A Musical Recipe by Erik Satie (1866 - 1925)

Cefalophones

2 flutes with keys (F sharp)
1 alto overcoat (C)
1 duckbill (E)
2 stroke clarinets (G flat)
1 siphon in C
3 keyboard trombones (D flat)
1 bass in leather (C)
Chromatic tub in H

Instruments belonging to the remarkable group cefalophones, with 30 octaves extent, completely unperformable. An amateur in Vienna tried in 1875 to handle the siphone in C; after having jared with a piercing drill, the instrument burst, broke the spine on the executor and scalped him completely. Since then no one has dared to concern oneself with the powerful assets that cefalophones contain and the state has forbidden all schools teaching the instruments.

Remix Live!

For the last few months, Wigger Lee Battersby (he's the Red Wigger) has been involved in the Remix My Lit project, where authors of the calibre of Kim Wilkins and Cate Kennedy have made available works to be recut and posted by members of the public. The Remix My Lit project climaxes in August with a live remixing event as part of the Festival of Melbourne.

Guests at the festival have been invited to bring their laptop or mobile phone and be part of a live multimedia remix event at Federation Square, where they can freely remix your work.

Remixers will find copies of the stories on the day or can access them in advance at the Remix My Lit Website - they can re-imagine and remix them - and then send the remixed short story to a mobile phone number. Using the Fed Sq SMS TV system the RML team will be publishing this flash fiction on the big screen at Federation Square as part of a live A/V set by ".M."

Readings of the stories have also been recorded by .M. and will be incorporated into her set, including video images inspired by the original stories.

All works created on the day will be posted to the Remix My Lit website and considered for publication in an accompanying print anthology.

If you are going to be in Melbourne for the festival we would love to see you at the event:

Date: Saturday 30 August 2008
Time: 3.30pm - 4.30pm
Venue: Federation Square - The Big Screen in the Plaza

For more info visit the official MWF program:
http://www.mwf.com.au/2008/content/mwf_2008_events.asp?name=3099

The Art of the Double Suck-in

Paul Haines hit Geoffrey Maloney the other day with an email that made him realise that he might be falling into a pattern of not just telling silly stories for creative purposes, but telling silly old fart stories to anybody who will listen. The Art of the Double Suck-in is one of those stories:

Paul, your email reminds me of practical jokes we used to play at high school generally known as the "suck in" -- basically trying to convince someone of something that wasn't true, and once convinced the cry of "sucked in" would ring loud in the air. The height of this art was reached with the "double suck in" -- a very difficult thing to do. It involved the original victim of the suck-in (would it be suck-in-ee ?) turning the tables by adding additional information which lead to the suck-in-or believing that their lie was an actual truth at which the cry "Double suck-in" would go up. Sometimes this involved very subtle nuances and relied a lot on the personalities of the people involved to pull it off. Here's an obvious example complete with usual schoolboy obsessions.

The suck-in

Randy schoolboy 1:"Hey, guess what Mr Hardcox got caught by the headmaster rooting Miss Truelove in the sports storeroom."

Randy schoolboy 2: "Shit, man, I would never have guessed. He's such a creep and she's so fucking cute."

Randy schoolboy 1: "Sucked-in!"

The double suck-in:

Randy schoolboy 1: "Hey, guess what Mr Hardcox got caught by the headmaster rooting Miss Truelove in the sports storeroom."

Randy schoolboy 2: "Man, I knew they were gonna get caught one day. I saw them going at it after school last Tuesday, down behind the toilet block. It was disgusting. He's such a creep and she's so fucking cute."

Randy schoolboy 1: "You really saw them?"

Randy schoolboy 2: "Going at it like a couple of dogs."

Randy schoolboy 1: "Shit, wish I'd been there."

Randy schoolboy 2: "Sucked-in!"

As you can see a double suck-in is a far more complex play. It takes imagination, a quick brain and good verbal skills:) Whereas the single suck-in could be set-up well in advance even by the slow-witted. There is no record of a triple suck-in ever having succeeded.

Six Silly Stories

"Six Silly Stories", an absurd collection of fantastical stories by Geoffrey Maloney and artwork by Diana Maloney, is shortly to be released from Elastic Press in the UK. Here's the author shot that Diana carefully constructed.

Australian Story - She's Not There

I've been trying to get this published on the ABC site tonight but The Moderator appears to have difficulty in releasing it. I may have used the wrong words, but I suspect that I took the wrong angle that the ABC wanted me to take. So I'm realeasing it here. It won't make any sense unless you saw their god awful show.

What a tragic tale of bitchiness. How incredibly ugly it was to see those woman moaning about about their team who collapsed during the games and not one word of sympathy or empathy for what must have happened to their rowing partner during that horrible day. What horrible horrible people they are and they still can't get over and still don't care. Congratulations I guess to the ABC for getting these women to talk, but it would have been better if we didn't know about about them. Ugly, ugly people who are justifying themselves on the basis that win at all costs counts more than anything else.

Their joy at the end about Sally not making it to the Beijing olympics was simply disgusting.

Sam's Town - The Killers

The Killers with their very first album burst onto the scene with iconclastic rock and pop. The very best of the Brit and US rock at the time. Great songs, great voice and a wonderful production.

I've spent the close to the last 12 months trying to make sense out of their second CD. But the production is now totally all pumped up guitars, the voice is lost and because of that that stories the songs might have told as well. The production is awful.

And there you have The Killers on the back of the album - a full on B&W photograph of these guys, dressed in black and wearing beards. Like they will be the American icons. Somebody got them and captured them and they went with it. Sad. It turned their specks of gold to specks of shit.

GEORGE CARLIN

Goddamn, it’s been a year for losing genius’. Now George Carlin is dead, aged 71. Truth be told, he was never going to outlive George Burns, not with his lifestyle, but still, he was arguably one of the best three or four stand up comedians of the 20th century, and his passing represents a real loss to anybody who appreciates hard-bitten, precise observation. His wasn’t the fluffy nothingness of a Jerry Seinfeld, or the cozy reinforcement of a Tim Allen or Jeff Foxworthy. Carlin trod the same path as the likes of Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and Billy Connolly, challenging the perceptions of his audiences and the structural status quo of the culture around him. He was, by turns, savage, acerbic, loving, and radio-friendly, and yet managed to maintain his rage and sense of damnation through forty years and something like 20-odd albums. And he transcended age: my boys knew him from his appearances in movies like Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, and the Bill & Ted movies, and now they want to know more, to hear what he was all about.

I don’t own enough of his work: my predilection for collecting comedy albums on the original vinyl is shown up by Perth’s distance from anywhere meaningful for such endeavours. But what I have is brilliant indeed, and among my list of stuff to be rescued from house fires.

If you’ve not experienced his work before, there are lists of quotes all about. Here’s a couple for starters: here and here

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan, the greatest novelist in the English language of all time? I suspect so. In terms of history McEwan's work will be remember. As he spans two centuries he might be be up for grabs in either one. Who knows?

Everything McEwan has written up to now has been brilliant. We might quibble about "Amsterdam" being a more minor work even though it won the Booker, but it was exceptionally clever. Certainly "Child in Time", "Enduring Love" and "Atonement" are all monumental works, spectacular in their pacing structure and far beyond, in terms of literary merit, than "Amsterdam" could ever aspire too. "Black Dogs" is a favourite of many.

So "On Chesil Beach" : As with most McEwan novels it's painful to read. This is what makes his work a delight and horror at the same time. He captures people in their most vulnerable moments like no one else. This he does wonderfully time and time again.

No plot synopsis with this one; you can get that anywhere on the internet. I'm more interested in character and structure with this book, and pacing too and it fails on all three.

Firstly the characters are rather boring. They didn't give McEwan enough space to work with. They were far too tight and British. This was exactly what he wanted but still his characters weren't working for him. As a result, he couldn't get his pacing to work, and then there was no real structure to the story that was worth mentioning.

The ending is tragic of course. It would not be a McEwan novel if it wasn't. But the greatest tragedy was the irresponsible and lazy ending where paragraph by paragraph he counts down the years of his main character. At age forty, Edward was like this. At age fifty he was like this. At age sixty he was like this. A great big fucking yawn.

The whole thing appears like it should have been a much longer work in the making. Lives that could have been traced out in much more detail. But he didn't do it. Couldn't do it with the characters he chose, I suspect. They were deadly boring from the start and had no more to tell.

That said it is an incredibly tragic love story, and a very tragic novel because he never really finished it. The ending was rushed and totally unexpected for McEwan's work.

Even more strangely he adds at the end "The characters in this novel are inventions and bear no resemblance to people who are living or dead."

Now I could add that to every single story I have ever written. Why would someone like McEwan bother unless the story was true.

In which case we might ask what he is doing with this book. Because I don't know. Here is the best writer in the English language with a huge unfinished mess on his hands and he handed it over to be published. What he was thinking? What the fuck was he doing?

Ian McEwan is a great novelist. If you have never read his writing before read "Child in Time" first or his wonderful short stories "Between the Sheets" then "Enduring Love". Then read "Atonment" suffer it's first forty pages of too much Englishness and weep for the next 200 pages. It's that good. "On Chesil Beach" is an exercise in writing by comparison.

TO LEE BATTERSBY, THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNPUBLISHED 18 YEAR OLD, BEST WISHES AND GOOD LUCK, ALGIS BUDRYS

Back in 1989, I did a couple of things in quick succession: read Algis Budrys’ novel Michaelmas and discovered the Writers Of The Future contest, which Budrys was co-ordinating. In those pre-net days (how did we ever survive?) you had to write in to get details of the competition. So I did- a gushing half-query, half-fan letter in which I signed myself off as ‘the world’s greatest unpublished 18 year old’.

Shaddup. I was young, okay?

In due course, back came the guidelines sheet. But also: a copy of the latest Writers Of The Future anthology, with an inscription inside— the title of this post.

Was I inspired? I had a story in the mail within a fortnight. It didn’t win, it didn’t even place. But the fuse was lit. Over the next 19 years I’ve written and performed stand-up comedy and one-act plays; published poetry, cartoons, reviews, interviews and short stories; completed my first novel; written a feature film and a TV series pitch; and on and on and so forth. The whole of my bibliography, set into motion by an act of kindness.

In 2001, after several years away doing other things, I entered the Writers of the Future competition for the second time, and became the first Western Australian to win. In August of 2002, I flew to LA as part of my prize, where I was going to be able to meet Budrys and tell him, face to face, what he’d inspired in me. To make things even better, before I flew out, I sold and saw published a reworked version of that story I’d originally written back in 89 (there’s a hint, kids. Never throw anything out….). It’s still archived: you can read it here. Sadly, Budrys fell ill, and so we never met, but I was able to tell the story, and have it relayed to him.

Last night, as reported over at Ed Gorman’s blog amongst others, Algis Budrys died of cancer, aged 77. We never did get to meet, but he was, and always will be, a central figure in my karass. He was a writer of important works: Michaelmas is a major SF novel and unarguably one of the major precursors of cyberpunk, and Who? is an astonishingly humanist reworking of the cold war/spy thriller. But more than that—he was an inspirational and kindly figure who will be remembered by a generation of writers for the hand he held out to them along the way.

Vale.

FRANK WOODLEY: POSSESSED (A REVIEW OF SORTS)


When Luscious and I were in Adelaide recently, we had the fabulous opportunity to get out and catch some theatre, something we'd been unable to do for far too long. Frank Woodley's new solo show Possessed was on, and I was keen, but Lyn professed to being not a great fan of Lano & Woodley, so we passed. Instead, we bought tickets to a show that was cancelled ten minutes before we were due to take our seats when a crew member electrocuted themselves and blew out every fuse in the hotel where the show was being staged. So it goes.

Tuesday night, thanks to the miracles of teen babysitter and free tickets from my work's social club, we got a second chance. And this time, we went.

Woodley's always been a fantastic performer, combining an amazing physical elasticity with a talent for drawing pathos and sympathy from an audience with subtle changes in stance. And yet, and yet....

Possessed is the story of Louie, a lonely borderline agarophobe who spends his days collecting sailing ship memorabilia and building model ships to hang around his tiny basement apartment. When he is possessed by the ghost of Phoebe O'Leary, an Irish girl who drowned whilst stowing away on the ship whose model he is currently building, it leads them both to question their relationship, their choices, and whether to stay locked up within their own personal purgatories or take the chance on actions that may liberate or damn them.And much like the Jim Carrey movie The Cable Guy, what could (should?) have been a startlingly good example of one type of story (in the case of the movie, a black comedy. In the case of the play, a heartbreaking and ultimately sweet and hopeful love story) is cut off at the knees by the need to insert 'signature' aspects of the main performers style of comedy. Put more bluntly, there was far too much falling down stairs and not enough character in this one-person tour de force for it to be successful.

Don't get me wrong: Woodley still is, and will remain for some time, a masterful physical performer. But he's not so capable of character acting that I ever quite believed in his ability to transform from male to female mannerisms. His turns as Phoebe feel like just that: comic turns, a chance to mince and flap in a burlesque manner, rather than the assumption of a true alter ego. And, ultimately, the story of Phoebe's fate, and the journey she must take, are so well written and genuinely sad that they outweigh the bulk of the performace: Woodley's stock-in-trade physical buffoonery as the cross-lobed Louie is at odds with the tragedy that unfolds behind him.

The end result is neither wholly one thing or another, and left me wondering what the play could have been if performed by a genuine character actor, played straight, or at least, with a greater balance between the sadness and a gentler form of melancholy humour.