First photo from iphone.

I know I have poor fashion sense

But I absolutely love this Perks and Mini t-shirt that I bought (on sale!) today because it totally cracks me up. Those sausages are so cute!

Random fact about Evol #336

In three months I'll be turning 30, and I still don't know how to do up a necktie. No, I didn't have to wear one to school.

Gettin' Neurotic

Hey yallz, my pal Jon has recently joined the cast over at homo-neurotic. A New York based blog/online zine talking everything art, fashion, music and pop culture with a queer edge. Jon is now homo-neurotic's resident writer on all things decadent and Bling. Check it, bitches.

Do(n't) believe the hype!

I must admit that until a few days ago, I wasn't really that fussed about the impending release of the iphone. A phone that connects to the internet and lets you check emails? Meh.

But Frances and I realised at the turn of the financial year that we should have had our mobile phones registered under our business name, rather than getting the business to pay us back as an expense. You know, better for personal tax. So we started talking about getting new phones, which led to the idea that it would be cool to be able to check our emails occasionally when we're out of the office and expecting something urgent.

So this morning we ordered an iphone each. I feel a little like the hype has gotten the better of me (I'm about to have a Domestos shower) but at the same time I'm kinda excited about being able to join a Guy and his Mac in an iphone reportage orgy. Also, that I can carry some music around in itunes on my phone.

See what I mean? It's a bloody phone for chrissake! Why am I (we!) obsessed with all this other fandangle stuff? At the end of the day all we really need it for is making phonecalls right? And when you really think about it, us humans survived for a long time without mobile phones, hell without any phones at all!

Hmmm, this modern life is a real contradiction. As the ever anxious Thom Yorke once professed, "Here I'm allowed, I've got everything all of the time."

Still, I bet Thom's already got a iphone.

Newsflash!

Nicole Kidman gives birth to Sunday Roast.

Weekend warriors

I've been super frantic at work this week. We had a new, fairly large client come on board, which has been taking up a lot of my attention. I've had to spend a lot of time on the phone whoring myself off to journalists, a part of my job that I truly despise.

So it was with much relief that at 4pm Friday afternoon Andrew and I were skirting traffic jams on the freeway, heading out towards Metung for a weekend with our friends down there. We were handed champagne on arrival, and after dinner we polished a bottle of red in front of the fireplace.

A weekend eating, snoozing, reading my book and walking in the fresh air. Just what I needed.

The lives of others.

This afternoon, Frances and I were giggling like schoolgirls while on a tram traveling down Spencer Street past Crown Casino, when the vehicle starts screeching to a halt. Us passengers jolt forward and I instinctively look up and out the front windows of the tram. Two scraggly junkies, a guy and girl, are shuffling across the tram's path, all scabs and oily hair and cheap tracksuits. They're only two or three metres in front of the tram and I think to myself that they're never going to make it out of the way in time. The carriages groans to a stop, there's a dull thud and screams escape a few of the passengers. The male junkie is sprawled across the tracks in front of another tram closing in from the opposite direction. His girlfriend is trying to pull him out of the way, but she's floating in space with no gravity. He picks himself up at the last second, seemingly oblivious to either of the trams, and they stumbled in a haze across three lanes of beeping and skidding peek hour traffic. Amazingly they make it to the footpath unscathed and drop to the concrete, where the guy lights a cigarette.

Satan is Boring

(untitled)

Mr Dan over at Wordage posted a wonderful meme recently. One that totally appealed to the music nerd in me - place your iTunes on shuffle, and use the song titles to answer the following questions.

1. What does next year have in store for me? Face

2. What’s my love life like? Dry Lips

3. What do I say when life gets hard? The Needle and the Damage Done

4. What do I think of on waking up? Keys open Doors

5. What song will I dance to at my wedding? Space

6. What do I want as a career? Improvisation Ajoutee

7. My favorite saying? Y.T.T.E. (Yield to Total Elation)

8. Favorite place? Scream Like a Baby

9. What do I think of my parents? Elixir

10. What’s my porn star name? Low

11. Where would I go on a first date? One More Time

12. Drug of choice? Could you be Loved?

13. Describe myself. New Feeling

14. What is the thing I like doing most? How Soon is Enough?

15. What is my state of mind like at the moment? The Trees

16. How will I die? Lee is Free

Hmmm, for the record (pardon the pun) my lips are dry because my love life involves some serious passion! And I definitely want to improvise my career. My porn star name could be more exciting though, and I'm not sure my parents are an elixir. Question 7 came up kinda cool, and there's something kinda fitting about question 15.

If you're interested, the artistys behind the above answers (in order of appearance) were Dizzee Rascal, Lightspeed Champion, Neil Young, Clipse, The Beta Band, Sonic Youth, Matmos, David Bowie, Vast Aire, Silverchair, Bob Marley, Talking Heads, The Smiths, Autechre, Sonic Youth

I won't burden anyone with the meme, but give it a go if you can bothered peeps. Meme it up!

This craze ain't catchin' on

While browsing the furniture stores on Church Street in Richmond yesterday, Andrew and I stumbled across one of the those cars that radio stations have parked randomly about the city, offering giveaways to passers by. This one was for Mix FM. Now, I rarely listen to the radio because I can't stand hearing the presenters bang on and on and on, but if I was to listen to the radio, Mix FM would not be my station of choice.

Needless to say, that didn't stop us from making the most of the chips and chocolates being given away by the young, perfectly sculpted boys with no brains. Along with the junk food, they also gave us one of these each:

In case you can't make out the label, it's a can of self-heating coffee by some company called Perkett's. Sounds like a very Japanese concept to me, and while I was mortified by the chemical reaction that must take place in that can to heat the drink up, I was intrigued enough to try it. I'm always up for a gimmick. Here goes.

Step 1, Shake can well.

Step two, release the 'tamper proof' cap. See that greenish ring in there?

Whatever that green shit is, that's what heats up the coffee. The next step was to push down the centre of the green ring until the green liquid disappears, like so.

After waiting ten seconds, you flip the can upright and wait 5 - 8 minutes until this pink circle:

turns white, like so

And finally, open the can and suck down that chemically hot caffeine........goodness.....

It tasted like crap. It was like stuffing ten packets of artificial sweetener and three tablespoons of instant coffee into your mouth. I had three sips and threw it out. By the time I got to the bin, my stomach was churning and a little bit of barf lurched up into the back of my throat. Andrew took one sniff of the coffee and was smart enough not to try it.

Perkett's, your product tastes like ass.

The polls are open.

Today I'd like to discuss a very serious social dilemma. A conundrum that we all (well, something like four out of ten of us anyway) face on perhaps a daily basis. The cornerstone of social etiquette.

Today I'm going to discuss, the gay greeting kiss.

We know a couple that we don't see very often. An older gay couple. And whenever we see them, they greet us with a giant kiss each. And not any kiss. They go for the lips.

Personally, I turn my head and give them the cheek. But Andrew, he feels too rude doing that so he goes along with it.

We're not big on the gay greeting kiss, I don't know why. Perhaps because we don't give a hello peck to any of the straight guys we know, so why kiss our gay male friends hello? In my mind, the greeting kiss is something for your female friends (or more importantly grandmothers and aunts). Which is kinda silly when you think that in many European countries men kiss each other hello left, right and center.

Maybe deep down I have this horribly sub conscious, internalised sense of doubt about my own sexuality. But no, I doubt that. At the end of the day I'll give a greeting kiss when it's called for. But the lips? I think that's getting a bit personal!

So, I'd like to poll you guys for your thoughts on the gay greeting kiss, and more specifically the gay greeting kiss on the lips.

Hit me.

Spooky

Frances and I shut the office a little early yesterday and snuck out to see Spanish, supernatural thriller The Orphanage. I'd originally thought the film was directed by Guillermo Del Toro, responsible for the delicious Pan's Labyrinth, but as it happens he's merely 'presenting'.......

It's not difficult to see why Del Toro has openly supported The Orphanage because the stories driving the above mentioned films are very similar. Where Pan's Labyrinth focused on a young girl lost between the realms of fantasy and reality, The Orphanage inverts this scenario by placing an adult in the same position.

After her adopted son goes missing, Laura begins to believe the old orphanage she has just renovated with her husband could be inhabited by a group of mischievous spirits. But is this just a symptom of her grief?

I really liked the film. It had a beautiful pace, the cinematography was impressive and it used subtlety as a scare tactic rather than beating you over the head with levitations, bleeding walls and the like. And that kid with the sack over his head was just plain creepy.

R*yan reported that while he enjoyed it, he didn't require diapers during the film, but I was sufficiently spooked. Check it out if you can handle subtitles.

Teen angst and the sentimental

I've always been a bit of a hoarder. But over the last 12 months I've gone through a phase of pushing myself to get rid of stuff I know I'll never use, and which has no real sentimental value. In a nutshell, I've run out of space for my crap.

last night I got around to sorting out three shoeboxes of clippings, flyers, old photos, found objects and random bits of junk. I started collecting this stuff more than ten years ago when I began art school and was really into making collages. I never stopped collecting.

last night I culled it all down to half a box. Amongst all of the crap, I found this:

I took this photo back in 1997, my first year out of high school, while I was doing a folio building course to get into artschool. We had to shoot a self portrait as part of our final portfolio. That's my teenage bedroom in the picture. I used a tripod outside my window, and a really long exposure, so that by moving around the room while the film was exposed I'd end up as a ghostly presence.

The print is fairly damaged - there's pin holes and blotches all over it.

Of all the things I found in those three shoeboxes, this photo struck a major chord with me. Instantly I was teleported back to my last couple of 'teen' years - which I really struggled with. Half in and half out of the closet; stuck deep in the bowls of low-income suburbia; growing up with kids who weren't interested in anything cultural and whom I had little in common with; I felt like fucking freak.

I spent a lot of time in that bedroom. With the stereo on, loudly. My head buried in a book. As you can see from all the crap that adorned my walls (yes those embarrassing paintings were mine), it was a typical teen angst bedroom and literally my world. When I took that photo I wanted it to be as voyeuristic as possible, because I actually felt like I was in some weird place separate from the world, looking out at everyone.

Finding this image, and suddenly feeling like I was back there for a moment, made me realise just how far I've come, and how much my life has changed. I'm happier, more centered, I've achieved lots of things and had experiences I hadn't imagined I would. I feel like I'm part of the world now.

Ten years is a long time, you change and your life changes. But often you don't really notice these changes. You don't necessarily feel any different. Until finding something like that photo and realising your journey.

Then there's my favourite Radiohead lyric (favourite lyric of all time?) -

"Don't get sentimental, it always ends up drivel."