Learning to embrace sentimentality

You don't have to be angry and misunderstood to make music.

When you're young, sentimentality is anathema. No one could possibly understand the anger and rage that you're feeling. No one listens to you. You're an outcast. An acceptance of sentimentality in your experiences would be a betrayal to your rebellious ethos. And you want to tell the world that you're special.

These days, the internet allows everyone, from tween fanbois to baby boomers with financial problems, to voice their opinion. Forums are built upon a narrow set of interests, allowing existing prejudices to build with the encouragement of others. There will be discussions that explore differences in opinion, but by and large these are superficial. A lot of chaff abounds from which a tiny bit of wheat can be sorted.

There is an interesting combination of youthful ebullience and insular online communities which breeds a culture of protest against sentimentality. And to that a desire to belong, to something, to anything, and the internet magically produces endless levels of pop culture elitism.

Had I assumed a greater online presence when I was 17, I wonder if I would have been stunted in that young-rage period. I don't pretend to be an island, with opinions set in stone. In fact, I can be very impressionable, and at times I suspect that my thoughts about something or other may be someone else's rather than my own. It is when I reach this thought that I take a self-imposed break from the internet to think for myself.

I talk about this now because I feel that I have grown to embrace sentimentality in music, movies, and TV. I am not bursting with iridescent anger, the diffuse kind of anger which characterises teenage and young adulthood - where you are furious, but don't know about what. I have albums in my collection which I recall being so sympathetic to, but no more. And now, I enjoy music which my younger self would have slapped me for even considering. That is not to say there isn't energy, life or a sense of protest in it - there still is - but it is leavened with reason and focus. You cannot stay angry at nothing forever.

Comedy snobs and wine snobs have more than a thing or two in common

The first few times I tried to drink wine, I couldn't get past the sourness. I went away to learn a bit more about what I was supposed to taste. The dozen or so times afterwards, all I found was that I should have been referring to "acidity" rather than sourness. Now many bottles later, I'm proud to say that I can pick out a few broad descriptors, but I'll be damned if I can detect a slight hint of French oak in five millilitres of fermented grapes.

There is one general guide to wines that I have found more than useful, though. Wines essentially require the right balance between sweetness and acidity. Too sweet, and the wine is sickly and cloying. Too acid, and your mouth will pucker, and you will be unable to taste anything else. In this respect, comedy and wines have more than a thing or two in common.

The American sitcoms of the '80s and early 90's could be paradigms for the sickly sweet category. Shows such as Growing Pains, Full House, and Home Improvement traded on safe stereotypes and morality plays. The excessive sweetness of the characters and plots paradoxically created a sense of blandness; that is to say, after being bombarded with the nice, the show's personality loses all definition. Of course, these criticisms are hardly revolutionary, and many of these shows attempted to redress the balance with what became mandatory "very special" episodes - Webster meets a paedophile, Blossom gets her first period, Balki is put into immigrant detention - well, the last one is untrue but I always wondered how Larry would have responded in such a situation, given how much of a milquetoast he is. Nevertheless, these very special episodes only served to confuse an audience who could not have expected this from TV shows which had never given any indication of perverseness.

None of this is new. But I wonder if we are now suffering from what is at the other end of the spectrum - unrelenting and intolerable acidity.

There is a good deal to be mined from humiliating and embarrassing situations. It is almost impossible for a youngish person like myself to remember a time when mockumentaries weren't part of the comedic landscape. Now they're everywhere and reproducing like the proverbial bunny. From this country alone we have had We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High; the most notable examples from overseas have included the Office, Extras, and Larry Sanders Show (+ It's Garry Shandling's Show). There is one other thing that links them all together: I have never been able to complete an entire episode of any of them, not out of boredom or disgust, but due to the amount of skipping I do.

I find the bitter humiliation which engulfs their main characters on a regular basis to be so noxious that I cannot watch it, cannot bear to be in the same room as it, and cannot get past the pain to enjoy the rest because, well, I'm no longer within watching distance of the TV. And if I cannot watch it, how can I enjoy it? The successes of the above listed shows demonstrate that there are many people out there with far thicker skins than I. Personally, I find these shows to fall a bit too much on the sour side.

There are, of course, numerous examples of shows which have successfully mixed the sweet with the sour - Arrested Development, the Simpsons, Futurama, Spaced, Flight of the Conchords, even CNNNN, which combines attacks on political figures with increasingly elaborate Fungry's ads - but sometimes I wonder if the comedy scale had been recalibrated without my knowledge in the mid-90's, enabling meanness, humiliation and insult to pass for comedy and entertainment. How else can I explain the rise of the vindictive reality program, which appears to demand uppity sharp-tongued critics, and harsh unwarranted judgement of contestants from an ignorant and superficial public?

You will not believe me if I told you what brought on all this thinking. I have been listening to Mick Molloy's temporary stint on Nova FM, co-hosting with Dave Hughes and Ed Kavalee. Hughes' comedy appears to centre entirely on being insulting; when he fails in a war of insults, he often trails off and mumbles, with little else to say, certainly not anything positive. Molloy on the other hand, also relies on insults, but is able to switch gears at times to put on his "poor me" act to endear himself to the audience. And is also well capable of being entertaining with just plan wit. So how is it that Dave Hughes is the one with the radio program, the TV program, the DVD? Where's the comedy scale and who's messed with it?

When mediocrity no longer cuts it, and you're found out

If Sydney's tourist attractions were a weapon, it would be Homer's make-up shotgun.

Another day, another marketing piece reporting Sydney's declining tourist popularity. What has always bothered me about Sydney's popularity as a tourist destination is why anyone would want to visit it a second time.

Those destinations steeped in history are well able to exploit its monuments and places of anthropological interest. Those which are relatively young must instead strive to keep changing its face - that is, to continue to generate interest in returning by providing a new experience each time. Often this is in the form of modern art, whether it be theater, music, visual arts or sporting occasions.

That is not to say that Sydney does not have any of these things. But it seems not to be a major point of tourist advertising. Hello, harbour. Hello, Harbour Bridge. Hello, Opera House. Hello, Taronga Zoo. Hello, Circular Quay. Hello, Bondi Beach. Right, let's go home. This can be done in a day. What else is there? What of the city life? You wanna get glassed at 2 in the morning, go ahead.

As a born-and-bred resident of this shithole, I could go on and on about the lack of civil planning, but that is generally of no interest to tourists. Nevertheless, the shameless bragging about Sydney's greatness as a place to visit makes me sick. And it makes me glad that there's less reason for that arrogance as visitors stay away. Keep your hard-earned dollars, dear tourists, and go to Melbourne instead.

profernity's midway report on the ICC World T20

Yeah you read that right. The part of your brain which makes your daily leaps to conclusions has been causing you, like the rest of us, to call this competition the T20 World Cup, when in fact it's not a Cup, who told you it was, not me, not the ICC, no way, it's the ICC World T20, which is a nonsensical title. What is a World T20? Is it a single match of twenty overs, but with 55-a-side? Would India and Pakistan be placed on the same team? Would Ireland and Scotland also be placed with England? I suppose you may as well, seeing as how England has poached so many of their players (zing!)

Stupid name aside, what this tourney does right is that it's only about 2 weeks long. That's how an international tournament is staged, not that abortion of a competition called the ICC World Cup, which seemed to continue on as the seasons shifted from spring to winter. And Australia won that too. Utterly useless.

As for the matches, they've offered some real surprises here and there, sometimes due to the nature of knockout competition, but really due to the way T20s can bring out some unexpected results. I hesitate to use the word lottery, because teams never entirely luck themselves into or out of a win, but it definitely takes less to turn a match around in this format. I can't talk about specific matches really since I've seen less than a handful of them (call it a fingerful, if you like), but I suppose the one conclusion I have is that we don't have an applicable ranking to T20 teams because they're just defeating each other too often.

What are my attitudes to T20's? Fine, get rid of ODIs. For all the 6-fatigue I get from watching a single T20, god forbid I actually get the chance to watch an entire tournament, that would do my head in. Yet I had already grown tired of ODIs before this. It used to be a steady first 15 overs, consolidation during the middle 20-25 overs, then acceleration at the end. Then Sri Lanka came along and changed all that, so we had Australia 0-65 after 10 overs, faster consolidation in the middle overs, then 80-100 off the last 10 overs or so. The totals kept increasing and increasing, grounds got smaller, and really T20 was inevitable.

I curse Powerplays. We had batting powerplays to further assert the batsman's dominance in ODIs, then bowling powerplays were introduced because the ICC realised that maybe that wan't such a good thing, when really they could have just done away with the powerplays altogether, but NO, they'd rather overcomplicate by adding more rubbish to a game with many rules. How about relaxing the wide rule? Fuck if batsmen don't get soft treatment in ODIs and T20s. If it were up to me, get rid of ODIs and replace with T20s, because even after decades of the stuff, I don't think there's one cricket-playing nation who treasures an ODI series trophy, other than as a marker of genaral achievement.

Eu sou aprender a falar Português.

This is too much work. I want to be ferried from place to place without having to think. Am I turning into the "coach tourist"? I would dearly love to just walk around Lisbon for a few days. But learning Portuguese in two weeks is too much.

"Hope I die before I get old"

I am officially over the phenomenon that is Fake IPL Player.

Initially an exciting novelty, interest was furthered with the dawning realisation that this person is someone close enough to provide details. But it has fizzled out, for me at least, and now I wish it to be over and gone before long.

The sheer number of posts per day, and the potentially libellous statements contained within them, are signs of an unsustainable blog. The inevitable amount of media attention was amplified simply because of the Indian focus - IPL, Ganguly v. Shah Rukh Khan, and the gaudy Kolkata Knight Riders franchise. Since the story has "blown up", so to speak, the interest in the blog, and the blog posts themselves, are entirely centred around uncovering the identity of the blogger. In other words, he has achieved what all trolls love to do - to draw attention to themselves, and derail any kind of sane discussion.

The fun for myself, initially, was that the blog provided a sort of portal into how professional teams (or cobbled-together superstar aggregations) operate. For this to be an enjoyable experience, the narrator needs to occupy very little space in the story. He or she is your eyes and ears, not your brains or conscience. As it is a blog and not a thesis, the narrator's thoughts and opinions are welcomed, but when it loses its balance, it becomes impossible to know what is honest, what is dishonest, what are accurate appraisals and what are character assassinations.

This is what the more recent posts have become, and thus I treat them as pure fiction. The writing comes off as paranoid and bipolar - sometimes everyone's against him, at other times he is allied with other players against Buchanan and his entourage; sometimes he shows signs of worry, at other times he displays extraordinary confidence and arrogance. Perhaps it's the work of more than one person. Maybe more. But I am almost 100% certain that I will not care much for whomever they are revealed to be, for they have not been truthful to the audience and as such I have never really known them.

The Wisdom of Kevin Smith

If you haven't listened to his podcast, SModCast, you are missing out on receiving pearls of wisdom from one of the wittiest, wisest and intelligent people I have ever has the pleasure of listening to. Whether you are an admirer of his work or not, he is always a fun and interesting orator.

I want my time back

6:00am Wake up; exercise; shower, breakfast
8:00am Leave home
9:35am Arrive Redfern station
9:55am Enter lab


5:00/6:00pm Leave lab
5:30/6:30pm Take train from Central
6:25/7:25pm Arrive at Cabramatta
6:50/7:50pm Get home
10:00/11:00pm Sleep


I want all my time back. Why am I paying for the collective incompetence of Sydney's public planning with my life? Why am I travelling almost four hours a day for approximately 70km distance? When I was an undergrad, I had to leave at 7am, and slept at midnight-1am. During high school, It took me just about 3.5hrs a day of total travel. I'm only 23. Sydney has taken away 12 of those years, not simply by subtracting a quantity of my time from each day in which it inflicted its torturous public transport, but significantly by leaving me no better than a walking zombie.

3.5hrs x 5 days x 40wks x 6yrs = 4200hrs
4hrs x 5 days x 26wks x 4yrs = 2080hrs
4hrs x 6 days x 50wks x 2yrs = 2400hrs

Total: 8680hrs, so far. 362 days. Almost one entire year spent on public transport.

I hate you Sydney.

So odd.

And I'm a little worried about the position of the right hand.

Or is it a visual representation of the phrase, "In the driver's seat"?

But for that, nothing beats Kyle Mills' effort:


*HOOOOONNNNNKKK HOOOOOONNNNNKKKK*

V8 Supercars and I are done, professionally

As with most sports, there is a problem with the most well-funded and well-resourced teams always maintaining top spot year after year, while smaller teams may only get a look in once in a while, should the giants momentarily slip. There is no use denying this.

One of the great sources of drama in sports is when you get to see the David and Goliaths mixed up and battling on more even ground. The Clipsal 500 has been a shining beacon for dramatic races, where the more proven contenders suffer misfortune, by their own making or not, and must display the best of their abilities to drive through the field. This has often made Race 2 of the Adelaide Clipsal 500 tense and exciting.

So it came as no surprise to me that rule changes have been made to remove this feature of V8 Supercars. More specifically, qualifying rules have changed, such that your final position in qualifying determines the starting position for all races in that weekend. This is a rule that double, or even triple, punishes those who do not qualify well, while also reducing the punishment on those who qualify well, but do not perform in the race. Why shift the importance towards qualifying? Are we tuning in to see the qualifying, or the race? Why must drivers be forced to fight through a packed field over and over for a single error in QUALIFYING? The very word indicates that it is a method of assessment for a future event. The event being the RACE.

For those who do not support the large teams (like I), this is a kick to my imaginary balls. What's the point of racecraft if you can't pull out a few fast laps in 10 minutes? An error during the race should have consequences for the rest of the round, and not be rectified with this shitstain of a deus ex machina, which deigns to basically airlift the usual top 4 out of any trouble and plop them back at the front of the field at the beginning of each race. These guys make very few errors as it is, what more fucking help do they need?!

This rule is going to destroy sprint rounds. It is hard enough to make headway through the field in short races, this will just confirm once and for all that V8 Supercars doesn't give a shit about anyone else besides Triple 8 and HRT. If this rule continues, I'm done with this joke of a "sport".