Hard Launch
Big discount on comedy tickets! A strange wax museum! A link to a story about a tiny little Beethoven!
If my first Plastic Corrosion Awareness email was the equivalent of a blurry Instagram photo of a shoulder, please consider this one a clear picture of a smiling face with the caption ‘great weekend away with this one xx’. We’re locked in. This is happening. And it’s fine if everyone knows about it.
I’ve realised I used to write in my own voice all the time. I wrote silly little opinion pieces about unimportant topics. I wrote badly about important topics. I even, I’m sorry to tell you, did some stand up. Now, most things I write or do have at least one layer between myself and the audience – I write fiction, I write sketches, I write character comedy. Do I need to interrogate this further? Probably. Part of it is exhaustion at coming up with new ideas or opinions that I actually hold myself, because there are only so many opinions one person can have and being forced to generate more is awful for the mind and spirit. Part of it is that I got tired of disagreeing with my past self. Part of it is that certain elements of the world tilted towards the fictional themselves, so it felt absurd to talk about them in any other way.
The strange impact of this shift is that writing this short section, right at the top here, feels incredibly exposing. It feels like I need to impress, without any tricks or backup. It feels, for lack of a better word, cringe. But I’m aiming to get better at it – and if I don’t, you can berate me on social media, or, if you get the chance, straight to my face. You can even screen capture my terrible thoughts, poorly expressed, and share them in group chats to pick over the entrails with your wittiest, cruellest friends.
There’s a kind of narcissism to imagining you’ll get roasted in a group chat, but there’s also a narcissism to sending out a newsletter on Substack, and there’s a narcissism to doing anything like what this newsletter contains at all. And while it would be great to join the ranks of those who claim not to do publicity, or put any thought into building a profile, or read their own reviews to find pull quotes for social media, there’s also no invisible team doing that on my behalf to leave me free to make such humble claims.
All of this is to say, I hope you’ve subscribed because you’re interested in what I’m up to, because I have a couple of things to share – but I’ve also included links to some work I’ve enjoyed, which I hope you might also enjoy!
Scoot Lambrock: Journey to the Infinite Void
After giving last year’s festival a miss, I’m bringing the show I had planned to the 2023 Melbourne International Comedy Festival: ‘Scoot Lambrock: Journey to the Infinite Void’!
Unlike my last live show, this follows a solo character – Scoot Lambrock, a virtuoso of adventure, a master of intergalactic spacecraft, statecraft and stagecraft. It’s set on the bridge of his ship, complete with a viewscreen into space, with the audience joining him on his most dangerous adventure yet – the titular journey to the Infinite Void.
As a thanks for reading ‘First Dates’ and/or this newsletter, I have a 2 for 1 offer available for Plastic Corrosion Awareness subscribers, which I guarantee is the biggest discount I’ll be offering throughout the run!
There are only six shows, so bring a friend or two or fifty-nine (for physical reasons it’s sadly not possible to bring any more than yourself and fifty-nine friends) along to board the Thunder Phoenix – just use the discount code ‘PLASTIC’ when you purchase tickets via the Comedy Festival site.
If for any reason you’d like to attend but aren’t able to pay, please let me know and I’ll do my best to arrange a ticket for you.
If you happen to be interested in reviewing the show, or know someone who would, I’d also love to have you! Just reply to this email to get in touch.
Wax (in Griffith Review)
My short story, ‘Wax’, is available in the current issue of Griffith Review! It follows a family as they visit a waxworks in an obscure Australian town, and isn’t (intentionally) funny.
It’s also part of a great issue with the theme of fakes and frauds, which includes work by Julie Koh, Beau Windon, Oliver Reeson, Ben Walter and, of course, the members of the band Regurgitator.
Some Quick Recommendations
Short Story
‘Ludwig’ by Beth Morgan in The Baffler
Mal took public transportation home around midnight, saddened that this was how she needed to travel. Her phone lit up with promotional emails and no personal ones. Although she briefly envisioned changes she might make in her life, she was too tired to do anything but lock the apartment door behind her with paranoid, trembling hands.
This is a story with a simple premise: a woman returns to her apartment to find a tiny version of Ludwig von Beethoven, who claims to be a time traveller. We’ve all been there!
The voice and language of this is so fun, but I loved it even more for constantly making choices I didn’t expect. It builds on the premise, gives it heart, makes some ridiculous moves and lands them all.
Collections
I’d usually write something here, but I recently contributed a quick 2022 book wrap-up to Meanjin with a focus on Australian short story collections. You might recognise some writers I’ve mentioned in this newsletter (or in ‘First Dates’), but there are also some other collections and anthologies I enjoyed. Though I’m still catching up on a few things published last year, if you’re interested in speculative or ‘darkly funny’ (the blurb/review phrase of the year) Australian work hopefully there’s some work here that might interest you!
TV
For All Mankind (available on Apple TV in Australia)
Going back to the subject of space, I thought I’d throw in a plug for For All Mankind, which aired its third season last year but seems to remain vaguely under the radar. It’s difficult to say this is always incredible – there are some frustrating plots and characters, and it sometimes veers towards the soapier end of what we’ve come to know as ‘prestige TV’ – but I will never stop watching. Besides the core idea, it knows how to land a season finale in a way that makes me instantly forgive anything it’s done in the preceding episodes that have made me groan at the screen.
The show’s basic premise is an alternate history, beginning in the 1960s when the Soviet Union beats the United States to the moon. This means that instead of the space race effectively being over, the US doubles down, the Soviet Union doubles down, everyone is fighting to be first to get a moon base/get to Mars/get big hotels out there/etc, and the Cold War keeps churning.
The seasons take leaps forward in time, so while the initial consequences of the Soviet Union landing first are vaguely plausible (like Ted Kennedy’s political career being very different), later events are a little more ‘please allow us to remind you history is different now’ (like John Lennon not being killed). Most of the focus is on astronauts and staffers at NASA, but this broadens to include their families and others, and NASA is far more politically central in this alternate timeline. The show also makes decent efforts (at least for my Wikipedia level understanding of space travel) to portray what might have been possible with the technology of the time, which has given me no desire to be on any rocket to Mars in my lifetime.
As a bonus, there are a large number of Reddit threads that try to guess what the music drop will be when there’s a new jump forward in time, and in classic Reddit style some people manage to nail it – figuring out not only which year the show will leap to, but which song they’ll play to hit us with the appropriate nostalgia.
If you’ve read/watched/seen anything I’ve mentioned, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments – or, if you have any of your own recommendations, please share those as well!
And if you’re reading this for the first time and you’d like more strange stories, thoughts and recommendations in your inbox, please subscribe.