Going The Distance
Director: Nanette Burstein

Going the Distance is Nanette Burstein’s first film that isn’t an award-winning documentary of some description. Perhaps peculiarly, it’s a rom-com starring Drew Barrymore and her real life man-friend Justin Long (the Mac from the Mac vs PC adverts). Going the Distance has Barrymore and Long accidentally starting a long-distance relationship, then it falls apart because long distance relationships suck, but then they get together in the end. Barrymore (who is awesome) and Long have great chemistry and there are a fair number of comic turns, with Christina Applegate and Jim Gaffigan getting some excellent scenes, but there ultimately isn’t much that is remarkable plot-wise.

While the film often stays within the safe confines of the genre, a combination of the artistic predilections of Burstein, Barrymore and Mormon producers Jared and Jerusha Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) has resulted in the insertion of some (occasionally stilted) serious indie vibes and honest-to-god comedy that finds its roots in the characters, rather than the situations. Burstein obviously used her years of intimate study of people and the way they tick to humanise her characters, with the only complete cliché being Christina Applegate’s neurotic housewife. The rest of the characters were, thankfully, ramshackle constructions played with a dash of integrity, just like real life. Sadly though, all of this is still within the genre, and that genre eats up the running time like your nana eats hard candy; as a result, much of this excellent work stays in the background.

The work being hidden is the problem with Going the Distance. It’s a perfectably acceptable date film; unlike recent rom-coms Bride Wars, The Back-Up Plan, or The Ugly Truth, it doesn’t suck. It’s just not good enough for someone like Burstein. She’s got the talent, a unique eye and a pedigree history. She’s the A student that seems to have stopped trying this semester. I hope she’ll do better next time.

3/5

The Expendables is marketed as a throwback to the eighties; a vehicle starring a bunch of the action stars from the last twenty years with a plot about a Latin American dictatorship. In a way, it is Sylvester Stallone’s answer to Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, but instead of a film about being a vaudevillian, Stallone made a film about what it means to be a hard-bodied 1980s action star. It’s the closest Stallone will ever come to doing an art film, and in this respect the movie works: the film’s too flashy and ‘new’ to be one of those 1980s hard-body films, yet too ‘real’ to be a pastiche. That said, it’s still viscerally exciting and undeniably manly, with bros beating on bros and breaking their bonds of broship before becoming bros again.

Because of its atemporality (a fancy word for it being a throwback) there is a heap of things that just miscarry throughout the film, the most egregious being an attempt to find something for Jason Statham to do. Stallone does this by giving Statham a tarted up Charisma Carpenter to avenge when the man she cruelly replaced Statham with starts beating on her. The women of the film are paper cut-outs to be brutalised and save, but that’s the source material—isn’t it? The film does do something remarkable, going out of its way to present water-boarding as actual, unbearable torture, unlike almost every other facet of American media since 2004. Watching Stallone make political statements in that vein while maintaining his warped form of artistic integrity almost makes the film worthwhile.

2.5

Band Substances was the second Fringe Bar musical comedy night of the year. While it couldn’t live up to the first one, where the Flight of The Conchords did a “surprise” set, it was a better produced and more sustained night of musical comedy. I am crediting producer and supporting performer Robbie Ellis for much of this. The man is a musical genius with an acute comic bend. Bringing the musical comedians/comic musicians of Wellington together and making them perform with a seven piece band instead of just a guitar and a smile was a good idea executed well. Rumour has it that he arranged most of the music too.

The night was a mix of comic song, musical gimmickry and “normal music”. Some was amusing yet disposable: The Fringe Bar Operatic Soloists performing operatic versions of popular music is a sort of thing that I’ve often heard before but was happy to listen to. Other sets were rather marvelous though: I consider Matt Mulholland Wellington’s best kept comedy secret; every time I see the lad he delights me, and his new songs were no exception.

The different energies of the performances gelled together rather breezily, with the exception of three staggered character songs performed by members of improv soap The Young and the WITless (Paul Sullivan and Karen Anslow), which melded a brief moment of character-based improv with a musical standard. I didn’t get these sequences—they weren’t funny enough to be comedy and not captivating enough musically to keep my attention. The songs were really well performed, but it felt like unnecessary filler.

I understand that musical comedy takes ages to write and score, but I saw a large portion of material that I, and most of the crowd were overly familiar with, including stuff that was performed at the last music comedy gig in April. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but it makes me fear for the sustainability of such a show.

Ellis’s new arrangements did keep the old content from becoming overly stifling and, in fact, made some of the songs more interesting than they ever were. Sarah Harpur’s songs especially benefited as her lyrics are grand but her music is often a bit mechanical. Gabriel Page, the headliner of the night, also responded well to the backing band treatment. The man writes some highly amusing love songs, and seemed almost like a legit rocker up there, and that was cool to see.

Band Substances
July 30, Fringe Bar

American: The Bill Hicks Story
Director: Matt Harlock

There is a myth of Bill Hicks. We are told of a bright-eyed young stand up who, like the progressive rockers of old, threw away his old stuff and strove for reinvention and righteousness, chasing his art’s truth through drugs and alcohol, before cancer killed him at the peak of his excellence. According to American: The Bill Hicks Story, it’s surprising where that legend maps onto what actually happened in his life. His relationship with alcohol and eventual abstinence from it and most other drugs doesn’t sit well with what I felt when listening to Tool. That’s what’s cool about honest documentaries: you can learn stuff that will alter your perceptions. There was little romancing of drugs or sobriety, or of being a comedian or a star, and while you could see the personal love in the interviews, you could see that he fucked those people off quite often as well.

Director Matt Harlock’s visual scheme for the film was unique and profoundly personal. They matched a collage of archived photographs to animation, scored with music that Hicks’ band made, to the interviews with his close friends and family. This created an authoritative narrative with a sense of amusing and psychedelic timelessness. I’m so stealing that concept if I get the chance, it was beautiful.

Three distinct types of people sat around me at the screening of American: comedy geeks (guilty), drug culture nerds (guilty), and the over sixty(?!)­—I don’t understand why there were so many geriatrics there, maybe they like watching films about dead people and the past, maybe their feet were sore and they wanted to sit down. I can’t begrudge them this, as I too often have aches in my feet. My point though, is this: you don’t think of the ravaged by age enjoying counter-culture stuff, unless they look like a burnt-out hippy. That misses what Hicks was about. He’d write intellectually honest material that would play well with a literate HBO-style crowd. Part of the aforementioned Hicksian canon sees Bill frustrated with his lack of recognition in the borscht/bible belts of America, heading to Britain where he became an international icon. As long as you’re intelligent you can appreciate what the man stood for.

Out Takes, A.K.A. the annual queer film festival, is 16 this year—meaning it’s still not okay for us to sexualise it, but we’ll all look the other way when it inevitably happens. 2010’s festival is higher of brow than some previous festivals, and that’s a good thing because certain past selections have been little more than your usual watered-down Reading schlock, with the queer experience tacked on. (Another Gay Movie, I’m looking at you!) In its best years though, Out Takes is a highlight for both the queer community and film buffs. It provides a niche for transgressive film and powerful queer stories that would otherwise never be shown in Aotearoa, as our country’s film distribution ethic is awful. This year’s lineup promises plenty of variety and quality, and to help you choose we at Salient have some suggestions:

Festival opener An English Man in New York is yet another film about the iconic Quentin Crisp to star John Hurt. This is set around the time America went gaga over him in the 1980s. It’s well acted, well shot, and it is fascinating to watch the New York scene. An English Man isn’t as good as The Naked Civil Servant, but honestly very few films will ever be.

Little Ashes is that film where Robert Pattinson plays a young gay Salvador Dali. Sadly the film’s had surprisingly few cinematic releases internationally. It is passionate, gorgeous and literate Oscar bait.

A friend made me watch excerpts of We Are The Mods a couple of months ago, and I devoured its aesthetic. Two young ladies in LA’s Mod culture hang out and experience each other. It’s keen.

Both Stephen Jackson and I recommend Translatina, a documentary about the lives of the trans people of Latin America. It’s remarkably interesting and thorough without sacrificing its political integrity to its quick pace and charm.

(multiple comedians with an MC) show with a theme; every comic comes from one of New Zealands shit hole small towns, you know, the other Levins of greater New Zealand. The comics were to discuss the inconic stink town and/or their own stink one over the course of the hour. Entertainment wise, it was a largely successful show. There were pleanty of laughs and the packed audience was obviously having a good time. Admittedly there were a few awkward silences generated over the hour and Jez Brown in particular struggled to keep the rapidly exhausting audience laughing near the end of his set.

This is how you should create a festival show for comedians who don’t have a full hour of material yet. The bill was well structured, the theme was catchy and marketable, and the venue choice (the Katipo cafe) was goldilocks sized- just right. They also did something specialthat you wouldn’t see on a regular night, when Gareth Bradley presenting a physical slide show with (2010 Raw Comedy Finalist) Nathan Winter interjecting with some rather superb one liners.

The big successes of the night came from Gareth Bradley and Master of Ceremonies Brad Zimmerman. They rocked the joint. At one point Zimmerman heroicly saved the night from a show threatening confused silence with charm and amusing stories, so for someone who claims he’s not much of an MC he is learning very quickly. Zimmerman is high energy, compelling and actually fun, if I were you I’d check out his show Jetlagged in week three.

Now I singled out Bradley because his exacting wit was the highlight of the show. He spent the lions share of the night constructing and deconstructing the loaded images we have of Levin and Hamilton, trading energy with Winter, and actually made you feel okay for laughing at what could be a cruel premise. My dad has a farm a sneeze away from Levin, and everything he and Levin native Jez Brown said was accurate. Browns was so accurate to my experince it hurt.

Though Levin wouldn’t stand up against some of the international line up shows, it was a really tight show from some promising Wellingtonian comedians.

Levin for beginners: starring Brad Zimmerman, Nathan Winter, Jez Brown, Gareth Bradley, reviewed Saturday 9th May at the Katipo Cafe

I’m glad that Jav Jarquin didn’t take his show to Auckland because fuck those guys, they get Avenue Q. We deserve something cool too. It was cool, just so you know.  Jarquin’s audience got to spend an hour cracking up at him doing ninja stuff with cards. They weren’t so much tricks as card feats—he impaled a pumpkin, hit flying cards with other cards and flicked stuff across the room. Hey, I don’t care what you say “person who didn’t attend the show”, Jarquin was freaking sweet.

The show was a weird balance of gimmickry, personal biography and laugh lines, which meant that there were fewer laughs per minute than you’d usually expect at a comedy show. This mix of energies worked towards the show’s favour, as it was easily the most unique hour of this edition of the Comedy Festival. I think that Jarquin chose wisely to stage Card Ninja now instead of the NZ Fringe Festival, as his slick show might have been lost among the weird shenanigans that constitute Fringe.

Jav Jarquin—The Legend Of The Card Ninja
Fringe Bar
28 April – 1 May 2010

This is a glowing review, just so you know. I think Harpur is a tops performer, and her show was well structured and rather daring.  

The thing is, Sarah Harpur does glow when she’s on stage. With her ditzy persona, good looks and bright sunny attitude, you are happy to let the pretty lady sell you on her jokes. It’s because of that people often ignore a pointed darkness found directly under her curly blonde hair tendrils. To expand, part of her show was a short film she made in the 90s reenacting the Bain murders with Barbie dolls, and that was awesome.

Harpur’s show was built around discussions of life, pets and death. Some of the material was stuff she uses in her shorter sets, but there was a bunch of deeply personal material. The death sequence discussed the suicide of her father as a bit of a jolly jape, and somehow it worked. Harpur is plumbing new territory as a solo performer now that she is growing comfortable with her comic persona, and I think it is working. She is at her best when she’s less frantic; her punch lines hit more deftly, so watching her when time isn’t an issue is definitely worthwhile.

Sarah Harpur—Harpur’s Bizarre
The Fringe Bar
27 April – 1 May 2010

Simon McKinney does funny voices and he’s damned good at them. His opening bit about a German not understanding the bucket fountain and a weirdo named Reg were wonderful. That’s a full twenty minutes of good times.

It might interest you know that he was a fish on Kiwi children’s television show Squirt. No guys, he wasn’t Gordon “the dick one”, he was that replacement hippy fish. McKinney was often hungover when recording for the show. Armed with this knowledge you now have the second twenty minutes of the show. It was informative but not very funny.

The other ten or so minutes were competent bridge work between various anecdotes and voices. I must say that the man is very watchable and that in the moment watching him mump about didn’t seem like time wasted.

All in all, I hope that he gets a lot of face time if a documentary about Kiwi children’s television is ever made, and the show was okay.

Simon McKinney—My Time as a Talking Fish
The Garden Club
27 April – 1 May 2010

TJ McDonald is the only 2010 Billy T Award nominee from Wellington, and I think that his solo show A Maori Ate My Great Granddad may just win him our greatest comedy award.

A Maori Ate My Great Granddad is a personal history of both McDonald’s family and of TJ himself, and this loose theme allows TJ to swing all over the world, from Iran to Polynesian strip clubs through to the infamous Kiwi forensic psychiatric hospital Lake Alice. It turns out his great uncle was a bit nuts. As someone else who has had family there, I found that story really quite relatable. But that’s what makes his show so engaging: we can actually relate with the history he’s spinning, the yarns he’s telling. Some of the stories featuring McDonald’s grandfather could be lifted out of the Uncle Trev books, or stolen from Barry Crump. And, let’s be honest, who doesn’t wish that they were related to Crump? Well, besides his actual family…

The thing that makes McDonald a watchable comic is his affable Kiwi intellectualism. This allows him to straddle a large area of comedy: in the same seven minutes I saw puns, Maori jokes, a discussion of aeronautics and Harry Potter, dick jokes and astute political observations. I can’t think of a New Zealand comedian who that would work with—maybe Brendan Lovegrove—and that’s a pretty special niche to be in.

If you’re the target demographic for the Capital Times, one of the more intelligent people in the room, or happen to like the BBC version of Who Do You Think You Are? then you need to see the show. Everyone else- you should definitely go too.

TJ McDonald A Maori Ate My Great Granddad
04/05/10, Fringe Bar

A Maori Ate My Great Granddad is a personal history of both McDonald’s family and of TJ himself, this loose theme allows TJ to swing all over the world, from Iran, to Polynesian strip clubs through to the infamous Kiwi forensic psychiatric hospital Lake Alice. It turns out his Great Uncle was a bit nuts. As someone else who has had family there, I found that story really quite relatable. But, that’s what makes his show so neat: we can actually relate with the history he’s spinning, the yarns he’s telling. Some of the stories featuring McDonalds Grandfather could be lifted out of the Uncle Trev books, or stolen from Barry Crump. And, let’s be honest, who doesn’t wish that they were related to Crump? Well, besides his actual family…

The thing that makes McDonald a watchable comic is his affable kiwi intellectualism. This allows him to straddle a large area of comedy: in the same seven minutes I saw puns, Maori jokes, a discussion of the aeronautics and Harry Potter, dick jokes and astute political observations. I can’t think of a New Zealand comedian who that would work with – maybe Brendan Lovegrove- and that’s a pretty special niche to be in.

If you’re the target demographic for the Capital Times, one of the more intelligent people in the room, or happen to like the BBC version of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?” then you need to see the show. The rest of you hoy-palloy, will merely enjoy the show a great deal.

T.J. McDonald
04-08 May at the Fringe Bar.
Tickets $20

When I saw Miles Jupp perform at First Laughs I feared that his ten-minute set based on the British class system and his place near its top would prove too exhaustingly foreign for a Kiwi audience to handle for an entire hour. So, when he opened the show with that same set I sweated beads of comic worry. To my surprise, it worked. The introductory lecture of classism gives us enough comprehension to understand his mindset as someone who cannot connect with the common man, which was key to the evening’s tales.

When cracking jokes, Jupp is superb; erudite, charming and scathing. His crisp ranting is reminiscent of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (Zero Punctuation) with Graham Chapman’s unflappability dabbed in. His ability to craft tags (the punchlines that happen after a punchline) is top notch, as is his ability to shoehorn local references to his bits seamlessly, something that speaks to his craftsmanship as a comic. Considering his other anecdotes, including a beautifully told tale of a teen hood testicular torsion, were so good I was surprised that the only disappointment to be had was in his last anecdote about a night bus to Amsterdam. The story plodded, and ultimately didn’t have direction. The way it fizzled out so, worrying for what was otherwise a pleasant evening.

If you wish Stephen Fry was slightly more cruel and swore a tad more often, then go to Jupp. I enjoyed him.

At San Francisco Bath House, 26 April – 1 May, 7pm

Chris Rock presents a breezy ethnographic documentary about African-America and its culture. The film is rather refreshing, as the subject which at first seems banal becomes rather engrossing, while Rock is his usual charming self.

We consume a metric fucktonne of African-American cultural by-products every day, yet even though we see more black Americans on television than New Zealanders of any shade, their culture isn’t an intimate part of our daily life. So the 77 minutes of hair talk had an air of false nostalgia to me. Of course black women use chemicals to straighten their hair out, and no, you should never touch a black woman’s hair. I knew these facts without knowing why; I blame hungover Sando watching Tyra.

Good Hair often amuses without obviously stretching to make comedic moments, unlike Bill Maher’s Religulous or anything by Michael Moore. Partly this is because the film is just an examination of a world that Rock finds fascinating. We see a Black Haircare expo/theatrical event, an industrial plant that produces giant cans of noxious alkali hair ‘relaxing’ solution, and Rock takes us to a weave (hair extentions, kinda) factory in India.

The documentary also dives right into the many social implications of hair care. The film was inspired by Rock’s daughter asking him why she didn’t have “good hair”, and that question opens up a whole other can of relaxer. What does it mean to be wearing afro-textured hair, or to straighten it to look more like white/Asian hair? What is the importance of white and Asian multinationals controlling the African-American hair market? What does T-Pain have to say on the matter? (A lot, actually. He’s a smart fellow.)

Long story short: It’s a tightly paced interesting documentary with its share of amusing incidents, King Of Kong-like if you will. A perfect date documentary, unlike that erection killer The Cove.

GOOD HAIR
Directed by: Jeff Stilson
Part of the World Cinema Showcase

So, this is it. The final Salient column of the year. Well, I mean presumably there could be another Salient column, but not by me. I’m sorry, but I am not in charge or even capable of designing this magazine, there are reasons, strange and disturbing reasons why I am not the designer for Salient, and that lack of competency is one of them. So, I apologise profusely if this isn’t actually the last column in Salient this week. It’s just not my fault, people.

Over the course of the year, I keep getting told stuff by randoms who hope that I, in my position as a high-status Salient volunteer can pass on the real truths to the nation. Well, why not give them a go?

I’m a student journalist, after all:
Peter Jackson is a scientologist. At least that’s what Graham, this guy sitting on the bus next to me, said. He reckons that Jackson’s funding a big Scientology branch to be opened in the space where Dymocks once was. Tom Cruise’s recent hugging of Jackson adds more credence to this, he says. As someone who can not see why a famous director and famous actor could possibly have dealings with each other on a professional level I support this random drunken psycho who insists on telling me things. Apparently his brother has foetal alcohol poisoning. Graham’s brother, not Jackson’s. I’m not entirely sure Peter Jackson has any other family members, excluding those hobbit kids Bill and Kate, and Fran Walsh.

An anonymous political science and psychology student claimed that many students who have not encountered Victoria University Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh automatically associate the man with zombies. According to the legend, whenever it is even slightly foggy, and all you can hear is the sultry sound of a first year throwing up her 12% Woodstock premixes, Pat Walsh is (supposedly) there: waiting to grind his teeth into the skull of her delicious Taranakian flesh. I’m not sure if this statistic is true, but it sounds true, and that’s good enough for me. I must admit that I also held this notion until the first time I met the man. Now I consider him more like a tomb lich, what with his pale skin and long delicate fingers, probing and testing the air in front of him for the ichor of the student soul. It’s what sustains him; that and research funding.

I also heard that it’s likely that bunch of classes are going to be unofficially capped next year, so if you want to actually get into that interesting 100-level religious studies course, or flip your major from a daddy pleasing double degree in sociology/bio chemistry into a film/theatre combined major, you should apply for your classes as soon as possible. Stop reading this and apply now, there are way too many recession-hit adult students and annoying teenagers coming in for the university to cater for everybody. Conspiracy? Probably, unless it’s like actual policy.

Okay, so this ex-student politician that used to live around the corner kept telling me things like Jasmine Freemantle spends a lot of time in her office “alone” with “people.” Not even, bro; if she’s in her office with another person then she isn’t alone, as there is another person right next to her. She might be alone in her “office”, like when people talk about John Key being in the office of Prime Minister at all times, even when he’s eating a McFlurry and crying because his Irish wife thinks he’s getting pudgy (he’s not, by the way. He looks great.), but then she’s only existentially alone and everybody knows that existentialism as a philosophy just isn’t relevant to “the real world”, which is the world everybody but students live in; just ask John Key’s wife, Bronagh. I couldn’t as I don’t have access to her email. Lame, eh?

So, yeah, that’s the calibre of special information I was privy to as a Salienteer. God I love being a journalist.

Next year is Twenty Ten. It’s literally the future. Take advantage of it, see cool theatre, rock the Fringe Festival, laugh at the comedy fest and finish up your double degree in Classics and Film Studies. It’s not going to be useful, but it’ll be fun.

Good night everybody!
—Sando. thesando.com

Impro Melbourne Presents Mr. Fish And His Spooky Library Of The Improv Macabre

This hour-long show’s central conceit of Mr. Fish (Derek Flores), inviting you into his house for spooky tales was a great way to lead us through four scary improvised stories. Infused with the spookyness of a live cello, each story was told in a different manner, ranging from hand puppetry to a very naturalistic story about a man who journeys from Russia to meet his mother.

It was also genuienly fun to just watch such a coherant show being created in front of us. Flores’ companions Patti Stiles and Rama Nicholas, both from the venerable Impro Melbourne, were not perfectly in synch with each other and very competent at creating both laughter and chills. There were occasional hiccups, like a muddling of relationships in what became the Russian Mother story, but for the most part the show’s flow was quick, precise and didn’t have any splashback.

I am not an improvisational newbie, yet I only rarely encounter improv that isn’t being used to create something that is just middle-of-the-road family fun, which of course is exactly how I became interested in improvisation in the first place. So in no way am I saying that family chuckle time is a bad thing, but I was ecstatic to encounter such a fresh show. I watched my partner, who completely turned her nose up at Binge Culture’s Animal Hour, have her eyes opened to the possibility of “artsy theatre that can actually be good.” All in all, I felt both beauty and terror while watching this show, and that’s the definition of the sublime.

The Con Artists Present Bite Me: Fangprov

The Con Artists are one of New Zealand’s most respected and oldest troupes, and their Jane Austen-themed improvisational musical was a highlight for many people last year. So when they came down to present Fangprov, an improvised vampire themed musical, I was completely ready to be sucked in. Yes, it was very funny, but I wasn’t blown away by the show.

The problem wasn’t their improvisation, because the troupe worked together well and Penny Ashton’s characters especially were quite watchable. I just don’t understand why they decided to stage the production as a musical. None of the cast really had the singing chops to front a musical piece, and Robbie Ellis, who is quite a musical genius, had to sit there grinding out hook after musical hook that the cast rarely latched onto, so the actual numbers were thinly spread out.

I enjoyed the actual narrative of a small American town overrun by a family of vampires, and Stayci Taylor did a grand job of anchoring the tale with her hairdresser character. Though, the usually fabulous Clare Kelso was left out of the action for most of the show. However, as this was just how the show was improvised, that was just a minor disappointment, not a major problem for a piece of theatre.

So Fangprov was pretty good, just not amazing. The problem with improv is that while the story will change the format can largely stay the same, and they need to rethink the musical genre for that cast, as when they played to their strengths it was a bunch of family fun.

Thursday 8 October. Bats (The Scary Night).

The chief concept and magic of the Wishing Tree is this: As the audience enters the theatre, they are each asked to write a wish on a little tag and tie it, with red string, to a small tree. Eventually the tree is wreathed in these wishes, like a swan plant covered in butterfly pupae – heavy with potential beauty. Later the tree is bought to the stage, where the improvisers each select a wish, and use them to launch the night’s tales. After each story has reached a conclusion the improviser that had introduced that wish stands to one side and rips the tag into pieces- scattering it and the story into the air. It’s all very moving.

As a conceit the tree is a very enticing way to solicit audience suggestions instead of ask-fors, and the tree was an excellent visual device, standing on the stage as a performer in it’s own right: a surrogate for the audience’s usual interaction with improvisers.

Some wishes are simply fulfilled, like a woman who leaves her job to row the Greek isles. Others take “be careful what you wish for” and move to create serious pieces of drama. One instance of this was the rather frivolous wish “I wish he’d fuck like a rabbit” which led to a pathos filled story anchored by Nicholas and Derek Flores, about a man who almost destroys his relationship by constantly cheating on Nicholas.

It was refreshing to encounter a long form game that wasn’t a spin off of Del Close’s 1967 creation, The Harold, as unlike Harold based long form games, each story didn’t twin and twine with each other. Instead the scenes and stories were left to burst or simmer for as long as they needed, without heed to the energies of their sibling stories. The scattered nature of the stories also allowed the more unconventional narrativistic elements of straight story telling and the framing device of paper ripping room and performative status enough to control what could, in the hands of poorer performers, become a student theatre style mess.

The performers who took part in the Wishing Tree spent a couple of days with Nicholas workshopping in the format, so hopefully the Tree or forms based upon the Tree will spread through out New Zealand’s improv troupes sooner rather than later. Already Wellington Improv Troupe has announced that they will be performing their own season of Wishing Trees in December, so if this sounds of interest you must go and experience the show for yourself.

The Wishing Tree was part of the New Zealand Improv Festival 2009, presented on Friday 9th Of October at Bats Theatre.

-Nic Sando

The nuts and bolts of Christchurch improv troupe the Court Jesters show Off the Map are this: It was a long form piece based around a small New Zealand town (Friendly Springs) and the characters that lived in it. Story strands involving different characters comfortably interwove into a town shaking conclusion involving a flaccid clock being used to save a family from a giant cabbage.

What I really enjoyed about watching the Court Jesters at work, was how quickly they could snap between scenes. To transition, an improviser would literally run onto the stage, calling an end to a scene merely by his presence, the other improvisers would immediately vacate the stage unless they were grabbed by the new improviser.

I know this doesn’t sound like much of an innovation, but the conceits speed and cleanliness was at odds to the often muddied change overs that I see in most improvisation. A high stakes manoeuvre to be sure, I felt that the transition could only work because the troupe itself had such an implicit trust with each other that could only come from a large volume of quality play time together.

As for the actual interaction of the troupe, they were both very real and very amusing. While there were gags for gags sake, the world the Jesters formed was one of solid characters and relationships, who while inherently amusing (a fry cook/part time stripper who’s in love with a 75 year old man), surprisingly managed to touch me in my emotional special area. Part of this had to come from the precision that the Jesters assumed their characters. Javier Jarquin was especially effective at this with both a one note gay poet character who bloomed into an emotion fulcrum in a story about domestic abuse, and a clock tower worker who forces his father into happiness.

That’s right, the Court Jesters, managed to take domestic violence and work it into a funny story that didn’t mock the horror of that situation. This was a very successful show by a really tight troupe.

The Court Jesters Present Off The Map was part of the New Zealand Improv Festival 2009, presented on Friday 9th Of October at Bats Theatre.

The problem wasn’t their improvisation, because the troupe worked together well and Penny Ashton’s characters especially were quite watchable. I just don’t understand why they decided to stage the production as a musical. None of the cast really had the singing chops to front a musical piece, and Robbie Ellis, who is quite a musical genius, had to sit there grinding out hook after musical hook that the cast rarely latched onto, so the actual numbers were thinly spread out.

I enjoyed the actual narrative of a small American town over run by a family of vampires, and Stayci Taylor did a grand job of anchoring the tale with her hair dresser character. Though, the usually fabulous Clare Kelso was left out of the action for most of the show. However, as this was just how the show was improvised, that was just a minor disappointment, not a major problem for a piece of theatre.

So Fangprov was pretty good just not amazing, the problem with improv is though, that while the story will change the format can largely stay the same, and they need to rethink the musical genre for that cast as when they played to their strengths it was a bunch of family fun.

The Con Artists Present Bite Me: Fangprov was part of the New Zealaand Improv Festival 2009, presented on Thursday 8th Of October at Bats Theatre.

-Nic Sando

It was also genuinely fun to just watch such a coherent show being created in front of us. Flores’ companions Patti Stiles and Rama Nicholas, both from the venerable Impro Melbourne were in synch with each other and very competent at creating both laughter and chills. There were occasional hiccups, like a muddling of relationships in what became the Russian Mother story, but for the most part the shows’ flow was quick, precise and didn’t have any splash back.

I am not a improvisational newbie, yet it I only rarely encounter improv that isn’t being used to create something that is just middle of the road family fun. Of course that’s exactly how I became interested in improvisation in the first place, so in no way am I saying that family chuckle time is a bad thing, but I was rather pleased (aka ecstatic) to encounter such a fresh show. I watched my partner, who completely turned her nose up at Binge Culture’s Animal Hour have her eyes opened to the possibility of “artsy theatre that can actually be good.” All in all, I felt both beauty and terror while watching this show, and that’s the definition of the sublime.

Mr. Fish And His Spooky Library Of The Improv Macabre was part of the New Zealand Improv Festival 2009, presented on Thursday 8th Of October at Bats Theatre.

-Nic Sando

Edited for poor grammar by Sando @ 0011hrs 11/10/09

I’m sick of being some columnist with no respect from the ladies or the laddies or the ladles. So from now on I am a hard-nosed investigative journalist, investigating stuff, okay? Okay, good. Here goes.

SHOWER GATE

New Zealand’s John Key visited New York city last week. As you may or may not be aware his hotel had it [insert possessive apostrophe here] s water cut off, possibly because of refusing to pay the water bill. Unable to shower because of the sad state of his New York hotel, Mr Key had to walk, on foot, disguised as a regular bloke, in jeans and a t-shirt, to the Australian Embassy. While there he begged access to the shower. Sources report that it was hot, and at 142 degrees Fahrenheit AKA 61°C, they would be accurate. As a newspaper journalist man it would be improper to speculate upon what the most powerful political entity of New Zealand did in his shower. However, officials reported that it was pretty hot also—and rather quick. Which was a good thing, as many more people, including the Foreign Minister of New Zealand Murray McCully, were awaiting use of said shower. While Mr McCully’s shower wasn’t as well received, though it was noted that even he is not as attractive as Mr Key, he has very expressive eyebrows, and “What a voice! Am I right ladies‽” Yes.

Kiwi political analysts investigating Shower Gate believe it stepped up the relationship of New Zealand/Australia, as Mr Key was invited to keep a disposable head for the Australian Primeministorial mechanical toothbrush. Provided it was the blue one—Kevin likes the pink ones. Looking further afield, it was observed that noted communist Joseph Stalin did not bathe. So, by showering Mr Key sent a definite message of contempt towards the remaining communist countries like Cuba and supposedly China. Also, he smells refreshingly of Head & Shoulders, and Rexona for men. Yummy.

LOCAL MAN UNIMPRESSED

“I don’t care what they said at the door, those statues are plaster of paris. You can tell, because of the grainy whiteness.” Shane Holland should know because his mate Dave is a plasterer. Dave mainly does that 3-dimensional bird shit spackling effect you see on weather board houses in the burbs.

Holland intentionally missed the Terracotta Warriors exhibition—housed in Wellington last Summer—as he considered it unlikely at best the Chinese government would let the real terracotta warriors out of the country “because that shit’s fragile”. Holland decided to travel to China so as to see the other ones.

“You know what mate? There were a whole bunch of ‘em there.

“You know, I thought to myself, if I were to wander down Terracotta Street or whatever it’s called, there’ll be a billion copies of those statues, all better looking than the dudes at the Saint James. I mean, the proportions are all totally fucked,” he said.

Holland is right.

There are many replica souvenir stands surrounding China’s greatest archeological site—the Tomb of the First Qin Emperor, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After confronting the English language tour personnel at the tomb he declared: “If they ain’t plaster then they look like they’re made out of fucking mud.”

As of today the Chinese are still reluctant to refund his admission fee to the site.

See, two stories down. I’m this close to being Judy Bailey. And I want to be her. She has great bone structure. Such great, great bone structure. One time I met her, it was awesome. (JOURNALISM FOR THE WIN)

A couple of weeks back my lover Julian and I ordered a free sample pack of Eat Me’s (eatme.net.nz) 100% Whey and 100% Isolate protein powder. You mix the powder with water or milk to create a protein shake and then drink it. We went about trialing these products. This a story about us doing that thing.

PRO TEENS

As a nerd and gym culture novice, I knew very little about the world of protein supplements, but was ever so eager to approach the subject with all the cynicism and university database access that I could muster.

Protein powders are nutritional supplements which provide a large amount of protein with a small amount of carbohydrates and fat. Often including amino acids as well, they are consumed or “eaten” before and after a work out. Via the use of these powders as well as their regular well balanced diet a body builder/gym rat/exercise fanatic gives their body more access to the base chemicals used to bulk up with muscle. The idea is that your body needs to be digesting protein during and right after exercise for speedy and efficient muscle repair. To lay some street science down on your ass, your muscles are made of protein so you need to eat protein.

The problem is that there is no scientific reason to believe that you need to eat more than an average amount of protein to see muscle building gains, and a typical meat-eating student will get that amount through the course of an average day. To be honest, the average person may consume well over the amount needed. There is a lot of peer testimony and large chunks of gym culture built up around the consumption of extra protein however, and as an open-minded man I decided to humour Julian the obsessive gym rat.

Comparing EatMe’s whey protein and protein isolate formulas to other ones commonly found at the supermarket and sports stores, I noticed that EatMe’s product is not only quite cheap comparatively, but is also one of the more protein-filled protein supplements on the market, with their 100% whey being about 80% protein. Using my Sando sense, I realised that protein packedness is the most important thing when it comes to these supplements, and so think that’s a good thing.

THE TESTS–MUSCLE BUILDING

Objectively, I knew that there would be no noticeable muscle gain from just a week of exercising and eating the free samples, because the time frame was too short. But emotionally speaking, and I am an emotionally competent person, I should feel myself buffing up. That’s ‘feel’ as in ‘emotionally sense’, not ‘feel’ as in the tactile sensation. This is confusing as being more toned, denser and less gelatinous would be things that you should be able to touch. Mang, emotional intelligence is a complex beast.

So before we started up, my muscle mass was calculated as a turgid yet inquisitive level on the old emotional odometer, but by the time I had finished my week of shakes and free weights, I had increased to a quiet yet assured optimism. Thanks Emotional Intelligence, you’re a valid avenue of inquiry after all; my dad was so wrong!

TASTE TEST

For the taste test itself, we would just compare the 100% whey powder, as I misplaced my sachets of isolate. (The current theory on their whereabouts is that my flatmate’s polydactyl cat has stolen them for use in a dirty bomb.)

I decided to let Julian consume his any way he wanted, while I would take a little ice and water with my protein, blending with my mixing wand to create a smoothy. From past experience, these supplement shakes have a tendency to clump up, so the mechanical blend ensured a fresh thick and creamy texture that wouldn’t mess with the flavour too much.

Taste Test of EatMe’s 100% Whey product:

Cheeky Chocolate Whey

JULIAN: The chocolate one was gross. Maybe it was off? Or something, I hope it was off.
NIC: Actually, this does have a kind of rank slickness to it… it tastes like really, really, old Easter chocolate.

Voracious Vanilla

JULIAN: The vanilla one was fine, eerily much like Up and Go in fact.
NIC: It’s really creamy, which is surprising for something that is only remotely milk. It doesn’t just taste like vanilla essence and sugar either.

Sexy Strawberry

JULIAN: I still taste the chocolate one man. It’s inside me, growing like my baby. He wipes his tongue with a dish towel.
NIC: Wow, this is actually better than most strawberry milkshakes I’ve tried. Take that, New Zealand’s dairies!

HERE’S WHERE I SUM UP MOST OF EVERYTHING

I can’t justify a belief in the claims that gym culture and the supplements industry make about needing extra protein, which is sad because I enjoyed the EatMe 100% whey range. So much so, that I am considering buying some of their vanilla or strawberry protein powder to use as a basis for a low calorie shake. While protein may not be super amazing, it’s still less damaging than a Wendy’s super shake… Unless the link between excessive protein consumption and kidney failure is proven. Which it isn’t!
The EatMe people say that they have a student discount, so if you, like Julian, are a true believer, give it a go—the stuff works out quite a lot cheaper than many ‘supermarket brands’ and excluding the chocolate, actually tastes quite nice.

Through out my university life I have furiously masterba… Wait, no! I promised a Salient column that wasn’t about some sort of psychological problem stemming from some sort of attraction to my step-sister Jay. Oh god, that early childhood educator is just so hot! My cousin who was raised kind of like my brother dates my other step sister, so it’s okay to harbour these secret fee… NO! NO! NO! Umm. Anyways, Throughout my university life, I have furiously promised myself that one day, before I left varsity I would manage somehow to either scrimp and save or just blow heaps of people for long enough to be able to afford a pair of Doc Martens. I fucking love those shoes.

SOME AWKWARD CRUSHES I HAVE HAD

• The Sun Maid Raisin Packet Lady
• The Ultimate Warrior
• The teacher who had an affair with my primary school principal
• Jasmine Freemantle
• Shahir, my very first film tutor

Doc Martens, like most good things, came from a Nazi. It’s okay though, the Nazi in question wasn’t a Jew killer or even a Pole killer, though he may have hated us queers. You see, Doctor Märtens was a really terrible skier, so while his country was at war, he was on the slopes, having himself a great time. Then he died. Well, he didn’t ‘die’ die, but he fell over and hurt his foot, and then he had the gall to be too prissy to wear regular German Infantry boots with his sore leg hand.

Obviously, he didn’t realise the Germans had invented methadone in the years before his fall, or he wouldn’t have created his distinctive soles that are just awash with air-cushioning comfort. So, thank you Doctor Märtens for being to medically incompetent. Oh, or pethidine could have worked too, you know, hey, give it to women in labour, the Nazis invented that too. Pethidine, not procreation.

SOME OTHER AWESOME SHIT NAZI GERMANY CAME UP WITH

• Manned rocket flight
• Fanta
• Rotary engine
• Magnetic tape
• Romantic love
• Methamphetamine

So, finally I managed to get my sausage-like fingers wrapped around a pair—slowly choking the life out of them. As soon as they were broken in my corpulent feet would be kings strutting the courts, saying “Hey, fuck you peasants. Go mill some wheat.” My Docs, well, they really are a beautiful mash up between business shoes and the boots I fantasised about from age 18. Glorious in shining black leather they be. Argh. I look like I could be a Proletarian minister awkwardly trying to fit in with the cool teens at his youth group. Or, like a skinhead who has realised that if he doesn’t get an office job soon he’s one facial tattoo away from being a criminal offence in Whanganui.
These magnificent shoes cost enough that I can’t afford to buy another pair any time soon, and are too impractical for me to wear anywhere or to anything. I make the best purchasing decisions with my money.

BOOKS ABOUT WHALES

• Moby Richard
• Dear Fatty
• Whales and Dolphins of the World
• Leviathan
• Wales (Lonely Planet Country Guide)

The woman who sold my Dr Martens to me said I should be careful not to throw up on them, as while acid won’t damage my kick-ass soles, they will seriously fuck the buff on my polish. As her hollow eyes sent me the message that she knew this from a painful personal experience, I vowed to myself to give up my bulimic habits, at least while fully dressed. Oh god, why do I binge? Oh Shahir! I miss you more than Britain misses the Dr Martens manufacturing plant that has been moved to China.

THE END

I just realised the other day that justice isn’t actually decided by the cosmos, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some magic man. I’ve known for years that there really isn’t anything in our heads that we didn’t put there ourselves, but I never really wanted to accept that justice was as man-made as the one-eyed Santa Bear that I used to carry around as a snuggling device. He was cuddle-filled and fuzzy. The only justice that we are able to access comes from what we as a social group have decided we can afford to mete out. And that’s the best we can hope for without taking matters into our own hands. I, like many of you, watch those stories of the little guys managing to tough it out and make a difference against the government or big business. So, I decided to be like the people of Minamata, Kumamoto, who suffered from large-scale mercury poisoning caused by big business and fight the power.

Every single pair of pants that I have bought from Farmers has died really quickly after being subjected to what I like to call “wearing.” I am now quite adept at using my clumsy sewing skills to find a way to keep wearing them. Crotch seams, new buttons, that thing where you kinda sorta repair zipper… You name it, I’ve got a pair of pants where I’ve botched the job and now use safety pins to keep myself from spewing out the sides like a beige wave of gelatine. Thanks to the poor quality goods that Farmers keeps supplying me, I decided this year to boycott the only chain store whose clothing I could afford. Well, I suppose I could head out to K-mart, but really, that’s in Porirua, and Porirua isn’t a place for arrogant hipsters, no matter how plus-sized they be.

So, like many a lone warrior, fighting evil in the night I got cold, but I staved off the violent winds and shocking rains. I managed to get through a couple of months before my birthday hit and beloved family members gave me Farmers vouchers. These free clothing vouchers and the fact that it was desperately cold and damp caused me to re-evaluate my one-man protest of Farmers. I’d given it my all for seven harrowing months, and gallingly the chain was still in business. Even more gallingly, my partner had accepted that I had made the decision to let my clothes rot into me. Further and fully engorged gallment came from the fact that no one even comprehended my epic struggle against big business… “Dude, just take the receipt in and get a replacement pair of pants,” was the comment du jour, when mentioning my pet hate. Well, Alexander Rodgers of Kelburn, maybe I don’t like keeping receipts against the chance of something going awry with my purchases. Ever think about that?

Fuck no, of course you didn’t.

Individual people can not change the world. No one man truly make sa difference. Well, some individual people can, because they have leverage with institutions like mega corporations, governments and creepy religious orders. But they are few and far between. Did you know about Farmers boycott ’09? No, because I am not the Pope. Ultimately I gave up my principles and was rewarded for doing so, and if it is convenient for you to do so you should too. There ain’t no justice.

I like making myself sad, it helps me prove to myself that I can still feel. A girl taught me about that and the pleasant feelings of pain when I was in high school. She was a lovely person, who is gone now. Well, she’s in America with her girlfriend and a billion piercings, but I still think of her fondly.

One of the ways I found of making myself sad recently was simply logging into trademe.co.nz and searching for the free animals. There are just hundreds of them, just staring out at you with these big brown eyes. Notice how many of them are from people who are desperate to find a home for their cat or dog, that they loved, so that they can move over seas, or what have you. I noticed recently that one dog who was on trademe.co.nz months ago, resurfaced there again, same hungry eyes, same black face, but now under the care of an animal shelter. The subtext to these photos was that if Madeline (three years old Labrador X) wasn’t saved by someone soon, she’d be put down. After all, the RSPCA doesn’t have room for infinite pets, and they have to, as disturbingly as it sounds, make room for the new stock. I’d like to blame the pet owners for not planning ahead for their dog, or the SPCA for having such a restrictive criteria with regards to what people they will let house a dog, but that would be allocating blame without knowing the full story. The only thing I know is that poor Madeline (cat and child friendly), if only she had chosen to be cuter for longer (she likes walks!) she wouldn’t be in this horrible conundrum. Madeline (a quiet temperament, she comes with three leads and a doggie blanket!) she should have known better than to be the pet of somebody who would one day be put into a situation where they were unable to care for her. There ain’t no justice.

New Zealand, much like its obese and sweaty sister nation Australia, is somewhat hard to get to. However, Australia somehow does manage to get much “performative action”. Indeed, bands from all over the globe drop down for a litle frisky fun time with Oz. As while she is a little broad in the beam and generally unappealing, she’s a really generous lover who will go to the erotic extremes of audience pleasurability that is simply unheard of in the northern hemisphere. Contrastingly, we are the lisping and slightly hairy sister with the thyroid problem who awkwardly fondles herself behind the couch while Oz has herself a time. Occasionally performers will notice us and give us a pity fuck in the fleshy mound that is Wellington, though more often it is just the oral satisfaction given by Auckland. That’s why I went up to Auckland—to watch the Cirque Du Solei molest the oral orifice found north of the Bombay Hills. My defacto partner or “Def-po” and the Def-Po in-laws came up too, and spent unbearable hours sitting next to me as I wrangled my molestatible metaphorics… and played Pokémon Platinum. It was a long train journey.

So, the Cirque Du Solei performance that I traveled toward is called Dralion. It’s about a half-dragon half-lion and the four-way battle between the elemental nations of Earth to control its powerful bhudda nature. Or something, look, it was big flashy and had a ballet done on light bulbs, it could have been about a laboradoodle that farted the cure for cancer and I’d still have been willing to watch it a second or third time. The circus has been on tour for eleven years, so it was fairly obvious that we were low on their list of places to visit. No matter says I, as I greatly enjoyed the performances, and even if they were just phoning it in (which was doubtful, Kiwi audiences are quite hard to generate feedback—the life blood of performance—from), eleven years of the same schtick makes for a tight show. Just ask Anthony Keidis of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers ‘Hayo; listen what I sayo’. Indeed Tony, indeed. So, while I was wrapped in the Cirque’s French Canadian embrace the female Def-Po in law was weeping her way through the performance. I think she was scared by the the female lead vocalist who kept screeching down from the rafters like some sort of sentient cobweb, ready to tangle you in the threads of long murdered spiders and then mind meld with you or some such.

Now I did other things in the City of Sails too: Like one day I went and watched tourists make commerative pennies of the Sky tower for $2 a pop. Now, I don’t know about you, but for two dollars I’d expect like twenty pennies, right? Man, the Sky Tower is an unfathomable eyesore, isn’t it? Well, not so much from a distance, when it looks like a giant strap-on with glistening neon veins, just standing ready to peg the sky. (Because the sky is a dude in Maori mythology?) It’s the inside that pisses me off, as it’s barren concrete and the windows to look outside of the damn thing are dingy and dirty. What’s the point of being high up in the tourist trappingist place in New Zealand when all you can see is some greasy smear that’s been there so long that it’s accumulated its own layer of greasy detritus? Thankfully the Sky Tower’s revolving restauraunt was well maintained and had beautiful views. My partner only threw up thrice from rotational motion sickness, which worked out to be once a course, but I wouldn’t blame the food. That was top notch fine dining. The chips were just excellent.

To me, going to Auckland wasn’t just about people watching—do not get me wrong, sister—first and foremost it was about watching those wonderous freaks manipulate their bodies in the circus, but then it was about finding ways to piss around with animals. So, Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter and Undersea World, the Auckland Zoo, and butterfly house-cum-petting zoo-cum-lizard hutch Butterfly Creek were all must sees. Did you know that Kelly Tarlton’s does stingray encounters? Essentially you wade out and jam chunks of fish into the gaping maws of couch-sized female stingrays. Tarlton’s doesn’t keep males as the aquarium is sexist. Oh and male stingrays have razor sharp vampiric fangs, but it’s mainly the sexism. At Auckland Zoo, I managed to convince a parrot to land on my finger by finding one of the food cups the keepers had lazily left lying around and letting it keep eating like a champion. The apathetic animal handling of New Zealand’s greatest zoo worked well for me there, yes it did. Now Butterfly Creek claims that it is “Australasia’s Premiere Butterfly House”, but you know, the butterfly area was adequate at best. The best bit was the live aligator fondling. You see, there were these tiny alligators that they are growing for some sort of bizarre petting ritual, but wow, fondling those alien intellects made me forget I was subjugating an intelligent undomesticated species to an unnatural life outside its original environment, and instead let me experience a oneway bonding experience with El Legarto. It was really special. Oh also, Butterfly Creek’s tame goose attacked the female Def-po in-law and gave her a huge bleeding welt. That’ll teach her for thinking that geese would like food pellets. Who did she think she was? Animal Ghandi?

I guess what I am trying to say is this: Look, just fuck you Tony Keidus. Mr Bungle was a far superior band to your Chilli Peppers and you effectively ended them like Queen Latifa effectively ends cupcakes. I don’t know why I find her so attractive. Wait, fat, dark-skinned women… Rosita Vae… West Auckland… Auckland. Auckland is a city that was birthed by successive booms in land speculation resulting in a town the size of London for no legitimate reason. This aparantly makes it the best place in New Zealand, so I must strongly suggest moving there for keeps. Obviously, if I could I would, but umm… I kind of thought it was a bit shit?

THE POSITIVE INFOBOX

5 things that were neat in Auckland

1. Spookers – it’s a house haunted by awesome.
2. The Classic – it’s the home of comedy in New Zealand
3. Waitakere – the city all of New Zealand should aspire to be like
4. Cheap buses, 50c for a trip. Seriously, Tranzmetro is gouging us people.
5. A healthy pan asian subculture that gave me some of the best Korean, Chinese and Japanese food that I have had in this country. Also, cute fashionable asian students were everywhere. God I love bangs on a young man.

I went down to Eastside last week, and you know what I saw? An empty television sitting in front of a Kurt Cobain poster. It looked strangely familiar, and then I noticed the NYC-style graffiti that was scrawled upon its front, spelling out my name. N.I.C. I had a shrinking feeling down there and realised that yes, this was my television.

This is the history of that television set.

Bought for a God fearing family sometime in the early nineteen eighties, the mighty analogue television bounced around Kapiti before ending in the hands of my friends Karl and Haydin, who gutted the thing at the insistence of my youth pastor so that we could place an evangelical talking head/goth inside of it to narrate an awful bible/Alice and Wonderland/suburban drug culture Christian agitprop play that I had written. I won’t lie to you, it was a dire situation that took a dive towards the even more banal when the stage show, with stirring covers of Kiwi Christian rapcore group Wash, was co-opted by a capri-wearing preacher from Australia who started laying his hands on the crowd gathered in the car park. He kept claiming that he was a cool guy as his sweaty paws caused his devoted followers to quake and tremble inside their skins. I remember thinking of the lyrics to Wash’s song ‘What is your drug’ and realising that this sort of crap was the drug of evangelical Christians, and I helped in it. I stole into the drinks cabinet that my father had left behind when he fled the domestic situation at home and poured myself a stiff Pimm’s cup. This and being kind of gay were starting spell out a reason why I needed to flee the church.

The next day I snuck into the carpark of the tavern-cum-youth-centre-slash-religious-compound, and took the television set in mothers car. It then spent a half life at my house, being used as a convenient place to store my fire-breathing equipment when I wasn’t, you know, breathing fire.

Later I started to perform on the streets and would kneel, with a mask on, inside the box and make up the news to passers-by. As I was a first year theatre student I, like many before me, believed that I was shit hot. It was completely surprising to me when I was repeatedly pelted with Burger King, kebabs, and in one horrible instance, a light bulb filled with substance. The television survived this horror—my desire to perform street theatre did not. This was a good thing as with very few exceptions street theatre at Manners Mall is just, as Uther Dean would say, “not that good, I’m glad they are trying what they think is new, and maybe they will tap into a performative vein that should be mined, but usually they squander their precious blood gold.” For this brief while the television was mounted on two skateboards, and I would trudge it around the central city, then I realised Wellington had hills and I was, as Minister of Ethnic and Women’s affairs Pansy Wong could possibly say, “showing the signs of an obesity problem.” God, she is such a potential downer.

So anyways, this television got hauled around a bit and eventually ended up at the VUW theatre department where it appeared in at least two multi media art pieces in the space of six months. Soon fearing the wrath of the incredibly tall and manly Hawaiian theatre technician, I borrowed my friend and his girlfriend’s brand new BMW and tried to sandwich it into the car. It snagged on the leather, and in the space of a two second shove, I caused multiple thousands of dollars worth of damage to the interior. Consequently I was told to shove off and struggled carrying the rather delicate television around Victoria. Fearing the worst, I went to the only place on campus that would put up with my shit. The Salient offices. My television, abandoned by me in the Salient office outstayed three editors and more boyfriends than you’d ever have sister *snap snap snap*, finding use as a television-themed waste paper basket. But only now do I realise that it lives at the Mount Street Bar and Grill.

I just went down to confront them, beg the owner to love my box like I did, but the bar was closed and I’m easily intimidated, so didn’t want to talk to the people who were obviously cleaning up inside. So, for now, my precious television set slash puppet theatre slash waste paper basket, you rest safe in the Mount Street. Don’t let that poster of that poser Cobain give you any bad ideas. Unlike me, you still believe in Jesus.

1. Petrol
2. Pet troll
3. Pineapple
4. Shampoo
5. Napalm in the morning

Top Five Reasons You’re Pregnant

1. Condoms are for pussies.
2. You can’t get the ECP in Palmy
3. That special night with Ken Orr
4. Let’s see him leave now
5. Apathy

Top Five People Who Displayed Displeasure With Salient Last Week

1. Paul Henry
2. Tasmin Dismantle
3. The university
4. 90% of the population
5. Ally’s mum

Top Five Things That Are Around Us Right Now

1. Footy
2. Footy
3. Footy
4. FOOTY
5. FOOOOOOOOOOOOOTY

Top Five Things Wrong With Previous Top Five

1. Painfully self-referencial
2. No one cares about footy
3. It’s a transperant and lazy space filler
4. Not nearly as funny as it should be
5. Footy

Top Five Things About Your Dad

1. He’s always right
2. He’s always wrong
3. He’s always thong
4. He’s always fucking the mad shit up
5. He’s always good in the sack

Top Five Schmears

1. Albert Schmear
2. PAP
3. Lisa’s Jalepeno and Lime Hummus
4. Schmear Jet
5. Cream Cheese

Top Five Food Substitutes

1. Chocolax—the laxative-flavoured fitness shake
2. Polystyrene
3. Tyra’s once-toned arms
4. Despair
5. Hamburger Lego

Top Five Reasons We Should Pay Politicians to live in their own houses

1. Because they’re worth it
2. We don’t want them to live on the street, do we?
3. To get them out of sight
4. Bill English. We know where you live.
5. It’s a Duncan Garner-based conspiracy to make more news

Top Five Twitter Feeds

1. @stephenfry (obviously)
2. @common_squirrel
3. @goku_karori_28
4. @swinefluremedy_
5. @Nude_UK_Girls

Top Five Ways to Ruin a Film

1. Cast Shia LaBeouf
2. Less dialogue, more pebbles
3. Genital mutilation
4. Not cast Harvey Keitel
5. Have Uther Dean review It

Top Five Ways to Improve Salient

1. Read it
2. Write it
3. More footy
4. Less footy
5. Genital Mutilation

Top Five Ways of Getting Your Shoes to Tie Themselves

1. Glue
2. The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique
3. Bribery
4. Extortion
5. Emotional blackmail

Top Five Injokes

1. “It’s on the barge!”
2. “There’ll be free beer tomorrow!”
3. “Lack What-a-ka?!”
4. “The monorail to where?!”
5. “Too slippy for some dogs!”

Top Five Things I, Uther Charles Allen Dean, Would Be Doing Rather Than Writing This Top Five

1. Watching the new Torchwood
2. Having a really good wank
3. Tvtropes.org—it’s like crack mixed with heroin mixed with love.
4. Colour coding my focus sheet
5. You

Top Five Reasons to Make Love To a Walrus

1. Their saxophony is better than Bill’s
2. Where are you going to get an aardvark this time of year?
3. Because, counting the Egg Men, it’s a gang bang
4. The reassuring aroma of fish
5. Next best thing to Mark Sainsbury

Hey guys if you aren’t high as a kite on the latest designer ‘it’s-not-illegal-but-will-be-soon’ style date rape capable party pill you will know that we live in New Zealand. Now according to the hate filled ideographic system ‘Google Maps’ we are an archipelago—quite far a way from any other country of cultural worth. It is quite difficult for us if we want to access new films, television shows or music in a timely fashion, as we “take a while to deliver to.” It is also hard to get new ideas or communications from outside our small flesh bubble of peers, because there is only so much a tiny flesh lump cluster can create together in both an economic sense and a cultural one. The Tyranny of Distance is what I’m on about boys and girls—we are far away from the good things and can’t do anything about it. It’s distance that keeps us from having the latest fashion, information and technology that Europe and the United States have access to. Well, kind of.

When we were unreachable by anything but physical means—for example, a sailing ship—New Zealand really did have a problem when it came to advancing. A certain indigenous people of our fine country had a saying which roughly translated into “knowledge from the sea, power from the land”. I guess the land gave them tūrangawaewae—a place to stand indeed. Any who, when news papers turned up in Auckland or Wellington, they were often months out of date and incredibly precious. They’d be passed around the community or given to a printer who would take some of the articles and use them for their own news papers. The information which anchored these early European settlers to their homeland was scarce and precious.

Hold on I just got tweeted. It seems that Uther Dean secretly dances, I simply must remind myself to learn to dance better than him and in public.

Now because you are a person who lives in 2009, I do not need to explain where this is going. Information is easy to get, which is good because New Zealand’s news media is all to often a pathetic place to get information. The stories it covers are either banal or pathetically dated and it’s always a surprise to see what stories you’re actually going to get revealed to you. Dispassionately sitting with my RSS news feed and watching Paul Henry on Breakfast I’ve had to start viewing the New Zealand process of information release as a sick puppy: you never know what bits of crayons, toy soldiers, other dogs poop, etc, that it’s going to vomit on the floor. And when it does you’re always too intrigued at first to pull away and let your mum clean up its mess. Eventually when you’re done, you go stare at the next door neighbours cat or “google news” and wonder what it’d be like not to have a diseased wretch as a companion animal.

The enigmatic creature that is RarahSobson has just tweeted @uther “Is it tap?” His reply “It’s a secret.” Fuck, I do not want to have to glue bottle caps onto my brand new etnies to beat that doppelganger at his own tap dancing game. I’m not very graceful you know.

There are many reasons for this news lag: the news has to be paid for, and the story has to be something that the editors are sure will be of interest to the public, which a strong reason why we have a glut of sporting stories in our limited television news space. I use news as an example, because by default it is something that should be, you know, “new.” When it comes to other forms of entertainment I have been schooled to be more accepting of its lackful and lagging nature. I knew there were insightful and biting episodes of South Park which dealt with hot topics that satirically ravaged the American landscape. Because it’s not just the wait for the information that keeps us in the distance, it’s also the corrosive abilities of the gate keepers of New Zealand and overseas that choose what we can access. These people can also hold back a television series for months or years. When you receive it the world has moved on and you have a rusty thing that may have been a swing set or situation comedy.

Now I get to my point, I fucking swear it. I am from the internet—I named my (rather shakey) Comedy Festival show after it;  I spend my time communicating with people from all over the world through this medium more often than I talk to my flat mate Wyatt (remember him? He stole my birthday,) and this waiting around for seeing things is problematic. People see things and I can choose to have this entertainment be completely spoilt and vicariously live through my peers. I can choose to remove and segregate myself from the community effectively silencing myself and removing my peer interactions, or I can pirate this media which will allow me to be on the same footing as others in my community—but has the side effect turning me into a criminal. It is impossible to function as a full peer in a cybercommunity without accessing the topical information.

This problem is an aggravated version of the old one that all Australasian nerds faced—J. Tulloch’s interesting screed on the Australian Doctor Who fandom “We’re Only a Speck in the Ocean’: The Fans as Powerless Elite,” mentioned Australian fans feelings of inadequacy and frustration that they were were unable to contribute to their fandom in a meaningful way, let alone actually see the show in the quality and regularity that their British peers could face.

Okay I’m practicing my soft shoe shuffle, lets see Uther beat my bojangles now.

According to a former president of The Victoria Science Fiction Club—which had been running ten years, before the advent of high speed internet—a member of the club would pay an American to VCR television and mail it to Wellington so they could access this sweet sweet media. I understand premium membership in the club during those years was set at around $100 because of the eye gouging prices charged to them for access to what was free to air (or at least basic cable) for him. The poor man must have lost his wife, house and kids when the first 256k modem hit our shores. Of course,the modern Sci-Fi club is as legitimately run as the Christian Union, Christian Club, Student Christian Movement, Adventist Student Association of NZ, or the Young Nationals. Today the club legally purchases media when possible and according to my research, even received money from VUWSA for that very purpose. Kia Ora legitimate nerd social club, kia ora.

But this weeks column really isn’t about choosing to go legitimate or pointing out information is only scarce because we let it be scarce. In New Zealand have to actively choose how to access information every time we try to kill the Tyrannosaurus of Distance. I feel it’s something that we don’t really talk about enough, and right now we are trying to decide how to rewrite the copyright law. There is an almost certain chance a bunch of people will find themselves removed from the digital arena very soon because they tried to stay in it without permission, prisoners on this fucking island once more. Serves them right?

Heidi and Rose are two girls­—no, two young women! And they are a very capable double team—well quadruple team, with their supporting fellows, but what ev’s. According to Rose Matafeo’s Twitter, their show on Thursday was “the worst show of my life” which blows, because first of all, it was my birthday that night, and secondly it was actually rather enjoyable. It seemed they were struggling for energy in the middle of their show, and sure the room was small, and some of the bits that they were presenting were encountered by myself in sitcoms during the ninteen ninties, but threaded through that were neat little things including metatextual infighting, which is something that is uncool that they made rather pallatable. The team that they had assembled managed to lump together the genres of musical comedy, stilted nerd delivery and double team antics, and it worked well, almost like good devised theatre… a little everywhere, but with a likable core. So, I mostly liked it, and would really like to see more of them down here. Though considering how loved the two are in Auckland, they might decide not to bother. Uncool potential future Rose and Heidi, uncool.

MICRO REVIEW
The night was a double header, as Rhys Mathewson was also there. If you don’t know of him, he’s an 18-year-old white kid with a giant afro—no, forehead, and some of the sharpest comedy I’ve seen a teen produce. The show’s main problem was that it was part of a double billing for 15 dollars, so it’s entire fucking premise was negated. However his stories were somewhat passionate, amusing and mildy rambly. I’m running out of space, but he was a kicking stand up, and though the show wandered a bit, next time you see him he’ll be just a stand up, you will do well to see him. as soon as possible, he won’t age prettily, though will still probably be quite amusing.

Heidi and Rose’s Guide to the Uncool, and Rhys Mathewson’s Best $18 You’ll Ever Spend.
July 9th @ Fringe Bar.

I don’t see my uncle very often—part of the reason is that he lives in Whanganui, another part of it is that he is a bit mad. Literally, it’s a family matter, so I will give you my thanks to not pry. Over the course of my life he has given me presents, ‘celebratory gifts’ if you will, to celebrate certain occasions of celebration. Birthdays and Christmases are two such events. Wow, this would have been much easier if I’d have simply said “My uncle gives me birthday and Christmas presents,” wouldn’t it?

My uncle gives me birthday and Christmas presents. This piece is kind of about that. My earliest memory of him was from a winter holiday (so this story is about a birthday, as Christmas is a summertime occupation), at my grandparents’ farm in Wanganui; he was home from studying at Massey for the holidays, and I guess rather bored. He took me out on his farm bike, it was red so therefore it went fast. We tried to rock up to the top of the really steep paddock, but didn’t quite make it, and the bike, he and I rolled the fuck down that slope in a big cluster of ‘not understanding physicsyness’. He told me not to tell my mum, but of course I thought that it was totally awesome, and so stupidly bragged about it to her. She was not pleased that her preschooler had almost been flattened by a dirtbike tyre. I was not pleased that I was not allowed to ride on the bike anymore, my uncle was not pleased that he had burnt himself on the exhaust protecting his sister’s womb goblin and still got bitched out about it. My dad didn’t give a fuck.

I just realised that this sort of story coming from me means that you the reader at home is probably scared that this is going to be a bittersweet story of being molested by a mentallyill relative. Well, it isn’t, it’s a happy story. I didn’t even get molested by any adult until I was well past the age of consent. Screw you Kenakena Primary School.

Anyways, it was my birthday in like a day and I was more excited than comprehension, even the thought about the next day released a wave of crushing anxiety about what would happen, followed by an up swell of anticipation, and followed by a giddy rush of endorphins about how the very next day was my special day. That night my uncle showed me his weird olden day telephone, it was shaped like a box and had a speaking turret. I wasn’t allowed to touch it personally, because, well, I don’t know, I think I may have been one of those disgusting little kids who are always kind of sticky; maybe it was because he was fucking with me; maybe it’s because it was an antique, look I don’t know, I was almost four and a total dumbass to boot. The point is, I realised that it had a circle like a clock, and I thought if I could just turn that bastard around I could have my birthday now. Later that night after watching an absorbing commercial about a dog trying to find his way back home, I snuck into my uncle’s room, and using my newfound ability to sneak, I used his chair to climb upon the dresser, to be able to turn the handle on the birthday making telephone from the past. I slipped off and cracked my knee on the ancient wooden floor, thinking that my knee was probably broken for ever I ran (see, dumbass) and hid in the bathroom, and played around with my granddad’s electric razor and foul smelling toothpaste. Toothpaste isn’t very useful as shaving cream, and a now broken electric razor won’t shave your tongue for you. Another of my uncles knocked on the door and told me that he’d turn me into turnip stew if I didn’t get out of the bathroom. So, I did and went back to the sleep out where I was sleeping. There were posters promoting the 1981 Springbok tour in the room, though I didn’t know the politics behind it and just thought that the old All Black uniforms looked warm. I fell asleep.

The next day was what we in the industry call “my birthday” and I have three salient memories of that day. The first is that we had hot stewed rhubarb on weetbix and cornflakes for breakfast. I remember looking at the sweet-yet-sour red mess and wondering if that was what insides looked like. This caused me to pretend to be a dinosaur eating dinosaur guts, so my breakfast was both delicious and fun. The second is that as it was a Sunday we were having a roast for lunch, and for desert we had a delicious Garfield ice cream cake for my birthday cake. I’d blown out the candles and it was all going well until my granddad jumped up and ran outside. The chimney had caught on fire, and the roof was heading that way too. My uncle jumped up onto it and started beating out the flame with an old potato sack. He was soon joined by nearly every male relative up on the roof, who dumped wet sacks on the glowing chimney. When we came inside my cake had melted, and someone (mother? Nana? Aunty Joey?!) had put it aside to throw out. I took a spoon to it, and celebrated my birthday mirthlessly, alone, by consuming Garfield’s caramel-flavoured face. Then my mum came in, and saw that I had wrecked my cake, and everybody’s desert. I’m not sure what my punishment was, but I’m sure both Sue Bradford and I felt that it was unreasonable. After my punishment, and later on into the twilight of what remained of my birth’s day, my uncle took me aside and said “tell me that you like, Mr. T.” I said, okay… not having any idea who this letter T man was. He smiled and went into his room, coming out with a pile of stickers as deep as my hand. All of the A-Team’s main man. Handing me those stickers he said solemnly, if he had been here Nic, we’d all have had Garfield cake. I carry those sage words everywhere I go dudes, and now you can have them too. Cheers.

As I am writing this it is my birthday. It’s also my flatmate Wyatt’s birthday. This is the first time I’ve had to share a day that, to my mind, is something special and rather unique to me, with someone whose own life intrudes so personally upon my own. Obviously, I knew in the abstract that my date of birth was shared with people, but there is a difference between knowing I shared something so personal with Canadian Spree shooter Kimveer Gill, or American actor Tom Hanks, and the guy whose kyak is propped up outside the door. For one thing, I have a reasonable hope of becoming more famous than Wyatt as I age, unlike that murderous bastard Hanks.

I’d like to pretend my shock and awe at this was something other than narcissism, but I am done lying to myself about anything excluding my weight. I, like everybody, find little things to make myself feel special. Things that encode me as a unique individual eeking out an existence in a way that hasn’t been done before on our planet Earth. So with the discovery of Wyatt’s shared birthing, I suffered a small crisis of self. Panic overcame me, and for a split second I questioned whether I was in fact an autonomous entity. I have concluded that I am probably not. Stink eh?

This wasn’t the first time I suffered such a crisis, oh no. You see, a small while ago, while I was a theatre student at this very university, I started hearing rumours that I’d said or done something funny, and while yes, it is possible, or even probable that I had indeed committed some mirth-generating act, I was fairly certain that I had not quipped that particular wittism. Like all self-aggrandising narcissists, I of course claimed that, yes, it was me. Then, I paused, reflected darkly and drank out of the old jam jar that happened to be the only clean drinking vessel in Studio 77’s green room.

I dug into this matter over the following weeks, and discovered to my dismay there was another person stumbling around the same stumbling grounds as I—large, hummocked, obsessed with the same nerdly theatre and amusements as I.

I wasn’t surprised to find that we both wore the shitty Farmers brand clothing for huskier gentlemen. I avowed to meet this man face to face and confront him for stealing my essential me-ness. I plotted against this fellow, and thought of all the beautiful and aesthetically pleasing ways I could stop him from being me.

Straight murder was one option, but first I’d have to ceremoniously disfigure this chubby funster. Perhaps a quick plunge into a vat of an undisclosed chemical, ala the Joker would be the best for him, so his brain would be fundamentally disfigured as well as his face. Maybe it would be easier just to slash him with a knife, and keep on slashing until he looked more like a Picasso portrait than I ever could. Perhaps it would be best if I merely poisoned him with some sort of tasty gelato laced with strychnine. That would give him a grin that I would never be able to comfortably produce, and it would be permanent. Yes. If he were anything like me (and he was), he’d like the taste of gelato… Coconut gelato. He’d eat it all up and ask for more. God knows I do.

Sadly, when I did meet him at a party off of Constable Street in Newtown, I wasn’t overcome by the same rage I had initially felt. No, instead I was rather drunk and seeing my eyes, his hair, our horrific stretch marks. I was soon brimming with a frantic wonderment. This lasted for all of a minute, before I had to rapidly flee and sit outside across from where former Salient theatre editor, Jackson Coe was lazing. Panicking I repeatedly and vigorously jabbed at my arms, gut and legs to make sure they were still connected to me; I noticed I was breathing rather hard, and came to the conclusion that of course, this other me, this ever so slightly blonder, younger me, was controlling my very lungs, swamping my brain’s electro chemical stimulation. He was absorbing and rearticulating my Ka.

This would not stand. I made a new vow that night, to never again steer myself into a position to meet him again. To whit, I would never go back to finish my theatre degree, and instead pour more effort into my film papers. At the time it seemed the only sensible thing—after all, he could have his precious theatre, I would have my precious “not having my body parts controlled by some other fuck.” Some would say that I was over reacting to what was actually a common enough thing, sometimes people who aren’t related to you happen to have similar physical and intellectual characteristics. After all, we can’t all be that uniquely stunning international student with the really large freckles all over her skin, making her look like some sort of divine leopard woman. If we were, we’d all look the same anyway, and that poor international student would have to go through the same crisis that I have faced.

Later I would begin to speculate that maybe the universe had needed someone like me to be born with certain qualities at a time and place like Wellington in the 1980s. But along the way realised that I’d fucked up and turned on their back up plan, turning another relatively small child into a rapidly chunking and frumping amusement machine. Bitter at the universe having just thrown me away without even bothering to explain how exactly I’d fucked up my place in the world, I turned on television. It was a small feature on E! News talking about Chris Farley: another obese blond. I watched as that fatty fell down and made funnies, and realised… hey, that fucker died of an overdose before he reached his potential: Chris Farley assassinated himself with excess at the same time I started realising my own horrific weight and disturbing artistic voice. The universe helped kill him for me. I was here to take Farley’s place, and until I died Uther Dean couldn’t do fuck to my destiny. That week I tracked Uther down and vowed to make, if not friendship with the lad, then at least a glowing acquaintanceship with him.

Uther, I reach out my hand to you, on this the day of my birth to say this: I don’t want to kill you anymore. I think.

The live improvisation I grew up on came in two varieties: improv in school, and the show or three I could make it to in Wellington each year. When ever I’d see one of those shows I desperately sought out the Theatre Sports ticket, because to me, that was what improv was. A bunch of funny people working with each other to dick around and create the funniest snippets of comedy I had ever seen. Going into Circa, I felt giddy with excitement and strangely moist with anticipation. The Improvisers were putting on a show and I was going to see something kick-ass. My brain sent a terrified message to me—screeching that I couldn’t return to my youth. It couldn’t live up to my rose coloured memory. My moistness was right, my brain was not.

The Theatre Sports format relies on small gimmicky games and scenes—Who’s Line Is it Anyway borrows heavily from it, so you’ll be familiar with the shenanigans that go on already. The thing is, live improv is so much more involving than the partitioned and packaged television show. I remember watching performers like Richard Falkner and Pete Doil working their brains and bodies to the hilt in an animal scene, and I reeled a little on the mash up of personality and style of the group. I feel like I’m overselling it, but really, when an improvisational performance works well, it is a joy to behold unlike any other event.

Improv desperately relies on the interconnectivity between performers; you have to function on a great deal of amused trust to really stretch the frantic
energy provided into something special. If you get the chance, trust the improvisers to provide this.

That night was special.

So, Sando Says! Remember how excited I was at how Joanne Black managed to find a way to write short snippets of infotainment via using communist boxes? Well, this week I want to test if it could work with non-communist boxes. My theme for this week? Smiley faces—how else would your mildly autistic friends know if you were joking online? It’s a visual clue that written language was quite happy to do without until computer scientists just had to start talking upon the internet in the early eighties. God damn you, father of modern emoticon usage Scott Fahlman, I’m going to go over to Pittsburgh and shank you one day. Shanking is of course when you provide someone lamb shanks at a dinner party. As New Zealand lamb is of such a high quality, he’d be asinine to turn down the offer.

Whanganui vs. Wanganui. Who cares? This guy. I’ll tell you this: if you don’t want to see an H in that city’s name you’re a racist. There’s no difference between you not accepting the correct Te Reo spelling of the word and killing Maori culture. And, anyway, by trying to stop this cultural rebranding you’re cutting into the already decimated financial pull that Whanganui has. Do you know how many jobs hanging the new signage up is going to create? Seven! That’s going to raise employment levels in Whanga-Vegas by nearly 9000 percent. Please Whanganuites, absorb what I’m saying and let the “H” back into your heart. You did it for “P”, it’s time to let the rest of the alphabet in too.

I’m addicted to not being in pain. Oh yeah, I have chronic pain, from when I had a football-shaped ‘inside zit’ removed from my tailbone a couple of years ago. The pain hasn’t really gone away, but does lessen during certain times of the year. Not as in that ‘time of moon when it neither waxes or wanes’ or ‘times when I’m not at school’, but as in, when it’s summer it is warmer and I’ve noticed less painful. So to further elaborate: I can tell the temperature by how much my butt pain makes me want to top myself. Sorry, I mean “better myself”, I wouldn’t want to mention suicide in an offhanded way, considering how serious the topic is. The point I am trying to make is that I take pain killers to numb my pain. I used to just take codeine, which, amazingly, did the trick right away. This week has been one of the worst weeks that I’ve had in dealing with my ass pain in quite a while. Even now while sitting on a very padded seat, with polypropoline leggings, pants and an Antarctic rated sleeping bag on, I still feel a dull ache and sharp pain down there, just sitting at the bottom of my consciousness while I try to type out my column. It is smirking at me right now. I take painkillers to combat this smug bastard, and some of them help. The best thing I was allowed access to was codeine. It was just so useful, 30-60mgs of the stuff at a time in the middle of winter and bang! I didn’t feel the pain any more, but I didn’t become a spaced out zombie who just slept the entire day. Less than this amount and I feel fragile, and start trying not to move too much, I don’t want to cause myself further pain by doing normal person stuff, like beating myself half to death with fruit. For a while there of course, I thought that it was a little bit romantic living with an ailment—I felt like Horatio Nelson, after losing an arm. Sadly the realities of living in this situation are as depressing as watching an armless rat going through the motions of cleaning its fur. Now, like many, I can’t get access to just codeine (because that would be silly, it’d have to be something like a codeine phosphate), and have to take it mixed with other substances like paracetamol, which is fine and all, except that over 2000mgs of paracetamol a day can cause kidney problems, and I’m taking at least that daily during times of high pain like… say June through August, or ‘Winter’ as it’s now known. Let’s not even mention the fact that I saw a close acquaintance try to ‘better themselves’ through taking a whopping great amount of it at once. Thank god they were ignorant enough to think that taking a huge amount would kill them faster rather than make their body want to hyper purge. I get why we demonise opiates, really I do, I wish I was less panic-riddled and could just discuss this with my doctor, but every time I do, I can see the cleverly placed Narcotics Anonymous poster on the wall, and my hopes dip just a little while my invisible arms try to free myself from the psychological dirt that peppers my pelt.

I am having one of those existential crises that I keep reading about in stupid magazines that litter the Student Health waiting room. You see, two of my friends have just had a baby, it’s not like they are the first in my peer group to birth a womb goblin, not by a long shot; I have emerged from as small town after all, and what happens in small towns? You do drugs, or become incredibly religious. Either way, chances are you’re going to have a baby, the options just determine whether it’s born addicted to PCP or Jesus at birth. I guess my biggest problem is that they were the sanest of my peer group. They probably still are as well. If they are still as sane as all out, and I am still part of that crew, it is now an indicator that I am either nearing a time where I should consider using some vagina-wielding person to birth a baby for me, or it is an indicator that I fucked up something chronic a while back. When is it sane age to start going all Spogworts Wizarding Academy for Semi Gifted Children, I ask rhetorically? It’s all so fucking frightening how normal the people back in Paraparaumu are finding this progression of getting married, moving into a small highly mortgaged house, and having babies is. Did I miss some sort of family memo that this is how life is meant to go? Well, yes, it turns out I did. Many thanks New Zealand Postal Service, your incompetency has cost me my future and the lives of New Zealanders in potential. Why don’t you go protest that, government-mandated abortion-picketing Christians?

My partner came in gabbling and babbling about some sort of psychotic homeless people making music out of objects. It turned out, after I had forced half a box of antipsychotic medication down the gabbling throat, that it wasn’t Blanket Man or the “shkews me” fellow who had been making noise, but the professional musical dance show Stomp. I promptly forced more hypnovel, or ‘midazolam’ if you will, down the offending throat, and went out to tub thump, what ever that is.

So, which 1st years frittered away all of their hard-earned $1000 course related costs without leaving themselves enough to get a coat for winter? Good luck guys, the op shops have been out of the non-smelling like rat pee ones since before the century started. Try not to die or have unprotected sex for warmth. Get money for it at the least.

Night yo.

Diane Spencer is a lady. I verified this in the way that you usually do—through asking and being given a baffled look of incomprehension. On stage she was a little British hornet of darkness packed into a tight redheadedness that complemented her lovely grey jeans, recently acquired in a Wellingtonian store. If you’ve ever read Grant Buist’s Brunswick or Jitterati, you’d see much of Fitz Bunny in her. If you haven’t, well, learning city-specific pop-cultural references are an important part of being at Victoria University. Oh look! A fountain made of buckets! How refereshing!

I greatly enjoyed watching Diane as she orated through her mother, weddings, and other chick stuff like talking binge drinking tampons without it grating on my delicate sensibilities. She had a story that was about her becoming the red-headed yoghurt girl on the telly. This was quick, and many comic moments were had in the over-arching amusement which both vilified and agrandised Ms Spencer in that order. Why am I describing how this bit worked? No reason.

If you ever wished Sarah Silverman was smarter and from Somerset, go see Diane Spencer.

Did you know that Phil Patston is openly disabled (what does that mean?) and gay? (I like men too, so “represent?”) I did, I had figured it out from the blurb of his pamphlet, and from vague memories of him on Pulp Comedy when I was a tween. For you see years ago, Phil Patson won an award. A Billy T Award which is a pretty high honour. It’s the Kiwi Comedy Guild’s version of the Paraparaumu College Principal’s Award for Outstanding Excellence in Chemistry, a much sought-after prize from an august organisation that recognises an outstanding talent from a small pool. In this case, chemistry students in Paraparaumu. Being a man more interested in comedy than the incorrect science taught to secondary school students I took this for a sign of quality and went along to his gig at the Fringe Bar.

His show was one where he told stories, talked to the audience and read some poems. As a performer he’s quite engaged with the audience and when nattering to them there was a sense of play that was rather delightful. However, I didn’t enjoy his show that much, peeps. I found it moved quite slowly, and that some how I had absorbed most of his jokes well before the punchlines came. Using my ability to retrospect I believe it’s just because some of his stories were ancient. The central stories in his act were about things that he’s obviously moved well away from by now, his ten? fifteen? twenty minutes? of being on Shortland Street 10 years ago, where aparantly he was Waverly’s boyfriend Josh that stole coffee, was well practiced yet mirthless. He also did an extravagantly long story about being a vegetarian before revealing that he wasn’t one any more and how betrayed people felt about putting up with his vegetarianism for nothing. I felt the same way, to be honest.

The last part of his show was full of his poetry, and you know what? I enjoyed the first couple, but… Fuck it, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room. He talks slowly and is slightly hard to understand thanks to his motor skills being messed up. On the plus side, performatively, this means that his quips can be much slower and therefore better evolved than the usual charismatic comedian, a situation he exploits expertly. However, it also means that it takes him a while to get through something like a poem than it usually would. This means that unless his poems are frightfully awesome you’re going to be sitting there bored, itchy and listening to bad poetry. His last poem of his set was actually rather short, snappy and quite funny so I was glad to leave the show on a high note, we’d had more fun than not fun, you know? Then some fucker called out ‘Encore! Encore!’ And then he did one that he’d cut because “it’s pretty long guys.” I got so itchy.

The distinguished Mr Sando actually says something to you this week. He speaks. Oh, how he speaks. It is about government. It is about Anne Tolley. It is Sando speaking.

This is like Salient’s podcast but Sando, talking smack. Just talking smack everywhere.

Enjoy.

Know your Government by Nic Sando

New Zealand has a history of non demonstrativeness, cultural modesty and a cringing shame towards any public satirical performance. Well, that was the traditional myth of why New Zealand didn’t have any truck with comedy. And this was actually true for a time, but that time was like ages ago, when there were touring vaudeville acts that roamed the world on boats powered by a dry fuel called coal. Of course, the “we” that we are talking about back then was a white colonial outpost balancing precariously on the heads of the Maori while using culture provided to us by the British as a pole. The actual creative content that we were producing was cloyingly sincere because when you’re a tiny southern colonial outpost, a zit on the ass cheek of the world, it’s important to advertise how totally sweet you are. If it wasn’t for that emo Katherine Mansfield, and her one hilarious story about the businessman torturing a fly, then we would have nothing comic emerging from a Wellingtonian from that era at all. See how cleverly I included Katherine Mansfield as a Wellingtonian, even though she was working and living in Britain during most of her creative life? I thought that was rather well done, as it makes the Wellington comedy scene seem older than it may indeed be. Choice! Speaking of old, during the 70s, the 1960s Satire boom had finally reached New Zealand, and occasionally you’d see something that was meant to be funny on TV Often, it was filmed at Avalon Studios. This is why Ginette McDonald got to be Lyn of Tawa instead of Lyn the Westie, it’s also one of the reasons why Wellington has had a reputation for having funny stuff going down on it. We were reported to have comedy, and people kept turning up wanting to have a go. That’s pretty much the birth of any comedy scene or culture Wellington has. This article is a kind of “look around the history and currency of Wellington Comedy.”

So small, so inclusive

A couple of years ago, Wellington beat out Ekatahuna to be New Zealand’s cultural capital. It’s been an uphill battle to keep our struggling creative industries alive ever since. Comedy, oft considered the bastard genre of entertainment has been something that we as a city have had to toy with. For you see, lads and ladies, Wellington’s comedy tradition is one that is largely tied into the other arts, comedy would occasionally piggy back on one of the mediums that were used for more serious endeavours. This is because Wellington is very small. There are many creative types crammed in here, and there is only so much time a city can have all of their creatives involved with a year of Shakespeare, or a season of Samuel Beckett. Peter Feeney [A Night with Beau Tyler, Black Sheep, those Memphis Meltdown ads] in a post performance discussion said that a performer can make a living in New Zealand, but has to keep doing as many different things as possible, and he’s pretty much on to it; that’s why I quoted him. This is an article. You must have noticed that we have a ridiculous number of theatres in the central city, right? By having these things scrambling for content, there is the potential for a diverse population of zany stuff and what have you. However, we’re still far too small as a city for people to be able to do just one thing in a vacuum. This excess of theatres and bars and paucity of people mean that there isn’t a great division between people like Feeney being stand ups, or being improvisers, serious actors or writers, and because the same groups mix with each other we see a great performative elasticity in this comic culture. Comedian/radio show guy Steve Wrigley did improv and directs, Jerome Chandrahasen acts (I’ve seen him), Dai Henwood made travel shows and as I discovered when I was rooting around the VUWSA archives for kindling, Raybon Kan used to write for Salient; I think that it is neat that he’s an Asian New Zealander.

Infobox: Psst… Raybon Kan is an Asian New Zealander, pass it on.

Everybody who is into the creative crap that we’re known for in Wellington will see pretty much most of what’s going on, or get a whiff of it from one of their mates. What this means is that it’s small enough that people with genuine talent get noticed really quickly. Recently, if you weren’t too tripped out on passionfruit flowers laced with angel dust you might have seen political science major Guy Williams becoming Dai Henwood’s protégé. Not so recently, in 1971, John Clarke was noticed doing a Sketch Revue here at Vic and then driven over to Avalon Studios in the Hutt, before being plonked on the tele. By 1973 his Fred Dagg character was a house hold name and then before the eighties he had taken off to Australia because “Australian broadcasting paid you enough to eat.” Dick.

John Clarkes gallivanting off overseas was a step that many Wellington comedians do, Wrigley and Henwood are both Auckland-based now, and the bigger entertainment centers like Melbourne and London have robbed us of Raybon Kan and Ben Hurley. Sure, as a performer they give you more opportunities to display your throbbing comedic qualities to a wider variety of people, which means more opportunities to make money doing what you love, but as I said before. Dick. So while Wellington doesn’t support performers enough Wellington is a place to start creating a comic identity, learning to improvise, learning to make entertaining plays and so forth.

What have you to say Victoria University?

Until about six years ago, Victoria had vibrant tradition of sketch comedy and student plays, and many of the collectives and crews that went on to genius started here. Theatre Militia has an association with Vic, and So You’re A Man, came from here too. So You’re A Man featured Taika Waititi, Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. The death of both the Vic Drama Club and the Capping Revues can’t be tied to one guy embezzling funds from the Drama Club, or the extreme raising of beer prices that killed off Student Culture after dark at the University, but these things didn’t help. Six years is pretty much two generations of undergraduate students at Victoria, and what we’ve seen in Vic during that time is that there are still great comic performers coming out of Victoria like Guy Williams, Matt Mulholland (New Zealand School of Music), and the Binge Culture Collective, the difference between now and six years ago is that they have branched off in very different avenues with out the same close unity that the University’s culture used to provide. And that’s the difference between now and then.

Infobox: Victoria University was actually named after a time travelling Victoria Beckham, who was searching for the fountain of youth. Instead she just shacked up with Hongi Hika, who was described as a gentle lover.

Live Comedy

Recently you may have noticed that the Blue Note, a venue known for having rather attractive T-Girls and awful karaoke has reinvented itself as the ‘Fringe Bar’, which is now a venue for comedy, until late at night when the few remaining queens drag themselves down to the bar and party heartily with the song styling’s of Raj from accounts. There’s a sentiment that Wellington as an audience stock has been just too small to cater for a venue aimed specifically at comedy, so this Fringe bar development is both scary and exciting as it’s a major indication that people have managed to convince at least one business that Wellington is able to support a full time comedy culture, instead of just one night a week at the San Francisco Bathhouse, plus the occasional performance in a theatre. The Fringe Bar has an aim to be Wellington’s version of the Classic, an iconic home for comedy in Wellington. This isn’t the first time that a great white shark of hope for Wellington’s comedy has emerged in the city, the Fringe Bar is another in a (small) line of experimental ventures; Fergus Aitken (True Stories and Other stuff that isn’t, Mr Fungus) , fondly recalled to me that in the 90s, the St James Cabaret, run by Santa Fe’s Garth Rosson was driving force in bringing comedy onto the Wellington stage with local comedians and bigger acts like Strassman (yes, he’s Rosson’s fault), to our attention as a city and as a culture. However, you might notice that the St James Cabaret is just not here no more.

Infobox: Iconic New Zealand comedian Michelle A’Court was the women’s rights officer of VUWSA. Thanks Michelle. Thank you for everything.

So what?

Well, Wellington has comedy in it, it always has comedy in it to some degree, but the International Comedy Festival is its final week, so right now it’s a really good time to actually get out of there and experience comedy. I don’t know how long the comedy buzz will last for, it’s hard to predict the future. Right now, the New Zealand media has been dishing out money to make comedy in a way that hasn’t been heard of before, so we probably have at least two years before TVNZ gets discouraged, panics, cuts funding and comedy goes back to being a small part of the nation’s cultural scene, rather than a main attraction. When that happens, we’ll see new comedians coming in and building themselves and their comedy style up with the inclusiveness of the Wellington performing arts scene, and maybe break through into mainstream consciousness again. God I hope so.

Yeah, the end.

Infobox: Nic: Hey Jackson, next week can I write about the Holocaust? Jackson: No, you’ve made a hash of this article and your life. Nic: That’s harsh but true.

Oh it’s you, Small Boy, do you not realise what the time is? Oh, hiding from your parents in the hammock set up at my flat, are we? Do you indeed not need your sleep to function optimally during the day? Mayhap and perchance you do not feel the same throbbing red desperation to just die for a few moments that I, your parents and the Somali family below us both also feel every time we close our eyes, not just on our beds, but every time we even blink. No Small Boy, I’ll not lie to your parents’ faces and tell them where you are. Why? Why aren’t I helping you, the being who makes sure that our own marital beds are a refuge no longer, thanks to your irate cries of emotional trauma at being bedded at what some people (you) claim is an unreasonably early time. Here, let me get you another blanket, it’s cold out at the moment. Oh, yes, I for one acknowledge your lack of a fair deal, mum. And that seven on a school night is too early for the good TV. and that yes, ‘well, daylight savings is dumb then.’ You may ask me why I myself am staying up late tonight? Oh, well, let me tell you. It’s depression week at Salient, and it happens to coincide with the anniversary of one of my friends’ deaths. Yes Small Boy, I am drinking. No, not because I’m sad, because I’ve run out of painkillers and this is a way that will let me get to sleep through the long dry ache that is my tailbone. I’m glad that you’re here now though. You can keep uncle Nic company. Where the fuck do you think you’re going? Oh, your parents are going to miss you, are they? No, I can see your mother watching that copy of Twilight in the window. She often watches it when your father is out late at night, she is having the time of her life. Trust me. Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll watch Pinocchio together. No, Small Boy, I think you’ll find that not only little babies like this Disney classic.

Okay, so, my friend in question moved away from Paraparaumu a while before his suicide, which was one of the reasons why we all thought it was so out of the blue. Apparently, there is often no sign that a person is suicidal as opposed to just depressed, or in fact perfectly normal. You could be suicidal right now and not even know it. Do you feel sad? Oh, you do! Do you want to watch telly? I think Gordon Ramsay is on! He’s yelly! Oh yes he is! He makes people upset. My mate worked in a kitchen for a while, he was just kind of bumming around for a while. He wasn’t a loner, we’d spend similar hours a day on the internet chatting about our lives and sending each other photos. I got closer to him that year because we would be up when other people weren’t. Speak Up! Hospo means you work hours that other humans deplore. Hospo means hospitality, young dude. Like, cooks and waiters, and people who pour drinks of coffee and alcohol. It’s fine work, though you can feel dislocated in your life.

Hmmn, that outraged bellowing means that your mum’s noticed you’re missing. Oh, you’re asleep. Fantastic, a queer male with a stolen child in his house. At least I’m not that drunk. Or am I? Nope. Sweet. Yes, hello, over here! He’s on the couch. No, I wasn’t touching your child, I was just torturing him with tales of my sadness and woe. Look lady, he came to me, and I was just about to call you over but I could see how absorbed you were in Robert Pattinson’s eyes. Did you know that in the last book Kristen Stewart’s character gets super rapidly pregnant and her baby kicks her so hard that she’s paralysed. Apparently, it’s written quite sexually, so, there’s a good chance that the porniness of the filmed will be ramped up in a really specific fetish way. Oh, sorry, spoiler alert. Get your spawn and get the hell off of my porch. I’ll slip him a roofie next time. No! I’m not a paedophile, I’m just really tired, I’m so tired, and you’ve got to be parenting him wrong, have you not watched Super Nanny? Well, maybe take a course in parenting or something. Please, I’m so tired.

Cheers broseph; you were a bit of a dick, but so am I and I miss you. I hope you made the right decision in your life, because ultimately, that’s the only decision people can’t take away from you, unless you’re one of those assisted euthanasia cases, but you weren’t, so I hope it was quick and merciful.

Emissary @ HAPPY Bar, 7.00 20-23 May, tickets at Tickitek

www.TheSando.com

I was about eleven, and thought to myself that it was completely unfair that girls got to grow breasts and experience the ultimate act of human connection, with growing what father termed a “womb goblin”, while the best I could get was a receding hairline and five o’clock shadow. Why did my slut mother birth me onto the escalator of escalating male violence and competitiveness? Why couldn’t I be a somewhat attractive and socially acceptable woman? How is it fair that at age eleven my skin didn’t feel right? I could see the path my hormones would force me onto, and thanks to my parent’s controlling interest, I could not see a way off of it—Oh my fucking God there’s a bee.

There’s a bee, there’s a fucking bee on my ear. Shit guys, I’m serious. I’m twittering for help as we speak. Jesus, come on bee, you don’t go there, that entire area is specifically designed to be not for bees. That area’s for sound, or at least for decoration on deaf people. I can’t hear anything but a doom-laden buzz, spooky. Come on Twitter, why aren’t you at all useful? What the fuck is your business model? Why would Google want to buy you?!

Oh god! Bee! I think it’s a bumble bee. I pray that it isn’t a wasp, they can keep on stinging until I’m dead. Why won’t he just leave me be? Wait… If a bee can sting you then it’s a female animal, with shriveled and poisonous ovaries. Seriously, ask a misogynistic insect scientist, he or she will set you right. Misogyny, it’s not just for men no more. Now where was I? Oh yeah! Giant bee crawling into my ear.

Why has no help arrived yet? Why am I typing this while holding my head perfectly still? I think I’m going to need to remove this bee by myself, and that fills me with dread, as I am what is known as a coward with a bee in my ear.

Okay Mr Bee, I want you to bee very calm while I slowly claw at you with these chopsticks I’ve picked up. Now, I know have a motor skills disability that causes my hands to shake like the pouty and feminine buttocks found on the behind of Beyonce Knowles. I want to be that so bad. Now, if you could just… NO! Don’t panic, I’m trying to help you, you asinine pollination-obsessed wonder of nature.

That’s my dumb flatmates key in the door, isn’t it. Please Lord, don’t let her slam the door. Okay, okay, God’s real because that loud bitch. “Bex… Bex.” I softly call her. “Yes Bex, I know there is a bee climbing in my ear. No, I don’t know, maybe my earwax tastes of honey. Just Help. Me.”

Ow. Well, no sting, but her long fingernail has shredded my inner ear. Thanks Bex, you’re slightly better than a social insect. Good work.

God I wish I looked as good in a skirt as she does.

There is something scary about going into any form of performance based around depression—not because of fear that you’ll get depressed, but with the dread that you’ll be bored out of your rock. Well, okay, often there is legitimate fear of both; Chris Brain’s A Better Place is about life with depression, and is sponsored by those people who do those awful John Kirwan ads. I want to draw out the fears I had, but fuck it, this show was funny and an interesting tale that I got quite caught up in. It’s barbed, so smart and so real. Billy T. Nominee Chris Brain actually talks about the actions that he does while he’s depressed and how fucked his life gets because of the depression. If you want deep content in your stand up, go see it. If you just want to laugh (which isn’t a bad thing), there are lighter meals on offer.

2. Jason John Whitehead: Emotional White Mail.

He’s a ginger Canadian stoner who is very funny. I like it when reviews don’t have much to add.

Okay, well, the really neat thing about JJW is that he has this natural aversion to what he calls “righteousnous”—basically, the thing that almost all comedians have which makes them hate authority and claim to be egalitarian, except with him you can actually hear a palpable understanding and then rejection in a Salient manner. Sure he disguises it with his engaging persona, but the content is there and he exposes it in a most delicious manner.

3. El Jaguar’s Cinco De Mayo’s Fiesta De HaHa

This was a late night rambling show celebrating Cinco De Mayo—which pro wrestler El Jaguar claimed was Mexian Independence Day (it’s not)—that threw any weird piece of comic performance they could get ahold of at you. It was the closest thing stand up has to being a party while still having an audience. To exemplorise, Jerome Chanderhausen delightfully screamed at us for five minutes, Matt Mullholand (who has been missed in the performing circuit), played a tin whistle to Celine Dion, and Vinyl Burns made a beer bottle vanish. It was a fun show that crashed like a burning tyre through the window of my house’s humour room. The door was open guys, Jesus.

1. Toby Hadoke’s Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf. Uther Dean and myself, The Lundy Twins if you will, being geek burger JRs, encourage any of the nerd elite at Vic to go see this. I’m talking to you, members of the Sci-fiClub, Games Club, and Interface, give in to your popular culture leanings and see the show that you’ve probably already downloaded, but live! It’s probably going to be in a higher res than what you’ve got, right?

2. True Stories by Fergus Aitken. Why?! Well, it’s going to be one of the smarter and more lucid of the late-night shows (it’s on at 10.30pm, at the Paramount). Fergus Aitken is also a pretty tested performer, having been doing his tháng, as I call it, from before Pokémon was a thing. Plus, that Dai Henwood’s protégé guy, Guy Williams, is Fergus’s opener, and he’s actually pretty good too. So, it’s pretty much a genius late-night double team that will earn you huge comedy fest cred. You’d be retarded not to go.

3. Miscellaneous Etc. WHAT?! It’s a bunch of up-and-coming Wellington Stand Ups doing a show together at the Fringe Bar. Some of them come from Victoria University. Bernard Stuart has a beard I’d like to nest in. Also, Dom and I both have this huge comedy crush on Cruzanne Macalister, who is one of the comics on the bill. Well, I also would like to be her, but that’s neither here nor there. [See this week’s column.]

4. Monkey vs. Robot. I want to see anything that references a James Kochalka comic, and as Jarrod Baker writes Newtown Ghetto Anger which is a ‘webcomic’ (note this Interface), and TJ McDonald is a huge nerd, I am guessing that this was not an accident. Anyway, Baker won part of a Billy T Award, and McDonald was amusing during first laughs, so it’s fairly safe that this will be awesome.

I’ve written about four shows, but there are obviously more out there. How about you take a look around and take a punt on some comedy, it might be fun. Or it might kill you in some freak accident. You choose.

Concern was raised over whether Wayne Brady’s extended solo improvisation was really worth the $80 price of admission. Considering that he probably sold out around six months ago, we needn’t have wasted our short and gasping breaths—well, Dom’s weren’t, but Uther and I did not want to feel so bitterly alone together.

Dom and I fought like fag hag against sweaty fag deep in heated debate on divvying up who got international acts Maeve Higgins’ Kitten Brides, and Janey Godly, of whom Dom claimed “may be the most interesting woman on Earth.” Both of these shows will be good, as I have yet to see a bad Godley show, and Higgins—well, YouTube her, and take a look for your fine self.

Uther and I discussed the merits of what made a good shock comic, which is why segueing this into Puppetry of the Penis makes sense, my mum loves them, but as Uther said, “good on them for playing with their penises on stage, but eventually that’s just masturbation.” I just don’t think I could handle another hour of them with “that woman.”

I begged salivotory salivations of spit to see Breaking the 5th Wall (Bats), as from everything I have seen and heard of it, it seems like the sort of post-Snuff Box, post-Fast Show kind of sketch comedy that makes the ADHD child inside of me plastic bananas are great. Uther said that he was “always interested to see what improvisers do with scripts,” and considering the amount of WITed pedigree that is in there (Woody Tuhiwai for one example), it may just rape the ape for you.

Lets look at the Comedy Cure’s Word on The Street. Why? Because it’s four more or less gifted performers who are comfortable working with each other, trying something very new. I like new things. I like Cam Murray best as a writer in a theatrical realm, so I hope he had much to do with their sketch work. To be honest though, I’d probably be keen to see this even if it was just straight stand up, because with people like T. J. McDonald and two of the Comediettes, (Sarah Harpur and Jim Stanton), it won’t suck. Well, it might, I can’t control the future, but hey, fuck you kid.

Eptatretus stoutii, more colloquially known as an “enderberry” has been purchased, monetised and trade mark protected by kiwi super company Fonterra. For the first time this week, the enderberry was added to such popular products as Sanlu Brand Very Good Three Berry Nutritional Baby Pap for Children; Anchor Three Berry Smoothies, and yes—even Fresh and Fruity three berry yogurt, making the former products obsolete, and (dare I say it in this twitter-obsessed age),somewhat ridiculous.

The news that Christ-governed Australasian food giant Sanitarium have leased cereal rights to enderberry has not caused left-wing frenemy of New Zealand, Dick Hubbard, to sweat berry-flavoured bullets of fear as of yet.

“Hubbard foods is not at all worried about [enderberry]—in fact, we’ve just signed a contract with Zespri [international] to add dried kiwi berries into our fruit muesli. You kids still like that kind of overly-sweet crap, right?”

Upon sampling God’s gift to breakfast, Weir House resident Melissa Goff commented “Enderberry? More like Blenderberry! Let’s make some berry Mojitos, girls!”—to much rejoicement.

A lamb flap is one of two things: the side flap of sheep chests, or what was the top part of a lamb roast headed to the states, that was removed to make New Zealand lamb seem leaner. Smooth, guys! The M.I.C. claim that there is a way to cook this meat in a low-fat manner, but considering that the fat is micro-layered between meat, they are bull-shitting you. However, we can leech some of the fat out by slow cooking.

1. Take your lamb flap (bought from Pak ’n Save), and encrust it with salt, pepper and ground ajowan seed (or thyme). The salt will draw out moisture, and later, fat. The other stuff is for taste.

2. Roll up the flap and tie it tightly—a neat little bundle. Rest for an hour—this will allow the salt to work.

3. Place lamb flaps on a rack over a large oven proof dish of unsweetened tea into a preheated oven at 120c. We are going to leave that slut for pretty much 2–3 hours, turning occasionally. The water will keep the stuff moist at first, the tea will add more delicious flavour.

4. Turn on the grill for a couple of minutes, watching until the outer layer gets a crispy crust.

5. Remove and rest for five minutes. The surviving fats and juices will congeal inside the meat fibres during this time.

6. Slice or shred the meat and serve with hot sauce and rice. It’s good, I swear. 1400 dead Papua New Guineans a year can’t be wrong.

By Nic Sando

Pear Pudding

- 3 egg whites
- 1/2 cup of sugar
- 1/4cup of self-raising flour
- 4 large pears, peeled, cored and sliced
- 1 small block of dark chocolate

1. Preheat over to 180°C. Beat 3 egg whites to a stiff peak. Make sure the bowl is clean and dry before beating.

2. Fold in 1/2 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of self-raising flour and 3 egg yolks.

3. Line the cake tin with baking paper.

4. Place sliced pears and chock chunks in the cake tin.

5. Pour the batter over, layering with more pear and choc if needed. Bake at 180°C for 30 minutes till golden.

My family enjoyed this pudding with hokey pokey ice-cream on a cold Bannockburn autumnal night.

By Polly

I lost my virginity this morning.

It was pretty weird—let me tell you. Also, it was awkward and painful. Boy did my penis feel odd going in there, kind of rubbery to tell you the truth. Then, once it finally engaged with the vaginal cavity of my chosen mate, it just kind of stuck in there, like it was being clamped down on by a sock made of beef steak. I remember wondering if this really was the amazing and special event that was meant to rock my world and finally turn me off of men. I mean, am I doing something wrong? My pastor says that my fagitude is a choice and that as soon as I find the right girl, I’ll realise just how wrong and unholy my thoughts have been. Did I choose the wrong one? I mean, to be honest, Belinda asked me out, so all I really did was reciprocate, but, what if she was wrong? Are there different textural vaginal fields? What if my penis is the right size and density for a vaginal style most common in certain Asian ethnicities but not for Belinda’s pan Polynesian one?

Is that even a thing? I just don’t know enough about this.

After Belinda left to get some fish and chips, I tried a water displacement test to see what my mass was down there, but its two little friends kept skewing the results. A quick google search turned up few to no insights about this, so I must assume that I’m a pioneer of this sexual science. Another thing I noticed, is that it felt alright while I kept my eyes shut, but when I opened them and saw her, erm, flailing bosom, I lost track of what I was meant to be doing. Maybe I just don’t like fat people? Well, she wasn’t fat, but her brother didn’t have a bosom, that’s for sure. Have you ever noticed that girls have facial hair too? It’s a little downy and sparse, but it’s there. That’s something to hold onto I guess.

What I don’t really get is what the big deal with actual penetration is. Why does it have to be foot in shoe, when thumbing the buckle gets such a great reaction? I read somewhere that many women can’t even get off from, you know, vaginal penetration. I was totally cool with going there, but Belinda just insisted that I man up. It’s not natural,people. Why should you have to penetrate stuff when you aren’t going for a baby? She coerced me you know. Well, no she didn’t. Actually she said I didn’t have to go through with it if I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want her to not like me, so I figured that it’d be over pretty fast. It was by the way. Afterwards we went and watched that Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It was pretty cool, I hope they make a sequel or something.

Hey, according to this meme quiz, my inner Pokemon is Electabuzz.

What’s the deal with attractive dudes?! Wellington was always kind/sorta full of attractive women, but the men were character actors at best, like Steve Buscemi or Michael Galvin. Now we have people who strut around like Craig Parker in his glory days. I wonder just how many of us had a coming of age when they saw him in the Rocky Horror Picture show. I’m guessing around 14 of us. I wander around and there are hotties ranging from Old Banks Arcade all the way down to BATS. My penis thanks the metro-sexuality fad of a couple of years ago for teaching the modern emo kids to dress well and bathe. Because it’s bathing that sets emo and New Romantics aside from each other. You ever smell Tori Amos? If so, drop me a line at nic@thesando.com, I’d love to interview you.

I’m actually rather feverish while writing this column today, so forgive me for the sticky and sweaty stains that may be pooling around your copy of Salient, as that is how printing works, isn’t it? The point of this is that I was suffering both a fever and that awful band and symptom The Chills at the same time since five o’clock this April first. Now, as we all know, the most important thing that happened on April first this year wasn’t the two ten-minute and one half-hour break “thang,” which our Prime Minister, who, if not hateful, is at least downright disappointed about workers’ rights, has promised to repeal given half an excuse. No, the real story was about a warehouse of cheap and old television called Comedy Central being birthed onto Sky digital. Its first broadcast started at 8am, with little to no fanfare. It took another hour and a half to betray its own nature by playing an episode of a show called The Game, which according to the web is a dramady at best. And they didn’t even start with the first episode of the show. It’s tragic. I am almost willing to forgive it by inserting a sequence called BITS, which is made up of New Zealand comedians being filmed at BATS. God help them if they play the same seven one-minute pieces over and over again for eternity.

I had yum cha on Saturday, it was totally awesome. You see, yum cha, much like the New Year, is filled with promise. It contains everything that you have not yet sampled or changed, and you’re prepared to do it all. You never will, and will probably end up bloating and despising yourself months later, but that doesn’t stop the joy of the occasion. I am in love with this eating style. Not because of the delicious food or the delicious tea, no! It is because I was able to use one of those amazing rotating table trays to consistently move the delicious tea and soy sauce out of the reach of my other diners. Then, when they tried to use the thing, it took just one subtly placed hand to slow down the rotation and irritate everyone. It’s not that I was trying to hurt their feelings, it’s just that during my fever-ridden dream, Bus Driver’s Union boss Nick Kelly appeared to me on an angelic bus driven by Engels, and told me to do it as a way of screwing with the capitalist order. I didn’t understand him then, but the dream had to be real or else how could he have known that my favourite yum cha place had rotational tables? It’s not like he’s a Christian Scientist who believes he can see into the very future itself, is it?

Speaking of last week’s Stop Work Meeting of the bus drivers’ union, why can’t they advertise these outages more effectively? I knew for weeks that some dumb-ass triathlon was halting my ability to take a number 14 to Oriental Bay—why was it that the three posters about the Stop Work meeting were all located in the central city? How is that useful? I had to stand next to an old woman for forty minutes before her stink drove me to walk into town. It’s not that she had old lady smell; it’s more that she was an old lady who also smelled.

Sin… Morality… Sin… Morality… Sin… A well-known politician paused from his thoughts and looked up from his champagne flute. He spotted the bald pate of Rodney Hyde glinting in the wind and wondered softly to himself… “Wait, am I a Bear Hunter?” This columnist assuredly hopes that he is.

When I was a child the Easter Bunny touched my eggs. At least, that’s how I kind of construct the scenario and how it went down at the time. It’s weird, because I didn’t really think that it was bad per se, I just didn’t understand why he’d even want to. I wasn’t to tell anyone because they’d be jealous. So I didn’t. And you know what, they didn’t get jealous, so the Easter Bunny was right.

My childhood. Oh god. No wonder I eat so. You know what, I just find this entire skipping my column around like Mary Hunter Benton the jump rope champion to be really hard. The strings of narrative and polemic that I so deftly tug fall too short to create natural movement on my puppet of a page, and it’s almost impossible to create a pataphore of any complexity. It’s not that reading a bunch of dislocated snippets about my palsied life isn’t interesting enough, but what of it? Where is the insight? The high-handed judgement? The raw meat of it all?! Oh yes, it’s easy and indeed fun to use a small paragraph to talk about cute National party members or to editorialise to you all about my horrific childhood ideals in a comic tone, but… Yeah, okay, I see why Joanne Black does this now. This is the last sentence of this week’s column. Or was it? [Yes, it was.–NS]

Today’s advice is a triple hitter because Jackson, the arsehole editor went and pissed all over our relationship with the president of the Students’ Association. Now she has pulled her exposé on staff wasting student money on excessive dog grooming. News flash: Some dogs got overly pampered. Spoiled your headline there didn’t it?

A charming young man sent this to me via a post card with the humorous slogan, ‘Kiwis eats shoots and leaves.’ The joke is that kiwis are insectivores, a specialised type of carnivore who don’t so much eat vegetable matter as rummage through it for delicious grubs.

“Dear Nic, I was pro the war against Iraq, and to be frank all American foreign policy since Clinton was in power. But now, with the advent of that mulatto, Barack Obama, being in power it has become cool to like America and therefore hate its wars again. I have unfortunately burnt my bridges with the left wing people in my neighbourhood. What do you recommend?” –Percy

Amusing post card writer and blatant racist: He’s not a mulatto—well, I mean, by the very definition of the word Obama is, but you don’t use that word. Biracial is more correct, but as race is a choice, he’s African American. Look, it’s like calling Heather Roy a masseuse who has no business being in the armed forces let alone government. It’s just something that our editor Jackson Wood thought but didn’t say. Out loud to Heather Roy. At her massage parlour. While having a throbbing erection. It’s just something that didn’t happen, and would be considered libel if put into print.

You really should have thought about becoming right thinking and left leaning years ago. Surely you must have seen the writing on the wall? Even Bush could though he was too illiterate to understand it. More fool you and your denim shirt wearing ways, Percival. Do not fear though, for I have a solution.

My advice is simple: I suggest that you vote for the most left wing candidate that you can find in the next election. Consider the ALP. Then strut. Talk about how the [ethnic minority of note] is finally getting the access to the same hard-earned student loan payments as you. State that you look forward to reading more post-colonial literature from the Pacific, because it wasn’t right that Cook forced his Empire on them. Remember, now that the Deaf hate groups have weapons it is only a matter of time before they come for you and your highly mortgaged rental properties. So protect yourself by learning a smattering of NZSL, there’s a reason why it’s one of the official languages of New Zealand. Ooh, ooh! And tell people that they should know some NZSL because there’s a reason why it’s one of the official languages of New Zealand!

Name Withheld writes:

“Dear Nic, I hate myself. I constantly say and/or do things that I think will amuse others when it is clear to everyone else that I just look like a loud mouth. It’s beginning to hurt just getting up in the morning. Every day I contemplate ending it…”

Dear “Name withheld.” It seems that your letter is not actually a question—how am I meant to help you if you do not help me? Notice the question mark on that rhetorical question. Now you have seen the question mark in use you will be able to formulate a question which I can then answer. I hope that through helping your grammar, you can now help me to help you to help me to help you. I stole the next letter out from under the watchful guise of Becci, our “real helping people out person.” God I hate him/her. You know what Becci is short for? Rebecca. That’s right, a name with no ‘I’ in it. What the (famous theatrical theorist/director) Jauqes Lacock is that about?! I want to punch her or him in the face. We’re allowed to do that to Salient staff, right?

“… I started my first serious relationship a few months ago with a really great guy, but he’s recently started bringing up the subject of sex. I really, really like him, but I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far just yet. How do I let him down gently without him breaking up with me?”

Look, I could bullshit you about how this is a sensitive matter but it actually isn’t. If you aren’t prepared to offer him the sexual intercourse (or one of the peripheral sexual acts), it’s your call. Don’t bother with gentility, don’t try and coddle his dumb feelings, it’s a waste of time. If he wants sex more than being with you, the relationship will end anyway. It’s important to note that it is your body. I told my first boyfriend that I didn’t want penetrative anal sex, and that’s the way that we rolled. The fact that you need this advice scares me a little. Actually, looking at the date of the column I stole this from I’m a couple of years out of date. So, unknown him/her, did you manage not to pork him? Have any dormant haemorrhoids erupted yet? Still STI free are we? Or if you’re female, do you have an STI? How about a child and another on the way? Sadly for you, until we find some sort of device to contravene conception you have no choice when it comes to sexual intercourse. It’s a choice between babies or reading.

How about this? Are either of you, the male or female questioner happy? Because, in order to make up for the drivel that I’ve written here, I’ve been instructed by Jackson to say that that’s what Salient hopes that you are.

There’s no magical reason for sex. It’s fun and it sometimes makes babies. That’s really it. We know that it’s not something animals do in the wild, but it’s so natural to our way of life that we don’t think of escaping it. I know, I know, to you it does seem like you can’t live without wiping or tearing up after climaxing, but trust me, after a couple of months alone on an island you’ll hardly remember what it was like to not have an infected and puss dripping orifice; and that metaphor works well for both pooping and having unprotected sex! A winner is me!

There is a bias in my libidinous meat: Yngwie Malmsteen totally wears a bra and Rob Halford’s legacy rocks ass, The D&D references I recently deleted from this article to get under the word limit is just one example of graffiti in the level 2 Kirk building toilets. But this article is about the media. So after drinking a lot of mead, and preparing my ear, I immediately thrust my gorgeously supple body head-first into the bed of Salient’s own news maker-upper, the one and only Mr. Michael Jackson Oliver. I kicked all the children out of Mikey’s bed, slothed ecstatically over his Morrocan hand-quilted satin sheets, and was quickly evicted when he saw the ciggie burns along my throbbing, veinous phallus, and the way I’d tattooed my entire scrotum to look like a hairy, bilious-green brain with corpuscular striations imprisoning two vacuum-sealed cherries on a microscope slide. Michael picked me up with his famous return-button-pinky, ripping my lethargica from his plush mink-skin pillowcases, and swinging me around by my cabinet member. I think he was also rather unimpressed by the puncture wound massacre round my gangrenous and misshapen willy, that I had made by years of shooting synthetic amphetamines and heroin-derived opiates directly into my urethra.

I left shaken, yet with my chaste Christian virginity intact, which I quickly sold to a businessman upon a dark Marion Street parking lot. I was revolted when he stupidly stated Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force album contained greater guitar work than ANYTHING Judas Priest’s own dynamic duo, the legendary K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, had ever done. I slapped him, proudly and defiantly flicked off the pearl necklace he had given me, took the agreed-upon five dollars, buttoned my shirt, unthatched the reigns and bridle and unmounted. I left with my head held high.

Has it truly come to this? Where number of notes outshines true songwriting talent? Hold me Halford, sing me your tender but brutal lullaby, let me turn down Malmsteen in favour of the haunting epic ‘Victim of Changes’, which contains the best vocal and guitar melodies in music. Spank me, Rob, take me to your ‘Island of Domination’ and show me ‘The Ripper’. Get to ‘Breaking The Law’ with me. I lick your bullet-belted leathers, gripping and squeezing them hard, and not letting go, never never let sweetly go, burning fiery passion into your seacrest tuna blue eyes, so bright, so bright, no Rob NO! Forgive me! Aaaaarrrgggh!

Oh man, better get the stunt cock …

True love knows not!

Oh yeah, I’m not gay or anything. But what about Mark Lundy? Here is the media saying that he killed Peg, Kelly and Bud, and went boy racing with Jefferson! Nuh-uh! I never saw that episode! Bud was recently seen on the set of Lampoon movies—which, career-wise is being murdered—and Kelly is on a poster on my wall! Peg is doing vocals for a techno band called Futurama.

I’m sick of bias! I want the truth! Well I can’t handle the truth! That’s what Michael Oliver told me in his best Jack Nicholson voice when I asked him what the hell was up with life, and stuff, you know, and just what ‘mature’ student Janet Sampson would do on the first date.

Now the fact that there is a competitive edge to this whole monopoly of truth thing is another example of how getting two people together immediately turns them both into politicians, and you can’t trust either of them. My friends, you can trust me on that. I am pretty confident that I will win the chocolate back rub and parsley cake this week, because I have been doing a lot of work for JJ Wood lately. Work… under his desk, if you know what I mean. Doing a lot of rubbing up and down… gyrating his little man, get it…? Releasing a lot of Jackson’s white liquid everywhere… Taking care of all the little baby Jacksons… yeah… yeah, you’re a dirty bitch, you know what I mean. I mean I’ve been sanding and undercoating Jackson’s Warhammer Fantasy Battle dwarf army with white paint.

Why, what did you think I meant? Oooo, yuk man, you are sick… you’re so biased… you need to get a bra….

Look, you need to relax! Go for a sweet moonlit swim with Rob Halford, forgive him for the 1988 cover of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and just let him let you let him. But basted medications are so bullshit! It really gets my margaritiferon in an eye spliced half anglered reef knot! I think I will just get Janet Sampson to play with my bally ball balls.

Rebuttery Goodness
Judas Priest shot onto the scene with their eponymous 1976 debut, Sad Wings of Destiny, an album with solos as epic as Necrophagist’s hit disco single ‘Fermented Offal Discharge.’ Priest fully carb-loaded the world with ripping guitar riffs and a psychological bikerish croon with a depth and grace as yet unexplored by heavy metal pioneers like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Somewhat like a more edgier Uriah Heep, they rocketed to the top of British Metal early on in their professional life as a band.

So you see, Nic, it’s like this. Okay? You ready? Want me to lay it on the linebacker? Okay, here goes: Basically, if we take modern globalisation into account, corporately, the mass marketing of internet and communic—BABA BOOEY BABA BOOEY BABA BOOEY HOWARD STERN’S PE—

By Guy Armstrong

The media does not have a liberal bias

My dearest feck-stained and oat-mouthed Guy,

I write with the greatest of hopes that this letter finds you in good health. Mayhap the life on the orchard is doing you if not a world, then at least a continent of good? Keep harvesting those plums my good man.
Now as to your query of bias within the media, I must sadly and solemnly state that there is, and it’s purely infavour of the liberal agenda. I know, it sounds like none more than the poppiest of cocks. My good friend Rupert in fact controls a fair whack of the media. However, my gentle, mild and dim Guy, what you must understand is that Rupert Bear—as we call him at the club—is what you call a “closeted liberal,” as his ideals, which he spreads with the virulence of super AIDs throughout the unprotected anal cavities of his media concerns, just aren’t conservative enough.

Murdoch and many of his ilk want women at home not working: a return to the nuclear family. He, much like the Doctor Phil, believes that a little womb goblin should grow up with its womb tender tending to it. The way he does this is by publishing large quantities of propaganda about how neato-terrific and blessed motherhood is. This plants the seed of letting seeds be planted in your orifices into women’s seedy little minds. So this media churns trash out and mind controls party girls like Christina Aguilera, M.I.A. and Rhys Witherspoon into turning their bodies into baby manufacturing plants, which creates more fun information to be used in his publishing houses, making more women want to propagate like ferns. Like disgusting gametophyte producing ferns, encouraging a woman to have a child and then leaving her, the mother at home with the child is a terrible and new idea.

The more (wo)man hours spent with a child, the greater intellectual capacity it will have. We don’t want this. We should be trying to conserve and return to how life was before that minor upset the “great war”, whereupon every one man, woman and child worked hard and for a solid 12 hour period—the twelve to fourteen hour day being the most useful length of time everyone shared what little they had with each other, from housing right down to cholera. Nothing puts the unity back into community like an infectious disease. With a community kept lean by scarce resources, disease and more of that oh so throbbingly hard work that are too busy to demand changes, the people in charge, i.e. myself and Sir Roger (or Duggles, as we call at the club), will be able to keep staying the course through the slight market upsets and minor wars that keep every day interesting. We conservatives see that the most efficient jobs are factory ones, like steel manufacturing plants and Burger King. Everyone knows that the best Burger King worker is that inbred kid. We conservatives aren’t saying that we should cultivate inbreeding among the lower classes, so much as saying we should encourage inbred-like effects in the lower classes. I’m sorry Guy but that hot Whale Rider chick you get so sexually excited about should be back making movies while her child sorts screws in Kaitoke.

The Liberals who want change and fiscal clarity are missing the point—the masses are better off when they aren’t aware of what’s what. Even by mentioning that something could be considered “what”, they are forcing me to further their horrid and uplifting agenda. Through their massive release of words they can’t help but liberate all people, as the literate often refuse to shut their yaps, giving peasants and bee farmers access to all sorts of eldritch information. An apiarist can still make honey without knowing that my governmental pogroms are eliminating the weak and fungal strain of Welshness from our virile Pakeha gene pool—well, that is assuming he isn’t Welsh himself! I take it you’re not Welsh Guy. You just look so Flemish.

The point here, Guy, is that democracy is a liberal invention, and even by Murdoch buying into the John Key and John McCain electoral bid, he was voicing the dangerous liberal thought pattern of “people have choice.” No, they shouldn’t have a choice, Guy. Tyranny is so much more simple and easier to enforce. Democracy and liberalism are dangerous, as they inspire governmental weakness, and as I wrote earlier, I want things throbbingly rock hard. By publishing on these so-called “elections” Murdoch is playing a game with people’s safety. Much like suicide, information about elections should never be published, let alone published in such a positive light.

Guy, in short, we conservatives always err on the side of caution. Of course you should trust us with knowing what’s best without out even knowing what it is that needs to be thought of as best. Simply, Jeanette Fitzsimmons wouldn’t save a Chinese child from a burning building, but she’d make sure that you knew she could have. While I and my shadow government would have secretly made sure that it had fire extinguishers and access to a wasteful twelve-month course of herceptin, just to be safe. Publishing—it’s evil and wasteful Guy.

Blind Rebuttal

Sweet muddled Guy,

Your point that Lillian Gish is the “it” girl of the naughties has much merit. I believe that her mouth shows a yearning to be covered in an infinity of kisses and her eyes break both my heart and my waters. I know that you would marry her, and I’d gladly grant my blessings, but I must let you know this—Lillian was the “it” girl of the naughties. The Nineteennaughties, not the Twentynaughties. Oh Guy, she’s long dead and mouldering by now. Oh Guy, I never wanted to hurt you, just educate you on media bias.

By Nic Sando

What I don’t get though, is how Sarah Harpur—already one of the funniest women in New Zealand who just needs a little more material before she will explode bloodily and blondily—managed to not include her son singing along to her songs into her act. How did she miss this golden opportunity? I sat next to him, as he smiled while she called him a moron and talked about how she should have had an abortion. The child’s a charming little bastard… I assume. His voice was rather light and would require the assistance of a mic, but think about how horrible it would be having a small boy singing about an aging manager. Sarah, when you find this after self googling, know this: he was already word perfect. Damn you Sarah Harpur. Damn you for not exploiting your son.

Look, I would happily go on to write of Cameron Murray who was caught at an unfortunate crossroads with the audience who did need laugh lines and gags. I would also enjoy mentioning Guy Williams, who almost channelled Steven Wright, and how his funniest moment was with a Mabeline cut out that didn’t really fit with the rest of his act, but truth be told, I lost track of what I was writing and drew a picture of the cast. The guy with the poofy hair is called Rhys Mathewson. I wanted to fondle his boofy hair, but was too timid to approach him. For some reason I drew Guy Williams as a mouse.

20–21st March, Fringe Bar

Sampson, 54, claimed her old bones felt the cold more fearsomely each year and this winter is already ramping upto be the worst.

“It’s only autumn, or fall as they say in the United States– the United States of America, not the United States of Belgium, you silly bears. That was only a loose confederation of states for a brief period in 1790! I’m surprised you even remembered back that far with your blippy blip MTV goldfish memories,” Sampson said.

Sampson then rambled incoherently for what one student, Michelle Kennedy, described as “an age longer than the sweet eldritch tang of death itself.”

Sampson returned to her original other point.

“Friends, other students, members of the media and the nice young lecturer man, I don’t mean to alarm you, but over the past several weeks, it has come to my attention that I might not be around much longer. Oh shush, it’s not that I’ll be leaving you alone to face LAWS 121 without my guidance, oh dear me no! It’s just that I might not be among the living anymore,” she said.

“The winter—it is a sentient presence I can feel in my bones,” she said, motioning specifically to her knees, elbows and her grotesquely swollen knuckles. “I guess it’s the water on my knee; the cold sneakily enters my bones; it freezes my knee-water, spreading little diamonds of ice through my body where it bursts and shatters the delicate tissues of my very being.”

She paused and then added “I ache. All the time. I ache.”

She then proceeded to pull another oversized woolly cardigan over her bony frame.

Jane Koh, student representative for LAWS 121, confided in Salient.

“I mean, I guess it’s sad that she’s dying, kind of. Is it okay that I want her to die? Well, I don’t mean ‘die’ die, I mean, I just want Janet to die a little—on the inside? Is that okay?” Koh asked sheepishly.

LAWS 121 lecturer Christopher Lamonica (it rhymes with harmonica) declined to comment on either Koh’s position about Mrs. Sampson or her incomprehensible gibberish, and in a display of apathy so pronounced it would make this sentence make sense, he continued phoning in his lecture as per the course outline.

I waited at the soon to be defunct Espressoholic from 0955hrs to1027.39hrs, a full 27.25 minutes longer than he said he’d be there by. Now as all journalists know the high code of journalism, which was first codified by Journo of Alpes Maritimae in 64c.e, and states that an interviewer should forgive a new parent —which Flores is—22 minutes of tardiness to an interview, as child bearing addles the mind and misaligns your four humours. Understanding that and knowing how important humours are to both comics and breastfeeding mothers, I gave him those 22 minutes. Willingly Wellington, believe me. In fact out of love and admiration for the waif-like humourist, I gave him a further two. The clock kept ticking though, didn’t it? A full 2.33 seconds later and I was spewing; vomituous bile, that is. I should point out, dear reader, that this statement was true on both a figurative and literal sense. I was asked, politely yet firmly, to leave the coffee shop and thanks to the incomprehensibility of the land lords I shall probably never return. Adios and adieu to you, you centralised coffee shop.

Now, a better journalist than I could, and indeed would, attempt to reconnect with his subject, or mayhap search out an even better interview. Not I, however. Armed with Journo’s creed I decided to do the interview alone with the help of my favourite acid alternatives—passion fruit flowers with just a light dusting of PCP. Realising that now I had evacuated my stomach, I fled to La Casa Pasta, where I was to dine on a light luncheon of creamy pasta and comic words. Who was Flores, and where was he now? Strung out, I looked down towards my food. ‘Blub flub’—was that just the sound of my over-sauced fettuccini cabonara settling into its wide bowl or was Flores trying to compel my interest with tales of MC Jerome Chandrahasen’s impeccable yet restrained comic appeal? I was too fat and too hungry to find out.

Another flower, and I was out, prowling the streets with my good buddy Derek ‘The Bucket Fountain’ Flores by my side. “It was vital”, he said, spitting over everyone, “that you mention that Sarah Harpur is very amusing, and rather cute.”

“Fie! Fie and what ev’s” said I, throwing back my head in resentment. Journo was quite clear that I was to control my interview and not let an interviewee lead me. Standing up from my multi-coloured seat, and glowering at the small children nearby I left, chasing the shadow of Flores as pidgeon down the street and towards the bus shelters.

“Please try card again,” Flores’s mechanical yet strangely calming voice erupted from his speakers. “Please try card again.” I was, damn him I swear it, I was. “Insufficient funds.” I almost leapt at him, but I remembered my Journo: ‘we report, or verily, sometimes fabricate the news, though we never be the news ourselves.’ I paused, “Insufficient funds, the Young Guns is only $8 dollars at the door, Insufficient funds.” Grunting, I desperately flung three dollars at the bus driver. To calm myself, I fingered my cut out of the heavily pregnant and fantastic light entertainment reporter Francesca Rudkin and bore on towards journalistic integrity. Oh Francesca, if you can put up with reviewing Neil Diamond concerts, and the grasping hands of Paul Henry, I can deal with this hypnogogic subject. “Nic”, Derek talked to me now through the screeches of the bus’ ancient shock absorbers, “Why don’t you run away with me? We can live together on my Canadian dirigible and commune with the celestial kitten. We could converse about Del Close and Keith Johnstone!”

“Oh Derek”, I shrieked, and I fell into his arms, a marshmallow cradled by a spider. We lay, his gentle spooning turning into a loving fork, while I gazed out to the sunset watching worlds collide collapse and eventually…end.

[NB- We contacted Derek Flores as part of Salient fact checking procedure and he said that he hasn’t talked to Sando since a food poisoning incident at the Chit Chat Lounge in early February. Sando was too busy batting away imaginary bees and cutting himself with glass to comment. The magazine is currently reviewing why he was allowed to interview anyone anyhow. Possibly, it’s because we’re chronically under staffed and under-budgeted.]