Week 1: Finding Falls

The first bad thing that happened to me in 2014 happened at 1650 hours on the 4^th of January. I was pulled over and fined $289 by Leading Senior Constable T. Asquith (great name) for speeding. He had a moustache.

The first three and a bit days of this year have been some of the greatest days of my life, as well as the last few days of last year. In mid-November, Alice and Bella, two girls I met in the second half of 2013, asked me to come with them to Falls in Byron Bay and at first I was tentative – I am CONSTANTLY without money but am, somehow, meant to be saving for my trip to Europe in July. “No no no no no” ran my brain's automatic response system. But after asking myself the question “what else will I possibly be doing with myself on New Year's?” I told them I would come, a prudent aversion to sadness willing me to leave the previous question unanswered.

I don't really want to recap the events of the last few days, because I'm not excited right now, and the best time for me to tell stories is when I'm on a role and they seem to come out tied together like a magician's string of coloured handkerchiefs. Coming home in the car though – holy GODDAMN we drove back from Byron to Melbourne in like 28 hours after waiting in line in the FILTHY sweat and dust of the carpark exodus for four hours and then having a five-minute swim in the ocean... coming home in the car I started thinking of my life in Melbourne and the direction it is heading in. I started thinking about comedy specifically, and about everything that I want to achieve this year: Adelaide Fringe, Melbourne Comedy Festival, another comedy trip to Brisbane, France, Edinburgh Fringe, Spain... the only way I can ever hope to cram all of this into one year is to attack this thing head on.

For the four days that we were at Falls; camped out in tents surrounded by beautiful people that quickly became like a small town – for those four days, I felt invincible. I felt like I could do anything, and I don't know how or why, but now that I've accessed that feeling like the greatest, most charismatic part of myself, I need to have it back for always.

It's not funny. It's not even that interesting. I just feel (felt?) fan-fucking-tastic. Maybe I should pose myself a question, because I don't know whether just telling myself “I did it before, I can do it again!” is really going to be enough to maintain the level of excellence I felt within myself for those four days in Byron Bay. The question the question the question... how to bottle that euphoria and take it home with me. I am home again now, and I can already feel it slipping away. I was loud. I was happy. I was laughing. I was smiling. I was charismatic. I was fun. Maybe the reason people go to festivals like that is so that they – we – can have our chance at unlocking that secret door to the best part of ourselves, and letting it out for a few days while we still know how. But I want it BACK. I KNOW I can get it back.

Somehow...

Last year, during the Christmas party for staff, residents, and regulars at Station 59 (the Richmond pub I currently live above) a crossdresser named Mark (or on other days, Cassie) told me in a drunken slur, “I hate your guts mate, I'm cutting your internet off as soon as I get upstairs!” This would seem an absurd threat, if it weren't for the fact that due to the phone line running off of the street and into his room, Mark/Cassie actually does control the internet in our building. He wields this arbitrary power like an iron rod (whoops... PHALLIC!!) of injustice and forces everyone else in the building to pay extortionary monthly prices for use of his rodINTERNET!.. penis

He really did plan to cut off my internet... and that's exactly what he did.

A few days prior to this we had had a heated exchange in the hall where I like to think I – and I'll puff my chest out for this one – “PUT HIM IN HIS PLACE MO'FUKKA!” he left me the following note:

"Taco,
Here are the rules... Pay on or before the 10th of the month, or the internet will be cut off and never restored, PLUS come at me with that attitude you did today I will cut you off for good. I don't care if you think that is fair or not, but this is our new contract.

Mark
oneday [SIC] late and bye bye internet, suggest you start looking for your own."

I have since stuck this note to my wall, in front of my laptop and scrawled over it in pen three words of warning:

“NEVER BECOME SAD”

This is the other side of the coin. For days after that infuriating defeat at the hands of someone who I am SOOOOOO tempted to call my Mortal Enemy, I went around telling everyone what I was going to do to him when I got back. “This is war!” I spitefully proclaimed. How feeble of me, how petty, how just like him – I can hear that spite in my voice, even now as I try to banish it. But at Falls, none of that. I didn't think about it once – the dreadful mess of a situation waiting for me back at home when all the joy was over, and I sit amidst that situation right now. I am currently accessing the internet via my phone; I paid $20 for 1.25GB of extra data this month, and I know I know, that's a terrible fucking deal... if Falls has taught me anything though, (and the debts to my friends and the negative symbol next to my bank balance tell me that it really has to have) it is that there is no place in a happy life for anger, spite, and negativity.

Getting ticketed for speeding was the first thing to bring me back down off of my cloud and god did I hate it, I hated it so much. I DEFINITELY deserved it, and that made me hate it even more. It made me remember that the high I was riding couldn't last forever, but after moping for a while I realized that didn't make me feel any better either.

Smiling is free. And being happy. And laughing. It's all part of a choice.

I don't quite know yet how to actively make that choice, but at Falls Festival 2013/14, I had it clasped firmly in my hands. Now, my only job is to get it back.

Peace, Taco.

Comedy Musings 002

I've been feeling like the last week or two have constituted a relative drop in the quality of my gigs, which is super frustrating... I guess the fact that it's happened during Fringe time isn't really that terrible, and if anything could be seen as a bonus as now more than ever, no one important is watching my sets. This decline in quality may even be because of the fact that it's Fringe time, but whatever it is, I'm going to work through it... NOW.

So first of all I want to say before I get anything else out here; Melbourne Fringe kinda sucks. Well, I don't know how much money they have to work with or what kind of angle they're going for with it, but as far as comedy is concerned, I see little to no point of putting a show on outside of one of the truly established venues. Even though we (Line Up Comedy) are at the Portland – a venue at the heard of festival comedy in Melbourne – very few if any people are aware of our existence. Flyering the streets before shows we might as well be flyering for a regular, stand-alone, ticketed showcase. No one I've talked to knows that the fringe is on, or even what it is. The bars in Fitzroy are conspicuously lacking any Fringe promo posters or even guides, and the laundromat I go to every week, with it's full wall of free promo material, magazines and give-aways, has nothing either. Today on the 109 tram I saw a lonely A5 poster for the Melbourne Fringe in one of the frames on the wall, and rather than assuage my pessimism, it only served to make me feel sorry for the people staking some sort of reputation or hope on this lonely, forgotten carnival. Never mind though...

In the month or so leading up to the Fringe I promised myself I'd stop writing so much and concentrate on making the material I have work well so that I could consolidate a strong ten-minute set. The bits I was thinking of including in the set at the time were:

• Girls: about how I'm never going to pick up doing comedy
  
• Dog: a pun that turns into a rant at the audience about living lives devoid of wonder
  
• Anal: story about writing a bit on the tram and having a girl see the word 'anal' in my notebook
  
• News: “I don't like the news” going into a political bit
  
• Herpes: fabricated story about a friend's new girlfriend, that ends with a strong, jokey punchline
  
• BrisTrain: story about a train billboard in Brisbane that pretends to be intellectual before ending with a dick joke
  

Of those bits, I still do all except the 'News' one, which I had to drop after I tried doing it post-election and discovered that it was only really floating along with the political maelstrom leading up to September 7. 'Girls' is now my opener, after Beau Stegmann and Brad Oakes both said it's a good joke – I trust their judgement and sort of understand their reasoning, but I think I'm still trying to come to a complete agreement with them within myself. 'Dog' and 'Anal' I feel are fairly similar, in that they contain parts that I like very much, but neither ever really fleshed out to become a solid bit to rely on. 'Herpes' started out as my best joke, but lately has been receiving diminishing returns, possibly in part, I've been thinking, due to the fact that I've been getting a bit vague with the setup, or partly because I'm sick of it, or partly because it's a bit blue for no reason, or maybe all of the above. 'BrisTrain' started as a silly idea I had – it took me two months from writing it down before I even tried it – but I'm growing to like it more and more with time and I think it provides a welcome respite for audiences amidst a lot of my rather intense attitudes/jokes/subjects.

So the reason why my gigs have been a bit shit lately though, I still can't quite put my finger on it. I mean, my expectations haven't taken a sudden jump upwards... I don't think they have. They are constantly rising as I continue to improve, but never in big jumps, they just rise to meet my last ten or so gigs and where they have left me. It's possible that not writing so much has left my act slightly stale, although the reason I wanted to stop writing was because I wanted to figure out how to perform more effectively, without the crutch of having new bits to invigorate me. The situation with 'Herpes' is the most interesting, I think, because it's been, and continues to be, a reliable bit, although I think it was working better as a three-and-a-half minute bit with a long lead-in, rather than just a quick one-and-half-minute thing out of nowhere. Launching in to a story about “my friend's new girlfriend” might shock some people and appear bitter and pointless. Maybe that's it?

Also I've been focussing on writing my show – although 'focussing' really is a generous way to term it. I've been thinking about the show a lot, but only in the last few days have I come to some conclusions about what is to be done to resurrect what only a week ago seemed to me to be the flailing carcass of a good idea executed with not enough skill and experience behind it. I just need to work at the thing, and I finally have some ideas for where to start.

So yesterday and today I've written some new jokes, and I'm trying to bridge the gap between my 'material' material and my 'show' material, by writing observational bits specifically for my show. It needs to be funnier, and I need to be working on it week in week out during my spots or the months will fly by and I'll find myself all of a sudden at the Adelaide Fringe with the same show I have right now, and it'll suck, and I'll be embarrassed. And fuck that. Fuck that right off.

Peace, Taco.

The Eve of the Melbourne Fringe

The Melbourne Fringe starts tomorrow, and I finished writing my show yesterday. I'm doing two shows – well three actually, but two have only two dates each, and they're going to be the same thing.

The first is Line Up Comedy at the Portland Hotel, a fifty-minute group show with Dick Wakefield, Brett Blake, Megan McKay and Geoff Setty that will see us doing ten minutes each, every night, with a guest each night (only four of us will be on each show). Because I'm going to the Gold Coast from the 30^th of September to the 5^th of October for a paid gig (gig? I'm standing in front of a tent talking to people for a week for a thousand bucks) though, I'm going to miss five of the eleven shows, when originally we were only supposed to miss two each. That's kind of annoying. Still looking forward to doing those six ten-minute spots, I'm pretty confident with my material right now. Tonight I'm doing a ten minute preview at Voltaire, which I intend to use trialling some new stuff I've written, while opening and closing with the jokes I'll be opening and closing with during Fringe. So that's all looking fine.

The other show I'm doing is '36 Hours', the show I've been writing since the end of MICF this year, and, barring misfortune, will be taking to the Station 59 Free Comedy Fistival in January, Adelaide Fringe in February, MICF in April, and Edinburgh in August next year. This time around, I'm only doing it in a half-hour incarnation, the first of which is tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to finally putting the entire narrative on stage from beginning to end. I've had this thing in my head for the past five months, only being able to trial certain parts of it five to seven minutes at a time, so playing it all out is going to do wonders for the form, structure, and hopefully, the jokes. I only finished writing this thing yesterday, so I'm not really expecting fireworks... or any kind of works to be honest. The writing has been a huge task, and I'm glad that now, as the Fringe season is about to commence, I have finally finished the first draft.

The next three weeks is going to be fucking insanity, I have nineteen (NINETEEN!!) shows between now and the 27^th of September, that's nineteen in fourteen days, including one night of three shows. It just occurred to me literally five minutes ago that I haven't made plans to see any shows myself, which I should probably do to get out of my narcissistic little bubble for a second, so I think tonight I might have to scoop up a Fringe Guide and make some plans to that effect. Also I just realized I haven't got my Fringe Pass yet. Fuck. COME ON! I guess I haven't been thinking that much about the festival in the lead-up, too busy writing my show and doing spots and writing new material and performing and worrying about jobs and places to live and food and money and my room and drinking and clothes and writing these blogs and why don't I eat more seafood?

About to go out flyering for the Situation Comedy Festival, which I'm lumping in as part of the Fringe, even though I know Alan would kill me if he ever knew. But he doesn't, and he won't, so there. Take that Alan. Why don't you go and rape somebody.

Peace, Taco.