Hieronymous the Anonymous

Not so funny

Lately I seem to be going through a movie watching phase. About 8 weeks ago I saw Wolverine with the boys (very disappointing) and a month ago Terminator Salvation with them (better, but not close to the classic status of the first two - Sam Worthington is the best thing in this one). Next week we're going to see the second instalment in the Transformers series - as you can see, all boy movies, and all movies we've seen with the wives left home.

On top of that I saw Hangover with one of the yoga teachers (fun, but hardly Oscar material), and last night I saw Bruno with the publisher.

Last night didn't get off to a great start. This was one of those preview screenings, meaning that everyone had to check in their mobile phone. There are long lines moving slowly and security guards to make sure you don't do the wrong thing. I went through all this with the Star Trek movie, so left my phone home - which didn't prevent a slight disturbance all the same.

I've bypassed the desk where people are checking in the phones and the burly security guard is waving his metal detector over my clothes. It beeps around the chest pocket of my jacket where I had left my iPod. I show it to him. He calls over one of the guys. "Hey is it ok to take an iPod in?" he asks. The other guy has a look and pronounces it an iPhone and not an iPod, can't take it in. I point out to him that it has no camera and furthermore it has very conveniently printed on the back 'iPod'.

By now another guy has got involved, the supervisor of all this, a short, chesty guy. "Can't take it in mate", he says with the finality of a man in charge. I'm patient, but I've got an edge to me by now. I look at him and once more I point out that it is a simple iPod and all it does is play music.

"But it's got a memory though" he says, as if this is the clinching argument.

"So do I", I tell him, "but I don't have a record facility, and nor does this." He waves me in, but it's not pretty.

That was pretty well the highlight of the night. I thought the movie was pretty ordinary to shocking.

I liked Borat. It was hard watching sometimes but very funny, and it had a satirical edge to it. Borat himself was an endearing character, an innocent abroad, and the humour had some bite in its silent critique of American society.

Bruno has none of the charm nor intelligence of Borat. Bruno, the eponymous character, is an homosexual model and disgraced celebrity from Austria. He travels to America to become famous. The first hour is pretty well taken up with his antics in attempting that. Some of it is pretty full-on, harder watching I suspect for heterosexual men than anyone else. That's ok, except that much of it is just plain dumb, if not juvenile, and extreme for the sake of being extreme. It has none of the whimsy nor any of the insight that Borat had.

It improves in the second half marginally, but only because he moves away from the contrived scenes and returns to the Borat formula: skewering the extremes and prejudices of American society. In the end though I came away feeling exploited, which is a strange thing to think. It was a free ticket so I shouldn't complain, but I was very disappointed.

Interestingly the publisher loved it. She thought it was hilarious. I laughed too at times, and, like watching Borat, shifted uncomfortably with embarassment often, but...Sacha Baron Cohen is capable of much better. I think he is a very skilled comedian and character actor, and has an amazing ability to transform himself - he just needs the right material, and to prove he's more than a one trick pony.

The cruellest cut

I dropped the dog off this morning to be 'fixed'. That's the word I prefer to use, though I'm not sure exactly what is being fixed - if anything he's being broken. That sums up my attitude to all of this. I've been putting off this procedure for months, and even after I finally booked him in I was riven by doubt. Right up to the last moment there was every chance I would cancel.

But no. Bright and early I clipped Rigby's leash to his collar and packed him into the car. As always he was a picture of excitement and enthusiasm. He only needs to see his lead to begin leaping in the air with anticipation, and to this point every trip in the car has led somewhere nice. This only made it worse for me. From the moment I booked him in I have had the sense that I was betraying him. It was not something I wanted to talk about, but felt obliged to say something to him - pointless I know, as he knows little human (food, up, down, sit, stay) and I know no dog.

I felt as I drove the short distance to the vet as if I was delivering him into something awful. We walked into the vet and there was a fully grown Staffy already there. At the sight of each other both dogs got excited and pulled at their respective leads. The young vet led us out out back where she asked me all sorts of questions while Rigby continued in his exuberant way - he was so excited his eyes were bloodshot.

I guess she works with it every day and so is not nearly as squeamish as me, but she must have said the c word - castration - about half a dozen times in our short conversation, and each time I felt like wincing. When I left him there I felt like I was abandoning him.

Everyone tells me it's the right thing, but I can't help doubting that. I know he'll likely be better off, I know he'll be calmer and my guests will no longer will risk having their leg humped, but it seems wrong that he should have his little balls removed to achieve that end. I feel as if I'm denying him his natural expression, and wonder what right I have to make such a decision on his behalf. And I fear the affectionate, exuberant dog I love will change.

A lot of this is me being a man. It seems a terrible and extreme thing to do to castrate anything or anyone. Once this is done he is effectively a eunuch. All those desires are removed from him, and even if by chance they're not then there is nothing he can do about it. It's unnatural.

Necessary though, so I'm told. I guess the other thought is that I can no longer have any little Rigby's. He'll never be a father and so his beautiful pedigree ends with him. But, it's done.

He's home with me now, very quiet. He is not his usual bouncy self, but that's no surprise. If he wags his tail it is very wearily. He seems lost, lethargic but unable to rest. It's not helped by the bucket he has on his head, but that's a necessary evil if he's not to pick at his stitches. I feel for the little fella, and can't help feeling guilty.

I had a couple of things on tonight, but Ive cancelled now. I'll stay home and cook up a nice meal and spend time with him sitting on the couch watching a DVD or something. He'll be alright, and I'll make sure to treat him when he's up and about again.

Perfect stories

Last night I read a short story so good it's worth recommending. I read a lot of short stories, and I read some pretty good ones along the way, along with the less good. Mostly the stories are by authors I follow, and it is only in the random collections I read that I stumble across less celebrated authors. This is the case with this story.

The story is The Rotifer by Mary Ladd Gavell. She was American, the managing editor of Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, and obviously a part time writer on the side. She never lived to see her story published. She died of cancer in 1967 and the story was published in Psychiatry by her colleagues as a tribute to her a few months after her death. It was picked up by The Best American Short Stories of 1968, and may well have languished there forgotten except that John Updike, the editor of the best stories of the century, chose to select it - which is where I read it.

There's no point in describing the story except to say it is a gracefully written, beautifully weighted piece that is almost the perfect example of what a short story can and should be - life in miniature but complete in itself. You read, perfectly convinced, and shut the book to think about what you have just read and what it means for you. As in all the best art I think there is something in it you recognise, tucked away deep inside, and brought to the surface by the genius of these artists. There it breathes, and there you feel the connection to something indefinably sublime. That's a great moment.

The tragedy, aside from her early death, would be if she had never written anything else. The good news as I discovered is that more than 30 years after her death all the stories her husband had put away where published into a book, I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly and Other Stories.

It's quite possible - likely even - that none of her other stories measure up to The Rotifer, but I intend to find out.

Michael Jackson

Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere you've probably heard that Michael Jackson has died. It's hard to miss.It tops the news bulletins, the newspapers have wrap-arounds and pages devoted to his life and career, and already TV specials are hitting the air-waves. On top of that is the huge outpouring of grief from all over the world. This is what I find most curious.

In his day Michael Jackson was a great and greatly influential recording artist. He was a prodigy from the time he was a cute little kid with a button nose until sometime in the mid-nineties I guess, when it all started to go a bit sour. His was not really the sort of music I listen to a lot, but that didn't stop me from admiring his musical instincts while I wondered at his peculiar life. 

For a long time he was a darling child, admired - loved - for his music, and for his gentle, child like nature. That doesn't always last because it seems human nature is innately capricious. While he retained his hard core supporters who would forever love 'Michael', his increasingly strange antics and odd behaviour distanced many. He became a subject of increasingly bizarre speculation, and I guess as a result became more reclusive. At the same time his recording career dwindled and his success petered out.

From my perspective he always seemed like a child, like someone who never grew up and never wanted to grow up. I never ceased to feel a little bit sad whenever I saw him. I remembered what a cute kid he was, and even from the time he made Off the Wall, when he was young and seemingly normal, dark skinned and good looking - unlike the pale, strange looking man he became. For all the success and adoration he had found he seemed a sad figure to me.

Now he's dead at 50, and even as I write this his after-life seems like it may follow the strange pattern of his life. I must say I was not shocked to hear of his death, but now with questions arising about how he died this is not going to away quickly or easily.

At the same time there is this huge amount of press and public grieving, as if so many people have lost a personal friend. It does not equate his musical career. Though he was huge in his day that day had passed - was he as big as Elvis? No, I don't think so. But like Elvis, and perhaps more aptly, like Lady Di, he had become bigger than what he had achieved. His music introduced him to the world, but it was is life and his strange foibles and frailties exposed to an eager world that made him a kind of cultural icon.

That's what he is I think, an icon, not because of his music but because of who he was. Like Lady Di much of the world felt as if they knew him, and I think many perhaps identified with him in some small way. Though he was way up there, out of our reach, he had, like Lady Di, those human qualities, the feet of clay that made him mortal.

It's news because he was huge once, and we have since grown use to watching the freak show that was his life broadcast into our homes. He was a cultural reference point. Now he is gone, and so many feel the loss like a hole opening up inside them.

What cheeses me off part...

Is how every kind of political controversy is now tagged with the "gate" suffix, after Watergate of course (which was actually the name of a hotel). The latest is the very Australian Ute-gate (pickup-gate for my American readers). Good grief. If they insist on doing this (and I can't see it changing) then it should be ute-watergate (the Watergate had nothing to do with water), but that's not going to happen either.

On a sidenote this little episode has some curious aspects, not the least the protagonist at the centre of it all, the humble and mysterious public servant beautifully named Godwin Grech. That's a name straight out of Dickens or Washington Irving or from the pages of Gormennghast. Great to see.

The upside of civilisation

I always think that breakfast is the most civilised meal of the day. When you consider that it's pretty odd really - and yet it feels true. More often than not breakfast is a pretty casual affair, and occasionally pretty sloppy. Many a time I've thrown on the nearest available clothes after a big night and slopped up the road and licked my lips in anticipation of the big cooked breakfast. Often I've eaten it bleary eyed with the newspaper spread out on the table in a manner that is anything other than formal. That's the crux really, for me at least, breakfast is far from the most formal meal of the day - but it is the most civilised.

In the back of my mind I picture the sort of breakfast I have never had. You know those classic English breakfasts of kippers and tea poured from a silver teapot by an availing butler, Bertie Wooster being looked after by the ubiquitous Jeeves. And I've got a notion that foremost amongst the civilising influences the colonial English brought to the various peoples they lorded it over it was a good cup of Darjeeling and the leisurely breakfast.

Leisurely I think is the key word there. Sunday morning sitting down for breakfast and the working week seems an eternity away. You move slowly, without hurry in any aspect, idly conversing about whatever comes to mind, reading the paper perhaps, or perhaps simply looking out at the world as it sleepily unfolds around you. You have your coffee and your breakfast and recline - all good. Another coffee? Why not - it's a fine idea. And so the time dribbles away, indulgently so.

The fact to that remove yourself from home to eat breakfast out is significant. Anyone can slurp up a bowl of corn flakes in between getting set for work. There's nothing civilised about that. And even if you sit down to enjoy it is more functional than leisurely. No, to be truly civilised you must journey outside of home to some place where people will serve you.

That's indulgence. It's a civilised indulgence. It is the whim of the rich man to forego everything for this simple but refined pleasure. Good thing is, you don't have to be rich to enjoy it.

So then, question, if the Sunday brunch is the most civilised thing since somebody decided to make toast, then where does the midweek breakfast rank in the pantheon of civilisation?

Okay, rule out those congealed offerings at so-called breakfast meetings and presentations. It may be technically breakfast but is entirely against the spirit of it. I mean the real thing, Sunday breakfast on a Wednesday say?

I ask because that's what I did during the week. I hopped in the car on Wednesday and drove 5 minutes up the road to check out a place on my list, Home, in Burwood road. I sat by the window and looked out over the road lost in my own thoughts. I'd chatted to the guy behind the bar coming in, and ordered the regulation brekky of poached eggs, toast and mushies with coffee and juice. That's always good. And afterwards I sat there in no particular hurry wondering what was next even though I had a full list of things to be done. I sat and looked out and with half a mind listened to them do the newspaper quiz behind me. 

Eventually I left, but I reckon that's as civilised as it gets. And I guess that makes me a civilised man. Got it's upside civilisation.

The other man

I caught sight yesterday of a photo from Jennie's wedding. Jennie, of course, looked fine, but it was her new husband Tim who really caught my attention.

He's an odd looking fellow. Unattractive really. You might expect me as the other man to think something like that, but I like to think I'm pretty fair. I knew he wasn't flash looking, but lets face it, beauty isn't everything. But he's definitely both odd looking and ugly - which is surprising if only because Jen is a good looking girl herself.

Funny thing I didn't feel a lot seeing the photo. I felt disconnected from it, as if it had little real relevance to me. That was accentuated by the way he looked - I couldn't see him as a rival, even though he got the girl. I certainly didn't feel any pangs of loss or jealousy. If anything I looked at the photo and recalled the connection we had Jen and I, and felt affirmed that it was indeed a close run thing.

These days I'm pretty philosophical.

In the dentists chair

I went to the dentist on Monday for the first time in about 8 years - I'm one of those people not so crazy about the dentist. The good news was that my teeth are pretty good. One small filling and that would do it. Today I popped along to the dentist again to get it done.

I remembered this morning why I'm not crazy about the dentist. I mean nobody likes getting holes drilled in their teeth and pointy needles stuck into their gums, but there's a lot more to it than that. For me I reckon it's the absolute loss of power. There you are sitting in the dentists chair, tilted back and with your mouth agape. You lay there with your mouth jammed open and numbed from the anaesthetic. Above you like some omnipotent God the dentist pokes around in your mouth with sharp instruments and a humming drill pulverising the decayed tooth. He chats with the dental assistant about lunch plans and about a groovy song he heard coming into work that morning. You stare up through the oddly coloured and silly looking glasses they've put on you, incapable of anything more. You might as well be a piece of meat, except every now and then the dentist brightly asks how you're going. In normal circumstances you might attempt some witty rejoinder, but the best you can do with your mouth jammed open is some kind of guttural grunt. While all this is happening the dental assistant sticks her little sucking tool in your mouth like you're a baby. Sometimes you feel a trail of liquid run down your chin onto the small bib they've clipped around your neck. Oh joy, you think, so this is what its like to be a baby. Or a very old person.

Then they're done. You rinse and spit. One side of your face feels swollen. You imagine your misshapen face. And afterwards when you have a coffee you have to guard against dribbling.

Good news that's it for 6 months - or maybe another 7 years. We'll play it by ear.

In his reflected glory

Went for a walk with Rigby this morning. This is a regular event, but is always cause for great excitement in his life. Like most dogs I've met, there's no such thing as too much walkies. Anyway we wandered up the quiet Sunday morning road with him leading the way, pulling at the lead and snuffling in bushes while I ambled behind him, occasionally calling him to heel.

Up at the shops I tied him up while I bought a couple of groceries, and then we started back again. As on million occasions previously I was stopped by an elderly woman smiling at Rigby as if she'd never seen anything so beautiful. The usual questions followed: he's a chocolate, isn't he? Yes. How old is he? About 7 months. Is he a good boy? Mmm, sometimes. And it's like that regularly, people stopping to enquire or pat him while he dances excitedly, jumping up and licking them; and others simply grinning at him as if the mere sight of such a beautiful creature is enough to brighten their day. Which might be fair enough.

By and large this attention is 100% for Rigby. I'm just the dolt on the other end of the lead, or so I figure - and I'm happy for it to be that way. I'm proud of the boy. Then as we neared home this morning a girl came the other way near the roundabout. She was all smiles at the sight of Rigby, but then she looked at me and gave me a smile all to myself.

We passed, Rigby and I walked on, and I ruminated on this. It occurred to me that this had happened before. And as I considered it I figured out why, or at least I think so.

Chances are without Rigby in tow this girl today would not have given me a second look. With him though - and this is strange - I bathe in his reflected glory: I must be a lovely guy to own such a beautiful dog. Can't argue with that.

*Rigby graduated from his obedience classes yesterday. No dog runs through a tunnel as well as he does.Good boy!

**Yes, this is the week for asterisks. Next week: footnotes.

Gastronomic juices

I don't normally plug other blogs, largely because I'm an arrogant bastard, but also because it seems somehow elitist - I may be arrogant but I'm damned if I'm elitist. Anyway, I'm making an exception on this occasion.

Melbourne Gastronome is the blog of - guess what? - a Melbourne gastronome. To that extent I guess it has limited appeal to those unfortunates who don't reside in Melbourne, and/or are not gastronomically inclined.Of course I am one of those privileged many who live in this great city who also loves food - things that go together really, like roast meat with gravy.

I first came across her blog a couple of months ago when Fong excitedly sent me a message about it. Guess what she said, there's a photo of us on this foodie blog!* I checked it out. Sure enough, there we were, handsome H and Fong, sharing a meal on one of our regular forays out for good tucker. The thrill soon passed but I continued to read, and read, and read...

The gastronome writes about the myriad restaurants, cafes and various gastronomic nooks and crannies of Melbourne with passion and a mouth watering clarity. I think I eat out a lot, and get to some out of the way places, but the gastronome has me well and truly covered.

Reading her reviews and the descriptions of the meals she had I must admit I started falling in love with her a touch. What do they say? The way to a man's heart is through his stomach? Well, half right anyway, but true enough that I began to feel a warm glow reading her rapturous words.

It's hard not to experience an heartfelt affection towards a woman who shares so many of my pleasures - and with such gusto.** I began to actually believe she was living my life, only more so - the food, the restaurants, the weekends away. Then I figured that she's probably 20 stone with all that food. I'm happy to be a distant admirer and an avid reader - and I recommend her to all you foodies out there.

*As it happens this blog is referred too and quoted from in many contexts, but possibly none more so than when it comes to food in general and restaurants in particular. It's odd to come across these little snippets on other people's blogs, but sort of nice too. 

**For some reason I am reminded about that classic Woody Allen joke (from Annie Hall):

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."

Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.