As I will be working on the weekend, I took a day off today. I woke late, I watched a bit of television, and then I caught up with Colin for lunch. We had a vague plan of meeting at the Oxford Street corner of St Vincent’s Hospital, and then heading up to Victoria Street for a nice lunch.
Although Italian was my initial suggestion, as I walked towards Taylor Square, and began to visualise the restaurants on Victoria Street, I remembered Sel et Poivre, a terrific French cafe.
It was Colin who first took me there several years ago. I remember having snails for the first time there, and I remember with fondness their beef cheeks. I’ve been back several times to enjoy the beef cheeks, by the way. Truly memorable. Today, however, I didn’t have the beef cheeks. Instead, we both had the Beef Provencale which was excellent. And for mains, we entree, we shared a really lovely terrine.
World Cup Qualifier – Australia v Japan
After lunch, we visited the nearby French patisserie, as I’d heard they sold Princesstorta, which I mentioned the other week. And sure enough they do, in all its lurid green glory.
A brief visit to a friend who has been ill lately followed, and then I had every intention of finding a movie somewhere. Instead, I came home for a nap.
The day ended with our usual Wednesday night at the pub. “The usual place, the usual bunch”, to misquote an ABBA song. Oddly enough we found ourselves enjoying watching the Japan/Australia World Cup Qualifier which was screening on the big screen. The match was made especially compelling by the tight game. We all decided Tim Cahill was a star, even if he came across as a little inarticulate/difficult (?) in the post-game interview.
There’s something kinda distressing about having workmen on your door first thing on a Monday morning.
You’ve woken up, you’re thinking about the week ahead, you’re trying to make an important fashion decision, and then you have to deal with two strange blokes installing a new intercom.
They weren’t strange blokes, of course. In fact, they were quite nice. And they did their job quickly and quietly. One down, 31 to go, they must haver been thinking to themselves.
And to be honest, I’m pleased I was allocated first thing on a Monday morning and not 10am Tuesday or something like that.
This was before I started school, as we were still living in Kyogle Street. I'm guessing I was about 4-5 years old.
I played football or catchies or a combination of both with my five year old nephew this afternoon.
Well, I threw it to him so that he could catch it. And then he threw or kicked it back to me, which meant I had to run half-way around the yard as some of his hand-eye co-ordination skills are still developing.
He’s going to kindergarten at the moment, ahead of starting school next year. And thus, he still has the great innocence and joy of youth. He’s passed the terrible twos, but hasn’t reached the cynical sixes yet :)
Did I feel in any way clucky? Nah, as he’s quite the chatter-box. Believe me, a small amount of a five year old goes a long way.
I love his honesty though. My family have started to calling me “James” instead of Jimmy, which I’ve been known by for almost all of my adult life. “It’s Jimmy, not James” he keeps reminding them.
I guess they’ve come to a collective decision you can’t be a “Jimmy” when you’re 44 years old. I quite like, however, having a name that my family calls me that no one else does, except perhaps when they’re being sarcastic.
It’s part of that bond you have with your family, but not your friends. And equally you have a bond with your friends that you don’t have with your family.
So today, we just hung out. We watched some television. We went to the supermarket. I renewed my Worker’s Club Membership, we visited some relatives. Nothing much in particular, but rich in many ways.
“I hadn’t realised it was so soon after his death when the book was released”, I told my friend. We had just been to see a screening of the movie version of “Holding The Man” at Sydney’s Verona Cinema. We were right in the midst of the film in many ways. St Vincent’s Hospital. “The Wall”. “I could lead a walking tour of the area covered in the film”, I joked. A couple of people at the pedestrian crossing laughed out loud. At the end of the film, the credits tell you Timothy Conigrave completed the book at the end of 1994 and died ten days later.
Buying that book, sometime in 1995, is one of my first memories of moving to Sydney. As I wrote a few years ago…
When I first moved to Sydney one of the things that most impressed me about the place was the late night book-store, Ariel. Having spent all of my life in the country (I include my four years in Brisbane in that), I’d found myself suddenly living in Australia’s largest city. And one of the great things about that was that I could walk up to Oxford Street and purchase a book at the oddest hours.
I swear it must have been about nine o’clock on a Tuesday night when I bought, “Holding The Man”, because I’m pretty sure I was late for work the next day. It was sometime in 1995, though I’m not exactly sure when, when I walked to Oxford Street, bought the book and came straight home to read it. It must have been three or four am when I finished reading the book.
In such a short period of time I had never experienced so much laughter and tears, as the story of Tim and John was revealed to me. From their furtive teenage sexual encounters to their deaths from AIDS in the early 90s, it was such an incredibly well told beautiful story, made incrediblY strong by its absolute authenticity. Indeed, it was an authenticity which cut a swathe through the emotions of so many of my peers.
A few years later, I went to the opening night of the play, and wrote about the apprehension I felt that was soon swept away…
By the play’s end, however, I was in tears. But as emotional as it was for me, I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for those who knew Tim and John. I was sitting next to Noel Hodda, for example, one of the founding members of Griffin Theatre Company which Tim was a part of. Also in the audience was Penny Cook, a close friend of Tim’s, who was referred to in the play. As the play deals graphically with the impact of HIV/AIDS – “a footballer who loses his body and an actor who loses his mind” – it must have been quite harrowing for them to go over some of those experiences again. Or maybe it was cathartic? But for me it was probably one of the best nights of theatre I’ve ever enjoyed, with a tremendous ensemble cast and faultless direction and staging…
I felt a similar sense of apprehension about seeing the movie. “How can they possibly cover such an important story in a film”, I worried.
Holding The Man
Overall, I didn’t laugh as much (or cry as much) as I did in either the book or the play. But in lots of other ways, I gained some really amazing new insights into the story.
“Tim was a really flawed character”, my friend said, as we walked along Oxford Street. To be honest, before seeing the movie I’d never really thought that before. But there’s a moment in the movie when the lecturer at NIDA says to Tim something along the lines of him always wanting to be the centre of attention, which kinda re-enforces that idea. I also thought the film was far more “sympathetic” (I’m not sure if that’s the right word) towards John, as we watch his sad, slow, drawn out death. Though Tim is there with John to the end, you’re left with an almost incomplete view of how difficult Tim’s own final days must have been.
This is not a criticism of the film. Quite the opposite. It’s meant to demonstrate how the film differs from the book and the play, and how each of these different manifestations has made me think deeply about this story. This is not simply a word for word adaptation of the book.
The script is great, the acting’s great, and it’s beautifully filmed.
As I walked to work this morning I snapped these shots of a wardrobe which has been literring the back laneway.
I can understand why it hasn’t been taken away already, as it’s pretty old and crappy on the surface.
But then as you look closer, you notice the Britney Spears stickers, and you really understand why it hasn’t been taken. There’d be just too much work in getting it looking good, I suspect.
As I looked at the wardrobe I was reminded of my own teenage wardrobe.
First there were Sherbet posters. Darryl, Garth, Alan etc with their hairy chests (yes, even that young) collected from the middle pages of TV Week and TV Times.
They were later replaced by ABBA (posters everywhere), until finally also discovering the delights of Corey Hart (another hairy chest poster from TV Week, or was it Smash Hits).
Discarded wardrobe in the back laneway.
In these days of built-ins, I wondered if the teenage wardrobe still existed as depository of adolescent fantasy and desire?
Or maybe I’m jumping to conclusions? Maybe it actually belongs to a thirty year old gay man?
In other news, I went out for lunch with one of my former bosses today which was great, and my friend Sue has arrived from Melbourne for work for a couple of times.
“I’ll bet it’s on Youtube”, I told my friends at the pub tonight.
It was a story I didn’t know about my them, however, and their mid 80s appearance in a little known video clip by American singer, Meatloaf.
As we reflected on the anecdote later, and why the memory suddenly came back after all these years, we concluded it was possibly because one of them had ordered meatloaf for dinner. Life’s random, eh?
The story, as told tonight, and I’m sure The Best Judge will correct me if I have any of the details wrong… is that back in the 80s, he and another friend were sitting at a bar on Oxford Street together. It was The Exchange, actually, back in the days when the pub had bird cages and all manner of odd things decorating their back room.
A woman was, apparently, walking around the room that night chatting to people, which my friends assumed meant she was selling something.
When she came up to them, however she explained that she was recruiting extras for a video clip being recorded that night at the nearby Paddington Town Hall. “We don’t have enough people” she explained, and that free beer was on offer.
After some discussion, they decided the offer of free beer was more than enough to entice them to catch a cab and participate in what they discovered later was the recording of a video clip by Meatloaf.
Over dinner and drinks tonight, my friends told me about their involvement that night, about their creative contribution to the clip, and how neither of them had ever seen the clip in the light of day.
That’s when I said, “I bet it’s on Youtube”.
Coming home tonight, checking out the clip was one of the first things I did when I walked in the door. Although it’s reasonably grainy, obviously transferred from video to video to video, I’m reasonably sure I can make out my friends in the clip.
Aside from that, it was anotherwise lovely day.
Except for the weather. That was really shitty, of course.
