They took away one of my bollocks, and then I dyed my nipples black
I crawled into your bedroom, you were snorin' on yer back
What the fuck you doin' to me babe...
In February, I will be paying money to go and sit in an old theatre in Dunedin and be sworn at by a hairy bloke older than my dad. Other men of my vintage are excited about going to see cutting-edge international DJs, or big stadium rock acts like U2. Is being excited about going to see Billy Connolly play the Regent as sure a sign as any that elderly decrepitness is vaulting over the horizon to devour me where I stand?
As Millencolin would have put it, can I say no?
Billy Connolly was a massive part of my childhood, or more accurately my adolescence. The old man had a bunch of his live albums from the '70s and '80s taped, which got a fair hammering in our household. Basically, Billy Connolly taught me to swear. There is nothing on Earth, if not the Universe, funnier than agitated swearing in a Glaswegian accent. And if ye done like it ye can fuck off Jimmeh. Getting out videos of his live performances - an achievement in itself as we didn't even have a VCR until mid 1991 so we usually had to hire that as well - was always a highlight. One of his best routines was on the dubiously named 'Wreck On Tour' (mid Eighties I think) live album which started with a long diatribe about the sorts of people who should swear and the sorts who shouldn't. "The Pope," he said, "he should swear. Probably feels like it kissin' all those fuckin' runways. 'Don't you people ever sweep this fuckin' thing?' He should swear. Maybe he does. Says it in Latin and nobody notices." That's still the single funniest audio recording I've ever heard. Go find it on Amazon or something and buy it now. Now I tells ya.
There was a routine I saw one New Years at home (long before drinking age) he did about incontinence which could literally make you piss your pants. There was his version of Tammy Wynette's D.I.V.O.R.C.E. which went to number one in the UK (probably on the basis of his reference to his wife calling him an F-ing C). And even as recently as his World Tour of Scotland (OK that's twelve years ago now) he did a bit about his old man trying to buy a prescription windscreen for his Robin Reliant which placed me in physical pain through laughing. Even though now he's old, and grey, and doing ING commercials - not doing them a lot of good judging by the fact they've posted their first ever quarterly loss, just the 478 million Euros or so - he'll still sell out the entire country (marrying one of the locals probably helped his NZ profile a bit).
Anyway it's gotta be better than the last stand-up I saw. Wil Anderson at Livid about six or seven years back. He was off chops on go-fast, babbled incoherently, foamed at the mouth and even fucked up his very old, very tired 'Kieren Perkins has his name on his milk' routine. When you're even getting fired from Triple M, you're fucked. Then again there was the Pizza live show at the Festy Hall - last show there ever before they built a Borders and a stack of Oaks serviced apartments on it - which was pretty much carried around on the back of Tahir Bilgic (aka Habib), the only decent stand-up amongst the cast.
So I may be the youngest person in the building on Feb 4 at the Regent, and he may be as old and wobbly and pretty-much-past-it as AC/DC, but to be fair Billy Connolly is as much a part of my remembrances of growing up as AC/DC were. Who are also touring again soon. Time to get the lads together p'raps...
The Doctor is OUT.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Thursday, November 06, 2008
End of an era
No, not Dubya and the 'Publicans getting New Broomed into irrelevance by Obama. Nothing as small-scale as that, by criminy. I type at you this afternoon regarding the end of an era much, much more significant in the history of stuff.
Chateau Dodgy Mark One is no more.
It has ceased to be, gone to meet its maker, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Chateau Dodgy I, not to put too fine a point on it, is an ex-sharehouse. What is is, as of my touring past its former location at 60 Hawken Drive an hour ago, is a construction site. And that's very, very sad. Black armband, flags-at-half-mast sad. Ahh, the memories. If only I still had any. Like the '60s, if you can remember it, you probably weren't there.
Chateau Dodgy I was of a rare breed of St Lucia sharehouses - rare in this decade of slap-dash 2bdr apartments for Africa - in that it was pretty much your archetypal, Felafel-style decrepit Queenslander with all the mod cons expected by anyone who has read Mr Birmingham's 1994 treatise on the subject. Old mango tree shedding its contents over the driveway. Three bedrooms in various states of disrepair. Batshit insano female flatmate incapable of maintaining continuous gainful employment, relationships with men, relationships with humans of any sort, or any fair share of housework, billpaying and/or grocery shopping. Kitchen best characterized as biohazardous. Enormous back deck with a view of the backyard that can only be described as stellar. (Literally. The backyard was largely taken up by a stand-alone flat inhabited by Stella, a statuesque late-twenties/early thirties blonde who drove an old Merc and had a penchant for getting changed with the French doors open.) Old fireplace perfect for winter, and in particular perfect for winter fireside seductions while the other Dodgites were out for the night (and it probably would have been even better had I actually bothered to get some firewood in before the girl in question dropped around.)
It was, in brief, magnificent. And now it's a large hole filled with construction shit. It looks like it's going to be replaced by another house, rather than yet another soulless, identikit block of flats, which I suppose should leave me thankful for small mercies. But I ain't. The new owners - invariably rich twunts - can't begin to appreciate that place like we did. Just the little things, like the fact it was on the bus route to pretty much anywhere, or the front step was the perfect vantage point for watching summer afternoon thunderstorms rolling in over the west, or the bottle shop two hundred yards up the road which almost always had something or other on special (and by on special I mean less than a buck a beer for carton price - this was the year 2000 after all. You can't even get Tasman Bitter for that anymore.) No real surprise then that erstwhile flatmate Craigos put on six kilos in the first month after I moved in. Between the $23-a-carton XXXX Draught and the endless swathes of Pizza Caffe lovin' it's amazing we both didn't end up looking like Mark Viduka on a pies-only diet. Or at least he didn't.
Of course, it wasn't all beer and skittles, or beer and corridor cricket at least. There were thunderclouds of our own on our doorstep... primarily of the batshit insano variety, as previously foreshadowed. The only reason there ended up being a vacancy at Chateau Dodgy I in the first place, at the time I moved up to Brisvegas, was that an old school mate of Craigos' (that's an old mate of his from school, not a mate who was strictly Old School) who'd signed on to live there with Craigos and Batshit Insano Chick managed to last pretty much one month before packing up his van and running for the hills. He was a tradie, had his shit together, dealt with people for a living, had spent time overseas, could pretty much deal with most things thrown his way. He lasted thirty days before deciding he'd rather spend the rest of his life in Woombah than another hour in the company of Batshit Insano Chick. Methinks that should have been the mildest of indicative precursors as to how things were going to turn out.
Then again, while Batshit Insano Chick was pretty much useless when it came to taking the bins out, paying her share of the phone bill or even holding down a rational conversation, she was half-decent at one thing. No, not that, you disgusting reprobates. (I wasn't the one who declared very loudly, very late one night that he wanted to pound her in the... actually let's not get into that. The gentleman in question is a medical professional now and could do without the besmirchment of his reputation.) Batshit Insano Chick was international best-practice at getting monumental volumes of absolute randoms to turn up to our self-evidently epic house parties, being as though she knew a lot of people even more batshit insano than herself (an achievement in itself). Stuff happened at those things. There were firetwirlers in the backyard, spitting sparks into the tinder-dry garden remnants... Super Soaker wars in the front yard... Catholic schoolgirls and reformed Goth chicks... phone books used as projectiles... jello shots used as wallpaper... and one memorable evening, an entire kebab shop set up on our back deck.
Good times.
60 Hawken Drive is now a yuppie project home under construction, but Chateau Dodgy I died long before, of course. It truly died when the place was sold out from underneath us by Doug Dickhead Real Estate, with the assertion that the new owners wouldn't be interested in leasing it to the scummy likes of us. When the new owners' property manager (tellingly, not from Doug Dickhead's lot) got in touch, as Craigos and I were preparing to sign the lease for Chateau Dodgy v2.0, it was belatedly made clear that stable tenants were one of the major attractions. Obviously they hadn't meant our rather unstable other tenant, but the key thing was, they still wanted us. Unfortunately they wanted us at the increased rate of $280 a week; we'd been paying $240. Stupidly, we blew them off. We didn't have a third party to join us at that time, regardless of what windy waftings we were hearing from various mates on the North Coast about finally moving up (we're still waiting, lads) and we thought the increase was nothing less than gouging. Given we ended up paying $230 between two at version 2.0, and that in seeking a replacement third Dodgite, even taking the randomest of randoms, we couldn't have ended up with anyone more random than Batshit Insano Chick... it seems like we might have erred.
So vale, Chateau Dodgy Mark One.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember you.
And at the end of the day, I go to bed.
The Doctor is OUT (to go see if they've run a bulldozer through Hiron St as well.)
Chateau Dodgy Mark One is no more.
It has ceased to be, gone to meet its maker, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Chateau Dodgy I, not to put too fine a point on it, is an ex-sharehouse. What is is, as of my touring past its former location at 60 Hawken Drive an hour ago, is a construction site. And that's very, very sad. Black armband, flags-at-half-mast sad. Ahh, the memories. If only I still had any. Like the '60s, if you can remember it, you probably weren't there.
Chateau Dodgy I was of a rare breed of St Lucia sharehouses - rare in this decade of slap-dash 2bdr apartments for Africa - in that it was pretty much your archetypal, Felafel-style decrepit Queenslander with all the mod cons expected by anyone who has read Mr Birmingham's 1994 treatise on the subject. Old mango tree shedding its contents over the driveway. Three bedrooms in various states of disrepair. Batshit insano female flatmate incapable of maintaining continuous gainful employment, relationships with men, relationships with humans of any sort, or any fair share of housework, billpaying and/or grocery shopping. Kitchen best characterized as biohazardous. Enormous back deck with a view of the backyard that can only be described as stellar. (Literally. The backyard was largely taken up by a stand-alone flat inhabited by Stella, a statuesque late-twenties/early thirties blonde who drove an old Merc and had a penchant for getting changed with the French doors open.) Old fireplace perfect for winter, and in particular perfect for winter fireside seductions while the other Dodgites were out for the night (and it probably would have been even better had I actually bothered to get some firewood in before the girl in question dropped around.)
It was, in brief, magnificent. And now it's a large hole filled with construction shit. It looks like it's going to be replaced by another house, rather than yet another soulless, identikit block of flats, which I suppose should leave me thankful for small mercies. But I ain't. The new owners - invariably rich twunts - can't begin to appreciate that place like we did. Just the little things, like the fact it was on the bus route to pretty much anywhere, or the front step was the perfect vantage point for watching summer afternoon thunderstorms rolling in over the west, or the bottle shop two hundred yards up the road which almost always had something or other on special (and by on special I mean less than a buck a beer for carton price - this was the year 2000 after all. You can't even get Tasman Bitter for that anymore.) No real surprise then that erstwhile flatmate Craigos put on six kilos in the first month after I moved in. Between the $23-a-carton XXXX Draught and the endless swathes of Pizza Caffe lovin' it's amazing we both didn't end up looking like Mark Viduka on a pies-only diet. Or at least he didn't.
Of course, it wasn't all beer and skittles, or beer and corridor cricket at least. There were thunderclouds of our own on our doorstep... primarily of the batshit insano variety, as previously foreshadowed. The only reason there ended up being a vacancy at Chateau Dodgy I in the first place, at the time I moved up to Brisvegas, was that an old school mate of Craigos' (that's an old mate of his from school, not a mate who was strictly Old School) who'd signed on to live there with Craigos and Batshit Insano Chick managed to last pretty much one month before packing up his van and running for the hills. He was a tradie, had his shit together, dealt with people for a living, had spent time overseas, could pretty much deal with most things thrown his way. He lasted thirty days before deciding he'd rather spend the rest of his life in Woombah than another hour in the company of Batshit Insano Chick. Methinks that should have been the mildest of indicative precursors as to how things were going to turn out.
Then again, while Batshit Insano Chick was pretty much useless when it came to taking the bins out, paying her share of the phone bill or even holding down a rational conversation, she was half-decent at one thing. No, not that, you disgusting reprobates. (I wasn't the one who declared very loudly, very late one night that he wanted to pound her in the... actually let's not get into that. The gentleman in question is a medical professional now and could do without the besmirchment of his reputation.) Batshit Insano Chick was international best-practice at getting monumental volumes of absolute randoms to turn up to our self-evidently epic house parties, being as though she knew a lot of people even more batshit insano than herself (an achievement in itself). Stuff happened at those things. There were firetwirlers in the backyard, spitting sparks into the tinder-dry garden remnants... Super Soaker wars in the front yard... Catholic schoolgirls and reformed Goth chicks... phone books used as projectiles... jello shots used as wallpaper... and one memorable evening, an entire kebab shop set up on our back deck.
Good times.
60 Hawken Drive is now a yuppie project home under construction, but Chateau Dodgy I died long before, of course. It truly died when the place was sold out from underneath us by Doug Dickhead Real Estate, with the assertion that the new owners wouldn't be interested in leasing it to the scummy likes of us. When the new owners' property manager (tellingly, not from Doug Dickhead's lot) got in touch, as Craigos and I were preparing to sign the lease for Chateau Dodgy v2.0, it was belatedly made clear that stable tenants were one of the major attractions. Obviously they hadn't meant our rather unstable other tenant, but the key thing was, they still wanted us. Unfortunately they wanted us at the increased rate of $280 a week; we'd been paying $240. Stupidly, we blew them off. We didn't have a third party to join us at that time, regardless of what windy waftings we were hearing from various mates on the North Coast about finally moving up (we're still waiting, lads) and we thought the increase was nothing less than gouging. Given we ended up paying $230 between two at version 2.0, and that in seeking a replacement third Dodgite, even taking the randomest of randoms, we couldn't have ended up with anyone more random than Batshit Insano Chick... it seems like we might have erred.
So vale, Chateau Dodgy Mark One.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember you.
And at the end of the day, I go to bed.
The Doctor is OUT (to go see if they've run a bulldozer through Hiron St as well.)
Sunday, November 02, 2008
(Green and) Gold Coast Indy
Helio Castroneves is used to close shaves. He's Brazilian. Despite having won the Indy 500 a couple of times, he's probably more famous for another career victory which doesn't figure on his racing CV - winning the US version of Dancing With The Stars, which means that even Seppos who wouldn't know an Indycar from Indiana Jones (note: one is wrinklier) know who he is. Helio had a shit weekend last week, flying halfway around the world to finish a lap down and approximately nowhere in the first Gold Coast Indy to actually feature 'Indy' cars for about thirteen years, while his teammate won the thing. Helio will probably have a lot more shit weekends to come, however, given that the Feds have indicted him on multimillion dollar tax evasion charges. His trademark 'Spiderman' victory celebration is unlikely to translate well to his probable new digs, given that the fences he's accustomed to climbing aren't usually electrified and topped with razor wire.
However, while Helio had a shit weekend, his was not the shittest weekend of all at the Indy. That went to ludicrously named local lad Will Power, who for the third Gold Coast event in succession, put the thing on pole; and for the third Gold Coast event in succession, proceeded to fuck his shit right up, inexplicably finding a wall to munt his 'Team Australia' (urrgh) car into while leading the field on lap 16. Will Power is not terribly bright. Will Power is from Toowoomba. Instead, the honour of being the first Australian ever to win the Gold Coast Indy went to Ryan Briscoe of Penske, who held off 2008 series champion and Indy 500 winner, Kiwi Scott Dixon (who the American commentators were unwisely describing as 'Australian-born Scott Dixon' - which, while factual, would get 'em a lynchin' in the Shakies). Briscoe has had a fairly shit career - dumped from the Toyota F1 test team, seriously injured in a car-splitting fireball endo in his first season in Indycars, left to try and rebuild his career in sportscars with Penske's Porsche team. Even earlier this year there were questions raised about how long it'd be before Penske fired him from the Indycar team, but a couple of wins sorted that - in the end, he outscored his mate from Internal Revenue by three wins to one, and if Dixon hadn't spun under yellow like a hammer-thumbed arsewit and taken them both out at Watkins Glen, it could well have been four.
The main benefactor of an Aussie finally winning at the Gold Coast, other than the Aussie in question, is the event itself. Following the shotgun reunification of the Indycar and Champcar series, this year's race was a non-championship event (the late-September Chicago oval event has series-concluding status written into its contract), about which serious doubts were cast re participation of the marquee teams. In the end all came, all saw and one conquered. The problem re continuing participation of the Indys in the Indy isn't about the season-ending issue any more though - it's about the Indy peeps wanting to buddy the race up with the Japan event, and the Queenslanders (whose strings are being pulled by the V8 supremos) objecting to most of the alternative dates as they clashed with AFL finals and whatnot. As usual, it's V8 boss Cockhead Cochrane who's making the biggest arse of himself over this, slagging off the Indycar people, the proposed replacement series A1GP (which to be fair, is losing money faster than your average high-exposure investment fund) and coming out with the diabolically daft suggestion that the Qld government seek to sign the German DTM touring car series as a replacement, seeing as though they won't buy into his vision of the event becoming V8s only. Cockhead is power-mad and delusional, particularly after the NSW gummint finally bent over re his long standing wish to see multicoloured taxis lapping the Olympic precinct, but the delusion clearly doesn't extend to taking into consideration the following facts:
(a) the Indy absolutely has to have a high-end open-wheel racing series as its centrepoint, if only for the glamour stakes, otherwise it's no more than the Clipsal 500 Mark Two; German taxis alternating with Australian taxis ain't cutting it, and
(b) despite Cockhead's cockiness, the DTM boys will make his show look very fucking ordinary. They are proper race cars, with proper race drivers. No sign of anyone called Winterbottom in here.
Anyway, that was dull, I know, but we'll try harder next time.
The Doctor is OUT.
However, while Helio had a shit weekend, his was not the shittest weekend of all at the Indy. That went to ludicrously named local lad Will Power, who for the third Gold Coast event in succession, put the thing on pole; and for the third Gold Coast event in succession, proceeded to fuck his shit right up, inexplicably finding a wall to munt his 'Team Australia' (urrgh) car into while leading the field on lap 16. Will Power is not terribly bright. Will Power is from Toowoomba. Instead, the honour of being the first Australian ever to win the Gold Coast Indy went to Ryan Briscoe of Penske, who held off 2008 series champion and Indy 500 winner, Kiwi Scott Dixon (who the American commentators were unwisely describing as 'Australian-born Scott Dixon' - which, while factual, would get 'em a lynchin' in the Shakies). Briscoe has had a fairly shit career - dumped from the Toyota F1 test team, seriously injured in a car-splitting fireball endo in his first season in Indycars, left to try and rebuild his career in sportscars with Penske's Porsche team. Even earlier this year there were questions raised about how long it'd be before Penske fired him from the Indycar team, but a couple of wins sorted that - in the end, he outscored his mate from Internal Revenue by three wins to one, and if Dixon hadn't spun under yellow like a hammer-thumbed arsewit and taken them both out at Watkins Glen, it could well have been four.
The main benefactor of an Aussie finally winning at the Gold Coast, other than the Aussie in question, is the event itself. Following the shotgun reunification of the Indycar and Champcar series, this year's race was a non-championship event (the late-September Chicago oval event has series-concluding status written into its contract), about which serious doubts were cast re participation of the marquee teams. In the end all came, all saw and one conquered. The problem re continuing participation of the Indys in the Indy isn't about the season-ending issue any more though - it's about the Indy peeps wanting to buddy the race up with the Japan event, and the Queenslanders (whose strings are being pulled by the V8 supremos) objecting to most of the alternative dates as they clashed with AFL finals and whatnot. As usual, it's V8 boss Cockhead Cochrane who's making the biggest arse of himself over this, slagging off the Indycar people, the proposed replacement series A1GP (which to be fair, is losing money faster than your average high-exposure investment fund) and coming out with the diabolically daft suggestion that the Qld government seek to sign the German DTM touring car series as a replacement, seeing as though they won't buy into his vision of the event becoming V8s only. Cockhead is power-mad and delusional, particularly after the NSW gummint finally bent over re his long standing wish to see multicoloured taxis lapping the Olympic precinct, but the delusion clearly doesn't extend to taking into consideration the following facts:
(a) the Indy absolutely has to have a high-end open-wheel racing series as its centrepoint, if only for the glamour stakes, otherwise it's no more than the Clipsal 500 Mark Two; German taxis alternating with Australian taxis ain't cutting it, and
(b) despite Cockhead's cockiness, the DTM boys will make his show look very fucking ordinary. They are proper race cars, with proper race drivers. No sign of anyone called Winterbottom in here.
Anyway, that was dull, I know, but we'll try harder next time.
The Doctor is OUT.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)