Tasmanian Intellectuals say no to Chungking and Miley Cyrus

So today, I was really lethargic, I stuffed around at work doing some idle plotting involving Google and, er, Google Earth, as part of my new ambition to join the committee at Kermandie Football Club within 2 years. Now, I've been told there's no such place as Kermandie, but there is a swing park, and a pub, so I'm going to stake out my territory by spending some time drinking warm beer in the pub and making some quips that are on the knuckle. I've been reading various books for inspiration - Alisa Camplins "Flying High" of course (with quotes from Alfred D Souza), Steve Waughs "Out Of My Comfort Zone", and Dave O'Neills "Unfit For Life - A Handbook" (OK, that one, I found in my little basket of books, and I have no idea what the hell it was doing there). Hanging around football clubs and reading books by unfunny fat comedians is probably not the intellectual path in life that I hoped I once may take. I chose a path of pop culture references some time ago (Swoop over Satre my friend called it) and I stand by it. Sure, I can derisively snort at things with the best of them (go on, just mention Bernard Fanning) but my idea of an intellectual discussion seems to be (with my friends) the positioning of women on sports programmes as bubble headed seat fillers (I'm watching one now, interviewing a soccer referee and asking if he, tee hee, does his hair? Even the beautiful devine not quite as beautiful now she's married Christi Malthouse is reduced to being asked "is it cold?" on a weekly basis by her intellectual inferior "Quarters"). I'd love to sometimes sit down and discuss something other than "did you see that girl being sick in the pot plant?" - and then at other times I think, god, what an insufferable bore, why is he talking about the social history of letterboxes (someone really did to me once) when there's a new Miley Cyrus single out? Besides, Tasmania, as much as I've tried, hasn't quite proven to be the Left Bank in my search for intellectual enlightenment...maybe that's my fault, because I've hung around Penguin football club too much, and that's where you are an intellectual if you ask for a Kit Kat...

When I moved to Mt Stuart, aside from living on the edge of a cliff, one thing I always wanted to was go to the State Cinema. The State Cinema is of course our fearsomely indepdent North Hobart cinema which loves to show really smart films from Iran, and it certainly isn't the kind of place where you sing "let's all go to the lobby" as you queue up for a choc top (maybe you can queue for a helping of flavoured salt). I don't know anything about films - as you may have gathered from the constant references to Cop and a Half with Burt Reynolds. I know a fair bit about music, but films, I have no frame of reference. However, my friend told me that it was a good place to pick up, and what intellectually minded mid 20s foreign film buff wouldn't want to hook up with a fresh from Burnie uni student who's idea of culture was to dismiss Weekend at Bernies II as a little lightweight? Still, along I went, I tell people I wore a tuxedo but that's not true - it was everyone else that wore one. Even the female uni students. It was a big night at the State Cinema, the premiere of a new French war epic, and certainly no time ask if Plastic Bertrand was making a cameo (I know he's Belgian, but I felt under pressure). My main memory of the evening, apart from my obvious discomfort, was that people were queueing up, man at the football style, for mugs of tea in proper giant mugs, which was a long way from the 8 foot plastic coke cups of Burnie cinema legend, which people only bought to peg at the screen (who would do that, shameful...certainly I was never thrown out of Space Jam...). Apart from the good quality tea and the tuxedos, I vaguely remember that the film seemed to involve everyone in France getting cholera. Well, not everyone, just the women, and the only way the women could be cured of cholera was to take all their clothes off, lie on the ground, and get rubbed. And that was pretty much the film - got a standing ovation it did, and that didn't happen with Space Jam. One of the intellectually minded mid 20s foreign film buffs called it a harrowing contrast between light and shade, which I guess was why my mate went to see the film another 12 times - all the shade. And all the contrasting light. I went home to watch Lano and Woodley. It might not have had openly pervy buxom women being rubbed with dirt as a cure for cholera, but it had a man saying "burnies, burnies, carpet burnies"...somehow, it felt a little more me...I mean, I only went back and watched the cholera epic 4 times...

I'd quite like one day to do a public reading of one of my novels or some of my poetry, and I'd do it at the Republic Bar, North Hobarts home of intellectualism, hippies, and left wing rhetoric. I've mentioned before, when I first moved to Hobart, it was a pub that had topless barmaids, gun fights and steel bars on the window - now, it's got Tim Rogers playing strummy guitar rock and telling people who request Berlin Chair to get fucked...anyway, the point is, they regularly have poetry evenings, advertised on blackboards on the path. Now, I did a poetry and writing class at TAFE a few years ago, and the big climax was to stand up and read some of our work at some upstairs tea room midway between North Hobart and town - my timekeeping was a horrible issue a few years ago, and I really couldn't find a park. I stepped into the tea room, took in the atmosphere, and then realised I was in the wrong tea room, and went next door. I had to go up a spiral wooden staircase and I was really nervous - when I went to the top of the stairs, I saw a lot of people sitting on beanbags smoking dope, and making intellectual purring thought noises in the direction of a girl who roughly weighed as much as a bottle of Mr Sheen. She was dressed, not unreasonably, as a fairy, a goth fairy in all black, with blood red wings, and she was reading a poem, again not unreasonably, about her boyfriend - let's just say, you'd be amazed how many words seem to rhyme with castration. Suffice to say, her boyfriend wasn't coming out of it well, and with every rhyme for castration, she would swing her wand at a light fitting, and let out a shriek. Naturally, this was going over incredibly well, especially at the end when she began stroking a little plastic cat. Ah, performance art...and understandably, I looked at my own writings, which were very much "hey, what's the deal with S Club Juniors? Huh? Am I right folks?" and absolutely bottled it, going back to my car. I didn't even stop for my special muffin...

Of course, not everyone shares even my slight desire for intellectual discourse - and even I find it sometimes a little uncomfortable - and not just with my friends who are really hoping Chungking break into the charts. This one time I had come back to Burnie for a party and was having a lovely chat with someone about what happens at parties when you get someone drunk and make them laugh for no reason at all, which was kind of intellectual when this girl, and I will preface this by saying she was really really nice and one of my best ever friends, announced everyone had to be super quiet. I presumed it was going to be a cake or a speech or maybe a clown (lousy clowns, lousy lack to tricks, oh what could it be, is it water? No it's conf...er...). I figured that this would be an important moment in our friendship, a time when she was going to get up and deliver the kind of "we'll all be friends for life" emotional speech you only ever see in the final episode of teen dramas. So I twisted in my beanbag, and prepared to be touched (not in that way, matron). At which point, she's gone into her little shelf of DVDs and pulled out a newly bought DVD of...Friends, Series 1. "I thought we could watch the Smelly Cat episode!" she said, which as party stopping speechs go, is up there with "...and I said, really contagious!" (is Gary Larson intellectual? I could never tell). And so, that's what she did, she put on the Smelly Cat episode of Friends, and made everyone sit in absolute complete silence, which, if you've watched Friends lately, you'd realise is Friends natural setting when people watch it...no talking, certainly no laughing, just absolute, complete, perfect silence...

I better go for now though, I think my next door neighbour just got cholera...