Imagined Slights

by Avril Rolfe
March 10, 2010

Parties Will Tear Us Apart

It seems to be a thing with a lot of big stars that they need desperately to have people around them. For example, I recollect an episode of the television series of Fame in which a High School of the Performing Arts alumnus, who, I seem to recall, was some kind of Gregory Hines figure, revealed that he couldn’t stand being alone and that this was the basis of his complicated psychological makeup. I also remember reading an article about Bill Pullman some years ago in which he said that he liked to have a houseful of visitors around him at all times and exactly how sorry I felt for his wife when I learned this piece of information.

The dazzling Ava Gardner was one screen idol of yore who really enjoyed going out on the town. Now, as we all know, this is a woman whose stunning appearance (which led MGM to bill her not merely as the world’s most beautiful woman, but as ‘The World’s Most…

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Scarcely Relevant

by Tony Martin
March 10, 2010

That Thring You Do

It took nearly forty years, but one of my oldest dreams finally came true: last week I got to do a voice for an animated cartoon. As the decades have passed, I’ve reluctantly given up on most of my childhood dreams, having realised that I will probably never get to drive a steam train; illustrate an issue of Justice League; or be shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a dying industrialist to do battle with giant antibodies accompanied only by a scantily clad Raquel Welch. But getting to do a cartoon voice had remained a tantalising possibility, and I had assumed it would only be a matter of time before Yoram Gross called, begging me to voice the bad guy in the latest sequel to Dot and the Kangaroo. But it never happened. Slowly, I began to assume that Yoram Gross was himself a fictional character.

I first became aware that the…

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Boxhead

by Matt Quartermaine
March 10, 2010

Tramps Like Us

Recently, the world’s biggest studios unsuccessfully tried to sue iiNet for encouraging illegal piracy, and a settlement was reached in an action brought by Nintendo in the Federal Court against an Australian individual accused of ‘illegally copying and uploading to the Internet’ part of New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It’s only a matter of time before the big corporations hunt down the owners, like yours truly, of bootleg albums or illegally downloaded songs. The day will end in court. I know just how it will unfold and I have the court transcript to prove it:

JUDGE: Mr Quartermaine, you do realise that, as the defendant, you are…

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Visiting Scrivener

Michael Witheford
March 10, 2010

Back in Cack

Did you know that AC/DC have never written a song called ‘Lap It Up’? A few minutes ago, I was writing about how the crowd at their Melbourne show lapped it up, the whole AC/DC thing, and I thought that surely there was a ‘Lap It Up’ on record somewhere. Some album track somewhere in the Akka Dakka canon. No, said Google, and when Google speaks, you listen. Anyway, I’m just saying. Bit surprised. Let’s move on.

Here they were anyway, home at last. The tickets were free, so I was more curious than expectant. I quite like AC/DC’s seventies stuff. When I was a teenager, songs like ‘Let There Be Rock’ were a perfect fit for a drunken Green Ginger Wine-fuelled lurch around someone’s parents’ garage, capped off by a fulsome spew on some outside foliage in the dark.

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