A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

Thursday night-

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

- in which despondent film-maker Chris Waitt, feeling like Britain's Most Dumped after yet another relationship breakdown, decides to track down every girl he's ever had any kind of involvement with and find out why they ditched him.

I would hazard a guess that most people have thought of doing this at some point in their lives. Or maybe it's a guy thing. A dumped guy thing. While writers like Nick Hornby, Ben Elton and Nick Earls have explored this territory through fiction, Chris Waitt decided to do it for real.

His attempts to reconnect with his past and fix his present take him through an odyssey of awkward scenarios. Chris unshamedly puts himself in cringe worthy situations, from confrontations with hostile exes, to blind dates, to begging for sex on the street, to a visit to a dominatrix's dungeon to have his attitude to women "corrected". It's rough and ready film making, with many sequences filmed on webcam, or "video diary" style by Chris himself, but it never fails to be amusing.

However, as riotously funny as this film is, it doesn't sit quite right. Partly, it's a dirty feeling at so much Schadenfreude in one hit. But it's also because the film raises questions that it neglects to answer in its pursuit of laughs.

For starters, after ten minutes watching Waitt on camera, the question the audience wants to know is not why all his former girlfriends broke up with him but why they were with him in the first place. Chris Waitt is essentially Shaggy from Scooby Doo but without a cool talking dog. To add to this, the camera constantly shows him at his worst for comic effect, which makes him seem caricatured, the embodiment of the Undateable Man. Clearly he isn't that - he does have, after all, a very long list of former girlfriends - and there are other way in which his onscreen persona doesn't add up. The character you see on screen is a man with a painful lack of self-awareness. Yet this same man apparently directed a film which knowingly highlights this lack. There is something calculated about the way Waitt presents, which means that for all the personal material in the film (and there is some very brave personal material) I still felt like I was watching a performance.

Complete History is Waitt's first documentary, his previous work having been mostly in comedy. This background clearly rubs off on this film. It is like a romance version of Jackass, drawing on the same "hey, watch me do dumb shit" appeal. It does succeed very well on that level - it has been a long time since I sat in a cinema with a crowd reacting to what they see on screen so energetically, whether it was belly laughs or groans of horror. Still, I can't help but feel that there is a dimension of character exploration which this film only dips its toe in when it really needs to dive.

Rock n Roll Nerd

They say in show business, success is all about who you know and being in the right place at the right time. The same can be true for documentary. When Rhian Skirving started making a film about her friend Tim, a struggling cabaret performer, she probably thought she was making a simple character piece, not a rise to fame story in the vein of a classic rock biopic.

When Tim Minchin finally did break onto the world comedy scene, with his eccentric appearance, like a caricature of a rock god, and his irreverent musical comedy, he took off like wildfire. And Rhian Skirving happened to be there with a camera recording him, from his first decision to change his image in what comes across as almost a last ditch attempt to get recognised, through his uncertain early tours to his current sell-out success. Now that's timing.

>> Speaking of timing, mine was totally off last night. The movie was at 9.30 and I was finished everything I had to do by 6. Going home and back in would have been crowded but three hours in Melbourne city on a rainy evening with no money seems very very long. I spent most of it wondering how chestnut selling could possibly be a viable industry, as I have never seen or heard of anyone buying them. <<

You've probably seen a zillion biopics about how musicians made it big. The difference with Rock n Roll Nerd is that it follows Tim's rise in fortunes as it happens, not in retrospect. This gives the story an immediacy and insight that is usually lacking in zero to hero stories. Even the most well crafted artist biopic is tinged with the knowledge of the successful artist's public persona. This film, having been started before Tim's public persona really existed, and shot by someone who had known him for years before he was anything like famous, breaks through that barrier. It's funny, of course, because it's got Tim Minchin in it, but it's also remarkably touching, as well as giving an inside view of the back end of the comedy business. All in all, a rocking film.

>> Timing timing timing, I thought as I was heading home. Like if I started filming one of my artist friends now perhaps and then they... but my own personal timing was still way off. As I was going to sit down on the tram, half way seated in fact, a wiry little man nipped in and sat in the seat my bum was aiming for. I was left in the awkward position of having to straighten back up and find another seat. He had as much right to the seat as anyone I guess, and I wasn't 100% in it, but still it was odd. <<

Cartoon Rabbit

The Melbourne International Film Festival sounds like an illustrious kind of affair when you pronounce its full title. When you pronounce only its acronym, MIFF, it sounds like a bunny rabbit from a children's cartoon. How people manage to say it with any gravitas is beyond me but they do.

Oddly I've never been to MIFF much, because it clashes with Byron Bay Writer's Festival and this time of year normally sees me heading north for my annual beach, ideas and organic coffee fix. This year though I'm doing the whole MIFF experience. Starting last night with the Documentary Shorts Program.

MIFF's Shorts definitely sounds like a children's cartoon. Being documentary there were no cartoon rabbits although there were, perhaps surprisingly, both cartoons and rabbits. Animation in doco is a bit of a hip trend and the night saw two films that made heavy use of it. Cyanosis intersected animations in and out of observational footage to represent the world as seen by a delusional brain-damaged painter, using the nightmarish visions from his paintings to weave a semi-imaginary landscape around him. Under Construction took place mostly in a virtual landscape representing now demolished suburbs of a Chinese city, with real footage appearing only in fleeting ghost like images. Animation as memory, in this case, a representation of the forgotten rather than the imaginary. In both cases they were powerful tools, but also in both cases they were slightly overused and even I, who am a great fan of animated documentary, found myself hankering for a greater dose of reality.

Rabbits in documentary are not quite as hip but they still put in a showing in Szmolinsky. Szmolinsky is the German guy who breeds giant rabbits and was planning to sell them to Korea to alleviate food shortages there. The film centred around, a) surprising you with how giant the giant rabbits were, and b) the scandal over him selling them to Korea where it was assumed they would end up in inhumane farms. Apparently, I've discovered following up the story on the net, they never got to any farms but all got eaten by Kim Jong-Il and his closest cronies in a banquet... not that any of that got covered in the film, which cut off at the five minute mark, feeling a bit like something created for assessment.

The much hyped A Triumphant Tale I know for a fact was created for assessment, because it was produced out of the same course I'm doing. A tale of two bakers competing in a vanilla slice contest, it was built up big but ended up being a bit vanilla itself, and rather heavily iced with stylistic devices that didn't suit the tone or subject matter of the film. City of Cranes also bore the name of a film school in its credits, and its four chapter structure looked suspiciously like a student film that had been expanded, but was by far the most visually arresting film of the night. A portrait of tower crane operators in London, it soared on the strength of its wonderful photography. The cranes and the city they looked down on were the stars, while the interviews with the crane operators played only a supporting role, the human voices serving primarily to remind you of the human presence in the cranes and to stop it being a film only about machines. By contrast, Mimi and Vali was visually more restricted, being about two elderly sisters living together in a cluttered house, but got by on sheer strength of character. Using only interviews and observation of the ladies at home it still managed to be the most emotionally affecting film in the program.

Dirty Pictures by John Smith used even less devices. In fact it used none at all. Not even editing or plot. This British guy sat in a hotel room in Bethlehem, filmed the roof and spoke about his day. Later, he started filming the rest of his room - tea cups, cupboards, his bags, his shoes. For the first half, this was far more entertaining than it should have been but towards the end he was stretching it a bit. Apparently John Smith (if that IS his real name) does this in hotel rooms all around the world.

This was the first of our class group outings to the festival and we later dissected them all in a bar on the riverbank. Some loved all the animation, some hated it; people were alternately tickled or confused by the giant rabbits; others were nearly ready to put a contract on the head of John Smith. There is always a feeling I get at these group things like there is a bunch of film-makers out doing something and I'm the tag-along fraud. I always find this. Among actors I feel like a writer out of his depth, among writers I feel like a film-maker out of his genre, among film-makers I feel like an actor with pretensions. Sometimes I feel like a lost public servant but then again in the public service I felt even more out of touch, like a cartoon character trying to fit into an otherwise verite style documentary. Somewhere someone's watching going, "No no that character's totally inappropriate for this story. This isn't working at all. Two stars."

A Heavy Layer of Virtual Dust

Last post, October 2006. This blog has lain pretty much undisturbed since then. You could blow the dust off it. Except it would be virtual dust, whatever digital accretion gathers to unaccessed memory. I imagine it as a layer of faded greying electrons, washed up on a disused circuit along with ancient undeleted emails, unopened e-newsletters and drifts of old spam. As the browser disturbs them, like an intruder's breath, they scatter into the air and sparkle briefly like motes of true dust in a sunbeam. All this happens unseen, of course, lost and microscopic in the vast depths of some anonymous server.

The thing exposed, like anything that needs dust blown off it, is an obscure artefact with a faint patina of sentiment and no conceivable purpose. Did I really write a travel blog? Who for? I'm quite sure no one read it. And were my travel adventures really as unadventurous as they appear in retrospect? I suppose they were. My main memories of that trip comprise of wandering wet and heartbroken around Vancouver and my lung nearly exploding as I climbed a mountain. I'm not exactly waiting on someone to offer me a movie deal for my story.

I have a theory about blogs, and diaries and all kinds of personal record that you only keep them when you're not really doing anything. I mean if you were actually doing stuff you wouldn't have time to sit down and tell yourself about the day you just had, would you? You'd be too busy. So the only things that get recorded are everybody's in-between times, their idle musings, daily nothings and minutely described inactivity. When future generations clear the dust, real and virtual, out of long abandoned servers and painstakingly recreate the data of our time, they will reach the conclusion that we were all a bunch of idle whingers, who never DID anything.

Except maybe review films. Which is what I'm going to dedicate this blog to now. In theory. If you're a member of a future generation and this is the last post, then you'll know I was only making idle promises. Or else that I went and did something amazing and didn't have time to tell myself.

California Sunset

Ahhh, Auckland airport. It's like a sixth home to me now (given that Vancouver is like a second, and so forth). I am sitting at the exact same internet terminal I used to write my Da Vinci machines blog many days ago. The trip down to Big Sur was great. Spectacular coastlines, about two hundred radio stations to choose from in the car and even a trip to Hearst family's San Simeon ranch, which was the 1920s version of Neverland, zoo and all.

Of course the return to the airport was another experience again. American roads are like science fiction - overpasses and flyways curl in intricate knots, linesof traffic seem tofly above you, criss crossing mid air, plus there are some of the largest and most absurd cars ever driven by human hand. The landscape of roadways, which on the outskirts of a city like San Fran goes for miles and miles and MILES, is pretty gross in terms of the amount of concrete and the sheer absence of nature but it's not entirely ugly. But it does feel more like the Jetsons than real life.

I had hoped to see my last sunset over the Pacific. Nuh uh, there was fog that evening. So my last California sunset was seen over the outer suburbs of San Francisco, on the airtrain from the hire car garage to the international terminal, gleaming off electricity pylons rather than ocean waves.

It's an interesting place, America. It has its mixture of beautiful and ugly, like anywhere, and I can see how if you ended up in the burbs without the money to go to the touristy areas I was visiting it could become a vision of Hell, like the illustrations to a modern translation of Dante's inferno I saw in City Lights bookstore, with the circles of Hell represented as an urban wasteland of strip malls, car wrecks and rampant advertising.

But then I've seen some of the most beautiful landscape I've seen anywhere - for me Mt Robson in Canada stands with Uluru as a sight so beautiful its effect is like an emotion. The west coast cities - San Fran, Seattle, Portland, Victoria, Vancouver - are as cool as it gets, really. Some things in America are like they leapt out of a TV screen or a movie, but on the other hand it is really quite different to the way we see it in Australia.

On the whole, I loved it over there. Mind you, there was an amazing feeling of relief to get on the plane last night and hear New Zealand and Aussie accents around me. When I got off in Auckland and heard Missie Higgins playing, then I knew I was coming home.

A Grand Unveiling

In between hanging out in Portland and rushing down the coast to hang out in San Fran, I decided to do one last big "sight" one last big "attraction" to add to my photo collection. In 1980, local volcano Mt St Helens blew up, flattening the forest for miles, killing a number of people, spewing vast clouds of ash into the sky turning day to night and laying the seeds for bad movies like Pierce Brosnan's "Dante's Peak." For a long time there has been only half a mountain there, with a big crater where the top went boom, but recently the volcano has started to grow again inside the crater. I just had to see it.

I travelled up there in a minibus with a German goth called Marcel, a British backpacker called Rob, a guy called Larry from Florida and half a cruise boat of tourists from Illinois. As we drove the guide passed back photos of the devastation in 1980 and played recordings of 911 calls from the day of the disaster. Anticipation was building. We entered the "blast zone",about 15 km out from the mountain where everything had been flattened and shattered stumps and trees splintered like matchsticks remained among the regrowth. The ground was not dirt here but ash, with layers of pumice.

Unfortunately the higher we went, the worse the visibility became as what began as an atmospheric mist wreathing among the splintered trees turned into a full-grade pea-soup fog.
It still had its charms, as Marcel the goth pointed out, but for a mountain viewing tour the absence of a mountain kinda stood out. The tour got restless. The guide got apologetic and a bit depressed.

We conferred and decided to wait it out to see if the clouds would break up. Luckily they had a visitor centre up on the ridge that faces the crater, where normally the view would have been. For a while, we amused ourselves with stories of survivors, multimedia exhibits, shattered tree stumps and so forth. Pride of place was a cinema, which showed a movie using what looked like digital reconstructions of the blast based on photographs taken in 1980, followed by some SFX of the fiery wind tearing through trees and then some actual footage. For the finale, which being in America had a LOT of portentous leadup, the screen rolled into the roof and the curtains at the back of the cinema rolled open to reveal windows looking out onto the awe-inspiring sight of....

... nothing. Just pure fog. It was like the Nothing in the Neverending Story.

"It's all gone," someone said, "the whole thing blew up."

"There never was a mountain. It's a conspiracy!"

Eventually, defeated, we drove back down. I will never know how awe-inspiring that unveiling was meant to be. When it happened, I personally LMAO.

No more sights then, unless you include the people on the late night Greyhound down to San Francisco, who were admittedly almost as good value as a trip to the zoo. It was a long bus ride, and I was just on the short 17-hour leg from Portland. There were people who'd been on the bus for 2 days, even one lady the whole 4 days from New York City. This on a bus with no leg room to stretch out, no curtains on the windows so you could sleep at night and an onboard toilet that didn't appear to flush but just sloshed around in the back. I recalled the remark from the hotel clerk in Seattle who said that after four days to New York City, you debussed looking and smelling just like the locals.

San Fran, so cruisy when I came through, is now in the middle of "Fleet Week". That's right, it's when all the navy and the airforce and everyone come to town and are celebrated, and fighter jets roar back and forth over the city like some kind of friendly Operation Shock and Awe. Looking at some of the faces around me when the ear-splitting jets roar over, it might still be too soon for some, hearing low-flying planes in the city.

So much for a cruisy couple of days hanging out in San Fran. With the last of my dwindling resources I am setting off for one more, just one more sight, hiring a car for my last two days and taking it down to Big Sur. Wish me luck, the traffic is gnarly out there...

The Real America

After a couple of days in Seattle, I boarded a greyhound again. A packed one this time, for a really authentic American travel experience. South of Seattle, with its bookstores, wonders in blown glass and lively music scene, you hit Tacoma, with the steel greey Tacoma Dome, advertising "cage fights" and a bus-stop out the front of the Bullseye Pistol Range. Ahhh, now this is America.

Behind me I'm hearing these two guys have a conversation.

"So, do you know anyone who would be into like, buying illegal weapons? It's a traditional mace, it's really nice. I'd keep it, but I'm trying to get an apartment with my girlfriend and..."

"Yeah, movin' that kind of merchandise can be real hard, pal. Yer best bet is the internet."

And so on. Then I arrived in Portland, which at first appeared to be nothing but a complicated knot of elevated highways but on the inside turns out to be a classic American town with leafy streets and big old wooden houses like something from Lovecraft or Stephen King. Which is interesting, because starting this week is the HP Lovecraft film festival, which will be opened by a "Cthulhu prayer and blessing".

America is fun.

Like Escape from LA... only not in LA... and with no escape...

It took me f'ing ages to get out of Vancouver! After my last entry, I missed my bus because I spent too long seeking out genuine Quebec poutine (chips with cheese curds and gravy basically, though there are variations), finding organic maple syrup for my sister, browsing in an SF bookstore and tasting different varieties of smoked salmon. So there I was on Granville Island (again!) it was dark and I had no bus ticket and no bed. So I did what any self-respecting Aussie does in this situation. Got pissed.

Anyway, to cut a long story (a three-pub trilogy in fact) short, I checked back in to my same hostel and planned to leave on Sunday. Then I made a mistake. "It would be a crime," thought I, "to leave town and not see a single movie at the International Film Festival. Just one movie... just one..."

Four movies later...

To cut a long story short, I checked back in again. Anyway, I am in Seattle now. I was just passing through but then I discovered the Elliot Bay Company bookstore. Imagine if the Minotaur decorated his maze with bookshelves and you can picture this place. So I am spending another night in Seattle I guess. What, me hurry? I've got a whole week to get to California.

An aside for anyone who was in Sydney for Caroline's birthday... I did finally see the plastinated bodies of German anatomical artist Gunther von Hagens. They were showing across the road from the Vancouver station, so while I was waiting for my bus I dropped in on them.

It was.... educational.

It was.... different.

But what kind of freakin' Frankensteinian mad genius is Von Hagens that he would even consider doing this???? Half dissected bodies preserved in plastic dancing and throwing javelins and riding skateboards? Whose imagination carries the seed for this? Who are you Von Hagens? What misty Gothic novel did you escape from?

It's... yeah, it's different. I asked the staff at the touch table (yes, you can touch kidneys and human cross-sections and so forth) what Gunther was like. "He's... German," the girl said. "Do you want to touch the liver? It feels just like plastic, I promise."

I got to Seattle but the creepy bodies of Von Hagens are following me. They are being advertised on buses here. In Canada, the exhibition was called "Bodyworks 3" (indicating it's already been there twice!) and mentions Von Hagens' name on the ads. Here, it is simply called, "Bodies, the Exhibition." That's... American.

A Spot in the Top 10

OK, this place is raining on me again but I can see why people love this city so much. At first I thought it was all the partying - usually going on at high volume downstairs from my bed at 1am, enough to make the floor in my bathroom actually tremor - and that the appeal lay mostly in local beer and music, both v good but not so much fun when travelling alone. But I think the real draw card is that there is always something on. When I arrived it was Vancouver Fringe Festival, now as I am checking out the Vancouver International Film Festival is beginning, if I stayed for that then I wouldn't get out of town before the International Writers Festival fired up. There are heaps of theatres, impro shows with the theatre sports league every week, laser shows at the planetarium on weekends, hockey games and music music music. If I stayed around for everything that was on or coming up I would never get out.

So there, maybe Vancouver is one of the world's most livable cities (in the Top 10, according to Lonely Planet) even with the rain. It certainly has the best comic store I've ever been to. : ) (Though I will admit I was geeking out more over their collection of Gustav Dore and other old timers more than the superheroes.) Still haven't found any decent maple syrup though...

Meanwhile, I don't know what the other 9 are. Paris? Florence? Toowoomba? I don't know. But Portland and Seattle also rate pretty high on livability scales and they are where I am off to on this rainy afternoon.

Fully sick, ja?

Words don't really describe the Rockies. (Except to say.. WOW!) Pictures don't really capture them. (But be warned I will still bore you all stupid with the gazillions of photos I took up there). You simply have to see them, they are unlike anything else on Earth.

After my last blog, I checked in (under the watchful gaze of various stuffed and mounted animal heads) to the Athabasca Hotel, which has been there since Jasper was a train stop in the wilderness. Banff and Jasper national parks are among the oldest national parks in Canada. They were originally started as a tourist venture to get more passengers on Canada Royal Pacific Rail's trains, and that heavy focus on acquiring tourist dollars remains today. After one night at the Athabasca I needed somewhere a little easier on my hard done by wallet.

Then I came out and found my car had been hit with a coke bomb: some kids had planted a full coke can beside my car and stamped on it so that one whole side of the car was COVERED with droplets of sticky soft drink, congealing in the sun. Took f'ing ages to clean off. After that I'd had enough of towns and went down to a canyon and hung out at a lake and climbed up to a look out and watched an elk swim across a river and night found me still in the Jasper area, with the Athabasca still the cheapest option. I drove out of town to a hostel, which was crowded with screaming kids and had no beds. But I was not going back in to Jasper.

"Well," said the girl at the desk in a heavy European accent, "we have a fully sick hostel up on Mt Edith Cavell. There is no electricity or anything.."

So I drove out into the wilderness, up this winding road in a dark forest, with occassional glimpses of snowcaps and glaciers in the starlight, and found this place. Like I said earlier, wow.
So sorry if none of you have heard from me for a few days, I've been busy tramping through forests, and climbing up above the treeline to look at glaciers and sitting by lakes full of icebergs. It's been pretty good.

I spent too long up there and needing to get the car back left me with a hell drive across BC trying to do in one day what had taken me three on the way over. From mountains and 6 degrees in the morning, to corn fields and red barns and fruit stalls with mountains of pumpkins stacked in front of them, to vast sparkling lakes and multi-lane highways through industrial zones, to deserts (yes, deserts, in Canada!) and 28 degree heat, to sunset over more mountains and night-time forests where deer ran from my high beams, I drove and drove and drove. But I couldn't quite do it, I couldn't quite make it, and in the middle of the night with no more energy or wits to drive, I ended up in... HOPE! Chainsaw town! Nooo!

But as I pulled in, I found myself in a strip of motels and takeaways and neon signs, and no sign of the creepy place where I'd had my door rattled in the night. I walked up the motel strip until I found one where I could talk the guy into giving me government rate (ie the rate reserved for Canadian public servants) and returned to Van next morning. Just as Creepysville had disappeared, so had Rain City. It was brilliant sunshine and smiles in Vancouver this time.

Goes to show, I guess, each place has a hundred faces, just depends on what day you come in. I will be back in Australia on the morning of October 12th, which will be the 40th day of my journey, and the last day of the 30th year of my life. Anyone want to get pissed and look at pictures of mountains? Lots and lots of pictures of mountains...



PS Caroline, I owe you a beer, so you better come. It was about 20 minutes. Damn those parked cars, eh, they really sneak up on you.

Beyond Hope

OK so I didn't get murdered by a chainsaw wielding maniac.
BUT...
That town was freaky. At 4 am I got woken by my door being bashed and shaken and my lock jiggled. I still have no effing idea what it was but it was like there was a demon out there trying to get in. It stopped when I got up and put on a light.
WHAT THE...?
I guess it could have been a fierce Canadian wind. A very fierce Canadian wind. Or a bear who wanted to get in at the large quantity of bananas I have with me. Or someone from another room who got drunk and thought their door was stuck. I don't know. At 4 am, the most plausible explanation was that it was A MURDEROUS AXE WIELDING LUNATIC WHO WANTED TO THRUST HIS HEAD THROUGH THE DOOR AND SCREAM HERRRRRE'S JOHNNY, BEFORE CUTTING ME INTO LITTLE PIECES AND EATING THEM!
Anyway, I didn't get much sleep. I had only got to sleep at 3, the lunatic (or bear, or wind etc) came round at 4, and after that I wasn't feeling sleepy.
So next day, despite being in a place optimistically named "Hope" I despaired. The day before I had been so bad a driver I had... yeah well, it's a bit embarassing what actually happened but it wasn't my finest hour let's just say that. Now I'd had 1 or 2 hours sleep, it was pouring rain and I had a choice of driving up a mountain in the fog or staying another night in the chainsaw town.
Neither was looking good. I got so dejected I turned around and drove back to Vancouver.
Or thought I did.
Wow, I'm thinking, as I drove off in my sleepy daze, this so much more scenic on this side of the river. On the other side it was all suburbs, who would have thought this landscape would be so different. Man I'm lucky I didn't try to go on in my state - that was 300km or so to the next town and this hundred and fifty k to Vancouver is taking, like, forever.
Does anyone else smell a moron?
I was so tired I went straight past my road and driven off in a third direction. 200km down the road realised I was heading toward a place called "Hundred Mile House" and pretty much nothing else but logged out badlands.
So...
I didn't get where I was going. I didn't turn back. I got to see a side of Canada I had never dreamed of. Still alive, still driving, just reached the Rockies today. Passed a sign reading "Dangers d'ourse. Bear Warning". Yeah, it's all good.

Rain City

I have finally got out of Vancouver. I seemed to crash land there for longer than I intended, getting rained on, getting shouted at by various street bums and wondering what I was doing in this forlorn part of the world.

I know. Arts! West Coast is famous for its arts. So I went to Granville Island (a man made island under a highway bridge which they seem to have created for the express purpose of housing the artistic community) and saw a couple of Fringe shows. "They Went Another Way" was a pleasant comedy about a couple of struggling actors - a good warm up act though not mind blowing. This was followed by "Jesus: the Lost Years" by Monster Theatre. This filled in the years in Jesus' life between 17 and 30, with high energy physical theatre and Hollywood cliches. All done by two actors, who would switch roles mid scene. It rocked. It's the only fringe show I've ever seen get a standing ovation.

So Fringe was good but I missed "Bard on the Beach" Shakespeare festival because I spent a whole day looking for a mobile phone. A whole day. They are all locked to the networks, and trying to find an "unlocked" one to use with my Telstra SIM was nigh impossible. "Hmm, an unlocked phone. An UNLOCKED phone? I think they have them over at Wally's Wireless World..." But go to Wally's Wireless World and they will direct you somewhere else, who will direct you back to the first place you went to. Others will just refer you to mysterious "third parties" whose identities they are bound my contract not to reveal - I assume these "parties" are just guys on the street with greatcoats who go "Psst, you wanna phone" because no above board phone dealer ever has them.

Which left me again wondering why I was here. I know! Beer! Canada is supposed to have good beer, if you go to the little brewpubs, so I took me to Steamworks Brewery in Gastown, the semi-slummy heritage part of town. I had wheat beer and dark beer and lager and raspberry beer, RAPSBERRY!, and I got well drunk and then ended up spending half the night sobering up under an awning waiting for the rain to die down enough for me to stagger back home.

Again I wonder.

I know! Mountains! The Rockies are just up the road. Why don't I get a car and drive up there? So I got a car. I can drive on the other side of the road, it's all good. Uh... yeah... Wanna take bets how long til I pranged it? Guess the right number of minutes (yes minutes, not hours) and I will buy you a beer. When I can afford one again after this trip. Should be by 2010.

Anyway, this place I'm in is called "Hope" and it is apparently the "Chainsaw Carving Capital". I assume they're talking about WOOD carving, but you know, this is rural America. Fingers crossed. If I don't post again anytime soon, then...

Anyway, keep in touch, people. It's a lonely part of the world up here.

(PS I did eventually get a shitty little phone for $300. But I have still lost everybody's numbers, so don't forget to email yours to me, if you haven't already.)

Welcome to Vanshterdam

Seattle was great. Obviously seeing the city with my mother wasn't all grunge music and sleepless nights a-partying, and having to get up at 6am because of her early conference starts was a drag, but the city's got a great vibe. I can't remember who I've emailed about what but to recap briefly: the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame is awesome (although, sorry Rami I resisted dropping in next door to the Star Trek 40th anniversary convention), the burritos here are tremendous and the coffee's great. I even went into the original Starbucks - where they still make it by hand on the original machine and it's way better than in their fully automated franchise stores. With Mum's conference thing we also went to Blake Island (birth place of chief Se'Atl after home the town was, to the good chief's annoyance, named) for an "authentic" Indian cultural display. It was so tacky it was iconic - like something from the Simpsons or the Family Guy.

Since then, I've been on the go. We caught a ferry to Victoria - Canada's answer to Canberra - being a small town, on an island, which is the provincial capital of British Columbia. It also thinks it's Britain, with Tudor homes, hotels that serve High Tea (another "authentic" cultural experience at $60 for cucumber sandwiches and scones - given we've drunk tea before we passed on that one) and double decker tour buses. From there to Vancouver - a Canadian mixed grill of steak, salmon and prawns for dinner and then an early start up to Whistler the next day.

Whistler is unbelievable. It is not just a ski lodge. They call it a "village" but it's not that either. It's Ski City. Take a chalet, turn it into a palace, make this just one wing of a building and that's what the lodges look like. There's several "villages" of them, with golf courses and celebrity homes as well. We took a ride on a "floatplane" (ie a seaplane) around the mountains and the tail end of the Pemberton Icefield. WICKED! Even more wicked that we got back to the lake before the storm hit!! It came rolling over the mountain like the apocalypse and the winds bounced our plane on the water a few times as we landed. Those who had gone up the mountain on the gondola got windblown, snowed on and had to be rescued by truck. There were still some trapped up there at the end of the day, but none from our group.

Next day, today, Mum left for Oz and so it's just me. Gotta say, while Canada's got the reputation for being the nicer of the North American nations, since crossing the border we've found people a lot less helpful (pre-paid shuttle bus to the airport that doesn't turn up, anyone?), people actually do get surly if they don't think you've tipped enough and I've copped a bit of aggression from random people on the bus or the street, which I didn't in the States. Vancouver is a lot grungier and seedier than I was expecting. It has the reputation of being liberal re drugs ("Vansterdam" some call it, according to Lonely Planet) and that's actually been quite apparent - both from the number of drugged out people I've met and the smell in my hostel!!!

Still, the multicultural nature of the place is pretty cool, the surroundings are beautiful and any big city (Van has about 2 million) is going to bitch-slap you on your first day or two, til you find the good bits. I'm here til Monday, in time to catch the end of the Fringe Festival. : )

However I am changing to a budget hotel from tomorrow night on. I just checked in and used the bathroom at the hostel and I'm still feelin' kinda dizzy.....

A Lone Knight

Okay so I am living on borrowed time on this free internet terminal before someone wants it. Gotta be quick.

My plane ride was hell on a stick. Next to old people on both flights. The antique New Zullanders I was next to Auckland - SF were the worst: the guy kept going "A-whoo!" like a geriatric werewolf. He was all over red with some rash too. I switched off by reading George Lucas' biography (great prep for going to California!) and playing chess on the Air NZ inflight entertainment system. Nice idea but the computer player was dumb as two planks. On its highest setting, even after I sacrificed my queen, a rook and a bishop to even the odds it still couldn't beat me. I cleaned its entire force up using a single knight.

So San Fran is really great, but I only saw the Golden Gate from a distance - when I went closer it was covered in mist. It is hot in the day, then every afternoon the sea mist rolls in and it turns cold. The Mosser was interesting - seeming to exist only to route profits toward its studio and various environmentally sustainable farming initiatives. The shower had only one tap because water came at one temperature - freeze-your-butt-off cold.

The people are really friendly. It's like TV, you can just go and sit in a bar and start talking to people. Which is why my beer budget blew out early. Every day I meet someone interesting. What's odd is that a whole lot of people "recognise" me like I've got doppelgangers all down the west coast. I've had a homey girl call out to me in the street, thinking I was "Joey", a hippy in Haight ask me where my blue puppy was and a guy on the train going "I keep thinking this guy is Chris. Hello Chris. Hello!"

So anyway got into Seattle one day too early , at midnight, had to book in someplace over budget (where I could see the Space Needle from my window) and after the 25 hour train ride I just slept and kept having hot showers. About time I checked out the birthplace of grunge. Some things, like all my gadgets (phone, camera etc) not working are getting frustrating but otherwise I love it here even if I totally can't afford it. Travelling alone can be lonely but it's easier being able to talk to people you meet and hey, if one knight can win a chess game, surely one Aussie can survive anywhere...

Tears of a Genius

About to head off overseas for an unknown period of time, with unclear destination past the first week, I did the logical thing to prepare - went to Docklands for the "Da Vinci Machines" exhibition. Yeah!!

Da Vinci and the Docklands are a strange combination. Docklands has been set up as a "destination" and "attraction" full of cafes and funky apartments and things that should bring life to a place - but it is strangely soulless and hollow. While in the Da Vinci tent pulley systems and machines of war and cogs, usually such lifeless things, are given warmth by having been so lovingly made of polished wood and rope. If you are in marvellous Melb it's worth seeing - a few minutes in the chamber of mirrors (that enable you to see yourself from every angle with one glance) is a trip out worth the admission price alone.

I came out of the exhibition with an amazing sense of his mind - brilliant and distracted at the same time. In particular, his fascination with flight is striking. Working in an era of plague and sword and cannon warfare and horsedrawn carts, he designed every conceivable way people might attempt to fly, from ornothopters (mechanical birds) to gliders to a primitive helicopter that was supposed to work my men furiously working at crank-handles to spin the huge spiral shaped fan. None ever got off the ground. Most never could. But that didn't stop him not only designing them in intricate detail but also coming up with in-flight devices for navigation and measuring wind speed etc.

He did however leave out two key components of flight in his calculations - cheap and nasty food served in plastic packaging and squealing children. If he had been on Air NZ flight 6 with me today, he would have wept.

(PS in Auckland airport, waiting for transfer. Could be worse than Docklands but not sure)

Booked and (gulp) Paid For

So I booked my room for San Francisco this morning. I'll be staying on Fourth Street (how American!) in the "only hotel in San Francisco with a state of the art recording studio." Just in case I want to rip out a single while I'm there!!!

Mosser Hotel, SF

The Mosser's actually pretty cheap for SF. (In fact, it is the cheapest thing you can book on the net, apart from motels out toward the airport.) I did consider doing the email rounds of hostels but it was easier just to have something booked. I don't want another One Gentleman of Prague Experience. Why I gulp is just how quickly a really cheap deal in US dollars ($59 a night) becomes a more weighty proposition in Aussie bucks ($90 a night). And there will probably be someone I need to tip, too!

Location location location though. I will be about five minutes walk from Union Square (which is like SF central), five minutes from the Museum of Cartoon Art, and five minutes in the other direction from the Tenderloin (which guidebooks say to be "wary" in). Hmmm.

Well you will hear all about it next week! (Possibly in my debut single...)

Fearless

I am leaving really quite soon and I need to start doing things like packing. Tonight I took the first step and went to see a martial arts film. Yeah!!!

It was Fearless, touted as Jet Li's finest martial arts film ever. I've got to say, despite the sometimes wooden screenplay, occasional OTT acting, obvious wires here or there and a complete disregard for historical veracity (thankyou wiki and google) it's an affecting film. For a martial arts epic that's saying something.

It's set in the early 20th century, a time when China under the Ching dynasty was at its lowest ebb and at the mercy of foreign powers. Huo Yuanjia is the child of a martial arts family - physically weak his father won’t train him, so he trains in secret, learning by spying on his father teaching his disciples… If that’s not the start of an epic, what is? Add a challenge to pit the best of the West against the meanest in the East, enemies intent on revenge and honour and an arena where combatants must sign “death waivers” and you’ve got a direct ticket to kung-fu heaven!

Huo Yuanjia will rise to become the founder of modern wushu but the way is not easy. We see Huo's highs, including the somewhat ambivalent high of being a big fish in a small pool in his native village, and we see some terrible lows. We see him go from physically weak to physically strong, and then have to go through the same journey with his spirit. We also see him kick a lot of ass with that inimitable Jet Li magic.

History of course gets chopped up to fit the mould of an epic. The setting is simplified to a clear-cut clash of cultures - weakened East and overbearing West - and leaves out the corruption and tyranny of the Ching dynasty’s waning years. This was a time when Chinese men were forced to adopt identical hairstyles on penalty of death (rather similar to the Taliban’s insistence on beards) among other oppressions. Many, including some of the Huo family’s friends, dreamed of the Chings’ overthrow – but this muddies the waters too much to rate a mention.

Likewise people in Yuanjia’s life get reinvented as more epic characterisations - the life changing love interest, the childhood friend / lifelong companion etc - and events get inflated to suitably dramatic proportions. Two of Huo's early opponents, a Russian wrestler and a British boxer, are combined into an American hulk (in so doing, gaining the courage to face him in the ring, which neither of the real guys did.) The hulk’s improbable name – Hercules O’Brien – is actually the only accurate part of the sequence.

Historically, Yuanjia's prowess against foreign challengers - from British colonial thugs to Japanese judo masters - restored Chinese national pride at a time when it was under attack. The film emphasises this fact grandly, with a liberal dose of communist symbolism sprinkled in. While the themes of the film aren’t played with subtlety, they nonetheless manage to be compelling, and while the film may fall into a predictable rhythm in parts, I did not expect in the early reels to be taken on the emotional journey the film became.

For me, this movie fills a similar role as Dragon, the Bruce Lee biopic. Like Bruce Lee, Huo Yuanjia was a genuinely inspiring man and both are inspiring films. I find their real stories more interesting than their simplified onscreen parrallels but without the movies might never have heard either story told at all. Fearless is not without its faults but it does pack a punch. A big Jet Li punch and you know you’re not walking away from that without feeling it for a long time.

How to Make a Mad Aussie

OK, before embarking (which is oh soon, and I'm oh so far from ready) I think I should spend a few minutes establishing my mad Aussie credentials, as advertised in the "about me" space.

On my mother's side I am descended from a long line of mad Aussies right back to the loopiest of the bunch, "Mad Tom" Davey, an officer on the First Fleet and later lieutenant governor of Tasmania, philanderer, alcoholic, right bastard and all round great Aussie bloke. That family line also includes zany characters like Greg Blaxland, who crossed the Blue Mountains and who we can therefore blame for rural New South Wales.

On the Dad's side I'm Latvian. Famous Latvians include Jason Akermanis. Enough said.

With this kind of pedigree, how can I possibly go right? Of course, the zaniest thing I personally have done lately is try to cross my office with a single push on my wheelie chair, but you know, a man's got to have a dream...

Hold the Hoo

Wooo-

I am half out. Yesterday was my final day as a desk jockey in an obscure corner of the mental health system. But I still need to go back in and make sure I've got copies of my stuff for my CV and that there are copies of all my reports out for the next guy (though it will probably be a girl - males are a rare and endangered species there). Yay for Saturday.

Farewell was kind of awkward and pointless. As usual you get a card signed by the couple of people who will actually miss you, a couple of people who can't wait to see the back of you but want to look nice and a whole lot of people who have no bloody clue who you are. Most people didn't come of course. "Nick Spindle? Who the fuck's that? What cake are they having? Ehh, sponge, call me when someone's having a mudcake."

Well that's the end of two years, eleven months and one week. We can say three years. Three years, six bosses, and so many coworkers (each with a cake and card I wrote something trite on) that I can't even remember all their names. It was a lot to pack up - especially as there were three years of work that mostly didn't go anywhere. All the junk - the reports that no one ever read, the plans that were never implemented, all the records of liaison between two people who didn't give a shit, the books and books of notes... it was like that scene in the Shining where she finds her husband's novel and sees that it just says "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no..." over and over. Except in this case, it was me who had been writing it.

Archived. Deleted. Shredded. Handballed. Get rid of it any way you can.

- HOOOOOOOOO!

Change of Scene

Hi all. I've decided to move from the trashy corridors of MySpace to the more refined halls of Blogger. I feel better already. But it's not my only change of scene, as you know, as I am leaving for America in 2 weeks. Not for that long - a month or so - depending on funds, but it's as good an excuse as any to get my blog off to a new start, and will save you all from those group email things.

In memory of the travels of the most famous mad Latvian Australian of all, Crocodile Dundee, I'm calling it "That's not a knife!" My god, and you thought the 80s were over. Sorry. I look around at the hairstyles and I see it isn't so.

And in case you don't believe me that Crocodile Dundee was Latvian - here's the monument to him in his hometown of Dundagas.





Let's see if America can give me any sights wackier than that!!