Melbournetown

Handed in something vaguely resembling a Masters thesis and celebrated by spending the next 24 hours in a hideously uncomfortable seat being force-fed microwaved fish and drooled on by two middle aged globe trotters in matching navy blazers as I flew home.

Its good to be back in Melbourne but there are literally NO jobs at the moment so today I officially went on the dole. In other news, have moved into a massive warehouse in Fitzroy with eleven hippie stoners. My room is a small curtained-off hovel built on the roof of someone else's hovel and is only accessible by climbing a precarious flight of stair made out of milk crates. I doubt i'll last more than a month. There are communal showers. The good side is we are converting the entire block into a massive urban garden with vegie patches in every available corner. The bad side is I can't afford to leave the house.

Hazmat!

August To-Do List:

1. Set fire to things
2. Eat corn with Maia
3. Wear a Hazmat suit
4. Write masters thesis




Three out of four ain't bad...

Yay I finished my film set!

24 and counting...

Celebrated my birthday by falling off a childrens climbing wall that your average three year-old could navigate with ease, eating my bodyweight in tofu and chocolate cake at a vegetarian restaurant on a bus, looking at dead badgers at the natural history museum, drinking amazing coffee, and wearing stupid hats and double denim. Also had a house party that degenerated into a standoff between my friends and my housemates friends over who got to control the stereo, watched six episodes of Twin Peaks in a row, ate too much cherry pie, danced to soul music wearing a furry cat outfit, and fell asleep on the sofa wrapped in a filthy leopard print rug. Don't listen to what they tell you kids, getting old is fun.

A brief history of cake

What else is there to do in Paris?

Plastique Fantastique!

Went to Portsmouth for the day for the Plastique Fantastique performance at Aspex Gallery, which my friends Lawrence and Dav were performing in. They paraded along the wharf-front shopping mall wearing masks and chanting and performing strange rituals, thereby offending or confusing most of the shoppers. Dav's mask (above left) is The Venice Biennale, and Lawrence (right) modelled his on the yellow panels where you swipe your Oyster cards on the Tube. It feels amazing to be going to these performances and participating when two years ago I was obsessively reading about Plastique Fantastique on the internet but never dreamt I'd meet them.

Wimbledon!

Got up at 4:30am after an hour and a half of sleep to queue for Wimbledon... totally out of character, I have honestly next to no interest in sports but Sam said he had a 'surprise' for me and I had to be there at 6am... We queued for five hours- apparently this is what the English do best, we got gold booklets on 'The Art of Queuing" and embossed number cards to prevent anyone from pushing in. Ridiculous. Inside it was all roses and trellises and strawberries and cream, but I had no money so we couldn't afford to eat anything and by about 5pm I was falling over and my eyes mysteriously stopped working so I had to go home. Saw some funny tennis though, I loved it when the Russian girls missed the ball and screamed like petulant teenagers, and I got to see Andreas Seppi fall flat on his face. I think I'm a sadistic sports viewer.

The proudest day of my life

Europe Tour Part 2!

After ten days hanging out in London together I followed the Crayon Fields to Sweden for a week of gigs, free beer, and two-minute noodles. We stayed in lots of different peoples apartments, which ranged from impeccably pristine to gross and cat-ridden. Everybody in Sweden seemed to have cats- they kept sitting on my head as I slept, filling my mouth with hair, eating the money out of my pockets, and gnawing on all my electrical cords. In Stockholm Geoff got poisoned by a glass of bad red wine after the show, and spent the next 24 hours throwing up. They had to play at a swanky hotel that night, where we all got free luxury accommodation and meals, and he had to spend all day in bed. Ten minutes before the gig he staggered upstairs, threw up in the hotel bathroom, then jumped on stage and they did an amazing show. I explored Stockholm for a couple of days and went to lots of galleries, then caught an 8 hour bus up to Gothenberg to meet up with the bands again. The only show in Gothenberg was a really relaxed afternoon gig at an art gallery, where everyone sat around on pillows on the floor sipping tea, and we saw an awesome psychdelic American band called 'AU'. Afterwards, the organiser invited us to a private live recording of El Perro Del Mar at a tiny radio studio in the back warehouses of Gothenberg, which was the most amazing show ever. There were only about thirty people in this beautiful little room, and she came down the spiral stairs, all beautiful and elegant, and gave the most incredible, flawless performance I have ever seen. We were so lucky! The next day we got the train to Jonkoping, which is a small Christian town outside of Gothenberg, where the Crayons and the Motifs played a show at what felt like the local youth centre. The guy who organised it, Pierre (in the picture at the top), cooked us all vegan danish pastries and lentil stew, and after hanging around for hours playing musical chairs he took us back to stay the night in his parents country farmhouse. It was so beautiful in the countryside, we went for a midnight walk among the cherry trees to see the horses and the other farms. Next morning I had to head back for London and the others left for Latvia, Finland and Estonia. This is Jacqui relaxing at a cafe in Gothenberg where the girls from Liechtenstein took us for toasties- And Geoff playing solo at the Gothenberg art gallery-
Neil passed out in a pile of cat hair at Mathias' apartment in Stockholm-
And me, very very grumpy at having to go home-

Europe Tour Part 1!

I finally handed in my final disastrous round of essays, just as the Crayon Fields and the Motifs arrived to crash on my couch and play some awesome London shows. They're in Europe for six weeks, yay! Its so nice to see Melbourne people. I went to Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg with them, where we lounged around in cafes and ate nothing but bread, cheese, and beer for a week. The first show in Berlin was rad, it was at this place called Madame Claude's where all the furniture was glued upside down to the ceiling, just like in the Twits. I ran into my old housemate from Fitzroy, who now works there behind the bar, its was bizarre. The first night we were homeless, so Geoff and I stayed at a crazy little hostel on a boat moored in the river, and then for the rest of our time this lovely German woman called Ursula, who plays under the name 'Skirt', put us up in her beautiful apartment. Her kids were away for Easter so I got to stay in one of their beds, which was shaped like a castle. In Dresden the bands played at an amazing old-fashioned GDR style venue, called Ost Pol, where the organizer cooked us a massive feast of vegan curry with grapes, which was a little odd. Then in Hamburg we went to a three day festival called the POP! Weekender, and got to stay at this crazy place called the Rock n' Roll Hotel, which had incredibly loud music til 4am every night and pictures of naked sailors all over the walls. They greeted us with whisky shots on our arrival, and all the bands from the festival were staying there so there were many hilarious drunken hallway and awkward shower moments. One of the bands we met in Dresden, a Swedish group called Liechenstein, were playing the festival as well, and we all went together on a tour of all the sites where the Beatles played there in the early 60's. Later on they put us all up in Gothenberg, and took us on a tour of the city-After Hamburg I went home while others went to Glasgow, Nottingham and Cardiff. It took me 12 hours on the train to get back to London and I threw up the entire way from general exhaustion and alcohol poisonning. To make matters worse I was stuck in the middle of a German hens party, who were passing chunks of sausage and bottles of beer back and forth over the seats, and making me feel even worse.

This is Alexis writing set lists for the show in Jonkoping, Sweden-
And a crazy psychodelic American band called the Lexie Mountain Boys (actually girls) who we met in Gothenberg-
And this is a hideously obese cat belonging to one of the girls we stayed with; it was so fat it couldn't climb onto the couch by itself, and when it wanted to eat it just lay down on its belly in a massive tray of food and gorged itself for hours on end-

G-20

Been at a lot of the G-20 protests in London this week, there are so many cops about its insane. These photos are from the Climate Camp protest outside the climate exchange in the centre of the city- everyone set up tents and blocked off the whole street. There were heaps more anarchist crews than I'm used to seeing and the police were being pretty brutal. Someone kicked my bike and broke it, which sucks cos I've just spent the last month building it up from scratch. I saw brat London celebrities Daisy Lowe and Will Blondelle at today's protest, looking lost and being followed round by a film crew:

This is my baby- I bought the frame for 30 pounds off some guy on Gumtree. I converted it to single speed and it rides like a dream, even though I only have one brake. The only problem is I can't go down any big hills because it takes me about twenty metres to stop, and cycling in London is a bit of a suicidal mission what with all those big red buses trying to kill me.

Dungeness

Last week my Lab group from college went on a massive day trip to Dungeness to see Derek Jarman's garden. It was supposed to be a collaborative effort but I think I was pretty much the only person who originally wanted to go there. The beach was spectacular, all flat stones as far as you could see, with the massive nuclear power station rising out of nowhere, and these huge concrete constructions called 'acoustic mirrors' which were used during the war to magnify the sound of approaching aircraft. There was something super creepy about the actual town of Dungeness- kind of cultish and supernatural. Every garden had strange conrete gnomes with crazy faces and there were no people on the streets, only flickering shadows behind curtains. We were such an oddity that a bus full of school children that drove past had to literally pull over so they could scream and point at us. Then they chased us a little way down the deserted street. Kids in the English countryside are creepy.
We had fish and chips for lunch in the only pub, which was also the local library and tourist information centre. It felt like something out of Twin Peaks, but even more creepy. I was pretty happy since over the last few months I've become uncontrollably addicted to mushy peas, and they gave me a massive serve.
My addiction seems to be spiralling dangerously out of control though lately; I've discovered you can buy mushy peas in a can for 83 pence at the supermarket, so I keep having them for breakfast like porridge. This might explain my unnatural pallor and slight greenish tinge.