That's great, but what are you gonna call it?

was playing a parlour game the other day, with a bunch of Esteemed Reprobates, and we started talking about what one would call one’s memoirs, should the need arise.

I think I would call mine ‘I Hate You All But I’m Only Going to Blackmail Some of You’. There were some other good entries, to: ‘I Tried Jogging Once, But the Ice Kept Spilling Out of My Drink’ (although it was pointed out that this was actually a quotation from David Lee Roth), ‘The Next Time You Are in Doubt About Self-Immolation, Just Go Right Ahead’, and 'If You Are Reading This, You Will Go Blind'.

Readers are invited to come up with their own.

The entries will be judged by a panel of aphorism experts and prizes doled out accordingly.

A smart arse in a dumb shirt

I just had a bunch of t-shirts made up that say ‘I am not part of your target demographic’. I did this because while I usually find those kinds of shirts irritating on other people, for some reason they make me feel like less, not more, of a tool.

The other thing about them is, when one goes to the gym, fit young people tend to come up and say hello, how about that t-shirt you’re wearing. (Other favourites include ‘I hate your band’ and ‘Your product here’).

Anyway, this post isn’t really about all of that. It is more like an open letter to the Public Relations Industry:

Dear Public Relations Industry,

I believe I can save you a lot of time, and generate some positive vertically integrated efficiencies, by telling how it is that the Young People think about the politicians. The truth is that the average young person regards your standard Aussie pollie with a mixture of indifference and disdain, and more importantly as some kind of manifestation of a hyperaggressive media. John Howard? My gosh, he’s on TV a lot. Just like Anna Coren and those Hollywood starlets. Kevin Rudd? Isn’t he that guy with the MySpace page? God, how frightful it is to actually be asked one’s opinion on something like that … usually when the baby boomers & poll wizards want to get some ‘qualitative data’ about said individuals.

Acutally, the funniest thing I’ve read recently was a short article in the Daily Telegraph about some internal polling that Crosby Textor had done on Christopher Pyne, Tony Abbott, and the pharmaceutical and medical insurance industries. While the latter could be expected to be pretty much universally despised, they actually scored a lot better than the two minister. If you don’t find this funny I don’t know and can’t even tell you why you’ve read this far.

The actual thing about opinion poll data is that, as far as predicting outcomes of election goes, it is about half as reliable as seeing what the bookmakers are giving. There have been serious studies done on this, and if the information were more well known it would have to be suppressed … so my suggestion to you, PR Industry, is to maybe combine the most Satanic of your Dark Arts with the methods employed by the gambling industry.

Aside from the dangers of this combination bringing about the Rapture, there could be some opportunities here to leverage … oh, what the f*ck.

yours,

Evan

The Hilltop Hoods, just like that

Oh how it warms the hackles of my callous, hateful heart to hear the Hilltop Hoods on the radio. It some legitimises my Australian-ness, my whiteness, my suburban-ness. Why if these boys can get jiggy with it like this, then anyone like them can. And I am one of the million and a half or so Australians that think that the next one could be one of us. We are aware of each other, we know that while it might not be cool to be an Aussie here right now, all over the world we are treated with respect and admiration. Even in countries in Iraq that is the first thing anyone will say about Australians. They don’t mind us. We are not being ordered to shoot at them by the Great Satan. It’s okay. They understand.

We are seen as like Canadians, only funny. Italians, but more warm. And so on. Our little cult TV shows become cult viewing over there. About every five years or so an Aussie Rock Band will sell a million or so over there. And if they can get away with it, why can’t we?

The only remaining hurdle, it seemed, was this hip-hop thing. In this country, except for an exceptionally few bright souls, the music was mostly regarded in the same way that Country and Western fans might view it.

But now here these lads are. They just released an album with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Before that they had a nice little career as a touring act. Now, when you hear this stuff on the radio, you don’t feel like cringing. You reach down and turn the stereo up, bop your head a little, maybe shout along for a couple of bars. Just like that.

you would not think to look at him, but

we used to have nicknames for each other
i called her cinnamon because
never mind because. it was nice
time went by and she got more and more
cynical
and apart from those two words sound when you
say them together
cinnamon and cynical
there was nothing nice about that

Music was better back then

Music was better back then. Back when? Back then, when I was younger. You know it, I know it. There were really big heavy metal bands, like Metallica and Guns and Roses. Hair metal was nearly dead, but even then people had to admit that bands like Poison and Warrant had some pretty good tunes on the radio. Hair Metal. A concept so alien to youth of today you couldn’t even begin to describe it.

There were bands like Nirvana, and Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam. These were bands who were so awesome that you can’t even try and put their impact into words. Especially Nirvana. But also Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, and … it was called ‘the Seattle Sound’. And it was amazing. It saved peoples lives.

You could go to a festival and see a lineup including, but not limited to, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Rancid, Ani DiFranco, Beck … you could take the bus up from Canberra with your mates and you could work out things about your life, your middle-class Canberra teenage life, you could lie down under a big tree next to some Canadian girl you had just met and puff on a jay and there would be Thurston Moore in the distance, singing about how men are a not alone on the Diamond Sea, and you could feel like you were having some kind of epiphany, even if you couldn’t quite say what it was. Because it was true: men are not alone, on the Diamond Sea. Look into his eyes and you will see.

Siamese Dream, by the Smashing Pumpkins. By now it had gone past the stage of starting a band: even though you weren’t in the band you could play some of the licks from that album, and it was kind of cool that you could do this and one of the guitarists in the band couldn’t, it was even cooler that even though he was kind of a prick he would sit with you and he would say, so how did you do that, and you would show him the lick, it was really simple, you just had to tune it to drop D. Cool, he would say.

Nothing was lame. Every act that was signed to a major label, that was selling CDs in Australia, was simply amazing. I am talking about bands like You Am I, Spiderbait, Regurgitator, the Dirty Three, Tumbleweed, the Cruel Sea, Magic Dirt, you could go along and see bands like these every month and your life would change, probably for the better. Henry Rollins did a show at the Refectory and someone threw a Doc Marten onstage and he stopped the song and bellowed out “Whose fucken shoe is this?” and everyone there put there hand up, and he said “oh, it everyone’s fucken shoe! It’s a goddamn commie shoe! That’s what it is! I fucken hate hippies!” and then he hurled the shoe back into the mosh pit and the band struck up again, right where they left off. I know this because I was there. I was there because someone let the side door open, those big glass doors, and even though me and my friends were underage we ran right it, just in time for Henry Rollins and the Communist Doc Marten. Henry Rollins is principally known these days as a spoken word artist.

There was a band called the Black Crowes. They were like the greatest bar band in the world, a bunch of stoners from Atlanta who somehow managed to sound better than the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces, at least for a couple of albums, managed to sound better than the reference points that the music critics were using to try and describe their sound. I just don’t think you can say that, with a straight face, about any new rock and roll band in the last five years.

So yeah: music was better then. Of course, music is still being made now. This is what people tell me, at any rate. But it isn’t the same. It just isn’t. You know it. I know it. I mean, I realize that this argument is embarrassing and self-referential and so on and all of that, and that Magic Dirt are playing the Refectory on Thursday night, but it’s just different now.

It’s different now for a hundred different reasons, none of which I know how to describe … I mean I could say something like an iPod is just a walkman or a discman but with more, uh, memory capacity, but that when listen to an MP3 the sound is all compressed and shitty, so really it doesn’t matter that you can be walking around with ten thousand songs of whatever floats your boat. It’s irrelevant. You could even have say, the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in there and it wouldn’t matter, because you probably weren’t there when the thing came out. This is not your fault, it’s not my fault. It’s just a fact. I was at a party recently and people were plugging their laptops into the stereo. I can tell you for a fact, people, that ‘Epic’ by Faith No More just does not sound the same when it’s been compressed down to a file on a laptop. Everything is just too close together.

The astrologer in the student paper says that as sure as the Earth revolves around the sun, everyone here hates me because I’m a mature age student. Well, I would just like you all to know that I understand why, and there is nothing I can do about. And I understand. Everything really is average nowadays. I was just lucky, I guess, to have grown up at a time when the omnipresent wallpaper that is popular culture was not an infinitely customizable shade of grey.

Hello

Hello.

Hello, and thanks for taking the time to read this stuff. Really. I know that the world needs another one of these like it needs another Frank Sinatra.

But the barriers for this kind of self expression have apparently fallen. So here we are.