The Street of the Lifted Tom

Whoa, Livejournal.

It's been a long time.

...

I've got nothing.

Moroccan Jamal Zougam was sentenced to a total of more than 40,000 years in prison, although under Spanish law he can only serve a maximum of 40 years.

Man, imagine having 39,960 years taken off your sentence. That'd feel great.

And I might just make a proper journal post someday.

Hey all. Back from the Brow Tour. It was pretty amazing. Can't be arsed reading the last two weeks of your posts, so if anything interesting has happened, like you discovered a duck what has magnetic feet, please tell me. Special Edition Extra Long Monsters Eye Video Brow Tour Special Edition coming when I have the time. Tired, sleep now.

So, I'm in Melbourne with Jane, Ronnie and Chloe. It's been good. I've spent too much money already, but really only on things like sandwhiches and so forth. Oh, and wine. Actually, we went to this crazy Moroccan Soup Bar last night, with a few other people. They don't believe in printed menus there, and they just remember everything, or tell you what you want to eat. Which reminded me of Grover at first:



And then this is completely unrelated, but terrifying:



Anyway, we went with the option of them just giving us whatever, and it was delicious. More stories later. Many in Videoblog form. Alright!

I'm off to Melbourne and Newcastle with Ronnie to cut sick for a couple of weeks! Oh, the adventures we'll have. It'll be filmed, and thusly a video blog will be formed. Eventually. After uni is over. Those things take ages. See you chumps in a couple of weeks!

Once again, Sunday has saved me. Not that Friday and Saturday night weren't fantastic, oh no. Friday was watching Blue Velvet with good friends, pizza and wine. And Saturday was being the only straight man in an inner-city rooftop spa, followed by booze, and then more booze at a club, where I drank all their wine. They only had about half a bottle though. But, still, I drunk the club out of their wine - that's pretty cool. There's things I can't remember about that night, but one thing I do remember is a lingering bitterness that has nothing to do with anything except my own ability to interpret the world at the moment. That bitterness lasted past 12:30pm on Sunday when I woke up with quite the hangover.

So, old John McGeachin calls me up and invites me to the Brisbane Jazz Club. I say no, I have plans to walk to KFC in my pyjamas, eat it in front of the TV, then spend hours and hours perfecting two or three lines of poetry while drowning myself in coffee. But, John and Shannon convince me - and it's fantastic. We drank some wine at Eraan's house, and the old hair of the dog kicked in straight away, and I felt great. Then there was the cheese! Some sort of delicious sundried-tomato/cheese combination. And more wine! Myself, John, Shannon, Eraan, Chris and Dan caught the old-style ferry over the river from New-Farm to the Jazz Club. We stood on the top, open-air part those old ferrys have, and sung round after round of "My Father's a Postman" for the whole trip, with John and myself leading the singing, and coming up with a few new corkers, such as "My Father's a Sculptor", and "My Father's a CEO". At the Jazz Club, there was a huge big-band playing wonderfully, many conjoined tables of friends, old people dancing, later us dancing, beautiful river-views, much wine. Amazing. We clicked, we joked, I swing-danced many a time with the beautiful Eraan. We made old jazz fans in their sixty-somethingth year think that young people weren't so bad after all.

Then, it was back to Shannon's place for cards. Cards being throwing cards at each other in the kitchen, tackling everybody to the ground, and then sparring in the backyard. That place was an absolute shemozzle when I left at about 10:30pm (Jazz Club starts at like 5:30pm), I hope they cleaned it up. We had lemon fights. I got lemon all over me.

I then left to catch the last bus from New Farm on a Sunday evening. Walking past the Alibi Room, I notice a bunch of miss-matched freaks from the poetry festival inside. Knowing a couple of them, I walk in to check it out, and see young Clare Julia up the back having drinks with her sister and friends. So, I forget about my bus, drink with them, and then because it's Sunday and there's nowhere open, we head to the Normanby. I was against this idea, but it wasn't my deal, so I happily followed because I was with cool people. And it even proves the Normanby on a Sunday night can be bearable if you're with wonderful people and already drunk. Otherwise, of course, it's hellish.

Anywho, I then walk home listening to some Muse, and type this. No longer bitter, just happy. Sunday has saved me again.

For those of you who haven't seen it, here is a film I made that got shortlisted in Tropfest a couple of years ago. I wrote and directed it, it stars The Manboy and Two-Balls Al, it's called Rudiger Meets Mr Salmon, and it will probably be looked back on as the pinnacle of my artistic career. Presenting:

Yeah, so I've been doing stuff. Uh, drinking coffee. Reading... newspapers. I enjoy the daily news. I've been writing, rhyming. Prosing. Prose before hoes, is the rule in our house. Other stuff, I'm sure. Drinking. I've been drinking. Spinning around in circles on my big black awesome mad chair. Rolling around the house on it occasionally. Listening to music. Bit of punk. Bit of rock. Bit of "alternative". A little bit of wuss-bag indie. Jazz, blues. Post-punk. It goes on, really. Watchin' some movies. You know, just movies. I saw a bunch at BIFF. Well, five. Crazy Estonian animations were pretty rad. Uni is involving. Assignments loom like so many... looms. Looms that knit doom from my head-threads of dread. Um. I cut my toenails. They were getting kinda long and gross. People who have to see my bare feet are much better off now. I should change my profile picture thingo, cause I don't have a beard anymore. Just a lazy-unemployed-man's five o'clock shadow most of the time. Well, goodbye, then.

...Ughhh...

When I moved into Hampson St, it was quite easy to bring all my possessions in one ute load. I had a bed, a desk, and a small bookshelf. It seems after living there for two and a half years, I acquired quite a lot of crap. I didn't realise how much, however, until Sarah and I moved it all into our new house with Ronnie in the next suburb. Combined with the cleaning of the house, it was the most hellish week ever. It was sort of fun, though, cutting sick in the backyard with a full-powered scrub cutter that could shred through a man's ankle without a shudder.

So, at the end of our fucked up week, we hastily finished cleaning the house at 9pm, and, all the energy drained from our muscles, mentally exhausted, physically numb, we went to a big party. Then, we recovered for the next week, and I've pretty much just been slowly unpacking and sitting staring at walls. And listening to punk rock. And reading. Huzzuh! Here's to a boring post. See you slags soon, eh?

Without facial hair, obviously, but that's coming off today anyway.

I'm very tired from moving. This is good, however, as it means Sarah, Ronnie and myself have finally found a sweet house, and are moving into it. Some say the house is in Herston. Others say Kelvin Grove. Who knows? What I do know, is that I'll be internetless for a little while... which, embarrassingly, is a little scary. More about stuff later, when I can think.

The awesomeness that is Liason Officer Sue White in Green Wing:









A HANDBAAAAAAAAAG?!:

Tell me, what do you folks think of this as a pseudonym:

Theodore Salmon

I quite like it. I think it says fun, yet serious storytelling at the same time.

Sarah, Ronnie and myself have been denied two houses so far. Time is running out, and with any luck it won't come to me standing on the road outside this house I'm in now surrounded by mountains of furniture, clothes and books, in the rain, watching new people move in.

This sort of thing was much easier when I had a nicely-paying full time job. Oh, and when 1000 people weren't moving to Brisbane a week. Taking all the houses. Knobs.

Dammit, it was 4:30 this morning and I still had a good hour of utterly necessary study to go for an exam tomorrow before I could fall asleep, when I took a quick break and flicked on the TV, where Parky was going to be interviewing Clive James and David Bowie, so now it's 5:30am and I still have a good hour of utterly necessary study to go. Parky also interviewed Victoria Beckham, and it was interesting to see how little she said sitting in between two incredibly smart and talented people.

Browsing through the 400 film quotes the American Film Institute nominated for the best film quotes ever award, I keep getting little shivers up my spine and arms at the sheer brilliance of just a few words strung together. I might need a little lie down now.

An edit later:

My favourites off the list aren't particularly funny, neccesarily... they just drip with awesomeness. Absolute awesomeness.

"Get away from her, you bitch!"

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

"That'll do pig. That'll do."

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."

"Kid, the next time I say, 'Let's go someplace like Bolivia,' let's go someplace like Bolivia."

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

"Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!"

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

"You're gonna need a bigger boat."

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!"

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL"

I have many more... these are just the favourites from the list.

And I'm gonna die with a twinkle in my eye, 'cause I sung songs, spun stories, loved, laughed and drank wine.

Except tonight, 'cause an assignment I worked all last night on disappeared from my computer without a trace. I spent an hour searching through the dusty, bobby-pin and leaky-pen strewn innards of my laptop, but to no avail. So, now I'm at uni doing it again, better hopefully. Maybe. At least I'll email it to myself this time. I don't wear bobby pins.

Ronnie has kindly put up the recording of my epic poem The Knight, Squire, Maiden, and Beast on the Brow website, and you can download it from here:

(Right click and say "save link as", cause otherwise it'll probably just try to play it for you. It's 16 megs, but that's because it's 15 minutes long. Also, I'd better warn you that I've laced it with subtle hypnotic suggestions to make you all like my cooking.)
http://www.theliftedbrow.com/mp3s/The%20Knight,%20Squire,%20Maiden%20and%20Beast%20by%20Thomas%20Benjamin%20Guerney.mp3