Capital Punishment in Canberra.

Last night? ROUGH.

No point raking over the ashes and demanding retributive justice and probing independent inquiries. Been there done that BOUGHT THE FUCKING JERSEY.

No. The whole affair can be illustrated by two things. 1. The traumatised subtext of girl-J-bo’s text messages (I have selected just four but there were A LOT. Girl was in a lot of pain. Public pain.) And, 2. Laurie Daly’s shell-shocked post-commentary reaction.

1.

“I’m at the pub with a bunch of nth qld fans. I have ordered a BLT but I am not hungry anymore and at the very least it’s going to be embarrassing to eat juicy fatty pig while we loooooooose”

“I’m so not going to be able to eat that thing when it arrives. I’m dreading the beep of the bistro buzzer.”

“Well, I guess it’s fitting that I ended up with tomato sauce all over myself.”

“Waaaaaaah…Why oh why am I moving back there…….”

2.

By game’s end Laurie Daly was babbling and bereft. Soon after, when asked where to now for the Raiders or some such bullshit question he was rendered speechless and just… gaped into the camera with a pinched, wincing look. When he gathered himself pretty much all he could offer was the suggestion that Dave Furner enlist a psychologist. I’m with Laurie. The schizoid tendencies of the Raiders are completely out of control. Mental disintegration is afoot. Help is needed. Shit is dire. And that’s about all I’ve got to say about that.

Now. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me now, mid-season, I’m going overseas for five weeks, starting this Thursday. This means that I am taking the Raiders Cowboys game with me, into the fucking Himalayas, as my freshest rawest football memory, so help me God (or Buddha. Ganesh. Somebody! Anybody??) I’m taking my Raiders scarf, acrylic be damned. Maybe if the mood strikes me I’ll offer up some sort of high altitude agnostic prayer on their behalf. Yeh. And come home in May to find them riding high on the ladder and, like, completing sets and offloading and doing all that really fancy specialist shit. IMAGINE.

Retro Raiders!

Round 4, Raiders vs Tigers.   

Best Bits:

1.      Terry yelling at the refs. Terry arguing with the refs. Terry entering into disputes with the refs that had nothing to do with him. Terry been scolded by a ref: “I don’t need your help Terry”. Terry in general. TERRY.

2.      Warren Smith in commentary observing Joel Thompson leaping to his feet with intent to agitate after a tackle and saying mildly “yesss…always looks to be happy to accommodate somebody if it gets a bit frisky out there is Joel…”

3.      Jack Whighton, who my brother and I have taken to referring to only as Jack Boom, giving it to Benji Marshall around the chin and leaving him reeling and drooling like Brendan Fevola at the 2009 Brownlows. Do not be fooled by his sweet nineteen year old sugar-face and baby animal eyes, people: he is an agent of aggression – less sunbathing Labrador puppy, more chained-up-overnight-at-the-wreckers-attack dog. My approval is wholehearted.

4.      Reece Robinson. He just… SEEMS SO NICE. And he hustled back from injury early – risking messing up that pretty face with his fractured cheekbone – to fill in at fullback for Dugan and had a high-octane and audacious blinder. He ran! He leaped! He contested! He caught! He did it all and he looked fine doing it! Consequently, he was the subject of pervy texts – not for the first time – from my girl J-Bo. Example: “Robinson I love his assssssssssssss!!!!!” He pleased us both greatly. This makes him a people-pleaser, and proves that he really must be very nice.

5.      Footage of the Raiders belting out the victory song in the sheds, and Blake Ferguson accompanying with his half River dance, half stroke victim choreography. It has a name, his collection of moves – ‘The Fergie Dance’.  A sublime visual representation of victory.

6.      Laurie Daly’s chickens finally coming home to roost. He is clearly burdened with a psychic blockage that prevents him from tipping against the Raiders, no matter how diabolical their form. You just don’t see loyalty and resolve like that anymore.

7.      Jarrod Croker – sweet sad eyed man-child, summing things up beautifully in his post-match interview with the stirring words “Guess we played a bit of Raiders of old.” Croker! Jesus me! That is the most deeply meaningful and poignant post-match sentiment I have ever heard.

8.      Raiders 30, Tigers 16. Ye olde Raiders REPRESENT.

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?”

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.

The Burgess Rabbit - Another Pest from England

Because rugby league is a ravenous and constantly evolving organism you gotta keep up or be eaten up. In an effort to stay up to speed - it was Bob Dylan who said get out of the road if you can't lend a hand and truer words have never been spoken (Matt Orford take note) - here are some loose notes. This is what comes of me blathering on all day and still not being able to keep up; loose, unadulterated notes.

Burgess brothers are coming out of the woodwork like roaches. We now have three on our hands, and I think there's a fourth still in utero/England? I googled Burgess brothers and here's what I got:

From left to right: Sam, George, Luke....

These pictures satisfied my curiosity perfectly, but then I saw photos of Sam getting lubed up at Bondi and who am I to resist a cultural stereotype?

The latest one has been described as "leaner than Sam and darker than George", which sounds promising, albeit mysterious. They are the NRL's equivalent to the Daddo brothers, basically, and just as whorey I imagine. How long since we've had a three-strong brotherhood? The Walters brothers?

Wassup with the Panthers? Arana Taumata (I know, doesn't ring any bells for me either) was accused of stealing a Penrith club doctor's prescription pad and using it to buy valium at pharmacies all over Paramatta and Campsie. Taumata's name appeared on the prescription sheets but when confronted he denied any involvement and told Gus Gould a teammate from the Windsor Wolves was responsible.

Remember when Todd McKenney was found sprawled over a park bench at 5am with GBH in his pocket and said "BUT OFFICER THEY'RE NOT MY PANTS" and got off the charges? I think that was a watershed moment that changed Australia's legal landscape forever. I know I filed that ingenious excuse away for future reference, anyway.

I'm no legal eagle but I have had the Jay Z and R. Kelly - he of the "BUT OFFICER SHE LOOKED LEGAL" defense - song  Guilty Until Proven Innocent on high rotation for the last week, and as such I am loath to cast uninformed aspersions. Still, the miniscule amount of research I did on Taumata showed that he's already had controversy-plagued stints at the Bulldogs and the Roosters (show me a player who hasn't), as well as at the Broncos, Storm, Tigers and Cowboys. Christ. I don't know about fire but that's a hell of a lot of smoke.

Anyway, that flight the Windsor Wolves took to New Zealand? That sounded like an abolute hoot. Taumata got turned around at Auckland airport and flown straight back to face Gus' great venegance and furious anger regarding the valium. Dane Laurie got hammered on the flight and was promptly sacked after a teammate dobbed him in. Someone else was forced to go home after discovering his passport had been through the wash - this is almost as funny as when that kid whose name eludes me packed his passport for his first ever away game in Queensland. Bless. Finally, Michael Jennings was fined $10 000  for drinking while off with injury. Seems a bit extreme, but there you are.

I noted with interest that the Panthers all managed to pull it together and turn up to a group appearance at Hooters in a gallant effort to promote the chain's push into the west. Apparantly even players who weren't required to attend came along and many have returned since on a regular basis. Trent Waterhouse is totally up in that Hooters shit, I can just tell.

Gus Gould going all Mao Zedong with his cultural revolution at the foot of the mountain is taking a terrible toll on his appearance. Is it just me or has he aged about a dozen years in the last few months? It's alarming. I don't know what goes on out there at Penrith but unless Sandor Earl is involved it's not pretty. I called them one of the uglier teams in the league last week and can I just say a) Not that there's anything wrong with that, and b) Manly are much uglier. Either way, Gus now looks to be going the way of Brandy Alexander: i.e. to shit. Brandy is one of the more intruiging statesmen to me, in that he looks like nothing so much as a rapidly aging accountant. I look at Brandy and see scarcely any resemblance to the guy who made me go for the Panthers back in my babycake days. It's true, I did.

Here's what I found written on the back of a magazine from last weekend:

"Brandy. So much eye makeup - eyes, eyebrows. He is cadaverous. Scurvy, maybe. Or AIDS"

Way harsh? Maybe, BUT HAVE YOU SEEN HIM? A Weekend at Bernie's type situation unfolding while he's live on air is not outside the realm of possibility, trust.

There were two other fragments scrawled onto the magazine : "Soward = Prick", and "Mini barking orders from the back"

Yep. Nothing gets past me and my hawk eye.

Compare Brandy Alexander to the man I believe to be the best-preserved and altogether most attractive statesman in league: Laurie Daly. He is the dead set Dorian Gray of the NRL, he looks fucking BOSS. I also think he's lovely. Brandy can tell a good yarn and he has a sort of hair-trigger twitchiness that I like but he seems a bit of a twit, frankly. Loz is the real deal. He says "Gorrrrn" for 'gone'. Plus I find his unwavering support for the Raiders and his absolute, steadfast refusal to ever tip against them to be beyond charming.

And that post I wrote on Matt Elliot being all elusive and enigmatic? That all came crashing down with the revelation that he was seen lunching at Gloria Jeans with Luke Lewis and Lachlan Coote. Way to ruin my cred, Elliot.

Speaking of credibility, I died a little when I heard that Gus Gould peppers his text messages with 'lol'. That is all shades of wrong and is akin to Laurie Daly weraing this Ed Hardy shirt:

On the opposite end of the scale, I fell a little more in love with JT when he said he listens to hip hop and rap. I mean, the writing  is on the wall, this pretty much makes us soulmates. We may as well have a Mickey and Mallory type hand-cutting, blood-mingling-for-all-eternity ceremony right now and be done with it, seriously. JT, call me.

Word is that last week post-game - in the showers, no less - an admiring Nathan Gardner told Paul Gallan "you're a modern day warrior". Gal's response? "You're an idiot".

Adorable. Bitch is real. He cares not for ice baths, dressing room physio and the compression garments that everyone is trussed up in like Christmas hams these days, AND his drink of choice is bourbon and coke. Word.

Let's all take a moment to reflect again on just how adorable Gal is:

Meanwhile, Chris Sandow continues to solidify his position as the game's biggest Grub. I still think he has a way to go before he strips Jamie Soward of the Grub King crown but damn if he isn't giving it a red hot go. Sandow needs to come to terms with the fact that Dave Coal Train Taylor he 'aint, and behave accordingly. Give up those ill-advised shoulder charges before you get flattened - or keep them up and get flattened, see if I care - but cut it out with the cannonball tackles already, they are unwarranted and filthy. We are hip to you and your carefully timed tactic of hurling yourself at a held up players unprotected legs and we find it and you very unpleasant. Cease and desist, bitch.

Those who pay close attention know that I don't like fouling my pristine posts with pictures of undesirables. You don't shit where you eat, people! So in the interests of keeping We Need To Talk About Todd nice I'm substituting Courtney Love and Lil Wayne for Chris Sandow.

In closing, I wish to make just one passing remark. It regards jerseys. If there is any group of men who should not be seen in round necked jerseys, it's NRL players. Not to put too fine a point on it but they're not exactly known for their swan-like necks, y'know. This is the reason they all look so good come international rep time - because the jerseys are V-neck. Not only that, but they have a natty collar. Even Billy Slater looks bitchin in such a garment, and trust me, I can  scarcely believe this myself.  See the comparisons below as evidence. Anyway, I'm all for improving aesthetics in the NRL and I don't understand why anyone would dress men already challenged in the neck stakes in jerseys that give the impression of almost total necklessness. It's very odd; and it doesn't seem right. Tell me something in this world that does, though.




Willie Mason. My brother calls him a "refrigerator with eyes", for obvious reasons.



Paul Gallan: WITNESS THE FITNESS. Fierce.

And the good ol days of V-Neck jerseys:

Some footnotes.

1) Once I said the notorious Arana Taumata's name out loud I realised he did ring a few bells -  none particularly positive.

2) On R. Kelly: I'd been listening to M.I.A.'s Arular for many a month before I picked i up on the choice gem of a line:

'Could it be/that me and he/are tighter than J.Lo in her jeans/and could it be/that me and he/are tighter than R. Kelly in his teens'. 

That just takes the biscuit in terms of awesome bad taste.

3) Chris Sandow's emergence as a grub-to-watch had me hastening to check the playing schedule in the hope that there are no upcoming Raider Rabbitohs gane. There is. Cue creeping dread. Of the apparently many thousand things Josh Dugan's precious Bambi legs do not need right now, Sandow throwing himself at them at knee height would have to be top of the list. Do not try it, Sandow. Seriously. Push me and I will push back.