Time travelling

I am so bad. I mean, how long was the last time I wrote here - about 800 years ago? So much has happened. So much does happen doesn't it? Unless you're locked up in an iron lung somewhere.

I mean almost a month has gone past since I bleated and blogged. I know I only do this for myself but surely I could be a more faithful and dedicated correspondent to me, my one and only reader.

Everyone says you have to keep blog posts brief. I make it a habit to listen to everyone and believe all that they say. So, in a snapshot, recent writerly connected activities include:

• The writing of my final folio piece for my RMIT 'Introduction To Fiction Writing' short course (we also presented it in front of an RMIT big wig and now I must decide if I will enrol in Professional Writing and Editing next year and actually try and pen a novel).
• A small piece by moi in Epicure, The Age, about the Henry Jones Hotel
• The writing of a press release and the various hawking of it to get coverage for The Rehe Family Benefit we recently held. See Patsy Fox - aka illustrator Angie Rehe's - artistic presentation of moi above. Her pencil flatters and lies but it's nice to be immortalised like this. Angie I have blatantly stolen this from your site!
• Interview after interview for the September issue of Get Creative magazine (find out about Biddy Bags here for instance)
• The writing of a media release for Circa, The Prince
  

AND

• The finishing (finally) of Middlesex for the Mrs Underhill Book Club - so heads up book club members ... let's pull our arses into line to get some discussions happening. I need a vote on whether we stick to online only or gather for an 'on wine and on cheese' format. Get it? Genius hey?
  

As usual I am behind on everything and the emails and so forth are piling up. My attendance at the Cleary Horror Seminar has led to a group challenge to write a thriller horror piece - I have nightmares regularly so this should be a shoo in* - and the RMIT class has turned into a fortnightly Tuesday night writing class at The Victorian Writers Centre.

Life is kind and good to me, so much so that I feel forced to head up to Byron Bay the minute I close my computer from this deadline and flop there for my bestie's 40th. Spoiled? Me? So?

*PS: Shoo in = was originally a racetrack term, and was (and still is) applied to a horse expected to easily win a race, and, by extension, to any contestant expected to win an easy victory (Find out more at www.word-detective.com)

Stuff this white girl is liking

The lad who has written STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE is in town. I just caught the end of the interview with him on Jon Faine and I can't believe this blog of his, ironically listing all the crap we whities are in to, has gotten to book stage. The hysterical thing is that Stuff White People Like and Jon Faine are BOTH, I am aware (!) stuff white people like. Ha ha!

Are you aware of this website and book? The book's subtitle is 'A Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions' meaning, of course, that people who think of themselves as unique actually share shed loads of identical tastes and wants. I'm not sure of the point of it all, wagging a finger at self indulgent wankers mostly, but I always laugh when I read it because ''self indulgent wanker' is the t-shirt I am currently having printed for myself. One glance at the list - attending writer's workshops, liking David Sedaris, going to Africa to feel really guilty - are all on my personal CV.

Anyway, on to other topics ... this week is deadline for our folio pieces for my (what white people like) RMIT writing class. I have (almost) decided to do a piece on a workplace for special needs people. If I like it I might post it here.

Over the weekend I caught up with the first three episodes of PUSHING DAISIES. While I don't think I'd become obsessed by it I do think it's worth a look, paricularly for its gloriously colourful art direction. It's all bold colours and 50s silhouette dresses. The lights are brighter, the smiles whiter and the buildings are crazier than in real life. The main character, The Pie Maker, has a pie shop called the Pie Hole. It is round and the roof is in the shape of a pie. Love it! The local morgue is red and white - very pretty - and the female lead, Chuck, played by Anna Friel, has one of the most beautiful smiling faces I have ever seen. You just instantly fall in love with her. She's like the 2008/9 answer to Simon the Likeable from Get Smart.

It also has the wonderful Kristin Chenoweth in it who is a big stage and musical star in the USA and originated the role of Glinda the Good Witch in Wicked, which earned her a Tony Award nomination.

Saying all of that I think it has now been cancelled in the USA, explaining why it has not been on free to air here but is in the video shop. Also picked up at Blockbuster on the weekend was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I am still in my (production designer) Ken Adams obsession mode. See this film for the design of the escape pod if nothing else. This is the Bond film that Ken got his Oscar nomination for.

Book Club update

It's not too late. Read this excerpt ... so good:

In front of me girls were entering and exiting the showers. The flashes of nakedness were like shouts going off. A year or so earlier these same girls had been porcelain figurines, gingerly dipping their toes into the disinfectant basin at the public pool. Now they were magnificent creatures. Moving through the humid air, I felt like a snorkeler. On I came, kicking my heavy, padded legs and gaping through the goalie mask at the fantastic underwater life all around me. Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmates' legs. They came in all colors, black, brown, electric yellow, vivid red. higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing, tipped with stinging pink. Everything was waving int he current, feeding on microscopic plankton, growing bigger by the minute. The shy, plump girls were like sea lions, lurking in the depths. -From Middlesex, page 297-

The Farrah Fawcett Effect

I am officially too lucky. There is no denying this.

Do you know what I did today? It is deadline week ... I am home all week and concentrating on the August issue of Get Creative which promises much entertainment for me as I interview quilters who are helping out survivors of the hideous Victorian bushfires and finding out tricks from crafty bloggers who make their blogs look crushingly artful.

I am tres organised this month which, lo and behold, meant I fricked around this morning and, after getting another little job off for another client, I did NOT settle down to concentrate on my writing. No, instead I watched the Farrah Fawcett documentary on the computer. I know! I am shocking!

Anyhoo I got all fired up about making the most of each day while I feel fit as a fiddle and DO NOT have anal cancer (how uncouth is that for the poor woman?) and, knocked off a quick story and then headed out in my new convertible with the roof down to lap up the wonderful winter sun we enjoyed in Melbourne today. I jogged my way around my fave track at North Road beach before heading home again to get back to the mag and knock off a phone interview with the good folk at Oxfam. In the midst of it all I got invited to see the Martin Short show next week at Crown.

So much sadness goes on around me, dear friends are laid very low with depression, there are deaths of young and old people in my close circle of friends and even my poor old muddah has to have a 'procedure' this week but I am in tripping off to writing seminars, eating great Lebanese food at Ablas (Abla Amad was born in Lebanon and arrived in Australia in 1954 at the age of nineteen. In 1979 she opened Abla's, a restaurant that has become a Melbourne institution) and planning for a birthday lunch with one of my besties (see one of her wonderful articles here) at the John Brack exhibition at the Ian Potter Gallery later in the week. I mean, seriously, how can the universe dole out such good with such bad?

Of course I have NOT done my RMIT homework which is bad of me and I have not had a good look at Project Gutenberg Australia (free ebooks or etexts that may be read on a computer using a simple text editor or viewer) but the key to happiness, so they say, is having someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to. I am blessed on all accounts and all the things on my TO DO list simply mean I have that much more to look forward to ... which includes cleaning the tiles in the shower and scrubbing the stove top. Told you I was too lucky!

I develop little obsessions about things. I’ll give you an example. Lately, while walking and listening to podcasts on my MP3 player, I’ve been listening to old style radio plays of Agatha Christie classics. They’ve really been fascinating me. It’s intriguing to see what kind of world is created through sound effects to bring a script to light. Also interesting to conjure up characters in your mind just based on voices. I am enjoying it.

BUT, I cannot leave it there. Yesterday I rented and watched both ‘Evil Under The Sun’ and ‘Murder on the Orient Express’. ‘Evil Under The Sun’ is a classic. You should see the costumes … divine … and the cast - se magnifique … Peter Ustinov, James Mason, Roddy McDowall, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, to name a few. The other film was less successful, downright awful really. It’s fascinating to be reminded of the role the brain can play as its own art director, set dresser and cinematographer. I think I could produce a better ‘Orient Express’ in my own head, certainly there would be less over-acting. Kids should listen to radio plays. Like books they really allow the imagination to soar.

My imagination will be soaring … fingers crossed … when I go to ACMI this week to do two days of Stephen Cleary's thriller and horror lectures. God knows what I am doing at this thing but how lucky am I to be able to go? For me this is the ultimate voyeuristic thrill ride. I am not looking to write, direct, produce or develop horror films, but many in the audience will be. How much fun to hear their ideas and get an insight into the creative lives of these people! Plus I get to hang with a writerly friend who may one day walk the red carpet, Oscar in hand. Hopefully she will remember the little people when the time comes.

I am wasting my time

Patsy Fox’s blog is too good. She is meant to be drawer, not a writer and yet – read her stuff – she is hilarious. Of course she is hilarious as a real life raconteur too so I shouldn’t be surprised. But I am often described as pretty “funny in the flesh” too (fleshy and funny also) and yet, when I put pen to paper/key to board I am singularly unfunny. In a recent post Patsy discusses hilarious going ons as she tries to track down The Sartorialist while he was in Melbourne recently (THIS IS HER DRAWING OF HIM, I HAVE STOLEN IT FROM HER SITE). She then talks about the fun of simply doing ridiculous things. Maybe that is the case – I do not do enough ridiculous things.

On Saturday just gone I did catch a taxi home from Croydon North (8000 miles from home) which cost 85 freakin dollars!!!! Now that’s what I call ridiculous. Of course it’s also too embarrassing to share with others … which maybe is the problem. I am not willing enough to share my embarrassments – like the fact that, as well as the $85 price tag, I also had the driver waking me up from snoring as we arrived at my doorstep. Classy!

Rose coloured glasses are a must-have fashion accessory for me. Recently a lot of things have been pulling on my memory threads, from requests to write a bio for a magazine I used to edit, to the beginning of a short story for my writing class, to time spent with a friend’s family at her 40th.
As I get older I am struck by how much I can re-write my history to be a much more pleasant place than I felt it was when I was younger. For instance, in terms of the job, I found myself thinking oh-so-fondly of the wonderful travel I did – flying in a glass fronted chopper in Vicenza or listening to Andrea Bocelli sing in an open air palazzo – and remembering some of the friends I made and have kept in touch with in the decade since. I did not think of the lifelong insomnia I developed during that period, the weekends I spent at the desk and the family losses I experienced when there.

When it comes to the short story I played with in class, I began to laugh at what a funny, eccentric and special man my Dad was when, the story in question, really only brought me embarrassment and further proof of how he was trying to ruin my life when it took place. This even led to a whimsical reminiscence of my long lost sister and a stroll through my mind's landscape to our happier times.

And the time spent at the 40th made me think about how people’s lives change dramatically, especially the lives of busy parents who go from having houseloads of blustering adolescents and argumentative teens to having sporadic connection with these offspring as adults and watching them from afar, almost as if they are strangers. I also saw dramatic, staggering effects of age on the good old human body. Obviously I drank to stop those images becoming long term memories.

A rich man died in Melbourne today, a bloke by the name of Richard Pratt. Already on the radio they are debating whether he deserves a State funeral – he gave mountains of cash away in philanthropy but recent times saw him come under a legal shadow in his business dealings – and the memories surrounding his life, the stories from colleagues and friends, are already being edited and polished to give off the finest hue.

We all have a history. We all have our own stories but do they change as time goes on and, if they do, do they become more or less accurate? In class last night we discussed genres. Many stories, upon reflection, can be written equally as well as a romance, a drama, a mystery, a work of science fiction, a poem or graphic novel. Which genre are we living in today?