antipopper

Our road trip back from Adelaide is over. After Sonics/Synergies, we stayed in town for Staking A Claim: Global Buffy & Local Identities, which was deeply strange. But amidst all the over-serious analysis and somewhat defensive justifications for studying or even LIKING Buffy (including David Lavery’s “Buffy makes me feel smart — this is what I got a PhD for”), I did get to reappraise Seasons Six and Seven, which proved fertile ground for participants to spin some interesting shit. Best, tho, was bumping into Trisha Pender, who’s briefly back in the country from her duties at Stanford. We were Buffy fans together in Nineteen Fucking Ninety Two!

We got to meet some really nice students during our stay in Adelaide. Shout outs to Pipstar Buchanan, Kylie (“it’s all neoliberalism”) Jarrett and Danni Nicholas-Sexton (who steered us in the right direction). And I’m really disappointed to have missed Katy Stevens’ “Spike as Buffy’s dolly” paper. Boys generally seemed very thin on the ground.

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Morphic resonance: As Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake is released, I go to the Art Gallery of South Australia and see a bunch of interesting Sidney Nolan portraits of Ern Malley (a indistinct chimera of a fellow), Max Harris and the Angry Penguins crowd.

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Lena got stalked by this weird guy with few teeth. At the end of Sonics/Synergies, he waited for her after everyone left and attached himself to us as we walked down the road. Making dumb smalltalk while Lena deliberately called someone on her mobile to escape, I said, “So, are you sticking around in Adelaide for the Buffy symposium?”. He looked at me and said, “I wasn’t going to, but I might now”. D’ohhhhhh. And lo and behold, he arrives at the end of the Buffy symposium, and we have to make a run for it.

A new spin: After our very amusing dinner with him in Adelaide, we hooked up with Tommy DeFrantz again to see Maya support 1200 Techniques in Melbourne. (We were late, but what we caught of Maya was fantastic. Her new single “Move”, which Spider produced, is getting airplay on Triple J. Yay!) Amidst all the gossip (“shut up!”), Tommy revealed that he had been stalked by No-Teeth Guy as well, in Melbourne! (“That Guy is here! I met That Guy!!” There were eeeeks all around.) On tour with Doug Kellner, Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery, they’d all been taken out to dinner by some local academics, and No-Teeth Guy just turns up and has dinner with them. It appears that their hosts know him well, and firmly have to turn him away after dinner. And the next day, Tommy’s shopping with Rhonda when No-Teeth Guy turns up again. “I’m sorry,” says Tommy to No-Teeth Guy, “I need some time alone with Rhonda”. Tommy’s a funny guy.

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The drive from Adelaide to Melbourne was very pretty, but deathly cold and rainy, and we all got a bit cranky. But during a pitstop in tiny Meningie, we met these really lovely guys who worked at a dodgy bistro. Noting that their wine was the same as the stuff in the wineries we’d visited earlier that day, but cheaper, we asked them whether this was because they didn’t do the wine-wank commentary. “We can do wank!” they offered, and lo, it was good.