project!

kids.
arrggghhhhh KIDS!
There are two sayings that I never thought would literally happen but has, due to kids
1) I saw red
2) my hair stood on end.

I saw red on a teaching round once. I was at a really rough school teaching grade 5/6. There was this kid in the class who was 14 and bigger than the rest. Everyone was scared shitless of him. He was definitely a “problem child” and he used his fists often enough to prove it. One day I asked him to come to the board to write something down and on the way to the board he punched a kid in the head. I was so mad I saw red. It flashed and blurred my vision for a second. I felt like running over and grabbing problem child by the jumper and throwing him out the window (second storey) then jumping out after him and kicking him. Of couse problem child was actually taller than me and would have kicked my arse for sure, and I never would have done it anyway, but I’m just sayin’… You can take it from me, seeing red can happen.

My hair standing on end however was a more recent phenomenon. I’ve been so overworked, rushed, stressed and manic this week that when I came home today I looked at my hair and just laughed my head off. I looked like a hybrid between Albert Einstein and pig pen from Peanuts. I have no idea how it got like that except maybe that the electricity from my brain did something to the roots in my hair.

We started filming our movie project this week and my god I just hope our editor can do something to make it look somewhat cohesive and you know..good. It’s been a fair effort considering that the kids wrote the script, storyboarded the action, filmed it, prepared lighting, composed music, produced and directed it – they will also edit it and transfer it to DVfilm. Of course it’s amaturish but well, they’re kids!

Our actors have been a godsend. Truly they have been so professional and wonderful what with the constant cutting (2 hours to film one 30 second segment?!!) and 2nd, 3rd, 20 takes. Through all this they never lose momentum or focus and have for the most part added something special to their roles. It’s been a lot of fun and laughs (with many bloopers).

BUT.

Dawson Leary (named for his obnoxious, self centeredness – editor) and Ed Wood (named for his utter crappness – camera man) have driven me insane. Dawson has an opinion about everything – usually the opinion is “that looks really bad, why can’t you do a better job [insert name here]?”. If I have to listen to his pedantic nit picking for one more second I will commit homicide. Meanwhile, Ed Wood almost got fired for being a hyperactive nutcase who lost the camera half way through filming. I knew where it was but wanted to see how long it took him to realise it was gone. It took him a while. Then he kept cutting off heads while shooting even though he insisted they were in shot. DUDE that’s what the bloody LCD screen is for. Maybe it was his shortness, I don’t know but I could have drunk a bottle of Bach Rescue Remedy right then and there and it would have done nothing to deliver me from the pain of controlling myself around him.

On top of this we have a lighting person who missed the one course on “lighting” that we did so she has no idea. A sound person with a little mouse voice, so that when she said “quiet on set” noone could actually hear her. A storyboarder who would rather be sketching in his notepad and a script writer who is at the moment in China (though, did a brilliant job while she was here). Producer and Director I can’t fault.

Hair standing on end?
yep.

Australian Idol

You have no fashion sense. You’re not funny. You’re not as mean or smart as Dicko and you fucking WISH! That’s all.

Once upon a time you were Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar. Once upon a time you were cool. Once upon a time you had credibility. Now you are the worst excuse for a judge I’ve ever seen. GET AN OPINION, WOMAN!

Quote from tonight’s episode “you’re a ziggidy boo from xanadu”. Yeah, we realise the 60s were psychadelic man but you need to get another dealer – he is selling you some fucked up shit. PS: Get a life.

Australian Idol is back folks, this means I get to spend an inordinate amount of time bitching at the television set while simultaneously not being able to miss an episode. Do they pump crack through the speakers? Because every year I come back for more; hating on the judges and then wishing an audience member would blow the whole stadium up on the finale so noone can win. But hey, I still watch. It’s like train wreck – can’t tear the eyes away.

One of the contestants tonight

sang Under the Milky Way – by The Church. Great fucking song. Not a classic in the way that khe Sahn is because duh it’s actually good – so a great choice really. Despite the fact that it looked like his skull vomited up some hair Bobby did an okay job of it. Well, perhaps okay is an overstatement. He did a job of it that was no better or worse than any of the other tripe on offer.

Kyle breaks out the old gem “great performance but a shit song”. SHIT SONG? Mate, shit? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Then Marcia and Mark both sing the “you’re so …unique but” vibe and Marcia even adds the old patronising “I really, really ..hope.. people vote for you”. What is that? A pat on the back for the autistic kid? pfft. Okay, he did look a little…err..strange – but let’s not try to pretend we’re pushing for talent here. It’s all about the face and chops! I’m not even sure why they keep letting people with a hint of a voice even go through the audition process – it’s such a tease. In the end the finale is all bout Ocker “real Aussie blokes” who can’t sing or dwarfs who can but are too ridiculous to ever have a real career.

Yay, Australian Idol is back!

ps:
I knew something fishy was going on!

stress and other stories.

A while ago #1 came back from OS with the news that she is pregnant! It turns out that her missed period during the Coldplay concert really was a baby and not just an annoying blip on the menstrual calendar (do people actually keep these things?). It’s all very exciting news and I can’t wait for it to be born. However, already the horror stories have started with the news that an aquaintance of ours couldn’t even get her baby out because it was too big. Jesus Christ, we must be eating way too much chicken or some shit.

I think I am destined to be honorary aunt about 50 billion times before I have my own sperm doner baby. This morning I woke to the 60 minutes tick tock but realised it was my biological clock reminding me what a loser I am. What if I can’t ever have them or just don’t? What if I’m destined to be a mother in the teacher kind of way only? Do single guys ever think of this kind of baby stuff? I don’t actually ever want to think about it, but it just keeps popping up. For girls, at some stage the talk moves from good shags to babies and the biological clock. As E says “ugh..I guess I gotta start squeezing them out at some point don’t I?” Am I just rambling? yes, just checking.

Anyway that aside, I’m doing a lot of running around lately. There’s a lot of furniture movement in the art room so the place is a ridiculous mess, I’m trying to coordinate the mural being put up but there seems to be dead ends everywhere I go, the clay work needs to be glazed and fired and that bloody pathway that never seems to be getting up off it’s feet is still hanging over my head. There’s just too much going on at the school that has to come first. The whole place is a shambles. The most pressing of all my stressors is the movie project – which I fear will give me some sort of an ulcer before time is up. Filming begins this week and then editing has to happen next week. I can’t wait until the whole thing is over and I get my life back. There is too much other stuff happening this year for me to give this project what it really needs plus my group is always busy with high school transition stuff, various tournaments, interschool sport and their yearly concert. Coordinating them alone is murder, let alone the actual creative element of the project. I really don’t handle stress very well I tend to bottle everything up until my insides are a festering mess. Then I emerge with a sword in my hand, fighting. It’s just a shame that it only ever happens when a flame is lit under my arse. I only ever seem to get it together when all the chips are down. I really need to bring it together this week. Send good vibes my way please.

Today, I was running around tearing my hair out when I was stopped by a parent who told me that she was in a meeting the other day with a whole bunch of other parents they all agreed that their children love art so much more this year with me than they did last year with the other teacher – and they hoped I’d stay on in the art room for a while longer (actually the words were “if you aren’t in the AR next year you’ll have a protest on your hands”). Right at that moment that was exactly what I needed to hear.

If you’re a parent, go on and say something nice to your child’s teacher tomorrow. I guarrantee it’ll make their day.

with the ocean washing over…

I was floudering in the stress of VCE in high school when I discovered Jeff Buckley. My father had just died and I was quietly having a little nervous breakdown my corner before emerging each morning for roll call. Good times. That year the album Grace quickly became one of the most played discs in my collection. Perhaps there was something noteworthy in the heartbreak and sadness in Jeff Buckley’s voice that was so relevant at the time for me as well. I’d just listen splayed out on my bedroom floor with my eyes closed willing everything else to melt away. Of course the album always comes to an end and there you are blinking into the oncoming high beams that is the stark reality of life. But Grace helped somehow. I love it when you come across an album that is magnificent from the first chord to the very last fading note. Consequently I think Grace is an album I think everyone should have in their collection. If you don’t, you need to go and get it.

My best friend at the time S was also into Jeff Buckley. Our musical tastes are actually quite different (still) so it was interesting that we both were caught in the Jeff Buckley web. We decided together that we were going to go see him in concert the next year, even though it was an over 18 event and we were both still going to be 17.

There was a slight anxiety about doing this. Neither of us had fake ID and a year earlier we had been thrown out of a pub for being underage. Okay, perhaps we could have planned it better than just walking past and deciding to ‘give it a go’. In our doc martins and casuals we stuck out like sore thumbs. It also happened to be biker night that night at the pub which didn’t do us any favours – 40 or 50 leather clad men with bushy mos and tattoos of snakes up their arms. Together we must have given the bouncers a real laugh as we looked for the “drink menus”. I distinctly remember turning to S and saying um, how do they expect us to know what we want??!. She answered with a shrug uh, I dunno!. It was about then that a biker came over to us smiling (not so sweetly) and saying “hey supergirl” to S (who was wearing a superman T) and winking at me and before we could blush a hand came down on both our shoulders and we were told to get our arses out of there. Denied! We walked home laughing so hard we almost peed in our jeans.

It turns out our fears over being carded at the concert were exaggerated. We took our spots in the hall and waited for Jeff to come out. That concert that night was one of the best I have ever seen. I remember thinking to myself that I must have died because the experience was just that good. I had to keep reminding myself to breathe – just breathe while Jeff on stage stood caught with a halo of light shining around his head, and a voice like a hypnotic dream vibrating out into the crowd. Magic, really.

A year later Jeff Buckley drowned. A good friend and JB fan who took a creative writing class at uni with me hadn’t yet heard. I whispered the news to her and she started crying and we hugged. Our lecturer, a rather underwealming published author, was unimpressed with our emotional outburst in the middle of one of his dreary monologues and told us to leave. We stood in the hallway for a bit feeling sad.

I hadn’t really listened to Grace in a while until a couple of years ago. The whole album is so melancholy and stictly only for those willing and able to go on the mind trip it takes to get there and then to bring yourself back. It takes a gifted musician who is able to do that to his audience.

I think almost all the songs on the album have been my “favourites” at some point or another – from the hopeful sounds of the title track Grace to the gut wrenching Leonard Cohen cover of Hallelujah. All have got me at some point and tugged at my thoughts or soul or whatever it is that music touches so …rightly.

The song I pick today is a relatively new favourite – I discovered it’s beauty quite late – (probably about 2 years into listening the album). Sometimes songs get you only when you’re ready for them. I hope you are – it’s really a lovely one.

Dream Brother – Jeff Buckley

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rant #7554

I’ve said it before so it’s really no surprise when I say that I have little time for private schools and their shenanigans regarding ‘extra funding’ and the like. I’m a big supporter of state schools. I don’t believe in paying through your teeth for an education. In fact I hate it. I believe education should be a right that everyone enjoys regardless of socio economic status. Not something that is held up like a carrot and dangled over the heads of families who can only just afford to make the ends meet after paying off their mortgage and bills every month (read: most of the population). Maybe it’s because I went to a state school and so did most of my friends. We all got into university and/or the work force by working our arses off. I don’t support buying your way into university and I will never support the boys club (or the sorority mothers club) shaking hands under the business table in order to give little Joey a go in big business. Fuck yas. I say.

So with that in mind you can imagine me so eloquently puking my guts out when I heard this little piece of news. It seems that Haileybury College, an elite (or so they say) school located in the outskirts of Melbourne has been poaching a number of high flying students from surrounding schools and offering them scholarships to study Haileybury. This, of course gives the school an instant chance when it comes to the much coveted top 20 position in those “best schools” lists. Not only that: If a school can afford to poach a whole volleyball team for an $18,000 a year scholarship then they have waaaay too much money to burn. Either they are not using their tuition as they should (on their students) or they are being given too much government funding (don’t even get me started). It’s also a slap in the face of those parents who scrimp and save and go without other things in order to send their children to these private schools, on a full tuition. Meanwhile teachers in government schools are oft found in the local stationary shop buying up pencils so their students have something to write with.

I realise campaining for students is a symptom of a larger problem of our schools trying to compete for funding and uni places – especially now that there are so many fee paying places (grr!!!). In order to be more attractive to prospective parents schools find themselves under pressure to offer an impressive (ridiculous) range of extra curricula activities, present an image of high academic success and show they have wide arms that reach right into the job market – that will ensure that John/Jane will have a little leg up should s/he need it. Life has never been fair, and money makes money and you may argue “if you got it, flaunt it” but that just pisses me off when it comes to something so important as education. What else do we have to give us a lift out of poverty but education (and health, mind you)? I prefer the playing field in these cases to be a little more fair. I find the whole mess sickening, really.

take 5.

It’s not the caffeine, or lack thereof. You’ve found yourself awake at 3am or 4am or 5am, tossing under the covers and driving you from bed for months now. Most of the time you glance at the blinking display, roll over and fall back into dreams. Other times you are not so lucky, sighing into the pillow and fighting with Dream. This particular morn you wonder if the rain woke you or whether it was something else more sinister. Either could be true. Regardless, here you are once again, listening to the rain hit the roof. It begins as the kind of light shower where you can hear each individual droplet, the light pin pricks and the heavy thuds dancing against the buildings and road. You lay back you close your eyes to the shadows of the room and hear how each sound distinguishes itself from the next until suddenly it all changes and the rain comes together to form a consistent rolling sound. A parade of heeled footsteps. A clapping audience. A drum beat in a jazz tune. You can’t be bothered thinking anymore. Wouldn’t it be nice to just turn it off? You will the tune in your head to send you to sleep.

for fuck’s sake!

And the Ass saw…

When I was about 15 going on 21 I discovered Nick Cave. When I say discovered I mean, I knew of him and that he was around, but I’d never really contemplated him as anything more than an artist other people listened to. It wasn’t until the summer of my mid teen years that I started realising that there was a big wide world of music around me outside the mainstream and this conscious shift all started with Nick Cave. I think you’ll agree if a preppy girl is going to go dark, then Nick is about as dark as you’re doing to get.

I remember clearly the first moment I really noticed him. It was in seeing the video clip to the terrifying Loverman. If you know the clip then you know why it would have made such an impact to a young teenage mind. Basically we have a near naked man crawling along the a shadowed floor, grimacing and screaming as if posessed. And there was I, a young thing just staring at Rage (TV) with my mouth hanging open and thinking it was so amazing and theatrical. From memory (and perhaps it wasn’t like this but it’s how I remember it anyway), that night they played three video clips in a row on Rage:

Black Hole Sun – Soundgarden
Loverman – Nick Cave
Violently Happy – Bjork.

That was the moment right there folks – the moment I changed. All songs and clips got me for different reasons but it was Loverman that I played over and over and over again until my parents got really…worried. I went through Nick Cave’s back catalogue with gusto but really it was his Live Seeds album that did it for me. I couldn’t believe that someone could be so raw and passionate and still be able to function as human – you could hear it resounding in the crowd and you could hear it in his voice, this primal language resonating that didn’t even need words. I was so attracted. He totally got me.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I got to see him live. It was one of the best live music experiences I’ve ever had. Before the set even started I remember looking at the man in front of me. He had his shirt off revealing raw finger nail welts bleeding right down into his pants and it was then before the show even started that I knew I wasn’t in “Kansas” anymore. Nick Cave walked out with a champagne bottle in one hand, a glass in the other. He put them down on top of his piano, lit a cigarette and started to tell us a story about a girl. It was sublime. Unashamedly – right then, should a NC harem have existed then I would have joined it.

Let’s face it. I’d still join it – the man gets better with age. He is one of those multi talented artists that not only dips his hand in at everything but is also good at it. I have loved his work it seems since forever, but you wouldn’t really be a Melbournian if you didn’t. He’s become an institution without even meaning to.

I tossed and turned all night over which song to pick. In the end almost any song is as good as any other. But today, I think this is the kind of mood I’m in. Take from that what you will.

The Mercy Seat – Nick Cave

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not miami..

Sunday should be reserved soley for leisurley dozing right up until mid morning while drooling into your pillow, followed by a long breakfast then back to bed with the paper and a pen to do the crossword. Maybe you’ll emerge from the warm embrace of the doona in the early PM, go do a few things; shop, drop in on friends. Maybe you’ll just sit around playing with your remote control or other noteworthy stiff objects for the rest of the day. All done with a smile on your face, because it’s Sunday, it’s almost spring, the sky is a deep blue, the day is yours and life is good.

Or, how’s this? You get up at the crack of dawn because without caffine you have been yawning at people by 7pm. This means that when you finally get to say hello to your bedsheets there’s no time for cuddling your pillow and pretending it’s Alan Rickman; oh no, you have already fallen asleep! A good night’s sleep means you get to hear the birds twittering in the trees the next morning, a rather foreign sound to untrained ear. You pop the kettle automatically but before you can reach for the coffee you realise it’s not there anymore. It’s been cleverly replaced by tea. Bloody peppermint tea. You try to go back to bed with the paper but all you can think about is what you don’t have..

Last night someone casually mentioned fantales (the lolly) and you have not stopped thinking about them since. One mention has made your nether regions contract in food lust. You have already gone through the fantasy of being naked in a pool of caramelly ambrosia. Surely this is a joke, how can someone be this addicted to yummy goodness featuring chocolate and caffine? Two weeks isn’t that long is it? Chriiiiist.

Do you have a vice? Does it rule you?

painting her