mockturle06 | Entries tagged with star trek

This week everyone has been so kind, surprisingly so. Indulgent, even. So I refuse to be a brat and ask why no-one was this supportive ten or twenty years ago when I needed this kindness more, and just accept and wallow in the kindness I have now, and thank my lucky stars I’m surrounded by much nicer and kinder people these days.

So something has gone right for me. I think I made the right choice turning down that job I accidentally got. They even offered me more money, but it wasn’t that much more (like only the price of a decent sandwich, I’m not that hot), and I think, right now, sticking where I can, for as long as I can, surrounded by people being as good as they can be (we all have off days), is the right choice for me.

So, as you might expect, it’s all been comfort food (and I can’t tell you how disturbing the diet has been, but yum) and comfort telly.

Doctor Who has been my go-to for troubling times since I was three or four years old. For some long-forgotten and astonishingly disturbing reason I decided at a very young age that this fictional mad bastard in a box was a comforting, reassuring and protective presence. Even weirder, I still find the Doctor a comforting presence, and I don’t know whether it’s just familiarity or habit, or the result of too many nights as a tiny child scared of the dark praying that the Doctor would save me. Whatever, entirely silly and unsound, but there it is, the Doctor is my touchstone, my safe place, and, dammit, it works.

I mean it. I’ve had some long dark nights, and every time, if I can find the Doctor on telly (or somewhere), he makes the shadows go away, just for a bit. That’s real magic, that is. I know it’s not real, but I’ll take the placebo, thanks. Watching Doctor Who makes me feel better, for a bit, and that’s enough.

Maybe that’s why the Doctor is so special, because so many of us remember being a child, and afraid of the dark, and those tiny whispers, hoping to be brave in the face of monsters.

And man, there have been some monsters this week. The kind that can’t be banished but just have to be lived with. Any respite is welcome.

Cute enough, one episode was the Robin Hood one, so I had two heroes for the price of one. Double my champions.

And of course Foxtel screened Star Trek again, and who was I to say no. I wasn’t going to, but I did, and my innocent wee babies (as they were when they made that) made me happy, for a bit.

I didn’t think Chris Pine could be a comforting presence any more, but he was. Not that I don’t love that peculiar boy and his own particular brand of peculiarity. Oh no, don’t take the lack of posts as a sign of that, it’s just that the posts that used to drop into my feed like rain have all dried up, so there’s nowt to share.

Perhaps he’s been a little too peculiar for some. I’m all art for art’s sake, but perhaps a modicum of sense or sensibility is required when one’s pay cheque is determined by the number of likes. I mean, go nuts, young man, but we don’t want to end up like Shia LeBeouf now, do we? Don’t be Shia LeBeouf.

If he’s kicking against the roles he’s being offered lately, then either don’t take ‘em or make your own, be your own art project if you must, have fun, but don’t go too far. I mean, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt (that’s my only worry, and, you know, I worry).

That said, I have a sticky soft spot for that crazy boy and his shenanigans. I mean, you can go too far the other way, and lose out because you’re too slick and smug and manufactured, ain’t that right, Tom Hiddleston? So don’t be Tom Hiddleston, either.

Nobody wants to be Tom Hiddleston (and damn, because that beautiful boy I saw in Othello was so damn sweet and full of promise).

So go your own way, my dear, it’s amusing to watch from a distance, just don’t get lost, okay?

Whatever, what would I know, stuck in a crumbling life, with crumbling dreams. But hey, like my tag line says, if you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning.

And I just don’t know why I like the Pine so much, but with my penchant for the Doctor, and Sherlock and the like, maybe I just like the floridly eccentric. Maybe, oh nos, I like people like me. The freaks, geeks and losers.

Because, and I’m being honest here, nothing scares me more than normal, boring people. People like my local rellies (not my nutty northern ones). People who only talk about painting their back deck. People who won’t eat things for a dare. Who won’t be with people who don’t share their rigid beliefs or hold to their strict codes of behaviour. Those people terrify me. And, I think one can say this these days, they’re everything that’s wrong with the world.

Nah, give me the weirdos any day. Even if they break my heart. Because what’s life without cuts and bruises along the way? You can’t make wine without smashing grapes (I know it’s supposed to be eggs/omelettes, but I could really use a drink right now). It’s been that sort of a week.

Meanwhile, I’m going to have to take up walking every lunchtime from next week if I keep up with the comfort food (oy) but I figure (what figure?) now is not the week to let my sugar levels drop. Maybe I could take my camera. I haven’t done that in ages (usually it’s wall-to-wall midday meetings).

I wonder if the war memorial is open – it’s been closed since 2015 and the reflection pool dug up. I know, WTF, right? I wanted to see Rayner Hoff’s Sacrifice again, because it was referenced, and it made me want to see it again. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking, highly charged sculpture, and I’m not just talking all the cultural, social and historical meanings piled upon it. If you see it, you’ll know what I’m talking about, maybe. Doomed youth, is there anything more romantic or tragic?

You’d think I wouldn’t talk that way after this week, horrid week, but nothing stops me being overly gothic in my fancies. If anything, it makes them worse. Shameful, but there it is. I am what I am.

I did say freak/geek/loser, right? With an unhealthy obsession with Chris Pine. And an innumerable number of Tardises (WTF is the plural) hiding in her bedroom (including a tiny one pictured on a teapot).

News of the world: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113197665355692280218/posts

This morning I tripped and fell in the utter blackness right into the lavender bush. I always looked like I’ve been dragged through brambles backwards, but at least today I smell nice.

Sunday was spent, on the one day this month it didn’t rain for an 8 hour period, desperately processing loads and loads and loads of washing. I couldn’t get the bloodstains out of my Spandau Ballet t-shirt, which is sad, because I both own a Spandau Ballet t-shirt (but they’re great live) and I bled all over it, and stained it forever (well, I could probably try soaking it in a bucket but there wasn’t time). I bled because the other week I was having such a bad period and I was in so much pain I gave myself second-degree burns with my dangerous hot water bottle and never even noticed it on top of everything else, so my whole back has been a bloody pus-filled mess ever since. Yay. I’ve just about run out of black shirts to wear to work (not goth, just bleeding, which I suppose is pretty goth).

Anyways, when not washing I was watching the Chris Pine double feature on Foxtel. Because. It was Star Trek anyway, which is my happy place. I don’t know why because that film has plot holes that could suck down an entire galaxy, never mind a planet, but there it is. But it makes me happy watching the wee space twink (as he was), so I don’t care what you think.

The other was the regrettable This Means War starring noted children’s television entertainer, Tom Hardy. Well, he dropped another bedtime story this weekend, didn’t he, and some pics of him filming Peaky Blinders, and looking just stunning with his pal Cillian, and bless Peaky Blinders for their complete lack of pointless retooling, at least from the photos I saw.

I could have watched it all on DVD, but I’m too lazy, and it was there, like an excuse to view, right then, bugger doing anything more worthy or important.

Ah, don’t mock my DVDs. We have no decent broadband, so I have my DVDs. Our local streaming companies are very limited library-wise, so I have my DVDs. When they remove films I like, I have my DVDs. When they delete files from my library, even though I paid for them, I have my DVDs. Don’t mock the DVD.

Besides. I remain amused by my stack-o-Pine, that is rather like the pile of Fassbender I used to have circa 2005 when he was doing all those TV series I loved him in that he pretends he was never in these days. The spines of my DVDs show a rake’s progress of young Pine.

I worry about him these days. In the last six months I’ve seen like 27 different personalities, all with their own haircut and wardrobe, like that McAvoy film, and only one of which I’ve been able to link to a film role. I do hope the rest are related to our boy being suddenly all method and indulging in some performance, rehearsal, performance art project or whatever I don’t know about, because otherwise I worry.

The only other people I’ve ever known to try out a different personality every other week are all dead now. So I worry. And I hope it’s just performance. And because I can’t sit the boy down with a cup of tea and a Tim Tam and ask him if he’s ok, I hope his friends will. Because, seriously, none of the other actors I like are like this, even the terribly arty British ones. I mean, sure, they change for roles and the odd OTT fashion mag shoot (like Ewan shaving his hair for Fargo), but they snap back to their normal selves in-between times. I haven’t seen Pine look like himself since, well, since before Anton died (see the first Beyond press appearances, compared to everything that has come after). And that worries me.

So I hope it’s all performance, because otherwise, you won’t hear the crash, it’ll just be silence.

But hey, I’m just reading it totally wrong and being way, way oversensitive, because, you know, I lost a lot of people I loved, back in the day (because I was young, ignorant and careless). But I worry. Because it’s a different personality every other week. I do hope there’s a crap art performance reason for it. Somebody tell me he’s fine, he’s happy and it’s all just his art. I’m sure it is (and I’m just the one being melodramatic). It’ll all make perfect sense in the end. I’m sure of it. I hope for it.

Maybe I’m just tired. Last week broke me. The house is falling apart around my ears and a month of rain has not helped – huge puddles everywhere inside, running down the walls, dripping from the curling ceiling. Would that I’d been paid my 300+ hours of unpaid overtime, but it went unpaid, so no money for fixes. I have to fix the front door now because it got stuck and instead of leaving it like a normal person and exiting through the other door, Himself put his foot through it in a temper, so now I have to pay for a new door, too, somehow.

Good thing I’d already given up on seeing Jude Law on stage in London (I had a ticket). Besides, my Aunt’s just had a serious stroke so I wouldn’t be welcome as an added distraction anyway (I sent two care packages, and, oh man, they don’t make it easy for you to post stuff these days, that also broke me).

Oh, and work, aside from the joy of doing nine versions of an interactive accessible form and the client decided to stick with their 90s PDF instead, and that’s just one job that went nowhere last week, I have to reapply for my job and my boss hates me so we know in this round of musical chairs once again they’ll keep the pretty thin girls who do nothing all day and get rid of the tubby bad diet, bad sleeping 300+ hours of unpaid OT grumpy old cow, and does anyone ever think I might be grumpy because of the 300+ of unpaid OT and the impact it has on my sleep and mealtimes, working 6am to 11pm, with no breaks or meals, just to make ridiculous and arbitrary deadlines that the pretty girls won’t do and don’t have to, because they’re pretty? So there’s that.

Which is a pity because I really believe in the work that we’re trying to do. I really believe in trying to make information accessible (which is why the client clinging to their 90s PDF is so maddening). I mean, I watched The Green Death when I was a wee thing, and now I’m working in an environmental portfolio. But you know, with the politics these days, it’s not a good place to be. So there’s that, too.

The only bright spot in this bleakest of months (rain, nonstop), has been, of all things, a Disney Prince, in the form of Dan Stevens. If I wasn’t enjoying Legion so much (I adore the Prisoner/Avengers/Jason King/UFO aesthetic), it’d just be Beauty and the Beast, which was fine. I’d not seen the cartoon, but any opportunity to see my Brit boys get their screaming panto on.

And when I saw it at the State, that frou-frou of a palace, at the non-premier, with the bubbly and the dancers dressed as candelabra and being given a rose and a goody bag, and having the crowd so into it they all whooped and cheered and sang along and it was really great, seeing that way. I really loved them for roaring with approval when Le Fou got his man at the end. That was nice (and why all the controversy, has Beauty and the Beast ever not had a queer reading?). And Dan was still Dan under the CGI, and Ewan gave me my money’s worth, so it wasn’t a waste of time. And it made me forget my troubles while the screen flickered, and that’s all I can ask of these magical creatures we call actors.

I did manage to get through Saturday, which involved another Aunt (it’s all a bit Wooster, as if things weren’t topsy turvy enough) and her big birthday party with the rellos I never ever see (because they think I’m gay) and it was in a religious retirement home and they’re all hard-core god-botherers and they drink Coopers beer without shame (both are pro-religion, anti-equality) and yet they were all off to see Beauty and the Beast (written by gays, performed by gays).

Sucking up that amount of hypocrisy does bad things to my liver, I can tell you. Or maybe it was the prawns. Or the cheese. Whatever, it was more of something to be endured than enjoyed. There was a mighty fine bottle of Di Bortoli Yarra valley merlot that I demolished, so I’m pretty sure I’m free from invites for the next decade. Mission accomplished.

Haven’t been to the theatre much, but I saw a rather disappointing screening of the RSC’s The Tempest. I was so looking forward to my favourite Simon Russell Beale as Prospero, but he seemed to just phone it in that day. Maybe it was the cameras, or the real-time digital effects, or it was a wet weekend and I wasn’t feeling fab. Either way, shrug.

Much better, and far more effecting, was the screening of the Donmar’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, with a revelatory Gemma Arterton in the lead (I never knew she could do that).

I care nothing for religion, and this play had a fair bit to say on the matter, as you might imagine, but the gender issues, the whole woman versus the established patriarchy, the power games between the rich, the entitled, the powerful and those who set themselves up as gate-keepers (and how these things are often opposing forces rather than interchangeable titles), well, that was all entirely relevant and current and electric (and they didn’t even need the conceit of the fake Newsnight broadcasts to hammer than one home).

Had I seen it last year, before all the shit hit the fan, it would have merely been good. Now, with all that is going on in the world – and how fucking depressing that a play about medieval persecution is so now – it was one wild ride. I hope you saw it. Weeks later, I’m still thinking about, often. It got under my skin, because it was so on point, and so visceral. That’s proper theatre: timely, thought-provoking, commenting on the real world and gut-wrenching. Even just watching the screening, the punches landed.

The only other thing that have given me joy recently is Preacher. It is taking me forever and a day to get through this (limited bandwidth plus a month of wet weekends, and every man and his dog hogging my .0004kps connection, does not make for streaming fun).

My main lark is that, however many liberties they may take with the source material, for better or worse (and I really dug the comic in my misspent yoof), Cassidy is still Cassidy. I always knew Cassidy was the sort of character who wouldn’t stand for any actor trying to bring his interpretation to the screen. No, Cassidy is having none of that shite. He is what he is and that’s an end to it

From the photos Dominic posts from set, Joe Gilgun seems to be either the most method actor ever (take note, Pine) or they simply managed to employ an actor who is Cassidy, 24/7. It amuses me greatly. Because I have long adored Cassidy. He’s scruffy, a vampire and, well, Irish, and I always think it’s the being Irish that gets him in trouble far more than being a vampire, which amuses me further still.

So I’m loving that, what I’ve seen of it (though it gave me a moment of difficulty to press pause mid flailing entrails and answer a call from a prospective employer, because I was watching it on my phone at the time, because at least I can use 3G to fill in the wifi lags, at great expense).

Hey, the mashed spud brain still knows all the lyrics to The Models I Hear Motion. They were playing it in Coles while I shopped in the wee hours.

I’m impressed, because there’s precious little I remember these days. A few flashes of Yeti and Cybermen from Doctor Who. Admiring my stack of Fassbender DVDs like Smaug and his pile of gold. Posting on a Life on Mars board once. Watching a dumb film while flying across the orange part of Oz. Don’t remember a second of the holiday I was coming back from, but I remember that. What film? Please don’t ask. Who was in it? Who do you think?

So, buried somewhere my Models discography is still intact. Yay?

Mind you, last week Coles were playing Bucks Fizz. I figured if I throttled any deserving arseholes that day I could cite mitigating circumstances, having been unduly provoked. Because Bucks Fizz.

And finally, the word of today is: amplexus (when two frogs like each other very much…)

News from the front: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113197665355692280218

I realise I’ve not yet reviewed any of young Christopher’s fillums here.

Am I ashamed and embarrassed, a little, yes. Somewhat.

A lifetime’s worth of anglophilia means I usually prefer my actors with solid and lustrous theatre credentials that include Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Stoppard, Pinter, Williams, Beckett and the like, and even my favourite Oz actors can manage that (saw Toby Schmitz from Black Sails doing both Stoppard and Shakespeare, David Wenham from Iron Fist doing Ibsen, Hugo Weaving doing Beckett, and even Damon Herriman from Justified doing Mamet).

So yes, I am, I must now admit it, a dreadful snob.

Compound that with his early roles as Disney princess/non-threatening boyfriend, and, well, did I mention that I’m a dreadful snob? Not that I haven’t seen Princess Diaries 2, but I was on a plane, for days, and it had Julie Andrews in it.

But the boy isn’t just a pretty face, and he seems to have a solid work ethic – certainly I’ve yet to see him phone in a performance of rely on a bag of shticky tricks (hello Benedict), and I usually like his choices. Sometimes they can seem a bit mechanical and precise, like count three beats, turn and smile, but maybe that’s because I’ve seen them so often (thank you Foxtel and the Pine Nut in programing). And he’s diverse enough to pop up all over the genre cable movie channels, so that’s something (I’m not keen on niche actors, I like my boys versatile).

Countless regrettable YouTube videos demonstrate the lad is not afraid of making a complete and utter tit of himself on camera, which shows a bracing lack of preciousness for a Hollywood boy, and I’m not just talking about the interviews, either, which seem to fall into Chris Pine is so bored he’s losing the will to live, Chris Pine is a lunatic and needs to rest now or Chris Pine is quite possibly very drunk/hungover (I blame PR for those, never schedule promo interviews the morning after the night before).

So, Z for Zachariah, which I tend to think of as the radiation film so soundly mocked in Mamet’s Speed the Plow. Well, it is, rather. Rather a lot. It’s a quiet film, lovely to look at (and I’m talking the NZ scenery here, not Mr Pine, though this is pretty much peak Pine, right here), suitably bleak and mumbly, existential without ever delving deep, and pivoting upon, not so much the end of the world, as more of a jealous Othello vibe (and I saw Chiwetel as Othello at the Donmar, years ago). Apparently, there will be no threesomes at the end of everything (don’t tell my school chums that, see previous post).

It was kind of Beckett-y, and I think I was supposed to be getting some Eden references , but I’m a bloody heathen, so nope. And it was a bit kitchen-sinky for a post-apocalypse film - surprisingly lacking in zombies and car chases. Like I said, Beckett-y.

CP is darn pretty, and that’s actually a plot point, as it makes him an immediate threat to the not-at-all cosy domestic arrangements he’d stumbled into. He’s a bit shady, and may have done some pretty dark deeds to survive, or maybe not, he’s certainly not as overtly violent as CE, and there’s a real sweetness to his ever so brief and budding relationship with Margot’s character. They actually talk, unlike CE, who, like all scientists (trust me, I work with enough of them) who just bosses and bullies.

And the not very ambiguous last scene of his, when Caleb knows he’s in danger, shall we say, it’s a heartbreaker, every time. The look on his little face. Poor possum.

So that’s that. The radiation film, where three’s a crowd.

The Finest Hours is a Disney flick, so you’ll never hear anything stronger than ‘damn’, which is hilarious, with all the merchant navy men and coast guard crew all thinking they’re going to die. But no swearing. Keeping it tidy in the face of almost certain death, now that really is the finest hour (cue Sandra Dee here, as it’s set in the 50s anyhow).

Oh, but CP is so adorably dorky in this. I was in love with Bernie before he even got out of the car. There’s such a lot of bashful stammering, a real Jimmy Stewart-like performance. And that’s not a bad thing.

The flick also features firm favourites Holliday Grainger, Aussies Eric Bana and Keiynan Lonsdale, Ben Foster, and Graham McTavish, so that’s kinda neat.

So it’s your basic Thunderbirds plot, sinking tanker in the middle of a massive storm, and our heroes have to get out on the world’s tiniest boat, through some rough CGI seas that remind me of catching the Manly ferry through the heads in inclement weather, and try and rescue three times the number of people that will actually fir on their tiny little boat (I spot a flaw in their plan here, but I guess that’s where the heroics come in). They actually cite the maximum number of passengers at this point, to my great amusement, but sweet little rule abiding Bernie, having just about drowned in CGI seas, is 100% done with rules and regulations and backchat and snipping and sniping and all those sharp comments about the last attempted rescue that failed, and, after the hissy fit that has clearly been a very long time coming, he disobeys a direct order and steers his tiny, overloaded little boat back to shore, which, for dramatic purposes, has been blacked out by the storm.

It’s a pity the storm effects are a bit wooby (the script was writing cheques the digital department couldn’t cash) as I’ve seen some storms like that out here, you know, the one last year that started to sail someone’s pool off to New Zealand, or the one maybe ten years back where the tanker, an actual tanker, ended up on a Newcastle beach. So I don’t doubt the storm, just the Turner-esque soft-focus CGI rendering of it. I mean it’s cute that the art department were clearly referencing Turner’s Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, but maybe a little more realism wouldn’t have gone astray in providing some real peril.

That said, I do like this film, I like that it’s based on a real story (don’t know why, just do, usually I like my fiction fictional) and I like CP in this, and his ‘be one with the waves’ moments. He’s sweet, and f-knows, I could do with some sweet in my life.

He's sweet in Hell or High Water, too, even though he's running around robbing banks. Did you know you can only rob banks during business hours - out of business hours it's just plain burglary? Of all the trivia I've picked up from QI, that has to be the most useless, but hey, I'm using it now.

So you know the drill by now, also starring Ben Foster and a scene-stealing Jeff Bridges. It's by the same dude who did Young Adam (yes, which I saw because of Ewan) and I liked it enough I guess to recognise the guy's work without having to resort to IMDB.

And it's a perfect western. Absolutely perfect. Now you know I've a bit of a thing for westerns, they're just a genre I grew up with, and I love a neo-western (hello Justified, Supernatural, and hell, even Game of Thrones and Peaky Blinders count these days). And let me tell you, this was perfection. Not a shot, not a moment, not a note out of place (I have the soundtrack on vinyl).

And Chris, it's too damn bad nobody decided to give Chris a nod because it's a great piece of low-down tightly wound thousand yard stare acting. I guess it just wasn't showy enough but Chris has never been a showboating actor, he's always whatever the role needs, no less and no more. Like I said, precise in his choices. He just lives Toby Howard the entire time he's on screen and he doesn't have to scream and howl his pain, it's there in every downcast look, every flinch, every silence.

Toby is the heart and soul of the film, he's the one who sets it in motion, and he's pretty much the one who ends it, too, with that magnificent showdown, or rather stare down, and ooh, just the way he leans there with the rifle resting against his thigh, I could watch that all day, no lie.

He's a broken man, but there's steel there, too, and he just doesn't give up. He might not show his scars so easily, but you can tell he's had it just as hard as his brother. It it shows, just in the way he stands, all hunched shoulders and tight. It's a really finely calibrated performance. Another lost boy (see also T2, previous post).

The film is great too, the story I mean, all the comments on how the west was won, and lost, land rights, poverty, the insane lack of law and order (the bank customers being more heavily armed than the bandits) and the dark humour. It was very much of the same cloth as Justified, and I have no problem with that. Not one little bit.

And Chris, if ever there was a man who could rock a saggy porn 'tache and look like he hadn't bathed in a week and still make me want to jump his bones in the worst way, well, I never thought it'd be Chris, but there you are. Who knew my clean-cut honey could be all gritty and sweaty and oh, yeah.

And it's a damn shame he didn't get more kudos and encouragement for doing this. And I'm sorry I don't give the boy the respect he deserves, especially when some of my lauded Brit boys have become caricatures of themselves (hello, Benedict), or making regrettable life choices (hello, Tom). Lately Benedict seems to have gone the full Widow Twankey pantomime, twirling about in his roles, the subtle shades of performances like the one in Stuart a long distant memory, not to mention both he and Eddie playing wizards decades before I ever expected it of them. Oh dear.

So, yeah, giving Chris some love, and there are worse things than being a Disney princess (or crushing on one). And I haven't even mentioned the space movies yet, but taking such a beyond well known role and making it his own, well, that's stylish, that is.

So there are a few Chris Pine films that aren't too shabby. (Notice I didn't mention Bottle Shock. I hope someone burnt that hideous fright wig but I suspect one didn't have to get too close to an open flame for that to happen). He does a half decent spy, too. I'd love to see him as Felix, James Bond's BFF, but I guess I never will (but stranger things can happen, never expected to see Hiddleston, after Shakespeare and Chekhov, in a giant monkey movie).

And I'm looking forward to seeing him in Wonder Woman (with Spud!), even though I suspect dearest Steve is going to get fridged so bad. And I'm also curious to see how he manages the quatum leaping deadbeat dad in a Wrinkle in Time, too. That was one of my books as a kid, as was Wonder Woman, so, you know, it's important. (Between those roles and Star Trek he's pretty much hit all my childhood fancies, so it was kind of inevitable that Chris Pine would cross my line of sight, sooner or later).

Sorry, but I don't have much else going on right now, which is probably a good thing...

Current Mood: impressed

The other day there was a lot about Kurt Cobain’s non-birthday. It was more about me feeling old and tired, than any distress amongst his surviving nearest and dearest.

And at least the man had the dark good fortune to leave his legacy intact. Age shall not weary him, enfeeble him or cause him to make embarrassing tweets or indulge in humiliating comebacks, reality shows, reunion tours or misguided acoustic solo albums of spoken-word poetry. None of that. Just the pure vision of a doomed Romance-age poet. Beautiful.

Yes, I’m being dreadful, but which has more value? Unblemished art or, say, the sad, staggering degeneration of a David Cassidy? (Who was never in same league, but for comparison). I mean, which would you rather, blowing your own face off or appearing in I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. There are indeed, it seems, many fates far worse than death.

And if you think I don’t know real pain, hey, my Dad killed himself and the worst and most difficult project I’m working on right now is pretty much the digital equivalent of what happened to all his actual papers: burying them in landfill. So no comments about taking dead dads lightly. No, it’s my own pain that makes me such a bitch about it.

So yeah, getting old sucks, and at least when you’re dead you don’t know what happens to the shit you leave behind.

Oh yes, cheery mood. I thought going to the school reunion would throw some light on the skittering cockroaches of my mind, but instead it’s sent me spiralling down the rabbit hole of existential bleakness.

But first, Trainspotting 2. Oh yeah, it’s all about getting old and still being as much a loser as you ever were. If there’s a theme this year, it’s constantly being reminded that all my dreams will never happen now. Like that Marianne Faithfull song, I know now that I’ll never ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair, etc., etc.

Which is pretty much T2 in a nutshell. One could blame poverty and society (or lack thereof), being perpetual outsiders, but, pretty much, they’re a bunch of nothing losers making the same mistakes they always make and everything changes and nothing changes and nobody ever wins. Or something like that.

But damn, it was funny, and stylish, if gritty Scottish squalor could ever be called stylish (and funny how they’re knocking all those slum towers down when they’re just starting to throw them up where I live, developers, eh?). And if Ewan was worried he couldn’t ‘be’ Renton again, let me reassure him, he was Renton again, completely and utterly. It was brilliant.

And as for Robert Carlyle as Begbie – hee (I was hoping to have some distance between watching the delirious return of that mad bastard Begbie and Once Upon A Time, but no, EvilChannelSeven decided to whack on several episodes I hadn’t seen all at once on Sunday and I only caught them because I was hungover and looking for no more energetic activity that lying glassy-eyed in front of the goggle box).

So I liked that, I really did. And I saw it for free, because I won tickets, so that was a small spark of light in my otherwise bleak and run-down existence.

So I thought it was cute to watch a film about old friends who were really anything but, sadly trying to re-run/reboot/relive their youth and failing most terribly, and then go off to the school reunion. Uh huh. I just sat in the corner while everyone caught up on their many husbands (quite the partner exchange going on there, I should write a HBO show) and kids and dogs. But hey, at least a lot of them have quite interesting careers, which is something considering we were never expected to amount to much (working class government school, see comments re grit and squalor, above). But hey, to those princesses I have to work with, if you think I’m too loud and a bit rough around the edges, meet my classmates. I’m the quiet one, dammit.

At the time I didn’t think it was too bad, and one dear chum I’d known since kindy introduced me to expresso martinis - and I still don’t know whether to thank her or smack her because I think I’m still suffering the hangover. Oy.

It was just afterwards, I was all rippled like a pool into which many stones had been chucked, and one of the former bullies I’d hoped to face and put behind me pursued me on Facebook all Sunday until I deleted the app. Again.

She was all ‘you didn’t talk to me, didn’t you remember me?’

What I thought was, to paraphrase Willow from BTVS, she made my life a living hell for four years and I hated her with a fiery passion. What I actually mumbled in reply was the usual lie about old age shredding my memory (less of a lie these days but it’s more serious head injury than age).

Come Monday and I’m being picked on from all quarters, and I’ve just about had enough. Stayed home on Tuesday to deal with a whole pile of issues that had been dumped on me, but it was mainly so I could curl up and cry. I didn’t, but I wanted to.

At least there was Chris Pine on the telly this week. My drug of choice (and less painful than an expresso martini, though it did, at the time, make watching Star Trek, yes, again, almost as transportive as watching it high on hospital grade anaesthetic, which sums up my 2016, pretty much). The dear boy. Chris, if you’re ever looking for a reason to get up and go to work on a wet Wednesday, keeping me out of the knife drawer should do in a pinch. My little slice of California sunshine.

Though last night I wallowed in Penny Dreadful repeats, because sad and gothic and doomed and oh, I’m probably going to start reading those thick Victorian novels again. And bad me, watching that second to last scene at the graveside all wrong. No, I must not, never mind that Timothy Dalton was being his most Bryonic since playing Heathcliffe or Rochester, both of which I saw as a schoolgirl in pigtails, so you can’t imagine how much it moved me, or set the standard. And Josh Harnett, whom I loathed as the most typical of cheesy Yank actors, was giving it his very best Bryonic, too, and almost nailing it, and so, love.

Then of course Rory walked in and stole the show, but that’s what he does (and why I always think the ‘film’ he was in was way better than Spectre, because the B Team/Scooby Gang looked like they were in a way more interesting film that was happening off-screen, let’s be honest here).

But no, must not, no new fandoms, must not dump current fic the way I dumped my MUNCLE one like a red hot stone (but it was basically such an, er, um, homage, and why, I’ll never know, to This Means War that the subsequent Chris Pine flail that caught me entirely off guard really should have been no surprise at all as it seems my subconscious was leaning that way long before my eyeballs caught up, and it was more the, er, um, optional ending on the DVD anyway, plot-what-plot-wise. Ahem, and I’d love to ask Chris if he was playing it that way through the rest of the flick, because, well, gosh).

Pity, because I did have fun scribbling most of the first MUNCLE one, which also owed a lot to The Champions and The Thunderbirds, damn my magpie brain. The second wallowed in Le Carre inspired ennui until I happily gave it up for a new/old toy.

Besides, I like my current fic, even if there are more daddy issues than Hamlet and Oedipus combined. Poor wee abandoned pup (read a great article on daddy issues in Hollywood).

There’s an awful lot of T2 riffs there, too, which my subconscious did pick up on a good 48 hours before the rest of me did, before I’d even seen the damn film (sometimes I think subby should drive the car, it seems to know the truth way before I do, but then it has, as they said in that episode of Doctor Who, all it needs to see clearly, it is both clever and unloved).

Mind you, I have thrown in a lot of Frankenstein, Dracula and Heart of Darkness riffs, that I can see myself stumbling towards Penny Dreadful, even now (my always abandoned fics are always like this, morphing into the next obsession before I’ve even got there).

Which isn’t to say I abandon the fics because I lose interest. No. Yesterday I wanted desperately to write, but was at the beck and call of others from 4am to 11pm, so no, no writing. Sunday, I did try, but ended up with, no, not the dull ache of a hangover, that I can cope with, just, but the red hot needles of my old concussion headache, and I’ll never know why an hour or so of scribbling in a notebook sends me wild with pain, but it does. It’s not helping or making me happy, I can tell you that.

I have over 300 pages of plotiness sloshing about in my battered old noggin, and I’ll never get it all down, especially the dialogue which goes from 40s film snappy in my head, which is ideal, to 90s tv soupy, which is bad, when I finally, finally get a chance to touch pen to paper, which is very, very rare. (What I need is a non-judgemental secretary who will work all hours for free – yeah, right).

So I get upset and frustrated, especially as my muse is really funny, and he needs to keep that snap that he has in my head while I’m travelling home, all bitter and twisted, on the bus (no, I can’t write on the bus, I’m usually strap-hanging and the roads so bad and the drivers so crazy if I do have a seat I’m hanging on with white knuckles because I usually don’t get a seat until near the end of the line, and it’s a race to go off shift for Mr Bus Driver, passengers, traffic and the laws of physics be damned).

So the one last hobby I’ve tried to keep, all others sacrificed to the great god of duty and doing endless shit for other people, all the time, is barely registering a pulse these days.

My next book to read will probably be re-reading the Princess Bride (though it’s been so long it’ll be as new), if I ever finish the dreary Hornblower, if for no other reason than certain characters in my never-to-be-finished fic riffing on ‘as you wish’, which is cute. Derivative, but cute. No, I can’t change it, they do what they like and I’m not allowed to interfere at all or they’ll slam the door on me and I’ll be banned from my own little imaginary world. Yes, even the imaginary characters in my head make me their bitch, such is my miserable existence.

But enough about that. Watching tv while lonely and sad (and sometimes tipsy) always leads down to the path of ruination, wasted lives and truly awful fic.

One outlier to this saga of death and decay was also seeing Hidden Figures. It’s being sold as a chick flick here, which is odd, as it’s all about maths and spaceships, usually such a male prerogative, but I suppose that’s the point. A chick flick about maths, whoda thunk it. Why, they even had a few conversations that didn’t revolve around men – gasp.

So it wasn’t quite as mawkish as I’d feared for an American can-do film, and it was such an Obama-era film that I wanted to cry, but it was pretty damn formulaic in structure, but for a film about maths chicks, I’ll take it. And it would have been a touch more suspenseful if I’d not been familiar with the mission, but I’ll allow that too (it was a bit like watching Macbeth and thinking maybe this time it won’t play out the same way). So it was pretty much by the numbers (heh) but performed with such verve, I couldn’t help but like it.

The one thing that really struck home was the long dashes to the loo. I once worked in a Victorian building that had fancy loos for the chaps, but the ladies had to use a near heritage-aged demountable set up in the loading dock/courtyard, because women neither worked nor peed when that building went up. So I’m used to lengthy dunny runs in all weathers. And this was in 2007.

So that rang true. Alas, no forward thinking Costner-like manager came around and co-opted one of the gentlemen’s lavatories for us girl-types, so it was always coming back soaked if one had dashed off sans brolly. The life of a working girl in a man’s world, eh? (Don’t even talk to me about potty parity).

And I do feel for their challenges. I’ve been called a monkey with a university degree, to my face, just for being poor and the undeserving recipient of an over-generous state education.

I do wish I didn’t look like my maternal grandmothers (especially now), and much more like my Viking paternal ancestors, so I could properly look the part when I’ve a mind to rip someone’s head off, because they’re well past deserving it. All my cousins are proper little Vikings, all blond and ginger terrors.

I do wish I didn’t look like I do. I wish my Dad had bought the house in Bondi, so no one would ever sneer at my postcode origins. I wish I was normal and could talk to people.

I don’t particularly wish I had my school chums lives. It seems all about partner-swapping, sex, pay checks and vet bills. I know I live too much in my own head for that (mainly because I was trained to do so from a lifetime of bullying).

And I know, despite being cut of plain cloth, I set my standards way too high (yet quite rightly decided I’d rather die a spinster than live with a gamer, but you all know what they’re like now, right?) and I know I want the moon and the stars, and a dream man not afraid of red velvet dinner jackets – heh.

Ah well, and I really should tell Katy Manning this, Green Death was, and remains, a favourite story of mine from childhood, and, in a way, I am still fighting that fight for the environment. It’s pretty much the only reason I stay put with the long hours and lousy pay. The good fight. There is a purpose (even if the politics and pettiness are maddening).

I just wish I had time for a wee bit of fic. But come 11 pm and I’m too knackered. And yes, watching telly on Sunday arvo was a waste of time, but that was only after the headache from hell and being hounded by an old nightmare on social media. Maybe I should stop fussing about the right time, and write at the wrong time. Maybe I should get a better cheap PC and try out some speech recognition software. I could mutter to myself like Auntie Rotter, wouldn’t that be…just too weird.

So that’s my so-called life at the moment: no riding through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in my hair. These days I’m lucky if I can just manage to catch a ramshackle old bus.

Stuff I found on the interwebs: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113197665355692280218

Current Mood: discontent

Briefly, what I did do: hugged a giant glittery clitoris. What I didn’t do: anything constructive.

Ok, so, last Saturday. Didn’t see Nick Cave (I’ve been leaving ticket buying to the very last minute and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, I just never know if I’m going to wake up bedridden or not).

I did see Amanda Palmer (and Neil Gaiman).

But first, the wimmins march. What was it good for? For learning, in an empirical way, that I’m not the only person in this anonymous city who is concerned about recent events. What I hoped to achieve? Nothing except a good showing to demonstrate that we, the people, hold a strong and different opinion to the wizened old men in power.

Also, it was fun, if hot, and marchers have always, always been on the right side of history (look at the Chartist movement) – unless you’re that 1% we’re protesting about. And, you know, I’ve got a tradition to hold up. From Swing Rioters to mutineers to revolutionaries to ratbags, I come from a long line of front-line socially conscious folk. So, you know, these were my people. In pink hats. Deal with it.

After the march, as I was a touch unwell, I found my favourite old oak (?) tree in the gardens and collapsed under its spreading branches and read a Hornblower novel (I’d popped into Kinokuniya on the way and picked up some Hornblowers and Aubrey/Maturins, thus reaching a new level in naval gazing, ahem). I’d intended to write, but alas, was a touch too touched by the sun for that (and my alone time had been whittled down by a third).

Actually, it’s frankly annoying that I have had a lot of spare time, like yesterday, and I want to spend it scribbling, because I need to spend it scribbling, but I can’t, because after an hour or so the headaches are so bad my head feels like one of those magic cabinets with all the swords sticking out of it.

It drives me to tears and my muse is on fire and I can’t keep up and when I do find an hour I have to myself and I’m not cross-eyed in pain, I can’t remember all those wonderful scenes that played out in my head. Could have been my best ever, but will never be finished because I just can’t manage it.

Which is a damn shame because my grumpy, forever calling a spade a fucking shovel, muse is so funny, and he breaks my heart.

Anyway, Amanda Fucking Palmer. Live at the Opera House, with the usual staged managed chaos that can make such a huge space feel so intimate. The seats weren’t great but weren’t bad (we were practically on top of the piano, but that meant we spent half the time just looking at Amanda’s magnificent shoulders.

It was funny, it was sad, there was a lot about the march, Brendan was wonderful (and funny and sad), Neil came on and read a Leonard Cohen protest song, and then there was the Glitoris. It was, as stated, a giant glittery clitoris, and made such an impression it got a write up in the Guardian. After the show, folks, including me, lined up to meet Amanda and have their photo taken with the Glitoris. As you do.

So that was Saturday. Pretty much been wobbly afterwards (too much sun, too much big day), and I didn’t even do anything for Burns Night, and Oz Day is usually just Burns Night recovery day (since I’m not allowed to mention my ancestors) and I was going to go to the park to see what was going on (they promised music, balloons, vintage cars and cooked meats, which is usually enough to get me out the door), but, alas, no, I just slobbed it instead (too much hot weather, too much concussion, too much that time of the month).

I did finish my Hornblower book, though. It wasn’t bad. Hornblower’s a massive dick, though. Total and utter dick (the way he treats women and his besties, for a start). Heaven help any character based on him, she says, coughing into her hand. (Ioan, I’m thinking, was far too sweet a boy to be playing Hornblower). And, no, I’d never read them before, couldn’t find them, until now (thank you, Kinokuniya).

Obligatory Chris Pine mention? Well, they had Star Trek: Into Darkness on telly on Monday, which I watched, instead of going out (was somewhat invalided, anyways), and besides, it had all my boys in it, or, you know, Chris, Karl and Benedict being, well, Benedict. Or, as some wag referenced on tumblr, it featured god’s perfect idiot, a British villain, a moody teen, a gratuitous cameo, a CGI character, etc.

Not that it’s a cliché at all, she says, sarcastically. It’s a total mess of a film. It starts out being a spy film, they throw Khan in there for no reason and nothing makes sense after that, and those boys have so not earnt their KHAN! moment so they should really can the Khan, if you know what I mean (I’ve sooo jumped ship) and don’t even get me started on the white-washing or why all movie villains are British posh boys (actually, that does make sense, we loathe those 1% Hooray Henrys). But, boys, pretty. I’m so shallow.

So I pretty much missed the entire Sydney Festival this year. Couldn’t be helped (though it would have helped if Neil and Amanda and others would stop Instagramming their festival fun, I feel so stay-at-home frumpy). Alas, it’s not a tickets at the last minute kind of thing, and just rocking out once a week is killing me (but brave, brave me for trying despite being so old and wretched and wrecked, yes?).

I could say something about World/US politics, but where does one start? I do know that after a century of tremendous bluster in all their fillums and tv about how they were going to stand up for what’s right, blah, blah, blah, the only resistance to a tyrant they can actually muster is a teen mag and a park ranger. Shame on you.

News from the world: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113197665355692280218/posts

Well, my nerdgasm ornament arrived from Ebay, but I couldn’t manage a decent photo of it last night, though I may, once I get a chance to have at it with Photoshop, post the one that looked like some dystopian tableau. ‘I don’t get it, is it avant garde’, to quote Buffy (sadly no longer do I own any BTVS ornaments).

My phone actually died, good and proper it’s dead Jim, shuffled off this mortal coil, shagged out after a long squawk, gone to the choir eternal died, and at first I thought, bugger, like I have time to get a new phone when I’m already waving the white flag over trying to get shopping done in-between long days/nights and mad deadlines. Then I realised if I couldn’t pick up a new phone the office couldn’t call me over the break. I did such a heartfelt dance of seasonal joy my phone rebooted itself an hour or so later. Sigh (though it does mean I am once again in temporary possession of my photos).

What else? Oh, you know, usual 2016 stuff. Damn nearly got taken out by some maniac driver doing the most illegal turn into a bus lane on a one way street the wrong way on red this morning. Like, way to try and finish the job. So that’s got me all hands shaky (this time I saw him and jumped, so he only drove through the hem of my skirt, which was an a-line one fer once so it flared out – ole!). Very near miss. This town, eh?

The other day I had my own private thunderstorm that pelted down solely for the duration of my travelling from the bus doors to my front door, lightning all over the place. By the time I was standing, dripping, in the kitchen the sun was shining.

Still, I did get to look right up the black swirling chimney of my own personal storm cell and it looked just like those swirling clouds you see painted on the ceilings in Europe, only without all the naked bums and thighs (dammit). Thought for a minute it was going to sweep me off to t’other Oz, but no such luck on that front, either (the only way I’m going to get to travel, alas).

My anticipated 12 Days of Chris film festival fell over. I saw like 20 minutes of one filum, 10 minutes of another, and my dvd player is dusty – thank you end of year deadlines. Sigh. Would really have like to have indulged in that bit of silly because, you know, it’s been a bit bumpy this year.

I did hit play on a Youtube video of some old interview, though, and made the possum scream again. I don’t know why Chris Pine, of all people, sets the possum off like that, but he does, and it’s very useful, I suppose, as possum repellent (not just a pretty face).

The possum has no problem with Tom Ellis or Benedict Cumberbatch, if you’re interested. I’ve checked, in the interests of science.

Speaking of ‘so how does this make you feel’, I did catch Princess Bride on telly last Friday. Thank you Channel 11. I was pretty much hanging onto the frayed bits at the end of my rope when, skimming through the guide for something to put on while I had an apres horror commute cuppa, I found that. Yay and yay again. Still a fave. Can still quote it off by heart, too (which pleases me, I completely blanked on the name of Mina Harker’s BFF yesterday, it’s Lucy, btw, if you need to know).

So, yeah, sadly no theatre (ack, I missed several things I really wanted to see), work, work, work (even though I’m supposed to be on short weeks and there was supposed to be a shutdown) and the usual desperate scavenger hunt Himself sends me on every year with his list of impossible things (one thing he asked for this year isn’t released until 23 Dec so no way will it be on the shelves, the little crazy making bastard).

I would like to thank the nice guy in the record shop and the nice guy in the groovy bookshop for helping me find the weird and obscure. You are cool guys who managed to make it look easy. Oh, this rare volume, it’s just over here….

I deeply suspect he always asks for stuff he couldn’t find himself, so he’s gonna be surprised at my best ever hit rate this year. Again, thank you cool beardy hipster shop guys.

Too bad Amazon don’t deliver to Oz any more. Fortunately there’s still Ebay, and, as I said, cool and supernaturally competent hipsters propping the old bricks and mortar shopfronts. Besides, if you haven’t sweated in a 2km long queue at the height of summer, you haven’t done your seasonal shopping properly.

Addendum: Did some more last minute shopping last night. Yikes. This article pretty much covers the horror: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/angry-sydney-is-at-its-absolute-worst-in-the-week-before-christmas-20161222-gtgnjj.html

Himself is of good cheer, but I’m finding it hard to care. Probably because my shopping today was two pillows and a box of advil. After two months, this extreme headache can go, really it can go.

Meanwhile, missed the solstice (damn) and missed my possum. I didn’t hear the little fella stagger in this morning (and one can always tell the sort of night the possum’s had, depending on whether it skips or stomps, the moody beast).

Anyhoo, I hope that was yon critter crossing my path in the dark as I walked up the unlit street to the main road because otherwise I’ll feel guilty for torturing small furry creatures with Chris Pine (being a moody, bored, fed up and passive aggressive wee bugger in most interviews except when he’s being oh so earnest and serious or completely off-the-wall gonzo, there is no inbetween, or, indeed, ahem, a happy medium – someone hates press tours).

Maybe it was the cats. Every time I open my door these days there’s a cat sitting there, like ‘hello, I heard there was an elderly spinster in residence?’ The cheek of them.

So, much like the rest of the world (except that 1%), I’m tired, I’m hurt (far more than I ever expected to be), I’m cruel (to small furry creatures who keep me awake all night and pee on my posters) and I’m just not feeling it. The milk of human kindness is orf, luv.

And it’s been three days and I haven’t had a chance to finish off the last three pages in my notebook. That burns, too. Sure, it’s stupid, but it’s the only hobby I have left. And it’s been hard. Tried for an hour on Saturday and spent two days in bed shaking with pain because it hurts so bad, and writing makes it hurt the worst, don’t know why, just does.

So, not happy. Tomorrow I think it might have to be the moscato, mince pies and all three Star Trek (Kelvinverse) movies. Because.

Meanwhile, links to stuff I found interesting on the interwebs: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113197665355692280218/posts

PS. Possums are protected under law so I would never hurt the blighter, but being an annoying room-mate, playing loud videos when it's trying to sleep, well, that just happens. It goes both ways.

Real shame the markets at Hyde Park Barracks were rained out last night. I'd been looking forward to that all year, because last year was so unexpectedly fun and I'd run into some dear friends. This year it was sitting on a bench under a tree, mostly sheltered from the wall of rain, eating oysters and drinking gin. Oh yeah, that East Ender ancestry is showing its petticoats again.

So it was fun, but not super amazing fun, though the desperate store holders were all chatty and sweet, and I did come home loaded with pies, chutney and cordials. Now I'll have to cook a dinosaur-sized turkey as I seem to be anticipating an unhealthy amount of leftover sandwiches.

This year, thanks to be hit by that 4WD, I've successfully pleaded my case for not working over the break (I have a note) so I'm looking forward to leftovers, gin cocktails, and good books.

Which is why I've had to go buy a couple of new editions of old beloved books because they're so damn old (35+) that they're almost too fragile to open, let alone bouncing around on the commute or whatever. Ouch.

( more: beloved old books and heroes of yore )

So I did see Hell or High Water last night (always a close run thing given my unexpected deadlines in this 24-hour news cycle life we lead now).

Oh boy, golly and gosh (and please don't show CWP my original tweet, I was having a fit of the vapours).

So yes, I should have said Hell or High Water was a jagged pic of the souring of the American dream and not just CP being gorgeous. Chris Pine was gorgeous though. How did no one notice those blue eyes? Should have put an APB out on those eyes. Bank robber with the bluest of blue eyes, ever.

It was a perfectly judged and understated, very quiet performance, and I loved him dearly for it. I have faith in him as an actor again, a damn fine actor.

Because I wasn't sure, knowing he went from this straight to Trek, if it was because the role, as written, required Kirk to looked tired and as if he was just phoning it in, or if Chris was just tired and phoning it in. Maybe both, I dunno. Not that I mind angsty, miserable Kirk (it makes for much angsty teenaged fic, all There Is a Light That Never Goes Out), but still.

But I loved Hell or High Water. It is one of those classic old noirish westerns where you want the bank robbers to win because the world ain't fair or right. And a Nick Cave soundtrack. Bonus. Proper.

And man, I am missing Justified so bad right now. I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but I think Chris actually out-did Timothy Olyphant's Raylan Givens for sleek, bruised cool, and that is saying something, because, man, does Raylan make me go weak at the knees, still, so you can imagine what that last scene did for me. (Still, it'd make me the second person in my family tree to spontaneously combust, not the first). I like my boy being all intense and more than a bit bad and dangerous.

Not that I don't love him being all gosh darn sweet and heroic - how many times have I watched The Finest Hour now? Love the accent. Pretty spot on with accents (except British, ouch).

So, yes, great film about the current American dystopia. How the west was lost? And how dumb is the SMH saying we should look to US re housing when I've just seen a film about brothers robbing banks to save the farm. Seriously. No one should be looking to America as anything but a horrible warning, not a shining example.

Speaking of hard times, ran into my favourite Big Issue seller on way to Quay (I walked across town, yay me). He's doing it tough too since they sacked three whole towers of government workers (including me) over the last couple of years (they switched out the lights just the other month).

It's not just the government employees who lost their jobs. The coffee shop, sandwich shops and newsagent are gone, too.

I told him the survivors are down the skanky end of town. There's only a few here from my old offices that made it, so I didn't do too bad, coming through some extreme elimination rounds. Of course it's only because I'm easily pushed into working long days for no pay, but still, I get paid for half the time I work, which is better than none.

And it's good to have a few old mates here - startled a co-worker down at the coffee shop when I was hugged from behind. Oh, that was just the Head of X I explained, to her further astonishment. I knew Y when we were girls together in Dept Z (and bless her, she still treats me like we're still girls together on that old floor). That's nice.

But, yes, basically, saw Hell and High Water, it was amazingly good and Chris Pine was totally rocking that porn 'tache (which means he can't play a Qantas pilot anytime soon). That was some mighty fine Pine.

So, there I was, party at the Belvoir, glass of cheap, woody red in hand, and one of theatre's leading light's, Eamon Flack, turns around and there he is.

And there I am, stupidly opening my mouth and attempting to say something intelligent. Yeah, I think you know what happened next.

Hindenberg

( more: never meet your heroes )

Still wrecked from seeing Helen McCrory in the screening of NT Live’s Deep Blue Sea yesterday. I love Helen McCrory, she always rips me apart, even playing Aunt Polly on Peaky Blinders.

There’s no way I should have been seeing a play about a suicidal woman, but I did, and I’m glad I did. It was the most, raw, real, honest and truthful play I’ve ever seen. Most plays are by the privileged classes whose idea of a disaster is an imperfect macchiato, but this was real. I recognised the truth in this, apparently written by a playwright who knew what he was writing about. And he did. The egg sandwich was mocked by middle-class monsters leaving the theatre. They didn’t get it. They’ve never been there. I was screaming at Hester to eat the damn sandwich, knowing if she could make it through the sandwich, she’d make it through the night. Because it’s like that.

That was the most real moment I have ever seen on stage or screen. I’m still a wreck. What can I say, I’ve had a few darkest night toast slices myself. My life has not been kind (doesn’t matter whose fault it was, you feel, it’s real).

So there was that. Otherwise I spent all weekend trying to kill someone. To borrow from that ancient Jimmy and the Boys song, ‘I’m not like everybody else’. Heh, not by a long shot. Agatha Christie makes it look so easy – and no-one ever comments on the plain fact that this woman seems to have spent most of her time on dig sites and the like thinking of ways to kill people, as in, oh, look at that plinth, pushy, pushy, or that ornamental hairpin, stabby, stabby.

So, yeah, I was thinking of playing with Holmes/Watson tropes, and what do I get? Poirot and Hastings and the Orient Express, in space. That last bit should be said ala Matt Smith. I just love his delivery on ‘…in space’, every time. It’s all gee whizz plastic spacemen in a cornflakes box, put in by writers my age, but young Matt manages to nail the delivery every time despite being born long, long after plastic spacemen ceased to be cool. He makes them cool again, or tries to (never brought back bowties, either, but it was a damn fine try).

So, yeah, wallowing in the McKirk, big time. This is a big thing, jumping ship after a lifetime’s OTP, worse, re-watching TOS with McKirk coloured glasses (start with ‘plum’ and continue on). It was the problem with the Kelvin-verse, they keep trying to push the tradition, but it just wasn’t there, barely a civil word, an extraordinarily unearned Khan set piece. Nope. They made it an AU, they should embrace it, and the McKirk just pops on-screen. If all the bitching and grabby hands doesn’t convince you, or the old married couple matching outfits, how about the wait-until-he-smiles moment at the birthday party. Aw. Totally.

Well, like I said, I wasn’t well, upset and drugged when I was watching it and it hit me, in a dazzling aura (that’d be the hospital drugs). I’m just stuck on it, but I’m having fun and unreality is at least getting me away from frightful reality (housework never done, too long hours at work on projects that go nowhere, dreadful neighbours, everything in the area being knocked down and concreted over). Trying times.

So sorry (not sorry). Have a new fandom, but not. It’s all very something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. I’ve got something to preoccupy me, which is the main thing, because, as I think we’re all agreed, this is proving a particularly difficult year.

I wonder what the last three months would have been like, had I not been made to stay back late at work, again, like Cinderella, for a deadline that never happened (to add insult to injury).

Less obsessive, certainly, but it’s been fun, kind of, and I do now have that photo of Karl I can use to frighten the horses (and children and other animals, large and small, and probably anyone of a nervous disposition…)

"" (Watch on YouTube)

It wasn’t something I’d planned. I was chugging away, reading my John Le Carre, watching cool classic 60s films, all for UNCLE fics that spooled out in my head but never committed to paper. To be honest, I was loving the books more, I came to adore George Smiley and pals, and the films, oh, give me that mid-twentieth century aesthetic.

So it wasn’t really something I’d planned at all, and I didn’t think I’d be that upset (it wasn’t the first time I’d missed out on things for work). But I was. Then I decided to go see the film anyway, and work, ahem, sabotaged me, three times (one more night and a weekend). Seriously Kirk-blocked.

Okay, so now I was upset. I think it was the grief, too, over Anton’s sudden and awful death that twisted the knife deeper than it ever should have gone. It hurt. And I was unwell, so unwell I tore my retina being unwell.

So, exhausted, grieving, unable to have my own life, I got up at 2am on a Sunday, for crazy work deadlines again, in deepest darkest middle of winter, and worked until midday. Then, instead of going to see the film, I had to take myself to the hospital to get my eye checked. That took eight hours.

By the time I managed to get home I was beyond tired, scared, hurt, upset, woozy from quality hospital meds and my eyes blown so wide open that everything was starbursts. The first JJ Abrams film was on telly and so, you know, I thought something was better than nothing.

Ok, so I was high, exhausted and everything was lights and I’m watching Mr Lens Flare and then this golden boy, this sun king, Apollo himself, walks on screen, and dazzled doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was… glorious.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Simple Minds - Glittering Prize

I’ll never experience anything like it ever again. I know I was off my nut, delirious, but man, it was fun. It moved me, as they used to say.

So now I’m a goner, trawling through his back catalogue, searching for that elusive hit. I know it’s stupid, but what else am I’m gonna do with my waste of a life, and it took my mind off the very real possibility I’m going blind (not to mention other RL merde).

Which is why I was playing ‘if it’s the last thing I see’, and, for a whole month, the universe decided to play along: Foxtel was screening wall to wall filmography, the JB bargain bin overfloweth and every second billboard and bus stop at the posh end of town was graced by his cheesy mug. It was like being in the Matrix, in really was. It was fun.

And besides, the filmography wasn’t that bad. Okay, there were a couple of films that I’d fork my own eyes over if I had to watch again (but my eyes are already forked), but the kid does good work, every time. And he’s funny, and I saw him drop references to Vermeer and Hopper in the same sentence. And he seems to have a thing for that mid-twentieth century aesthetic I still can’t leave alone. So I'm smitten, a bit, just a bit.

But I know I’m being annoying. Macbeth, the house possum who usually sleeps mere millimetres of asbestos away from where I sleep (as in ‘sleep no more, Macbeth doth murder sleep’) screams and stomps to the other side of the house now if I play a YouTube clip. Sorry, possum (this is what happens when you raise your possums to be serious anglophiles).

And yet, I don’t want to stop, just to please others. I’m having fun. I’m waking up at 2am in the morning (that might be Macbeth coming back after a night on the tiles, but still) with the story going so fast I can’t get it down. Housework is neglected while I spend hours just trying to capture some of it before it vanishes. It’s like I’ve been waiting since I was a kid to write this, and now I can’t stop.

Well, the writing part yes because I still do 18 hour days at work, so no writing, but they have yet to find a way to stop it playing out in my head.

It’s a pity, because it could be some of my best. It’s like I’ve been teaching myself how to do this, since forever, reading books, going to every Shakespeare play I could my whole like, just so I could drop a line here of there. Stupid, I know, but, I think that’s exactly what I’ve done, in a round about way.

This is my last time, let me have fun. (More to the point, let me have some of my freakin’ TIL so I can fill up another notebook of silliness). No one will ever see it, but I just want to get it out of my head. It’s been in there too long.

So yeah, they should have let me go that day, three months ago. None of this would have happened. No films, no cons, no meeting old friends, no ferries at sunset, no finishing off something I tried to write when I was seven. Yeah, you damn well should have let me go.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

The Dandy Warhols - You Were The Last High

Meanwhile, the bus stop is infested with redback spiders again. These are the little bastards that'll drop you dead if you don't get immediate medical attention (and used to drop you dead when I was growing up). But last time when I rang the council, all I got was 'yes, my three-yeard-old niece is also scared of spiders'. Bitch. Well, let the spiders swarm then, see if I care (well, I care a bit, I don't like hanging around deadly spiders, no matter how small and pretty they are).

Well, at least that production of Macbeth was ticking all the boxes of my bad production bingo: bare black stage, a wooden chair, a fall of glitter. Check, check and check.

What a pity, and Hugo Weaving was so good, damn good, a magnificent Macbeth, full of sound and fury. If only we could have seen his Macbeth in a more tradtional production, and, hell, a traditional staging really would be radical in this town.

I can see now why our best actors go overseas. They have to. This was...woesome. It was like watching Gandalf bestride Ramsay Street, with glitter. (Yes, I know he played Elrond, but you get the idea, he was playing it big, the others, not so much).

Let down by the production. The whole putting the audience on the stage in the world's most awful plastic chairs just made us gaze yearningly at the comfy chairs that now formed the backdrop. The whole thing was a gimmick, and I've seen it done much better, at Traflagar's Macbeth, fer starters.
( more: and then it got worse )

Disorders of macadamias, it sounds like some fiendish Booker prize baiting wankery, soon to be adapted by S. Stone for the stage, a bare stage, with lots of shouting.

Sorry, another Sisyphean task of indescribable soul sucking repetition and pointlessness, and thus my mind wanders. Why, I ask, again, am I always the one to be stuck with these jobs. Always.

Dear Past Me, thank you so much for remembering to buy the box of peppermint tea I totally forgot to buy this morning, and for putting it away properly so I wouldn't find it until I was really desperate and scrabbling away in darkest cupboard corners. What a treat, surprise tea. Most excellent, dude.

Ah, senility, every day is like Xmas. I'd like to say it's just chronic lack of sleep, but no, I'm probably dribbling out grey matter onto the pillow every night.

It probably explains all the trash tv I've been watching lately. I should be so ashamed. And yet, and yet, on the run through the tunnels this morning (actual subterranean malls I run through to cut a few corners off my 2km walk from where the bus dumps scum like us, on the city limits, lest we rabble sully their hallowed halls, and where I actually work, within the gleaming citadel) every other shop, still shut up but nevertheless blaring out the MOR pop and rock, all of it from the 70s today (one day it was 1982 from point to point and I was totally having an Ashes to Ashes experience), and, anyway, I smiled. Just a little smile.
( more: )

Apparently I can walk out of the house in anything but a Hello Kitty onesie, according to Himself. Good to know.

There was some chick wearing a painfully bright orange Tigger onesie with bright pink hair and matching bright pink heels on the bus down to Canberra, and, frankly, nursing a massive migraine, I simply wasn't in the mood. Apparently 47% of respondendents polled by the Sydney Morning Herald agree with my curmudgeonly view that animal themed onsies, worn in public, on public transport, are a sure sign that the end of civilisation is nigh.

Oh dear, having more and more of those grumpy old 'you left the house looking like that?' moments. Especially those girls who got on the train at some podunk stop, heading into Newcastle (UK) on a Friday night. Now I grew up in a place so reknown for its skanks and moles people still always raise an eyebrow when I admit to my geographic origins, so imagine what these girls must have looked like to set me back in my seat.

Another one of those wrist slitting I am turning into my mother moments (please, no).

Anyways, today I am dressed like I'm off to join Department S, and it was entirely unintentional. The only tops to hand (in the dark) were my powder blue top, the one that screams 'please slime me', and my ochre turtle neck, so, easy choice. Next I fumbled further and found my black cardy with the white piping, and yes okay, it is stupidly retro, but comfy, and, as it was raining at the time (blue skies everywhere now), I picked my pencil skirt and leggings and those new silly lace up boots with the chunky heels I bought and lugged clumsily all the way back from Canberra because they were on special and I am insane, just 'cause I didn't want my long skirts dragging through knee high wet grass on the trek to the bus stop. Put the hair up in a bun because I forgot to wash it and now I look like I'm ready to chase after naughty men in silver space suits. Oh dear. And yet I strangely don't care.

So, yes, Canberra. Went off to see the Turner exhibition, not because I'm wild about Turner, but because it was all the way from the UK and I figured I ought to go and get myself educated (as though I'd never frogmarched myself around the Turner Gallery at the Tate because I knew I had to).

Still wouldn't walk across broken glass to see a Turner (though catching a bus down to Canberra with a mighty migraine must count) but it wasn't too bad. Near the end of the exhibition period, so not too crowded, and, being a piddling little show for the colonies, featuring, as always, just the early stuff and the late stuff (never the good stuff with the artist at the height of his powers).
( more: Peace through chemistry )

I came home with glitter in my cleavage. Well, that's what happens when you go off to do the most anti-rugby things one can possibly do. I'm afraid I'm not a very good bogan.

So, work, horrid, blah, blah, blah. Off to give the course a miss (and I didn't miss it a bit) to see Star Trek first. Hmmm.
( more: there was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom )

Found a window in this crazy 70s building that pointed east, and, with my hastily constructed diy projector, obeerved the eclipse. Managed to attract a small crowd of curious onlookers - should have charged a penny a peep - grin.
( more: on the rack of adjustments )

Such a cosy gathering at Chez Munroe in Grimm last Sunday, the gang all together, happy days. Except Juliet rattling around alone in the big empty house slowly going nuts. Can you say entirely surplus to requirements? Good thing, too. No tv show ever needs a whining girlfriend.

It's about time they got rid of her, anyways, as Nick is starting to enjoy it way too much (I saw that smile). There's always a paying of the piper in tv shows. Get rid of her, give Nick some new reasons to feel all guilty and angsty, hit your tropes, move on. Not original, I know, but she just does not fit in with Nick's wee Scooby Gang. TV time is limited, give her the flick, I say.

Nothing worse than having valuable screentime gobbled up by characters I cannot stand in shows I like. If you wanna do a buddy cop show, do a buddy cop show, ferkrissakes, and stop dilly dallying with pointless, story slowing domesticity. If I want domesticity, I'll watch Munro in the kitchen, thank you very much.

Okay, rant over. And I'm not even going to mention the maggots. Ick.
( the joy of cowboys )

Bless the Google doodle. They've had some beauts lately, and it is so often one of the few things to raise a smile these days, which is terrible, but the world is a much meaner place these days.

Nobody has time for meandering eccentrics these days, it's A Type arseholes, and isn't it grand. Just look at all those bankers and hedge fund managers, all those disgraced and/or arrested so called sporting heroes. Those so called sportsmen make this cynic smile bitterly, as recent press would seem to prove that this type are the same poisonous violent bullies they always were in the schoolyard.

With all these bullies roaming about, it's no wonder it's so difficult for those who don't fit the narrow deinition of acceptable these days. Sigh. Sometimes I think Wllie Loman in Death of a Salesman isn't the isolated incident of a loser who couldn't cut it, but the canary in the coalmine.

There should be more to life than screwing over the other guy. There should be.

Oh, apparently it's not just my imagination. It's in the water: Anti-anxiety drug in water makes fish fearless.

Anyways, went off to Canberra to see the TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: PARIS AND THE MOULIN ROUGE exhibition at the NGA, as part of my running away from home thing.
( more: decadence for art's sake )

Precious little to report as theatre was cancelled and I bunked off my usual philosophy course. I was tired, it was wettish, and decided to wallow with my box set of The Hour instead. Good choice, imho. I love The Hour. Think State of Play in meticulous 50s drag. Except it's grim London 50s, not sparkling LA 50s. Makes it better, as far as I'm concerned. Also, crushing big time on Mr Whishaw.

It was all about the rain. Stood in the rain for about forty minutes or so outside the old State Theatre just to catch the most fleeting of glimpses of James Bond. Well, it was the dismal end of a miserable week and it was on the way to the bus stop, anyway, which is on the other side of town (scruffy reprobates from my zone need not bother coming into the city proper, they are neither welcome nor required, apparently those photocopiers fill themselves).

Anyway, I stood, I got soaked, I did but see him passing by. For a second, under an umbrella. Still, it wasn't that bad. The crowd where I was standing seemed to be made up almost entirely of British ladies of a certain age, and their withering comments, be it the weather or the fashions of minor soapie stars, was entertainment itself (British moaning does get on one's tits in the long term, but in short term exposures it's hilarious).

The monorail also provided a unique bonding experience, as we were standing right under the track in the rain and I tried to warn the tourists what would happen, but they pshawed (I wasn't wearing the grey cardigan of trustworthiness), until it did come around the corner and swept all the water from the track before it down onto our heads. After that their were cries of 'monorail!' every time it hoved into view. Well, I did try to warn 'em.

Never mind, good crowd of the very damp and the very faithful, and very British, and therefore very vocal. It was kind of fun. Reminds me of why I do the stage door thing there, but never here.
( more: the mad, the bad and the dangerous )

Monday: It's an ill wind and all that, and there is one good thing to have come from the McCarthy witch hunts, albeit indirectly, and that is Shakespeare's Globe theatre, dream project of Sam Wanamaker, father of Zoe, who ended up in London as a result of being blacklisted.

I couldn't make the screening of Much Ado About Nothing, which I had been squeeing about in anticipation for weeks, and I was, and remain, completely gutted, but, bless 'em, the Globe just got back to my hastily thumbed email to say that they would certainly think about venues closer to my locale (which is kind, as Sydney transport is nowhere near London transport) and that Much Ado would be out on dvd from The Globe shop by years's end. So yay. Not as much fun as being there, or seeing it on the big screen, but still very much yay because I thought I'd missed out.
( more: in the air tonight )

My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

Monster of the week

I Hear Motion

a star to guide me

Road to nowhere

All that glitters

Hmmm, reasons to be cheerful? You’re kidding, right?

a wrinkle wrinkled

Even cowboys get the blues

crash and burn

Something blue

Bedazzled

come to naught

jet packs and georgian crockery

rip it up

living on the ceiling

sky darkens

the box in the corner

history repeating

november movember

blow, blow, thou winter wind

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