Caking, there's no stopping us.
Rock that beat(er)!
Before we get started, get a load of this lounge room from an ad for a ridiculous house for sale right now.
Hold on to that awe you’re feeling, I’ll tell you more about this house later.
My promise in the first issue of this thing was that I was would ignore the weekly online zeitgeist, its brouhahas and memes to take you to places outside our screens.
Though this week's Dr Raygun Napolean Vegemite Breakdancing palaver was tempting. So many thoughts and angles to explore. I even took some hours of my life to read her academic work but you know… there’s hundreds of places you can go for any of that.
But it did remind me of a weird ('weird' is so hot right now) intersection of arts as competition, the news, and my mum, way back in 2010.
My mum was/is a master wedding cake maker and decorator.
Years ago, couples would pay her hundreds of dollars for a cake that would take weeks to make. You could say it was a professional operation but really the cost would barely cover materials - nowhere near the gazillions of hours it took to make one of her cakes. But these projects gave her making purpose and vibe, while the money subsidised the materials. She tells me that she has SO MANY CAKE TINS. I’ve seen her cake room. She’s right. There are SO MANY CAKE TINS.
Look at this cake she made for our mate, Katia’s wedding.
Look at the flowers. They’re not flowers. They are flowers made out of sugar and icing. Incredible, huh.
She learnt with the best people out there and became part of the intricate cake decorating scene’s groups and associations.
This leads us to competition cake making.
Every year for as long as I can remember, mum went to the Royal Melbourne show to see the entries. It’s part of the community sport of it all. All those cakes. So many hours of love, work and expertise (for most of them).
Mum entered twice. She won the novice section first time she entered. But it’s the second time, years later when she entered that I was reminded of this week…
Meet the Hotham Street Ladies.
The Hotham Street Ladies are a collective of four artists who make incredible, cartoonish sculptures out of icing and fondant (cake decorating stuff). They came up with the name from the share house they lived in on Hotham Street Collingwood.
Of their many many shows, they’ve made a huge pair of sagging breasts, a room for an old lady and her cat (full kitty litter), the aftermath of a new years eve house party gone wrong, and lots of women’s bits blood-themed work.
If this rings a bell, you might remember when they entered the Royal Melbourne Show under a non deplume with a cake that looks like a mostly eaten takeaway pizza with an ashtray of ciggies. It made the news. One of the artists, Lyndal Walker told the SMH that they would be embarrassed if it was seen “in any way to denigrate the skill of the other entrants.”
At the time, I laughed about it, and sometimes rib my mum about the pizza cake against the beautiful cakes.
Surely cakes can be creative, they don't all have to be white towers, and I would say that the artists seemed to mean well.
The next year, in 2010, they were disqualified for this cake, Mrs Havisham’s Wedding Cake because it was deemed to be in poor taste.
But after watching the Dr Raygun thing, much in how I wondered what other breakdancers thought of the Raygun’s seemingly deliberately daggy entry, I wondered again what my mum really thought of these artists making a big splash into her cake decorating world.
So I called her.
Turns out the cake with the mouse in it was delivered to the showgrounds pavilion at the same time my mum was delivering her own wedding cake entry - the second and final time she’s ever entered a competition.
Mum, what did you think when you saw it?
(laughing) It had a rat in it and it looked like it had fell on the floor. The first thing I thought was, oh god, did they have an accident? I was shocked mostly because if there’s one thing that we’re scared of when we make cakes is dropping them. I wouldn’t have a clue what other people there thought of that cake but I found it was very funny.
It was just funny, and besides, the disqualified cake was entered into a different division as my mum’s cake so she had no reason to do anything else but laugh. She definitely didn’t feel any offence about it even after it was disqualified.
So how did the wedding cake my mum enter go?
Oh, she won.
It was the show’s best wedding cake that year…
…and my own wedding cake a little while later.
That time in 1931 when dignity and decorum returned with the long skirt.
Last weekend’s perplexing coach to under 7s three quarter time tactics conversation.
I’ve been my little fella’s under 7s footy team’s coach in the past few weeks. This conversation threw me…
ME: Great quarter. I love that you shared it around with all that hand-balling. This quarter I want you to when you get the ball, instead of hand-balling, kick it long, and kick it high, INTO THE STARS!
(two seconds of silence)
JAKE: It's daytime. There are no stars.
BILLY: The sun is a star.
ME: Then... KICK IT HIGH INTO THE SUN!
(two more seconds of silence)
BILLY: But the sun is THAT WAY, and we're kicking THIS WAY this quarter.
(more silence)
ME: (flummoxed) Yep, you're right. Um... GOOD CHAT GUYS!
A house you should buy.
In a coincidence that’s too good to be true, another infamous/famous/whatever share house on Hotham Street is now for sale. 75 Hotham Street is a haunted, orange house I shared in the late 90s/early 2000s with my great friends, Jeff and Dicko, and later a Norwegian bloke called Trond.
You could call us The Hotham Street Gentlemen. Maybe even The Hotham Street Blokes but you'd be more on point with The Hotham Street Bozos.
A lot of stuff happened in this house. Looking at my subscriber list, at least 20% of you have had some very interesting nights and days and then the next nights inside, outside or in outer-space at this place.
Let’s have a look at our lounge room again.
Nothing has changed, except we had a lot of pictures of Rod Stewart on that ridiculous wallpapered wall. I think there were pictures of Rod in every room.
In a rare act of honesty, the real estate ad opens with…
“In need of some love and attention, this light-filled brick residence has certainly seen better days.”
MASSIVE LOL. I’ll never forget the shower. There was a hole in the floor tiling which got bigger over a few days. Look into the hole and you’ll see it was bottomless. Drop a rock in the hole and you would never see it land… Stranger Things hole to the upside down world vibe sort of thing. So we call the landlord in to fix it.
An hour later, they let themselves in.
I’m on the couch on the phone interviewing some indie rock band about their next EP and can hear all sorts of banging and scraping from the bathroom, and out from the bathroom an ancient Italian lady dressed in black, holding a can of WD40 barks at me, PLASTIC BAG. YOU GOT PLASTIC BAG?
I get her one from the kitchen, and she trudges back to the bathroom with it.
Yes, that’s how she fixed the hole. She put the plastic bag on it. Thanks.
The house is yours for $1,325,000.
I 💩 you not.
What to listen to.
Our Nick is doing interviews for the new Bad Seeds record about to come out. You probably saw the Leigh Sales interview already. It was great and sad as the others you’ll hear. I reckon he’ll be on heaps of podcasts too. Listen to all of them.
This Steve Colbert interview is lovely. Colbert is a wise, beautiful fellow, comfortable with taking his interviews into places of grief, faith and hope for a CBS late show. The end is really something. I don’t know how he can keep doing this. It looks so draining.
Friends you should hire.
Renee Frantzeskos is one of the most adept, smartest people I’ve ever worked with in my years in advertising. As a suit when I was at DDB, she wrote great briefs, sold and protected the work, and later when I was at Ogilvy, as creative services director (tough job not many people can do well), she kept things humming.
Now after some time with young kids, she’s ready to put together award entries for agencies and I’m sure, other project management briefs. I think you should get her to help your workplace with your award entries because it’s that’s also a tough job you don’t want to stuff up. Get in touch before she gets booked out.
IKEA rug or giant merkin?
I’m convinced the naughty people at IKEA know exactly what they’re doing with this. Five hairy stars, David.
Thanks for last week.
Once again, thank you Chaz for your beautiful piece on the awful stuff going on in the UK, and thank you to those who’ve come over here to read it and subscribe. This is the stuff that keeps me doing this.
What a movie Glenn’s Party would be in that house.
Kids innocence mixed with frankness, just laughing at yourself and the odd things you come across, and images of a home that reminds me of my Gran’s house which the furnishing colors were equally contrasting but summed up my Gran.
A great read, cheers.