Eternal Nightcap

I come across The Whitlams' Eternal Nightcap and it reminds me of being in the car on one of our road trips to the Central Coast where the four of us would sing the whole way. Our favourite song was 'You Sound Like Louis Burdett' and we'd sing it at the top of our voices. My mum would even let us sing the line "All our friends are fuck ups,' and Luca would sing it the loudest because it was the only time we were allowed to swear.

This line, from a young adult novel called Saving Francesca, was something I noted every time I read the book. 

Do you have 'comfort reads'? Books that you dip back into when nothing else seems quite right. Books that hail you like an old, well-loved friend from the shelves on a lazy night? Saving Francesca is one of those for me. I came across it years ago while I was pricing books at the used bookstore where I used to work. A perk of working at a store with no computerized inventory is that there was no record... Reader, I liberated this book (and a few others over the years, I'll admit). And I read it many times, and I still go back to it a couple times a year. I don't know exactly why, except that the author, Melina Marchetta, manages to capture the essence of teenagers: moody, unfinished, loyal, loving, fierce, yearning, angry, funny... 

Here's my book-jacket blurb: 

Francesca, whose larger-than-life mum is suddenly stricken with debilitating depression, suddenly has to figure out the tough stuff by herself: she's in Year (grade) Eleven at a new school, and the crowd she used to run with isn't around to tell her how she should act anymore. After five years of being largely subdued and colourless- just to fit in better- Francesca may just rediscover her real personality and save herself, with the help of some new friends, her large Italian family, and a certain Will Trombal... 

The characters are well-drawn (Marchetta is a teacher) and wonderfully three-dimensional: Francesca often clashes with her uncompromising mother, but also loves her more than anyone else; her two closest male friends are two frequently oafish and crude teenaged boys, but they also show moments of true kindness as Francesca negotiates her difficult year. And although it's a story that could take place anywhere in the world, it also has little touches that set it firmly in Sydney, Australia, which makes it slightly exotic. 

So anyway, I really like this book. And I'd always wondered about The Whitlams, but then I'd finish the book and totally forget to look them up on the internet to see if they were real.

Well... last July, Jay and I took a little road trip on Vancouver Island, and we stopped in at Ladysmith to look at my favourite antique store, and we also checked out a store that was most definitely second-hand as opposed to antique, and they had a tray of used CDs so we pawed through them, and lo and behold- 

There it was. So I paid my 50 cents or whatever it was, went back to the car, and put the CD in the slot...

The lush strings of "No Aphrodisiac" came on, and 3 tracks later, there was "You Sound Like Louis Burdett", with its slightly deranged honky-tonk piano, and bizarre lyrics:

I'm chewing ice and grinning/I'm spewing up and spinning/It's biliousness as usual in my corner of the kitchen/Hey you, lose that friend before we go anywhere/

And of course, the refrain:

All my friends are fuck-ups/but they're fun to have around/Banana chairs out on the concrete/Telling stories to the stars...

There was '90s piano rock, there were more guitar-based tunes, there were songs that owed a lot to The Beatles, there was a song that wouldn't have sounded out-of-place in an Irish bar; there was even a Bob Dylan cover! And I was hooked. 

We played The Whitlams quite a few times over that weekend road trip. Then I took it home and forgot about it, and just pulled it out two nights ago as I was sorting through receipts and papers to get stuff ready to do my taxes. And got pulled in again, the lush arrangements and loopy lyrics providing a cool counterpoint to a boring chore. 

And that's the story of how a novel lead me, after many years, to an album I love. I'm glad I never remembered to look up The Whitlams while I was reading Saving Francesca. It made finding Eternal Nightcap in that grotty second-hand store all the more exciting. 

Here's the song that Francesca and her brother Luca liked to sing at the tops of their voices. Enjoy. 

Get a Job.

The sun, she is beating down as if it's August, already. We're having to take cover in our little suite; shutting the blinds, blasting the fan, keeping the light off in the fishtank to keep its temperature down. At nights, I run a cool bath and soak in my own "tank" for a few minutes; go to bed still dripping with cold bathwater so as to dry off slowly and coolly under the sheet.

I am sporting a fine tan already, even though I slather on the sunscreen. My calf muscles are tight and firm from running. I am relaxed; buying plants, cleaning the apartment, loving the outdoors.
And I am jobless and living off my savings, again.

Having just re-read some of Anne Cameron's muscular Westcoast fiction (anyone tried her? I like it, but it's often pretty depressing), I feel slightly guilty. Guilty in an artsy-fartsy, work-when-I-feel-like-it, live-for-today kinda way.
The fact is, if it weren't for the money my granny left me, I couldn't relax like this. I'd be scouring Craigslist for another low-paying retail gig for the summer. What she left me paid for an online course, a computer program I needed, a few other things. But the rest is being used as I vowed it wouldn't be: groceries, rent, life.
I don't owe much and I don't have dependents. Therefore my life is my own, and if I want to have a lazy summer, so be it. I have time to do publicity for the upcoming Redboot tour (and I've been doing tons), to practice my instruments, to make my place look decent. These are all good things. I can leave on tour, fly to the east coast for a week, have band practice without having to beg for time off from a job that doesn't pay enough anyway.

But there's a little voice that says make the most of this. Make it count. If you have no job, then make sure you're doing the tings you want and need to do. Don't waste this by sleeping in, by getting flabby, by not going to parks and on hikes whenever you can.

I intend to listen to that voice as much as possible.

Getting Away With It.

Reading Alan Bennett's Writing Home for at least the 5th time. It's the perfect diary: a glimpse inside the life of a wonderful, understated and very funny writer. So modest ("I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground...trying not to get my feet wet or egg on my face"), and yet he never lets himself get away with his seeming modesty either: "...I prefer to be liked and thought a nice man. But I'm not. I'm just as bad as the rest of them, only I don't like to show it." An introvert, liking to lurk on the sidelines, happily morose. Hard on others, hardest on himself. I wonder what he would think of blogging (having published several volumes of his diaries for the world to read, he can hardly be too judgmental, one would think). He talks about a friend calling him to congratulate him on one of his plays, "...but really to congratulate you on getting away with it again." That's how I often feel when I've finished a project- as if I've dodged a bullet and somehow no one's guessed the truth: that I have no idea what I'm about. But I know that somewhere, someone knows, and it helps to keep me humble.

After a run-through at Studio 58, where some of my latest work will be performed in The Merchant of Venice; Kathryn Shaw, the head of the school, gives me notes and I quail as generations of actors have before her gimlet eyes. I feel as if I have squeezed in my work for that show between days at the Pumpkin Patch and various other chores, and it's not my best stuff. Watching Antony Holland direct and act (as Shylock) at the age of 88 is several lessons in itself: I was nearly moved to tears watching him in the run-thru. Approaching his nineties, he is spry, sharp as a tack, and has every line memorized: the stage manager only has to prompt him twice. For the first time yesterday I was truly aware of the honor of working with someone who is literally a living piece of theatre history. His delivery is simple, stripped down; none of the histrionics or mannerisms that sometimes characterize an actor of his generation. The meaning of every line is crystal clear. At 88 my grandmother was already sinking into dementia; this man can still recite Shakespeare, for god's sake. The lottery of aging is so random.

The curse of my kind of life: afraid of turning down work I accept it all... and then end up feeling resentful that my time is not my own, and scared that I'm not good enough at all these jobs I take on. A friend of mine blithely takes all kinds of jobs he knows next to nothing about and executes them competently enough because he has no doubts that he can pull them off. But I am more like Alan Bennett: knowing how little I know I can only wait until I am rumbled by someone who's onto me: congratulations on getting away with it again.