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September 29, 2005
Falsely Accused!
1. The A-Team
L-R: Lt Templeton "Face" Peck, Col John "Hannibal" Smith, Capt H.M. "Howlin' Mad" Murdock, Sgt Bosco "B.A." Baracus".
In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire The A-Team.
2. Christopher Lambert
"A Prison of the Future. A High-Tech Hell. Built to Hold Anything... Except an Innocent Man." It is the year 2017. When his wife is found to be pregnant with an illegal second child (they lost the first one! THEY LOST IT!), Christopher is imprisoned in a state-of-the-art underground hellhole. He eventually escapes with the assistance of an enormous truck. Rumours that Warwick Capper (as "Braindead Prisoner") contributed to John's escape would seem to have some merit.
3. Daniel Day Lewis
A happy-go-lucky, hard-drinking petty thief who liked to chase girls, Daniel Day, in the Jim Sheridan film In The Name Of The Father, was arrested in 1974 under the newly-introduced British Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which allowed Police to hold a person suspected of terrorist activities for up to seven days without charging them and without providing them access to a lawyer or a magistrate. He was interrogated, physically beaten and deprived of food, water and sleep by police who wanted him to confess to the IRA bombing of a pub in Guildford. He protested his innocence until the last day when he signed a confession under the impression that he would be able to later retract it. He, along with three others who together became known as the "Guildford Four", were convicted and imprisoned on the strength of their forced confessions. Appeals failed. After fifteen years, the files hidden from Daniel Day's defence lawyers were discovered and he was released, an innocent man.
4. Gerry Conlon
As per Daniel Day Lewis, above. Oh, except it actually happened to him.
But don't worry, our anti-terror laws expire in ten years.
Posted by Peter at 01:31 AM | Comments (1)
September 26, 2005
A Very Glutbusters Grand Final Day
0500. Is it time to get up yet?
0530. Please. Can I get up now?
0545. Please please please can I get up?
0600. Wake. Lie in dark waiting for alarm. Grand Final day is better than Christmas.
0630. Alarm.
0655. On bike. Getting pissed on. Heaps shitter than Christmas.
0715. Arrive at MCC Members Gates. Walk around perimeter of ground to back of queue of blueblood toffs lining up for their first footy game of the year. Claim moral highground.
0720. Still walking. Passing hall of famers. Leigh Matthews' moustache even more implausible on a 10-foot bronze statue.
0725. Arrive at end of queue, only metres from where I parked my bike. Marvel at how many young members have the collars of their polos upturned.
0800. Queue begins to move. Collars remain firmly vertical despite stiff breeze.
0815. In ground. Monster elderly members en route to brilliant seats - front row of level 3.
0850. Receive ticket. Go home.
1100. Receive call from friend with two free tickets that she can't use. Swear. Remember workmate who is a Swans fan (and lecherous Paul Roos lover), and her 12-year-old daughter even more (though less on the Roosy, more on the Kirky). Offer them as possible candidates to receive tickets. Friend announces she will ring a couple of other people first. End call. Crisis of faith - should I have lied and said I didn't have tickets and then passed them on to let two fans go to the Grannie? Could I have begged? Should I have pleaded? Have I failed the gods of football by not laying down my dignity to get a fan a GF ticket?
1130. Friend rings again. She is plagued by similar doubts. Offers tickets.
1135. Call work colleague. She does loud squeals down the phone. She tells her daughter, who does loud sobs.
1140. Shit! Should I have thought of The Redhead first? To whom to I owe first obligation? Her or football?
1230. Amidst toffs again as I arrive to collect the tickets from friend at the Athanaeum Club. Tickets not there. Head to ground.
1240. Tickets have arrived. Back to the club.
1245. On way to the ground. Tickets in wallet - the dreams of a little girl now in my hand. Pretty comfortable with "hero" status.
1300. Meet colleague and daughter. Daughter head to toe in swans gear. Tracksuit, jumper, scarf, 9 badges, face painted. Weak with excitement. Hand over two tickets to paradise. Or hell on earth - we'll see.
1310. Shit! They were AFL Members' tickets! The horrible possibility that I have lured a young girl from Hurstbridge in the hope of seeing her Swannies win a flag only to be denied at the final hurdle by an overly-officious AFL person rears its ugly, ugly head. More panic.
1320. In ground. SMS from workmate confirms they are at their seats and that she has already knocked off a couple of burbies to calm her nerves. Who could blame her.
1331. Delta subjects us to her ugly, ugly voice. I'm all-a-quiver. (False alarm, just gas).
1339. Australian Idol finalists perform Waltzing Matilda. Peter from Glutbusters heard to exclaim (a little too loudly) "could you butcher this song any more you talentless shits?" Stands by it in face of stern glares from fellow members.
1356. Michael Bublé. Why?
1400. Dame Edna. Gold.
1432. National Anthem. Roar. Goosebumps.
1435. Perhaps the greatest football game I have ever seen begins.
1530. Father and I divided in our loyalties. Me the Swans. Him the Eagles. To be more precise: him Chris Judd.
1700. Leo Barry takes the biggest mark of the year. Me and Dad exhausted yet buzzing in the knowledge that we have just seen one of the all-time greats.
1710. I weep. Again. Deep down, just a little bit, and I'll never admit it, and I have no idea what you're talking about, I wished I barracked for Sydney. A sneaky look at Dad suggests he might feel the same.
1800. Call from colleague. Daughter heard to say "best day of my life". Turned out the seats were near workmate's brother, and they were able, when the siren went, to exchange glances and remember their father, a Blood from way back, who died earlier this year.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. God, I love football.
Posted by Peter at 12:02 AM | Comments (11)
September 21, 2005
It's The Little Things You Do Together
Being in a play, a good one, anyway, with a good cast, is like falling in love.
In the early rehearsals, you're all getting to know each other. Did he really laugh at that? Does she always wear those clothes? Could there really be another person that into Stevie Wonder? All you know at that stage is that these people love the same thing you do - the rest is a mystery. But all it takes is one significant shared experience, say, a rehearsal weekend at a beach house, and that curious attraction turns into full-blown, first-day-of-spring, dancing-hand-in-hand-through-a-field-of-daisies romance.
That's where I'm at now. I am HOT for my cast. I've had play crushes before, but this is a play crush on fifteen people. All I want to do is spend time with them. And then when I do, all I want to do is nothing - laugh, talk shit, sing songs. When I'm on my own, I idly wonder what they would think of my CDs, my clothes, the fact that I stink of petrol because my Kombi is trying to kill me slowly with fume inhalation. We have our own little private jokes, shared stories, facial expressions. I am besotted with them, all of them. Besotted with the group, with the feeling that is only there when we are. God, I feel unfaithful to The Redhead just thinking about them.
It's this feeling that keeps me coming back to plays and musicals. Sure, I love the performing, but the magic of a group of people being thrown together to create something (hopefully) great is something that I've never felt anywhere else. "Fun" isn't the word, though it's the one I use most often to describe it. But the short answer is that you don't know what it's like until you've tried it. And once I did, I couldn't get enough of it.
But ours is an impossible love. At the end of October we'll finish the last of our five shows (five shows? All that work for five shows?) and that'll be it. Some of us will keep in contact, some of us won't. And even if, by some unprecedented miracle of post-show relations, we all regularly get together, it won't be the same. The thing that binds us together so strongly is only fleeting. But, like a love lost, it'll always be with us.
Posted by Peter at 02:47 AM | Comments (16)
September 19, 2005
Circle Of Life
Heartbreaking tribunal controversies?
A mysterious Brownlow leak playing havoc with the odds?
Not enough tickets for all the fans?
I love Grand Final week.
Posted by Peter at 01:38 PM | Comments (56)
September 16, 2005
Overheard in New York - for a different perspective on Jesus.Posted by Peter at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)
Narky Mark
A lot has been written by people sharper than me about Mark Latham's savaging of the Labor Party, so I won't go into any analysis of the political implications for Latham, the ALP etc etc.
What I will say is that this whole sordid thing makes me very sad.
Sad because I put my eggs in the Latham basket early on, and rode with him all the way. On my short-lived radio show (Glutbusters, funnily enough) we had a "Latham-watch" segment, a slot based on the premise that Mark was the future of the ALP and he was worth following, and also cause he called the Libs a "conga-line of suckholes".
Sad because after years of pissweak opposition under Beazley and Crean, I finally felt like I had a real Labor man who'd get up there and tell Howard to fuck off, who'd ridicule Alexander Downer for the poncy toff he is, and who'd drop the shoulder, Byron Pickett-style, into the rest of the front bench if he encountered them in the halls of Parliament House. Sad because here was a bloke who'd put his balls on the line and say "health and education - fuck yeah! And if you don't like it, you're a selfish prick!"
Sad because I was so convinced that the rest of Australia would see what I saw that I held an Election Night Party in eager anticipation, for which I printed out electorate profiles from Antony Green's awesome site and blu-tacked them to the wall for easy reference.
I still think that he would have been the sort of PM that made me proud of my government. Maybe that's naive and idealistic, but shit, someone's gotta be.
So I'm sad that it's come to this. But most of all, I'm sad that not only is he not around to drag the government over the coals for an atrocious exercise of their fancy new "anti-terrorism" powers ("piss off, you bearded university dick, and pay us eleven grand", government heard to say), but that he's pushing it off the front pages.
And so it goes.
Posted by Peter at 02:36 PM | Comments (9)
September 14, 2005
Self-Analysis Time
In the wake of Roger Federer's demolition of Andre Agassi in the latter part of Sunday's US Open Final, and Agassi's concession that he has never seen a player like Roger, it's time to examine that other loose cannon on the tennis circuit - Peter from Glutbusters.
So let's break down the game.
Forehand - Once the lynchpin of a formidable schoolboy game, perhaps its most famous moment was being ripped off the back foot past an approaching Rob C on the dusty red en-tous-cas of court 1 at St Andrew's Church, Brighton, around 1995. Now a shadow of its former self. At its best: a crushing weapon of demoralisation; at its worst, an embarrassing shank capable of sending balls into neighbouring courts/houses/heads.
Attire - Defiantly casual. Collars shunned unless part of deliberate retro pastiche of tennis fashions past. Shorts appropriately-lengthed; neither religion-revealing (a la John McEnroe circa 1982) nor obtrusively long (see Rafael Nadal). Anklet socks preferred for calf definition and lengthening of legs except on certain surfaces. (Tips for new players: on grass and en-tous-cas/clay, longer socks prevent your shoes filling up with crap from the court- Ed.)
Backhand - Aesthetically the rival of Federer's. Front foot planted and knee gracefully bent. Tremendous shoulder rotation. Ball striking tragically generates about as much power as a newly-retired midweek lady. Wish I had listened to my coach when, at age 10, he counselled a double-hander. Recently-outed (at the time) lesbian Hana Mandlikova hit one (or did she?). Either way, I wasn't interested.
Accessories - Excellent use of trendy sunvisor in neutral grey. Wristband (always present on right wrist) rotated through a variety of styles/colours and used theatrically for brow mopping at crucial moments. Key to club kept on bright green Prince lanyard next to Prince racquet - the syncronicity of marque suggesting sponsorship as a not unlikely possibility.
Volleys - Solid. Spectacular in fact. Particularly down low. A crushing piece of the Glutbusters armory.
Serve - Punishing. Economical, Sampras-esque technique, excellent reach, unparalleled accuracy. See Fig 1.
Fig. 1
Temperament - Top class mastery of a broad range of tantrums, from the frustrated racquet-bounce to the despairing self-flagellation ("Peter, you fuckwit") to the run-for-your-lives-kids-there's-a-psycho-on-court-twelve explosiveness of hitting balls into, and occasionally over, the back fence.
Big-game experience - Held on to win a nail-biter in the Men's Doubles (Section 2) at the Cohuna Lawn Tennis Club Easter Tournament 2005. Nerves of steel.
Look out, Roger.
Posted by Peter at 12:10 AM | Comments (3)