I have become platonically enamoured with a nineteen year-old Russian boy for one particular reason. I was lying on the floor with my head under his desk, to rest, while he ignored me and continued doing some kind of film editing thing. I started talking about the children's book I am writing, outlined the plot, explained what I am hoping to convey through story, being out of place, the sorrow that comes with unsuitable surroundings, the physical manifestation of despair through metal diving suits and sinking parrots. He paused in his work, cultivated a wicked grin to throw in my direction, declared the story to be 'emo' then carried on doing some kind of film editing thing.
Surely one has to become platonically enamoured with anyone who can convey, in two seconds, that they have heard and properly understood, have sympathy for your process and value your presence enough to cheer things along with playful irreverence.
I think it's getting complicated
Searching for a new job involves the kind of fortuitous miracle needed to convince a cat to vomit on the tiles and not the carpet. I'm not saying it's exactly the same thing but it gives the same kind of feeling in my bones.
SLAMMATOWN: Mad Men Strike Back
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| Illo by Onnie Cleary |
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away I was interviewed for a new job. I didn’t realise I was in a different time zone and galaxy until after the interview concluded and I was spat back out into a normal Wednesday afternoon in Sydney. It was then that it hit me, something really fucked had just happened.
After shaking my hand and sitting me down she launched into the first of many stupendous and terrifying rants. She told me she hated my resume, all of it, from the font to the layout. She ranted for ten full minutes while I sat and wondered just why in fuck was interviewing me if she hated my resume so much.
The interviewer interspersed her ranting with comments about how great I was, how smart I was, how many qualifications I had. I was entering an advanced state of confusion when she kicked it up another gear and started to really go for it. She hated my hair, said she’d never seen hair so unprofessional before. I was going to mention that we had almost identical haircuts it was just that my hair is wavy and hers is straight when she started on my shoes.
I was wearing the wrong kind of shoes, apparently only an idiot goes to a job interview wearing flat shoes. She stood up to demonstrate how she was wearing high heels, pulled up the leg of her trousers so I could properly view her shoes. After the ‘one must always wear high heels’ rant she started on the rest of me. Fortunately she decided that my face would have to do because she didn’t suppose anything could be done about that, apart from more make up. The horrifying conclusion of this job interview is that she thinks I would be fantastic for the job but I have to be interviewed again first, just to make sure. She said she’d give me a couple of days to ‘do something’ about my hair, my shoes and my wardrobe.
I have to confess I’ve been obsessed with watching Mad Men. I came a little late to this party, most people I know started and finished their own Mad Men obsessions some time ago. What everyone failed to mention about Mad Men is how horrifying it is. Everyone talked about the fashion, the cigarettes, the stupid men with their suits and slicked down hair but not the horrifying slow reveal of repression and oppression. How the women were judged more on their legs than their ability to do the job well.
In the first episode of Mad Men the new girl gets a proper going over, everything is commented on from her hair to her shoes. I remember thinking how glad I was that that kind of shit was over years ago, nothing like that could possibly happen to me, not now in 2011 when the most important thing is having the skill, aptitude and qualifications to perform well in a job. As usual it turns out I was wrong.
High heels and straight hair turned out to be weapons
I've almost figured something out. I thought I had it yesterday but it slipped away on one of those inevitable cleaning the house, cooking the food, going to sleep tides. I can't quite remember. It had something to do with outsiders or Harry Potter or irrevocable change.
There is part of me that always thought I was just being wayward, or slipping into the idea that I am an outsider now, a marginalised person, but I could go back in, to where most other people are, if I just stood up and opened the right door but that's finished now. I can't go back to where I never was.
There is part of me that always thought I was just being wayward, or slipping into the idea that I am an outsider now, a marginalised person, but I could go back in, to where most other people are, if I just stood up and opened the right door but that's finished now. I can't go back to where I never was.
SLAMMATOWN: Hire Me, Bitches
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| Illo by Onnie Cleary |
I’m lucky enough to have one or two friends happy to read over some applications before I send them in. Their unanimous opinion is that I need to ‘toot my own horn’ more. The problem is applying for jobs makes me feel altogether hornless.
My professional experience includes the usual list of jobs I did just to pay the rent, a good job I fucked up, a great job I left for heartfelt reasons I can no longer remember and an erratic career path that looks more like crazy paving than the path to success. The other problem is my finer skills are unable to be politely included in any job application. I’m not talking about bedroom skills here, but the vast list of attributes that have so fixedly attached themselves to me they have become an essential part of who I am.
I’m taking this opportunity to devise a list.
Skills and attributes possessed by the very excellent and unique Dale Slamma:
- I am very good at throwing things in the bin, first shot, no rim, all basket, from any corner of the room. This is my very mild superpower.
- Strangers tell me their innermost secrets all the time, everywhere, for no actual reason and I don’t mean just crazy people.
- I can drink five cups of tea in a row and suffer no ill effects.
- My skill at deducing other people’s emotional state borders on the telepathic.
- Last time I counted I had sixteen personal enemies.
- I dislike Easter eggs and will not use opaque toothpaste.
- My inability to appear intelligent when meeting someone for the first time has never before been exceeded by even the stupidest person on planet Earth.
- I can wear starched, ironed and personally styled corporate clothes handpicked for me by the world’s best corporate stylist and still appear to be in casual dress suitable only for wearing to buy milk at the corner shop.
- The fabric of my soul is constructed of rock and roll. No really, get a scalpel and take a peek.
- I can cook with the best of them but choose not to, not if I can ever help it, for no reason I have ever thought of.
- The power of my ability to crave chocolate is exceeded only by the power of my snoring.
- You will disappoint me. Guaranteed.
Radio gaga
I can't remember precisely what I said on the radio (ABC Radio National) but I do remember that it was largely stupid and at least partially embarrassing nonsense. I am hoping they edited me out entirely.
The other people appearing on the program were much better than and deserve a listen. If you would like to listen to the others, including Vanessa Berry, click here.
The other people appearing on the program were much better than and deserve a listen. If you would like to listen to the others, including Vanessa Berry, click here.
SLAMMATOWN - Slamma of Arabia
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| Illustration by Onnie Cleary |
I don’t watch too many movies. For example yesterday I watched a mere ten minutes of Lawrence of Arabia. It was an action packed ten minutes in which thousands of horses jumped out of a train into a desert, a handsome be-robed man wandered around the desert looking commanding while an orange be-robed man with twinkly eyes shot someone who accidently exploded their underpants with something whilst waiting for a train, in the middle of the desert.
In addition to being interesting, Lawrence of Arabia raises an interesting point; the shooting of people who have exploded their underpants. It takes a brave and noble person to shoot the fatally injured person who cannot be taken to safety and rescue but must either be killed instantly by friends or left to die a slow and hideous death. This is the kind of important point movie-watching brings rightly to the forefront of modern café thinking.
Continue reading on RHUM...
FINALLY!
Yes! Someone has described me as fey! Finally! I have fervently wished, for my whole life, to be fey. In recent years I had given up hope at being called fey due to not being a willowy blonde sort of person who rambles around shoeless in floaty dresses with no bra underneath. Thank you Baron Von Harlot for not only reviving an old dream of mine but making it come true.
Nuns!
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| Illustration by Onnie Cleary |
The nuns - and their posse of priests and worshippers - stayed on the corner outside my office for a very long time. They chanted about Mary, God and some other people without pause whilst holding cheap-looking candles. After eliminating the possibility of them being an en masse outdoor karaoke performance, I decided to investigate what it was they were really doing. Through a scientific investigation process involving three listens to the song Ding Dong Dang and a minor hair-on-fire incident, I reached a firm conclusion. The nuns were using the occasion of International Women's Day to protest the existence of a women's clinic. If this is the best idea they had for celebrating women then they suck. Nuns suck.
My friend Leif once told me, in astonishing detail, about a video he saw of nuns sucking - nuns sucking all kinds of things. I was not surprised to discover that he finds the idea of nuns erotic. It just so happens that Leif's housemate is one of the singers from Psychonanny and The Babyshakers, which leads me back to the song and the street corner. This might not be so much about nuns as it is about geography and sound.
Some corners have a smell, like the corner of Pitt and Redfern streets in Redfern, some corners have a revolving temporal relationship with colour, light or shade. The corner outside my office seems to be developing a sense of something else altogether. Let's start with Ding Dong Dang. It was voted Sydney's fourth best karaoke bar by Time Out Sydney. My friend P Street writes for Time Out so it’s not too much of a leap to imagine that it was he who rated the bar, which is important for the following imaginary scenario.
Picture this. P Street is inside Ding Dong Dang singing his heart out to his open notebook, in the very same room Ashley last sang in before disappearing forever. Outside, a large posse of nuns chants over their cheap candles in the direction of the women's clinic while the producers of a car advertisement arrange three models in front of the green and white checkerboard tiles of Ding Dong Dang. Inside the women's clinic the medical staff are hard at work doing medical things and have no idea they’re about to be overrun by nuns. Across the street, I'm working in my office wishing I was at a party at Hibernian House, visible in the near distance over the heads of the nuns. On the opposite corner, the staff of The Australia Council for The Arts are ignoring everything that goes on and taking turns to have bathroom breaks so they can adjust the artful draping of their red plastic bead necklaces. Back in Newtown, Leif farewells his housemate who is off to a soundcheck for a gig at The Excelsior Hotel. The first song on their set list is Ding Dong Dang. Leif finds himself satisfyingly alone, wanders around the flat for a while and then decides that seeing as he is alone, just this once, he might put on the video featuring sucking nuns.
First published on RHUM...
SLAMMATOWN - Hey Roomy
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| Illustration by Onnie Cleary |
I hate sharing my house. I don’t mind sharing with Grizelda, she’s like family, but the idea of a stranger moving into my daily routine is freaking me the fuck out. Sydney’s real estate prices are threatening to rob me of my privacy and dignity. If you saw me first thing in the morning you’d understand about the dignity.
I’m not very good in the mornings. I tend to walk around in a daze, bumping into walls and trying to remember how to switch the kettle on. For the first hour of the day, for no discernible reason at all, I am largely disabled. Grizelda waits until I have half-drunk my first coffee before attempting to talk to me and I appreciate her tact and understanding because I know it is rare.
When I bought a new desk I spent six months researching desks; going into shops and sitting down behind them, imagining how it would feel to sit there every day, what it would look like brought into my home, where everything from my jar of pens and stack of notebooks to my external hard drive would sit. Now that I am showing people aroundThe Peach to see if they want to move in I get to spend about half an hour with a person before deciding whether or not they get to share my life. This is not ideal.
In a world where people did not go insane over property Grizelda and I would be able to afford The Peach all by ourselves, just the two of us. And the cat. Last week I was reading a budgeting guide for the modern man, printed in 1960. It suggested that spending more than ten percent of your income on a mortgage was stupid. If I lived in The Peach by myself, rent would account for one hundred and ten percent of my income. I used a calculator and that’s what it said, don’t doubt my maths. Real estate junkies have now officially inflated prices past the point of stupid. Well done.
Five times I have given someone a tour of The Peach, answering their questions about my temperament and living style politely. On the inside of me head I’m screaming, "It is none of your fucking business, stupid stranger bastard!". I’m losing myself in translation from inside to out. They all say I seem very calm and easygoing but I am not calm. And I am not easygoing. I am going to hate you if you fuck with my shit. And I don’t even know what constitutes fucking with my shit. It could be as simple as using my pink teapot without asking, misaligning my shampoo bottles on their rack or leaving your dirty cup on the coffee table. It might not be anything like that at all. It might be interrupting a sentence forming silently in my head, or talking to my friends, or not talking to my friends... These things are harder than expected to predict.
SLAMMATOWN - Slamtopia
Sydney has divided itself into four big, terracotta-roofed slabs we call North, South, East and West. So far as I can tell, all these suburban areas of Sydney are terrible. Everyone knows the north side is filled wall-to-wall with moneyed arses caring more about which ‘display’ books they range on their coffee table than about any real human issues. The east is something similar to north. I spent a large portion of my younger years rolling around the north-western rim of the Sydney basin - swimming in rivers, staring right up at the mountains no more than five kilometres from my front door and occasionally looking down at they city from the top of one, fervently wishing I could teleport myself there.
South I knew almost nothing about until last weekend, when I was lucky enough to spend three whole days in a beach house with friends. They all grew up south of Sydney in a place known as The Shire. And I have to tell you it sounds almost entirely fucked. There are the usual suburban consolations of wide spaces, easy access to bushland and riding around on your bmx with friends but that sums up the good points.
The Shire, like every other cardinal point spinning out from the city, is fucked. A large proportion of the residents sound narrow-minded, racist and aggressively ‘normal’. So aggressively normal that it is almost impossible to live happily as anything other than a nuclear family with a neutral-toned lounge room without being subjected to a truckload of shit. If the same can be said for all points from North swinging round to West then we have a problem here.
How is it possible that out of the whole huge sprawled guts of Sydney the only place I can live without fear of clashing with locals simply by making art and having ideas is the Inner West? I propose we make a new area, a new suburban area east of Sydney. By east I mean properly east, out past the headlands of the harbour on the bean-green ocean.
We have all kinds of technology now - like ships, bulldozers and helicopters. We could solidify some human waste, build a large floating land mass, map out wide house blocks and gently winding streets, plant trees, vegetables, herbs and flowers. We could build houses that are proper habitats for humans, encourage the birds and bats to fly and visit. We could have picnic lunches at each other's houses and talk rationally and interestingly about our differences and how we each widen the scope of the others’ understanding of the world. Or I suppose I could just get jets and blow some of the existing suburbs up. Raze them to the ground, grow a moustache, throw all racist, bigoted and narrow-minded people out into the desert to die in the sun.
I’d be happy with one or both of the above plans. Either way I’m going to need helicopters. Big ones.
First published on RHUM...
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