Some mornings you just need to rock this joint.
Also, the eighties were fucking weird.
Youtubery
Leaving, on a Jet Plane
It’s been about twenty years since I went on holidays with the rest of my family, but it seems we’ll be breaking that streak on Tuesday when all four of us gather and fly down to Adelaide to spend five days at the Fringe Festival.
We fly back Sunday night.
And on Monday, I turn thirty-six. It wasn’t until tonight, looking at a calendar and planning my work week after I get home, that I realised that last bit.
Birthdays are weird. I expect, this year, I’ll be reducing my celebrations down to the absolute minimum: sleeping in, re-reading Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, getting on with things. I mean, what little celebratory energy I usually have is going to be burned out by five days of awesomeness as the Fringe, and any reserves are going to be needed to get me through the week that follows at the day-job.
In theory, the coming week is a holiday. I want to take it as one, I really do, but I’m already mentally planning out the various things I need to sneak in between time with the family and the shows I really want to see.
There are still things that need writing, whether I’m on holidays or no. There are things that need doing for the day-job. I’m proving remarkably bad at putting either away at this point, which largely means Shifty Silas is making the trip to Adelaide with me and I’ve just spent a half-hour figuring out how to access the internet by hooking my laptop up to my phone.
If anyone’s got any recommendations for good places to hide out and write in the city-centre of Adelaide, I’m eager to hear about them.
If anyone’s got a free afternoon and they’re interested in meeting up for a write-club somewhere, I’m similarly interested in hearing the news.
These are the things that occupy my mind at the moment. It’s 9:53 on a Sunday evening, which is actually a little early for me to get down to the act of writing. I’m drinking scotch, ’cause it’s been a drinking scotch kind of weekend, and I’m going to be kicking off a short burst of writing that will serve as a precursor to some truly manic packing in the hours to come.
I’m looking forward to Adelaide. I’ve been to the Fringe a couple of times before and it’s always been ten kinds of fucking awesome. I’m looking forward to spending time with my family, although that’s tinged with trepidation at this point.
And, despite the fact I’ll be taking work down there, I’m looking forward to getting some distance from Brisbane. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m processing this year, a kind of unrelenting onslaught of things that need to be sorted out, and it’ll be nice to get away and get some perspective on things.
#
A final PS: I can’t remember who first pointed out that actor Donald Glover rapped under the name Childish Gambino – I think it was probably Patrick O’Duffy, but I’m not 100%. Either way, I kinda owe them, ’cause I’ve spent the vast majority of this weekend either a) re-watching the early seasons of Community, or b) listening to Gambino’s latest album.
It happens like that, sometimes. I develop a strong level of focus when I’m consuming media and I just start consuming *everything* I can get my hands on that fits within a particular area of interest.
I’m Hot and I’m Sticky Sweet…
Some days need a bit of Def Leppard. Some days do not.
Today, well, it’s one of the former.
Weirdly, I missed the period when Def Leppard was actually a big deal. Hysteria came out in 1987, which means I was both 9 years old and living in the middle of nowhere, far from the pop cultural embrace of TV and cinema and popular radio. I was far more likely to be reading books back in those days, getting exposed to music through my dad’s LP collection (although I wasn’t yet allowed to play records on my own) or the soundtracks to the handful of movies we saw when we came to Brisbane for the holidays.
Basically, I didn’t even really process that Def Leppard was a big deal until they became a lyrical riff in Bloodhound Gang’s Why is everyone picking on me in the mid-nineties. They weren’t a band by then, not really; they were a pop cultural reference that you either got or you didn’t. I didn’t. I’m not a child of the eighties, although I can play one on TV. Most of the parts of 80s music that I like, I came to much later, figuring out the parts I like via references in other media.
All art acquires baggage that affects its meaning. Music is always an interesting resource for considering this, since the presence of music videos and subsequent musical movements always effects the way a particular song is read. Take one look at a video clip and it’s nearly impossible to escape the various signifiers that mark Def Leppard as the stuff of the eighties: the hair, the jeans, the production. Seven years after Hysteria came out and became huge, Nirvana would kick off a musical movement that rendered everything that made 80’s metal fun vaguely absurd and crudely excessive.
It’s one of the reasons I love covers that recontextualize a song, letting you hear it fresh. Consider, for example, the version of the above put together by Emm Gryner and Buck 65:
Strip away all the aspects of the song that mark it as unrelentingly 80s and it actually becomes quite beautiful and haunting. It’s still the same song – slowed down, yes, and the riffs that hook you in are significantly less up-front, but they’re still there. And it’s one of those covers that makes me go back to the original and appreciate it a little more.
Sometimes it takes a few years for the context to get stripped away from the art. I could never have appreciated Def Leppard in the 90s. I was too young, too caught up in the spirit of the age, willing to disregard everything that was handed down from the 80s as a waste of time. And, truthfully, Def Leppard’s version of the song was never going to be my favourite, although looking back from the age of thirty-six I’m willing to acknowledge that it’s a damn fine pop song.
Hope your weekend rocks and rocks and hard.