A Nice Man

Brains are weird. When they go wrong, all kinds of bananas can break loose. At the more benign end of the spectrum there is stuff like colour blindness. These poor souls cannot distinguish between red and blue, or blue and yellow, or sometimes any colour at all, and so are doomed to wander the earth in paisley shirts and striped trousers. Other unfortunate individuals suffer from amusia, which sounds like a made-up clown disease but refers to the condition in which the sufferer is unable to differentiate between musical pitches, and is thus unable to enjoy, or even recognise music. When we move up a few levels we enter the territory of things like prosopagnosia, the inability to tell one face from another, Capgras Delusion, where a person is convinced that a close family member has been replaced by an identical looking imposter, or something called Paris Syndrome, which is suffered almost exclusively by Japanese tourists who, having spent years romanticising the City of Light, are unable to reconcile their idealised notions of the French capital with their first interactions with the breathtaking rudeness of actual French people, and as such suffer such severe culture shock that they undergo a mental breakdown from bottling up all their anger at douchey French waiters (there's even a support hotline for Paris Syndrome operated by the Japanese Embassy in Paris. This is completely true).

Since I moved to New York I've become convinced that I, too, suffer from an insidious misfiring of the brain. Whilst some people are forced to endure being unable to recognise colour, music, other people's faces, or that their wife isn't a robot, or that the best way to deal with a jerk waiter is to pour all the sugar all over the table as you're leaving, I am apparently unable to distinguish the difference between my home and New York's Grand Central Station, as evidenced by the fact that every single time I have to catch a train anywhere I'm still calmly sitting in my room googling images of lolcats when I should be well and truly on the subway if I expect to actually catch said train. As such, despite the blood-oaths I make to myself every time I'm sprinting through the terminal with a goddam backpack the size of a Galapagos tortoise on my back that the next time I have to catch a train I will bloody well leave the house with a window of more than fifteen nanoseconds to spare, I inevitably repeat my panicked mad dash through the streets of New York every few weeks or so. Being an intelligent adult capable of undertaking complicated planning procedures, the only conclusion I can draw from my Groundhog Day-like approach to interstate travel is that I must suffer from an acute inability to understand that trains to Connecticut do not leave from my bathroom.

The most recent attack of my unfortunate disorder occurred a few weeks ago when I had to go upstate for the Norfolk Music Festival. The closest train station to Norfolk from New York was about an hour's drive away, and so I had to be on a specific train at a specific time to be met by someone with a car to take me the rest of the way there, otherwise I would be walking to Norfolk. Of course, forty minutes before my train left Grand Central I was still toodling around in my bedroom, probably engaged in some task of breathtaking import like alphabetising my underwear, and when the realisation hit me that I had done this f@*&ing shit all over again I grabbed my backpack (which mercifully I had packed the night before) and ran out the door. The subway wouldn't get me there in time though. I had to catch a cab. That's okay, cabs are always going over the Williamsburg bridge near my house. Easy. Cabs.

There must have been a no-cabs convention or some shit because fifteen minutes later I was still standing like a pickle on the side of the road desperately hailing anything that even looked like a cab, including school buses, ice-cream trucks, and a lady pushing a yellow pram. As my panic and self-reproach began to approach tears-in-public level (I am such a baby), a cab finally pulled over. I gratefully flung open the door and prepared to hurl my backpack in.

"I'm off duty," the guy said.

"...?" says I.

"I'm off duty," he says again.

"You're off duty? You pulled over to tell me you're OFF DUTY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!" I shrieked calmly inquired (meanwhile, four vacant cabs that had apparently been skulking out of sight and waiting for me to be distracted made a break for it and whizzed past me triumphantly over the bridge).

"I have to go to Mosque," the guy explained. Ah. Of course (?).

"Come on, man, my train leaves in like thirty minutes, and I'm totally stuck!" I begged.

"... okay, okay, just get in, I'll take you over the bridge but I won't charge you."

All I really heard was "get in" so it wasn't until we were actually moving that I processed the rest of the sentence.

"You won't charge me? Don't be silly, I have to pay you."

"No, no, I'm going over that way anyway, I have to go to Mosque, so I won't charge you. I'll get you as close as I can to Grand Central, then I'll get you another cab".

Which he did. Traffic on the bridge was unusually light, and my man got me a mere ten blocks from my destination before he was satisfied that I'd be able to catch another cab without too much hassle. I tried one more time to pay him, but he insisted: no money, he was going to Mosque. A little stunned by this completely un-New Yorkish approach to taking other people's cash, I thanked him, ran out into the middle of the street and jumped into the cab that screeched to a halt to avoid running me down. I made it to the station with ten minutes to spare and so have probably learned nothing from the experience, except that once people learn you suffer from a disabling brain disorder like mine, they can be really, really nice.

American Summer

I have a friend... for the sake of anonymity let's call him N. Luff... No, that's too obvious... let's call him Nathan L... So Nathan grew up in the remote confines of Yass, an inland country town known for agriculture and being closely situated to Canberra (although not as close as Queanbeyan. I'm not really sure who the winner is in this urban ménage à trois). When I say Nathan grew up in Yass, as far as I can tell he really grew up in Yass. You see, Nathan didn't see the ocean until he was nineteen. I mean, he'd seen pictures of the ocean, and no doubt had seen movies and television shows with nautical themes, and was vaguely aware on a conceptual level of the pelagic nature of the edge of the continent, but the first time he stood on a beach with the sand between his toes, the sun above his head, seagulls squarking in his ears and the eye-sucking vastness of the Pacific Ocean before him was at an age when the average person's "firsts" consist of consuming and experiencing as many illicit, immoral and illegal pleasures that hitherto had been off-limits as quickly and as often as possible. Prior to this, Nathan's concept of standing on a beach was on the same level as standing on the moon: some people had done it, but not him, and it was unlikely in the near future he would be able to join their ranks. Not being Nathan, I can't be 100% about this, but I can speculate that after finally, for the first time, experiencing the splendor of the ocean (and experiencing the less splendorous finding-sand-in-every-nook-and-cranny-of-the-goddam-car-for-months-afterwards) Nathan was like "huh.... it all makes sense now..." 

Nathan's story feels to be a great illustration of what living in New York is like for a thirty-two year old who has grown up with America on the television screen. On some idiotic, conservative, pocket-protector level I feel that I am too old for "first experiences", or at least, too old to smile stupidly at the sheer enjoyment of first experiences. (I have to admit, most of my "American Firsts" have not been unadulterated orgies of pleasure: My first dealings with the American visa system; my first phone call from my unpredictably bizarre landlord; my first time doing a commando roll in an effort to avoid being mown down by a grade-A douchebag in an SUV the size of an aircraft carrier who felt that observing pedestrian crossings and traffic lights was an inconvenience not to be suffered on his way to his lobotomy or wherever the fuck it was that shitlicker was going). But Nathan's story popped into my head as I walked home from the pub tonight, and I feel compelled to write about an American First that is everything TV promised it would be, and much, much more: The American Summer.

I'll admit that until recently I firmly believed that whatever these uppity Northern Hemisphere countries thought of as "Summer" would pale in comparison to an authentic Aussie summer. In some respects, I'm right. New Yorkers bitch and moan about heat that the average Australian would consider to be a mild December afternoon. But now that we're officially two or so weeks into the US Summer (they do their seasons by the solstices... pagans...) I think they may be on to something pretty sweet here. It's difficult to articulate, but the cut-throat, desperate rat-race feeling that usually pervades the city seems to have evaporated into a cloud of sunglasses, coronas and thongs (the Australian kind. And maybe the American kind too, but I don't often get to see those). It's like the whole of New York has gone on vacation to New York.

Parks are full of people. And I mean FULL. There's a lot of people here and virtually none of them have backyards, or even a balcony. For most of the time, their "outside" time is spent on sidewalks, trudging from the subway to work to the gym to the pub and back home again. So when the sun comes out, hordes of New Yorkers descend upon their local public park, quickly filling every available square inch with people reading, lazing, talking, watching squirrels, or playing instruments (including one ambitious guy who drags an upright piano to the park near my school every lunchtime and plays rags for an hour or so).

My neighborhood has a distinctively party feeling. It's made up primarily of Dominicans or Puerto Ricans, and these guys take relaxing pretty seriously. All day long they guys will set up charcoal barbeques in the streets and play dominoes. In the evenings people hang out on their stoops drinking beer and talking long after the sun has gone down. Kids knock the covers off fire hydrants and play in the spray. Latin music blares from every window (and, to be perfectly honest, this drives me bats.) Walking home from the pub it feels like you've been to a party that's spread out across the entire neighborhood. Everything might look decrepit, but it feels awesome. Its what I imagine Cuba would be like, if Cuba was a filthy bastion of capitalism instead of a bolshy haven for pinko commies.

The weird thing is that this seems incredibly familiar even though these scenes are NOT at all what my summers are like in Australia (for, unlike our anonymous friend in the first paragraph, I've been to the beach every summer since I was a born). Think about it: Sesame Street, Seinfeld, Friends, Sex in the City, even NYPD Blue (remember that show? I HATED THAT SHOW. KEEP THE GODDAM CAMERA STILL, YOU DICKWADS), all of these shows have action that takes place in the summer, and every one of them will have scenes like I described above. Any Australian that grew up in front of the idiot box and then comes to New York in the summer will straight away know what I mean. It won't be like, "What the hell? Where are the backyard barbeques, or the sunday sessions in the pubs, or the days lounging around on the beach? How do these people enjoy summer?"... it'll be more like, "huh.... it all makes sense now..."

Good Times in Norfolk, CT

It's a gloriously sunny day today in New York. Hardly a cloud in the sky, a gentle breeze blows through the streets, and the pavements seem particularly crap-free. There's a sparkle in the air and I'm relaxed and happy. Even the asshole truck driver who woke me up this morning by parking outside my bedroom window and beeping his horn non-stop for three minutes to attract the attention of the person to whom he wished to deliver his package rather than go to the bother of actually dragging his obese fanny* out of said truck and waddling up the six steps to the apartment block’s front door couldn’t take the sheen off my mood.  Since I am more neurotic than a busload of Woody Allens I expect this feeling to last for but a short while, and so have decided to document the circumstances surrounding my unusually positive attitude.

"So… Why so cheerful, Tim?" you may ask (or you may not. You self-absorbed jerk). And I shall answer you: I have had my soul nourished by a magical week in a lushly verdant pocket of the world tucked away in the heart of rural Connecticut. A tiny hamlet of lovingly maintained New England mansions, oldey worldey water mills, wide open streets utterly free of traffic,smudgy mists that waffle down from viridian hills,babbling brooks, blarping frogs, floofing birds, and sunsets that would make God weep. I have spent a week in Norfolk, CT. (Also there was free ice-cream).

More specifically, I have been one of the fellows at the Norfolk New Music Workshop, run every year since 1941 by Yale university. The workshop is a residency that is part of a larger music festival that takes place in the Ellen Battell Stoekel estate, a sprawling parkland that was once home to a philanthropically-minded gazillionaire by the name of Ellen Battell Stoekel (duh). Ms Stoekel left the whole kit and kaboodle to Yale university with the specific instruction that the ol' farm be used to host an annual music summer school. Seventy years later, it's still kicking along, and this year I was fortunate enough to attend (especially since there was free ice-cream).

For those of you who don't know what a residency is, it's pretty much a working holiday for artists. You send off an application, saying "look how good I am! Can I come and stay at your place and make some music/art/sculpture/interpretive dance based on the manufacture of dental floss?", and then the people who run the residency go "Sure! We'd love to have you along!" (or sometimes "No f&#king way! Your music sounds like a bagful of drowning cats! Go to hell and take this migraine-inducing crap with you!") and then you go and live there and do your thing and generally have a nice peaceful time of things. I've been lucky enough to undertake a few residencies and they're all different and awesome in their own way, but Norfolk was so great it'll stick in my mind for many years to come. The scenery was amazing, my fellow artists-in-residence were a stellar bunch of people, and the whole thing was run by two of my favourite folks, "nicest composer in the whole world" Martin Bresnick and "rip-roaring pianist" fellow Aussie Lisa Moore (plus there was free ice-cream).

So generally speaking, there are two kinds of residencies: one where you're required to demonstrate some kind of finished product at the end, and one where you're required to just exist and add a certain classy romanticism to the place (much like in the days of Byron when wealthy landowners would go to the length of actually advertising for, interviewing and hiring hermits on a contract to live in purpose-built ramshackle cottages strategically placed in discrete corners of the estate, so when the landowners were out wandering with their entourage they could wave vaguely at this utterly artificial addition and say "oh yes... that's where the hermit lives... poor mad fellow..." because nothing says "thrillingly romantic" like having an unkempt hobo squatting in your backyard. Wait... where was I...? Oh yes. Residencies.) So there's two kinds: ones where you have to do something, and ones where you don't (it's more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, there it is). The Norfolk residency was the former, and for this one we (the composers) had to write a piece before we got there that fulfilled certain criteria: it had to be for a specific ensemble (clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin and double bass, if you're interested), and it had to make some reference to the work of the man who could be arguably called the Grandpappy of American New Music, Charles Ives (however there was no requirement to reference the fact that there was free ice cream).

So Charles Ives was, and still is, a pretty unique composer. He was doing his thing at the beginning of last century, and had this kind of "composer superhero" lifestyle... by day he was a mild mannered life-insurance salesman, and by night he was a mild-mannered composer who wrote some of the most wildly fantastic music you could ever imagine, so much so that of course in his day he was considered a joke, and even now there are some pieces that raise eyebrows. He did a lot of things that were considered bizarre and frankly unmusical in his day, like writing pieces in multiple keys simultaneously, or positioning performers all over the concert hall, but he is perhaps best known for his habit of mashing together pre-existing pieces against a completely whacko backdrop of sound. Essentially he was DJ-ing decades before anyone even thought to put those two letters next to each other (except in very sternly abridged dictionaries**). The man had a love of pastiche that makes the average hipster look Amish. So it was this aspect I decided to focus on my piece (and my free-ice-cream-eating habits whilst at Norfolk).

I also knew I wanted this piece to be for Blair. Blair passed away only a few days after I had started work on the piece, and in the aftermath it became glaringly obvious that this piece absolutely had to be for him, especially since the date of the concert at the end of the residency was June 25th - Blair's thirtieth birthday. I'm not a huge believer in fate or coincidence, but this was too weird to ignore. So I knew this piece was to be for Blair, and I wanted to write a piece that he would enjoy listening to. The problem was that in the entire time I had known Blair he practically never professed a bold love or dislike of any music. Plus he was so unfalteringly positive that I could have beaten him over the head with a trumpet and he would have said "mate, I love it! Totally original and clever! Not so hot on the beating, but what do I know?" The only piece of music I could ever recall him saying he enjoyed was a song I wrote for him for Death's Waiting Room (created by Danielle Harvey, script by Sam Bowring. Friendship obligations satisfied) called "Weed". In this show, Blair played a confused transvestite called Marie Antoinette. Confused because she longed to be a man, despite the fact that biologically she was male. Even though I wrote the music for this song waaaay back in the day before I had even considered composition as a career, I still think it's a pretty kickass tune, and it has an awesomely dark little harmonic progression in the chorus. So I used that as a basis for the piece - pretty much throughout the whole deal this harmonic progression is referenced in a bunch of permutations and guises, all dressed up in Ivesian pastiche to sound like a celebration of an awesome guy (and I'm struggling to think of a way to seamlessly mention free ice cream at the end of this paragraph).

The performance was awesome. The musicians were incredible. The whole concert was brilliant. It was a great day. Amongst the thickly forested hills of Norfolk, in a huge New England music hall made entirely out of Californian redwood, "Good Times" premiered in front of a small but completely devoted audience. This alone is reason for me to feel that this residency was a wonderful success. But there was more... during the course of the week, listening to the musicians work on the piece, and talking to the other composers on residency with me, and having time out just to sit and think about my music and Blair and where I've come from and where I'm going to, I had an epiphany: this was my sound. This is my thing. This is the music that I can write that is completely and utterly me. Unsubtle. Raucous. Theatrical. Like two circuses colliding on an enormous jumping castle, elephants and lions and acrobats and all. For an artist of any ilk this is a wonderful moment. It clears the away some of the uncertainty and gives a clearer direction to head in. It suddenly makes you proud of your work and prepared to defend it to the death. It's like being reborn, and virtually nothing in the world can beat that.

Except free ice cream.


* Before you begin sending me links to wikipedia pages outlining the anatomical difference between men and women, remember that in the USA “fanny” means “buttocks”. I’m trying to blend in.

** I totally stole that joke from Terry Pratchett, but it fit perfectly so I couldn't resist. Totally Ivesian.

I've yet to receive the recording from the concert. As soon as I do, I'll update the blog, so keep your eyes peeled!

This is a fence.

The forest behind the estate

An olde worldey water mill.

The mansion on the estate, known as "The Whitehouse". It was pretty extravagant. The dining room ceiling, for example, was upholstered in elephant leather. No shit.

If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, it's now.

Jaqui Kolek, a mutual friend of Blair's, and I (and Andy, Jaqui's BF) enjoying some post-concert Veuve in honour of Blair.

The gang (from L-R): Me; Preben Antonsen (composer); Tim Hambourger (composer); Julia Seeholzer (composer); Adrienne Pope (violin); Mark Broschinsky (trombone); Victor Caccese (percussion); Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet); Thibault Bertin-Maghit (double bass); Nick DiBerardino (composer); Edward Neeman (piano); Julian Pellicano (conductor). At the front we have Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick. Good times!

The night I called 911

The night I arrived back in the US after my most recent trip to Oz I met up with my friends from Australia, Christian and Hedy. They were in town for only a short time, and for months we planned to spend a much more substantial time together than we did, but Blair's death (which is still such a surreal statement that it has no actual real-world meaning) meant that we really only had that night to actually hang out. So we did. We hung out. And hung out. And huuuuung out. So a million drinks later I bundle the pair of them in a cab and I'm walking home. I'm thinking about Blair; he's pretty much all the three of us talked about for the previous four hours.

I come around the corner of my block and the first thing I see is a guy about my age slumped on the pavement, with some chick about my sister's age (but FAR more immature) standing on the nearby stoop saying, "Sir...?... Sir....?... Are you okay?". This guy was clearly not okay. He could barely speak his own name, let alone answer as to whether or not he felt in complete control of his faculties. This girl was making an effort to see if he was okay, but not a particularly effective effort. (Like most people, myself included, this girl was sincerely concerned with the condition of her fellow man, but she tempered that with earnestly polite detachment).

I got some information out of him. His name was Danny and he lived in Brooklyn. That was about as useful as saying his name was Mr. Smith and he lived on Planet Earth. Then he passed out utterly; in the half hour that followed I checked he was breathing by watching his belly bloat in and out of his sweater.

I suggested to Jillian (the chick going "Sir...? Sir...?) that we call an ambulance, initially because I didn't want to be woken up at 9am by a coroner's ambulance screeching around my front door to pick up a gradually cooling alcoholic's corpse from the front step of the apartment building ten doors up. But perhaps more so, I suggested we call an ambulance because Blair's death had made me incredibly conscious of how I treated other human beings, and while I was never a callous person, I feel as though it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I would walk past a guy in obvious alcoholic distress rather than try to take some responsibility for the situation. It was 3am after all, and I was pretty hammered and emotional.

So I dialled 911. A first! But I passed the phone to Jillian because I wasn't confident my Australian accent could convey the seriousness of the situation to an unsuspecting American call-center person...

Imagine if I did:

ME: Oi want to reepoirt a possible alcah-hoilic een deestress.

911: ...A what, sir?

ME: An alcah-holic een deesTRESS!

911: ...I'm sorry, who's wearing this dress?

ME: Noie, an alcah-holic! Hee neids hailp!

911: ...an alcoholic with broken knees...?

ME: NOI!!! What's WRONG with youi?! There's a pissed bloike on the steps of this apaahrtment block who neids meidicahl attinshun! (Note how thick my accent has become in the heat of the moment).

911: Sir, if you've had an allergic reaction to some kind of shellfish, which has cause a thickening of your tongue thus making it unintelligible to my nuanced American ears, then perhaps it would prove beneficial to both our interests if you gave the phone to someone without a debilitating allergy.

ME: (To Jillian) She wants to talk to you.

So the call was made. It was an uncomfortable waiting period. Jillian was young, and I could tell that she didn't often encounter tall, dark strangers from overseas (i.e. she totally had the hots for me. Who could blame her LOL ^-^) I didn't know what to say to her. So I started with local knowledge... I recalled something my landlord told me in an uncharacteristically communicative moment: a few years ago an apartment building down the street burnt down because some kid was playing with matches and set a bunch of rolled up carpets on fire, resulting in his death and the destruction of the building. I was expecting polite enthusiasm for a gruesome story.

"That was my nephew," she said.

Awkward.

So I panicked. The only reason I was stopping for this passed-out drunk guy (or so I believed) was because of my good friend's recent death. I thought I didn't give a flying fart as to whether or not this pissed guy lived or died; I just wanted to make my own life worth living. So I told Jillian about Blair. I told her of his sudden death and his philosophy on life. I was wearing my "good times" badge and I showed her that. I didn't spend much time talking about Blair, but I just wanted her to understand that I wasn't an insensitive schlub making stupid conversation. The futility of the effort and the apparent duplicity of my motives hit me like a hammer and I cried in front of a stranger over the passed-out body of another stranger.

I calmed down. She made soothing noises from behind the gate on her stoop. Eventually an ambulance showed up. (It's important you know that an ambulance in the US is not like an ambulance in Australia: we take for granted that an ambulance will take you to a hospital; as far as I can tell, in New York, you're lucky if an ambulance takes you to the corner unless you can prove you have ample private health insurance).

"Is he going to be okay?" Jillian asked as the ambulance drivers slipped their gloves on and pulled Danny to his feet.

"Yeah, we pick him up almost every night," said one indifferent ambulance dude.

"He was in handcuffs last night," said the other, and they tossed him in the back of their ambulance van like he was a sack of potatoes and drove off.

Sigh.

I don't really know why I'm telling you this story. I thought initially it was going to be an uplifting tale of humanity helping humanity. Maybe that's what I wanted it to be, but it didn't turn out that way. Instead it turned into a fucked up story of me trying to do good in the name of my friend and a flawed healthcare system got in the way. But since I've written this story I've come to the conclusion that if I (or anyone) is going to truly, TRULY learn something from Blair's death, it's not going to come from twee yet contemporary morality tales of helping drunk munters on the street outside my apartment. It's going to come from thinking about Blair's fairly unique combination of passion and compassion. Of caring about life, and caring about others you encounter in your life. I can't say for 100% certain that Blair would have stopped in the street to help Jillian deal with Danny, but I can say that Blair had a great deal of concern for the people in his life. Their successes were his successes, their losses were felt just as keenly by him as by them. And he always came out the other end looking for the silver lining. I'm not sure yet what my silver lining was in this weirdass night, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.

A Life Well Lived

On May 3rd 2009 I arrived in Sydney after spending five months abroad in Europe - three of them living in Dublin on a work visa - and I have never been happier to be on Australian soil in my life. With the irritatingly smug gift of hindsight I now know that in the year or so leading up to my impetuous decision to move to Ireland at the end of 2008 I was suffering from a bizarre mix of being both utterly absorbed by my career and having absolutely no idea what I should do next. All I knew was that I was turning thirty and had yet to live overseas, which for some reason I equated with "a good career move". But I couldn't bring myself to move to London because of my stupid obsession with being different from everyone else. My options were limited as I only speak English (albeit excellently, I might add), so with all this in mind I pretty much spun the globe and ended up moving to the Emerald Isle just as the world was entering the worst recession since the Great Depression.

I'll spare you the details of this horrendously ill-planned decision, but suffice to say when I returned to Australia five and a half months later with no savings, a maxed-out credit card, no house, no car, no job and STILL absolutely no idea what I was going to do next, I was pretty lost and dejected. Humbled, I actually listened to my friends' advice for the first time in my life and moved to Sydney to pretty much begin all over again. I was homeless for three months, and spent that time sleeping in friends' spare rooms, working shitty, shitty jobs to try and get some money together and generally regretting the day I'd even heard of Ireland. Without putting too fine a point on it, I was pretty bitter.

But life goes on and I had to claw my way out of this abyss I had created for myself; I knew that the first step to doing this was finding a place to live. I went and looked at a few places I found via the internet, but none of them really worked out (one place in Annandale was owned by a forty-year-old guy who had lived there since he was born. His mother had just passed away and he had inherited the house. The house was a real museum piece, but I was especially told that the front bedroom was off-limits as that was his mother's room and was to stay the way it was on the day she died. That creeped me out, but what finally turned me off was that the house smelt vaguely of burnt cookies and had that weird, dank, faintly greasy kitchen carpet that was popular in the seventies in every room of the house, including the bathroom). I was really getting the shits. Then my good friend Danielle suggested to me one day that I might try a mutual friend of ours who had recently broken up from a long-term relationship and was currently living with his mum. If we were looking for a place together than we could call the shots, plus wouldn't it be nicer to live with someone you know rather than a complete stranger? So with nothing to lose, I called Blair Milan and asked him if he'd be interested in moving in with me.

I had known Blair for about eight years at that point. We met in Bathurst, where we both did the same theatre course at CSU. He was a fresh-faced first year positively brimming with confidence, whereas I was the grizzled, twenty-three-year-old veteran who had finished his degree the year before but had yet to actually leave Bathurst and still lived with students (which does NOT IN ANY WAY MAKE ME A LOSER, FYI). Although our first real introduction was marred by the fact that it was at 4.30 in the morning when my brother Matt convinced Blair it would be hilarious if they both snuck into my room wearing hockey masks and wielding axes whilst I was asleep (it wasn't), I quickly grew to like Blair a lot. He was charming, confident, and so cheesily egotistical that he could do no wrong. Over the course of the following years we hung out only sporadically, but every time we did it was a really fucking good time, and by the time I left Australia at the end of 2008 I considered him to be within my close circle of friends in Sydney.

The day I called Blair to propose we look for houses together he was driving along the Great Ocean Road in a borrowed convertible with a gorgeous German backpacker he had met a few weeks before. I meanwhile was standing out the front of a high school in St George in the rain waiting to teach five thirteen-year-old girls with voices like starving cockatoos how to sing "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga. That pretty much says everything you need to know about our different points of view on life at that time: both broke, homeless, and virtually unemployed (Blair was an actor who spent most of his day-to-day employment working for a high-class catering company); one of us was wallowing in misery whilst the other gave life the middle finger and did what he damn well wanted (hint: it wasn't me).

Awesomely, Blair was enthusiastic about moving in to a house together, and four weeks later we moved into flat 2203 of 177 Mitchell Road in Erskineville. The apartment complex was huge and luxurious, with two tennis courts, an indoor and outdoor pool, a gym, underground parking, and a lovely leafy balcony. We were two young, handsome bachelors living in a kickass apartment with no commitments: the world was our oyster. Except I didn't see it that way. Not at first. I was still miserable, stressed and frantically trying to get myself back to the place I was in before I left Australia at the end of 2008. And misery loves company, right? All I wanted was someone to listen to me bitch and moan about how awful everything was and how much I hated my crappy job in a miserable box office in a dilapidated theatre for a company that could not, even with the aid of valium, given less of a shit about me (one time, an electrical fire broke out under the desk at my feet, and I managed to just get away before it turned into a small but serious blaze, and when I called the head office to tell them, the first thing they said was "can you still sell tickets?"). But Blair wouldn't have a bar of it. Not because he was deliberately trying to ignore my misery or because he thought I was exaggerating, but because his in-built positivity and optimism meant that he was actually incapable of dwelling on the shitty things that had happened. As far as he was concerned, they were in the past. For Blair, there was a whole wonderful world out there, and so whenever I bitched about something he would beam like a summer's day and remind me of something positive I had to look forward to.

After a few weeks, I was ready to kill him.

Yet he persisted. We began to spend the evenings on the balcony drinking wine and talking about good times we'd had, either with each other, or with our friends, or with people that the other had never even met. He'd offer his opinion on whatever piece I was writing, and it was invariably positive regardless of how godawful it was. He would practically cartwheel through the front door after getting home from work or the gym or from his voiceover lessons or from the pub or even from the freaking dentist brimming with glee at all the awesome things that had happened to him, no matter how big or small. And most of all, he insisted that the universe had brought us together - that the next twelve months would see us take ourselves to the next level, in career, relationships, and general satisfaction with our lives. For this reason, the apartment was no longer known as 2203/177 Mitchell Road, Esrkineville, it was only allowed to be referred to as "The Apartment Where Only Good Things Happen And Dreams Come True."

Crazily, it began to work. My general situation barely changed for six months. I kept the same shitty jobs (although I began to pick up some excellent work at local youth theatre companies, which kept me sane), I could barely earn enough money to rub two pennies together, I was still hardly writing any music, and I was, as always, chronically single. And yet one day, like a breath of beautiful fresh air, I stopped thinking about the things that I had lost and instead began to notice all of the incredibly awesome things I did have, including a truly remarkable housemate.

One evening, in late November of 2009, Blair and I were sitting on the balcony of our apartment. We had several empty bottles of wine in front of us and we made a pact: we were going to be living in the USA, come hell or high-water, by that time the following year. To confirm our drunken, 3.30-in-the-morning commitment to this endeavor, we wrote on the back of a big piece of paper: "BY SEPTEMBER 16, 2010, TIM AND BLAIR WILL BE LIVING IN THE USA" and stuck it on the back of our front door. We were both deadly serious about it, too. It became a constant topic of conversation, "what we were doing to get to the USA". Blair began to apply to residencies, and was successful in getting a six week stint in L.A. at quite a prestigious acting workshop. I meanwhile started to apply to schools in the USA in earnest, reminded every day of my commitment to do so both by the big sign on the back of the door and by the ceaseless optimism and support of Blair.

Now, I'm not going to get too Hollywood here and say that Blair was single-handedly responsible for pulling me out of my funk and giving me a much-needed kick in the pants, but there is no doubt in my mind that moving in with Blair was possibly the most serendipitously fortuitous off-the-cuff decision I had ever made. When we moved out of that apartment in early August 2010, with me about to move to the USA, one of the last things to go out of the house was the sign on the back of the door. I wish I had kept it.

You know much of the next part of the story: I moved to the USA in September, and began school, and have sporadically chronicled my misadventures on this blog (and I SWEAR there will be a whole bunch more coming soon). Blair meanwhile finally achieved his biggest break to date, scoring a co-hosting gig on a cooking and travel series with his mum, Lyndey, where they traveled around Greece for a few weeks generally having a kickass time of things.

A few weeks ago in early April I returned to Australia for what was meant to be a week-long trip. My dad is a budding artist and was having his first exhibition, and I went back to support him, give an awesome speech, and drink all the free booze on offer. There was a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing on my part though, as it would be right in the middle of the semester and would mean I would miss a fair chunk of school. But in the end I decided it was the right thing to do - if anything I had learned over my time living with Blair it was to never, ever take for granted the wonderful things you have in your life, and my family is definitely at the top of an awesome list. I spent three days in Orange and then went to Sydney. I was to fly out on Saturday April 16th, and had sent out feelers for a party in Newtown on the Friday night before, including a message to Blair. I was puzzled when I didn't hear back from him; Blair was always the first person to put his hand up for a party.

That Friday morning, at 11am, I got a phone call from Danielle: on Thursday, Blair had collapsed at home, and was in intensive care. He had leukemia. No one knew. A huge bunch of his friends went to the hospital to keep vigil with his family outside of the ICU where he lay, unconscious, fighting for his life for two days. His wonderful parents let us come to his beside, two by two, to see him, something that I will cherish for the rest of my life. Blair died at 1.30am on Sunday April 17th. He was two months shy of his thirtieth birthday.

* * *

I began writing this entry on the day I flew back to the USA. Strangely enough, it was May 3rd, 2011 - exactly two years after I had returned to Australia and began what I know now was one of the most important phases of my life. The phase where I stopped obsessing about the things I wasn't doing and instead enjoyed the things I had. The phase where I learned that one of the best things you can do is enjoy time with your friends instead of locking yourself away in your study for weeks on end. The phase where I began to enjoy the simple things in life once more, and take pleasure in planning for the future instead of being terrified of it. A phase that is inextricably linked to the life and philosophy of Blair Milan.

I'll miss you, buddy.

To Good Times.

http://vimeo.com/23216938

Blair, Danielle and Me

Why I hate the G train

Unless you've been living under a rock you're probably aware that New York has this quaint little system of tunnels known as the "subway". These tunnels have trains inside them, and they criss-cross the city thus enabling its inhabitants to get around with relative ease. Dirty, rickety and yet (to my Australian eye) incredibly efficient, the subway is the great leveler. If you live in New York you will almost certainly have to use the subway at some point in your day, whether you're a high-falutin' businessman, a too-cool-for-skool hipster, or the crazy man who was on the train with me one evening last year and spent the first half of the trip over the Williamsburg bridge ushering invisible people through the door adjoining the carriages, and the second half with his pants around his ankles talking animatedly to his penis.

Now, this might be revealing too much of what ticks around inside my head, but I can't help but consider some of the trains I usually catch to have distinct personalities. I have always done shit like this. When I was a kid I thought that numbers, letters, colours and even days of the week had "personalities" and I either liked or loathed them based on their traits, and since no one told me this was nuts until it was too late I still have vestigial flickers of emotion when certain characters pop up. The number "6" for example, still seems to be a selfish little shit of a number, Sundays are miserable and the letter "E" is so common but thinks it's sooo fucking good, slutting around all over the place. The number "11" however still feels exciting and different, ripe with possibilities, deep green fills me with joy and calm, and  one of the highlights of my day is being able to legitimately handwrite a capital letter "Z". So flamboyant, yet still elegant (like me).

Anyway, as I was saying, since I have managed to carry this lunacy into my adulthood, it didn't take me long to begin to associate certain trains with particular emotions. How could I not? Each train is designated with either a letter or a number, and then most of these trains are grouped with two or three others into particular colours, a perfect storm for a neurotic someone like me to indulge in a bit of crazy while waiting on the platform. My favourite is the "M" train, one of the helpful bright orange trains. It obligingly whisks me each day between the Marcey Avenue stop near my house to West 4 near school via the Williamsburg bridge, giving me an awesome view of the city and reminding me that I'm in freaking New York.  My day is always brightened when I get to catch one of the rich, royal dark blue trains, the "A", "C" or even the "E" (despite its slutty ways). Alas, such opportunities for me are rare, like getting to ride a camel, so I relish them when they crop up. Then there's the "L". The "L" is the James Dean of trains, a loner grey, a rebel. From the Lorimer Street station near my place it stabs into the heart of lower Manhattan with cool arrogance, and doesn't give a fuck what the other la-di-dah trains think, with their fancy routes all over the place. I want so badly to be friends with the "L", but it'd never talk to me.

Of course every story needs a villain. Some villains are oafish, stupid brutes, others are dorky little clerical jerks who think they're doing good but screw everything up, whilst others are tortured souls who can coolly assert that their noble end justifies their wicked means. But the villain in this insane cast of enormous metal actors (am I laboring the metaphor? Probably. But shut the hell up) is the worst kind. This is the Iago from Othello of trains: superficially appearing to be helpful, loyal and friendly, but you realise too late, too late, that it hates you and has been plotting maliciously all along to destroy you and everything you hold dear, that its most treasured dream is to dance amongst the smoking wreckage of what was once your life.

I am, of course, talking about the "G" train.

The "G" train.

I loathe the "G" train.

On the surface it seems to be a perfectly lovely train. It runs the length of Brooklyn and Queens. It doesn't need to show off and hang out with the other lines in Manhattan. "G" is a kind letter, a motherly letter, one that helpfully finishes things off with a graceful little curl. This train is a lovely calming green colour, one that suggests it could take you peacefully to the moon if you so desired. Even the stations on the "G" line feel welcoming, more like waiting inside a tiled cathedral than a subway station. But that's what it wants you to think... it wants you to let your guard down, to unthinkingly meander into its open craw, whereupon it will snap shut its doors like a Venus Fly-Trap and will take you God-knows where.

It will whizz through the station that you were intending to get off at for absolutely no reason at all. It will shut down without warning and force everyone off in the middle of nowhere at ten o'clock at night. It will decide it's tired and not run for weekends at a time. You'll wait for half an hour for a downtown "G", while across on the uptown platform trains will arrive every freaking five minutes. This trend is, of course, reversed on the return journey. Any plan involving me catching a "G" train will be given serious reconsideration. The promise of free gold bullion would not necessarily be enough to lure me onto this insidiously fickle asshole of a train. The worst part though, the absolute worst part, is that it is the only train that runs the north/south length of Brooklyn. AND IT KNOWS IT. It sits there, smugly grinning in its beautifully tiled lair, taunting you, knowing that as much as you try to avoid giving it the satisfaction of stomping down the subway stairs, waiting for an eternity for it to show the hell up, not being 100% sure that you will even arrive at your chosen destination, you cannot evade it forever. As inevitable as God's final judgement on mankind, eventually you will have to ride the G train .

In other news, it's hayfever season. I think that the antihistamines are stronger here than they are in Australia.

Responsible Service of Getting Smashed

When I was twenty two and working as the venue technician at the Bathurst Theatre I was sent off one day to the local TAFE to do my Responsible Service of Alcohol. I don't remember why any more; possibly my boss felt it was important that, as the holder of a freshly minted Bachelor of Arts degree, I become acquainted with the work I was likely to be doing sporadically for the rest of my life. At any rate, I dutifully attended the six-hour long course and learned about things like how to deny drunks any more booze (point at the "No Service to Inebriates" sign, because then it's not your fault, it's the sign's fault. Drunks are pretty stupid), or the importance of checking I.D. (because you'll get a five thousand buck fine if you let that gaggle of bubble-headed seventeen-year-olds in your bar), or what combination of drinks will give you the worst hangovers (officially it makes no difference what you drink, but after having a few benders where I worked my way through the rainbow of booze from beer to red wine to cocktails to dark spirits, I humbly submit that that is utter bullshit), or even the fact that it is illegal to have any kind of promotions that encourage one to drink, like free giveaways, two-for-ones and so on (not that I think Australians really need much encouragement to drink. As my friend Daniel said one day after I complained about having a hangover, "Why were you drinking last night? Was the day spelled with a "Y" again?". Smartass).

Anyway, drinking culture is one of those things that I hadn't really considered could vary from country to country. What could be different? You go into a big noisy room with a bunch of strangers and drink alcohol until either you don't want any more, your money runs out, or verticality and coherent speech are distant memories. Well, quite a bit could be different actually. New York City is a pretty big place for such a small place. The drinking culture can vary dramatically with the difference of a few blocks. If I attempted to experience and describe the differences between them all then this wouldn't be a blog, it would be a Lonely Planet Boozing Book and I would be WAY more broke and hungover than I am at the moment. So instead, I will limit myself to the drinking culture of the neighbourhood with which I am best acquainted... my own charmingly decrepit Williamsburg. And at the risk of heresy on a number of levels, I think that Australia could learn a thing or to from the boozing habits of the local hipsters.

Here, bars are small. Bars are plentiful. Bars adorn every corner of my neighbourhood. For a bar to be so full you can't find a place to sit, or at least lean against a wall, is pretty odd. The result of this is that bars have the vibe of a cafe. And it is absolutely AWESOME. When was the last time you were in a cafe and two drunken knobs started beating the shit out of each other? Or some thoughtless jerk bumped your arm, knocking your coffee all over you and your friend, and couldn't give less of a shit? Or some vacuous bimbo absent-mindedly burnt a hole in your favourite jacket with her cigarette while telling some crap story about the bitches at her work at the top of her voice? Never, that's when. Bars here are civilized dens of intelligent conversation, good-natured humour, and attractive people with ironic moustaches.

Here, they check your ID even though you are clearly WAY over 21. Personally, this is flattering but also annoying, since my drivers license lives inside a little plastic pocket of my wallet that I suspect was designed by the people who make Chinese finger-traps. Here, they have daily specials on different kinds of booze, from $3 mimosas, to happy hours that extend generously beyond the traditional sixty minutes, to a free shot of Jameson with every can of PBR beer you buy (although I wouldn't recommend that last one, not unless you enjoy exorcist-style vomiting). Microbreweries pepper the city, so here bars are full of obscure, delicious and awesomely named beers, such as my personal favourite, "Captain Lawrence's Seasonal Peculiar".

But perhaps the biggest point of difference for me is what I'd always thought inevitably happens when you combine good times with music, copious amounts of discount alcohol and a bunch of red-blooded boozey drunks in one place... the bar fight. I've been here since September last year, and up until last weekend I hadn't witnessed so much as a raised voice. New Yorkers, it seems, are much better at holding their booze than Australians. Then, last weekend, I finally saw what happens when a fight breaks out. No bouncer grabbing each trouble maker roughly by the arm and dragging them out the front to duke it out. They take a much more holistic approach. The ugly lights get slammed on. The music stops. Everyone in the room turns to look at the morons who have decided to ruin everyone else's night by getting all macho. The bouncer goes "hey hey hey!". The aggressors let go of each other's shirt collars (which were identical. Perhaps that's why they were fighting). Things calm down. The lights go back down, the music goes on, and everyone goes back to discussing whether James Joyce's finest masterpiece was "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake" over their boutique, exquisitely microbrewed beers.

So obviously the entirety of American Drinking Culture is not this civil (a la Jodi Foster in "The Accused" for example), but while I live in Williamsburg I'm cherishing going out to a bar and feeling like I'm at a party in someone's lounge room rather than a factory warehouse filled with lobotomized alcoholics. So much so that in my hazier moments I've toyed with the idea of trying to open my own bar back in Australia modeled on my local Brooklyn boozers. I reckon I'd make a mint. If nothing else I'd justify my old boss's investment in sending me off to get my RSA.