End

I will keep many images from my time in Melbourne...





... including this one of a man reclining in Fitzroy Gardens while fondling his own buttocks.


Melbourne: a classy place full of classy people.

Rewarding

As I bid Melbourne a sad farewell, it seems like to a good time to offer some awards to some of the excellent cafes I've visited:


Best food – Top Paddock. I had the most elegant and delicious version of eggs benedict I’ve ever eaten.


Best coffee – Hardware Societe. Absolutely exquisite; even the foam art was so crisp and immaculate it could have been printed with a laser.


Best wifi – Touchwood. Easy to access, fast, reliable, and so powerful that I could access it from any of the other cafes on the same block. I’m sorry, but holidays make wifi whores of us all.


Best music – Madame Brussels. The home of awful, addictive 80s love songs.


Most innovative menu concepts – Bowery to Williamsburg. They refuse to do the breakfast staples. Except Bloody Marys. I salute their priorities.

Bizarre

On my last day in Melbourne, I walked up to Prahan to visit the famous Chapel Street Bazaar. It's the only place in Melbourne, or indeed anywhere else, where one can buy a bowie knife, a taxidermed duck, vintage racist lawn ornaments, Star War figures missing their capes and light sabres, a Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament stolen from someone’s Rolls Royce, go-go boots or a 200 year old mahogany sideboard, all in the one convenient place.

In the evening my friends and I went to Nevsky, a culinary celebration of everything that makes Russia great. So... vodka, basically. The food was fine, the waitress was mischievous, and the spiced ginger and honey vodka was copious. And very good. Sadly I knocked my final glass over with the carafe, causing me to say a Very Bad Word out loud in a crowded restaurant, and thus revealing that I'd had quite enough. In my defense I'd only had about three shots, but that was on top of our pre-dinner cocktails. And our pre-pre-dinner cocktails.

Okay, so my defense sucks. I'm allowed some leeway on my final evening in Melbourne.

Contrast

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the NGV is hosting a major exhibition of works by Andy Warhol and Ai Wei Wei which is THE cultural event of the moment. As I'm leaving tomorrow, I grabbed my chance yesterday to see it.


It was totally cool.


In the course of his career, Warhol experimented with many different art forms, and viewed in its entirety his body of work attests to his genius as an artist. Sure, anyone could film the Empire State Building for eight hours and call it art, and we might decide that they’re just a plenteous wanker. But Warhol worked with film, paint, collage, drawing, screen printing, photography, text and what can only be described as “thought”, and managed to make intriguing and insightful pieces in each medium. The confidence evident in his embellished screen prints, along with his early sketches and watercolours, shows that he was definitely a true artist, not a charlatan.


The exhibition was clever in juxtaposing his work with Ai Wei Wei’s. The Chinese artist has many of the same influences, the same varied mediums, and a similar fascination with basic cultural iconography and notions of multiplicity. The philosophical parallels of Warhol covering portraits of Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus with diamond dust and Wei Wei imprisoning a thousand year old statuette in an empty Absolut Kurant bottle are clear.


Not content with only experiencing the sublime, I managed to insert the ridiculous into my life later that evening as I attended a cabaret show featuring leggy singer/dancer Rhonda Burchmore and local drag queen Trevor Ashley. I wouldn’t have gone ordinarily, but I was with a group of friends and we’d had a few drinks, so I bought a late ticket and followed them in.


While it had a few laughs, the show was basically terrible. The jokes that weren’t crass and vulgar were ancient when music hall vaudevillians did them. The sound was mixed by hitting the mixing desk with an old shoe. Burchmore and Ashley shouted where they should have sung and stomped where they should have sashayed. Even the costumes seemed to be badly put together and perpetually on the cusp of falling apart.


But I still enjoyed myself, mainly because of the company. Since I’d bought my ticket just an hour before the show I couldn’t sit with my friends, but I ended up being seated right in the front row. Enter Jocelyn and Jared, the platonic couple in the seats next to me. Both were a little drunk and naturally boisterous before the show, but when Burchmore and Ashley came onto the stage, Jared went into some sort of wide-eyed, gay diva meltdown. He was like a camp, flamboyant child who’d fallen into a vat of sugar, climbed out, then promptly fallen into another vat of red food colouring, then received a basket of adorable puppies. His squee when Burchmore first strolled onto the stage in a beautiful tight sequined gown was audible throughout the entire theatre, and possibly in other theatres nearby. He guffawed at every lame gag, stomped his feet with every chorus, and constantly turned to face me and Jocelyn with an expression of ecstatic delight, as if to check that we were witnessing the same orgy of fabulousness that he was. Which we clearly weren’t. But while his orgasmic enthusiasm was irritating on one level, but also kind of infectious. When I found my friends after the show, I discovered that I’d actually enjoyed it more than they had, mostly because I’d been breathing in second-hand besottedness from Jared for the last ninety minutes.


My friends were scathing about Jared’s behaviour, which apparently was visible from every row, but I found him so amusing that I took a selfie of us at the end to commemorate the evening. And he, naturally, was delighted beyond all sane reason to oblige.

Civilisation

With a couple of hours to kill later yesterday afternoon I dropped into the State Library on Swanston Street. Besides untold numbers of books and glorious Victorian architecture, the library also has a nice little art collection themed around Melbourne's history.


I hadn't fully realised that Melbourne was so young, nor that it grew so fast. In 1836 Melbourne consisted quite literally of a dozen huts on a hillside. A mere 50 years later, in 1886, trams were rattling back and forth in front of the grand public buildings that still stand today. It boggles the mind how quickly Melbourne blossomed, and how much money and determination was required to make it happen. In the reign of one queen, it went from kangaroo-riddled bushland to huge neo-classical buildings and public transport networks.


You can see why Melbourne is still considered one of the most liveable cities in the world. Outside the grandeur of the State Library, people lounged on the terraced lawns, talking, reading books and tapping away at laptops. A busker played sultry music with a guitar and an oversampler while comedians joked with couples as they handed out flyers for their shows. Beyond them, trams carried people up and down Swanston Street, and overhead the lights in skyscrapers twinkled down. It was a vision of a peaceful, prosperous, harmonious civilisation in action.


Mind you, there are two Melbournes, which a friend defined as the Melbourne within the tram network and the Melbourne outside the tram network. I’ve only ever visited the first Melbourne, the Melbourne of the Comedy Festival, jazz clubs, laneway cafes, 19th century terraced houses, hipster barbers and twenty different takes on eggs benedict. The Melbourne outside the tram network is… well… Perth. Suburbs, shopping centres, cheap Korean cars, Kmart clothes and obesity. Basically, the Melbourne I’ve experienced is a lovely, stylish bubble twenty kilometres in diameter, outside of which dwells the sad, sordid reality of most Australians.


But within the bubble all is good. As evening darkened into night I met up with a friend to go to Bennetts Lane. I visit Bennetts Lane every time I come to Melbourne, and it is always a revelation. On an ordinary Thursday night, with an audience of maybe fifty people, of whom only a quarter appeared to have bought tickets, we heard a fabulously talented nine piece jazz band playing a mixture of standards and their own compositions. Band leader Gianni Marinucci played an exquisitely controlled and soulful trumpet. The alto saxophonist was a bit of a showboater, but otherwise all of the band members played with flawless beauty, in a way Perth only sees once in a blue moon, at great expense, when the stars and fates align.


But in Melbourne at Bennetts Lane, it’s just another Thursday night to fifty people.

Ghettoed

I’ve moved from the apartment in Abbotsford to a friend’s place in Elsternwick. It was a fairly easy trip – I just boarded a 78 tram at its northern terminus and got off at its southern terminus and walked a little way further. The only difficulty occurred as I was walking to the tram and the heel came off my shoe. In what may be my most ghetto moment ever, I found myself sitting on the curb in the carpark of a liquor store unpacking all of my personal belongings from my suitcase rooting around for another pair of shoes, struggling to secure random pairs of underpants before they blew away down the street.

Privilege

I went out with some friends last night to catch some more comedy. I decided on Paul Culliver, a young stand up comedian who won the Comedy Award at the Perth Fringe Festival, which suggested that his show might not be disappointing and unfunny.


As it turned out, this was merely a suggestion.


I'm not quite sure how Culliver won the award for exactly the same show as he was presenting in Melbourne, given that his show was worse than any of the comedy performances I saw at Perth Fringe. Did he blackmail someone? Offer sexual favours to a judge with a fetish for physically lackadaisical suburban youths? Or (and I think this is the most likely reason) did he luck onto the rare Perth judge with exactly the right level of PC sanctimony and self-loathing to find his show dazzling... although not actually funny in any accepted sense.


There's something depressing about a cosseted white boy presuming to lecture an audience on white privilege and, in the process, mansplaining and whitesplaining sexism and racism. Far from the wryly humorous speaker of truth he no doubt imagines himself to be, he came across as a pampered little prince who'd never realised that his way is not the only way and his realisations are not groundbreaking, except perhaps to mummy's bridge friends.


The most ironic thing is that he probably took a place in the Festival from a non-white person or a woman who could have told us about racism or sexism from the perspective of someone who'd actually experienced it. Talk about appropriation.


Fortunately after that the night perked up. I was taken to a restaurant accessed by some back stairs off a laneway, which turned out to specialise in rotisserie chicken, like a Nando's reinterpreted by the cool kids from an art college. I didn't catch the name, which is unfortunate, as I'd like to recommend it.


This was followed by drinks at Melbourne institution Siglo. Siglo is a rooftop bar on the fourth floor of a Victorian building on Spring Street, an adjunct to The European restaurant. While we were there the staff silently retracted the roof, offering lovely views of the treetops, Parliament House and Parliament Gardens. My friends and I dropped by for a nightcap and ended up staying for several.


It saddens me to think that a place like Siglo wouldn't survive in Perth. I remember glancing at my watch and realising that it was nearly midnight on a Tuesday, but the bar was still thronging with people chatting, laughing, drinking martinis and smoking cigars. Melbourne is not by any means a 24 hour city - there are only a handful of 24 hour supermarkets, and good luck finding a tram after midnight - but in the romantic comedy of Australian urban life it's like the manic dream pixie girl played by Zooey Deschanel to Perth's uptight conservative bumbler played by Michael Cera. Even if Siglo were somehow magically duplicated into one of Perth's few remaining buildings older than Gangnam Style, by 10pm they'd have shut down the espresso machines and locked up the liquor cabinets, and by 10.15pm they'd be calling security on the people who hadn't left yet.


In fact the only place less likely to survive a cross-Nullabor transplant is Madame Brussels. Which saddens me even more.

Progress

It seems to me that Melburnians move about their city in a daze. I frequently see cars dawdling away from the lights as if powered by a lethargic tortoise. People walk out of buildings then stand in the centre of the sidewalk, contemplating the universe, in a way that would see them flattened in a less genteel city like New York. When the lights change and the green man flicks on, pedestrians stand there and slowly absorb the situation, then meander across the street once no better options make themselves apparent.


The good news is that I can cross the city like a lightning bolt. By the time the typical Melburninan has finished their conversation and stepped off the pavement to cross the street, I’m already on the other side and halfway down the next block. Then, unfortunately, colliding with someone who has just exited a building and is wondering what life will bring them next.

Set

Yesterday I had to move out of my neat little flat in Richmond and into a friend’s spare room in Abbotsford. It’s all part of making this holiday affordable, but it was a little sad since I enjoyed having my own private space, beholden to no one.


The good news is that my friend has a boxed set of BBC Jane Austen adaptations, so I’m getting my saucy Regency shenanigans on.

Alienation

Yesterday's breakfast involved a walk to Hardware Societe, a beautiful French café serving French-inspired food. It was probably intended to be the sort of place where the affluent local foodies would congregate for breakfast, and the fashionable Melbourne ladies meet for lunch. Instead, it seems, the majority of the clientele are status-obsessed Chinese tourists, who noisily slurp their gently sauteed spinach and stab at a croque madame in bewilderment. The cafe must be making money beyond the dreams of all avarice, but instead of an elegant salon it’s a loud, cramped, harried space surrounded by stony-faced crowds who are mainly there to tick it off their list and get on with their day.


It’s a shame, because my French toasted brioche with blueberries, frosted almonds and salted caramel was beautifully executed, and the coffee is easily the most exquisite I’ve had in Melbourne – quite an achievement in this coffee-savvy city.


In the evening I returned to the Centre for the Moving Image to see the 2014 Spanish film ‘Amor Eterna’, a deeply unsettling story of generational conflict, alienation, rebellion and, since this is a Spanish film, hot sex. I’m very glad I saw it. Not only was it a film exploring themes and a story that no English-language film would attempt, but it was beautifully shot with long, almost static but gently closing in shots of activities both frenetic (a couple having sex in a parked VW Polo) and mundane (a girl washing up in a stream). It also had an exquisite structure, which constantly gave indications that something creepy and horrible was going on in the background without revealing what it actually was until the final minutes.

Changing

As Richmond, like all neighbourhoods, gradually evolves, the outlet stores and discounted boutiques along Bridge Road are slowly vanishing. Apparently the land is so valuable now that the 19th century shopfronts are being gutted down to their ornate facades and five or six storey luxury apartment buildings are bursting up out of them like an alien out of John Hurt, only with German appliances and designer door handles. In twenty years’ time this area could be populated solely by workaholic yuppies and Foodara riders.


However some of the old clothing shops remain. I went into one today in my search of a new smart casual jacket, where I was served by two young but old-school voluble Italians in tightly fitted shirts, who gushed as only Italians can about the marvel that is a $400 deconstructed burgundy sportscoat.


I ended up buying a very nice dark charcoal jacket made from a thick, soft corded cloth, because it was just what I was looking for, it was on sale, and old-school voluble Italians really inspire one to wear beautiful clothes.

Fidgetty

Yesterday I wandered down to the National Gallery Victoria to take in their permanent art collection. The NGV is currently showing a blended exhibition of works by Andy Warhol and Ai Wei Wei, and Melburnians are all, without apparent exception, obsessed with it. However I’ll be attending that next week. Today was just about acquainting myself with the free bits – the 600 year old religious icons, the delicate 300 year old Venetian glass that has miraculously survived the centuries, the exuberant 19th century oil paintings with literally more square meterage than my apartment, the 20th century masters and the 21st century indigenous collection.


Like all modern public galleries, the NGV has a school holiday program, because apparently having hyped-up little kids rampaging through a hall filled with defenseless 13th century artworks is a great idea. The rarified hush of the fine art gallery is somewhat broken when it’s punctuated by children screaming at the top of their lungs, whether in joy or indignation or anything in between.


I noticed one woman (wearing yoga pants in the NGV because you never know when you might need to Salute the Sun in front of a Caravaggio) as she called out to her upset daughter and revealed the child’s name to be Maisie. I wondered why all fashionable little girls these days appear to be named after Edwardian scullery maids? You just know that Maisie’s next activity was going to be babyccinos with Millie, Tilly, Elspeth and Dora at a local café, making life miserable for some waiter with a man bun.


In the evening I was invited to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image to see ‘Querrelle’, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, and the only film ever to be shot entirely inside Jean Paul Gautier’s head.


A handsome sailor in an improbably low cut singlet goes through something of an existential crisis, alternately stomping taciturnly around the streets of Brest and having wild bouts off histrionics. Then he murders one of his fellow sailors for some ill-defined reason. But people seem willing to look past that, because he’s hot.


Meanwhile a construction worker flirts madly with the younger brother of the girl he’s supposedly keen on, to the extent that his fellow workers mock him. He responds by glassing his supervisor in the throat.


We’ve all been there.


Investigating these two murders is the local Inspector. However, he’s more fond of sitting at the bar in the local bawdyhouse flirting with the owner, while wearing an open leather vest and a leather hat with Police written on the front - apparently in Brest you can qualify for a job just by hiring the kinky version of the uniform at your local Sinsations store.


Querrelle is a surreal film, and has a certain beauty in its use of light and its evocative stagey set, but there’s a limit to how many scenes of actors reciting portentous dialogue in artistic poses an audience can take before it gets fidgety. It’s the quintessential art house film. Stylised gay sex? Check. Pretentious narration? Check. German and French involvement? Check. A famous but elderly actress playing a floozy? Check. Audience laughing at moments that probably weren’t meant to be funny? Check and check.


Afterwards I finally got to visit one of Melbourne’s cocktail bars, Eau-de-Vie. There I drank a cocktail made with bacon bourbon and blood orange marmalade out of a ceramic skull… if only I’d been wearing a leather bus conductor’s uniform, I could have been in a Fassbinder film.

Beastly

Melbourne is finally treating me to a healthy serving of its famous rain. Somehow the city just makes more sense when it’s wet, grey and gloomy, rather than bathed in sunshine and heat. Nothing worse than a sweaty broiled hipster, after all.


Speaking of hipsters, I treated myself to a hipster haircut and beard trim yesterday. You know you’re getting a proper hipster haircut when you’re sitting in a space filled with raw wood and exposed brick and the barber offers you a cider before getting out the scissors.





Beef’s is named after Beef, the owner’s lovable couch-sized mastiff. Beef’s face adorns the signage, and the beast himself spends his days dozing in the window, snoring like an idling tractor. As a piece of marketing its brilliant and, apparently, entirely accidental: the barber just didn’t want to leave him at home all day.


I came out immaculately shorn and smelling like four different kinds of manliness.


In the evening I went to another comedy show, ‘She Was Probably Not a Robot’ by the charmingly kooky Stuart Bowden. The show is basically a loose tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic world shot through with expertly improvised floundering. Bowden has a warm and goofy stage persona that makes it impossible not to like him, even when he’s just capering maniacally around the stage, or beating me over the head with an air mattress, or telling random audience members how they’re going to die (head falling off while brushing their teeth, in one case).


I ended my evening with a quintessential Melbourne experience: eating late-night Anzac biscuit gelati in St Kilda while being shouted at by a homeless lunatic about deodorant.

Copped

Last night I ventured into the Comedy Festival again for Police Cops, a high energy, exquisitely choreographed mockery of the clichés and formulas of American cop dramas. There’s the older brother/father gunned down before the young hero’s eyes, the slow motion flying from an explosion, the jaded ex-cop whose faith in humanity is restored by the hero’s idealism, the authority figure who betrays them and, of course, the casual racism.


We entered that macho, vaguely homoerotic reality when manly men do manly things and crack their own tough outer shells and learn to share their entirely manly feelings (a love for socket sets, or something). They raise a barn, they ride horses, and they fight bad guys… and rip their shirts off at every opportunity. The funniest part of the show, apart from the occasional slip in the choreography that sent props flying or left someone with their shirt on backwards, was the fact that two of the performers had perfect six pack abs, but the third, while no fatty, didn’t. When he went into one of his shirtless hero poses, he would hold it just a little longer than the others, flexing just a little bit more to make his muscles pop, catching the audience's eyes as he grimaced with the effort, thus breaking for fourth wall for a second and underlining the ridiculousness of it all.


At the end of the performance they were all drenched in sweat despite the chilly Melbourne evening. I only hope they washed their Old Glory underpants and cat costumes before the next show.

Thwarted

I had breakfast this morning at Three Bags Full, an establishment refreshingly devoted to the culinary power of fat. There was spinach sautéed in butter, mushrooms roasted in herbed oil, and bacon so crispy it could be used by one of those old time radio sound effect guys to mimic walking on autumn leaves.


They had slightly disappointing coffee, but the strange thing about Melbourne is that good coffee is common but good crispy bacon is rare. So it still gets a big thumbs up from me.


Speaking of disappointment, I walked past the local Country Road outlet store yesterday and discovered that they were having an extra 40% off sale, on top of the existing sale prices. Thus a jacket I’d seen for $500 in the city store earlier was only $150 here. Once I got my hyperventilating under control, I made my way inside.


The store was full of the sorts of surly, gimlet-eyed lowlifes who flock to a big sale regardless of whether they actually want heavily discounted business suits or high-end polo shirts. To them, a bargain is a bargain: questions of “need” or “want” don’t enter into it.


I, on the other hand, was looking for specific things, such as a new smart casual jacket. They had them in abundance – beautifully cut and detailed, in fine wools and linens. And naturally, when I slipped them on, they either enveloped me like a collapsed marquee or perched tightly on my shoulders as if I was a midget who’d suddenly Hulked out into a person of normal size. There were John Cena sizes and Peter Dinklage sizes, and absolutely nothing in between.


The only way I could have been more heartbroken is if they’d required me to vote for the Greens before entering.

Worthy

I had breakfast on Sunday morning at Bowery to Williamsburg, a hipster café named after Hipster Mecca. I had poached eggs with creamed corn, smoked trout and hushpuppies, a combination that didn’t completely work, but I salute their ambition.





Any disappointments in the food were compensated for by the presence of rather excellent Bloody Marys - just the right level of chilli and very nicely balanced flavours.


Hipster and Grey did not feel worthy.





In the late afternoon I went out to see a jazz session at one of Melbourne’s many heritage corner hotels. In true jazz tradition, there were about nine musicians who ebbed and flowed on and off the stage, and while they were all superbly talented and played brilliantly, it was clear that they hadn’t actually practiced the songs much. It was especially evident when each song ended, and the musicians, being musicians, wouldn’t stop playing. Instead of a snappy crisp finish, each song meandered along for an extra twenty or thirty seconds as the individual players either tried to get the last note in or just weren’t paying attention.





But I've obviously been in Melbourne too long if I start complaining that excellent music isn't ending enough.

Appearances

I had my Saturday breakfast at Pillar of Salt, where the beautiful people of Richmond come for their acai bowls and skinny decaf lattes. The girls flounce about in lululemon outfits with yoga mats strapped to their backs, just in case they suddenly feel the need to adopt the Downward Dog while crossing Church Road. The boys strut, simultaneously flexing and clenching, wearing rumpled sportswear in a way that suggests they spent the previous hour preening, cleansing and artfully tousling to get that “I just fell out of bed and I still look hot” look.


I had some bircher muesli… sorry, Amazon Superfood Bircher Muesli… at the suggestion of my waitress, who was one of those girls for whom everything is a delightful revelation. “You’re here for breakfast? OMG! No, you can totally sit anywhere! Would you like a coffee? Flat white? That’s super! And here’s a menu! Fantastic! Ooh look a puppy! Squeeeee!”


The puppy in question was a pug, of course, because this is Richmond and pugs are the 'it' dogs of the moment. You can’t throw a rock in Richmond without hitting half a dozen pugs, which probably explains why they frown on people throwing rocks in their neighbourhood. No doubt in six months’ time the poor little pugs will be clogging up the animal shelters as the fashionistas switch over to miniature weimaraners or whatever it is that comes in next.


Mind you, Melbourne is a city that loves its second hand stores, so the pugs may just get passed down the hipness ladder to the suburban classes, along with the fiddle leaf fig trees and rustic industrial light fittings.

Unperth

Yesterday I caught up with an old friend for mid-afternoon inebriation at Madame Brussels, a rooftop bar that takes camp to stratospheric new levels.


You ride up in an unreliable old lift, which opens into a space decorated with astroturf, fake flowers and reconditioned 1960s patio furniture, where you’ll probably hear Barbara Streisand and the Bee Gees singing “Woman in Love” and other cheesy 80s ballads. The cocktails have lewd names like Ginge Minge and Love Juice, and come out in half-litre jugs festooned with fruit and berries.





“Madame Brussels” herself is lavish blonde of indeterminate age whose vocabulary is 90% “darling” and “fabulous”; like Patsy Stone’s cheerful, upbeat Australian cousin. Her waitstaff are all young, athletic and tanned, the girls in swishy little tennis skirts that offer glimpses of frilly knickers as they lean over, the boys in tight white tennis shorts that show that they haven’t been skipping leg day. And if the sun gets too much for you, Madame provides parasols in pastel colours for your twirl over your shoulder. It’s gayer than Joel Creasey and Jedward combined, and more fun than a hot pink barrel of glitter-covered monkeys.

Obscure

A door in Collingwood apologises, possibly for not having heard of your band.

Fashion

Yesterday I ventured north of Melbourne city, where the culture of cool is of a slightly different kind. Whereas Richmond hipsters tend to be condescending rather than hostile, the youth of Fitzroy are edgier and angrier. Whether this anger is spawned by unemployment, housing affordability or the fact that someone over thirty is wearing the same T-shirt as them I couldn’t say.


However, there’s evidence that Fitzroy is slowly losing its grit and becoming Bobo. In certain streets the hard edges are being softened by the whine of electric cars, the giggles of well-mannered children and the gentle soak of money. They have a San Churro and a T2 now. Consequently many of the second hand stores and charity shops have drifted slightly east into Collingwood, where the rents are cheaper and the homeless people crazier, two requirements for an edgy cool postcode.


At a charity shop on Smith Street I picked up a boxed set of Futurama Season 3 and a copy of the classic 1958 monster movie ‘Fiend Without a Face’ for $5.25. Then when I got home I discovered that while I had the movie disc, someone had stolen the Futurama discs from their cases. I don’t know what sort of person steals from a charity shop, but I’m blaming students.


I also went to Shag and bought the World’s Most 1976 Shirt:





It cost more than most of my new shirts. But come on, look at it! Bask in its burnt orange and mission brown pseudo-Hawaiian glory!