

Young people often ask me, “Stan, what have you been listening to lately?” Actually that’s not true, but it’s a good excuse to put down a few words about some things that have captured my attention of late. I should say, though, before we start, that, notwithstanding what David Byrne once intoned, first impressions are not always correct.

There has been a quartet of “electronic” releases over the last few months that have grabbed my attention and not let go. First is Tiga’s “Sexor”, which comprises good-natured and gentle sleaze, Canadian-style, atop a musical bed that could have been made in those golden days of the early 1980s and is all the better for it. The others, which I kind of lump together out of ignorance, although each one probably occupies a different sub-genre if you are “hip” to the “jive”, are “Orchestra of Bubbles” by Ellen Allien and Apparat (which has a certain warmth and charm, unusual for electronic music outside of Kraftwerk, and which may be the result of having a woman at the controls), “We Are Monster” by Isolee, which I have been previously restricted to hearing in isolated snatches, but which works much better as a unit, and the new CD by The Knife, “Silent Shout”, almost on the strength of the sounds it tosses up (check those marbles on “Marble House”, I have never heard anything quite like them and don’t expect I ever will again), but also on the strength of that voice (which I once described to Adrienne as being like a cross between Kate Bush and Bjork, a description I am quite proud of even if it might be totally wrong).

Then there is the imaginatively titled “Espers II” by Espers, which grabs me in a very special place reserved for records that don’t quite fit any particular mould but which are nevertheless clearly drawing from traditions that mean a lot to me. Espers seem to be lumped in, for convenience (as is always the case with lumping in), with the “freak folk” gang, the likes of Devendra Banhart and what have you, lots of guys with unruly hair and unhygienic-seeming beards, you know the sort (and what about the afro on that guy from TV On The Radio, whose new album has kind of left me feeling a little bit underwhelmed after all the hype, although, as with Belle and Sebastian’s “The Life Pursuit”, it may be a delayed-onset experience). Anyway the Espers disc is probably my little bit of excitement for 2006, in the same way M Ward and Gillian Welch have been previously, which is high praise I know, and I may regret it later, but that’s what blogging is all about. (And on a not unrelated note the self-titled record by Brightblack Morning Light is not half bad, either; likewise the latest from Six Organs of Admittance.)

(And I was a bit scared by what I had read about the new Sonic Youth, but having finally given in, I like what I am hearing. Have they mellowed? Have I? I suspect that all that has happened is that we have all gotten used to the Sonic Youth sound, and that if you put anything off “Rather Ripped” up against actual “classic rock radio” the punters would still run a mile with their hands over their ears. Still, since when has the most fitting adjective to describe SY been “nice”?)

Adrienne and I have, in the last few years, got into a bit of a habit of buying each other, for birthdays etc, books or CDs that we would like to read/hear ourselves. So the person who buys the present ends up monopolising it, and the person who receives the present never sets eyes on it again. (Leaving aside the infamous Three-Tiered Bean Sprouter Incident of 1989, which will never be spoken of again. Except by Adrienne, whenever she feels like twisting the knife just that little bit further.) Anyway, it all kind of backfired (but in a good way) this year when I used mother’s day as an excuse to acquire the “Tropicalia” compilation on Soul Jazz (home of the wonderful “Reggae Disco” set, “The World of Arthur Russell”, and a few thousand Studio 1 compilations). It dug its hooks into her straight away, and has barely been out of the car stereo since. Which is bad for me, because I almost never get to use the car. From what I have heard, however, it would be difficult to stitch together a better, or - crucially - more enjoyable, representation of a "scene".

Meanwhile there have been Bob Dylan’s radio shows, and a whole slew of old reggae plates and reissues have been turning up on the internet, which it is hard to say “no” to. And then there’s Zorn, about which, a bit more a bit later.

From our political correspondent

ITEM!

A ten-year-old boy of our acquaintance recently spent the day with a friend of his, following his friend’s father, who works for one of the television channels, around Parliament House in Canberra. Somewhere in the endless warren of corridors they had a chance meeting with Mr Howard, our Prime Minister. Ever the consummate politician, he took some time to talk to the boys and foster their interest in politics (and maybe secure their votes for his party one day in the future). Debriefing later, the ten-year-old, when asked his impression of Mr Howard, said, “He’s very loud.”

ITEM!

Reading a piece by David Cole in the New York Review of Books about the ramifications of the US Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case, I came across a sentence that was at once beautifully understated, and horrifying (horrifying in the sense that you could never have imagined, five years ago, a situation in which such a sentence would ever need to be written):

“And it is quite possible that [US] government officials might actually decide not to commit war crimes - now that they know they are war crimes - even if prosecution is unlikely.”

Urgent update

Folks should head right across to Moistworks (link at right) and download "Who's That Knocking", a new song by Pajo (him of Tortoise "fame") which is, quite simply, incredible. What's with the rhythmic structure of this thing? The drums are strictly four on the floor (or three in some places) while the rest of it gets a little funky so that the whole thing is just slightly disconcertingly out of whack. But it's a thing of beauty, and probably the first song I've heard to make me take a sudden step backwards, "woah" style, since I first laid ears on the Junior Boys. You download 100 songs and hear something like this, it's worth it.

Gravity's Angel

Looks like it's Pynchon time again.

The facts on the ground

It was an almost warm afternoon, slightly muggy on account of a light rain that had fallen a couple of hours prior. I had obtained a ticket-of-leave from work in order to pay my nice Vietnamese barber a long-overdue visit. Beck had been playing on the car stereo, but he made way for Belle and Sebastian. Coffee was taken at Silo, in the company of a recent New Yorker, in which Alex Ross (link at right) attempts to listen to the complete works of Mozart. Silo is nice in the afternoon, it has emptied out by then and you can take in the ambience of the room itself, although the bread has invariably sold out long before. I had given up all hope of finding the new CD by The Necks, "Chemist", having scoured the record stores of Civic on the weekend to no avail (all likely establishments had had it, and had sold out: good news for The Necks, bad news for me). Something made me think of Abels, in Manuka. Well, I was on the road anyway. There I found what I was looking for, at something above the recommended retail price, I'm sure, but what can you do?

I walked past a handwritten menu board outside an Asian restaurant which contained the words "Pe...king duck", where a mystery third letter had been obliterated from the word "Peking". I wonder what it might have been: "Peaking duck", perhaps? Or "Peeking duck"? Something in me hopes that it had said "Pecking duck", but I very much doubt it.

Much later, "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" came up on iTunes, and for a few moments everything was right with the world.

The story of underpants

[Have been neglecting you guys lately. Apologies. Here's one I have been putting together over a long period.]



Whoever invented y-fronts must have had a cast-iron bladder. White undies, bog catchers, boston stranglers – call them what you will, they certainly don’t allow for any activity that is not tightly choreographed and premeditated.

(I would also like to have explained to me the distinction between “boxer” and “jockey” shorts. The two professions, as far as I am aware, make up a fairly small proportion of the overall male population – wouldn’t it make more sense to label them, say, “builders” and “accountants” shorts (although which would be which I could not say)? And what of that curious anomaly, the Jockette - a word that, or maybe this is just me, has certain feminine connotations, even though the Jockette is unequivocally a male undergarment.)

I managed to survive most of my primary school years wearing plain and structurally sound white underpants, the new coloured and skimpy variety - “jocks” by name - not arriving at Fish Creek until somewhere around the time that I was in grade five, by which point the Whitlam revolution was in full swing at our school (but that’s another story).

In the pre-jocks era, we boys were entirely comfortable and relaxed exposing our white undies on social occasions such as the changing rooms at the Foster Swimming Pool, or visits by the travelling school doctor. The principal source of underwear-derived embarrassment in those days was the existence and magnitude of brown skidmarks.

The obvious advantage of these newfangled coloured underpants was that they successfully camouflaged all but the nastiest cases of skidmarks – especially with brown being such a popular 1970s colour. However, the sudden appearance of choice in the underwear racks allowed, inevitably, for entirely new opportunities for social stratification, and ostracism, in the playground. The ongoing battle between the haves and the have-nots moved from footy cards and yo-yos to underwear.

This was particularly difficult for me. I grew up in relative isolation as an only child on a farm. My parents remained deeply scarred by the Great Depression and held firm in their resistance to my increasingly desperate pleas to be allowed to have a couple of pairs of coloured undies. My aversion to water can probably be traced back to traumatic experiences in the boys’ changing rooms during this difficult period (although it could also have something to do with the fact that I never quite got the hang of swimming, and, because I have been seriously short-sighted since I was five years old, never quite knew, in that pre-goggles era, where anything else was when I was in the water).

My crazy cousins who lived in Melbourne, and were therefore a few steps closer to what was fashionable than I would ever be, eventually came to the rescue, giving me a pair of black-and-white paisley jocks for Christmas. (I suppose mum could have had a bit of involvement in that, come to think of it.) My general demeanour must have instantly lifted, because the floodgates opened up and, before too long, I was also the proud owner of matching brown and green pairs, designed in a kind of late abstract-expressionist style.

And so it came to pass that I was able to go on the Fish Creek Primary School grade six camp, the undoubted highlight of the primary school years but which I had previously been facing with underpants-related trepidation, with some confidence. This camp, a five-day affair, took us to Phillip Island (about an hour’s drive away), where we stayed at the exotically named Island Bay Ranch. This turned out to be a kind of Wild West theme park, where we slept in covered wagons arranged in a circle, ate at long tables in a log cabin, and engaged in activities such as archery (heavily supervised, for obvious reasons), a flying fox (not for me, thanks), mucking about on inflated inner tubes in a dam, and hay-rides (the latter being particularly underwhelming for our group, given that most of us lived on farms, where “hay-rides” meant work). We even took a boat trip out to something called Churchill Island, where absolutely nothing awaited us, although I guess it filled up another half a day of “activities”.

Even though I was by now a fully fledged member of the coloured-underpants set, and therefore “okay”, the absence of older brothers in my life meant that I was deemed not quite “in” enough to be allowed into the tight circle around Tim Farrell, who had brought along his older brother Jonathan’s cassette tape of the first Skyhooks album, “Living In The 70s”. I was, however, accepted as a proud member of the massed air-guitar ensemble that, at the traditional “student entertainment” on our last night, performed a highly animated mime (Countdown-style) to The Sweet’s “Fox On The Run”.

Towards the end of the week, just when the teachers had begun to relax a little on the basis that we had all been reasonably well behaved, and therefore would all go home unscathed (physically, at least), Peter Napier poured himself a glass of what looked like green cordial but which soon revealed itself, as he began frothing at the mouth, to be dishwashing liquid. Several rounds of induced vomiting later, he seemed to be okay, but a number of us followed him around for a while, in the hope that other unusual symptoms might start to reveal themselves. We were, sadly, disappointed (which, in hindsight, was probably for the best).

Anyway – underpants. Having secured himself a fairly discreet spot on a top bunk in the back corner of one of the covered wagons, Justin Heyne (who was the son of the best teacher I ever had, someone who seemed to see behind my insecurity and weird behaviour, and who encouraged me to write stories and to read anything I could get my hands on; thank you, Mr Heyne, wherever you are) had managed to get through the first couple of days unobserved. Inevitably, though, he was “outed” wearing a pair of pale blue boston stranglers. He swore that they were bought like that, as if this would lend them an air of credibility, but a conclusion was instantly drawn that they were nothing more than white undies that had been dyed by his mother, and that this was, according to the Unwritten Law, not acceptable. A period of degradation and ritual abuse, like an unpublished chapter of “Lord of the Flies”, ensued until, eventually, the perpetrators ran off, pack-like, in search of the next victim, each one trying as hard as possible to make sure it wasn’t him.

Eventually, my original stockpile of coloured undies went to that big top drawer in the sky, to be replaced by others covered in road signs or farm animals (although I was destined never to own a pair like the much-coveted ones worn by Mark “Chook” McLeod, South Gippsland’s number one Ted Nugent fan, and about whom much more can be written, which featured prominently on the front a picture of a rooster and the words “Cock of the Walk”) and on to more subdued, single-colour models.

And now, thanks to the good works of Calvin Klein and the supreme power of advertising, it is, once again, safe to wear large white underpants. I guess this means that the schoolyard pecking order will have moved on to other things – mobile phones, perhaps, or hoodies. Or, this being the Information Age, the ultimate taunt: “My hard drive is bigger than yours.”

Spam of the Week

I quite like the morning ritual of deleting dozens of unsolicited emails. For one thing, the names the spammers come up with can be a work of art in itself. For another, I still entertain the vain and ridiculous hope that one day someone will offer to pay me to give up my day job and concentrate on writing.

Yesterday one in particular caught my eye. The content related to erectile disfunction, which is something no 42-year-old man wants to dwell on for any length of time. But the subject line made me think for a moment that I was getting a personal message from Mark E Smith: "Your future, pastry bag". Keep 'em coming.