Some Animals are More Equal Than Others

Snapshot of a sign at the entrance of a Melbourne store. Nice waste of sixteen letters and a comma, store dude.

Feeling Peaky

I hate it when I start writing something for this site and then read an article in a newspaper somewhere about the same thing. Bloody paid journalists… haven’t they, um, got something better to do? Still when it concerns Twin Peaks I’m happy to read anything and if you would too then feel free to have a read of this article in the Guardian today including interviews with some of the principal actors.

For those who don’t care about such things you might not have realised that its twenty years this month since Laura Palmer – high school beauty queen and secret drug-sniffing skank – was found dead, wrapped in plastic, her lips a beautiful Avatar-blue. Riding into town to her posthumous rescue was FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (‘Diane, I'm holding in my hands a small box of chocolate bunnies’) and television was never quite the same again.

Twin Peaks was mismanaged and axed after just two seasons but it left an indelible mark on me and television programming in general. Northern Exposure, the X-Files, Carnivale, Life on Mars, Deadwood, Lost (especially Lost) and any program that assumed a modicum of intelligence from its audience all flowed in Peaks’ slipstream. It also set the standard for the now common practice of internet fandom with conventions, fanzines and theory discussion all taking place in a pre-world wide web universe. Even now there are some excellent websites covering just about every aspect of Twin Peaks (the most comprehensive being Glastonberry Grove which is well worth a few hours of your internet time).

As a (slightly obsessive) fan it’s always nice to hear the actors’ perspectives on the show but what all devoted Peakies want to know about is will there ever be any more? (Spoiler alert) The television series ended with a Bob-possessed Dale Cooper banging his bleeding forehead against a broken bathroom mirror in his hotel room; evil seemingly triumphant over good with the real Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge. Hopes that this might be resolved by the 1992 feature film Fire Walk With Me were not to be, the film receiving a critical mauling from those desperate for answers.

All nostalgists hang for more of their favourite shows, bands and movies but Twin Peaks has a curious get-in card that it can play anytime between now and 2015. The one shard of hope that all is not over in lies in something said in the third episode, during Cooper’s infamous dream sequence (you know the one: red curtained room, black and white floor, dancing dwarf talking backwards?) In the scene a greying and prosthetically aged Cooper sits in an armchair whilst someone who appears to be Laura says to him “I’ll see you in 25 years…meanwhile..”

The implication is that our beloved Special Agent will remain trapped in the Black Lodge for a quarter of a century, at which point something will happen. The mythology around the Lodge implies that time has no meaning in there and I’m not delusional enough to believe that Mark Frost and David Lynch intended to pick up where they left off 25 years on, but it’s still an exciting and quite plausible loophole to kick things off again.

In reality a number of the key players have passed away since 1992, including Bob, Major Garland and (one of my personal favourites) Senor Droolcup, the aged waiter who is never far from the ring-stealing Giant (I know this sounds mad if you’ve never seen Twin Peaks). Still there are enough of the main cast still around, and with Frost and Lynch at the helm, some new characters and a whole lot of well-thought out retro-fitting I reckon there could be a huge hit waiting to happen for a brave network. With Lost winding up and Flash Forward stalling on its heels there will be plenty of room for a bit of intelligent clue-dropping on our screens. Over to you Mr Lynch… time to save television all over again.

Withnail and I (and I)

Bittersweet delights at the Astor Theatre in St Kilda last night for a special screening of Bruce Robinson’s masterpiece, Withnail and I. A first big screen viewing of one of my favourite films would have been enough to make me part with my cash, but the added bonus of a Q&A with principal actor Paul McGann ('I') was too much to miss.

Surprisingly handsome for his 50 years, McGann is refreshingly cognisant of the affection people have for Withnail, and is rightly proud of his association with it. Even from within the fug of his jetlag McGann’s (presumably oft-repeated) anecdotes were funny, interesting and insightful and certainly added to the experience of watching the film yet again (though clearly some in attendance had watched at least a thousand times more than I). Certainly Uncle Monty’s predatory stalking of young Marwood (‘I mean to have you, boy, even if it must be burglary!') has a new flavour when you know a young Robinson was similarly advanced upon by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli.

I’m rarely backwards coming forwards with superlatives but Withnail and I is truly one of the finest British movies ever made; a unique and hugely entertaining piece with pathos, wonderful performances across the board and more one-liners than an entire series of Blackadder. Indeed – Tarantino aside - it’s hard to think of many comparable films with so many distinct and iconic set pieces; with every scene offering something quotable. That it was made for pittance by George Harrison’s Handmade Films in the same year as 9 ½ weeks, Karate Kid II and Pretty in Pink makes it even more remarkable. The observation by McGann's son that Withnail was as out of time in 1986 as an album by The Smiths is perhaps most profound of the night.

With regards to McGann, there is no escaping the evening’s sub-plot that it is rather a shame he should be reduced to giving such presentations. His marvellous performance in Withnail hardly suggested a film career summed up with difficulty by the MC as roles in Alien 3, Empire of the Sun and the recent Lesbian Vampire Killers. Even the timing of his mid-nineties appointment as the eighth Doctor Who seems slightly tragic given that show’s status in 2010.

Consequently the event was slightly tarnished by a sci-fi convention approach that over-emphasised the money-making nature of such special screenings. Perhaps the mania encountered at such conventions has led McGann to the conclusion that fans of all genres can be easily parted from their money, but selling autographs at $25 a pop, he seemed relatively untroubled at his signing table throughout the night. And this despite a frustrating and overlong intermission designed to drum up trade. Perhaps Withnail and I enthusiasts are cut from a different cloth. With sympathy for McGann’s situation (though to be honest he’s never really been short of work) it’s hard not to recall Withnail’s self-pitying admission: ‘I'm a fully trained actor reduced to the status of a bum’.

Still, McGann's presence was welcome and a rare opportunity for people like me to show appreciation of a fine film. With this in mind treat yourself to a few minutes to enjoy the two scenes that created the biggest stirs tonight. Firstly Marwood and Withnail’s gleeful tea room
stop-off, which left the whole room to crying with laughter …



… and the film’s final scene – Withnail’s tragic soliloquy from Hamlet – which somehow elevates an already magnificent film even higher in just 100 seconds. What a piece of work is a man…



Interview with Bruce Robinson

Post script: the Astor's reputation for the best choc-tops in Melbourne is not fully merited. Whilst the chocolate and ice cream were of a high quality, no self-regarding choc-top should be served without a waffle cone. To highlight the danger of wafer cones, Mrs Custard's choc-top imploded revealing an ice-cream free hollow centre which nearly brought a premature end to the evening...

MICF: Interview with Josh Earl

Has it really only been a year? After what seems forever the 2010 Melbourne International Comedy Festival finally kicks off proper next week. Here at Mint Custard we’ll be trying to bring you a bit of a taste of what’s happening at the festival, as well as sharing our twopenceworth on shows to see and how to see them.

To kick off the coverage I’m chuffed to bits to be able to share with you an interview with Mr Josh Earl, one quarter of 3RRR’s top light entertainment comedy troupe, the Lime Champions. Josh is performing solo at this year’s festival with his new show Josh Earl vs. the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book. I’ll leave it up to Josh to tell you what it’s about. Here’s what he had to say...

Hi Josh – thanks for talking to Mint Custard. Where are you right now? I’m currently at home looking at a big pile washing up to do but procrastinating and watching American College basketball. It is ridiculous.

You’ve got almost a full month of shows ahead - have you been doing any Rocky/Team America-style training montages to prepare? Totally, I’ve been punching dead animal carcasses with a marionette, but this isn’t any different to how I normally roll. Seriously though I have just performed the show at the Adelaide Fringe and the Brisbane Comedy Festival so Melbourne should be a lot less nerve-wracking than normal as the show is already tested and complete.

What in a word is your show about? Cakes

What in a foreign word is your show about? Le Cakes

How many people are involved in putting on your show each night? Well I’m the only one performing it, but the festival provide me with a tech and a front of house person, I don’t know who these people are though yet.

I’ve always wanted to be a guest on the Muppet Show. I like the way they come to your dressing room to talk about issues in their lives or tell you there’s ‘five minutes to stage’. Is that what it’s like for you backstage before shows? Backstage for me is usually a curtain covering a brick wall in which I hide behind, with no toilet for a pre show wee. Last year I had to wee into a bottle backstage and I was convinced that the audience could smell it for the entire show

Do you have any good luck charms or superstitions? Not to piss into bottles before a show. And to take everything out of my pockets.

As a dessert-based blog your show caught our eye. What’s the best cake anyone ever made for you? My mum made me the dump truck from the Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, which is full of lollies - but she also added a trailer to the back with even more lollies. This was good until we realised that a dump truck would never have a trailer on the back. What a bogan.

What is fairy bread about? Fairy bread is wrong, and the name doesn’t even make sense. At least cut the bread into wings or something. It should be called pixelated bread because that’s what it looks like.

Do real men eat cupcakes? Yes, it’s fake men who don’t eat cup cakes because they are mannequins.

Why don’t you see Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver making cakes in the shape of trains or football fields? Surely that’s what the public really want to see. It would be good to see a challenge on Masterchef where they have to make the swimming pool cake. That would be interesting to watch, if only for George [Calombaris] to eat it really quick and get jelly and cake all over him.

As a comedian and musician you must dream of doing a rock opera one day. Who do you think is ripe for a Jesus Christ Superstar-type tribute? I think the beer poet that stands outside of the Rose Street Market would be a good person to pay homage to in a Rock Opera, and he would probably help promote the show by handing out flyers for it.

Both you and Justin have your own separate shows at the festival this year. Have you thought about combining your powers like the magic rocks in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and bringing a Lime Champions spectacular to the stage? We were talking about it but I already had this show idea, Justin was too busy with his writing, and Eva and Damien are both really busy with something they call ‘real life’ - but hopefully one day. Maybe at the Fringe? But we do have an idea to do a show at the Northcote Plaza on the stage they have set up during school holidays...

Can you ever see a version of Lime Champions making it to TV? Maybe. That’s something that would hopefully work, but I don’t think any commercial network would really go for it. I’d love to see our ‘slug-sex’ sketch animated. That would be brilliant.

What international act would you bring out to perform at the Melbourne Comedy Festival if you had the chance? Steven Wright came out a few years ago but was on at the same time as me so I couldn’t see him, so maybe him again but in a timeslot that suited me... and I’d love to see the League of Gentlemen live.

Are there any shows that you’d recommend at this year’s festival or ones that you’re looking forward to seeing? Yes, I think Melinda Buttle’s show Sista Got Flow is really funny. I saw it in Adelaide and can recommend that one. Tim Key is amazing and I can’t wait for his show, Slutcracker. And I really want to see Tig Ontario at the Hi-Fi Bar. Rich Fulcher should also be good – and he’ll be a guest on Lime Champions too on the 29th of March.

Sorry to admit this but I don’t like cake – will I still like your show? I hope so. I don’t force people to eat it or anything, but if you have any memories at all about this book then you should hopefully like the show. I had some overseas people in one night in Brisbane who had never heard of the book before and they said they loved the show. Hopefully they were telling the truth...

Josh Earl vs. the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book is showing at the Swiss Club, 89 Flinders Lane (btw Russell & Exhibition Sts), Melbourne Tuesday to Sunday from 25 March to 18 April 2010.

Listen to the Lime Champions live every Monday evening from 7-8pm on 3RRR 102.7FM if you’rer in Melbourne or via their online stream for the rest of the world.

Wrong on Toast

This could more common than I know - I don't get invited to many children's birthday soirees - but I couldn't help but be amazed by this plate of tasty yummy health-filled kiddie-energising sugar-laden goodness on offer at a friend's three year-old's pink princess party.

Yes those are hundreds and thousands. Yes that is bread and marg. Yes, Medibot would bloody love it... I, on the other hand did not.

Hello Dolly

It’s wrong on so many levels but I couldn’t help but chuckle at the news that Mattel has launched a deluxe range of Barbie dolls featuring characters from Mad Men. Yes, for a mere $75 US a pop you can score your very own Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling, Betty or Don Draper, replete with bespoke outfits and accessories. Looking at the publicity photo it’s a shame that they’ve made January Jones look like she’s been licking piss off a nettle, and strangely for Barbie they seem to have underplayed Christina Hendricks’ boobs, but hey.


Setting aside the evil of Barbie, there’s something car-crash appealing about watching the mainstream grapple with the overground in this way. Marketing people throwing lots of money at something they don’t quite understand often results in hilarious but strangely desirable curios. I have a nice stock of strange Twin Peaks-related paraphernalia made available for that short period in 1990-91 when everybody wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer.

As for who will buy these mini-Mad Men, well, please leave your Frankie-readers and Waylon Smithers-stereotypes at the pink Barbie Dream House door. Anyone who has been near a comic store in the past twenty years will tell you collectible replica figurines (they’re not dolls…) are big business; a Franklin Mint souvenir plate for the X and Y generations.

Building on momentum started by Star Wars and DC/Marvel superheroes, the majority of lovingly packaged plastic figures are sci-fi or comic book related. However we’ve also seen sports stars (notably WWF) and musicians (Jacko, the Spice Girls, KISS, Slipknot, Metallica and the Beatles) rendered in plastic, happily sharing shelf space with characters from movies with culty-type followings like Clerks, Nightmare on Elm Street and even Shaun of the Dead.

Mostly these figures stay in their packaging in the hope that one day – Toy Story 2 style - they might prove valuable. This is largely hokum. I still have all my original Star Wars toys (less a formal collection, more evidence that I didn’t really have any other interests in 1981) many of them in their original boxes. For a while in the mid-1990s (when I finally got hold of the R5-D4 figure I’d been tracking down for over 15 years) it seemed like these dust-collectors in the loft might pay for a small deposit on a house. That was until e-bay came along and created a generation of kids who could get anything anytime from anywhere. Now even my most prized item (a boxed Imperial Troop Transporter) can be picked up for mere $30.

Mattel has previously dabbled with TV and movie tie-ins with a Wizard of Oz range (a chance to buy some actual friends of Dorothy), I Love Lucy dolls and even Mulder and Scully from The X-Files so they must be confident that they can shift the Sterling Cooper crew. Just to be sure they’ve only made a limited run (10,000 of each) so it’s likely that people will snap them up. My advice to people buying them is simple… GIVE THEM TO YOUR CHILDREN TO PLAY WITH. You won’t make any money out of them in your lifetime but the idea of watching your kids, nieces and nephews creating a whole new world for Don, Betty, Joan and Roger involving trains, dinosaurs and teddy bears could be priceless.

Robert Forster, Toff in Town, Melbourne

How strange it must be being Robert Forster. Now in his sixth decade, the former Go-Between has been spending time since the unfairly-enforced end of the group writing about other people’s music for Australian arts and society magazine The Monthly. The first collection of his articles - The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll – was published late last year to critical acclaim. With pieces on Bob Dylan, AC/DC, Nana Mouskouri, Cat Power, Grant McLennan, Franz Ferdinand and even Delta Goodrem, it is as erudite, passionate and funny as you would expect and utterly recommended.

As pleasurable as Forster’s writing is I can’t help thinking that, to quote from his last album ‘something’s not right, something’s gone wrong.’ No doubt he wouldn’t even entertain the idea, but Forster’s own musical talent dwarfs that of the majority of his book’s subjects. In dissecting their music I wonder if he ever questions this peculiar alignment of the celebrity stars or considers just what does one have to do to marry art with commercial success? It certainly doesn’t show in his writing, but he’d have every right.

Tonight’s show is representative of yet another such distortion. As one half of this country’s greatest song-writing partnership, the idea of Robert Forster playing a venue as tiny as the Toff in Town should be too absurd to be true. The room is barely big enough to contain the man himself, never mind the scores eager to see his only Melbourne shows of 2010.

Whether the Toff was deliberately chosen for its intimacy, through a vast underestimation of demand or genuinely reflects Forster’s solo pulling power is unclear but to compare with an artist of similar vintage, an equally solo and acoustic Lloyd Cole sold out the vast Thornbury Theatre late last year. Inevitably tonight is a sell out which makes for a cosier time than expected, but at least everyone has a good view.


The performance itself begins with a curtain slowly pulled back to reveal the six foot three frame of Forster theatrically posed on an old wooden chair like one of Rodin’s statues with a guitar looking like he’s been waiting there for hours. It’s typical Forster, both arch and slightly aloof and part of his repertoire of hammy, eccentrically comical stage moves which also see him appearing to float around his acoustic guitar which seems to remain magically static in mid air.

Without a band tonight’s set differs greatly from the 2008 tour to support The Evangelist, an album which is conspicuous by its absence tonight. Instead Forster punctuates songs from the two Go-Betweens eras with choice cuts from his nineties back catalogue. We are treated to Snake Skin Lady replete with back story, and an eerie Danger in the Past with a foreboding Forster as Kingsley’s Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby from the Water Babies.

Still rightly proud of his contribution’s to the Go-Betweens’ 2000 comeback album the Friends of Rachel Worth, there are outings for German Farmhouse, Spirit and an apparently ad hoc encore of Surfing Magazines. Born to a Family and Darlinghurst Nights are pulled from 2005’s Oceans Apart and offer more evidence that the Go-Betweens reformation was one of the few in rock history worth its salt.

Inevitably though the biggest cheers of the night go to two of the Go-Betweens best known Eighties songs, played out as call-and-response with the crowd. McLennan’s Streets of Your Town (“…shi-i-i-ine…”) and Forster’s Spring Rain (“…falling down like sheets…”) bring a gentle euphoria to the room as well as a few moist eyes. The night concludes in raw beauty with a tender Dive for Your Memory, with the wistful refrain of ‘when I hear you saying that we stood no chance, I’ll dive for your memory, we stood that chance’ gently mouthed by everyone in the room.

Whatever the logic behind tonight’s venue there’s no denying that being able to observe your heroes at this range is a rare treat. In a week where Australia’s biggest news story concerned a cricketer and his girlfriend, it was nice to hide away from it all amongst people who know that Robert Forster - songwriter, critic, author, artist, is – to paraphrase the man himself, one thing greater than all the things that he is together.

Visit Robert’s website here

Buy The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll here