Yesterday contained a relaxing afternoon of browsing through secondhand bookshops on Glebe Point Road with the Coaxer. The Coaxer has a high speed, glittering intelligence, which I very much like, and the ability to express herself with dazzling clarity and skill, which I love. I greatly enjoyed being in near proximity to her. She'd also come up with her own anagram for "Geri and Houston," which was "Hi, not dangerous."

Afterwards I walked over to Chippendale to interview Greg Shapley. I suddenly realised that Chippendale should actually be spelt Chip 'n' Dale, and that Newtown and Redfern, just nearby, might be better off being called Skubidu and Tominjeri.

The last part of the walk was frightening: once I got off Cleveland Street, and closer to the house, several stray packs of angry children loomed into view, throwing rocks everywhere and mouthing off at anyone in earshot. I wasn't much bothered with the verbal abuse, but I did develop a realistic concern about meeting an airborne rock. Despite the presence of a famous university a short distance away, I felt like I was strolling through Beirut on National Rock Throwing Day.

Greg is just about to release his debut CD, so we had a chat about that. But the interview was conducted under less than ideal circumstances. In addition to all the noises coming from outside (which included police sirens, fighting and the ever-present whistling of flying rocks), we also had to contend with Oscar and Taco, two absurd dogs. Oscar is a kind of criminal lunatic, and Taco is very sweet and not too bright. Both of them kept alerting to us to all the noise outside by making a lot of noise inside.

(Note for future interviews: try to conduct them somewhere peaceful. It may not even be worth the bother of setting up a tape recorder if you happen to be in a bowling alley, or an airport, or Beirut.)

Greg, who's as intelligent and as underground as anyone I know, voluntarily used the word "marketing." But not in a financial sense: he was just interested in alerting people to what he was doing. He made me realise I have never devoted even a second's thought to this subject, and perhaps I should. Along the way, perhaps I could also try to figure out what I'm doing. Perhaps I could make some notes in my notebook, which is now being safely looked after by a sturdy leather notebook protector.

...

As a general thing, I've noticed that I feel healthier in Sydney. I'm still walking everywhere, as is my custom, but this is far more exercising here than in Melbourne. Whereas Melbourne has long straight streets, Sydney has a jagged shoreline and a strange geographical feature called "hills."

Yesterday I went to my father's place in Mosman and was given a pile of 28 New Yorker magazines. I then walked down the hill to Mosman Wharf with them, and started to notice just how heavy 28 New Yorkers actually are. I then walked from Circular Quay to the Powerhouse Museum, which is a reasonable walk at the best of times, but far more demanding with that kind of intellectual baggage.

Spent a bit of time looking at the exhibition to mark 50 years of Festival Records. The most interesting part of it was a small collection of song lyrics, which were the first drafts of songs by people like Tim Rogers, Paul Kelly and John Williamson.

The two most distinctive ones were by Richard Clapton and Nick Cave. Clapton had handwritten the words to "Goodbye Tiger" on hotel stationery, and I was duly impressed that the hotel was in Paris. Cave's lyric sheet for "The Mercy Seat" was a collage. He'd cut various pieces of typewritten lyrics out and stuck them on to a new piece of paper, and then handwritten more lyrics in the empty spaces. He'd also then made marginal notes about what words should go in which verse, and in what order the verses should go. The end result was a very untidy sheet of paper, and a great song.

After the marathon walk with all the New Yorkers, I got to the Metro Theatre as early as I could to find somewhere to sit down. After an opening set by Tim Rogers, Steve Earle opened with a hilarious song-and-spoken-word piece about being a "recovering folk singer," which then went on to explain the rules of folk music. (Steve's not a great one for rules.)

When he talked he was instantly compelling and hilarious. Over the course of the evening, he didn't do enough talking for my liking, but he did eventually say something about growing up in Texas and his early days of hitch-hiking and playing in cafes and coffee bars. (Nothing about his time in prison, though.)

But after the great start, for instance, he then didn't say another word for what seemed like a very long time. He just played song after song after song, pausing only very briefly to change harmonicas and drink something. This approach worked better when there was a definite shift of mood between songs, but there wasn't a huge amount of that.

Still, along the way he played all the stuff that I really wanted to hear: "Billy Austin," "Ellis Unit One," even "Transcendental Blues." And he played everything that he'd ever had a hit or a near-hit with: "Copperhead Road," "Guitar Town," "I Ain't Ever Satisfied" and "Fort Worth Blues." He's a great songwriter; the audience loved him, and it was a pleasure to watch him play.

...

The Lion Princess reveals a history of body building. She also likes The Cure. Is there a connection here?

And how would she go at carrying 28 New Yorkers on a long walk all over Sydney?

And does she have a notebook protector?

Some people refuse to believe that an aging Kombi van is capable of driving next door, let alone a return journey of 2,000 kms.

But not only did my Kombi get me home, it also managed the return leg of the journey carrying the additional weight of 28 New Yorkers, a whole pile of books and a notebook protector. And it did so in great style: timeless, classic style. And it did so with speed: timeless, classic, barely adequate amounts of speed.

Somehow in the last ten days I seem to have purchased 46 books. By a curious mathematical coincidence, there were 36 emails were waiting for me when I got back home. 46 and 36 ... these are different numbers. I'm not much of a mathematician, but how likely is that?

Numbers have been on my mind all day, as I tried to listen to JJJ all the way to Melbourne. In Sydney Triple J is broadcast on 105.7, but on the way south its frequency keeps changing, and it becomes hard to follow. There are also gaps in the reception, owing to Australia being quite large. There are numbers available to express Australia's size, which is fortunate, but not for me. As a mathematician, I'm the kind who stands in a deserted stretch of country, pointing to the vastness. As I've often said, binomial equations and parabolic functions are all very well, but sometimes it's much, much easier to point.

Anyway, to get back to the long drive in an old car with a dodgy radio, when I couldn't find JJJ, I had to endure the horror of country radio stations.

What astounds me most about them is their advertising, which appears to have been inspired by Stone Age ideas about hitting other people in the head. Country ads tend to assume that the listener doesn't know anything about anything, and is also deaf. So there's a lot of shouting, and a huge amount of repetition. Initially I listened with great hilarity to men with loud voices yelling about such-and-such a shop in the main street of Benalla, and then I turned the radio off and devoted a moment's silence to the victims of demented, evil advertising.

...

One last mathematical postscript: 46 books in ten days is an average of 4.6 a day. Yep, that's going to be a tricky number to make snappy jokes about.

So what about this: add up 105.7, 98.9, 88.7, 101.5, 103.3, 94.5 and 107.5. This gives 700.1. Now for the incredible coincidence: this is also a tricky number to make snappy jokes about.

I've spent a lot of time since getting back listening to Steve Earle. Steve's a guy with a lot of blues. But the thing is: he's at his best when he's got them. He's astoundingly articulate and expressive when he's singing something that ends up with the word "blues" in the chorus. And there's a lot of those: Transcendental Blues, My Old Friend The Blues, Continental Trailways Blues, Hometown Blues, Ft. Worth Blues and, in the singular form, Even When I'm Blue. Steve has had a rich and varied life: he's travelled the world, and seems to have had the blues everywhere he's been.

The other day someone on JJJ talked about seeing Tim Rogers supporting Steve Earle. The guy was bemused by the fact that Tim Rogers sang songs about musical renegades in Australia, which the Australian audience didn't seem hugely interested in. But then Steve Earle came on and sang songs about renegades in Texas, and the audience went berserk. The JJJ guy was perplexed by this, and said that "you'd think an Australian audience would want to hear songs about them."

Well, I think Australian audiences do want to hear songs about them, but Steve Earle did a far better job of that than Tim Rogers did, and he did so without ever mentioning Australia. Tim's going in the right direction, I think, but on the evidence of the show I saw last week, he's still got a long way to go. What I liked about him was what he said between songs: he came across as intelligent and articulate and interesting. Those qualities were in his songs, but only occasionally, and the rest was a lot of padding and waffle and repetition.

Meaningless repetition, in particular, sinks a song, and after Tim had played half a dozen songs, I started counting the meaningless repeats. I was doing that because he'd failed to emotionally involve me. If there were stories in his songs, or points of view, or characters I could care about, I couldn't find them. In their absence, I lost interest. The only thing to do then was count the meaningless repeats, which is the last refuge of the bored audience member.

Steve Earle's stuff is emotionally involving. That's why the audience responded to him so much more. None of his songs were explicitly about Australia, but every Australian in the room could relate to them. One of his songs starts with this:

My name is Billy Austin
I'm 29 years old
I was born in Oklahoma
I'm a quarter Cherokee, or so I'm told

So. From a listener's perspective, something magical has happened. Within a few lines, Steve Earle has disappeared. In his place is a character: Billy Austin.

As the song progresses, Billy tells us his life story. It starts from poor, uncertain beginnings, and ends on Death Row. We hear him calmly describe how and why he killed a shop attendant, and what the court appointed lawyer did when the judge sentences him to die, and why his case didn't even make the papers. ("I only killed one man.") And towards the end of the song, as Billy sits on Death Row, waiting to be executed, he says this to the judge:

There's twenty seven men here
Mostly black, or brown, and poor
Most of them are guilty
But who are you to say for sure?

And last Tuesday night at the Metro Theatre, these lines got a spontaneous round of applause. That's emotional involvement right there.

Willy Russell once said that if you write well enough about a place, people in other places will be able to respond to what you're doing. And it's the same with emotions, and emotional states. Billy Austin's life story has nothing in common with mine, but Steve Earle tells it so well that I can relate to it, and imagine myself in Billy's place, and feel what he's going through.

As far as magical happenings go, that's one of the best around.

Enraged email from Stig O. Walsh. He's taken enormous offence at my remarks about notebook protectors, and is shocked that I'm "trivialising such an important topic."

In my defence, however, I would point out that trivialising notebook protectors, or trivialising anything, is not necessarily easy. In my case, it was something I had to work up to. I had to go to a special school and everything.

But, in an indirect manner, Stig has made me aware that Sonata for Unfinished Yelling is just that. It's just a title. A title that's aimlessly floating around in space. The kind of title that could mean anything to anyone. The kind of title that lacks an image, a concept, a word, to anchor it, to explain itself. It doesn't have what modern, well-designed, award-winning titles have.

It doesn't have a subtitle.

So, in what will probably turn out to be a futile bid to stave off legal action coming from the direction of Stig, this could well be the moment to try a subtitle out. How does this look to you?

Sonata for Unfinished Yelling: An Exploration of Notebook Protectors

plus occasional discussion about other, less important stuff

Or perhaps this:

Sonata for Unfinished Yelling: The Art and Science of Notebook Protectors

like, as if there's anything else worth talking about

Or even:

Sonata for Unfinished Yelling: An Ongoing Tribute to Stig O. Walsh

with intermittent positive remarks about notebook protectors and Stig's legal team

Fair warning: there's more stuff here about notebook protectors. It's all part of a ridiculous bid to fend off Stig O. Walsh's lawyers. But at least the Threat of Impending Legal Doom has given me the incentive to come up with a shorter, more street friendly way of referrring to the standard variety of notebook protector: NoPro. (Though I'm still tossing up what the plural should be: NoPros, I guess, but NoProse is weirdly appealing, and I've also got the surprise move of putting the "s" at the start: SnoPro.)

Anyway. I wish to report a conceptual breakthrough, on the vitally important subject of tattoos and NoPros. Douglas Adams has a line somewhere about everything being connected. I've spent today redisovering the truth of this. A notebook protector is the modern equivalent of a detachable tattoo.

Wait, let me explain.

I've been carrying around a notebook for years. So has Stig. It's just the kind of thing that people like Stig and I do. Over time, notebooks tend to get dirty and scruffy. Over time, they also fall apart. As a result, valuable notes can and do get lost. Scattered to the wind, like ashes, dust, and Stig O. Walsh's legal team. The exact kind of thing which entirely defeats the point of keeping a notebook in the first place.

I've always known that notebooks fall apart, but until recently I never knew that anything could be done about it.

Enter Stig and his NoPro obsession. "Just think," he says, "your notebook will be protected. That's the nature of notebook protectors. That's what they do." Then he paused, and added the killer line of his already impressive sales pitch: "that's why they're called notebook protectors."

In a flash, my initial cynicism vanished. (Cynicism? Indifference?) I went to the Paddo Market, the only known source of NoPros, and got one.

The clouds parted. Sunlight came down. Dappled sunlight. Luminous, glittering sunlight. Triumphal music played, at least in my head, and I felt like a new religion had formed at my feet. I watched spellbound as it fluttered gracefully upwards, lovingly transforming every molecule of my body into a more caring, more noble, more sentient being.

And a few days later I realised that I'd also found a solution to my ongoing tattoo problem.

The ongoing tattoo problem?

I'm Libran. It's hard making decisions. The harder the decision, the longer it takes me to make up my mind. In 1979 I was offered the chance to see a movie with friends. I couldn't decide if I wanted to go, or what movie I wanted to see. And I'm still trying to work out what I should've done. To make it worse, all those friends entered normal society and got proper jobs, so now I've got the grief to deal with, along with the indecision. It's all hugely time consuming.

And I've been thinking about getting a tattoo for a long time. A looooooong time. 1979 marked another watershed in my career of indecision, as that was the year I first started thinking about whether I wanted a tattoo.

It's an issue that I've been thinking about now for twenty-three years.

To be honest, I haven't made much progress. At some point in my second decade of indecision, with no result in sight, I moved on to another question. What sort of tattoo would I get, if I decided to get one?

A few seconds later I was hit by a tidal wave of choices. Getting a tattoo turned out to be a simple yes/no. But deciding on the design of it could well take several thousand years, because there were an infinite number of choices.

So I began keeping a list of my design ideas. I filled notebook after notebook with them. This was before I got my NoPro, so many of my design ideas were scattered to the wind.

And when I was in London, at some point in 1998, I came up with the Tattoo Design To End All Tattoo Designs: an image of Rolf Harris, riding on a kangaroo and playing a wobbleboard.

One millisecond later

Reality hit. Hard. I had to admit that, if only for a fleeting moment, I had seriously considered the idea of permanently marking my skin with a cartoon of Rolf Harris. I immediately gave up on the idea of getting a tattoo, and checked myself in for counselling. The first thing the counsellor wanted to know was "why are you here?"

"Because I contemplated getting a Rolf Harris tattoo," I said.

There was an embarrassed pause. Then I asked, in a voice which couldn't hide my nervousness, "can you help me?"

"I'm not sure," said the counsellor, "but I'm certainly happy to try. That'll be a lot of money, thanks."

Three months went by, and my bank balance dwindled. And only after three months did the counsellor indicate that no help of any kind was available for people with Rolf Harris tattoos, whether real or still at the design stage.

My notebook entries at the time reflected an anger, a frustration, a sadness. At least I think they did. The weather was quite windy around then.

But a solution is now at hand.

Instead of getting a tattoo myself, I can tattoo my NoPro. As well as protecting my notebook (thanks for the tip, Stig!) it can also be my detachable tattoo. And if I don't like the design ... well, now we come to the crux of the issue. If I don't like the design, I can just get another NoPro. That's the real beauty of the idea. I did some research and discovered that it's much easier to get a new NoPro than a new skin.

I spent four years at a university learning how to do research like that. And this is the first time I've ever found a useful purpose for it. Those four years have suddenly added up to something marvellous. I don't think I've ever felt so clever, so satisfied, so complete. Twenty-three years of indecision has fallen away, and all I'm left with is the delightful tranquility of one incredible idea. I can't remember ever feeling so happy to be living in the modern world.

Thanks, NoPro.

Reading Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift. The title reveals an awareness of marketing, but the book is actually about people in the computer industry, and what drives them. Bronson's good at conveying what Silicon Valley feels like, and why people are excited to be there. His skills in this area are so good that, for a moment, I considered moving to Silicon Valley and trying to find some venture capitalists.

Apparently that's what people do: they hatch a great new software idea, and move to Silicon Valley to find wealthy, adventurous people to bankroll them. So, for a brief moment, that's what I wanted to do, except my idea was to get rid of the middle man (the great new software idea) and just get the funding.

The book starts with this:

By car, by plane, they come. They just show up. They've given up their lives elsewhere to come here. They come for the tremendous opportunity, believing that in no other place in the world right now can one person accomplish so much with talent, initiative, and a good idea.

Reading this so soon after being in Sydney makes me wonder where I should be living. What I really want to do is write: songs, stories, jokes. What I've already done a lot of is travelling, and wandering, and moving house. I've done a lot of all that stuff. Always looking for greener mirages, for somewhere better, for something else.

For the first time in my life, I'm starting to think that the best place to get some writing done is where I am right now: at home, in Fitzroy, surrounded by a pile of books, with a guitar just nearby, and with a Melbourne sky outside threatening a long winter.

I've never felt this before. It's a profoundly weird feeling.

In 1981, I achieved my academic goal: I failed HSC. It required careful planning and a steady, unswerving vigilance, but I got there.

But my initial feelings of victory and satisfaction didn't last as long as I'd expected, and only a few months later I was bored and depressed and not sure what to do. I didn't really know who I could talk to about my options, or even if I had any options, so I paid a visit to my old high school to see Glenys Nall. Glenys had valiantly tried to teach me English the year before, and had underestimated the depth of my commitment to failing HSC. Of course, midway through 1982 I was older and wiser, and didn't want to hold that against her.

"I'm bored," I said. "What should I read now?"

"Well," she said, "do you want me to write you a list?"

"Sure," I said, "that'd be great."

And she wrote out a list of maybe fifteen or twenty books.

And then something else happened; something that I've always been very, very grateful for. Glenys gave me some advice. "When you read a book," she said, "make a few notes about it. If you can, write down what you thought about it - whether you liked it, and why. And if you do nothing else, at least make a note about how long it took you to read, and what date you started and finished it." (That last one is a trick, by the way. If you can get it together to record how long it took you to read a book, it's then much more likely you'll go on to add a thought or three about it. The hard bit is picking up a pen.)

I can't be 100% certain, but I'm fairly sure that she also planted the idea that I should keep some kind of journal.

So I started one. Possibly the same day.

In the twenty years since then I've been to 36 countries, and lived in more than 40 houses, and turned up, more or less on time, to a vast range of jobs. But the only thing I've consistently worked at has been writing down what I'm thinking about.

So part of what I'm doing with SoFo is trying to convince myself that I haven't actually wasted every minute of the last twenty years.

And the other part is simply continuing something I've been doing for a long time. But there's one difference, which is that I've found a way to share what I'm doing.

And, I have to admit, that feels good. And, in case I haven't made this clear, it's great to have you here.

Just had a quick look at Neil Gaiman's blogger and followed the link to Which Member of the Endless Are You?

I can happily report that I'm not Dumbo, or Dweezil, or Dunderhead, because ... I'm Destiny. "Everything that ever was and ever will be is written in my book." Hmmm. I wonder if this is in Some Way Significant.

...

Some Time Later: nope.

Eight inspiring hours today with Amarevois, which was great. The 'Vois has outrageous musical skills, a vast chord vocabulary, and a snazzy way of hitting high notes on the piano with a kind of modified karate chop. It's a dazzling technique, but also a dangerous one. Using it risks disfigurement and damage if you get it wrong.

The first time I tried it, I got it wrong. Hours later I'm still dizzy with pain, and these words are being gingerly tapped out with breathtaking slowness.

She seems to be able to play all known instruments, and with great skill. I hate that. It makes me feel stupid and lazy. I played her a chord pattern of mine on her guitar, so she played some accompanying flute. Then I played another chord pattern on her piano, and she played some accompanying viola. Then I walked down the street to get some croissants, and she played some accompanying French horn.

You get the picture. It's ridiculous. By way of contrast, my musical skills are limited to (a) rudimentary piano, and (b) slightly more than rudimentary guitar. For the sake of honesty, though, I have to admit that the (b) is actually a sonic illusion.

Almost all guitarists use a plectrum, mainly so they can pretend to be Pete Townshend and flail their arms around. The first time I tried to do this, I smashed my hand into the top of the guitar. I ended up unconscious with pain, and unable to move my hand in any effective manner for several months. When I came to, I abandoned the Pete Townshend windmill approach, and just tried to strum more modest chords.

But doing this involves keeping a strong grip on a plectrum. Somehow, I could never remember to do that. Hundreds of plectrums disappeared into the sound hole in the middle of the guitar, and I found it embarrassingly difficult to get them out again.

After several years of this, the sound of the guitar changed. What started out as a twang gradually became a rattle. Plucking a string no longer produced the desired effect. Instead of sounding a note, it merely jostled the vast number of plectrums entombed within. I had progressed from melody to percussion without changing instruments.

In the end I gave up using plectrums. I wanted to perform a symbolic act of throwing the plectrums away, but even this proved beyond me. They were all trapped inside the guitar, and I couldn't get them out again. Of course, I only wanted to get them out so I could hurl them into the sea in a defiant gesture of rejection. Not being able to do this proved immensely frustrating. In the end I had to pay some guy to do the job for me, and the memory of his laughter continues to haunt me.

The upshot of all this is that I started fingerpicking guitar instead. Now, to the untrained ear, this might seem like I'm doing something clever. But don't believe the hype. I'm not doing anything clever at all. It's still the same old rudimentary chords, but only one note at a time.

To give you some idea of the contrast in our musical skills, Amarevois can play a B-flat diminished seventh with an added ninth and a slice of lemon and move to the key of E=mc² in thousands of different ways, some of which involve hitting the high notes with a karate chop.

She doesn't have a NoPro, though, so at least I could tease her about that.

... is because it's April. And April in Melbourne means that there's a Comedy Festival on. To be honest, it's actually been on for several weeks and I've only just noticed. As a result there's been a flurry of comedy going activity in the last few days. Last night I saw Chris Addison, The Journals (John Hegley and Simon Munnery), and Ridiculusmus. But there's no time to write up anything about any of these shows, because now I've got to go and see more comedy.

More in a bit.

The trick to surviving a comedy festival is to see so many shows that you end up with only a hazy idea about what you've seen, or whether you liked it, or where you live. I think I've seen eleven shows in four nights, with another three shows coming up tonight, but don't quote me. I've lost track.

Sheeit. I've also lost track of time. It's just after six, so I've got to go and jump on a tram to get to Sarah Kendall's show.

But one tiny piece of gossip before I go. Coming out of 7 Alfred Place after midnight last night I couldn't help but notice Geoffrey Rush having a chat with people in the schmoozy crowd outside. Also in the area was Stephen Kearney of the late, great, much missed Los Trios Ringbarkus. Both were looking good.

...

Well, at least I can say I've tried it. You've just read my attempt at being a gossip columnist. My one and only attempt. At least I've set a low water mark of quality ... "both were looking good." Ugh.

Four years ago, when I was in London, I was reading Mojo and Q and listening to the radio. It was The Verve's moment in the sun. Bittersweet Symphony and Sonnet and Lucky Man were all on high rotation, Urban Songs topped the album charts, and The Verve were playing a headlining tour around the U.K.

Imagine my surprise then to discover that The Verve were on tour at the exact time as ... The Nerve. Okay: I guessing that this is what they were called, but they were The Verve's patently unofficial tribute band. And they seemed to be following The Verve around the country, perhaps hoping that Richard Ashcroft and the boys would all fall ill and they'd get called up to fill in. So if you happened to be in Birmingham, you could go and see The Verve at the National Entertainment Centre, or, for a fraction of the cost, you could go and see The Nerve at some sleazy pub down the road.

What got me angry about this was the stunning lack of respect. Look, I'm no fan of The Doors, or Abba, or Pink Floyd, but I can understand why these acts have tribute bands. The originals are no longer operating, owing to the death of the lead singer, or the collapse of the band, or because of the insurmountable obstacle that is Roger Waters. This sort of tribute band meets a tangible need, to satisfy people's desire for nostalgia, for youth, for happier, simpler times.

Which fails to explain The Nerve. What on earth were these people thinking? They're out on the road providing people with nostalgic memories of when The Verve were riding high with Bittersweet Symphony and Sonnet and Lucky Man. In other words, they're providing nostalgia for something that happened earlier on that day. And they were doing so with blithe cynicism. Can't afford to see the world's hottest band? Here, come and see us do virtually the same thing, but for a fraction of the cost and for absolutely none of the point.

Four years later, in two Australian theatres

Anyway. I was reminded of all this because tonight I saw two tribute shows to two famous comedians. Both were complete crap.

Play Wisty For Me was a tribute to Peter Cook, which also featured a lot of Dudley Moore. The actors playing these men were fine, I suppose, but the script was empty. The first scene was great: Pete and Dud come out on stage and shake hands, but Pete's so drunk he misses Dud altogether and ends up unconscious on the floor. Dud stands over him for a moment, and then says "you're drunk again. You've let me down again."

That was the first ten seconds, and nothing else in the next hour was as interesting. Bits and pieces of Cook's work had been cobbled together and were presented in random order. His offstage relationship with Moore went entirely unexplored, which created a vast, gaping hole in the show. If you didn't know who Peter Cook was, you'd come out of the show determined never to find out. Some countries have penalties for this kind of thing, and rightly so.

But even worse was Screaming In America, a play about the last six months of the life of Bill Hicks. "A play," mutters the actor playing Hicks, "only a play. My life doesn't even get a movie."

Bill Hicks' life story deserves a movie. And while we're waiting for that, this play does nothing to fill the gap. If anything, it makes the gap wider. Hicks had an amazing life, and occasionally the play hints at that. Could just be me, but that seems like an enormous waste of opportunity.

At the start of the play we see a young Australian girl writing a letter to Bill. She feels she can articulate her thoughts to him, because she thinks he'll be able to understand her. I don't have a problem with that. As a dramatic device, it's fine. But here's the rub: we also get to see the girl's father. Quite a lot of the girl's father. Frankly, way too much of the girl's father. And he's always complaining: about his health, about how difficult his life is, about ... the thermostat not working.

As time slowed ticked by I asked myself what this had to do with Bill Hicks. And the answer came in a flash: nothing. Nothing at all. I sat in that audience, wanting and willing to see what happened when Bill Hicks discovered he had pancreatic cancer and not long to live. Instead I got ten horrendous minutes of a girl's father complaining about a completely irrelevant thermostat. Wow. Oh, man. How "arty." How "challenging." How "edgy," how "out there."

No, wait. How pointless. How unnecessary. How boring.

Another enormously inadequate moment was towards the end, when Bill utters his last words. The actor did this sitting on the floor a few feet away from the front row. This meant that only the people in the first two rows could see what he was doing. I wasn't sitting in the first two rows, so I couldn't see the play's dramatic highpoint. Uh, great. Stagecraft, guys, stagecraft. Make sure the audience can see and hear everything. And while we're here, give them a reason to care about what's happening on the stage. So having an irrelevant character endlessly whinging may not be useful. Just a thought.

I spoke to the show's producer beforehand, and she said that the play was really about how people were using the net to mythologise Hicks. "They're ignoring his message," she said, "and focussing on the drug taking, the cowboy, the legend."

Just for the record, I think that's complete crap. The net also makes available the genuine article: a huge number of mp3s of Hicks in action. And if I have a choice between reading what's being written about him on message boards, or listening to the man himself, I'm going to take the second option. And I'm going to take it every single time. It's just what I would personally choose to do. This is one decision that I find absurdly easy, and, as a result, I question its value as a starting point for a play.

Anyway. I had a crappy night. I have the distinct feeling that the box office made a horrible mistake, and I somehow ended up in a sleazy, smoky pub watching the comic equivalent of The Nerve.

...

"Christianity's such a weird religion. The image you're brought up with is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love." - Bill Hicks

I've been going to the Moosehead Awards for what seems like many years. If I can only go to one event in any given Comedy Festival, I always pick the Moosehead Awards above and beyond any other show. Part of this is sheer practicality: something like twenty comedians get up and do four or five minutes each, but they do so without the presence of television cameras.

Anarchy is often the result, and that's another one of the appeals of the night: the possibility, however slim, that genuine anarchy will suddenly appear and take a celebratory flight around the room.

The other attraction is the sheer scale of the thing. It's held in the main auditorium of the Melbourne Town Hall, which seats 1,500 people. Most comedy is performed in venues that seat about 10% of that number, and that makes for a big difference. When a comedian goes over a storm in front of 1,500 people, it's really, seriously, wildly impressive. That number of people can make an enormous amount of noise, and can show a devastating amount of appreciation. It's worth experiencing.

I should also admit something else: the Mooseheads, at least on occasion, have been a kind of religious event for me. Sunday's night show was good, but it certainly wasn't a religious experience. Twenty comics got up, and everyone was very good, and the audience went home happy.

But no one did anything anarchic. No one departed from their script. No one got up and orated.

I'm well aware that wanting comedians to orate is a completely unrealistic hope, but I still felt obscurely disappointed. A couple of years ago Anthony Morgan got up and produced that could only be described as an oration. It's still the greatest thing I've ever seen at the Mooseheads.

That year Anthony had made an artistic departure from his normal stand-up routine. His Comedy Festival show that year featured him doing stand-up to the accompaniment of a rock band, which had never been tried before, and which has never been tried since. Anthony can't sing, he can't dance, and the music was never in sync with the jokes. It was a profoundly weird experience to witness. He got uniformly bad reviews, and uniformly small houses. After three dispiriting weeks of that, he got up at the Mooseheads and said "oh, Melbourne ... you don't like change, do you?"

But before he said this he'd made an astonishing entrance. The previous act had left water all over the stage, and a stagehand was using a mop to clean it up when Anthony arrived on the stage. After the stagehand walked off, he offered Anthony, from the wings, the mop.

Anthony took it.

What he did then was to start mopping up an imaginary patch of water. He mopped with enormous, exaggerated care, and in extreme slow motion. Then he found another imaginary patch of water, and mopped that up. Then he became aware that there was imaginary water all the way from where he was standing to the microphone at centre stage. So he started clearing a "safe" path to it, still in slow motion, and taking only one tentative step at a time.

When he got to the mike he mopped that. Then he mopped the mike stand. Then he paused for a second and touched the mike stand with his hand. Then he mopped the hand that had touched the mike stand. Then he scratched his ear. He mopped his hand again, and for good measure he also mopped his ear.

What was really striking about this is that Anthony is a supremely verbal comedian. His ability at mime is roughly at the same level as his ability to sing or his ability to dance. And the extended mopping sequence was totally absorbing, because it was patently obvious that he had absolutely no idea where he was going with it.

Then he started speaking, and it became obvious that he wasn't too sure where he was going with that, either.

And that's the point. That's what I loved about what he was doing. He'd found himself on a vast stage, equipped only with a microphone, and carrying a mop. And he made something of it, right then and there.

It took him far longer than his allocated five minutes, but that was another wonderful thing about his performance: he was prepared to break any rule and any expectation and any time limit. He didn't care if the audience laughed. He just spoke what was on his mind, irrespective of the consequences. He orated. And towards the end of performance, he broke another rule, and attacked the other comedians who had played the Comedy Festvial that year. "They're all so middle class," he said. The implication being: they're all so safe.

So that's what I noticed at this year's Mooseheads: how middle class virtually every comedian was. And how free of genuine anarchy they were. Every performance was safe and warm and enjoyable, and I wanted something more.

I wanted chaos. I wanted the anarchic religious experience. I wanted the rollercoaster ride to an unknown, uncertain destination.

Taught another four hour class today, in which I had to film students making presentations. I asked them to talk about themselves, about interesting things they've done, things they're proud of, ways in which they're distinctive. One girl said "but I can't do that. Nothing interesting has ever happened to me, and I'm not proud of anything I've done."

I scratched my head in desperation and then suggested that perhaps she could talk about how she became the world's most boring person. "Hey," she said, "that's not a bad idea."

Time goes by. Everyone decides what they're going to talk about, and they prepare in a variety of ways. Some make notes, some stare at the ceiling, some make strange muttering sounds and stare at me in a hateful, enraged manner. Whatever works for them is fine.

After a while one student tells me that they're ready, and then so does another, and another. Once half the class are ready, I turn the camera on. The time starts to go quickly. Almost everyone looks comfortable up there and some of the presentations are very, very good.

But still to come is a girl who thinks that nothing interesting has ever happened to her. Eventually, it's her turn. She stands up, walks to the front of the room, and starts her presentation.

She begins by describing the circumstances of how she arrived in Australia. When she was two her parents tried to get themselves and their two children out of Vietnam, which proved difficult to do. Her father had fought in the war, which meant that he was known to the authorities. But he somehow managed to get out, taking her brother with him. She and her mother were left behind. Two anxious years later, under the most arduous of circumstances, she and her mother finally managed to leave Vietnam to rejoin the rest of the family in Australia.

It was spellbinding. Everyone in the room sat there thinking about how, or if, they would've coped if something similar had happened to them. And then she went on to talk about wanting to go back and visit Vietnam, the country she left when she was four, the country that her parents so often speak about, the country she was born in but scarcely remembers.

And she talked about wanting to visit other countries: lots of other countries. She wants to see as many as possible, and she had a wonderfully visual way of demonstrating this. She drew a globe on the whiteboard and then rapidly added random, invented countries, which she pointed to, explaining that these were all places that she'd get to one day. One of these new countries was about the size of Queensland, and completely circular, and located right in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Another was shaped like a triangle, and seems to have displaced China from its current position.

This bit of the presentation got enormous laughs. Partly that was out of contrast: her account of her early days was so traumatic that the ridiculous graphics seemed even funnier. In the midst of all this I was reminded of a phrase that one of those cricket commentators likes to use: it's all happening here.

So. One of the best presentations I've ever seen came from a student who had said that nothing interesting had ever happened to her, and who wasn't proud of anything she'd done.

Teaching is a wildly variable job. Sometimes it's a pain. Sometimes it's amazing. Every so often, you get to see a metamorphosis.

I've just started reading Mark Cunningham's Good Vibrations, and am already enjoying it immensely. This is my idea of a good book: it's a history of something I'm interested in, in this case record producers, and the story is told almost totally through the use of interviews. So: interesting people telling their stories, in their own words, while the author gets out of the way. I like that.

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This journal file is just getting too big. Time for some administration. Time to archive some of the older stuff.

Time to scratch my head a lot while I figure out how to do that.

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An hour later and I'm making very little progress.

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Two minutes later and I seem to have deleted everything I've written.

Er ... is that right?

One day later and I'm still having technical difficulties.

Mmmmm. Technical difficulties. Crunchy with a gooey centre.

Mmmmm. Technical difficulties. They taste good.

Mmmmm. Eventually.

Great. A trilogy of Aaaaarrrgghh.

Now I'm sick. Some flu thing.

I blame the technical difficulties I've been having.

I'm sore all over. I feel gloomy and uninspired. And to top it all off, the house has been invaded by mice.

Well it never stop?