You Know You're Living In A Kindergarchy When..

A colleague introduced me to the notion of a Kindergarchy. This is when the kids rule. A two year old can be very powerful. Terry said he’d put the DVD in the player, turned to his daughter and said, “Alright then?” and she barked back, ‘”Press play!” Terry said he felt like a human remote.
You know you’re in a kindergarchy when….
1. You’ve been driving for half an hour. There are no kids in the car. The Wiggles CD is playing anyway.
2. You’re driving. No kids again. You yell out, “Look at the big truck!”
3. The most intelligent person you speak to all day is yourself.
4. At a dinner party, all of your stories begin, “Emma did the funniest thing the other day…”
5. At a dinner party, you find yourself cutting up another guest’s food.
6. You’re wearing jewelry made of pasta.
7. If asked the time, you respond, “Now, the big hand’s on the three…”
8. When cutting a sandwhich into oblongs instead of triangles is a major catastophe.
9. When you think Thomas The Tank engine is the height of Ringo Starr’s career.
10. When it’s been a while since you’ve showered on your own.
11. The course of your day can be deeply affected by whose presenting Playschool.
12. Your only decent lipstick is used for colouring in.
13. You’re a big bloke and you’re enjoying the daily miniature tea parties.
14. When you know what’s on offer on TV at 5am
15 When you go to a café for morning tea and everyone else is having breakfast
16. When the art of choice is a framed finger painting.
17. When the song you can’t get out of your head is the the theme to Sponge Bob Squarepants… “who lives in a pineapple under the sea.”
18. When you defend SpongeBob Squarepants as decent viewing; “it’s really quite surreal and has a lot of absurdist humour…”
19. When you can form an opinion about the relative quality and merit of the Ice Age movies.
20. When you’re eating chicken nuggets at 5pm and that’s dinner.

This was compiled by listeners and texters to 702 ABC Sydney Afternoons. After hearing all this one suggested, “We need a Kinda Carta.”

And The Rest of Us See An Ass…

 

Nick Cave is everywhere this week. He’s got a book out. So of course, he’s on the cover of everything. And his book is wonderful. According to everyone.  If Nick farted, it would be well received.

Nick’s fart would get this kind of review…

During lunch Nick let loose with a   wondrous fart which was not just wondrous in its tone and delivery but also  an ironic comment on farts, a bluesy type smear on the kind of people who think farts are bad taste, an indication of a new direction for Nick, a rectal trumpet blast that was side splittingly funny while still being somehow redolent of eternal mysteries. Nick’s fart filled with air with a whiff of brimstone and a view of heaven, and by the end of lunch it had spawned a legion of imitators, none of whom seem to be able to fart with the kind of credibility only Nick can summon.

I’m not big on Nick.

I fail to see why Nick is so worshipped in the critical and curating community.

Actually I know exactly why Nick is so worshipped.

The kind of person who becomes a rock critic, an art festival director, a magazine editor, is often the kind of person who in their youth loved Nick Cave.

Perhaps they loved Nick for his songs and his band The Birthday Party or the Bad Seeds or did they love Nick because to love Nick was cool?

It was cool because no one else really liked them, but they really liked them and really got it, and loved being considered a bit out there and dangerous by the others who thought it was cool to like Abba or Led Zeppelin.

The Abba/Zeppelin people were cooler in terms of general popularity but you didn’t care, because it seemed even cooler to be in the group that the cool people thought was uncool.

It made you all the cooler.

All you cared about was finding the other people who liked Nick Cave  and reassuring each other that you were all so cool.

Nick Cave also thought you were cool and in fact Nick knew that the only thing cooler than liking Nick Cave was being Nick Cave.

And so he spawned a legion of imitators who wished they were Nick Cave but thought they better finish their arts degree and didn’t really like heroin that much so they did the next best thing to being Nick Cave; they wrote about Nick Cave.

And they wrote with passion and fire because it was them against the world. How much better the world would be if everyone stopped listening to Fleetwood Mac and LRB and listened to Nick Cave!  Of course, the world is really perfect as it is because it would be very uncool if Nick was suddenly popular. All those cool people  would lose their status as the kind of people who were so cool they like Nick Cave.

The Nick Worshippers grew up and became rock critics and festival directors and magazine people and  anytime they could they got Nick a gig. If Nick brought out a recording it was always five stars. If Nick wrote a film, it was incredible. Would Nick mind if we set a ballet to his music? Could Nick curate something for us, write a forward, make some sculptures? Then we  can write about it, and put Nick on the cover of our magazine and show once again how cool we are, because we get Nick Cave.

I get Nick Cave. He’s a writer, a songwriter, a hustler and a self pimper.
He’s fine. He’s out there hacking away trying to pay his mortage and live an interesting life  with a book advance and some song royalties.  He gets asked to do this that and the other and why should he say no? He’s gotta eat. If people want to put him on the cover of the magazine and they think it will sell, why would Nick complain.

But can I just say – I’ve never heard anything he’s done that I’ve wanted to hear again. His novel was crap. His film The Proposition  was OK. I’m yet to read his new book , but I’ve certainly read a lot about it already.

Such a slim body of work for so much reporting and critical comment.

This is because of the very nature of his  work and persona. It appeals directly  to the kind of person who becomes a rock critic. art commentator, a commissioning editor.

This is because he possess that mysterious quality which was so potent  in the mid seventies and eighties; credibility.

Credibility was everything back then. Credibility sought by all and granted only to a few meant that your every utterance had meaning. To be credible had nothing to do with actual ability.  One had to wear only black, have only a rudimentary grasp of music and songwriting, and write tunes of great angst.

It helped if you’d experienced great angst but in Nick’s case it was enough to do a good impression of great angst. For true credibility, you had to take drugs.  And the bad ones, not just a reggae cigarette in the band room.

These songs, excreable listening to most, were lauded by his followers as the most compelling utterances ever, and of course if you didn’t like them, it was because you were shallow and Nick was too much for you.

So compelling as though that may have been to the door bitches, the writers for the street papers, the JJJ set, the RRR set, I think now as we age we could apply some different criteria.

What’s he actually done?

Not that  much.

Is it any good?

Not really.

Nick seems to me to be a one trick pony. He discovered early on that if you shove Jesus and the bible into your work, it makes it sound deep. Just say the word Jesus, or Elijah or Gethsemane and it sets off a whirlpool of meaning for people and you’re work is done. His obscenity is too constant to be anything but adolescent. He has no range, he only brays. In Peter Conrad’s hagiography in the Monthly, it’s all blood, balls and bible onto which Conrad piles more meaning than a record reviewer trying to get a column.  Conrad is typical of those infatuated with Nick’s persona. He coyly refers to being with Nick as he drives around Brighton; they’re obviously acquainted. He therefore forgives Nick artistic sins which I’m sure he’d condemn in others. Nick is permitted and praised for ambiguity, obtuseness and verbosity.

 Three qualities I’m always on the lookout for in writers.

Nick as eager a self promoter as Paris Hilton. He uses the bad boy reluctance and truculence with the media in the same way she uses her physical charms and LA bratocity. He in fact has become something I believe he would despise. Nick is now merely a celebrity. He’s famous for being Nick Cave.

Nick wishes he could write with the simplicity and emotional directness of Leonard Cohen. He wishes he could summon the noir atmosphere  of Tom Waits, with Tom’s growling nonchalance. He wishes he could sing as well as Johnny Cash.

He doesn’t do any of that, so on behalf of those who’ll wait until Nick farts out something listenable or readable before we praise him unto heaven itself, can I just say that enough worshipful analysis already? He’s not even dead.

 

 

 

 

The Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, is not working. It’s reasonable to ask after fifteen years and big pot of money, why? How could this happen? Biggest brains in the world.  Lot of enthusiasm for banging some particles together and locating that elusive Higgs Boson particle. I for one rarely get a good night’s sleep pondering just how to explain the difference between the massless photon which mediates electromagnetism and the massive W and Z Bosons which mediate the weak force. CERN was going to provide the answer for us and let us all get some rest.

Why is this giant piece of engineering not working?

Anyone who’s ever renovated knows exactly how this went down.

 I’m seeing an electrician  tradie pulling up on the border of Switzerland in a black Maloo Holden Ute. Dog in the back. 2Day FM blaring out of the front.

“G’day, mate, I’m here to quote on the Hadron. Gotta see Gustav? Oh , G’d day Gustav, yeah I’m your sparkie. Sorry I’m a bit late, surf was up. Anyway, what are you lookin’ for here?

Right, you want the place wired up? What’s your budget?

Fifteen billion? Yeah, I dunno if we can do for that. Anyway, let’s have a look, and hope the chippies haven’t stuffed it up and we can still get you some voltage in here.”

Gustav then would have walked around with Steve the electrician and pointed out where he would like the power points in order to provide electricity so two particles can bang into one another and prove the existence of the Boson particle. Bit like  banging Malcolm Turnbull into Godwin Gretch and hoping that a real email might fall out.

Steve would have nodded, and said reassuringly, “No worries, mate. Sweet. She’ll be right. Yep. Too easy. It’s all good.”

When Steve returned later to put the wiring in, he glanced at the plans, patted his dog and bunged in some power points wherever it seemed like a good idea.

Later when they switched on the collider and didn’t work, Gustav would have rung Steve and steve would have replied apologetically, “Shit, mate. Not working? That’s no good. Jeez, I dunno what that would be. You wanted seven trillion volts in the place?  Yeah, well, that’s a bit more than you need to run your toaster that’s for sure. Look, I’ll swing round when I can, and take a look. Probably not this week. Maybe after the long weekend? Sweet. See ya.”

I’m not really that down on the tradies. You should see how much I forget and stuff up in any one day. What I love is that in such a massive project, in something that would have involved so much sophisticated thinking, a bit of simple human error has crept in.

The suggestion at the moment is that the magnets that are meant to pump up the voltage were left outside for too long before being installed and so lost their strength. 

It’s the same on any building site anywhere in the world.

“Oh, mate, can’t get them in this week. See, the plumbers have got to get their stuff in, then we’ll lay the concrete and then that’s gotta dry …”

I find it reassuring. From my bathroom to the world’s most hi tech tunnel – give me a stuff up every time.

 

 

 

Australians make the worst husbands according to a British study.  Apparently it’s because we don’t do the housework.

Scandinavia – of course, and the USA and Britian, all better.

Better husbands because they’ll do the housework.
Well, I say Australia is the last bastion of a true male. A true bloke who can live in squalor and never notice it. A bloke who can sleep in sheets until they change themselves. A bloke who says why empty the kitchen bin, you can always stuff more in it. A bloke who says clean the shower recess? It gets cleaned and washed down every time I have a shower, doesn’t it?

As for doing the housework, I’m proud to say that Australia is a land where if you chuck a cricket ball up the main street, chances are you’ll hit a bloke who’ll declare;  if you have to do the housework after you get married , why the bloody hell would you get married?

Go on, then darling, marry Sven then, see how like it. Oh, the kitchen will gleam, and you could serve soup in your bidet, but you’ll never know the joy of a bloke who’s happy with the one pair of underpants for the week – why add to the laundry pile? All Aussie blokes all you need to do  to clean a shirt is leave it on the bedroom floor for a couple of days.  See, we may not do  housework, but we have many strategies for reducing it.

Barbequeing is popular in Australia because you never need to clean a barbeque. Oh, I’m sure divine husband Nigel ruining a pork sausage on his Weber on his allotment in Norwhich cleans his, and I know that Chuck incinerating a weiner on his eight burner monster connected directly to a Texan oil derrick also cleans his, but any Aussie bloke knows that a barbeque is cleaned simply by turning it on.  The flames consume remaining pieces of barramundi or crocodile that were stuck on the grill and any further remnants are removed by cooking the kid’s sausages first.  We then cook the adult’s meal; often Fillet of Shark, wrestled that morning from the bay while surfing, or perhaps Kangaroo Fillets, cut from a beast felled with a boomerang from the mobs common in our city streets.

Why wouldn’t you want an Australian bloke? Bugger the housework, Australian men – it’s well known – play beautiful tennis, can round up cattle on horseback, have narrow hips and rarely speak except to deliver a devasting laconic aside.

But you go right ahead, darling. If you’d rather walk up the aisle with chip butty Nigel, or hamburger arse Chuck or herring head Sven because they’ll keep the linen cupboard well ordered, you’re missing out on a bloke who can drink beer with one hand, choke a taipan with the other and as long as you keep the beer cold for him, couldn’t give a dead dingo’s donger if you keep the place clean.