How about a hilariously embarrassing story that isn’t especially funny nor even all that embarrassing?

A couple of weeks ago I did another round of my experimental-ish solo-ish comedy show Pinball at Hanging Rock (next show: 7 June at the Grand Poobah!). The sketches went well but there was a long stretch of undisciplined stand-up at the start, based around what I still think are some great ideas, all of which were lost in unnecessary background detail and improvisational dead ends. Pretty straightforward outcome, lesson learned, even when I’ve got an essentially unlimited amount of my own time to work with, I still need to tighten it up.

I also decided to bring back a segment which had been the highlight of an otherwise pretty dismal Pinball back in March, entitled “A Conversation Between Two Women About Something Other Than A Man”, in which I gracelessly earned my show a passing grade on the notorious Bechdel test by selecting two female audience members and facilitating a conversation between them about anything at all, so long as no men were involved. As tediously obsessed as I am with comedic theory, I would still be hard-pressed to explain the point of this, other than that the Bechdel test makes an important and complex point about gender disparity in popular fiction and I thought it’d be funny to address that point and then miss it completely. (In case it needs to be said: it’s not about passing, it’s about escaping the culture of screenwriting that doesn’t trust an audience to pay attention when men aren’t on screen or even being discussed.)

In March it was short and silly, and didn’t ask too much of the unsuspecting women in question, and it worked out well on a night when not much else did. The second time around, however, I wanted to make it bigger and better, but I had even less of a plan, and I filled in the blanks rather embarrassingly. March’s show, as I recall, produced about a minute of stilted but friendly conversation about chips, but this time I started asking things like, “What’s your motivation? What drives you?”, and even though that kind of dumb arrogance on my part was meant to be the butt of the joke, that’s still way too much to throw at somebody and expect anything back.

As it went on, I got further and further out of my depth, and had the awful realisation partway through that I didn’t even know what sort of character I was meant to be (dude with a genuine respect for women’s rights, yet still bothering them with a microphone and asking vague personal questions against their better wishes??). It was a mess. Not a total disaster — as far as I’m aware, I didn’t upset anybody, and I think people enjoyed it about as much as they would have enjoyed anything unpredictable and unplanned — but still unfortunately messy all the same.

So I took two relatively new arrivals to my thick ol’ head — an interest in feminism and a desire to incorporate more audience interaction into my comedy, or at least get a lot better at it should the need/opportunity arise — and I unwisely combined them with very little forethought. It leaves me with a mild variant of the shame I felt at age 11 when a kid at my school was hassling me and I lashed out at him with white-belt taekwon-do. Then, as now, the result was thankfully so inept as to be unidentifiable. But I knew!

I wish we were allowed to see more beginners. First drafts. Nervous activists. A 50-year-old Nick Cave, on stage, learning guitar.

I’ve spent the afternoon writing something that functions as a sort of cross between an artist’s CV, a pub brag, and a vain, desperate plea to be allowed entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, like an atheist in a Jack Chick tract, stammering before the Lord, “B-b-but what about all my good deeds?” We all know how that turns out. But no matter — here it is!

Peter Escott, Explained (and thereby Spoiled)

Which in turn led me to finally put all my demented press releases in the one place:

Press Release Anthology

The magic is fading. The cracks are starting to show. Devoted fans will love it but anyone else should give it a wide berth.

Ugh. Those words!

The magic, when it comes to the Magnetic Fields, is a collective term for the little things that distract you from the epic intellectual exercise, that make you think wistfully about love rather than think critically about love songs. The ukulele, the psychocandy, the gender-ambiguous frisson. Love at the Bottom of the Sea is largely bereft of magic. It sounds like a propaganda broadcast from a Party ministry Orwell neglected to mention. Ministry of Authenticity? Ministry of Realism?

Love at the Bottom of the Sea brings back electronic instrumentation for the first time since 1999′s 69 Love Songs, and consists of songs 41 through 55 released since 69 Love Songs. (The numbers are debatable, because they’re wrong, but they’re not very wrong.) People say it follows a “no-synth trilogy”, but to me it’s the fourth Magnetic Fields album in a row that just sounds like the one thing, after that three-disc masterwork that sounded like everything. This time everything sounds like something electronic that I’m unfamiliar with. Claudia Gonson is credited in the liner notes with “fun machine”; is that what that is? Here’s what it sounds like:

“Andrew in Drag” is the instant classic, and serves as a reply of sorts to the gender ambiguity of past instant classics, your reward for thirteen years of puzzling over the possible meanings and implications of the word “unboyfriendable”. In this case the gender and sexual preference of all parties is unusually crystal clear: two narrators, a gay dude and a straight dude, both of them “turned” by the one-night-only vision of Andrew putting on a wig and a dress for a laugh. Even as pure concept there’s nothing about it that is not brilliant. Everything but the above is left completely to the imagination; one’s first instinct is to place the action in a sophisticated East Village performance space, but it could just as easily be some footballers engaging in post-season horseplay. Stephin Merritt: international treasure.

Then there are fourteen other songs! Some of them deal with a timely topic: “God Wants Us To Wait” has the potential to be an ironic hit in its own right among the kids that have been forwarding Garfunkel and Oates’ “Sex With Ducks” video to all and sundry for the last couple of years, but “The Machine In Your Hand” is a touch more cryptic about its smartphone lament. Some of them cross off a few more items on the knowing genre pastiche checklist: “Goin’ Back to the Country” and “Infatuation (With Your Gyration)” really don’t need to be here (although I’d be surprised if anybody bothered to skip them, as I sadly do with Realism‘s pointless “We Are Having A Hootenanny”), but the faux-Mexican faux-grandeur of “All She Cares About Is Mariachi” closes the album with baffling poignancy. One of them goes like this:

I love Hugh, and Hugh loves you
You love me, and he does not
I don’t love you, you don’t love Hugh
What a sad gavotte!

Sigh. Oh, you.

I meant that broken Macintosh icon as a compliment, by the way. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything exactly like it. If I didn’t know a word of English (and sometimes I get so exhausted thinking about the Magnetic Fields that I wonder for a moment if maybe I don’t), my favourite song here would be “I’ve Run Away To Join The Fairies”, a medieval folk song compressed into an overheated computer and subsequently corrupted, with every line punctuated by piercing random atonal noise. This excites me.

In summary: well, I liked it.

(I really liked Realism too and was sad to see it received relatively poorly! “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” was the instant classic there; “Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree” was the slice of daft genius; “Always Already Gone” was the song that badly needed to be written, and thankfully was; and “The Dada Polka” is groovy Bokononist pop!)

The following is a list of paragraphs in what I am writing right now:

1. Lists calm me, even when thoroughly unnecessary. Writing in the form of a list is one part of my plan to overcome my fear of writing. And the other parts of the plan? Perhaps one day I will list them for you.

2. In January this year I begat, and began, a live comedy show taking place on the first Thursday of every month at the Grand Poobah here in Hobart, entitled Pinball at Hanging Rock. It was to be an exhausting and ambitious project inspired by other exhausting and ambitious projects undertaken by people who (a) have a much greater “following” than I do, and (b) do not have full-time “work work” jobs, and in nearly all cases do not have children. Can you see where I may have set myself up to fail?

3. I’ve failed!

4. Well, it’s not quite as bad as all that. January’s debut was a ludicrously overstuffed success; prominent lilting grouch Kevin O’Flaherty noted that it broke records for “most performers in a solo comedy show” (about a dozen) and “longest hour” (the bits that I thought would make up half an hour ended up taking an hour, and then the final sketch, which I am still fiercely proud of, lasted another hour). February was a more modest affair but felt more like something I could produce on a regular basis. March’s effort was compromised by (a) the disappearance/unavailability of many collaborators, and (b) weeks of unexplained, all-pervading depression. Rather than cancel the show, I put my remaining energy into an hour of patchy but ultimately passable new stand-up. By the time I went to bed that night I was feeling relatively okay about it, but it was hardly a victory. And now I’m putting the whole thing on hold indefinitely.

5. A reminder: please remember to regularly assess and update the labels that you have placed on yourself. It was not long ago that I would still describe myself as “shy” and “socially awkward”, years after both of these had ceased to apply to me (at most, these days, “reserved” and “socially obsessed“). And I was so pleased to self-identify as “emotionally open” that I truly did not even notice myself slipping gradually into that Australian archetype that community service announcements have only recently brought to light, that of the farmer, on his farm, standing alone at a fence next to an empty field, black clouds forming, representing the dark thoughts that he refuses to mention to anyone, because man, and men. So to clarify: I’ve been clinically depressed, in a “not that bad, could be worse” kind of way, since about the age of 11 (I am now 27 and impatient for 30). I want that on public record, if only because it is a factor in certain decisions I make and an element in certain stories I tell, but I will try my damndest not to be an “oversharer”.

6. Pinball at Hanging Rock will return once I work out a long-term plan for its continued excellence.

7. ‘night.

On my way back.

I no longer guarantee that there will be new things here every calendar day. The guarantee is void. The last couple of weeks have served their purpose in helping me feel more determined and productive with my creative work than I’ve felt in a long, long time, but on days like today I don’t want to have to choose between (a) holing myself up in here with the computer for a couple of hours writing something, editing every sentence as I go, and (b) spending a calm and rewarding late afternoon and evening with my partner and three-month-old son, and then cringing as I remember there’s still something I have to do before bed. Quality before quantity; sleep before slapdash.

A History of Happy Days Anachronisms

There’s a dude named Wes writing these things for Scharpling & Wurster’s site now. Incredible. I’ve picked this one because it’s a perfect example of a false document ramping up the implausibility ever so slightly as it goes along, so that everybody who comes to it blind has a different moment at which they twig that something’s not right. In this case I presented the document to a very good friend of mine without a word of explanation and he was still none the wiser by the end.

I’ve been working on this all day, and while it’s not great in its own right (still stuck on a few beatmaking cliches, and I don’t have a clue how to keep finished mixes from just sounding like one big block of sound — do I just need to try moving individual elements towards the left or right channels, or is it more complicated than that?), I’m very, very happy with how much better I’m getting at using the MPC1000. Totally makes up for all my failed attempts at learning guitar.

It’s a remix of “Dancer” by champion Hobart band Tiger Choir, from their 2009 self-titled EP. The drums are from a sound library that came bundled with the MPC (at this point I simply must recommend Hip Hop Tools for anyone wanting to buy one for themselves, as they have excellent deals and speedy delivery even to my weird little island), the vocal sample is from Tiger Choir’s “Cop Show” from the same EP, and I played the keyboard part; everything else is from “Dancer”. Hope you like it!

(Tiger Choir’s debut LP, which I believe is called Unicycles, is due out sometime in the next few months I think)

Dancer remix by Paytahr Escobar