Tightrope
There is a small box.
Inside the box there is a tightrope.
Balanced on the tightrope is a creature.
The creature is soft and has wide eyes.
It is my job to keep the creature balanced on the tightrope.
I keep the box in the top pocket of my denim jacket.
I wear the jacket when I visit my niece.
In the kitchen, spontaneously, my niece takes my hand and puts it in my sister's hand.
She holds our other hands in her own tiny mitts.
She has just learned Ring a Ring a Rosy.
It gives her - and us - an almost indescribable amount of joy.
...
One day, she might take two people's hands to re-create this joy, to share this joy, to re-live this joy, and those two people might refuse.
They may even say that they hate Ring a Ring a Rosy, that it is for babies.
I want put my niece into the box, to keep her close to my heart, to keep her safe from the people who might reject her incredible joy.
At this moment, the creature falls off the tightrope.
...
...
I wonder if it is dead.
...
Or just temporarily wounded.
The beautiful mechanics of words
Yesterday I visited the Melbourne Museum of Printing.
It was an open day to raise funds.
Laurie spoke to us about how the skilled job of hand compositors was superceded by compositing machines.
And how then the job of compositing machines was superceded by computerisation.
We watched Laurie put together a line of print. He selected each tiny letter to go onto the edge of a small metal plate. Then he pushed buttons. The tiny letters went to all sorts of amazing places on this gigantic machine and at the end popped out the plate - with the sentence (or LINE OF TYPE) that Laurie had just created on its side.
This plate could then be used again and again for printing that LINE OF TYPE.
And once it was no longer needed, the metal goes back into the gigantic machine and is melted down and recycled to be used again.
Laurie and the machine showed a love for letters and words that is physical, mechanical, meticulous and careful.
The museum has many such people and machines. It smells like ink and paper and metal and carries the history of news and stories and information and specially printed party invitations and political posters and drawers and shelves filled with intricate, concrete, tiny pieces of mechanical beauty.
It is a potent place. Technology and digitisation makes it no longer an essential place of business.
But story and character make it an essential place for so many more varied and everlasting reasons.
The affection of children
Do not come to rely on the affection of children
It is easily given
Seductive
and gratifying as that first mouthful of iced water after a long, dry bus ride on a scorching afternoon
But it is unsafe to expect it
unfair to demand it
and unreasonable to think it can withstand the batterings of growth, ego and burgeoning identity
Pretty soon you will be - as all adults invariably become - a strange and pale being about whom they rarely think and if so, only to briefly compare themselves with and vow never to be so ...
boring
dull
flat
soft
Unless of course you are their parent
In which case the glass of water may turn out to be a poisoned chalice
that you gulp,
hoping for quenched thirst
but finding
bitter drops
that
get
caught
in
your
throat.
Susan the Obscure
Ah Choo Defecit
He said:
Your sneezes don't sound like Aah Choo!
She said:
What do they sound like?
He said:
Sort of, more of a ... Mmp!
She said:
I'm sorry.
He said:
It's not a bad thing. It's just a thing.
Not weird enough
This week's entry is the first of a special new series by guest contributor: Susan the Obscure. Thanks Susan! We look forward to enjoying your words of wisdom.
I've noticed a trend
I hope the trend ends
For young women to claim
on the comedy stage
that they are 'odd', 'weird' and 'strange'
It's apparently all the rage
But take heed young gals
you've got too many pals
and stories about dances and parties and friends
and normal events like childhood and travel
and sweet little white lies that innocently unravel
...
Yawn
...
Your tales are sweet
your performances are neat
but in order to claim the titles of 'odd'. 'strange' or 'weird'
you really have to ramp up the stakes
Weirdness is something you can't fake
My advice I hope you'll take
Otherwise I'll come after you and stab you with a rake
Susan the Obscure
Is TV killing the comedy star?
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival brings around the usual suspects of international and local comedians. Some testing new material, others trotting out the tried and true. And every year, the smattering of newer (most often younger) comics trying to break into the scene, or cement their place.
A disturbing pattern in recent years for new Australian comics in particular sees posters plastered with the words "As seen on ..." and "As heard on ..."
This is not a problem in itself. It helps the public to know where they might have seen or heard Joe or Bessie or Aaron. And it helps the new comics get bums on seats.
What's disturbing is what the plethora of commercial television and radio appearances is doing to the development of new comedy.
It's blanding it down.
Comics who earned their stripes in the 1980s, 1990s, even much of the 2000s did so by gigging around town, fronting up to pubs and rooms full of demanding and vocal strangers wanting big laughs fast and often.
This caused its own issues of 'pub' comedy but it also gave comics enormous freedom to test material, test their own mettle and see how far they could push the extremes of their comedy before taking it to more mainstream forums.
Now the mainstream forums are where everyone is heading from the get go. Which means comedy that is palatable to network executives, classification parameters and ratings roller coasters. Comedy that is reactive rather than trail blazing. Comedy that - in some ways - has to please more than provoke.
And this is bad for comedy.
Some comics simply entertain and that is lovely. But the truly great comics cause discomfort, analysis and strong emotional reactions in among their laughs. Truly great comics are often ugly, odd misfits who shine in that particular arena BECAUSE it is a place for ugly, odd misfits.
Three words that are light years away from what you have to be to make it on TV.
Be cute rather than caustic.
Quirky rather than queer.
Pretty rather than pissed.
Then you'll get a nice spot on the telly and plenty of other lucrative promotional gigs and your comedy career will blossom and grow.
Sadly it's the state of comedy and the audiences at live shows who miss out as ideas are honed down to tv sized bites that are easy to swallow and quick to forget.
Thank God (no - not for the blue door of banality) - for the comics who still sit firmly OUTSIDE the mainstream. The older, grumpy, weird, awkward folk who still make their living out of penning the words and saying the talk that shocks, confronts or simply - fails to fit the neat commercial mold.
They are the ones who keep comedy, ideas and culture moving ahead, while their marshmallow counterparts take the exposure, the big paying jobs and the glory.
Maybe it's always been that way but it seems each year at the Comedy Festival the scourge of commercial media infiltrates more and more, sapping away intelligent, biting material and inserting silliness, prettiness and perfectly proportioned faces in its place.
Altered State
Victorian number plates tell us we are a State 'On the Move.'
Our Premier proudly tells us we are the country's premier Event State.
We have festivals for everyone
Racing cars that drive round and round
Trains that drive commuters round the bend
And a giant wheel that doesn't go around at all.
There are lots of big things
and lots of busy people
going places
making things happen
making a mark on the world stage
...
I wonder if nicer things grew here when our number plates used to declare gently, with some modesty, and a degree of simplicity
that we were
The Garden State.
Vale Jenny
Jenny always said hello
she used 'dear' and 'gorgeous' with aplomb, making them desirable things to be
She was bright and beautiful
and sharp and stylish
and unfussy
She loved words, stories, pictures and art
(and could not believe that we went to see Australia - what? oh it sounds AWFUL)
Jenny always offered champagne
She did not want
a funeral
or singing
or a celebration of her life
Jenny always believed that dead was dead
And was a sparkling role model of
how to live.
The helpful world of hairdressing
A woman with short hair road tests a new hairdresser. Her favourite hairdresser has disappeared from the salon and queries as to his whereabouts provoke awkward and mumbled responses. He clearly did not leave on good terms.
The woman decides to be generous and give the new, young, short haired slightly bored looking hairdresser now standing behind her a chance.
'One thing I sometimes find, with short hair, is that's hard to know what to do for events. How to make it look special for weddings, dinners, that kind of thing.'
'Yeah, I know,' replies the young hairdresser with genuine concern and a glance at her own short hair.
And that is it.
The end of the helpful consultation.
The woman wishes she had thought to get the mobile phone number of her favourite hairdresser BEFORE he disappeared in such mysterious, mumbled and awkward circumstances.
Lazy Autumn hope
Extreme weather patterns aside, the first days and weeks of Autumn in Melbourne bring a particular joy to the city.
The light drops its summer glare and sinks into a lazy state.
People smile and sniff the air that holds auburn and musk and ground coffee and coats and hours spent reading a book or remembering that bakery where your mum used to buy you Neenish tarts after school on a Friday afternoon.
Summer was for the brilliant and those who can bash their way through.
Winter approaches and it is blue fingers, heads down and black, so much black.
Spring holds promise but it is jittery and precarious and makes you itch.
Autumn encourages
lolling
lingering
lazing.
It is cheeky. It flirts warm and cool.
It smells like hope.
Why is the sky leaking?
When we were little we walked places in the rain all the time. We wore raincoats and gumboots and we got wet. A lot.
My Few Words this week come via a friend, whose colleague was worried about her 10 year old son walking home from school in Melbourne during the week.
Not because he'd never walked home on his own before, but because he'd never walked home alone IN THE RAIN before (born into a lifetime of landscape in drought), and she was worried that he wouldn't know what to do ...
Mum?
Why is the sky leaking?