Review: Robert "Millsy" Mills

Oh Millsy, Millsy, Millsy.

What are we to do with you?

It’s hard to take anyone who came to fame through Australian Idol seriously. Now, I know, and I assume you know, that he was already reasonably well known around the traps in Melbourne for playing in a band that had a moderate following.

But somehow it seems that despite his existing in the Melbourne music scene outside of Australian Idol, we’ll always know him as the somewhat lame everyman of the first season of Australian Idol – you know, the only series that anyone ever watched. He wasn’t disturbingly Christian, like Guy Sebastian, he wasn’t a whipper-snipper on helium ocker, like Shannon Noll, he was just the dude you’d probably have a few beers with at the pub. You know, he'd probably be a bit of a dickhead, but you’d still hang out with him, because he’d turn up every week.

But then he slept with Paris Hilton.

Suddenly, Millsy became the archetypal little engine that could. How does a F-grade celebrity who was consistently middling in the show that brought him to fame land a multi-million dollar heiress with her own (admittedly very boring) porno?

We shook our heads. We slapped him imaginary high fives. We cursed him under our breath. But the boy had done well.

And he continues to do well. I have it on good authority that he is particularly good as Fiyero in the Melbourne production of Wicked (sorry, I'm not buying an exorbitantly priced ticket just to find out if the advice was correct), and while he did his time on midnight TV, he seems to be hitting his stride as a consistent middle-of-the-road performer.

Maybe Millsy is the archetypal Melbournian musician. He bursts onto the scene in a brash way that will eventually grow to be embarrassing, latches onto this fame to sleep around town, drinking the free drinks while the going is good, only to settle into some honest work that requires him to drop his personality, live within his means, and become a 9-5 artist.

The single greatest thing about Robert “Millsy” Mills is that he’s essentially the glue of the Melbourne social scene. Everyone in Melbourne is only two degrees from the man. It’s true. Think about it. You know someone who knows him, even if tangentially. So, even if the real Millsy is just a man, slowly settling into years of plugging away as a professional musician as a professional musical theatre actor, he’s still the glue of the Melbourne scene that birthed him.

3/5

Review : The Death of The Album

Apparently the album is dead. Or it’s going that way. Its lungs are slowly filling with fluid, and we’re supposed to think back on the good times we’ve had with the format, and feel nostalgic for simpler times as it slowly dies in the corner.

“Remember when the album was still young, and it was basically just a couple of singles, surrounded by cover songs as filler?”

Oh yeah, I remember that, you say, hugging your copy of Please Please Me.

“Remember when the album was an unruly adolescent, testing boundaries, getting a little fat around the edges as the growing pains set in?”

You pull over the milk crate and take out your copy of Freak Out!, The Wall and Blonde on Blonde.

And just as you’re about to pull out Abbey Road, Kid A, Grace, Murder Ballads, Dark Side of the Moon, Illmatic, Low, Never Mind the Bollocks, The Chronic, Nevermind, The Downward Spiral, Led Zeppelin IV, 36 Chambers, Blood Sugar Sex Magick, London Calling, Stop Making Sense etc etc etc, and start really bawling your eyes out, there’s a knock at the door.

The door abruptly slams open, and in stumbles The Album; drunk, barely lucid, muttering to himself. He walks muddy footprints over your carpet, steps clumsily on the records scattered around the floor and slumps into a lounge chair.Drool dribbles from his lip, and he undoes his top button.

“The rumours of my death have been great exaggerated,” he says, smiling dumbly.

And it’s true, you think, if somewhat unfortunate in light of its recent performance; it’s not in the best shape, and it’s definitely seen better days, but the album isn’t dead.

Sure, the sprightly EP (which could be considered the Twitter of musical releases - everything a band is up to in under 160 characters) is a safer bet in these times when people’s attention spans shrink and shrink. It’s also always been the case that you’re going to need a good single or two to get your album off the ground, but the album is still a strong and worthy goal for any band, singer or pop star.

It’s a big ask to make a good album, and it’s a big cost for a record company to back an album, as opposed to a single – more recording costs, multiple singles, ongoing marketing etc etc. don’t get me wrong, I’m not apologising for them - hell, the record company is really the reason we’re hearing the “death of the album”, “online revolution”, “download generation”. Perfect cases for this are the constant re-issues of albums barely a year old – see Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, or the “Deluxe Edition” of Back to Black by Amy Winehouse.

The album has become fat and useless in many people’s hands.

“The Death of the Album” is the product of lazy, hyperbolic journalism. When Pitchfork claims that Kid A is the product of a bygone era when the album actually existed, it’s something they do with full knowledge that album reviews are their main trade. Imagine Pitchfork receiving an album for review in 3 years time, the reviewer flipping it open and thinking, “12 tracks in one release? What the hell is this?”

It’s not going to happen.

1/5

Review: Australian relations with China

Diplomacy should, at its best, be a fluid and pragmatic approach to resolving issues, forming alliances and settling disputes between nation states.

This is all fine and well if you’re, say, America or the UK. You have reasonable amount of history and heft to throw around, your military firepower is significant (even if dated, in Britain’s case), and your standing in the world is established.

But what happens when you’re a comparatively young, tiny nation in, as Jerry Seinfeld so kindly put it, “the arsehole of the world”, surrounded by countries that (excepting New Zealand) can only vaguely be referred to as “democracies”.

What happens if the world’s most populous nation, with a several million strong army, governed by a multi-headed bat-shit crazy dictatorship, fond of jumping to conclusions about “security” breaches and prone to declaring any dissent or even criticism as “terrorist” in nature, is your biggest trading partner?

Teddy Roosevelt’s “walk quietly, but carry a big stick” only applies if your big stick is proportional to the size of the person you are attempting to negotiate with. Australia’s stick is about 32 times smaller than China’s, and it’s not like it’s telescopic, or electrified, or it has some kind of gun mounted on the end of it; it’s just a goddamn stick.

So, Australia’s attitude with regard to diplomatic relations with China is to take the words “walk quietly” from Roosevelt’s advice, and ignore the big stick bit, because the closest thing we have to a large enough stick is an aging superpower on the other side of the world - MacArthur’s feeling on the proposed Australian/US WW2 in this paper is reasonably scary, given the possible modern day parallels.

It shouldn’t be a shit fight to put on the film about Rebiya Khadeer’s life, “The Ten Conditions of Love”, within the bounds of an international film festival on Australian soil. It also shouldn’t be a bureaucratic nightmare to prove the innocence of foreign businessman, or at least plead their case, when it turns out that at least part of the evidence against them is apparently the personal opinion of an intelligence officer speaking outside of their job role.

It would seem that Sino-Australian relations are at a significant low. The fact that it’s come to this over a documentary and the apparently personal opinion of an intelligence officer who likes to blog about international trade in his spare time does not bode well for Australia.

2/5

Review: Pub Trivia

There are people who religiously attend their pub trivia and are dogmatic about rules, dogged in disputes between teams and would probably even be there if the beer taps were dry.

I am not one of those people.

I love my pub trivia because of the fact it doesn’t take itself seriously. We have an observation round, where the questions generally relate to the first two minutes of the fifteen minute clip we inevitably enjoy watching. There is a “Pick the Pub” round, where we are shown pictures of pubs stripped of their identifying signs and asked to work out what Melbourne pub it is.

Possibly most telling of all of the tone of the trivia, is the two questions each week with the title “Bush or No Bush”, where we are shown the upper half of a woman’s body and asked to guess at her modesty, grooming and even (on a few occasions) surrounding foliage via the two options. “Dangle or No Dangle” is similar in setup.

I’ve done the other kind of trivia, and it’s fun too. Not as much fun, and not as encouraging of the purchase of large amounts of Pale Ale and Cider for the table, but still a great experience with friends.

Pub Trivia is not about winning, although it’s nice to come back the next week and not have to pay for your drinks; it’s about making new friends, tying together your existing friends, and embracing the great Australian tradition of drinking copious amounts on a work night while showing off your ability to retain inane bullshit.

It is also mandatory to label anyone who places more than once within a month a “cheater”, because through the haze of alcohol, clearly any ability to maintain consistent intellectual ability must be either blind luck or the product of some bribery, or the fudging of scores.

Most modern pubs would probably die out if not for a regular flow of trivia participants on any given Tuesday. I’m not sure the five old guys who sit at the bar justify your local pub being open late on a Tuesday night.

Plus, if you’re lucky, you might get to see some well groomed genitalia - you will if you go to my trivia, at least.

4/5

Review: New Zealand Reality TV

New Zealand is apparently the most boring place in the world.

Kudos to NZ TV channels for financing original shows, filmed in local towns and suburbs, with local dialect and what are apparently local concerns, but I don’t particularly care if Kirsty from butt-fuck nowhere, NZ, is annoyed by her neighbour’s kids whipping handmade fabric whips all day and stopping her young son from getting his daily “kip”.

This barely-there contentious point between two people on a suburban street was the subject of an entire 30 minute episode of the cleverly title “Neighbours at War”.

Now, beyond the fact that the argument itself is about as interesting as two old people arguing over a bun at a nursing home (actually, that might be next week’s episode), think about the fact that the kids in this particular part of New Zealand are going crazy over standing in their front yards and cracking home made whips. The woman brought in to resolve the tension (apparently from Maori Tv’s “Ask an Aunty”, which sounds incredibly compelling), suggested that the women just wait until the whipping craze is surpassed by the newly imported krumping craze (?).

NZ “Highway Patrol”, “Border Patrol”, “Neighbours at War”, all smack of a country that is somehow even more boring than Australia, at least when put in front of a camera. Beautiful landscapes, the extreme sports/hobbies centre of the world, a country that just invented the fucking jetpack, and we’re watching two women call each other fat dogs over children whipping rolled up bed-sheets.

New Zealand, give those children jetpacks and let them fly from snow-capped mountain tops to battle each other to death with real whips while the two women and the lady from “Ask an Aunty” paint their faces, perform the haka and call for the blood of the loser to rain from the sky. Then you’d have a TV show.

1/5

Review: Tea

Tea, to my mind, is Coffee’s snooty, hormonal sister. Coffee is cool, it gets around any way it can, and it sleeps with a lot of people. You can take it any which way you like, but at the end of the day, it’s still coffee. Coffee can be bad, coffee can be good, coffee can blow a hole in the back of your skull because it has been roasted, ground and brewed to perfection, but at the end of the day, you know that basically you’re getting coffee.

Tea is uppity. It has many moods and flavours. It calls itself by one name one day, and you enjoy it’s company, hit it off immediately, and decide you’re going to change your whole life to drink of it’s sweet lips.

But the next day you think, oh tea, I love you so much, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet, I’ll try you in your “Earl Grey” pant-suit, or maybe your “Orange Pekoe” underwear or even out in your delightful “Russian Caravan” kaftan… Bam! It’s like you and tea never hit it off, and on reflection, this tea chick is actually a fugly bitch, whose lips now taste like burnt newspaper (Russian Caravan), chinese markets (Orange Pekoe) or grass clippings (Early Grey).

Tea is a fickle mistress. You pick your blend, and you stick to it. If you feel adventurous, maybe go with something with a vaguely similar name, and hope for the best. Don’t expect it to taste the same, because tea owes you nothing, and it’s unfair to expect it to be any other way.

The exception to this is Chai Tea, which is coffee for people who don’t like coffee, and are adult enough to not get a hot chocolate at every coffee drinking juncture.

3/5

First Post - The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

So Nick Cave has written a new novel, his first since his debut novel And The Ass Saw The Angel came out twenty years ago (really, twenty years ago? Good Christ).

You would think, that given the fact it has been soooo long, and the fact it’s Nick Cave, that the sky would open up and the ground would a-rumble and the mountains fall down to the ground, a flock of black starlings swooping down to peck out your eyes and so on, and so on…. But it’s really not that great.

I love Nick Cave – in my mind he is Australia’s late-comer Bob Dylan – but this novel is really disappointing.

The main character is an amoral nymphomaniac, a hopeless single father and a wonderfully deceitful (and skilled) salesman. The fact there is little to like about Bunny Munro would not put me off the novel alone, however Cave seems to feel such affinity for Bunny that he ejaculates Bunny’s every sex-addled neurotic thought, page after page, into the novel.

Initially, this helps you to feel all the more repulsed by Bunny, and get a feeling for the character, while readily enjoying the reactions of those around him. Which is fine at the beginning of the book, but by about one hundred pages in you begin to tire of the constant tangents on the size, shape and texture of Avril Lavigne’s vagina (yes, you read right), and just want the actual story progress.

The tragic voice of Bunny Junior, having just lost his mother, and slowly realising just what kind of man his father is (at age nine) could have appeared more often, and the just-on-the-boundaries Horned Killer could been better exploited if handled in a more overt Cave-esque manner.

Not horrible, not great. Definitely not worthy of Cave’s own name…

2/5

Side note: The top images are the three versions of the novel's cover. Apparently US retailers wouldn't carry the more overt Australian cover (far right), and instead went with the image of an actual Bunny.... yes, US consumers are apparently that easily startled.