Naoko: “Zen, what do you want to be when you are an adult?”
Zen: “I want to be just like Papa.”
Naoko: “You mean his character?”
Zen: “No, how he looks.”
Peter: “So… you want to have a moustache?”
Zen: “No.”
Peter: “So… you want to wear glasses?”
Zen: “No.”
Peter: “So… you want to have a big nose?”
Zen: “Yeah…”
Back from Melbourne, I spent 72 hours in that city. Monday was a normal day at work, which meant I was there from 8 AM to 7:30. I got home and Naoko and Zen were partying with three of Naoko’s ex-colleagues. They gave me beer and dinner and let me pack in peace. I got out of there at 9:30 in a cab to the airport. I had forgotten how crappy the Singapore airlines flight to Melbourne is – that’s the one that takes off at 23:30 Singapore and lands at 6:30 Singapore time (8:30 local time). Yes, it’s a 7-hour long night flight. To make the flight go better they serve dinner at 2:00 and then breakfast at 4:00. I had a very nice dinner at 8:00, I don’t know why Singapore Airlines thinks that they can outdo what my loving wife served me in my own home, but it seems that they think they can. This flight could have been vastly improved if they had quickly served a small, tasty snack at take-off, and then breakfast as close to landing as possible. Some people pointed out “you should have waived the meal,” but even if I’d been informed that there were two meals on the flight (I wasn’t), waiving them wouldn’t have automatically let me sleep on since there’s a lot of commotion involved with serving a meal in economy class.
I got to Melbourne all right, and I checked into my hotel early. Went to do three interviews, which was fun and nice, and then to hang out in Melbourne a bit. I found a cool comic book and toys shop, but the didn’t have any of the obscure things I was looking for. I also found a cool CD shop that sells EXACTLY the kind of music that I like, but they had none of the CDs I was looking for (although they had many of the obscure CDs that I do own). Got a flyer to a rock show on Thursday night, so I made plans to go to that.
Had a dinner with the conference people, then went out to meet a friend, then back to the room to sleep sleep sleep.
The alarm went off and I felt like I was waking up from a coma. Ughhh…
The first day of the conference went well, although I was stuck in the conference place a bit too long. In the evening they had a great big party for all attendees. I was the first one there, and tried out their “floating heads” gimmick that puts people in front of a blue screen so that they can lip-sync to a song, while their heads float around on animated bodies. The idea is to keep your head synced up with the video. Good fun – I sang “Wild Thing.” They burned me a VCD of it, but now I cannot find it, unfortunately… boo hoo. The big room party included lots of burlesque entertainment (“See girl sawn in half!! See scenes from Chicago!!! See scenes from Moulin Rouge!!!!”) that was good fun. They had people doing amazing things with hula hoops, they had girls spinning on ropes, and they had fat men on a trampoline. They had “name that tune” which was good fun, and the winners had to sing a karaoke-like song. Then they started with the bands, and there were dozens of musicians rotating onstage. One of the guys was the lead singer of the Beasts of Bourbon, a guy called Tex Perkins who is tall and gangly and wears a suit and sings dramatically, tossing his shoulder-length hair around so that you can’t help but be reminded of Nick Cave. They sang tons of great songs, and I danced like a maniac – so much so that I drew the attention of some of the guests. They finally did a song “for the brothers and sisters who are no longer with us” which was, of course, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Good stuff, guys. After that I went upstairs to the pub Fusion, which has a good band on Wednesday nights (at least it did last year) and I got in there one minute before they finished. D’oh!!! After that it was disco time, so I stayed for a bit to watch the attractive disco party people do their thing, but then headed home.
Thursday – woke up and felt great! But my legs were stiff from all the dancing. Ouch! Managed to get to the event, had some food, listened to some sessions, and in the evening went back, packed, and headed out to my own party. That was at the Colonial Hotel, where three local heavy metal bands were due to play. Got there just after it opened, the security guy took one look at me and asked me “do you even know where you are?” I guess I looked too old, or maybe he saw my mustache and assumed I liked other kinds of things for my entertainment. Oh well. The place had three floors, two of which played music. Good stuff – I heard The Stooges, Fugazi, and other good stuff. Melboulne seems like a cool place to hang out. The first band came out – Night Plague – and they did all of the corny death metal/Pantera things. The lead singer was a dude with a great headband, nice piercings, long hair, and a throaty growl. The two guitarists and the bass player took over and did all the great posing things, including spinning the hair in a circle. One of the guitarists was brilliant. He stuck around for the next band, whose name I wish I could remember. They were six people – same guitar dude and a keyboard girl, another guitarist, another bass player, a lead singer, and a really great drummer. They started their set and just went nuts, especially the bass player who was hopping all over the place, shaking his fist in the air. They had a lot of technical problems, and only one of the guitarists, the drummer and the lead singer really had their sound coming through, but they all had fun nonetheless jumping all over the place. The audience seemed to be digging it, and even the bored model in the corner was actually singing along! I took some pictures, wish I’d taken a video. It was the nuttiest night of live music I’ve seen since I was in Japan. Great, great, great… I left before they finished their set, I bet the third band was pretty good. Went home, packed, watched TV, slept.
Friday the 15th – Strange day. I took a taxi to the airport, the driver was an odd man from Ethiopia who spoke terrible English, I could hardly understand him. His driving was terrible too, he was swerving a bit on the road. He nearly took a wrong turn too. I got to the airport and I saw that Singapore Airlines had opened four check-in boothes for the regular passengers and four for the internet check-in people. The queue for the regular check-ins was really long and the internet check-in queue was empty. I guess internet check-in is the new priority pass. It seems a bid pedantic of the airline to let people who aren’t smart enough or informed enough (or who, like me, lacked a computer and an internet connection in Australia) to rot in a long queue just to teach them a lesson. But what should I expect from an airline that serves dinner at 2:00 AM.
I went through the customs, went through the security search, and when I got through the metal detector and the X-ray scan I was asked to go through a random spot check. I don’t know what good a random spot check will do after all the security, but I had no choice but to concede.
Happily the rest of the flight went well. I watched three in-flight movies and a TV show (the Simpsons) and nothing froze, the sound didn’t break up, and no ninnies interrupted me. I got to Singapore, Naoko and Zen were at the airport, and we went home and chilled out. Another trip out of the way.
Saturday we hung out in the morning. In the afternoon I went to visit my new guitar teacher to see what kind of person he is and figure out if he will be a good teacher. He seems quite good and cool and from next week he’ll come to my pad to teach me for 45 minutes. That will cost a bit more, but it will save me from lugging my equipment downtown every week.
Sunday we hung out, and then I went to Zen’s swimming lesson in the afternoon. I started researching about how to publish my novel. Step 1: reach out to literary agents!!!
The “Chicago” revue
Tex Perkins of the Beasts of Bourbon performing in Melbourne
Angry Anderson of Rose Tattoo performing in Melbourne
Melbourne city, seagull
747, ANZ advertisement
Movie reviews:
Asterix and Obelix at the Olympic Games – good, solid fun. Gerard Depardieu is nearly unrecognizable under his Obelix costume. Asterix is a loveable, albeit temperamental, short fellow. The Gauls and the Romans are crazy, everyone has a good time, people scream at each other, and there are interesting light sabre jokes. I laughed out loud a couple of times, forgot what they were but it was a charming movie. Interesting cameos – there’s Michael Schumacher as the leader of the German chariot team, also a cameo by Zidane as a proto-soccer player (the Greeks apparently experimented with a ball for kicking and considered calling the new sport “feetball”), and Jamel Debouzze (best-known for being married to the most beautiful woman in the world, French TV reporter Melisse Theuriau).
The Orphanage – My colleague loves this film, but I found it unbearably similar to a hodge podge of films, including “Ringu,” “the Vanishing, “the Sixth Sense,” and of course also “the Others.” A woman moves back to the orphanage she grew up in so that she can help kids with disabilities. She has an adopted son who starts to see dead people, but who disappears suddenly one day. She begins to uncover secrets about the place in her quest to find out why her son disappeared. At the end there is a resolution of sorts, and then the movie is over. I found myself wondering lots of strange things about this family: why do they want to move into the middle of nowhere? Is their project a commercial enterprise or social work? Why do they seem so wealthy if they’re pumping money into keeping a decrepit mansion under operation? And why is the husband so patient with his half-insane wife?
Son of Rambow – a very quirky film, this is a story of two kids with difficult family situations (the sensitive arty kid’s from a Quaker-like family but his dad died a few years back, the bully kid’s mum and dad are divorced and both absent from the home and he’s “looked after” by his poncy older brother) who begin a film project, which is to recreate a kid’s version of First Blood. Improbably, the two become friends, and there is a warm and tender scene that demonstrates it. Complications arise when the French kids arrive in a bus for their semester overseas and terrorize the British kids. Weird. Crazy. Fun. Of course there is conflict and reconciliation and a quirky ending. Not a fantastic film, no Napoleon Dynamite, but a fun kids film nonetheless.