Friday, December 26, 2014

Wham bam thank you Mambo

Hey pal, thanks for stopping by, I'll start this off with a quick hello just to let you know I wrote another article for the website Three Thousand. Click anywhere on this sentence to read it.

Did you read it yet? What's that, you're trying to read it right now but I keep on talking? Oh ok sorry, I'll be quiet for a moment. Here's the link again, I won't interrupt this time.

... You done now? No? Still?! Boy, you are a slow reader. Well ok, how bout I just tell you the gist of it?

So basically the article is about my Mum recently giving me a brand new pair of Mambo board shorts that she'd found at the Salvos and me not liking them because for me Mambo was the brand I only really associated being worn by my daggy year eight sports teacher. 

Of course that's probably being a bit too harsh on my year eight sports teacher, I mean back when I was in high school not everyone could be a dope fashionista like I was.
(Ha, who'd have thought that the guy in that photo would grow up to one day write an article for Vogue Living?)

Anyway so I chucked away the Mambo shorts and took out the bins, but the next morning when I saw that the National Gallery of Victoria was having a retrospective exhibition to celebrate Mambo's 30th birthday I knew that I needed to wear the shorts to opening. Luckily I was up so early that the bins hadn't yet been collected and so I ran out to the street and rescued the shorts.

Next thing you know here's a photo of me at the opening preview standing amongst a pack of reporters. I should've worn a 1950's hat, ideally with a badge on it that said PRESS. I'm sure all my fellow actual writers there with me would've found that very im-press-ive. Instead I just wore the shorts. 

The exhibition is great and completely changed my mind about Mambo, there was so much I didn't know, but I talk about that a little in the article so I won't go on about it here. What I will just show you here though is this photo of me doing a particularly dorky cool-guy stance, wearing the Mambo shorts while standing in front of a whole cabinet full of Mambo shorts. 
I actually like my shorts a lot more than any of the ones in the cabinet, mostly because my ones feature a really odd kind of cross promotion with the soft drink brand KIRKS.
An extra thing that I did just for fun and not for the Three Thousand article is before going to the Mambo opening I made a sculpture of the other great Mambo in our life; the CD single to Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5.

I took the sculpture along to the show hoping it might get signed by Mambo artist Reg Mombassa. I've been a huge fan of Reg for years, both for his paintings and for his music with the band Mental As Anything. In fact I think Mental As Anything's hit "If you leave me can I come too?" might be my favourite song title ever, (back on January 4th, 2012 I even named this treemendous blog post after it).

So yeah, I was as excited as anything. Here I am nervously waiting for a chance to speak to Reg while he does an interview with the ABC.
And here I am talking with Reg Mombassa about Mambo No.5, (which as I'm sure you don't need reminding was number one in the 1999 Australian charts for eight weeks in a row). 

Reg was real funny and sweet and very happily signed the sculpture. What an absolute Regend.

I asked Reg he would mind drawing one of his classic musical notes coming out of Lou Bega's trumpet, the kind of note he usually draws coming out the back end of a dog, and as you can see he certainly delivered; here I am very proudly holding my new and noteworthy sculpture.
And after signing my sculpture Reg then even signed the Mambo shorts that I was wearing. 
So there you go, amazing, and now there's no way I'll throw out the shorts. Thanks so much again to Three Thousand for another wonderful opportunity to have a bit of fun, (also thanks to Reg Mombassa and the NGV), it almost makes me feel like a real writer. 
On a separate story, speaking of writing, last week I listed an iPhone onto eBay which meant I had to write a brief product description to go along with it. 

Here's the photo I took of the phone to go with the ad.
(In case you're wondering why I had a spare iPhone it's cause my phone company sent it to me. I've been on a plan with Optus for a thousand years and so that's just the kind of friendly thing they do to encourage me to forget looking into how much I'm overpaying.) 


Throughout the eBay auction the phone received way more attention than I ever expected it to get, ha, and certainly way more attention than the phone that I actually use ever gets. The phone received something like 45 bids and all week long I received messages from bidders. Mostly people were just asking usual stuff, often regarding specific details about the warranty, but then Friday night I received this question;
I was a little blown away someone would take the time to write that, I even showed it to my Mum. And so of course I wrote back to anau211 saying thanks. At the end of my thanks I figured what the hell and I threw in a sentence saying how if they were interested in seeing some of my less iPhone related writing then I have this blog they could look at... 

I assumed that was the end of it, especially since anau211 didn't win the auction, but only moments ago I just saw that my last blog post received this comment;
So that was a nice thing that happened. Maybe it's a sign I should call it quits on the art game and instead focus my efforts on becoming an active member of the eBay community. Too bad I don't have any more phones to sell, it could've been my true calling...

The last thing I'll quickly report on today, something that's even less about art than that eBay story was, is that on Christmas Eve I woke up at 3.30am and my Dad, my brother and I went fishing. 

I've been trying to tell myself for ages that there's plenty more fish in the sea and now was my chance to find out.

Here I am driving the boat into the early stages of the golden sunset, while eating the middle stages of a golden McDonalds hash brown. It was hard to decide which looked better.
Another conflicting sight was this seal who splashed around by our side all day. Under most circumstances seeing this incredible animal would be most ex-seal-ent however in this case the seal was basically just a big hulking seagull set out to make catching my dinner even harder by circling about the boat and try snatch any fish off my line as I was pulling it out of the water.

I guess it really is the seally season.
Here I am holding a whiting that I only just snuck past the seal. (Also pictured is my brother and a smidgen of my Dads thumb.)
And here's a snap of me hours later having just returned back on dry land and about to fillet the days hunting. That beautiful snapper I'm holding is definitely my favourite of the fish I snapped up.
Snapper back to reality.
(Also, did you spot the subtle product placement in the previous two photos? The can of creamy soda I was drinking was none other than Kirks, that's right, the very lemonade company who according to my shorts are worthy of partnership with Mambo.)

I feel very sorry for the poor fish but they did come back to a good home, we crumbed them up and made chips and a salad and here was tonight's dinner. The fish was delish, which is a good thing too as I'll probably have to cook it again for the next three nights as well.
And after looking at that photo my tummy is reminding me that it's time to go cook dinner again now so I guess that's enough out of me for today. Merry Fishmas dear reader. This is a really tricky time of the year, particularly this year, to say the least, but I hope you're hanging in there and looking after others and looking after yourself and having fun and staying safe and happy and bla, bla, bla and you know, all that junk that sounds real cheese ball but I do mean it very sincerely. Thank you so much for reading, lots of love, and season's greetings from all of us here at double you double you double you dot kenny pittock dot com.

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