An Orange Boy in the Big Apple

Stupid Cabaret

2012-03-21T08:01:00.001-07:00

One of the goals I set myself to achieve during my stint in the big apple is to go to a fancy, A-list celebrity cocktail party. If I haven't drunk a gin martini in a room containing at least one of the sexy Ryans (Reynolds, Seacrest or Gosling, I don't care which one) by the time I've finished this degree then clearly this whole enterprise has been a complete failure. So when I first got here I knew I needed to insert myself into the entertainment world, seize opportunities when they came by, and inch by inch work my way up the glitzy, star-studded ladder to the point that I would receive a fancy invitation to an exclusive soiree filled wall-to-wall with so many stars that I would feel as though I was in a People magazine pop-up book.

Luckily for me, within the first few weeks of my arrival, an opportunity presented itself - interviews were being held for music directors for a cabaret to be performed by students from Tisch's music theater program. Tisch! Bam! I'm totally there! Tisch has some of the best music theater up-and-comers in the country, in a city that practically oozes flawless group choreography and snappy toe-tappers out of its grimy pores. And I'm a great MD for cabaret! It was meant to be! I wrote a long, detailed and completely professional letter to the address given, and waited for my interview.

My first clue that this was not as glamorous (or as well-organised) as I had hoped was that the interviews happened in the student lounge at 9pm at night. Well, we're all busy, I thought. And this is New York, baby! People probably have job interviews at 3.30 in the morning here because everyone is so glamorous and busy that normal business hours are for CHUMPS! YEAH! I'm having a glamorous New York interview... in the student lounge... with two teenagers... what the hell... are you guys even old enough to vote?

But, as they say here, forgeddabowddit! This is New Yooork! Glamorous!! A music directing gig with Tisch in New York is still a music directing gig with Tisch in New York, even if it is being run by Justin Beiber's peers. I showed up to my first production meeting... and was clearly much older than anyone in the room. This didn't really bother me too much, until one blonde little bubble chirruped and giggled her way across the room and asked me, "are you one of the professors here?"

"Ha ha ha! No, foolish child. I'm one of the music directors. I'm a student, like you. Well, actually, not a student like you, since I am 31 and you are obviously the reincarnation of Jonbenét Ramsey."

... is what I should have said. But I just laughed awkwardly and said no, I was from Australia. (This, of course, didn't answer the question but I've learned since moving here that this is the conversational equivalent of jiggling car keys in front of a crying baby, quickly distracting irritating noisemakers from whatever it was they were making noise about).

I should probably have pulled out then. I should have pulled out when they presented me with a stack of music an inch thick and asked me to learn it by the end of the month. I should have pulled out when I showed up to the first rehearsal and there was no piano in the room (and when I asked the producer about this she said, "what do you need a piano for? You didn't tell me you needed a piano.") I should have pulled out when rehearsals started getting scheduled at 10pm on a Friday night, or in church halls halfway uptown, or after one hungover ass of a Sunday when only one out of six singers showed up for a two hour rehearsal. I SHOULD HAVE PULLED OUT. But no! Glamorous New York! Cocktails with sexy Ryans!

At this point I would like to draw you a flow chart of what was apparently going through my head:

Flawless logic.

Anyway, the day of the big show finally arrived. I dry cleaned my suit, washed my hair, I even shaved. SHAVED. I hadn't shaved for a year. That's how deluded I was that this was anything but a grossly overblown wankfest. But the last shreds of my delusion were mercilessly stripped away when I arrived at the venue and... it was a lecture theater. With a piano that was not only out of tune, but was missing a number of keys. (I thought about saying something to the producer, but I was worried she'd say something like, "why do you need those keys? You didn't tell me you needed those keys!", at which point I would probably headbutt her, and that would put a crimp in the evening's festivities for all concerned).

So I sucked it up. I sat down, played my songs with a big flourish, acknowledged the director's pitiful accolade at the end of the evening ("...and of course, I want to thank the musicians! They've been great!" as though I just some guy that swanned in off the street that evening and begged to play half a dozen hackneyed showtunes on a piano that looked as though it belonged in an episode of the Flintstones, a request that she graciously granted), and left before the audience had a chance to get out of their seats. I stomped through the cold December streets, got on the train and got smashed in my local bar - no sexy Ryans yet, but an absolute shitload of gin martinis.

EPILOGUE: Six months later I received an email from the same group asking if I'd be interested in music directing the next show. I wrote back: "I would rather eat broken glass. Have a nice day".

The Battle of Broadway

2011-10-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

Warning: This story has a lot of hilarious swearing in it.

Last week I popped up to 96th Street to see a friend's show, have a couple of beers, and make the most of Monday night. By the time I was wrapping up, it was 11.30, and I knew it would take me an hour to get back to Williamsburg if I caught the subway (even without the Machiavellian aid of that accursed G train). So being in a cheerful mood I decided to spoil myself and catch a cab back downtown.

So for some reason I'm still a bit sheepish about trying to catch a taxi in Manhattan. Maybe one day I'll be able to stride confidently out into the middle of traffic with my arm stuck high in the air and a look of regal importance on my face as I stare down approaching cabs, but for now I kind of do this wishy-washy half-assed limp-wristed wave, as though I'm shooing away gay flies.

It was 11.30 on a Monday night around 96th Street - not exactly crazy time for taxis. So even though I made a vague gesture on the curb that anyone else would have interpreted as me waving to my shoes, to a cab driver on the hunt for a fare this was the equivalent of me hurling myself bodily into the middle of Broadway, and so I shouldn't have been taken aback when three cabs came to a squealing, wheel-locking halt on the street.

One cab, the one that had passed me furthest, realised that his chances of scoring me as a fare were pretty slim, and so quickly recovered and sped off (possibly looking for a customer with a less pissy hailing technique). But the next closest cab had almost caused a nasty accident because he had veered across two lanes of traffic, cutting off the third driver, who had come to a screeching halt directly in front of me. I was kind of oblivious to this though, as I was a little bit drunk and my need for a cab had been amply met. So I strolled benignly into the street and got into the nearest cab, which was been piloted by a genial-looking middle-aged gentleman. He turned around to me.

"Good evening, sir." He said in a pleasant voice, with a hint of some Eastern European accent. "Where can I take you?"

"Um, to 14th street please."

"Certainly sir." And with that he drove the car forward a little, wound down the passengers side window in line with the driver of the other cab and screamed at the top of his voice, "YOU MOTHERFUCKIN' COCKSUCKER! YOU TRYN'A FUCKIN' SMASH MY GODDAM FENDER YOU FUCKIN' PIECE OF SHIT?!"

The other driver, a gentleman of Pakistani descent and about the same age as my driver, responded to this perspicacious challenge with a similarly well-balanced counter-argument. "YOU FUCKIN' STEAL MY FARE, YOU GODDAM FILTHY ASSHOLE!! I SHOULD FUCKIN' KICK YOUR ASS!!"

"YEAH?!" countered my driver. "FUCKIN' TRY IT YOU FUCKIN' PAKISTANI PIECE OF SHIT!"

"YOU GODDAM RACIST ASSHOLE! YOU MOTHERFUCKIN' RACIST ASSHOLE! I'M GONNA FUCKIN' KICK YOUR ASS!"

The other driver however, couldn't compete with my driver's next move, a bold strategic strike of breathtaking maturity. "BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA!! THAT'S WHAT YOU SOUND LIKE. BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA!!"

The other driver, perhaps sensing he'd been outwitted, began to pound on his steering wheel and scream incomprehensibly at my driver. "YOU FUCKIN'.... GONNA FUCKIN'... YOU SHUT YOUR GODDAM MOUTH YOU LOUSY SON OF A BITCH BEFORE I FUCKIN'..."

My driver knew the day was won, and pressed the attack to victory. "BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLAAAAAA!!!!!!" he posited, accompanying his rhetoric with a visual aid in the form of puppet hands.

Roundly defeated in this battle of wits, the other driver tore off down Broadway, fishtailing through a red light and disappearing around a corner. Satisfied, my driver turned back to me and, as calm as Ghandi, said, "Sorry about that sir. 14th street was it? No problem." And off we serenely drove with not another word spoken by either of us for the rest of the journey.

The simple joy of owning a houseplant

2011-10-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

Having a blog is like buying a big fancy houseplant. You could be one of those people who, upon setting up their big fancy houseplant in the corner of the room, diligently waters it every thirty-six hours, checks the pH level of the soil once a month, gently trims sick leaves and nurtures healthy ones, croons to it at midnight, takes it for walks (or whatever you do with houseplants) and, after months of selfless care, ends up with a lovely, verdant companion. Or you could be like me, who buys a big fancy houseplant and, after an initial burst of botanic enthusiasm, completely neglects it, then watches guiltily as it transforms from a big fancy houseplant into a brown stick in a pot of dust.

But, houseplants can be saved. Even the most negligent houseplant owner can attest to the remarkable resilience possessed by their leafy wards, which can bounce back from the dead when their owner, struck with a plant-friendly combination of horticultural enthusiasm and guilt, actually waters the damn thing. That arduous task been taken care of, the owner will happily bask in his plant's chlorophyillic affection, and promise to never again be so neglectful.

Have I beaten you to death with that metaphor yet? I suppose not, because you're still reading (or you're a zombie, in which case, awesome). I knew at the back of my mind that it had been a long time between blog entries, and then all of the sudden I woke up and it was October. The moment of truth had arrived - if I didn't sit down and write today, then my poor little trusting blog was going to dry up and turn into a sickly mummified relic of an enthusiasm for New York that I'm not always entirely sure I still possess.

But don't worry: this entry is not going to be the bitter diatribe of a few weeks ago. If anything, this is the first tangible step I've taken in a couple of weeks towards getting back to my old go-get-'em self. It's the first step in reminding myself why I came over here in the first place, that I actually wanted to live here and there's a lot of great stuff going on. Over the past couple of months I've sunk into this gloomy pessimistic rut, making "this-is-too-hard" grumbles and "what's-the-point-of-all-this" whinges. And yeah, it has been a fucking hard couple of months, I don't think that I'm being a drama queen about it. I just know that there comes a point where you have to make a conscious decision to take the first step towards getting back on top of things. To start telling yourself how good things will be and affirming to yourself that you're good at what you do, to be kind to yourself and to take joy in the simple stuff that's at your fingertips if you just be in the present moment instead of wallowing in the past or fretting about the future. A good friend taught me that, and I'd forgotten it.

Anyway... this is not my finest blog entry, I'll admit that. Next one will be much more interesting, I promise. This entry is more for me to say sorry to my poor little blog for being so neglectful, and from now on he and I will go on together and enjoy our time in New York, for however long that time will be.

Mixed Messages

2011-08-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

This morning I was woken up by an SMS popping up on my phone. It was from my cellphone company, T-Mobile. It said, "You have been a T-Mobile customer for one year. Thank you for being a loyal customer". When I read this, my stomach gave a little twist and I barked out a short ironic laugh: ha! You see, as touching as it was for my phone company to want to mark this auspicious occasion, the pedestrian nature of the message stood in pretty stark contrast to the crazy mix of emotions I have to this anniversary. Not the anniversary of me joining the ranks of mildly satisfied T-Mobile customers - today is the anniversary of my arrival in the USA.

Actually, technically yesterday was the day I arrived in the USA. The 22nd August. But I arrived late in the day and so the 23rd was the first day I woke up a resident of New York City. I still remember the sunlight streaming through the window of my brand new bedroom, almost completely bare of furniture, and feeling completely at ease with the world. I lay on my bed listening to the murmuring city outside and contentedly mused on the fact that I had achieved something that for years I thought was utterly impossible: I had moved to the USA. I felt reborn. I had a totally new lease on life. Anything was possible, and the only way was up. I was a mess of optimistic cliches, and it felt fucking awesome.

It's twelve months later, and in case you have trouble discerning the slightly cynical tone subtly tucked away in the last couple of paragraphs, things don't feel quite so rosy for me at the moment. I've known this anniversary was on the horizon for quite a few weeks now. I've seen it looming in the distance, like an iceberg in the fog, and I've tried not to think about it. I wasn't really sure if it was something I wanted to mark. A lot has happened since that day a year ago that I woke up in my nice, shiny, brand-new life. I'm not the same person I was then. I've learned a lot about the world, music and myself. Some of it is good. Not all of it is nice.

I know now that I am definitely a composer. That's a big one, and a good thing to know. When I first arrived here I still had my doubts, that maybe I was still just play-acting and eventually I'd have to settle down and get a "real" job. No longer. I know in my heart I'm the real deal. I'm confident about showing strangers my music or declaring that I am a composer - that's a pretty significant change from the person who woke up in that empty room a year ago.

But I miss home every day. I get homesick regularly, and wish that I would walk into my local cafe or bar and see familiar friends sitting there. For a long time I felt ashamed of myself, or ungrateful that I could get so homesick. But I've recently concluded that my homesickness wasn't me being ungrateful, it's a genuine longing to be with people I love. So now I feel pissed off when I express my homesickness to someone and they say stuff like, "What? You're in New York. Shut up, you shouldn't be homesick. I wish I was living in New York." For the record, I never said I didn't like living in New York, I said I missed my friends and family. Would you prefer me to say, "Friends? Family? Oh shit! I totally forgot about you guys! I'm having such a blast here that relationships that took a lifetime to foster are completely meaningless to me now!" (Just keep that in mind next time someone, like me for example, says they're homesick).

And this leads me to probably one of the biggest realisations of all. I've always known that I am an ambitious person, and for a long time I thought that was a good thing. A great thing. A completely 100% positive characteristic. But I'm coming to realise that ambition is impersonal, like the weather. It can go both ways; a force to nurture or a force to destroy. It is good to be ambitious, but you need to temper your ambition with the things that nourish that ambition and created it in the first place, otherwise you'll end up a long way from where you started with no idea what you're doing there. This is where I am now. I spent so much of the last few years fixated on moving to the US, to "prove" to the world that I was a real composer, that I've sacrificed the simple joys of being around the people that I love to do it. Now I'm faced with having to figure out how to continue on the path I've set myself without having these people around me. The fruits of ambition are pretty bland unless you have someone to share them with.

Anyway...

When I was 18 I marveled at how I could finish high school and suddenly... BAM! I was an adult. I didn't feel any different. I still felt like a kid. Then adult stuff started happening to me. My first job, finishing uni, accepting that I was gay, deciding that I needed to go back to school to pursue music, my first love and heartbreak, my first real professional recognition, the death of my cousin, the marriages of close friends... a gloriously misguided attempt at moving overseas, humbly returning to Australia to rebuild my life and triumphantly moving across the globe to one of the greatest cultural powerhouses on the face of the earth... the transformation of my parents from brutal overlords to two of my best friends, the ups and downs of my beloved siblings' lives and loves, and the three incredible people they've brought into my life, and the sudden death of a friend that we all thought would live forever.... becoming an adult isn't a smooth upward trajectory, it's a series of calm plateaux interspersed with dramatic upheavals that launch you further into the realm of being a grown-up and further away from your childhood. Some are unexpected, others are self-inflicted, but almost all of them change you in ways that you never thought you could be changed. Right now I know I'm in the midst of one of those changes. It's not pleasant. And I don't really know what the outcome of this upheaval will be. A year ago today I was naively certain that everything from here on would be smooth sailing, and here I am more confused than ever, because I've never felt more like a kid and an adult at the same time than I do right now.

A.A.W.W.W Syndrome

2011-08-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

To whom it may concern:

We, at the New York Hospital for Completely Made Up Diseases, wish to advise that we are currently caring for one Timothy "Spiderman" Hansen (most likely a moniker, but strangely this is his name as indicated on his passport).

Mr Spiderman Hansen is currently in a semi-vegetative state, only communicating with our doctors with a series of non-sensical goo-goo noises and scrunch-faces. We believe that he suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown as the result of an extremely rare and dangerous condition known as Acute Absorption of Widdle Woo Woosiecutsiedoodles (better known by its acronym "A.A.W.W.W. Syndrome"). This insidiously crippling disorder is brought about by a sudden and intense exposure to "Cute". The sufferer finds his or her carefully constructed wall of cynicism completely worn down, resulting in unnaturally high levels of good will towards humanity and the world in general.

We were able to go through Mr Spiderman Hansen's photo album and reassemble the weekend that brought about his breakdown; due to the extreme levels of cute we strongly advise utmost caution in viewing these photos, and at the first signs of unnaturally high levels of good-will towards the world please call your local Bob Katter or Rev. Fred Nile to get really f*cking disillusioned again.

As you can see, his weekend began innocuously enough:


Aww... Paula and Stashu... Cute!


Hai-Nhu with Evelyn and baby Bea! So CUTE!!!

But things rapidly took a turn for the worse:


OMG!!! Rhea with a KITTEN!!! SO CUTE!!! OMG!!!!

The introduction of kittens into the mix proved to be the beginning of the downward slide for Mr Spiderman Hansen:


OMG!!! "I can haz kitteh?!" OMG OMG OMG!! CUTE!!!!


THEY THINK THEYZ PEEPLZ!!!! WIDDLE WOO WOOS!!!

Things only became more surreal as the weekend progressed:

Evelyn is JUMPING!!! I WANTS TO JUMPING TOO!!!!


I IZ JUMPING 2!!! CUUUUUUTE!!! gngnAAAARGH!!!!

NOW I IZ ON A HORSY!!! NEEIGH!!! OMG!!!!


IZ SMALL HORSY!!! IZ KYEUTEST HORSY EVA!!! OMG!!!

The situation became critical however when Mr Spiderman Hansen apparently went to a lake. Small children and water are a bad enough combination:


KIDZ IN DE WATA!!!! OMGGGGGBSgajhzguydfq&*dF!@


CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTE!!!!!!!!!!


....gnnGGnngn...ggnugnngGU...

... but in his weakened state Mr Spiderman Hansen was unable to resist succumbing to the mind-numbing cuteness of...


PUPPEEEEIIIZZEZ!!!


PUPPIEZZEZ SLEEPZ!!


PUPPIEZZ HAZ MONKEY!!!! OOMMMGGGG!!!!

PUPPIEZZ SLEEPZ IN A BED!!!! PUPPIEZ IZNT PEEPLZE!! PUPPOESIAIYOIQJWKQJGSNASMGhasfj,.as

It was at this point that Mr Spiderman Hansen became catatonic with sugary, diabetic-inducing levels of cutsie-wootsieness. Fortunately he was transported to our facility in the nick of time, where our crack team of experts delivered the only known treatment of A.A.W.W.W. Syndrome: Marilyn Manson reading excerpts of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar combined with repeated forced viewings of Bjork's Dancer in the Dark, Clockwork Orange style (bizarrely, this was covered by his Health Insurance). Mr Spiderman Hansen is showing signs of improvement, and we're confident that within a few weeks he should be able to return to work, once again ready to be crushed by the weight of a cruel and indifferent world.

Yours Sincerely,

The New York Hospital for Completely Made Up Diseases.

The Politics of Air Conditioning

2011-08-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

It's two a.m. My bedroom is about 35 degrees celcius. I have an upright fan that I've positioned inches from my bed, and in the stiflingly hot night air it's doing a great job of simulating the winds of the Sahara. I think I've had about seventeen minutes of dozey napping so far tonight. Not what you would call actual sleep though. But I don't care. I am strong. I am Australian.

I don't need air conditioning.

Ugh... so hot...

Shit... two-thirty... I'm convinced one of my housemates snuck into my room before I went to bed and replaced my bedsheets with wet towels. That's what it feels like: I'm sleeping on a nest of goddam wet towels. Big thick wet towels soaked through with hot water. That's the most logical explanation at two-thirty in the morning after a week of sketchy, feverish, sweaty attempts at sleep.

Wait, did I say two-thirty? It's three. Three a.m. and still no sleep. This is good though. I am strong. I am environmentally conscious. Let the molly-coddled mummy's boys of America have their air conditioning. I am Australian. I grew up on the most arid continent on the planet. I grew up expecting that any moment an army of red-bellied black snakes and funnel web spiders were going drop from the sky and eat my face off (or something. I may have gotten a little confused about that along the way). I am tougher than I appear. I may be as camp as a row of tents but by God I don't need a freaking air conditioner.

...gng.... I think I'm having a moment like Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting where he sees the baby crawling across the ceiling, except instead of dead babies I see a procession of penguins carrying trays of icey cold water.

I turn on my side, partly to expose my back to my Sahara fan and partly to ignore the penguins cheerfully traipsing across my ceiling. Still can't sleep, and like most people do when they can't sleep, I begin introspective musings on why I can't sleep...

I hate people telling me what to do. When I got here, one of the first things Daniel said to me was "you're going to have to buy an air conditioner". Phshaw, I said to him. I hate air conditioning. I'm Australian. I don't need air conditioning. "You're going to need to buy an air conditioner," he said again as though speaking to a developmentally disabled child. My resolve hardened: I would not need to buy an air conditioner.

Why so proud, Tim? What, are you in a Greek Tragedy? Your hubris refuses to allow you to see the wisdom in buying an air conditioner? The blind prophet Tiresias appears, foretelling doom, misery, and crappy sleep patterns unless you yield and get an air conditioner, and you, in your stubborn pride, toss him out of the city with warnings never to return... The gods are displeased...

God I need some sleep.

Shit, it's three-thirty. Three-thirty! I remember what sleep was like. It was so nice. So... not damp... or something.

You know what else? I hate not knowing something. I came over here thinking that the Australian summer was about as hot as anything I would need to live through. But New York is just as hot. Maybe hotter. It's definitely more humid. Some mornings I get up and there's a haze in the air like fog, except it's steam. Steam. Like in a sauna. It's so freaking damp and hot in the city that the air becomes STEAMY. I didn't know this before I came over. So I pretend like I always knew, and made a conscious decision not to buy an air conditioner despite knowing that New York in Summer is like living on the planet Venus, because if I was to buy an air conditioner then everyone would know that I didn't know and... and... well I'm not sure exactly what would happen but I'll be damned if I give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me not know something.

The penguins have set up a little wading pool near my closet. One of them smugly waves his little black flipper at me. Yeah, rub it in you tuxedo-wearing jerk. Not all of us can afford a swimming pool. What an ass-hat.

I roll onto my other side, so now I'm getting a faceful of hot air. It's about as refreshing as lying in front of an industrial-strength hand-dryer in a public restroom.

Four a.m... the sun will be up soon... (don't think about it because then you'll get even shittier and won't be able to sleep even more and that will just make you crankier and you have a hard enough time getting any work done in this oven of a bedroom as it is and if you've had no sleep at all then you may as well just pack it in because you'll be as productive as a sack of hammers)...

WHY IS IT SOOO HOT.... In Australia right now, it's winter... lovely, cool, sleety winter... bliss...

The resident penguins have called all their penguin-friends over for a penguin-party. They show up in their little air-conditioned penguin-minivans, carrying penguin-picnic baskets, penguin-kids chasing each other around their harried but happy penguin-parents, squawking cheerful hellos to each other. But they all keep one eye on the sweaty human lying prostrate in front what is essentially a decorative fan, like the crazy-cat-lady's house in a Stepford Wives' neighborhood... squawk squak squwaaaak... no air conditioning....

I hate doing something just because everyone else does it. "Gee willikers! You mean everyone in New York has an air conditioner? Well golly whiz, I guess I better get one, too! Because if everyone does something then it automatically is the best thing to do! I mean, if history has taught us one thing, it's that it's best to just do everything that everyone else does all the time! Wowee zowee! Off I go to buy an air conditioner!"

My sarcastic monologue ignores the Ireland-debacle of '09.

I hate being wrong.

However... I also hate my nighttimes being reduced to fitful bouts of sweaty half-sleep as I lay spreadeagled and damp on top of my bed like a decomposing starfish. Sunlight begins to insinuate itself through the curtains, promising that things are only going to get hotter than they are now. I finally crack. I half bellow and stagger to my feet, standing on my bed, swaying from side to side, dripping with sweat and fury and torment. The penguins, sensing something biblical is about to happen, pack up their picnic baskets and the wading pool and their icey drinks with comic haste and escape squawking behind my chest of drawers. I barely notice. I begin to tear my bedding apart in a primeval physical expression of the battle that rages inside me. The suffocating air in my room is filled with inhuman grunts and feathers from my pillow.

...UNGGH... Why do I resist air conditioning? ...NGNUGH... Am I freakin' Amish? ...ggnARGH... Do I not enjoy all the other benefits of modern civilization? Do I eschew the virtues of public transport, lattes, antibiotics, thermal underwear, iPods, Hollywood movies, refrigerators, elevators, ball-point pens, electric lights, democracy, internet pornography, Converse sneakers, supermarkets, non-institutionalised religion, shampoo specifically designed for curly hair, year-round tomatoes, dental floss, mobile phones, universal equality, Ray Ban sunglasses, laptop computers, orthopedic mattresses, digital cameras or frozen yoghurt? NO! I DON'T! So why the hell do I refuse to succumb to GODDAM AIR CONDITIONING?! ...gnnnnaAAAAAAAAARGGHH!!!!!!....

...

So I bought an air conditioner and now my room is lovely and cool and I sleep like a baby every night and my pride and Australian cultural stereotypes and the environment and the penguins can go to hell.

A Nice Man

2011-07-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

Brains are weird. When they go wrong, all kinds of bananas can break loose. At the more benign end of the spectrum there is stuff like colour blindness. These poor souls cannot distinguish between red and blue, or blue and yellow, or sometimes any colour at all, and so are doomed to wander the earth in paisley shirts and striped trousers. Other unfortunate individuals suffer from amusia, which sounds like a made-up clown disease but refers to the condition in which the sufferer is unable to differentiate between musical pitches, and is thus unable to enjoy, or even recognise music. When we move up a few levels we enter the territory of things like prosopagnosia, the inability to tell one face from another, Capgras Delusion, where a person is convinced that a close family member has been replaced by an identical looking imposter, or something called Paris Syndrome, which is suffered almost exclusively by Japanese tourists who, having spent years romanticising the City of Light, are unable to reconcile their idealised notions of the French capital with their first interactions with the breathtaking rudeness of actual French people, and as such suffer such severe culture shock that they undergo a mental breakdown from bottling up all their anger at douchey French waiters (there's even a support hotline for Paris Syndrome operated by the Japanese Embassy in Paris. This is completely true).

Since I moved to New York I've become convinced that I, too, suffer from an insidious misfiring of the brain. Whilst some people are forced to endure being unable to recognise colour, music, other people's faces, or that their wife isn't a robot, or that the best way to deal with a jerk waiter is to pour all the sugar all over the table as you're leaving, I am apparently unable to distinguish the difference between my home and New York's Grand Central Station, as evidenced by the fact that every single time I have to catch a train anywhere I'm still calmly sitting in my room googling images of lolcats when I should be well and truly on the subway if I expect to actually catch said train. As such, despite the blood-oaths I make to myself every time I'm sprinting through the terminal with a goddam backpack the size of a Galapagos tortoise on my back that the next time I have to catch a train I will bloody well leave the house with a window of more than fifteen nanoseconds to spare, I inevitably repeat my panicked mad dash through the streets of New York every few weeks or so. Being an intelligent adult capable of undertaking complicated planning procedures, the only conclusion I can draw from my Groundhog Day-like approach to interstate travel is that I must suffer from an acute inability to understand that trains to Connecticut do not leave from my bathroom.

The most recent attack of my unfortunate disorder occurred a few weeks ago when I had to go upstate for the Norfolk Music Festival. The closest train station to Norfolk from New York was about an hour's drive away, and so I had to be on a specific train at a specific time to be met by someone with a car to take me the rest of the way there, otherwise I would be walking to Norfolk. Of course, forty minutes before my train left Grand Central I was still toodling around in my bedroom, probably engaged in some task of breathtaking import like alphabetising my underwear, and when the realisation hit me that I had done this f@*&ing shit all over again I grabbed my backpack (which mercifully I had packed the night before) and ran out the door. The subway wouldn't get me there in time though. I had to catch a cab. That's okay, cabs are always going over the Williamsburg bridge near my house. Easy. Cabs.

There must have been a no-cabs convention or some shit because fifteen minutes later I was still standing like a pickle on the side of the road desperately hailing anything that even looked like a cab, including school buses, ice-cream trucks, and a lady pushing a yellow pram. As my panic and self-reproach began to approach tears-in-public level (I am such a baby), a cab finally pulled over. I gratefully flung open the door and prepared to hurl my backpack in.

"I'm off duty," the guy said.

"...?" says I.

"I'm off duty," he says again.

"You're off duty? You pulled over to tell me you're OFF DUTY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!" I ~~shrieked~~ calmly inquired (meanwhile, four vacant cabs that had apparently been skulking out of sight and waiting for me to be distracted made a break for it and whizzed past me triumphantly over the bridge).

"I have to go to Mosque," the guy explained. Ah. Of course (?).

"Come on, man, my train leaves in like thirty minutes, and I'm totally stuck!" I begged.

"... okay, okay, just get in, I'll take you over the bridge but I won't charge you."

All I really heard was "get in" so it wasn't until we were actually moving that I processed the rest of the sentence.

"You won't charge me? Don't be silly, I have to pay you."

"No, no, I'm going over that way anyway, I have to go to Mosque, so I won't charge you. I'll get you as close as I can to Grand Central, then I'll get you another cab".

Which he did. Traffic on the bridge was unusually light, and my man got me a mere ten blocks from my destination before he was satisfied that I'd be able to catch another cab without too much hassle. I tried one more time to pay him, but he insisted: no money, he was going to Mosque. A little stunned by this completely un-New Yorkish approach to taking other people's cash, I thanked him, ran out into the middle of the street and jumped into the cab that screeched to a halt to avoid running me down. I made it to the station with ten minutes to spare and so have probably learned nothing from the experience, except that once people learn you suffer from a disabling brain disorder like mine, they can be really, really nice.

American Summer

2011-07-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

I have a friend... for the sake of anonymity let's call him N. Luff... No, that's too obvious... let's call him Nathan L... So Nathan grew up in the remote confines of Yass, an inland country town known for agriculture and being closely situated to Canberra (although not as close as Queanbeyan. I'm not really sure who the winner is in this urban ménage à trois). When I say Nathan grew up in Yass, as far as I can tell he really grew up in Yass. You see, Nathan didn't see the ocean until he was nineteen. I mean, he'd seen pictures of the ocean, and no doubt had seen movies and television shows with nautical themes, and was vaguely aware on a conceptual level of the pelagic nature of the edge of the continent, but the first time he stood on a beach with the sand between his toes, the sun above his head, seagulls squarking in his ears and the eye-sucking vastness of the Pacific Ocean before him was at an age when the average person's "firsts" consist of consuming and experiencing as many illicit, immoral and illegal pleasures that hitherto had been off-limits as quickly and as often as possible. Prior to this, Nathan's concept of standing on a beach was on the same level as standing on the moon: some people had done it, but not him, and it was unlikely in the near future he would be able to join their ranks. Not being Nathan, I can't be 100% about this, but I can speculate that after finally, for the first time, experiencing the splendor of the ocean (and experiencing the less splendorous finding-sand-in-every-nook-and-cranny-of-the-goddam-car-for-months-afterwards) Nathan was like "huh.... it all makes sense now..."

Nathan's story feels to be a great illustration of what living in New York is like for a thirty-two year old who has grown up with America on the television screen. On some idiotic, conservative, pocket-protector level I feel that I am too old for "first experiences", or at least, too old to smile stupidly at the sheer enjoyment of first experiences. (I have to admit, most of my "American Firsts" have not been unadulterated orgies of pleasure: My first dealings with the American visa system; my first phone call from my unpredictably bizarre landlord; my first time doing a commando roll in an effort to avoid being mown down by a grade-A douchebag in an SUV the size of an aircraft carrier who felt that observing pedestrian crossings and traffic lights was an inconvenience not to be suffered on his way to his lobotomy or wherever the fuck it was that shitlicker was going). But Nathan's story popped into my head as I walked home from the pub tonight, and I feel compelled to write about an American First that is everything TV promised it would be, and much, much more: The American Summer.

I'll admit that until recently I firmly believed that whatever these uppity Northern Hemisphere countries thought of as "Summer" would pale in comparison to an authentic Aussie summer. In some respects, I'm right. New Yorkers bitch and moan about heat that the average Australian would consider to be a mild December afternoon. But now that we're officially two or so weeks into the US Summer (they do their seasons by the solstices... pagans...) I think they may be on to something pretty sweet here. It's difficult to articulate, but the cut-throat, desperate rat-race feeling that usually pervades the city seems to have evaporated into a cloud of sunglasses, coronas and thongs (the Australian kind. And maybe the American kind too, but I don't often get to see those). It's like the whole of New York has gone on vacation to New York.

Parks are full of people. And I mean FULL. There's a lot of people here and virtually none of them have backyards, or even a balcony. For most of the time, their "outside" time is spent on sidewalks, trudging from the subway to work to the gym to the pub and back home again. So when the sun comes out, hordes of New Yorkers descend upon their local public park, quickly filling every available square inch with people reading, lazing, talking, watching squirrels, or playing instruments (including one ambitious guy who drags an upright piano to the park near my school every lunchtime and plays rags for an hour or so).

My neighborhood has a distinctively party feeling. It's made up primarily of Dominicans or Puerto Ricans, and these guys take relaxing pretty seriously. All day long they guys will set up charcoal barbeques in the streets and play dominoes. In the evenings people hang out on their stoops drinking beer and talking long after the sun has gone down. Kids knock the covers off fire hydrants and play in the spray. Latin music blares from every window (and, to be perfectly honest, this drives me bats.) Walking home from the pub it feels like you've been to a party that's spread out across the entire neighborhood. Everything might look decrepit, but it feels awesome. Its what I imagine Cuba would be like, if Cuba was a filthy bastion of capitalism instead of a bolshy haven for pinko commies.

The weird thing is that this seems incredibly familiar even though these scenes are NOT at all what my summers are like in Australia (for, unlike our anonymous friend in the first paragraph, I've been to the beach every summer since I was a born). Think about it: Sesame Street, Seinfeld, Friends, Sex in the City, even NYPD Blue (remember that show? I HATED THAT SHOW. KEEP THE GODDAM CAMERA STILL, YOU DICKWADS), all of these shows have action that takes place in the summer, and every one of them will have scenes like I described above. Any Australian that grew up in front of the idiot box and then comes to New York in the summer will straight away know what I mean. It won't be like, "What the hell? Where are the backyard barbeques, or the sunday sessions in the pubs, or the days lounging around on the beach? How do these people enjoy summer?"... it'll be more like, "huh.... it all makes sense now..."

Good Times in Norfolk, CT

2011-06-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

It's a gloriously sunny day today in New York. Hardly a cloud in the sky, a gentle breeze blows through the streets, and the pavements seem particularly crap-free. There's a sparkle in the air and I'm relaxed and happy. Even the asshole truck driver who woke me up this morning by parking outside my bedroom window and beeping his horn non-stop for three minutes to attract the attention of the person to whom he wished to deliver his package rather than go to the bother of actually dragging his obese fanny* out of said truck and waddling up the six steps to the apartment block’s front door couldn’t take the sheen off my mood. Since I am more neurotic than a busload of Woody Allens I expect this feeling to last for but a short while, and so have decided to document the circumstances surrounding my unusually positive attitude.

"So… Why so cheerful, Tim?" you may ask (or you may not. You self-absorbed jerk). And I shall answer you: I have had my soul nourished by a magical week in a lushly verdant pocket of the world tucked away in the heart of rural Connecticut. A tiny hamlet of lovingly maintained New England mansions, oldey worldey water mills, wide open streets utterly free of traffic,smudgy mists that waffle down from viridian hills,babbling brooks, blarping frogs, floofing birds, and sunsets that would make God weep. I have spent a week in Norfolk, CT. (Also there was free ice-cream).

More specifically, I have been one of the fellows at the Norfolk New Music Workshop, run every year since 1941 by Yale university. The workshop is a residency that is part of a larger music festival that takes place in the Ellen Battell Stoekel estate, a sprawling parkland that was once home to a philanthropically-minded gazillionaire by the name of Ellen Battell Stoekel (duh). Ms Stoekel left the whole kit and kaboodle to Yale university with the specific instruction that the ol' farm be used to host an annual music summer school. Seventy years later, it's still kicking along, and this year I was fortunate enough to attend (especially since there was free ice-cream).

For those of you who don't know what a residency is, it's pretty much a working holiday for artists. You send off an application, saying "look how good I am! Can I come and stay at your place and make some music/art/sculpture/interpretive dance based on the manufacture of dental floss?", and then the people who run the residency go "Sure! We'd love to have you along!" (or sometimes "No f&#king way! Your music sounds like a bagful of drowning cats! Go to hell and take this migraine-inducing crap with you!") and then you go and live there and do your thing and generally have a nice peaceful time of things. I've been lucky enough to undertake a few residencies and they're all different and awesome in their own way, but Norfolk was so great it'll stick in my mind for many years to come. The scenery was amazing, my fellow artists-in-residence were a stellar bunch of people, and the whole thing was run by two of my favourite folks, "nicest composer in the whole world" Martin Bresnick and "rip-roaring pianist" fellow Aussie Lisa Moore (plus there was free ice-cream).

So generally speaking, there are two kinds of residencies: one where you're required to demonstrate some kind of finished product at the end, and one where you're required to just exist and add a certain classy romanticism to the place (much like in the days of Byron when wealthy landowners would go to the length of actually advertising for, interviewing and hiring hermits on a contract to live in purpose-built ramshackle cottages strategically placed in discrete corners of the estate, so when the landowners were out wandering with their entourage they could wave vaguely at this utterly artificial addition and say "oh yes... that's where the hermit lives... poor mad fellow..." because nothing says "thrillingly romantic" like having an unkempt hobo squatting in your backyard. Wait... where was I...? Oh yes. Residencies.) So there's two kinds: ones where you have to do something, and ones where you don't (it's more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, there it is). The Norfolk residency was the former, and for this one we (the composers) had to write a piece before we got there that fulfilled certain criteria: it had to be for a specific ensemble (clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin and double bass, if you're interested), and it had to make some reference to the work of the man who could be arguably called the Grandpappy of American New Music, Charles Ives (however there was no requirement to reference the fact that there was free ice cream).

So Charles Ives was, and still is, a pretty unique composer. He was doing his thing at the beginning of last century, and had this kind of "composer superhero" lifestyle... by day he was a mild mannered life-insurance salesman, and by night he was a mild-mannered composer who wrote some of the most wildly fantastic music you could ever imagine, so much so that of course in his day he was considered a joke, and even now there are some pieces that raise eyebrows. He did a lot of things that were considered bizarre and frankly unmusical in his day, like writing pieces in multiple keys simultaneously, or positioning performers all over the concert hall, but he is perhaps best known for his habit of mashing together pre-existing pieces against a completely whacko backdrop of sound. Essentially he was DJ-ing decades before anyone even thought to put those two letters next to each other (except in very sternly abridged dictionaries**). The man had a love of pastiche that makes the average hipster look Amish. So it was this aspect I decided to focus on my piece (and my free-ice-cream-eating habits whilst at Norfolk).

I also knew I wanted this piece to be for Blair. Blair passed away only a few days after I had started work on the piece, and in the aftermath it became glaringly obvious that this piece absolutely had to be for him, especially since the date of the concert at the end of the residency was June 25th - Blair's thirtieth birthday. I'm not a huge believer in fate or coincidence, but this was too weird to ignore. So I knew this piece was to be for Blair, and I wanted to write a piece that he would enjoy listening to. The problem was that in the entire time I had known Blair he practically never professed a bold love or dislike of any music. Plus he was so unfalteringly positive that I could have beaten him over the head with a trumpet and he would have said "mate, I love it! Totally original and clever! Not so hot on the beating, but what do I know?" The only piece of music I could ever recall him saying he enjoyed was a song I wrote for him for Death's Waiting Room (created by Danielle Harvey, script by Sam Bowring. Friendship obligations satisfied) called "Weed". In this show, Blair played a confused transvestite called Marie Antoinette. Confused because she longed to be a man, despite the fact that biologically she was male. Even though I wrote the music for this song waaaay back in the day before I had even considered composition as a career, I still think it's a pretty kickass tune, and it has an awesomely dark little harmonic progression in the chorus. So I used that as a basis for the piece - pretty much throughout the whole deal this harmonic progression is referenced in a bunch of permutations and guises, all dressed up in Ivesian pastiche to sound like a celebration of an awesome guy (and I'm struggling to think of a way to seamlessly mention free ice cream at the end of this paragraph).

The performance was awesome. The musicians were incredible. The whole concert was brilliant. It was a great day. Amongst the thickly forested hills of Norfolk, in a huge New England music hall made entirely out of Californian redwood, "Good Times" premiered in front of a small but completely devoted audience. This alone is reason for me to feel that this residency was a wonderful success. But there was more... during the course of the week, listening to the musicians work on the piece, and talking to the other composers on residency with me, and having time out just to sit and think about my music and Blair and where I've come from and where I'm going to, I had an epiphany: this was my sound. This is my thing. This is the music that I can write that is completely and utterly me. Unsubtle. Raucous. Theatrical. Like two circuses colliding on an enormous jumping castle, elephants and lions and acrobats and all. For an artist of any ilk this is a wonderful moment. It clears the away some of the uncertainty and gives a clearer direction to head in. It suddenly makes you proud of your work and prepared to defend it to the death. It's like being reborn, and virtually nothing in the world can beat that.

Except free ice cream.

* Before you begin sending me links to wikipedia pages outlining the anatomical difference between men and women, remember that in the USA “fanny” means “buttocks”. I’m trying to blend in.

** I totally stole that joke from Terry Pratchett, but it fit perfectly so I couldn't resist. Totally Ivesian.

I've yet to receive the recording from the concert. As soon as I do, I'll update the blog, so keep your eyes peeled!


This is a fence.


The forest behind the estate

An olde worldey water mill.

The mansion on the estate, known as "The Whitehouse". It was pretty extravagant. The dining room ceiling, for example, was upholstered in elephant leather. No shit.

If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, it's now.

Jaqui Kolek, a mutual friend of Blair's, and I (and Andy, Jaqui's BF) enjoying some post-concert Veuve in honour of Blair.

The gang (from L-R): Me; Preben Antonsen (composer); Tim Hambourger (composer); Julia Seeholzer (composer); Adrienne Pope (violin); Mark Broschinsky (trombone); Victor Caccese (percussion); Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet); Thibault Bertin-Maghit (double bass); Nick DiBerardino (composer); Edward Neeman (piano); Julian Pellicano (conductor). At the front we have Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick. Good times!

The night I called 911

2011-06-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

The night I arrived back in the US after my most recent trip to Oz I met up with my friends from Australia, Christian and Hedy. They were in town for only a short time, and for months we planned to spend a much more substantial time together than we did, but Blair's death (which is still such a surreal statement that it has no actual real-world meaning) meant that we really only had that night to actually hang out. So we did. We hung out. And hung out. And huuuuung out. So a million drinks later I bundle the pair of them in a cab and I'm walking home. I'm thinking about Blair; he's pretty much all the three of us talked about for the previous four hours.

I come around the corner of my block and the first thing I see is a guy about my age slumped on the pavement, with some chick about my sister's age (but FAR more immature) standing on the nearby stoop saying, "Sir...?... Sir....?... Are you okay?". This guy was clearly not okay. He could barely speak his own name, let alone answer as to whether or not he felt in complete control of his faculties. This girl was making an effort to see if he was okay, but not a particularly effective effort. (Like most people, myself included, this girl was sincerely concerned with the condition of her fellow man, but she tempered that with earnestly polite detachment).

I got some information out of him. His name was Danny and he lived in Brooklyn. That was about as useful as saying his name was Mr. Smith and he lived on Planet Earth. Then he passed out utterly; in the half hour that followed I checked he was breathing by watching his belly bloat in and out of his sweater.

I suggested to Jillian (the chick going "Sir...? Sir...?) that we call an ambulance, initially because I didn't want to be woken up at 9am by a coroner's ambulance screeching around my front door to pick up a gradually cooling alcoholic's corpse from the front step of the apartment building ten doors up. But perhaps more so, I suggested we call an ambulance because Blair's death had made me incredibly conscious of how I treated other human beings, and while I was never a callous person, I feel as though it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I would walk past a guy in obvious alcoholic distress rather than try to take some responsibility for the situation. It was 3am after all, and I was pretty hammered and emotional.

So I dialled 911. A first! But I passed the phone to Jillian because I wasn't confident my Australian accent could convey the seriousness of the situation to an unsuspecting American call-center person...

Imagine if I did:

ME: Oi want to reepoirt a possible alcah-hoilic een deestress.

911: ...A what, sir?

ME: An alcah-holic een deesTRESS!

911: ...I'm sorry, who's wearing this dress?

ME: Noie, an alcah-holic! Hee neids hailp!

911: ...an alcoholic with broken knees...?

ME: NOI!!! What's WRONG with youi?! There's a pissed bloike on the steps of this apaahrtment block who neids meidicahl attinshun! (Note how thick my accent has become in the heat of the moment).

911: Sir, if you've had an allergic reaction to some kind of shellfish, which has cause a thickening of your tongue thus making it unintelligible to my nuanced American ears, then perhaps it would prove beneficial to both our interests if you gave the phone to someone without a debilitating allergy.

ME: (To Jillian) She wants to talk to you.

So the call was made. It was an uncomfortable waiting period. Jillian was young, and I could tell that she didn't often encounter tall, dark strangers from overseas (i.e. she totally had the hots for me. Who could blame her LOL ^-^) I didn't know what to say to her. So I started with local knowledge... I recalled something my landlord told me in an uncharacteristically communicative moment: a few years ago an apartment building down the street burnt down because some kid was playing with matches and set a bunch of rolled up carpets on fire, resulting in his death and the destruction of the building. I was expecting polite enthusiasm for a gruesome story.

"That was my nephew," she said.

Awkward.

So I panicked. The only reason I was stopping for this passed-out drunk guy (or so I believed) was because of my good friend's recent death. I thought I didn't give a flying fart as to whether or not this pissed guy lived or died; I just wanted to make my own life worth living. So I told Jillian about Blair. I told her of his sudden death and his philosophy on life. I was wearing my "good times" badge and I showed her that. I didn't spend much time talking about Blair, but I just wanted her to understand that I wasn't an insensitive schlub making stupid conversation. The futility of the effort and the apparent duplicity of my motives hit me like a hammer and I cried in front of a stranger over the passed-out body of another stranger.

I calmed down. She made soothing noises from behind the gate on her stoop. Eventually an ambulance showed up. (It's important you know that an ambulance in the US is not like an ambulance in Australia: we take for granted that an ambulance will take you to a hospital; as far as I can tell, in New York, you're lucky if an ambulance takes you to the corner unless you can prove you have ample private health insurance).

"Is he going to be okay?" Jillian asked as the ambulance drivers slipped their gloves on and pulled Danny to his feet.

"Yeah, we pick him up almost every night," said one indifferent ambulance dude.

"He was in handcuffs last night," said the other, and they tossed him in the back of their ambulance van like he was a sack of potatoes and drove off.

Sigh.

I don't really know why I'm telling you this story. I thought initially it was going to be an uplifting tale of humanity helping humanity. Maybe that's what I wanted it to be, but it didn't turn out that way. Instead it turned into a fucked up story of me trying to do good in the name of my friend and a flawed healthcare system got in the way. But since I've written this story I've come to the conclusion that if I (or anyone) is going to truly, TRULY learn something from Blair's death, it's not going to come from twee yet contemporary morality tales of helping drunk munters on the street outside my apartment. It's going to come from thinking about Blair's fairly unique combination of passion and compassion. Of caring about life, and caring about others you encounter in your life. I can't say for 100% certain that Blair would have stopped in the street to help Jillian deal with Danny, but I can say that Blair had a great deal of concern for the people in his life. Their successes were his successes, their losses were felt just as keenly by him as by them. And he always came out the other end looking for the silver lining. I'm not sure yet what my silver lining was in this weirdass night, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.

A Life Well Lived

2011-05-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

On May 3rd 2009 I arrived in Sydney after spending five months abroad in Europe - three of them living in Dublin on a work visa - and I have never been happier to be on Australian soil in my life. With the irritatingly smug gift of hindsight I now know that in the year or so leading up to my impetuous decision to move to Ireland at the end of 2008 I was suffering from a bizarre mix of being both utterly absorbed by my career and having absolutely no idea what I should do next. All I knew was that I was turning thirty and had yet to live overseas, which for some reason I equated with "a good career move". But I couldn't bring myself to move to London because of my stupid obsession with being different from everyone else. My options were limited as I only speak English (albeit excellently, I might add), so with all this in mind I pretty much spun the globe and ended up moving to the Emerald Isle just as the world was entering the worst recession since the Great Depression.

I'll spare you the details of this horrendously ill-planned decision, but suffice to say when I returned to Australia five and a half months later with no savings, a maxed-out credit card, no house, no car, no job and STILL absolutely no idea what I was going to do next, I was pretty lost and dejected. Humbled, I actually listened to my friends' advice for the first time in my life and moved to Sydney to pretty much begin all over again. I was homeless for three months, and spent that time sleeping in friends' spare rooms, working shitty, shitty jobs to try and get some money together and generally regretting the day I'd even heard of Ireland. Without putting too fine a point on it, I was pretty bitter.

But life goes on and I had to claw my way out of this abyss I had created for myself; I knew that the first step to doing this was finding a place to live. I went and looked at a few places I found via the internet, but none of them really worked out (one place in Annandale was owned by a forty-year-old guy who had lived there since he was born. His mother had just passed away and he had inherited the house. The house was a real museum piece, but I was especially told that the front bedroom was off-limits as that was his mother's room and was to stay the way it was on the day she died. That creeped me out, but what finally turned me off was that the house smelt vaguely of burnt cookies and had that weird, dank, faintly greasy kitchen carpet that was popular in the seventies in every room of the house, including the bathroom). I was really getting the shits. Then my good friend Danielle suggested to me one day that I might try a mutual friend of ours who had recently broken up from a long-term relationship and was currently living with his mum. If we were looking for a place together than we could call the shots, plus wouldn't it be nicer to live with someone you know rather than a complete stranger? So with nothing to lose, I called Blair Milan and asked him if he'd be interested in moving in with me.

I had known Blair for about eight years at that point. We met in Bathurst, where we both did the same theatre course at CSU. He was a fresh-faced first year positively brimming with confidence, whereas I was the grizzled, twenty-three-year-old veteran who had finished his degree the year before but had yet to actually leave Bathurst and still lived with students (which does NOT IN ANY WAY MAKE ME A LOSER, FYI). Although our first real introduction was marred by the fact that it was at 4.30 in the morning when my brother Matt convinced Blair it would be hilarious if they both snuck into my room wearing hockey masks and wielding axes whilst I was asleep (it wasn't), I quickly grew to like Blair a lot. He was charming, confident, and so cheesily egotistical that he could do no wrong. Over the course of the following years we hung out only sporadically, but every time we did it was a really fucking good time, and by the time I left Australia at the end of 2008 I considered him to be within my close circle of friends in Sydney.

The day I called Blair to propose we look for houses together he was driving along the Great Ocean Road in a borrowed convertible with a gorgeous German backpacker he had met a few weeks before. I meanwhile was standing out the front of a high school in St George in the rain waiting to teach five thirteen-year-old girls with voices like starving cockatoos how to sing "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga. That pretty much says everything you need to know about our different points of view on life at that time: both broke, homeless, and virtually unemployed (Blair was an actor who spent most of his day-to-day employment working for a high-class catering company); one of us was wallowing in misery whilst the other gave life the middle finger and did what he damn well wanted (hint: it wasn't me).

Awesomely, Blair was enthusiastic about moving in to a house together, and four weeks later we moved into flat 2203 of 177 Mitchell Road in Erskineville. The apartment complex was huge and luxurious, with two tennis courts, an indoor and outdoor pool, a gym, underground parking, and a lovely leafy balcony. We were two young, handsome bachelors living in a kickass apartment with no commitments: the world was our oyster. Except I didn't see it that way. Not at first. I was still miserable, stressed and frantically trying to get myself back to the place I was in before I left Australia at the end of 2008. And misery loves company, right? All I wanted was someone to listen to me bitch and moan about how awful everything was and how much I hated my crappy job in a miserable box office in a dilapidated theatre for a company that could not, even with the aid of valium, given less of a shit about me (one time, an electrical fire broke out under the desk at my feet, and I managed to just get away before it turned into a small but serious blaze, and when I called the head office to tell them, the first thing they said was "can you still sell tickets?"). But Blair wouldn't have a bar of it. Not because he was deliberately trying to ignore my misery or because he thought I was exaggerating, but because his in-built positivity and optimism meant that he was actually incapable of dwelling on the shitty things that had happened. As far as he was concerned, they were in the past. For Blair, there was a whole wonderful world out there, and so whenever I bitched about something he would beam like a summer's day and remind me of something positive I had to look forward to.

After a few weeks, I was ready to kill him.

Yet he persisted. We began to spend the evenings on the balcony drinking wine and talking about good times we'd had, either with each other, or with our friends, or with people that the other had never even met. He'd offer his opinion on whatever piece I was writing, and it was invariably positive regardless of how godawful it was. He would practically cartwheel through the front door after getting home from work or the gym or from his voiceover lessons or from the pub or even from the freaking dentist brimming with glee at all the awesome things that had happened to him, no matter how big or small. And most of all, he insisted that the universe had brought us together - that the next twelve months would see us take ourselves to the next level, in career, relationships, and general satisfaction with our lives. For this reason, the apartment was no longer known as 2203/177 Mitchell Road, Esrkineville, it was only allowed to be referred to as "The Apartment Where Only Good Things Happen And Dreams Come True."

Crazily, it began to work. My general situation barely changed for six months. I kept the same shitty jobs (although I began to pick up some excellent work at local youth theatre companies, which kept me sane), I could barely earn enough money to rub two pennies together, I was still hardly writing any music, and I was, as always, chronically single. And yet one day, like a breath of beautiful fresh air, I stopped thinking about the things that I had lost and instead began to notice all of the incredibly awesome things I did have, including a truly remarkable housemate.

One evening, in late November of 2009, Blair and I were sitting on the balcony of our apartment. We had several empty bottles of wine in front of us and we made a pact: we were going to be living in the USA, come hell or high-water, by that time the following year. To confirm our drunken, 3.30-in-the-morning commitment to this endeavor, we wrote on the back of a big piece of paper: "BY SEPTEMBER 16, 2010, TIM AND BLAIR WILL BE LIVING IN THE USA" and stuck it on the back of our front door. We were both deadly serious about it, too. It became a constant topic of conversation, "what we were doing to get to the USA". Blair began to apply to residencies, and was successful in getting a six week stint in L.A. at quite a prestigious acting workshop. I meanwhile started to apply to schools in the USA in earnest, reminded every day of my commitment to do so both by the big sign on the back of the door and by the ceaseless optimism and support of Blair.

Now, I'm not going to get too Hollywood here and say that Blair was single-handedly responsible for pulling me out of my funk and giving me a much-needed kick in the pants, but there is no doubt in my mind that moving in with Blair was possibly the most serendipitously fortuitous off-the-cuff decision I had ever made. When we moved out of that apartment in early August 2010, with me about to move to the USA, one of the last things to go out of the house was the sign on the back of the door. I wish I had kept it.

You know much of the next part of the story: I moved to the USA in September, and began school, and have sporadically chronicled my misadventures on this blog (and I SWEAR there will be a whole bunch more coming soon). Blair meanwhile finally achieved his biggest break to date, scoring a co-hosting gig on a cooking and travel series with his mum, Lyndey, where they traveled around Greece for a few weeks generally having a kickass time of things.

A few weeks ago in early April I returned to Australia for what was meant to be a week-long trip. My dad is a budding artist and was having his first exhibition, and I went back to support him, give an awesome speech, and drink all the free booze on offer. There was a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing on my part though, as it would be right in the middle of the semester and would mean I would miss a fair chunk of school. But in the end I decided it was the right thing to do - if anything I had learned over my time living with Blair it was to never, ever take for granted the wonderful things you have in your life, and my family is definitely at the top of an awesome list. I spent three days in Orange and then went to Sydney. I was to fly out on Saturday April 16th, and had sent out feelers for a party in Newtown on the Friday night before, including a message to Blair. I was puzzled when I didn't hear back from him; Blair was always the first person to put his hand up for a party.

That Friday morning, at 11am, I got a phone call from Danielle: on Thursday, Blair had collapsed at home, and was in intensive care. He had leukemia. No one knew. A huge bunch of his friends went to the hospital to keep vigil with his family outside of the ICU where he lay, unconscious, fighting for his life for two days. His wonderful parents let us come to his beside, two by two, to see him, something that I will cherish for the rest of my life. Blair died at 1.30am on Sunday April 17th. He was two months shy of his thirtieth birthday.

* * *

I began writing this entry on the day I flew back to the USA. Strangely enough, it was May 3rd, 2011 - exactly two years after I had returned to Australia and began what I know now was one of the most important phases of my life. The phase where I stopped obsessing about the things I wasn't doing and instead enjoyed the things I had. The phase where I learned that one of the best things you can do is enjoy time with your friends instead of locking yourself away in your study for weeks on end. The phase where I began to enjoy the simple things in life once more, and take pleasure in planning for the future instead of being terrified of it. A phase that is inextricably linked to the life and philosophy of Blair Milan.

I'll miss you, buddy.

To Good Times.

http://vimeo.com/23216938

Blair, Danielle and Me

Why I hate the G train

2011-03-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

Unless you've been living under a rock you're probably aware that New York has this quaint little system of tunnels known as the "subway". These tunnels have trains inside them, and they criss-cross the city thus enabling its inhabitants to get around with relative ease. Dirty, rickety and yet (to my Australian eye) incredibly efficient, the subway is the great leveler. If you live in New York you will almost certainly have to use the subway at some point in your day, whether you're a high-falutin' businessman, a too-cool-for-skool hipster, or the crazy man who was on the train with me one evening last year and spent the first half of the trip over the Williamsburg bridge ushering invisible people through the door adjoining the carriages, and the second half with his pants around his ankles talking animatedly to his penis.

Now, this might be revealing too much of what ticks around inside my head, but I can't help but consider some of the trains I usually catch to have distinct personalities. I have always done shit like this. When I was a kid I thought that numbers, letters, colours and even days of the week had "personalities" and I either liked or loathed them based on their traits, and since no one told me this was nuts until it was too late I still have vestigial flickers of emotion when certain characters pop up. The number "6" for example, still seems to be a selfish little shit of a number, Sundays are miserable and the letter "E" is so common but thinks it's sooo fucking good, slutting around all over the place. The number "11" however still feels exciting and different, ripe with possibilities, deep green fills me with joy and calm, and one of the highlights of my day is being able to legitimately handwrite a capital letter "Z". So flamboyant, yet still elegant (like me).

Anyway, as I was saying, since I have managed to carry this lunacy into my adulthood, it didn't take me long to begin to associate certain trains with particular emotions. How could I not? Each train is designated with either a letter or a number, and then most of these trains are grouped with two or three others into particular colours, a perfect storm for a neurotic someone like me to indulge in a bit of crazy while waiting on the platform. My favourite is the "M" train, one of the helpful bright orange trains. It obligingly whisks me each day between the Marcey Avenue stop near my house to West 4 near school via the Williamsburg bridge, giving me an awesome view of the city and reminding me that I'm in freaking New York. My day is always brightened when I get to catch one of the rich, royal dark blue trains, the "A", "C" or even the "E" (despite its slutty ways). Alas, such opportunities for me are rare, like getting to ride a camel, so I relish them when they crop up. Then there's the "L". The "L" is the James Dean of trains, a loner grey, a rebel. From the Lorimer Street station near my place it stabs into the heart of lower Manhattan with cool arrogance, and doesn't give a fuck what the other la-di-dah trains think, with their fancy routes all over the place. I want so badly to be friends with the "L", but it'd never talk to me.

Of course every story needs a villain. Some villains are oafish, stupid brutes, others are dorky little clerical jerks who think they're doing good but screw everything up, whilst others are tortured souls who can coolly assert that their noble end justifies their wicked means. But the villain in this insane cast of enormous metal actors (am I laboring the metaphor? Probably. But shut the hell up) is the worst kind. This is the Iago from Othello of trains: superficially appearing to be helpful, loyal and friendly, but you realise too late, too late, that it hates you and has been plotting maliciously all along to destroy you and everything you hold dear, that its most treasured dream is to dance amongst the smoking wreckage of what was once your life.

I am, of course, talking about the "G" train.

The "G" train.

I loathe the "G" train.

On the surface it seems to be a perfectly lovely train. It runs the length of Brooklyn and Queens. It doesn't need to show off and hang out with the other lines in Manhattan. "G" is a kind letter, a motherly letter, one that helpfully finishes things off with a graceful little curl. This train is a lovely calming green colour, one that suggests it could take you peacefully to the moon if you so desired. Even the stations on the "G" line feel welcoming, more like waiting inside a tiled cathedral than a subway station. But that's what it wants you to think... it wants you to let your guard down, to unthinkingly meander into its open craw, whereupon it will snap shut its doors like a Venus Fly-Trap and will take you God-knows where.

It will whizz through the station that you were intending to get off at for absolutely no reason at all. It will shut down without warning and force everyone off in the middle of nowhere at ten o'clock at night. It will decide it's tired and not run for weekends at a time. You'll wait for half an hour for a downtown "G", while across on the uptown platform trains will arrive every freaking five minutes. This trend is, of course, reversed on the return journey. Any plan involving me catching a "G" train will be given serious reconsideration. The promise of free gold bullion would not necessarily be enough to lure me onto this insidiously fickle asshole of a train. The worst part though, the absolute worst part, is that it is the only train that runs the north/south length of Brooklyn. AND IT KNOWS IT. It sits there, smugly grinning in its beautifully tiled lair, taunting you, knowing that as much as you try to avoid giving it the satisfaction of stomping down the subway stairs, waiting for an eternity for it to show the hell up, not being 100% sure that you will even arrive at your chosen destination, you cannot evade it forever. As inevitable as God's final judgement on mankind, eventually you will have to ride the G train .

In other news, it's hayfever season. I think that the antihistamines are stronger here than they are in Australia.

Responsible Service of Getting Smashed

2011-02-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

When I was twenty two and working as the venue technician at the Bathurst Theatre I was sent off one day to the local TAFE to do my Responsible Service of Alcohol. I don't remember why any more; possibly my boss felt it was important that, as the holder of a freshly minted Bachelor of Arts degree, I become acquainted with the work I was likely to be doing sporadically for the rest of my life. At any rate, I dutifully attended the six-hour long course and learned about things like how to deny drunks any more booze (point at the "No Service to Inebriates" sign, because then it's not your fault, it's the sign's fault. Drunks are pretty stupid), or the importance of checking I.D. (because you'll get a five thousand buck fine if you let that gaggle of bubble-headed seventeen-year-olds in your bar), or what combination of drinks will give you the worst hangovers (officially it makes no difference what you drink, but after having a few benders where I worked my way through the rainbow of booze from beer to red wine to cocktails to dark spirits, I humbly submit that that is utter bullshit), or even the fact that it is illegal to have any kind of promotions that encourage one to drink, like free giveaways, two-for-ones and so on (not that I think Australians really need much encouragement to drink. As my friend Daniel said one day after I complained about having a hangover, "Why were you drinking last night? Was the day spelled with a "Y" again?". Smartass).

Anyway, drinking culture is one of those things that I hadn't really considered could vary from country to country. What could be different? You go into a big noisy room with a bunch of strangers and drink alcohol until either you don't want any more, your money runs out, or verticality and coherent speech are distant memories. Well, quite a bit could be different actually. New York City is a pretty big place for such a small place. The drinking culture can vary dramatically with the difference of a few blocks. If I attempted to experience and describe the differences between them all then this wouldn't be a blog, it would be a Lonely Planet Boozing Book and I would be WAY more broke and hungover than I am at the moment. So instead, I will limit myself to the drinking culture of the neighbourhood with which I am best acquainted... my own charmingly decrepit Williamsburg. And at the risk of heresy on a number of levels, I think that Australia could learn a thing or to from the boozing habits of the local hipsters.

Here, bars are small. Bars are plentiful. Bars adorn every corner of my neighbourhood. For a bar to be so full you can't find a place to sit, or at least lean against a wall, is pretty odd. The result of this is that bars have the vibe of a cafe. And it is absolutely AWESOME. When was the last time you were in a cafe and two drunken knobs started beating the shit out of each other? Or some thoughtless jerk bumped your arm, knocking your coffee all over you and your friend, and couldn't give less of a shit? Or some vacuous bimbo absent-mindedly burnt a hole in your favourite jacket with her cigarette while telling some crap story about the bitches at her work at the top of her voice? Never, that's when. Bars here are civilized dens of intelligent conversation, good-natured humour, and attractive people with ironic moustaches.

Here, they check your ID even though you are clearly WAY over 21. Personally, this is flattering but also annoying, since my drivers license lives inside a little plastic pocket of my wallet that I suspect was designed by the people who make Chinese finger-traps. Here, they have daily specials on different kinds of booze, from $3 mimosas, to happy hours that extend generously beyond the traditional sixty minutes, to a free shot of Jameson with every can of PBR beer you buy (although I wouldn't recommend that last one, not unless you enjoy exorcist-style vomiting). Microbreweries pepper the city, so here bars are full of obscure, delicious and awesomely named beers, such as my personal favourite, "Captain Lawrence's Seasonal Peculiar".

But perhaps the biggest point of difference for me is what I'd always thought inevitably happens when you combine good times with music, copious amounts of discount alcohol and a bunch of red-blooded boozey drunks in one place... the bar fight. I've been here since September last year, and up until last weekend I hadn't witnessed so much as a raised voice. New Yorkers, it seems, are much better at holding their booze than Australians. Then, last weekend, I finally saw what happens when a fight breaks out. No bouncer grabbing each trouble maker roughly by the arm and dragging them out the front to duke it out. They take a much more holistic approach. The ugly lights get slammed on. The music stops. Everyone in the room turns to look at the morons who have decided to ruin everyone else's night by getting all macho. The bouncer goes "hey hey hey!". The aggressors let go of each other's shirt collars (which were identical. Perhaps that's why they were fighting). Things calm down. The lights go back down, the music goes on, and everyone goes back to discussing whether James Joyce's finest masterpiece was "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake" over their boutique, exquisitely microbrewed beers.

So obviously the entirety of American Drinking Culture is not this civil (a la Jodi Foster in "The Accused" for example), but while I live in Williamsburg I'm cherishing going out to a bar and feeling like I'm at a party in someone's lounge room rather than a factory warehouse filled with lobotomized alcoholics. So much so that in my hazier moments I've toyed with the idea of trying to open my own bar back in Australia modeled on my local Brooklyn boozers. I reckon I'd make a mint. If nothing else I'd justify my old boss's investment in sending me off to get my RSA.

SnoWOW!

2011-01-30T09:31:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday night started like most other nights for me. I unpacked my school bag, had an argument with my landlord about the hot water, felt guilty about not having written seven symphonies and a wind quintet that day, the usual. That evening I was planning on meeting my brother's friend's mum Tracy who was in town from Orange (and if anyone can come up with a more Australian sentence than that without using the words "kangaroo" or "vegemite" I want to see it). We went to a fancy-pants French restaurant in Tribeca and sipped red wine and discussed the differences between 42nd Street and Summer Street (there's a few, BTW). Over her shoulder through the front window I could see the snow start to fall. How magical, to be sitting in a dimly lit yet tastefully decored bar in New York sipping French wine and watching the snowflakes prance and fly outside a... a... an increasingly difficult-to-see-through window... Holy shit, did that cab almost hit that lady? Geez, Trace, it's really coming down out there! What the hell?!

My first ever blizzard. Awww. It was nuts. You know what it looked like? A snow globe. Exactly like a snow globe. It swirled and fell in waves, spiralled around street lamps and headlights, and fell in piles and piles on everything. The thinnest of perches would have a pile of snow half a centimetre wide and six inches high balanced on it. Pedestrians battled their way through the wind, coated from head to toe in a thin dusting of powdery snow, making them look like they'd just been hugged by the dandruff monster. Moving vehicles acquired lovely white toupees and drove through the streets at five kilometres per hour, floats in a really shitty parade celebrating albino hair pieces (SHUT UP, this is my blog). It blew through doors, across faces, down subway stairs, and caused little short circuits on the subway overpass near my house, mixing showers of bright orange sparks into the murky gumbo, giving everything a thrilling post-apocalyptic feel. I couldn't help but laugh out loud as I fought my way home.

The next day when I woke up the light outside my window was weird, almost fluorescent. I opened the curtains to see... well, an absolute fucktonne of snow. Eighteen inches, in fact. It was beautiful. It was magical. It caused school to be closed for the day. And, as it turns out, it is a massive pain in the goddam ass.

Eighteen inches fell on the city that night. That's what, slightly less than half a metre? Didn't seem like that big of a deal. Until you consider that eighteen inches fell across the entire city. As my previous mathematical research has uncovered, that's eighteen inches over 780 square kilometres of roads, buildings, footpaths and subway lines. My maths might be a bit hazy, but I think that is roughly equivalent to 351 cubic kilometres of snow. Where the hell is all that snow going to go?

As it turns out, unless you live in uptown Manhattan and can afford a man to come and take it away for you, probably nowhere. It's been five days now and snow still sits everywhere, stubbornly refusing to melt. It turns black. It dissolves into slooshy slippery crap at every intersection, so much so that when I walk to the shops I have to stick my arms out like a tightrope walker to stop from falling face first in this toxic sludge. Garbage, which is never absent from New York streets even in the sunniest of weather, begins to accumulate in teetering piles since garbage trucks can't get around the streets. And of course the local canine population makes its mark on the winter scenery, leaving both bright yellow uriney stains and dark brown turds, the latter contrasting so boldly with its white background that the utmost care seems to have gone into its placement, like the most thoughtful shit in history.

Today though, there seems to be evidence of the snow being dealt with. There are a couple of bulldozers moving the snow around (although to me it looks like they have the "eight year old cleaning his room" approach of just moving the snow from one pile to another, hoping that somehow this will make everything look better). It's sunny today for the third day in a row, so I'm cautiously optimistic that this will make some of it go away. Not because it isn't pretty mind you; despite the black road-gunk, the neck-snappingly slippery pavements, the rubbish, and the dog shit, it's still quite beautiful. It's that I know me - and if someone is going to go ass over tits into this crap, it's going to be yours truly. It's lovely and magical and all that jazz, but if it doesn't go away soon then my next blog might be entitled something like "Why it's hard to be a composer with a broken wrist".

Talk like me

2011-01-18T18:50:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that there’s been a bit of radio silence from the blog for the last few months. Oops. Like most awesome projects I start, without immediate and constant praise for my efforts, I quickly lose any motivation to continue them, which is why I have a desk drawer full of half-finished workout programs and barely used books with titles like “Teach Yourself German”. And like most awesome projects that I start and fail to see through to any sort of meaningful conclusion, I never really stop feeling guilty about them, and I involuntarily wince at their little baleful, papery glares accusing me of abandonment I encounter whenever I go hunting through my desk for a pencil (or, on rare occasions, a halfway decent looking gym-program that hasn’t been too filled-in to be resurrected). So when I came back to Australia I was surprised and flattered by the number of people who complained that I had stopped writing my blog, since no one ever complains when I stop going to the gym or learning German (which might explain why I neither have a six-pack or know what "Ich bin ein Zwerg, reitet auf einem Staubsauger" means). So thank you, you devoted half-dozen of blog readers – your bitching has paid off, and I’m going to start blogging again.

So it seems the most appropriate place for me to get this party started (again) is how different Australia seemed to me after only four months away. Things I’d never noticed before suddenly seemed adorably provincial, or fucking weird, or sometimes just filled me to the brink with homesickness and made me not want to go back to the USA. I noticed for the first time just how full of utterly useless and infuriatingly irrelevant celebrity Sydney gossip the newspapers are, and how such ‘news’ stories about which swimmer is sleeping with what underwear model are considered of such earth-shattering import that they occupy vast swathes of the opening pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, with pesky filler articles about things like a new nuclear-arms race in the middle east or the beginning of the seventh year of Australia’s involvement in two unwinnable wars relegated to the arse-end of the paper near the comics and horoscopes. I almost clicked my heels with glee each time I walked into a café and ordered a skim flat white without the cashier looking at me like I’d just make some obscure Ku Klux Klan reference. I unthinkingly made the common tourist error of ordering a pint of beer in the heat of the Australian summer and struggling to get it down before it turned into humid mug of piss. I loved being in Orange and hearing the cicadas. I loved being in Canberra and smelling the wet-earth-and-eucalyptus smell that pervades the whole city. I even loved walking through Newtown at night and reading the ineffectual socialist propaganda sticky-taped to lightposts and parking meters by angry twenty-year-olds in the middle of their arts degrees (“Facebook and the War in Iraq: How the Capitalist Machine forces you to buy homophobic cars”). But the thing that I loved the most and at the same time found so bizarre and perplexing is probably the one thing that most Australians living in Australia never give the slightest thought to: the enigmatic Aussie accent.

Americans love accents of all kinds, but in my experience none seems to fill them with such child-like delight as the Australian accent (although admittedly I haven’t got any other accent to try out, so perhaps I might be a little biased. But whatever). Something as simple as ordering a sandwich can be enough to make the cashier’s eyes light up as though an honest-to-God magical gnome has just wandered in off the street and ordered a turkey-with-swiss. It rings like a bell across the most crowded of rooms, and sticks out like dogs’ balls in the streets. Obvious words like “tomato” and “banana” are amusing enough, but saying the simple little word “no” can send the most world-wise American into a fit of giggles. I never understood why until I came back to Australia, and suddenly I heard it: Americans and British say “No”, Australians say “Naoeie”. It’s like someone’s strapped the word into a little inflection roller-coaster and sent it on its way.

The personal result of this is that the mere fact that I say “banAHnah” instead of “banAANa” makes me much more popular than my personality probably warrants (although I am devilishly handsome and cheekily charismatic, which can’t hurt). I can confidently strike up a conversation with a stranger in a bar, since I already have the perfect ice-breaker: a nice broad “Howyagoinmaite?” usually does the trick. In fact, I suspect my accent has become even broader since I moved up North. It could be a subconscious defense mechanism to being immersed in American accents, but knowing my propensity to ham it up if there’s even the faintest glimmer of attention being paid to me, I might be (subconsciously) bunging it on. A bit. Sometimes. Just a little.

Part of the reason that Yanks love our accent might be that The Australian Accent is one of the last pleasures on earth that America can’t produce by itself. You wouldn’t think so, but apparently the Australian accent is a deviously tricky one to convincingly emulate. Most non-natives get the broad “aah” vowel that makes sentences like “is the car-park far?” sound like the speaker has a kazoo stuck in their nose, but apart from that most Americans I’ve encountered who try to speak with an Aussie accent sound like they’ve had the grievous misfortune of suffering from a stroke and anaphylaxis at the same time.

Furthermore the Australian accent is unusual in that, despite what many of us have been led to believe, there is no broad consensus on where the Australian accent comes from. (I learned this from a sweet article I read in the paper a few weeks ago, and you can check out the original here. Pretty much the rest of this blog totally plagarises it though, so maybe you shouldn’t read it and just think that I’m really smart). Anyway, accent experts can say with reasonable confidence that the Boston accent comes from the mixing of Irish and Italian immigrants in days of yore, or that the Californian accent is a mix of all the other states smooshed together, but recent studies have discounted the traditional theories that the Australian accent is a bastardized cockney accent, or that up until the beginning of the twentieth century we sounded as Irish as a leprechaun snorting shamrocks. Recent documentary evidence suggests that our English overlords were noticing a distinct Australian twang as early as forty years after white settlement (or invasion, however you prefer to look at it), and moreover they were not all thrilled with what they heard.

Even more interesting is that there are now actually three generally recognised Australian accents – the General Australian accent, (shared by myself and, depending on how ocker I’m feeling, either Paul Hogan or Nicole Kidman), the Australian Aboriginal accent, and weirdly but awesomely, the Australian Lebanese accent. But even most Australians would agree that the General Australian accent is fragmenting a little further producing such sub-species as the Melbourne accent (or, in the tongue of the natives, “Malbourne”), the glorious Bogan accent, or, my favourite, the Gingham-wearing knick-knack-shop-owning country-ladies accent which has definitely been around since I was a kid but has been thrust into the forefront of the Australian psyche by Prue and Trude from “Kath and Kim” (and I think it’s just graysche).

This variety in accents might explain the occasional difficulty Americans have in placing where I’m from. Absolutely no problem at all with that (I still have trouble telling Americans and Canadians apart until I subtly ascertain whether my conversation partner rhymes “house” with “moose”), but I was a little non-plussed at a conversation I had with a lady in the supermarket a few months ago. When she overheard me ordering my sandwich meat from the deli she said, “are you from London?”

“No,” I replied, without the minutest hint of condescension, “I’m from Australia”.

“Oh,” she said. After a short pause, she asked, “is that near London?”

What a stupid bitch.

Tips from a stupid foreigner

2010-10-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

In 2006 I went overseas by myself for the first time. I chose Vietnam for no other reason than my friend Sam had been there a couple of times and I thought he was cute. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival in Ho Chi Minh City I was in the back seat of a cab with no seatbelts whizzing through night-time streets slightly wider than queen-sized bed, while surrounded on all sides by hundreds of locals on Vespas, all beeping like a flock of deranged road-runners. Within an hour I was ensconced in my hotel room drinking Vietnamese beer (which looks like VB and tastes like awesome), lying on my Vietnamese bed (which was twice the size of any bed I'd ever seen in my entire life), watching Vietnamese television (which, on the bizarre-o-meter lies somewhere between Mexican Soap Opera and Japanese Game Shows) while bright orange Vietnamese geckos ran across my ceiling going 'gnak! gnak!' at each other (which was cool).

The point is that from my first night in Vietnam I knew that I was a total outsider. I had no idea of cultural norms, I didn't speak any Vietnamese, and so I could cheerfully bumble my way about the country for two weeks while the locals good-naturedly tolerated things like amusing mispronunciations of "thank you" or gross violations of holy buildings. I was a tourist, I was an idiot, and that was fine.

Living in America as an Australian is a little more tricky. As we all know, American culture leaves its Yankee fingerprints all over our dinky-di media industry (except of course for the ABC, which the British have claimed as their own). A lifetime's exposure to everything from "Seinfeld" to "Sesame Street" has lulled me into a false sense of familiarity with America, and the fact that everyone here speaks English only aids my delusion that the US and Australia are essentially the same place, just that they're on different sides of the world and one has far superior coffee (hint: it's not the US). In reality, there are a whole host of subtle yet bewildering social norms here that I grapple with on a daily basis.

The most obvious of these is tipping. EVERYONE knows that in the US, you tip in restaurants and bars (although on my first night ever in the US, way back in 2007, I forgot to tip the waitress. I still feel guilty about that). What no one told me is that there's a whole HOST of other people you have to tip. Catch a cab, and you have to tip the taxi driver. Get a haircut, and you have to tip not only the hairdresser, but also the person who washes your hair. Most recently, I paid eighty bucks for a fairly ho-hum massage, and on my way out the door the receptionist asked me, "and how much tip will you be leaving today?"

"Tip?" I asked, a little incredulously. "You tip masseurs here, too?"

"Yeah. Usually fifteen to twenty per cent," came the reply with smiles.

"Well, what did I just pay eighty bucks for?"

"Yeah, the minimum wage is pretty low here," was the explanation. I left a fifteen dollar tip, but I can't help but feel pissed off about some capitalistic yoga master sitting somewhere in Williamsburg on a pile of eighty-dollar massage money, while his poor little massage-minions wait hopefully for tips huddling for warmth around burning barrels in the street wearing Thai fisherman pants and Crocs.

The thing that is most bewildering about tipping though is that it seems completely arbitrary who you do and don't tip. If you go to a cafe and order a coffee and you collect it at the counter, you don't tip the person who made you the coffee. But if you order a coffee in a cafe and a waiter brings it to you, you tip the waiter. Surely you should tip the person who makes you the coffee? Doesn't that require some level of skill, more so than merely bringing a coffee to your table, which simply requires functioning arms and legs?

At first I thought I had it sorted out - you tip someone who actually physically does something for you. But then on closer scrutiny this doesn't hold out - you tip cab drivers, but not subway drivers. You tip waiters but not the garbage man. You tip the girl who pours your beers all night, but not the girl who later splints your leg after you fall down a flight of stairs, drunk as a skunk from aforementioned beers. I would say each of these services are just as important as the others, but only some of them are deemed worthy of a tip.

It's heavy. Being the caring individual that I am, I feel as though I'm exploiting the poor people who rely on tips to make a living. If they were simply earning enough from their wage to put food on the table or a roof over their head then I wouldn't give a shit. But to know that I personally have it within my power to either make their night or starve them to death is a responsibility I'm uncomfortable with. I almost feel as though I need to carry around a basket filled with one-dollar bills and skip down the street hurling handfuls of cash at anyone who so much as steps out of my way on the footpath.

The upshot to this is that the service industry here is a genuine service industry. Sure, it might be mercenary, but the promise of a crisp dollar bill is all it can take to encourage the waitress to smile and pleasantly offer you more beer rather than scowling, snatching away your pasta primavera before you've finished with it, and then arguing with you for five minutes as to what constitutes a "finished meal" (which happened to me once in Australia. Bitch). A tip is leverage to ensure that the service you are paying for is actually done properly and politely.

Damn, I wish I hadn't tipped the cab driver on the day I arrived. Stupid me.

Uncle Sam don't want no whingers

2010-09-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

"The problem with Australia," my friend Jeremy says, "is that your government mothers you." It's May of 2008, and Jeremy and I are in a bar in Sydney. Jeremy is a young American composer* who I met by pure coincidence in Canberra a few weeks earlier. He was about to return to New York after living in Sydney for twelve months, and after a couple of farewell beers we moved onto a conversation topic that always crops up when one party is foreign: What Your Country Does Wrong.

"What the hell do you mean?" I ask, mildly offended. Sure, we have public healthcare but that hardly qualifies us as mothered. God, in some Scandinavian countries the citizens cheerfully fork over half their income so the authorities can do things like buy thousands of bright yellow bicycles for public use (that are then all easily stolen by less-civic minded community members. Apparently the government in question had not considered that light-fingered cyclists might stoop to painting the bikes a less conspicuous colour).

"I mean, your government mollycoddles you to the point where everything is safe. There's always a safety net. Here in Sydney the job I've been working pays me twice as much as what I would earn doing it in New York because the minimum wage is so high. I have superannuation and cheap health insurance. In short, it's not that hard for me to keep my head above water."

"But surely that's a good thing?" I say. I couldn't think Jeremy was more backward than if he'd said, "you know what the problem with Australia is? You have way too much oxygen here."

"Look," he says, "if you're asking me if I would rather live in a society like Australia where I could feel happy and safe and not have to worry about whether I'll get sick or get a job all the time, then, probably yeah. But Australia sacrifices something for that. No one needs to take risks."

It was at this point that I kind of stopped taking the conversation seriously since I had decided that Jeremy felt the need to live his life according to strict sado-masochistic principles of struggle and angst, and it was pointless me trying to convince him otherwise. But something of that conversation always stuck with me, and two years later, living in New York, I think I'm beginning to understand a little of what he was getting at.

My neighbourhood is not exactly ritzy. It's safe, for sure, but it's a little grungy and maybe a little poor, kind of like a cross the Sydney suburbs of Newtown and Cabramatta, if the former had hipsters instead of emos, and the latter was home to several generations of Puerto Rican immigrants. It's noisy, busy and thoroughly lived-in. It also seems to be home to an inordinate amount of a limited variety of businesses. Walk down the street and in one block you might pass a grocery store, a laundromat, a liquor store (no bottle-o's here!), a cafe, and a hardware store, and in the next block you'll pass exactly the same kinds of stores mere metres from their competitors. The same can be said for most parts of New York - I guess the sheer volume of people keeps all these grocery stores and laundromats in business.

The stores are pretty basic. They're not bedazzled with lovely faux-mahogany shopfittings and soft downlighting, they're big white rooms with fluorescent lights and a bunch of stuff on metal racks. In short, the people who own these businesses are poor, perhaps with limited education who can't speak proper English as good as I or youse, and the choice is to either open another laundromat or starve. There's no welfare safety net to live off while they look for a job or go to publicly-funded TAFE (well there is, but it's so woefully pitiful that one can't help but wonder if it's a cruel joke).

But what is really striking about these businesses is that they seem to occupy a fuzzy middle ground between "business" and "lounge room". Anyone who has been to South-East Asia will know exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. They may be poor business owner struggling to make ends meet, but man, are they proud of their business. The shopfronts are just as likely to be decorated with pictures of the owners' kids as the actual stock inside the shop. They keep not just the shop spotless, but regularly scrub down the pavement outside the store. And they're social hubs - the owners sit outside on plastic chairs and talk shit with their friends or family waiting for customers to come, and when they do they stand obligingly behind the cash register until the customer either buys something or doesn't, whereupon they return to the plastic chairs outside in the street. The nights are still quite warm, so in the evening when I come home from a hard day's ~~drinking at the pub~~ study it's pretty common to see two dozen people congregating outside the grocery store on the corner having a barbeque in the street, kids running around, music playing loudly, old men arguing about whatever crap it is old men argue about, with only the occasional customer wanting to buy milk to spoil the illusion.

I think I'm painting a pretty rosey picture here though. Obviously there's a flipside to this salubrious business model. In Australia business owners can reasonably aspire to the luxury of not actually needing to be in their shop seven days a week from dawn til dusk. If they work hard then one day they'll be able to afford to staff their shop with disinterested teenagers with a faceful of piercings (I'm over thirty, I can say that kind of shit now). Here, the economy isn't as strong as the US government likes to pretend it is (or liked to pretend - I don't think anyone has any illusions as to the state of the US economy any more), and so it's pretty unlikely that anyone around here will ever earn enough from their business that they can afford to support themselves and a staff member. So the buck stops with them.

I reckon it's this kind of environment that has made America what it is today - a nation of self-made men (and of course women too, no sexist connotations, 'self-made men' has a nice alliterative ring to it, that's all. Shut-up, this is my blog). You grow up in an environment with no safety net. Mum and dad have worked hard all their lives to support you and your siblings, and they do it tough. Perhaps out of a desire to make them proud, but probably out of a desire to not have to work every day for the rest of your life, you think 'screw this' and you scrimp and save and work like a dog so you can afford to go to college to get a degree to get a decent job. And the government didn't do shit to help you. You did it all on your own. You can do anything.

So America takes risks. Americans love it when people rise from the gutter and become successful artists or media personalities or politicians or just plain old rich-as-hell. These people are beacons of hope to everyone else who aspires to one day 'make it big'. "If they can, then I can, because it's completely up to me - God knows the government isn't going to help me". Unlike Australia, there's no "tall poppy syndrome" here, because no one can afford to rest on their laurels and shyly suggest that perhaps one day they might like to be slightly famous. If you don't do it, then someone else will, and no one will give a shit that you're still selling drill-bits and curtain rods in the same store for fifty years.

Having read back on all this, it could be misconstrued that I've become one of those Aussie ex-pats that, having left Australia, pontificates from their soapbox safely located on the other side of the world about how they were never appreciated Downunder and that one day everyone will be like "ooooh, why did we not realise what a talent we had? Oh boo hoo hoo, poor stupid us... boo hoo...". I'm not (well maybe a little. But mostly not). I love Australia and all the opportunities it has given me, and one day I want to return and give back what I'm learning over here. Nor would I ever advocate the abolition of welfare or public education or anything like that in Australia. I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps there's a reason why New York is a cultural mecca and Sydney just likes to think it is - adversity makes you strong.

*FYI not all my American friends are composers. I'm not a complete music nerd.

Number Crunching

2010-09-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

Let's be frank - Orange is not, in the scheme of things, a thriving metropolis. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't need to be, and despite my promise to myself when I was 19 and first left my hometown that I would NEVER return, I've found over the last few years I've started to get pangs of nostalgia for the peace and quiet of Orange. I wonder sometimes, if I feel a bit crazy about all this, how must Ellie feel? Ellie is 18, from Orange as well, and this year also moved to New York to study dance at Julliard, one of the US' most prestigious arts schools. She's pretty much finished school, moved from Orange to New York without the benefit of the buffer period I've enjoyed of moving to gradually larger cities (aside from a couple of years she spent at school in Sydney. Wish I'd done that, darn it). When I first met Ellie in Orange a few months ago however she seemed composed, more together than I was when I was 18, and completely serene about the fact that she was about to move to what is one of the great cultural centres of the world from (again, let's be perfectly frank) what is... um... not one of the great cultural centres of the world.

Lucky her. I was always worried about how I'd cope with the hustle and bustle of the big city because I'm a country boy at heart. So when Daniel invited me to visit him in little New Haven last weekend, I happily accepted.

He seems to be settling in alright (at the very least there's been no more vitriolic encounters with cab drivers or the police. Yet). After a couple of weeks in New York, it was kind of strange to be in a little country town again. New Haven is kind of like Orange - it's fresh and open with lots of great food and beautiful houses, but at night it can be a pretty dodgy and there's certain neighbourhoods you don't walk alone in unless you have a bunch of pesky money taking up valuable space in your wallet and you need some thoughtful mugger to take it off your hands.

When it came time to head back home I jumped on the train and choo-chooed my way two hours south back to Grand Central Station. As I stepped onto the platform there was no doubt I was back in New York - on the platform with me moving purposefully towards the station entrance were hundreds of people, all collected from the dozen or so stops between here and New Haven. "Shit", I thought. "All these people got on this train to come to New York on a random Sunday. This line has a train arriving every half hour on Sunday. On weekdays during peak-hour, this train runs every ten minutes. Hundreds upon hundreds of people commuting back and forth every freakin' day. That's nuts!"

As my tiny mind reeled from considering the sheer numbers of people moving back and forth along this single train line out of hundreds of others in New York my fellow passengers and I entered Grand Central. Inside we joined thousands more people all either catching trains or leaving trains or greeting friends or seeing loved ones off or trying to sell shit to everyone else. And outside, unseen, were millions upon millions of other people determinedly, busily, relentlessly doing whatever it is people do in New York. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Suddenly, New York seemed to be impossible. How many people were outside the station? Where do they live? How do they all fit? How do they get their food? There's certainly no bloody farms here - there's barely even grass here. Where does their rubbish go? (A goodly proportion of it seems to end up on the sidewalk outside my house, but perhaps I'm being finicky). How the hell does it all operate? How can it even exist? Why doesn't this city just end up as a big, chaotic, stinking hole-in-the-ground, its inhabitants reduced to a sub-human scrabble for survival? (I mean more so than now. You know, without the musicals.)

I needed to know. So I did some comparative research. Orange has a population of about 38,000 people and takes up about 25 square kilometres of the Australian continent (I didn't actually find an official measurement on this, I just looked at Orange on googlemaps and held my thumb and forefinger against the scale and compared it to Orange on the map. It looks like about 25 square kilometres to me). Orange is a primary producer of quite a number of foodstuffs including pears, apples, stone fruit, animal produce, and of course, bucketloads of wine (but, as we all know, not oranges).

Orange is also the proud owner of Springhill airport, which cheerfully hosts 1,300 flights a year for about 60,000 passengers. It has 7 different bus routes, which can take you all the way from Warrendine to Blechington. All this food and transport and busy Orange-folk generate about 54,000 tonnes of rubbish every year, which ends up in the Ophir Road landfill (although during my research it turns out that this will fill up in about four years. Keep your eyes out for more news on this fascinating topic).

Conversely...

New York is home to about 19,500,000 people jammed into about 780 square kilometres (and Australia has a population of about 21,000,000). That means there's 25 people per square metre of New York. (Orange enjoys spacious luxury with each square metre being taken up by a mere 1.5 persons). Add to that the tourists that traipse up and down Times Square every day and the population swells an additional 8,600,000 a year, 420,000 of which are Aussies. To get there, these visitors and other travellers probably arrive and depart via one of the three international airports in New York, which hosts 1,360,000 million flights a year, welcoming or waving off 110,000,000 passengers. While in New York they probably take advantage of New York's famous subway, consisting of 24 routes servicing 468 individual stations to take the 1.58 billion individual commuters around the city annually.

All these people need to eat, so New York imports all of its food. This includes 5,400 tonnes of meat, 9,800 tonnes of cereal, 27,300 tonnes of fruit and vegetables and 5,000 tonnes of booze daily, for a grand total of 28,600,000 tonnes of food a year. FYI, the Statue of Liberty weighs 225 tonnes, and the Empire State Building weighs 325,000 tonnes.

That's a shitload of food.

Literally. New York also generates 5,600,000 tonnes of rubbish (or "trash") a year. Proving that Americans can be mysterious and paranoid about just about anything, this rubbish is packed into containers and floated away on barges to a top secret location. No shit. I couldn't find statistics on sewage (probably for the best... hope you're not eating breakfast) but I bet it's a wee bit more than Orange (pun totally intended, bitchez).

It's not surprising then that it can be overwhelming to think that all these people with all this activity and all this industry is bubbling away around you constantly. I can see how people here can feel completely disconnected from other human beings. It's not that there's no one else around, it's that there's so many people here that you ask yourself - how can my little voice be heard in all this noise?

This was all ticking in my head last weekend as I got on my subway to head home - I am living in a f#*king big place. I had to make a brief stop in a new part of town to get a keyboard. I got off the subway, walked up the stairs, and standing at the top as though we were outside the Orange Post Office on Summer Street, was Ellie, calm as a buddhist monk and apparently completely unsurprised to see me.

A Moving Story

2010-08-31T15:53:00.000-07:00

Moving is a pain in the arse. Moving overseas is a massive pain in the arse. And moving to New York and trying to find a place to live two weeks before university starts is such a staggeringly daunting task that to describe the level of arse-pain experienced requires those sciencey words usually reserved for astrophysicists trying to convey just how f#@king big something is. Fortunately for me, I managed to land a place to live before I left Australia (fortunate especially since I don't know any astrophysicists). Even still, the comedy of errors that was Moving Day was still a goddam pain in the arse.

I inherited a room off my close friend Daniel. He's lived happily in this little apartment in Brooklyn for two years now. The room is big with lots of light, it's on the third floor away from the noisy street, and not too expensive - a real find by anyone's standards, and (I'm led to believe) especially rare for New York. Anyway, he's a composer too, and a darn good one at that, so much so that he got into Yale in New Haven, about two hours out of New York. He offered me his room, and knowing what a goddam mothering pain in the freakin' arse it was going to be to try to find one myself, I happily accepted. All I had to do was give him a hand moving out, then go and get my own things to move in. Piece of cake.

At 7am on Thursday Daniel goes to collect a small truck for the move. Daniel wakes me at 8am to carry the bed I was fast asleep on down the stairs to the truck. Within two minutes of waking up I'm walking backwards in my pyjamas carrying a mattress down two flights of stairs so narrow and steep it might be more appropriate to call them "ladders". I neglect to have breakfast, which proves to be a big mistake ten minutes later when we're carrying his 100kg keyboard down the stairs and I almost black out from hypoglycemia. Daniel manages somehow to get down to my end (although God knows how since the piano pretty much filled the width of the stairwell) and holds it while I collapse and pant pitifully for a few moments at his feet trying not to vomit up my non-existent breakfast. I eat a banana and feel better. The move continues.

Half an hour later we're on the road. We have to go to Washington Heights to collect Daniel's new housemate Wayne and his few belongings. Washington Heights is about as far away as you can go from where we are and still be in New York. Googlemaps estimates the trip to be fifteen minutes. An hour later we arrive outside Wayne's place whereupon Daniel accidentally sideswipes a parked cab, breaking its mirror. Daniel swears a lot and bangs the steering wheel a little bit. The elderly cab driver abuses us through the truck window in Spanish. The accident attracts what appears to be every elderly Spanish-speaking cab driver in a fifty-mile radius, and soon the air is filled with shrugged shoulders and shaking heads, angry fingers pointed at the truck as though it was a tank, angry fingers pointed at Daniel as though he was a thoughtless retard, all accompanied by so much Spanish that I think I now know how to speak it.

Daniel has to call the police to lodge an accident report in order to claim the insurance. The cadre of Spanish-speaking cab drivers insist that he just give them the money for the mirror. I leave this lively exchange to meet Wayne and help him load his stuff into the back of the truck. Meanwhile the police arrive, looking shitty for having to come and deal with a broken mirror. They talk to Daniel. They talk to the cab driver. They go to the police car and write stuff down. They talk to Daniel again. They talk to the cab driver again. They return to the police car and write more stuff down. Again they talk to Daniel. Again they talk to the cab driver. The cab driver points at me. The police come to me. They ask me if I was driving the vehicle. I boggle. They tell me the elderly cab driver is now insisting that I was driving the truck. They ask for my drivers license. I give it to them but explain (quite calmly, I think) that I was not driving the truck, because if I did attempt to drive a truck from one end of New York to the other on the right-hand side of the road in traffic so heavy it could warp space-time that we probably would have had a much more serious accident than a mere broken mirror before I'd had a chance to get into third gear. They agree but they still take down my drivers license details (which I hope doesn't bite me in the butt one day).

An hour later the accident report is filled out, the cab drivers disperse, and we are finally on the road to New Haven. Fortunately there are no further incidents that could jeopardise the move, my health, or anyone's freedom. We get Daniel and Wayne's stuff inside, drop off the truck, catch a train back to New York, and get drunk.

So now it's my turn to move. The very next day I begin the quest to furnish my room. I'm kind of excited - I've never actually bought furniture apart from the bed I bought when I was twenty-one. I find a great used furniture shop about six blocks from my house and pick out a nice chest of drawers, a mirror, an awesome armchair upholstered in green faux-velvet, and what looks like a cute little wardrobe.

Now, I'm aware that standard practice when one moves house is to measure things. Things like say, the width of doors, or the height of ceilings, or even the weight of items that might require transport through said doors and under aforementioned ceilings. I foolishly neglected to do so. When my wardrobe shows up I realise that in the context of the massive furniture warehouse it looked all tiny and cosy, but now, in the foyer of my building, it looks like someone chopped down an entire forest and turned it into one piece of furniture.

I won't go into excruciating detail of what I shall henceforth refer to as "The Ordeal of August 27th", but let's just say there's still bits of ceiling plaster embedded in the doorhandles from when we had to physically pass this monstrosity over the banisters because it couldn't be negotiated around the turn in the stairs. Whoever inherits this room after me is going to get a wardrobe thrown into the bargain because that thing is not going anywhere ever again except in little tiny pieces.

For now however, the worst is over. I'm having a desk delivered tomorrow (and they WILL be carrying it up the stairs) and then I'm pretty much set. My room is big, it's light, and since it's on the third floor it's away from the street noise (a positive point that somehow slipped my mind during last week's move when I cursed mankind for ever endeavoring to build buildings with more than one floor - are we so PROUD?!...ahem...), it has polished wooden floors and big windows, it's relatively cool in the summer nights and Daniel assures me it's plenty warm in winter. I've become a cliche - a poor artist living in a loft in New York. F#*king tops.

New York Minute

2010-08-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

There cannot possibly be a breed of person more aware of how valuable their time is than a New Yorker. I discovered this about seven minutes after my arrival at JFK airport when I dared to get into a cab merely knowing the street address of the apartment I was staying at and not also the nearest intersection.

I told the cab driver my address - 343 South 5th Street, Brooklyn*. In my experience with cabs across the globe, this is generally sufficient information for a successful journey. Apparently not.

"What's the nearest cross-street?" the guy barks at me from the front seat.

"What?" I ask.

"The nearest cross-street. Brooklyn is huge. What's the nearest cross-street?"

"I uh... don't know."

"What?! Whaddaya mean ya don't know?! How do you expect me to get you there without knowing the nearest cross street?"

"Well don't you have a GPS or a street directory or something?" He ignores this.

"What's the nearest cross-street?"

"I already TOLD you, I don't know the name of the nearest cross-street."

"Well how do you expect me to get you there?"

I'm beginning to sense a certain Waiting for Godot quality to the conversation, so I mumble that I have been there before (over a year ago, mind you) and if I study my map of Brooklyn I might be able to recall the nearest cross-street. This almost placates him until I foolishly suggest we begin to drive to Brooklyn (this altercation has thus far occurred in the taxi bay at JFK in front of hundreds of other people).

"Sir," the guy says, like I'm missing a chromosome. "If you don't know where you're going there's no point in starting the journey."

"I DO know where I'm going," I almost shriek in frustration. "343 South 5th Street Brooklyn!"

"And what's the name of the nearest cross-street?"

"Goddammit!" I yell. (I think this qualifies me as an official New Yorker now). So I bury my head in my little pocket guide of New York trying to find where the hell I'm supposed to go. The cab driver is not content with our impromptu performance being a two-hander, and so he decides to recruit more performers into the show by leaning out the window and shouting to the taxi-queue manager, "This guy wants to go to Brooklyn but he doesn't know the nearest cross-street."

"What the hell?" the queue-manager says, staring at me as though I've just announced that I think it perfectly reasonable to attend a christening in a gimp-suit.

"Yeah," the cab-driver says, "how does he expect me to take him somewhere if he doesn't know where he wants to go?"

I'm really getting pissed-off now. I'm not really in a very good mood to begin with. I've just spent 24 hours in transit - 21 on a plane and 3 in customs queues - after having not slept my last night in Australia because I was too excited. This, compounded by the fact that the two nights prior to my departure were spent getting completely written-off means that I haven't had deep, non-hungover sleep since the previous Thursday. So when this guy starts leaning out his window shouting to all and sundry about the foolish Australian cluttering up the back seat of his cab with the audacity to request transport to an address without having an intimate knowledge of the destination borough, something inside me snapped.

"HEY," I said. "I've TOLD you already I want to go to 343 South-5th Street in BROOKLYN."

"And what's the nearest..."

"Do you have a GPS?"

"What's the nearest..."

"DO you HAVE a GPS?!"

"Yes sir I do."

"Then I WANT TO GO TO 343 SOUTH-5th STREET IN BROOKLYN."

There was a sigh, some typing on a GPS, and about ten seconds later we were on our way, which was a little ironic considering we had just spent five minutes immobile in the taxi bay because, to the cab-driver, his time was so freakin' important that he would be better off demanding that I somehow conjure the information he wanted from the ether rather than spend the three nanoseconds it would have taken to type the info into his goddam GPS.

So New York operates under the premise of hyper-efficiency. Everything from food to transport to dry-cleaning is undertaken with the minimum of fuss and pretense. Conversation between customers and servers is generally kept civil yet basic, none of this pesky "how are you today" or sometimes even "please" or "thank you" to waste everyone's time. Go to a diner and you'll be given a menu slightly thicker than a phone book. You can order anything you want on it and reasonably expect it to be at your table before you've had time to warm up your seat. Trains zip around on the subway so regularly they may as well install a high-speed conveyer-belt instead.

And to be honest, it's probably just as well. New York is, of course, freakin' ENORMOUS (well, to a little ol' country boy from 'Straya it is) and the city would grind to a halt if everyone spent all day naval-gazing while waiting for a train or engaging in prolonged social niceties every time they wanted a cup of coffee. Even still, it can sometimes be a bit intimidating. As such, I try to adopt the philosophy of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

I think of my experience with the cab-driver outside JFK airport as my initiation.

*Lest you think I'm clueless enough in this age of electronic-identity-theft to publish my address, this is a fake address. Obviously I told the cab-driver my real address though (duh.)