It was Charlie's 3rd birthday last Friday. His Nanna and Grandad gave him his first proper musical instrument: a guitar! (Or, to us fully-grown people: a ukulele.)
The following video was taken less than a minute after he first tore the wrapping off. What you are seeing here is Charlie's first ever composition and musical performance.
I finally fulfilled my lifelong dream. Indeed, it is probably the lifelong dream of many a tragic music fan (it being, in this case, the music which is tragic, not the fan)(okay, also the fan): I was a DJ.
No, that is not just me leaping into the frame of a casually set up laptop.
This is MY laptop!
That is my playlist!
I snaffled a gig DJing at The Fringe Club and was allowed to play anything I wanted! I was king of the world! There are few things I like more than my music, played loud. There are fewer people who appreciate my music, played loud, but the drag queen MC and the sound tech guy reported that they approved of my track selections.
What did I play?
Well, I stuck to my guns and tried to do that difficult thing of playing stuff that people haven't really heard, but would definitely like. That didn't last long.
For some reason, I'm both ashamed and proud. Ashamed that I stooped so low, and proud that I had the audacity to actually reach that low.
"Yeah, but I'm playing them ironically," I said, to anyone who asked why I was cranking out wedding floor fillers. No one actually asked. The professional DJ who came on at 11pm gave me a thumbs up and told me the Perth music festival he had just DJed at was cool. I didn't tell him that I'd just come from watching Looney Tunes cartoons with Charlie and that that was also cool.
There were so many highlights, one was playing the following song just as a nice young couple of dudes hit the floor together:
They didn't stay long.
No matter, it was totally exciting and I got paid in beer and pizza and I'm doing it again next week!
Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club. It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain. There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth. However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division. The full explanation is available here. But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.
Have you heard of the band Joy Division?
Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!
Champions of Guess The Header
What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
