Standard interviewer don't's.
Things it's probably best not to do in the preceding fortnight before interviewing someone you find musically and physically rather dishy:
1. Announce to the world/office/major friendship circle that you've been having erotic anxiety dreams about them.
This is relatively private. Must you really arrive breathlessly in the communal kitchen and tell everyone within earshot about your nocturnal adventures racing through starry-skied dreamscapes with your interviewee to be? I think not. Go and make yourself a cup of tea and be quiet and that way when it comes time for the interview you won't have eighteen hundred of your co-workers grinning through the window at you and giving you the thumbs up.
2. Stroll the streets of Sydney listening to some of their songs on repeat.
It will only make you nervously regard them as musically remarkable. You need to start the interview on an even keel. If you have been listening to their voice with your eyes closed THEY HAVE A DISTINCT ADVANTAGE DO YOU NOT SEE.
3. Find a magazine with a copy of their face on the cover and rip a hole where their mouth is pictured and stick your tongue through it.
An addendum: don't leave it on your desk where they may walk past and look at it with an increasing sense of alarm. There is a chance they may call security. You don't want this.
4. Imitate their amusing speaking voice on national radio.
You do realise a portion of people listen to this and there's a chance that you saying HAHA LISTEN TO HIS SWEET AND FUNNY KERMIT THE FROG VOICE will be reported back to him? Use your fucking head, for god's sake.
5. Be a pink-cheeked twit.
Dear Julian from the Presets, I'm sorry I got all tongue-tied this morning and stared at my lap when you came in to be quizzed on your upcoming shows. I am a goof. You smell nice and I still think four songs on your new record are very pretty. With love from ms fits.
Comments
well, julian from the presets touched my bum.
yes, thats right.
Fits, i do love your 'Ill-informed rantings and half baked-theory's'
enough with the ass sucking
did all this really happen?
i know peter costello's son. i see him almost every day at uni. before i matched him up with the "omg peter costello's son is in our course" rumour, my friend and i assigned him the appropriate nickname- bogan voice. i know his father's practically unemployed these days, so should i take it easy and stop cracking funnies in the form of muttering "kevin 07" and "sif vote liberal" etc. when i am near him?
if not, will you plz cum bak 2 melbz and join me?
Thanks for all the great tips on interviews, MH. Did Father Bob really give you the thumbs up? he is a legend.
what about the other one? no sexy-time dreams for Kim?
you best not be the cause of a presets breakup. Everyone knows that love, jelousy and all that jazz can be a real band-killer.
But seriously. It's bad enough to announce ones crushes to the world, because everytime thereafter anyone in your immediate circle of humanity ever hears you mention that crush, or knows you're going to see them, or discovers your plans to just happen-to-be-in-the-same-location-as-somewhere-said-crushee-mentioned-
they-just-might-chance-by-later-in-the-evening, they all tend to give you a slightly sad look, with appropriately maudlin smile, a minor sideways tilt of the head, and accompanying "Awwww", often followed by a friendly hug and/or tousle of the hair.
This can become quite annoying. Er.. so I've heard.
Don't be mean to PC's son, especially if, as me too says " i met him once & he's a little cunt."
These are the type of people who grow up to be in charge of things - your boss, council managers, the bloody PM for chrissake (Johnny being the uber-example of this). Once they attain their positon of power they proceed to take revenge upon us all for the slights they suffered. And cos they hold a position of importance, they are able to make our lives miserable. Just think, if people had been nice to little Johnny at school, we may never have had to go through the crap of the last 10 years. If nothing else is proved by the reign of JH it is this - the personal is political, and when a bitter and twisted little fucker gets their hands on the levers of power it becomes highly unpleasant.
Plus this PC's spawn is already connected so it is even more likely that he'll be in charge of something one day.
So, please, gird your loins, whack on a fake smile (i have heard that vaseline can help with this....though i can't think of how) and buy the lad a beer, make his acquaintance, and u just may save us from much wailing and gnashing of teeth further down the line.
It's yr public duty to yr countrywomen/men everywhere. Do this for us and u will never have to attend a crappola P&C meeting ever, or donate to the salvos for the rest of your life. Your duty will have been done, yr conscience will be clear.
Good luck.
Turn to the kindy-aged child of the mother sitting next to you and say:
"If you're really good, I'll tell you who your real paremts are."
I blame Jeanette Howard for the rodent's personality. Her need for status and dominance gave him those hunted, scared eyes. I heard she gave him the rounds of the kitchen on a regular basis.
We vote for one but get the team. I like that Therese Rein started her own business, kept her name and will continue to work. Particularly as the business actually helps people.
Much better example for my daughters.
Much better than the Howard spawn, lawyers and merchant bankers. Eeew.
/Rant over.
Be nice to cunts because they may someday be your boss?
FUCK.THAT.SHIT.
Hope your life as a doormat to the rich and powerful is comfortable for you.
Kill yourself, you're a stupid communist retard.
Love,
Me.
On the other hand I'm reading "Liars Poker" (which MFs may have suffered through but I find riveting - I work for those "destroyers of the earth"TM). It totally vindicates your position and clears my conscience. Those mother-fuckers are even WORSE these days! Bring forth the guillotine! Just remember I’m the one screaming “I was only following orders!”
... er yeah… bad interview prep Fits… try and settle... a bit...
Ha ha Ms Fits has been mentioned in the feedback stories of "six unimportant things about me that involve celebrities" on loobylu....
Maybe MsFits should ask Cherry to send the book back to FTBC!
http://loobylu.com/archives/000827.htm ...
Also, I went to summer camp with Marieke Hardy when we were about 10 or 11. And I accidentally took her book (Harriet the Spy) home with me after I’d borrowed it.
Just sayin'.
That said (and I know we're not judging here) it may have been for the best to hold off on "...You smell nice..." in the I'm-ok-you're-ok entreaty to Julian in the afterward. Some would argue that any "sniffing" of a dishy quarry prior to the 3rd-4th date really does need to be kept on the "down low", as it were (again, not judging).
p.s. Your blog is pure hilarity / zen wisdom / above-average fonts & layout. I only wish that we could put it in the water supply (no, really, Kevin07, get on it).
brodie, the best way to find good blogs is to go to mine, and then try to find ones that are almost as good as it.
Or do what I do, read The Age Green Guide and go, ooh, what a funny lady and what a lovely picture she makes me come all over goofy my word etc. I wonder if she has a blog hooray she does!
Fearbulgum, sound advice. Not just positions of power either, simply notoreity. Maybe if someone, just once in his childhood, had of given Kyle Sanderlands a kind word of encouragement after giving him a wedgie (we're only human afetr all)... Well, think what could of been.
I pride myself on being incredibly inappropriate, and its awesome - - I walked up to my sexy beast told him i thought he was rather attractive...
6 months later we're still boinking constantly.
no point in holding back.
it's like when your parents use the word radical, thinking they're being awesomely "radical"
bah.
The Last Scientician...point taken, most obvious weakness in the precis. But i guess i'm focussing on the early years where i believe there is still hope for everyone...relatively blank slate and all that...and i'm also trying to be pragmatic and outline an approach that will minimise future grief for the most people...am also enough of a realist to know that this sort of business may be genetic, in which case there is no hope, and if the person is awful devilspawn then we should all take every opportunity to be as rotten as possible to them.
Ahhh, the mysteries of life, which way to go?...i guess i would prefer to go for the more optimistic side of the equation.
You bitch, I've been looking for that for ages, give it back.
Moreover, an awful lot of them will turn into another pet hate of mine- Chapel St marketing wankers with their collars up who hold loud, pompous mobile-phone conversations on the train. Cunts.
Ahhhh. I feel cleansed.
It does make things complicated, certainly.
But even a vicious, bloodthirsty dog breed may be controlled, by firm and thorough training, and constant vigilance.
I was at that camp. For our class presentation we acted out the bit from 'Confederacy of Dunces' where Ignatious takes on a job in the French Quarter selling hot-dogs and gets into an argument with some middle class matrons.
I presented this as a metaphor representing the revolt of the white, male, red-neck underclass (though with intellectual pretensions) against the matrifocal but still patriarchal bourgeois establishment of the un-reconstructed South. You know, guilt ridden liberals?
I borrowed Marieke's hard-cover copy of the book signed by the author's mother.
First prize went to some girls who could dance the Macarena, though. And I got detention.
Fine point, succinctly expressed. It's a tough little nut of a problem this one. Another part of my motivation is that I was one of the tin lids that dished a bit out to various contemporaries. Most of the time i did it for no good reason...i was bored, they were easy targets for a bit of ridicule, etc. Thankfully i soon realised that what i was doing was often dramatcially hurtful to those on receiving end, and there was no burning need for me to be a prat to these kids, so i stopped.
I ponder on how very powerfully formative it all is in the youngest years, and how thoughlessness of action can translate into an adult with enormous chip on their soldier.
I would also add this...If we start from a position of kindness and care, and then the person who has been the recipient of these balms still turns out to be an arsehole, we can then be fully and righteously justified in bringing down some nasty business on their head, knowing that we tried, they didn't, so fuck em.
Back to you TLS
And while I don't believe in destiny, I do think it is inevitable that certain types of personality are almost inextricably likely to become, and remain pricks when exposed to the right conditions.
I also agree that our elasticity, our ability to easily make changes in our lives, gets less and less as we grow older.
There is always the Bell curve of a trait distribution, is there not? Be it intelligenace/stupidity, pricks/decent human beings, the bell curve demands a set quota of the full range of diversity, no matter what trait. So yes, indeed, we will always have the pricks. The question i suppose then is this - how big a prick are they gonna be, and what can the rest of us (who would like to think we are not pricks, or at least lesser pricks) do to make sure their propensity to prickdom is minimised so that our suffering is reduced overall?
/Also approves
I keep getting dragged into poxy management training programs by my employer. Invariably there's a four quadrant split of traits where our little personalities fit neatly. I imagine in 50BC hapless centurions were sent on mangement courses where the four quadrants were fire, water, earth and air or choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. It's all bollocks! So Happy Monday.
"Mischa said he later used a speedboat to try to take pictures of her in her room and also papped her at the Qantas Club as she and her mum were leaving to return to Sydney."
Papped her?
Andy Pants said...
"Alas, true genius is never really aprreciated in it's time. Is it marxstubator?"
I expect my mum will have my manuscripts published after I'm dead.
RWiggum said...
"My cats breath smells of cat poo"
I think you've turned the cat around the wrong way.
Why not! A bit of personal medical service to make up for the photo's...
How much do you want for it Ms Fits?
The difficulty is, if people have predetermined personalities they cannot change, then we have no more right to discriminate based on personality than we do on skin colour, or gender.
But if it is a personal choice, we have every right to discriminate, as free will is the primary cause of aberrant behaviour.
It always comes back to free will and the question of whether it actually exists or not.
So back to amateur sickology - I stand by what I said. Folks can only be labelled easily at a distance. The appellation "Little cunt" is only relevant if you've met said "Little cunt". Taking up the cry of "Little cunt" as a mob is pretty "ick"
"Big cunts" are a different matter of course - they're fair game because they're happily standing well back dehumanising us "Little cunts". So let's discriminate against "Big cunts" and reserve judgement on "Little cunts" until they jump the queue at the tuckshop - as Little cunts invariably do.
Nice work if you can get it. I tried it once. The money was dreadful. About $300 a week. But that was all I could afford to pay.
I firmly believe that understanding how things work informs our choices and increases our opportunities in life, beyond merely enjoying what we see around us. Also, if certain parts of our personality are inherent, it could save years of grief, self-loathing and suffering for some people to discover that the reason they can't change their behaviour is because they have about as much chance as trying to change their eye colour at will. Then they could focus on recognising the behaviour they dislike and focusing on minimising its effect, rather than attempt to be someone they are not.
But whether free will really exists or not is very difficult to prove, though not without merit as a goal. I tend to think we are very good at imitating creatures with free will, even if we don't have any in reality.
I agree about dehumanising others, the only way to have an enemy is to find a point of difference to focus on, and that is usually pretty arbitrary.
I find that humans have more in common with each other than there are differences between us.
Hear, bloody hear. I could not agree more. One of the most unfortunate side effects of living in an individualistic culture is that it promotes an overly-heavy self-directed focus on the things that mark us apart from each other. Thus it can be too easy for us to speak of difference, and get into the labelling of the "other", so as to justify to ourselves that there really is some fundamental difference that justifies my feelings of ill will towards another person. Discussions on too many areas of human endeavour far too often start on where we don't agree, rather than where we do. We are all homosapien, we all have a lot more in common with each other, than we have differences.
And this gets me back to my original point i guess - don't go to the mean space too quick. The person you despise could just as easily be you, if you had been placed in a different set of circumstances. Get the empathy business flowing, try to nut out what's going on with the other that you don't like, and try and build some bridges rather than throw some stones.
".... but realising that Van Gogh's paintings are composed of thousands of tiny brush strokes makes them all the more impressive, not less so, surely?"
I agree. All that Blakean and Keatsean nonsense about knowledge "unweaving the rainbow" of their Romantic longings is very reactionary.
Now, if I can just turn this juice back into an orange...
Yes, yes, I know. Time is a dimension in the Holistic realm of being.
I reduce... *thinks hard* ... "random drivel from blithering eegits" to "coherent pieces of information within a logical framework" for a living. So I have some understanding of your perspective.
My own feeling is understanding mental construction is useful but usually parallel to understanding behaviour in people. I fear we are very bad at deconstructing people anyway.
TLS/FGB: group hug... (trousers on)
That thing with the hole in the magazine kills every time
Somebody might have already asked this, Fitsy, (there are 65 comments above. Give me a break) but from which side were you poking your tongue through the magazine cover? There's a world of difference, as I'm sure you'd appreciate.
Jeezus. That wallper hanger is cute, isn't she? "
You've only just noticed!? She has been my salvation. She has done wonders helping me get over my crush on ms fits. Probably just as unobtainable, though. What can I say... I must be addicted to disappointment!
papped is actually a term used to describe the act of being photographed, odd, I know.
(from urban dictionary, for sake of ease)
1. papped
Papped: Photographed by a Papparazo
"Shit, I've just been papped again and I'm not even famous"
I think you might actually be surprised by the level of anti-relativism emerging amongst academics recently. It's almost become taboo to have a completely original interpretation of anything, for fear of it *gasp* being "wrong", which I think is a little sad seeing as it's usually the maniacs and idiots who contribute the most to the development of human thought and understanding.
In my eyes it is an academics responsibility to contribute to a common truth and build on established ideas, whereas it is an artists responsibility to be reactionary, question, dream and lay the foundations for the development of new ideas. And yes, even occasionally be wrong.
This can only really happen if an artist relies on and values their individual perception of the world. So personally I am on the side of Blake and Keats.
But then there is a difference between an artist and a normal person. So it's probably best to keep that in mind.
"...papped is actually a term used to describe the act of being photographed, odd, I know."
Oh, I figured that. But what a choice of term. Why not "snapped"?
alter-ego said..
"But then there is a difference between an artist and a normal person. So it's probably best to keep that in mind."
I've noticed this among my flatmates. The 'normal persons' pay their share of the rent while the 'artists' think they can buy you off with a free massage or a print of their latest WOMAD poster.
Darn, there's that wallpaper hanger again.
Ms Slocombe: did you like "for the love of god"?
"Blake and Keats were about as much alike as Leonard Cohen and, um, the presets, whoever they are, but I'm on their side too, anyway."
Firstly I'd like to acknowledge the the Cannalgal and Kayimai people upon whose lands I am while writing this, as they were the original inhabitants here. Though later these were taken over by the Meriton Corporation people.
Secondly, I mention John Keats because he and other guests at the "Immortal Dinner" given by the luckless painter Benjamin Robert Haydon at his home in Lisson Grove on 28 December 1817.
His guests, apart from John Keats, included William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Tom Monkhouse (merchant), with Joseph Ritchie (surgeon/explorer), John Landseer (engraver), and John Kingston (comptroller of stamps) joining them after the meal.
The whole of their evening is recounted in "The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius & Laughter in Literary London, 1817" by Penelope Hughes-Hallett.
The discussed the Blakean whinge about the unweaving rainbow and related issues.
One odd thing, John Keats's nick-name was "Junkets" as that's how he pronounced his own name.
But then again, I'm a nerd.
Knowing how something fits together does not grant the ability to replicate it.
' for the love of god' is classic charlatanry, and a hoot to boot, and at least Damien doesn't dress it up as anything else......
"As a child I dreamt of being Harriet The Spy"
Lots of other boys did, to
*siiiiigh*
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