Smell Me I'm Famous

The thing about living on this planet is that sooner or later you will bump into a famous person. Even if you reside in a remote village in a disease-ridden Third World Country where flies lay maggots in your skin, the tribe worships low-flying aeroplanes and the chief export is mud, one day someone like Sting will visit and shake hands with you and you can have a nice Polaroid to stick on the wall of your shack so that you can look at it while you and everyone you know slowly dies of AIDS, malaria, the Ebola virus, cholera, etc.

Datsun (artist, George Costanza-like liar, conman extraordinaire) was having his farewell drinks at Cookie bar on Swanston street. Just so people know- I hate Cookie bar more than I hate Satan. Its arrogant bar staff, arrogant customers, arrogant furniture- the whole lot. So it was a bit of a surprise that I actually enjoyed myself and ended up accidentally at the Big Day Out* after party.

Things to Remember at a Big Day Out After Party:

1) Jagermeister is More Valuable Than Spanish Bullion: Be nice to bar staff. The trick with staying at a bar past closing time short of handcuffing yourself to the radiator is to make friends with the poor bastards who have to serve self-important morons on a nightly basis. Plow them with drink early. Tip. Don't break bottles to get peoples attention. The staff at Cookie have changed since I vowed never to return to that place (for the third time). This dreadlocked and hungover individual- Hugo and bar manager John were pleasant to us the whole evening and allowed us to stay on for the after party. You guys are alright in my books.

2) Deal with Other Bar Staff Thusly: When you place an order of vodka on the rocks and the bar guy says 'That'll be $7.50 dude.' You reply, 'Do you know WHO I AM mother f-cker? I'm from the Cassanovas!' and you swipe the drink from their hands and walk away snarling.

3) Deal with Rock Stars Thusly: Now this I found a little trickier. Though it is easy to convince a relative unknown that you are from the Cassanovas it's a little harder to convince someone from the Cassanovas that you are in the Cassanovas. Though not impossible ('Yeah- I'm the new drummer. The rest of the guys fired you while you were throwing up in the bathroom. I know. It sucks.') The way that worked for me was to impress them in another way. I told people things like I'm the grandson of the guy who invented the mint choc-chip ice cream.

4) As You Stagger About the Bar Try Not To Spill Drinks On The Guy From Franz Ferdinand.

5) You Will Bump Into Other Guys You Know Throughout the Night: Namely, Tristan who works at onesixone (a bar in Prahan) and Don't-Tell-Me-Paedophilia-Jokes Dave. Which is fun but you will have to explain to them why a giggle of girls keep coming up to you and saying 'This is the guy who invented fridge magnets!' and taking pictures of you.

6) Don't Scratch The Delorean Belonging To The Guy From Franz Ferdinand: OK, so this didn't actually happen.

I'm still a little hungover actually so I'm going back to bed. Iggy Pop (formerly James Newell Osterberg, jr) , Godather of Punk, did not rock into Cookie so I'll leave you with a jpeg of him that I spent all of 3 seconds looking up on Google. And if there's any spelling mistakes just pop a comment in the comment bit. I'll fix it later.

It's Iggy Pop! Or an angry zombie. Check out his freakin' veins!

Fatman



* For those of you living overseas or have been trapped in a block of ice for the last decade, the Big Day Out is a massive music event where you spend the whole time trying not to get trampled by people who run from one end of the place to another as they rush to watch various bands like Iggy Pop, the White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, the Mars Volta, Wolfmother, etc. Some 1,000 bands in total (no, I made that up. But something like 120 bands playing for one day) play loud music for 45-minutes sets trying to deafen the youth of our generation.