Everybody Loves Weyman, or, The Horror of Long Haul Bus Rides

You know how when you talk a lot about football you end up talking almost as much about life, because the two so regularly intersect? Well, it was only a matter of time before the intersection between football and the visual arts demanded attention. Read on, culture vultures!

A fabulous life-sized bronze statue of Dragons behemoth Michael Weyman has been fashioned by a local artist in his hometown of Moruya and installed it in the park by the river. I can think of several hundred NRL players I would prefer to see immortalised in bronze ahead of Weyman (the visually splendid Carney astride the Big Merino, for one) but, still. From what I saw the artist appeared to have captured something of Weyman’s essential blue-collar, battle-axe spirit, as well as that look of piercing, squinting, enraged-bull stoicism he wears a while running at and/or over the top of opponents. (“Get Out of my Weyman”- humourous Red V sign)

I used to ride the Pioneer bus up and down that coast constantly from Bega to Nowra between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Months of my life were spent on that bus, nauseously watching landscape flash past though dirty windows. Moruya was the scheduled stop for the meal break*. It was a faded, seedy town in a state of nonchalant, not altogether offensive disrepair back then. Still, that river mouth or estuary thing lent the place a certain air of raffish elegance in a Mark Twain kind of a way. Towns with a river passing through them somehow always appear more interesting than towns without, even if they are filled with poor-looking people and mean-looking dogs and signs pocked with shotgun blasts. Perhaps the Weyman statue has added a new, more sophisticated dimension to the character of the place. I hope so. I hope the artist hasn’t misread his market. The Laurie Daly statue certainly lifts the tone of Bruce Stadium, but Laurie Daly is a very charming man so it almost goes without saying that his bronze rendering exudes characteristic charisma and charm.  So. Michelangelo’s David, Laurie Daly, and MICHAEL WEYMAN.

In any case, if you haven’t experienced a long distance coach ride you really haven’t lived. To ride on a cross country coach is to engage with a sordid underside of sad and awful lives.  You only really go on a long distance bus because you can’t afford to fly, you can’t afford a car, or you are a delinquent who has been forbidden from driving, and possibly from living within three hundred meters of schools and daycare centres as well.  As a result, most of the people on long distance buses are one of the following: actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, or just released from prison.  

In the same way that you do not buy a meat pie for the meat, you do not expect to meet the finest and best of mankind on long distance buses. I mean, you wouldn’t expect to slip into an empty seat beside the corduroy-wearing Stephen Fry, would you? Hardly. The whole experience is infected with an inexpressible melancholy, punctuated by occasional eruptions of violence as passengers lapse into psychotic episodes and are abruptly ejected from the bus. Additionally, there is the smell. It is a heady bouquet of stale, BO-steeped upholstery and grim, unspecified despair, and it increases in intensity the further back into the bowels of the bus you go. Apparently the Pioneer bus company has become the Premier bus company and has drastically cut back on trips and drastically jacked up their prices.  I wonder where this has left the dangerously disordered and the chronically down and out who genuinely need the bus service to travel up and down the coast? When is the world going to be arranged to benefit the people who need small mercies such as these?  

In other NRL art news (not a sentence I ever expected to write, but something I feel we could all do with more of in our lives), a portrait of Ryan Tandy has been entered in the Archibald competition. It’s a full frontal nude and he is depicted, just as nature intended, with a blue pig lying by his side. It took me aback when I saw it. I stared in a kind of frozen astonishment. The last I saw of Tandy he was being unceremoniously evicted from his apartment, hauling boxes and sweating profusely. He was locked into the slow, untidy spiral of decline that had seen him charged with match fixing and fired from the Bulldogs amid accusations of a gambling problem and substantial debts.

Clearly his personal decision making processes leave something to be desired, but, still, moments of mental collapse happen to the both the best and worst of us, and, if they didn’t our lives wouldn’t be enriched by wonderful moments such as Mel Gibson being caught driving with an open bottle of tequila clenched between his thighs and calling a cop “sugar-tits”. Mad respect to anyone who brings the term sugar-tits back to public prominence.

Really wakes up your interest in the visual arts, all this, doesn’t it?

*Me- “Was that takeaway in Moruya called the Red Rose Café?”

-Brother- “Yeah. Wasn’t that where we used to buy footy cards too?”

Sophie Monk Says NO NO NO To Camel Toe

People! Bad news! Sophie Monk has vowed to start dressing in a less slovenly fashion this year. More specifically, she has said NO to camel toe in 2012. Deep though my respect is for the woman, this irritates me no end. Still, remember when she signed up to be a spokesperson for PETA and was caught buying KFC – twice! -  in LA after doing an ad – a naked pin up, of course, because a. it’s PETA and b. it’s Sophie Monk – and releasing a companion video in which she specifically named and denounced KFC: “I think the message to KFC eaters [is that] you should think about what you’re eating. If you’re eating deformed animals that are being induced by hormones, you know, it cannot be good for you.” And remember how she said she was “buying it for a homeless guy”? A three-piece dinner?!! As excuses go, that one is fucking excellent. And by excellent I mean awful, obviously: crushed like a bug beneath the cold boot of truth. Sophie Monk, as I have previously pointed out, is slightly unhinged. This is good. (See: Courtney Love, Billy Bob Thornton, Britney, etc.) She’s also a raging bogan – the type who consider Summernats an example of high culture. This too is good. She is a national treasure.

Anyway. Before my mind snagged on the thought of Sophie Monk rendering her camel-toe obsolete I was intending to focus on more substantial and immediate issues…. Like the fact that my best friend has left the country. This is completely unacceptable. She asked me to go and I said no and she went anyway and now I miss her terribly. Here are the most recent top two reasons why she is my best friend.

1. She sent a card addressed and written entirely to my most treasured cat after he underwent traumatic and invasive eye surgery recently.

2. She started a conversation recently with the words “So I was watching Antiques Roadshow the other day….”

This year we both turn thirty. God.

Now I’m not saying that one thing has anything to do with the other, but it has recently occurred to me that there exists the very real possibility of slipping in the shower and breaking my skull open like a dropped watermelon and lying undiscovered and unconscious in the resulting emulsions for days. Not the most comforting of thoughts. Still, it’s pretty much the only concern I have with living alone and having a near total aversion to people so I guess it’s okay and anyway I’m half trying to bring myself to buy one of those grotesque sticky non-slippy rubber shower mats, which, along with those orthopedic beaded car-seat-cover things and Payless shoes, are just fucking tragic in the ‘I see dead people – most of them are still alive’ sense but the thought still appalls me so I guess I still have some work to do on that front. Whatever ‘that front’ is. I do know that I don’t like my feet to be exposed to strange textures and sensations within the home. I think I have mentioned my carpeted en suite which my mind cannot and will not accept and forces me to spurn it as I would a rabid dog?

Yes, it will be a dark night of the soul if I ever buy and install that fucking shower mat. 

Anyway, she turned thirty a few days ago and I am thirty in six months and while she seems fine (not surprising) a dull sense of agitation is infusing the air around me (not surprising either) but, y’know, I’m not one for wild over-reactions and hyperbole so despite this looming birthday being the occurrence that well may cause the four horsemen to saddle up just let the buzzards do what they will to my carcass before adding my old bleached bones to a collection of sacred relics and continue on with your rank and perky lives now won’t you KAY THANX. 

What? No I haven’t been watching bleak Danish films, but I did watch The Wedding Singer yesterday and that does seem to have laid bare the chilly clockwork of my life somewhat…It’s the Steve Buschemi character, he does it to me every time. “SELF TAUGHT – NO LESSONS, THANKS POP”

Anyways, this has gone way off track. Happy birthday, baby. Mazel tov. A new decade. You are the best bitch ever. Stay in my depressing disaster of a life forever. 

Russell Crowe & the Rabbitohs

Everyone knows that Australians are great sports lovers and that they’re great barrackers but does anyone ever mention how much we like being able to boo? And hiss? And hate? On a whole variety of teams, for a whole variety of really rude and entirely subjective reasons? Not enough, no. Unless of course the subject at hand is Collingwood, which is an unlikely prospect on this blog. Supporting a team to the point of just about having a stroke every time they play over the course of a season is a rich and satisfying occupation. Barracking is but part of this experience.

It was in this spirit that I engaged in an expansive conversation with my brother, via text, regarding our shared loathing of the Rabbitohs yesterday. It was great. How could it not be?

Apparently – and this is what started it - Daly Cherry Evans is being pursued by the Rabbits. By which of course I mean that the at once attractive and repellant Russell Crowe, equipped with that formidable gravelly voice, pungent charm and considerable authority, is wooing him, all whips cracking. I’m not used to saying it, but this doesn’t bother me. Cherry Evans plays well and seems friendly enough but he is obviously devoid of humour and personality and is therefore of little emotional interest to me. He’s very vanilla, isn’t he? Or white bread. He’s the human equivalent of a piece of white bread, untoasted, and spread with Flora margarine.  And Crowe, well, I love a wildly egotistical and morally muddy man, so I have no issue with him either. HOWEVER. On the morals thing: Cherry Evans needs to be prepared to watch his evaporate should he sign with the Bunnies. He will also need to ensure he is in rude good health, mentally, because goddamn if the Bunnies don’t turn most of the players they buy into burnt out husks with piss-hole eyes and poorly disciplined games within two or three seasons of being there. How do they do this??? They are astonishingly, mesmerisingly adept at it. Whatever the process, the reality is that the club does not encourage towering individual performances.  My brother said as much yesterday, texting about our hope that Coal Train Taylor goes back to the Broncos: “Yeh he was better when he was there. In fact, everyone goes crap when they go to souths. Greg who?”  Touche.

In any case, I approve of Russell Crowe’s involvement in league. It adds an element of absurdity to what is already an acutely absurd theatre sport. Matty Johns, who suddenly seems to have developed a diamond-sharp edge of anger to go with his mongrel-instinct intelligence and now sports a hairstyle reminiscent of Tony Mokbel on the worst day of his life, said the other week that league is a pantomime and you have your good guys and your bad guys. This struck me as very clever. Soon after, some deranged Warrior fan tweeted him asking if he was on drugs and he barked “No you have me mistaken for someone else”, and this struck me as very cruel, especially as he accompanied it with a steely-eyed look and I thought of Joey’s sad canine eyes and soft-shell crab demeanor and felt awful for him. I love Joey. I love Joey to such a degree that every time I see or hear him I instinctively think and usually murmur “Oh, Joey” and feel my heart wince. He has that certain haunted look that I very much admire - eyes imbued with the hollow despair of the damned that indicate he has looked into the face of something horrible. He’s lovely.  

Anyway, Crowe could, I imagine, turn a brain-numbing preamble about contracts and salary caps into the most gripping of soliloquys and effortlessly shift the mood from comedy to edge-of-seats suspense and back to comedy before the more slow-witted members of the football fraternity knew what had hit them. In saying that, I think the more intellectually lively players know what’s up. This is why, for example, Sam Burgess is a Bunny and Cooper Cronk is not. Not that there’s anything wrong with Sam Burgess. That great big head atop that great big body? Fantastic. A drooling Great Dane of a man with a peanut-sized brain rattling exuberantly around inside that big British skull? What’s not to like? I also like the fact that Crowe, clearly suffering from a chronic irony deficiency, seems to fancy himself as the Jim Jones or David Koresh of league. Well, why not? Every pantomime needs a handful of charismatic and unhinged egomaniacs; they add an unintentionally surreal and comic edge to proceedings. So, go forth Russell. Woo and charm and seduce and sign and never surrender to the soul-shrinking pointlessness of trying to buy a powerful Bunnies team. If nothing else, my brother and I appreciate the high comedy of the effort, and the ongoing opportunity to hang shit on the entire Rabbitohs organisation. It’s the Australian way, this booing and hissing and dancing on the grave of a despised team’s failings, and we are nothing if not patriotic.

SADDLE UP

Pretty sure there’s a rip in the space/time continuum at the moment. How else to account for the fact that the only way I have been able to gauge the passing of time lately* is by deducing what day I put my rubbish out (Monday) and using that as some kind of tragically domestic and slightly deranged touchstone?

Well all that is soon to be over. The 2012 NRL season is but moments away. This means that I will be giving myself over to the tyranny of time-sucking televised football. No more seeking comfort from fatty foods and firearms, then. Good, good. And at least you know where you are with televised football. Even during those mesmerising moments when it’s difficult to determine where the sport ends and where the theatre begins you generally still know where you are. By this I mean that you understand the hideous, soul-shrinking pointlessness of life and recognise that you are an insignificant and odious being caught up in the unforgiving machinations of a materialistic and hostile world but are able to spend eighty lucid minutes several times a week altogether untroubled by these rude realities. It’s a portal, football, much the same as flannel sheets and fairy bread. It’s more than just a game, too – it’s something to hold on to, a fixed point in the ephemeral modern world. It will also quench my depraved thirst for titillation, meaning I will have no further need for Manu Feidel (he’s French, in case you missed it). So. 2012. Not a new world, no, but a brave new beginning nonetheless. (And I don’t know why but the epic bombast of November Rain is echoing in my head right now.)

*I did know the New Dawn was soon to break because 6 or 7 weeks ago my brother sent me a text telling me about his annual round of long-range bets: “I just put $10 on Souths for the wooden spoon and $10 on Campo for the dally M. How do you like those apples?” Clearly I fucking love those apples. (Last year, at around this same time, he put money on Dugan winning the Clive Churcher medal – you know, the one that is awarded to whatever player did interesting and/or amazing work in THE GRAND FINAL?? Far-sighted realism has always been his thing.)

Bernard Tomic - The Teenage Dream

Ned Flanders said you’re never alone when you’ve got a fluorescent light. Word. C.S. Lewis said we read to know we are not alone. Word again. I say you know you're not alone when you’re watching sports.

Bernard Tomic administered a five set beating with dramatic splendor last night and, bless the boy’s cotton socks, delivered me to that state of almost narcotic sports-induced bliss. Talk about a bristling thriller. Tennis. Goddamn. What a game. It’s gladiatorial. Two men enter the arena and only one leaves. In a figurative rather than a literal sense, but still. And both players have to lug their own kit bags. I just love this; the way both victor and loser have to set about fussily stowing their gear in those giant bags in the game’s immediate aftermath. It speaks of gritty realism and real-world truth – win or lose YOU CARRY YOUR OWN SHIT.

These – what is the word I’m searching for? – shitheels who only last year were painting Tomic as a demanding and combustible boy overburdened by ego and poised for a slow crash into the chasm of oblivion can today AND FOREVER MORE endure the wretchedness of looking into the dirty mirror of truth and seeing themselves reflected as the fuckwits that they are. Wily precociousness is GO!     

And for the rest of us, this now affords the opportunity to marinate in the self-satisfied smugness that comes from longtime, ‘before they were cool’ fandom. Back when he was all emaciated-adorable swagger, remember? Yes.

There are many reasons to love Bernard Tomic. Here are just four:

1. He has the sheen of a beautiful youth strolling through Elysian fields and at the same time he exudes dark, eastern European cragginess. His father coaches him and, unlike the Dokics, the two of them constitute a charming narrative wherein the weight of European history is exchanged for New World optimism. John Tomic is just dour and spiky enough to preserve the thread of gothic intensity running through this story, and Bernard has just about the right mixture of jovial intensity and together the two are an aching invocation of how truly awesome tennis is.

2. He used his racket to walk a cricket off the court in the middle of round two, thereby saving it from certain death by tennis shoe and endearing himself to me, and, upon my retelling, my judgemental mother, who has never missed an opportunity to comment on how she cares not for his 'hard cold face'. Wench.

3. He crosses himself. Subtly, though. He doesn't, like, drop to his knees in the way of religiously demonstative NFL quarterback Tim Tebow. That would be wack.

4. He goes for the Gold Coast Titans. He is a huge fan. Fantastic. I love finding out people I rate support loser teams. It's one of life's great levellers.   

I love You Lleyton Hewitt

Summer. Uggh.

I’ve lived in this part of the country for a long time. You’d think I’d be getting the hang of things by now. But no. The specifics of the seasons continue to surprise and unnerve me. And by ‘surprise and unnerve’ I mean ‘make me feel suicidal/homicidal of a morning and, as my energy levels drop through the afternoon, wearily nihilistic by nightfall. So, summer. It just gets so goddamned HOT. Even if you’re lucky enough to lose consciousness at some point you eventually come to feeling like your internal organs have undergone a session in a thermally-heated slow-cooker, which in a way they pretty much have. The punishing nature of my work means that I am left devoid of the energy and inclination to do anything much of, oh, say, anything other than watching boxed sets of HBO television series and reading four and five day old newspapers with that kind of glazed immobility that comes over you when you are bone weary busted.

Summer is not the ideal season for those of a morose persuasion. All those people who seem to be inexplicably enjoying themselves? It’s irritating. No, summer is not for me. I prefer cooler weather. I can coat myself in goose fat and legitimate my melancholia.

I live in a town that fills with people from Melbourne’s outer suburbs over summer. Bogans. They swarm in and set up elaborate camps all over the banks of the Murray and amuse themselves hurling their obnoxious water crafts over the water at high speeds. Occasionally they crash them; run them up banks or wrap them around submerged trees and such. This leads to deaths and various forms of paralysis but it never seem to thin out their ranks any. Every year, more and more holidaying bogans; they come and they come. And every year the town runs out of meat and ice and bait and parking spaces. They all seem to have a terrific time, crashing about in the bush and crashing about on the water and drinking like fishes and emptying the town of its vital supplies.

Because I work outside every day under the brain-boiling sun of the punishing nature of my work out under the sun I tend to look at their zealous commitment to al fresco leisure as the last word in lunacy. I stagger to the supermarket after work looking like a walking autopsy and am made twitchy by plague proportions of boardshort wearing bogans exuding their special kind of frenetic, abrasive energy; buying huge quantities of sauce and Reef tanning oil and pre-mixed pasta salad and, out in the car park, staggering and reeling under the weight of the two or three slabs piled against their chest and obstructing their vision and mobility. Good people.

In any case, total respect to those who take charge of two tonnes of speeding metal over the Christmas and New Year’s period to drive hundreds of miles across the country in an insane pursuit of holiday happiness. Props. Also, I like people who appreciate inland beauty. This obsession Australians have with the coast perplexes me. The Murray is in something of a ragged and shabby state but it has a kind of faded elegance; it’s wide and serene and quietly majestic and goes about its timeless business of just rolling on and that’s about all you can ask of a river, isn’t it? There’s something to be said for people who chose to take their holiday somewhere out in the continental vastness, in indeterminate farming country, in the stinking summer heat, far from the cool afternoon sea breeze that blows over places like Lorne and Portsea of an afternoon.

Bill Bryson wrote something about the days before air-conditioning came along in America, and the special kind of grimy summer heat that used to characterise American cities, and how

“people spent every waking moment trying to alleviate it – wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of lemonade, lingering by open refrigerators, sitting listlessly before electric fans.

The world has changed a lot since those days, of course.

Everywhere you go is air-conditioned, so the air is always as cool and clean as a freshly laundered shirt. People don’t wipe their necks much anymore or drink sweating glasses of lemonade, or lay their bare arms gratefully on cool marble soda fountains, because nowadays summer heat is something out there, something experienced only briefly when you sprint from your parking lot to your office or from your office to the luncheon counter down the block.”

I don't know about you but Bill Bryson has the uncanny knack of making me feel nostalgic, homesick, even, for a time and a place that I've never known. I'm not entirely sure I even know what a soda fountain is but he has me and my bare arms right there on it. Remarkable.

HOWEVER. January sees my horizon expand to such a degree that I have  Something! To Look! Forward To! I know. Talk about insane optimism. If that sounds like it's the sun-baked delerium taking hold and warping my perspective, you're only partially right, because January is also the time that the Australian Open comes to town.

I look forward to the Australian Open with a fervor that is vaguely religious in scope and intensity. Strapping athletes straining through a series of intense and increasingly grueling encounters and Andy Roddick throwing a series of strops is a perfect accompaniment to the rigorous do-nothingness that summer afternoons, evenings and nights demand. I have a very real and personal appreciation the opportunity it affords to sprawl hypnotized in front of the box for hours on end watching that little ball being pinged back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It’s immeasurably soothing. It is cool balm for my fevered forehead. Sometimes it puts me into a state of almost narcotic bliss. What happens here is that sets and then games blend together so that they have no start or finish but are just continuous, like time. It's lovely. It's how I imagine heroin must feel.

I also appreciate the Australian Open for bringing John McEnroe back into our midst. That naff advertisement for his up-coming commentary role on Fox Sports? The one where he’s screaming “You have got to be KIDDING ME” at his answer phone - the veins of his forehead lively - as his agent leaves a series of messages suggesting increasingly ludicrous but kind of cool (“McEnroe – the musical”) career options? It excites my imagination every time. I know. My brain wants nothing to do with reason. It never has, especially during the summer months. Ergo: I look forward to Jim Courier, too. I like his egotistical waffle and his quiet but lacerating disdain for most things un-American and his poorly timed and mostly mediocre anecdotes. It goes without saying that I also like his carefully styled hair. I find it vulgar and tragic and perfectly suited to a man of his character and temperament – ie. a man who would greet friends and strangers alike with a non-traditional handshake. Yes, a knob.  

But you know what I look forward to the most? Lleyton Hewitt getting into the commentary box. My Hewitt-love is nothing short of strenuous. The poor bastard has had a torrid time of it, what with being cast by large portions of the population and media as a thorn in the side of the Australian psyche. This has always been unwarranted. God love him, though, he’s always stayed faithful to his own universe. It had long been my belief that Hewitt, along with Laurie Daly, is in possession of one of the sharpest sporting minds in Australia. This was brought home with some force last year when he did guest commentary at the Open and startled , oh, I don’t know; EVERYONE with the skillful truth, charm, grace and intelligence of his observations. Let me tell you something. There’s a reason that Hewitt and Daly have those sharp and darting laser-like eyes, and that reason is that they have spent their entire athletic careers seeing shit that other people - those in possession of slower-moving, bovine-like eyes - routinely overlook or misread. Fundamental truth #1. 

Being misunderstood was all part of his package as a player, but it would be lovely if the weak chinned cowards with ashtray eyes to whom his singular, seagull-eyed intensity posed innumerable threats could see him as the huge-hearted fighter that he is and thereby marinate in their own uniquely Australian blend of guilt and hypocrisy for a while. That would be nice.

Fundamental Truth #2:

“It’s hard to be a decent person when you have your boot on someone’s neck”

– some old saying: origins unknown (to me at least.)

In any case, I am very fucking keen for the Australian Open to begin so that I can 'slip into something more comfortable' - ie. a glassy-eyed horizontal tennis-trance.

egh

 HELLOis this thing on