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Finding Damo
The story of a man, his job, two cats and the meaning of success.
Archive for the tag “Tripod”
Imagination and the post-y generation
Last night we went to see Tripod: Men of Substance. It was a vaguely depressing show, as the boys (men, now) addressed turning 40 and sixteen years of performing. Shereen thought it was hilarious. I looked at us, 16 years ago, drinking at the Prince Pat and watching Tripod doing Open Slather. Each of them had their own coloured shirts. It was fresh and funny and we’d drink too much and stagger home afterwards.
This show started at 8.45 and we were home by midnight. Sad sad sad.
I’ve always liked Tripod. They write for my generation and my type of person. There are references to Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars and Commodore 64s. One of their songs last night was called “Waiting for the Game to Load” after putting the tape in, typing load and pressing play. Ah, the memories.
Builders had good taste
At one stage they commented on having to go to the tip to get porn. When I was a pre-teen living in Kyabram, we used to hunt down building sites. There we would find the builders’ stash of People (tame) and Picture (less tame) magazines. I had no idea that there was anything stronger available until high school and my introduction to working life as a paper boy. With 20 boys and 1 adult supervisor, suddenly we had illicit access to a whole new class of porn –Penthouse and Playboy at the tame end, Hustler and other plastic-baggers catering to whatever your particular fetish was at the other end.
But still, getting access to it required a bit of effort and some ingenuity. And of course, you had to outsmart your parents in the hiding. A regular rotation shift of location and the occasional emergency ditching to a friend seemed to work.
Now of course, the Internet has killed all creativity in that area. I teach a Cyber Safety unit at school. When I talk to the students about safe and unsafe uses of the Internet, I almost always have to take notes, as they list off incredibly thorough listings of sites with free access. Of course, they don’t tell me that these are porn sites. I ask them for popular web sites and they will say something like “Oh, I’m always on RedTube, sir, do you know it?” and then watch my expression closely. I have mastered the blank expression, but often I don’t need it. These students know more about free porn than I ever will (holding out wedding ring).
I got really side-tracked here from where I was going in this post. What was I going to say?
Oh yes, imagination.
Tripod’s other little gem was that boredom is the catalyst for imagination. My brother and I never got up in the morning thinking that today was the day that I would almost cut off his thumb. We would eat breakfast, sit around a bit, and then say “OK. I’m bored. What do you want to do?” And one of us would remember that there was a hatchet in the back shed, and a stack of wood that could be cut up. And of course, Justin would have to hold the wood still. And then there was the hospital trip and another experience arising out of boredom and imagination.
I’m not saying it right.
We would sit around, nothing better to do. And then Justin would point out that we could jump off the roof, onto the trampoline, and from there to the cushions and mattresses from the caravan. Mostly, he was right.
This is why I’m not in sales.
OK, last try. Dad would bring home a video camera. It was a massive thing, with a shoulder strap to hold the player, attached by a cord to the camera itself. We would spend hours creating film. We figured out how to do stop motion and would drive chairs around the backyard. We realized that if the camera was on a tripod (not a Tripod) we could do special effects, turning Elise into Dad and making people disappear. We would do David Attenborough specials through the wilderness of our backyard, and rope in our friends to create advertisements for made up soap and pet food. We let our imaginations run wild and rarely came back to earth.
bored is good
I’m not even sure that teenagers today would get Calvin and Hobbes. “Is he playing some sort of a computer game?” “Is it something like Inception?”
Of course, there are still the precious few – those children and young adults who can live inside their minds and find the hidden worlds that exist all around the bored and the inquisitive. And imagination exhibits in other ways. The special effects that abound in today’s movies are incredible. And someone had to imagine that. Computer games are pushing the boundaries between interaction and storytelling, to great effect. Only two percent of novels are published, which means that for every novel on the bookshelves, there are … um, more (199?) that have been written, but not published, which is an amazing output of imagination. Imagination isn’t dead.
But:
Kids who spend all of their time playing Clash of Clans. Kids who don’t know the meaning of boredom due to being given iPods at the age of four. Parents who turn on the tv or the computer or the console whenever a child says “I’m bored.”
These people are giving imagination a damn good thrashing. I’m sure our creativity is diminishing as a species. And what does that mean for humanity as a whole?
It’s the dreamers, the bored and the curious who have gotten us to where we are today. If nobody is allowed to be bored, they won’t dream, they won’t have a need to ask “What will happen if I mix these two…” BOOM.
And may the gods help us then.
PS. A side not that I couldn’t fit in anywhere else: Film studios need to get past remaking films from other countries and other decades, or adapting nostalgic television into nauseating and forgettable cinema.
PPS. Today was the bored. Next week will be the dreamers. Does that mean I now have to write a curious blog post about skinning cats?
PPS. Finding Damo word count tomorrow. I’m also writing a new one-act play.
The Money Fairy
So.
Have I told you about the Money Fairy? He or she is both blessing and curse. Throughout the years my relationship with money has been a tenuous one. I’ve never felt incredibly poor, but every time I try and get on top of my debts and into the black, something happens to dump me right back in the red again.
The Money Fairy
I get an unexpected windfall from the taxman, and then my car stops dead in the middle of Burwood Highway.
I work in Japan for a year, saving up a nice little nest-egg and then decide to go back to university full time.
I’m almost done paying off my loan, which will leave a good percentage of my wage free for savings and then I fly off to Europe for a couple of months.
Some people, including my fiancé, scoff at the Money Fairy. They tell me there is no such thing. But every time you say you don’t believe in the Money Fairy doesn’t exist, another Money Fairy dies, people!
Which may not be such a bad thing.
My point being, the Money Fairy won’t ever let me starve, but she never let me get ahead either. So when I find that there isn’t enough money to pay for the car rego one year, someone pays me back some money I lent them a couple of years previously.
Or I ask my Mum. She’s been a good agent of the Money Fairy.
But this isn’t about me.
I want to inflict Money Fairies on certain people. Kevin Smith? Needs a Money Fairy. Tripod. Money Fairy. Three of them to be sure.
Sam Raimi? No, he’s fine. Give him heaps of money and he makes Spider Man. I am NOT complaining there.
But I was saying to my fiancé last night: “I really want to watch Chasing Amy again. I love that movie!” I’ve always put Smith down as one of my favourite directors. His writing is brilliant and his movies are incredibly edgy.
Oh, hang on. No. Not are. Were. Someone in his or her wisdom decided to give him a massive stack of money and see what he could do with it. It’s hard to write about the woes and escapades of a bunch of New Jersey misfits when you’re eating a Nobu-burger from a gold-plated dining setting while your maid massages your toes. Kevin’s best work is now coming out of his Twitter account.
When Tripod released Open Slather, my friends and I all became instant fans. We went to gigs, bought t-shirts and cds and hoped that soon everybody would know how cool Tripod were. And then some people found out how cool Tripod were. And they got on TV. And started releasing studio versions of songs that were really only funny live…
But they did do Tripod Versus the Dragon. And I live in hope that they stay funny and stop releasing albums of re-recorded old material just to make money. And have to start scrounging for gigs again. And get funny.
Does true genius only come laced with a tinge of desperation? Is Stephen King’s Carrie superior in every way to Bag of Bones? The former was written while he was doing night-shifts at a laundry and teaching. The latter was written in his Maine mansion between signing limited editions and dabbing truffle oil from his chin with a lace napkin.
In my head, Claudia Christian is saying “I’m not bitter!” which was her catchphrase at the Multiverse Con, shortly after being cut from Babylon 5.
I’m not bitter. Or jealous. I really mourn the loss of quality, edgy writing that we discovered from these famous writers, directors and performers.
Simply because nobody thought to inflict a Money Fairy upon them.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and reset the Fairy trip-wires around the house.
Finding Damo 