Dispatches #145: Idiocracies, godwits and clown pants
Thursday, 20 April 2017
Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. I'm Andrew McMillen, a freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane, Australia. No new words this week.Sounds:
John Clarke on Penmanship (109 minutes). Episode 36 of my podcast about Australian writing culture features freelance writer, performer and author John Clarke. John died suddenly on Sunday, 9 April 2017, aged 68. I had spoken to him a few days beforehand, and we had made plans to record a conversation for this podcast while I was visiting Melbourne that weekend.
Since that cannot happen, I am bringing you a special episode based on a day that I spent with John in November 2014, when I was reporting a story for The Weekend Australian Review about the creative process behind Clarke & Dawe, the weekly political satire program that John wrote and performed alongside longtime collaborator Bryan Dawe. As I wrote in my article, Clarke & Dawe was more often than not among the week's sharpest commentary on up-to-the-minute matters relating to Australian politics and public life. Together, the two performers sought to make us laugh while also making us think.
This was a dream assignment for me, as it involved spending a day in John's company as he wrote a couple of scripts, met with Bryan to film the program at an ABC television studio, and supervised the final edits of a two-and-a-half minute program that would be broadcast around Australia the following evening. In between these tasks, there was plenty of time for conversation; at no point did John seem rushed, and he had a kind word and a wry joke for everyone he crossed paths with.
This episode consists of excerpts from some of the writing-related discussions he and I had that day, as well as a few amusing asides. I'd also encourage you to read my article for The Weekend Australian Review, which is called 'In The Line of Political Satire'. I put a lot of effort into the writing and rhythm of this piece because I knew John would read it, and that man rarely wasted a word.
John Clarke: Thanks For Your Time (30 minutes). This is a lovely tribute to John Clarke's life, based on interviews with some of his closest friends and colleagues, as well as his two daughters. I love that this was put together in one week flat, and I hope that the ABC (or someone else) is at work on a feature-length film about John's life and career to be broadcast down the track. He was a special bloke, and I miss him.
S-Town (7 episodes, ~7 hours). The latest podcast from the team behind Serial and This American Life is an immersive, deeply reported exploration of one Alabama man's peculiar life. It is an absolutely fascinating and beautifully told story. I gulped it down in a few days, and I think you will, too. If you get to the end of the second episode and you're not completely hooked, I think there might be something wrong with your narrative glands. Wonderful work.We pay tribute to much loved satirist John Clarke, with moving tributes from colleagues, politicians, comedians & friends including Former PM Paul Keating, Gina Riley, Sam Neill, Colin Lane, Frank Woodley & more.
Brian Reed on Longform (73 minutes). After you gulp down S-Town, listen to this interview with its host immediately afterwards, because it will answer a bunch of the questions and curiosities you'll no doubt have. I particularly enjoyed how much thought that Reed and his colleagues put into the podcast's novelistic style. This is simply a great conversation between two old friends, too.John despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. He asks a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who's allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, sparking a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man's life.
Brian Reed, a senior producer at This American Life, is the host of S-Town. "It's a story about the remarkableness of what could be called an unremarkable life."
Reads:
How Clown Pants Saved My Life by Zach Baron in GQ (3,900 words / 19 minutes). I think Zach Baron is one of the most consistent magazine writers working anywhere in the world right now, and I reckon this is one of his finest works yet. It's about how his fashion sense began to change last year, when his life turned upside down, and he wondered: could you fix yourself on the inside by shaking up what you wear on the outside?
The Bard of Suck by Willy Staley in The New York Times Magazine (4,500 words / 22 minutes). An excellent profile of Mike Judge, the creator of Idiocracy, Silicon Valley and Office Space, among other films and TV shows. So many great anecdotes and moments, but the one that ends this piece might be the best.Last January, after a lifetime on the East Coast, my then fiancée, Amanda, and I moved from New York to Los Angeles and promptly fell to hapless pieces. Our reasons for moving had been sound. She'd been offered a good job out here, and she was tired of winter. We were about to get married–I'd already pledged to follow her wherever she went. Plus I liked the idea of trying something new. So I followed her to Los Angeles. We rented a house on the side of a hill above Hollywood and leased matching cars with sequential license plates. She worked on a studio lot a short drive away, and I worked from home, where I wandered around our house and marveled at the thick silence that had settled in around our lives. One thing no one told us about Los Angeles is that it's one of the loneliest cities in the world. Everyone who lives here knows this, but we did not. Its flat constant beauty summons you outside, and then there you are: outside. You and the coyotes and the palm trees and the guys hoping to get work on How to Get Away with Murder. Neither of us had moved since we were embryos, basically. I kept getting stuck on elemental things, like what to wear. How do you dress when the weather requires absolutely nothing of you?
The Stopover by Robert Skinner in The Monthly (1,600 words / 8 minutes). A very funny piece of writing about spending 12 hours in Singapore airport, which gives rise to an existential crisis.As we took a seat in the back of the Commissary, a restaurant on the Sony Pictures Studios lot, Mike Judge pointed out a man seated two booths away. It was Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony Pictures and former head of Fox's film division, where he oversaw the rocky release of Judge's 2006 film, "Idiocracy." The movie imagined America 500 years in the future, populated and ruled by absolute morons, its infrastructure crumbling, its cities piled high with trash, everyone anesthetized by impossibly stupid television like the hit show "Ow! My Balls!" Though the film finished shooting in 2004, the studio mothballed it for more than a year. When "Idiocracy" was finally released, it wasn't screened for critics or promoted in any other way – there wasn't even a trailer – and it was shown in only seven cities, New York not among them. The studio, it seemed, was fulfilling the bare minimum of its contractual obligations, as if hoping that the movie would just go away. I asked Judge about a rumor that surrounds the film: that Fox spiked it because it lampooned so many of Fox's advertisers, not to mention Fox News itself. Its anchors, in the film, look as if they just walked in from a porn set.) Judge explained that, actually, the movie had tested abysmally with audiences. And because his first live-action film, "Office Space," had become a hit despite initially bombing, Fox figured it might as well not bother with much marketing – that the movie would take off on its own or recoup its budget in the home-video market. But he'd heard the other version of the story too.
Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses? by Melissa Febos on Catapult (1,800 words / 9 minutes). This piece challenged me to my very core, as I am a little obsessive about maintaining my email inbox. Not sure if I will change anything as a result of reading this, but strongly considering it.My trip overseas had been a failure, and not even a spectacular one. I'd gone away only with the vague plan of coming home feeling better. I sat around for days in romantic villas, alone, reading books by the dim glow of mood lighting, bobbed around in tropical waters, and never really worked out what I was supposed to be doing. Any hope for redemption lay on my way home, in that great tourist mecca: Singapore airport. I had 12 hours between flights, and though I had fluffed the trip, I was determined to ace the stopover. In an airport you can be anyone: no one knows your story; they only know you're going somewhere. It helps if you dress for the occasion. At 8.55 am I strode into the terminal with the feeling that I had my whole life ahead of me, probably because I hadn't done anything with it yet. But I was doing my best impersonation of a jetsetter: polished sneakers, my cleanest shirt and a hat from a hotel's lost property. "Transiting, sir?" a woman in uniform asked. I doffed my hat and replied, "Thank you, madam. I'm just returning from Indonesia," without breaking stride.
The Clarke Report by Fenella Souter in Good Weekend (4,200 words / 21 minutes). I read a lot about John Clarke in the last week or so, but none of the published tributes I saw were as good, and as perceptive, as this finely written profile of the man that was published in 2006. I was surprised to learn of his reticence at discussing his parents and his childhood at that point in his life.A handful of years ago, I had a revelation. This was back in the time when I worked very hard to answer all the emails in my email inbox. When I lived in fear of the disappointment of other people. When quelling the impatience of strangers was of higher priority than my own artmaking or sanity. Maybe you live in such a time of your own right now. I was trying to book a writer I admired for a reading series that I curated, a man some years older than me, who has since become a good friend. In my attempts to coordinate schedules and confirm his participation, I sent many emails to this writer. Sometimes, he would respond immediately, along the lines of: "i think that works let me check on smthing." Other times, he would not respond at all. I did not assume that he was an asshole. My minor frustration did not strike him dead. I simply learned that he was inconsistent in his responses. I calibrated my expectation to his inconsistency. I was patient and persistent, and eventually he gave a great reading at my series. Women are not taught to do this. We are conditioned to ever prove ourselves, as if our value is contingent on our ability to meet the expectations of others. As if our worth is a tank forever draining that we must fill and fill. We complete tasks and in some half-buried way believe that if we don't, we will be discredited. Sometimes, this is true. But here is a question: Do you want to be a reliable source of literary art (or whatever writing you do), or of prompt emails?
Commonplace by John Clarke in Meanjin (2,300 words / 11 minutes). Lastly this week, I'd like to leave you with the last piece of writing that was published before John's death. I reckon there will be more to come – I believe his editor had received his next Meanjin column, for instance – but for now, this is a fine insight into the amusements that were tickling his mind near the unexpected end. Just get a load of how the guy constructed sentences, in the below excerpt. Marvellous.John Clarke had left a message with the name of the cafe where we were to meet, the street address, the nearest cross street and a description of the shops on either side, just in case. Our appointment was at 3pm, it was now 3.15, I was late and he hadn't had lunch. Most interview subjects of any note would have been inside perusing the menu at least, perhaps considering a side order of injured self-importance. Instead, Clarke was waiting on the footpath, an unassuming figure in faded blue polo shirt and green trousers, worried his directions might not have been clear. He's that kind of person. Not quite on a par with Mary MacKillop, but the sort of man who helps strangers down on their luck, has many friends and few enemies, takes the time to post you copies of poems he thinks you might like, and doesn't interrupt his wife of 35 years when she's talking. A man of thoughtful nature and large brain. The brain is housed in that familiar, standard-issue head that could be screwed onto a bank manager, a parish priest or, if you added a little stalk, a banana in a pyjama.
A little while back I took some photographs of shore-birds, many of which are migratory and fly to the Arctic in our autumn to breed. Some of the godwits I photographed had orange leg-tags and when I zoomed in I could read the letters and numbers, so I reported these on a website that tracks migratory birds and which tells me these birds were tagged one year ago, in exactly the same place. This means that during 2016 they flew from here, over the South Pacific and southern Asia to China, where for millions of years they have fed on the mudflats in the Yellow Sea between the mainland and the Korean peninsula. Then they fly further north to either Siberia or Alaska. And after the breeding season they fly all the way back. Recently a small transmitter was put in a godwit that flew from Alaska to New Zealand in one go without stopping to eat or rest. As a result more research is being done about how the birds sleep. We used to think that each godwit would take a turn at the front, go like the clappers for a while and then slip back into the peloton for bit of a rest while fresher godwits moved forward and took over. Not the case apparently. Micro-sleeps is the current wisdom.
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Andrew
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