Yarn: Stories Spun in Brisbane

Here is the "more information."

Six "tellers," including yours truly, will be performing live, unscripted, true stories at Dowse Bar in Paddington this Thursday night.

Yarn is modelled on "The Moth" in the USA and this will be their first ever event.

Things get going around 6:30-7pm. I've heard some of the other stories and I'm actually really excited just to go. If you like, come and have a few drinks and listen to six people being either very brave or very stupid.


For full info have a look at the Facebook event and RSVP :)

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."

The history of the Disney company could be a lesson in smart business, but could just as easily not have been.

It was originally called the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, founded by brothers Walt and Roy Disney in 1923. Or should I say Roy and Walt Disney? Roy was the older brother after all.

Poor old Roy.

Between the 1920s and 1930s Disney was a marginal but reasonably successful company. They specialised in animation and made the transition to sound with the development of the Mickey Mouse shorts. Walt himself was the original voice of Mickey Mouse.

As we know, in conjunction with RKO Pictures they made the world's first animated feature film, Snow White, in 1937. Before its release, critics called the film "Disney's Folly." Both Roy and Walt's wife Lillian tried to talk Walt out of it.

But the film was very successful. Walt received an honorary Academy award and was presented with one full-sized Oscar statuette, and seven miniature ones.

Walt and Roy used some of the profits to purchase a new house for their ageing parents, Elias and Flora Disney. Flora was thrilled with her beautiful new home, but told Walt and Roy that there was a problem with the gas furnace. The brothers immediately sent repairmen to the house, but the problem was never properly fixed. A few weeks later, Flora died of gas asphyxiation. Walt later said he would feel responsible for her death for the rest of his life.

In 1941 they were very close to bankruptcy after the disaster that was Fantasia. Critics thought the film was a masterpiece. Audiences "didn't get it." Although Fantasia is now quite rightly considered one of Disney's most important animated films, it was nearly responsible, along with Pinocchio, for ruining the company.

To make some extra money Walt and Roy resorted to making American propaganda films in World War II.

They also made a snap decision to licence their characters (such as Mickey Mouse) so they could sell merchandise.

RKO collapsed after the war, and the Disney company continued to struggle.

The 1950s and 1960s is perhaps now thought of as the golden age of Disney animation. Unless you are a tacky nineties Disney enthusiast and think The Lion King is the culmination of animated Disney greatness, your favourite Disney films were probably made in the 1950s and sixties. Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book to name a few.

(Of course, that is not counting the development of computer-animation in the nineties and Disney's partnership with Pixar, which gave us the pleasures of Toy Story 1, 2 & 3, Finding Nemo, WALL-E and Up, among others).

But the 1950s was actually a pivotal period for the company because of their earlier decision to licence their cartoon characters. In 1955 Disneyland California was opened, and this and subsequent other theme parks have carried the company's surprisingly unsuccessful film division ever since.

Walt died of lung cancer in 1966. Many people believe he was cryogenically frozen and stored on-site at Disneyland. Many people also consider The Jungle Book (1967) to be the last "true" Disney animation. Roy retired in 1968, but remained involved with the company. In 1971 Roy planned to open the Disney Christmas parade, but he died of an aneurysm that morning.

Retrospectively, we can see that the success of the company was based on their perseverance, their advantageous use of fairytales with no copyright, their willingness to adapt new technology, and sheer luck. In terms of business. In terms of everything else, Disney did more for children's entertainment than anyone had before, or anyone has since.

Roy's son, Roy Jr., said that Walt and Roy would have loved Toy Story. It was "their kind of movie." 

Pluggity plug.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing "Julian Running," a nautical shadow puppet musical written by my good friend Matt Perkins, and produced by his friend Jennifer Bismire at the Anywhere Theatre Festival.

This is one of the most unique and interesting things I have seen in a long time. The music is absolute genius and the whole thing has this warm, positive vibe, despite the story actually being quite sad and moving, considering it's a musical about a six-year-old sailing on a jumping castle. 

I highly recommend going to see this thing. It's on again this Thursday, May 17 at "Our Place," 299 Brunswick St, at 7pm. 

You can book here or just show up - $8 student, $12 adult. 

I'm going again for sure. 

And now for something completely different...

I have a short non-fiction piece published in Stilts Journal issue 2, Legs like shotgun barrels. It's called "Yours and mine." You can read it online  here.

These are very nice people doing a good thing for writing and reading in Brisbane so if you like, you should have a look at the other pieces too.

Incidentally, here is my first ever mention as a legitimate human being, as per the Stilts April newsletter. Which I realise is probably a pretty immature thing to take a screenshot of, but here we are :)

From one Rhiannon to another...

"I am Rhiannon, the daughter of Hefeydd-Hen, and they sought to give me a husband against my will. But no husband would I have, and that because of my love for thee, neither will I yet have one unless thou reject me. And hither have I come to hear thy answer." 

-The Mabinogion; The Tale of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed.

It seems my namesake was just as much of a fool as I am. 

Ponyboy, Patrick Stump.

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
The leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

                 - Robert Frost. 

True dat.

I'm a hack.

Holy shit, what a horrible realisation. 

Dust

Saying yes is better than saying no, but saying no is better than saying nothing.

"Sitting at the bakery so early in the morning, the savoury smells of the pies and quiches seemed rude, almost obscene somehow. I never could eat in the morning; I was strictly a orange juice and coffee sort of person.

Something about being up and out so early both pleased and frightened me. There was pleasure in knowing I was fulfilling some sort of unspoken societal expectation; getting up, purchasing a breakfast-like food item, going to work. The ability to get the most out of one's day is, after all, most commonly associated with being conscious for the largest possible portion of it. 

And yet there was also something distinctly disquieting about knowing that this was the expected routine of life. The short-term satisfaction I felt at being able to say I'd gotten up early, eaten a Danish and bounced off to work was acutely marred by the knowledge that I was, even now in my apparently reckless youth, feeling the pressure of some cosmic push towards chronic, methodical sameness.  

I am approaching a time of life where my friends are starting to talk about security, investment, insurance, ownership. Please don't let me have any of these things. I don't want them. In fact, I'm disgusted by the thought of them. Life is not supposed to be safe, and a prison of possessions, while probably keeping you safe, will also slowly eat away at your lust for life until your only purpose is to maintain. Maintain your ownership of useless stuff, maintain your security, maintain whatever it is you've always had and always known. 

No. No thanks. I'm not doing that. Good stories do not have their characters sitting on piles of electronics and expensive clothes and getting up to go to work at 6am every morning. So no. I'm going to to do something else." 

Any word, said enough times, will eventually turn to nonsense.

That's not my name...

Well, yeah, it is. 

Just a thought...

I should probably stop using Corel photo editing software from 2006, shouldn't I? 

Recent memory of the week.

Say what you want, I really dug last year's Bonds Christmas campaign. 

Honesty and Empathy walk into a bar...

I ended my day picking gravel out of my hands and washing glue out of my hair. 

[Thobias Fäldt].

I'm getting so much worse...

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Ancient Greek. I can't even explain how much this item is everything I am as a human being. 

Self series pt. 2; Headpaint.

In my adolescent glory days of wannabe scenester-wank-fuckerdom, I used to dye my hair a different colour every few weeks. I completely disregarded years of careful blonde foiling at my ridiculously expensive hair salon one night and dyed the whole thing black because my boyfriend wanted me to. In retrospect, it wasn't a good look, but such is that time in everyone's lives I suppose. Unfortunately I chose this ill-fated moment to have my ten-year passport photo taken. Good move.

After the black I left it alone long enough for that to fade to a perfectly acceptable shade of brown, but after aforementioned boyfriend dumped me I went on what I now understand to have been a misguided hair-dyeing binge in an attempt to regain control over my life. I started by putting a few orangey-blonde streaks in my hair which probably didn't look too bad compared to what I did next, which was to bleach my whole hair about five times in one week so it went from being practically black to completely blonde. Well, almost completely. I'm pretty sure I gave myself actual bleach-poisoning in the process.

I realised how frighteningly generic I looked like this and made the inexplicable choice of dyeing the whole thing pink. I looked like some awful travesty of a 90s pop star. So that didn't last long either and I put it back to brown for quite a while after that.

For the next few years I basically left it alone. The brown faded and I started dyeing it somewhere pretty close to my natural colour, which is a sort of mousey honey-blonde-brown sort of thing. Just after I turned 21 I dyed it red and that's what it's been ever since.

As a result of all this my hair is now totally fucked. It won't grow. It won't take colour. The back fades so much faster than the front that a week after colouring it it looks like I've dipped it in peroxide. I know I should just cut it all off and start over, but honestly I just can't bring myself to give up on four years worth of wishful thinking.

Anyway I just discovered this stuff:

And three weeks after using this shit it's still the same colour all over. I've actually discovered that I miss my weekly ritual of ammonia poisoning and ruining the bathroom. Colouring my hair has become such an integral part of my life, which is weird when you think about the fact that the whole point of it is to change something about yourself from its natural state to an artificial substitute. These days we can choose pretty much everything about how we look. We can have piercings and tattoos, fake tans, fake teeth, fake nails, all manner of plastic surgery, hair extensions, high-heeled shoes, coloured contact lenses; there isn't an area of personal appearance that we can't alter in some way now.

I like this. While I would never personally have most of the things on that list, I think it's nice that people now have the choice to make their outside selves match more closely to their inside ones. In my mind I'm a redhead with a nose ring. In actuality, I'm a blonde with only two naturally occurring holes in my nose, but I get to choose to change this if I want to, and I do.

I think about how unlike themselves my friends with tattoos or coloured hair or whatever would be in their "natural" states, and it leaves me to conclude that the most natural state for any person is the one that most closely matches the way they see themselves. We're lucky now that we get to chase this possibility, and while I doubt anybody ever entirely achieves it, chasing down our real selves is what we spend most of our lives doing anyway, so we might as well look good doing it. 

Not coming out.

Sidenote.

Poor translations and hopeless romantics would have us believe that one of the deeds of Theseus before his defeat of the Minotaur was slaying a giant sea-monster in Megara.

Actually, all he did was push an elderly thief off a cliff. Sciron, the thief in question, would push travellers off said cliff where they would be eaten by a turtle.

Not a sea monster. A turtle. So to thwart Sciron, Theseus pushed him off the same cliff, where he was eaten by the same turtle.

Theseus was an idiot. After he slayed the Minotaur, he forgot to bring Ariadne home with him, so the woman who was responsible for his safe passage through the labyrinth ended up being left on a beach to become the bride of Dionysus. Which was not a favourable fate for a number of reasons. Furthermore, before Theseus left to slay the Minotaur, his father Aegeus told him to fly white sails on his ship when he returned if he was successful. Theseus forgot this too, so when Aegeus saw black sails on his son's ship as it returned, he naturally assumed Theseus was dead, and promptly proceeded to jump into the sea and drown himself.

The Greek myths really do favour women. Even the crazy ones like Medea were more adept than Theseus when it came to carrying out a plan.

Don't name your children after male Greek heroes. Theseus forgot about his lover and was responsible for his father's death. Herakles killed his first wife and children in a fit of rage. Jason promised to marry Medea after she helped him obtain the Golden Fleece and had several of his children, but then abandoned her for someone else because she wasn't of noble birth. Don't even get me started on Paris, Achilles or Odysseus.

Idiots, all of them. 

Wish she had.

Maddow for Prez.

No shit.

Incidentally, the album art for Thrice's album "Vheissu" was designed by Dave Eggers.

No shit.