Current Fashions for the Fugly

Dear Average Suburban Male,

Please do not wear white sunglasses. They make you look like a tool. They looked crap in the 80s and they still look crap, especially now you're a lot fatter from too much KFC and you shave your head so people won't suspect the truth: you've gone bald.

And please, please, PLEASE if you do choose to wear them, don't wear it with one of these (see picture below).



















Thanks in advance,
Milkcrate Magazine

Tori F*%#ing Spelling

Tori Spelling refuses to stop cursing in front of her young children, because she uses expletives to express herself. The former Beverly Hills, 90210 star insists she doesn't need to curb her swearing in front of her one-year-old son Liam - because she uses bad language in an innocent manner. She says: "I'm kind of a little girl potty mouth because I say it with such vulnerability. I don't have to censor myself in front of my son, it's not that bad."

Im a little confused, Tori. How can it be innocent? Isn't that the point of a swearsie to be rude?
Do you cry when you swear? Is that being vulnerable?

Are you trying to be cute by saying "I'm kind of a little girl potty mouth" because we've all seen your face. You cant fool anyone.

Svetlana and Ivanka : Funny

Elizabeth Sandy, a dear friend and one of the leads in lesbo-noir-extravaganza (can you call your own film an "extravaganza"?) wrote and co stars in this hilarious short... Enjoy. It's 3:53 minutes of some fun, politically incorrect, low budget, high laughs, short filmmaking, shot on location here in LA LA land.
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/bbdd38257f
And of course, drop her a note, or give her a vote.

Get thee to Ding Dong Lounge

You too can be like that surprised woman and Roman Tucker from Rocket Science!

It's a double serving of Corbett at Ding Dong Lounge on the 18th of April*! See Sixfthick as well as Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side with support from The Knockouts.

In related news, Rocket Science are playing at the East Brunswick Club on the 10th of May.

The surprised woman pictured above might be seen at Ding Dong, Pony or Tankerville should things get desperate.


*Bugger! Milkcrate are off to see The Raveonettes at The Hi-Fi Bar that night!

Brushes with Fame: How to Cope With Fallen Rock Musicians

I am linked into a government-assisted health organisation for people unable to deal with the real world just yet.

So what do you do when the person that’s helping you turned out to be someone you recognise? When it’s someone you saw on the TV as a kid, when you have one of their albums and would have gone to their gigs if you were in the same city at the time?

I ignored the fact.

A few times I thought, This guy’s fallen so badly he’s now having to deal with me instead of Dylan Lewis. At times I thought about telling him that I knew who he was.

For a guy in a Melbourne band that was popular in the '90s (who isn’t Tim Rogers), he probably may not get that many people who recognise him. It might have been exciting for him.

But I thought, No, this is all about me. For the duration time we are working together I'm going to play dumb. In the future, at some time, I'm going to be famous so he should be happy he’s working with me! He’s the past, I'm the future. And besides, he isn’t Tim Rogers!

So for a year we both played dumb. We spent a lot of time discussing music and I gave him hints I knew who he was by naming nearly every band around the time they were popular. I even stated that each of those bands, and particular band members from each, were my personal heroes for a little time.

He pretended not to know these people personally; he even feigned ignorance of some of them.

I'm wondering if that year of music talk was a bit soul-crushing for him. I wondered if he cried into his pillow, He knows everyone else, why doesn’t he know mmmmeeeeeeeeeee?! Weren’t we good enough?!”

Then he announced he was leaving for greener pastures.

We had one meeting left. I thought I’d confess then. I couldn’t let the opportunity pass.

In a café in Richmond, we sat down for the goodbye talk.

I handed over a CD of theirs that was signed by the band.

He took one look at it and laughed then got excited. I surprised him with my knowledge of his band.

When I lived in the country with my folks I spent a hell of a lot of time memorising facts and trivia about Australian bands in the '90s. So I think I frightened him with my memory and knowledge. Especially since I have trouble remembering yesterday!

So now that we both were honest about who and what we were, we got down to gossip.

Did you know that Molly Meldrum is available to be in a film clip if you give him a bottle of vodka? I didn’t either - but it makes sense!

Did you know that scumbags from radio stations hock off the media copies of albums they get before the album's officially released? What a bunch of arseholes!

Did you know that Ross McLennan is awesome? I did!

I've resisted adding him on Myspace since I met him, because that would have giving it all away.

I resisted going to a gig of his at my local pub. One time I saw him at a gig I was at.

I'm not clear of the protocol of what to do when seeing someone you work with, be they a doctor, shrink, teacher or case worker, and you're drunk off your skull.

I hid.

I think I did the right thing: I didn’t want to explain why I was dancing to Love Is A Battlefield in the middle of the dance floor at our next appointment.

So kids, be careful. Musicians need a day job to support their recording habits and they could pop up anywhere so you’re forced to pretend not to know who the fuck they are/were for the good of the situation.

It might bruise their ego a bit but it's going to help the professionalism. It will give both parties dignity. You don’t want to remind them of how much of a fanboy you are. You don’t want them to ask you if you remember a song of theirs. You don’t want to see the desperation in their eyes that screams “make me feel famous again!”

If you ever find Tim Rogers hanging over your office cubicle asking for some paperwork, don’t bring up his love of ripping off Rolling Stones songs or remind him of that night he was in the Tote snogging young men. He might attack you like he did Mark Holden or act like at the 2004 Falls Festival.

Info about 'The man who isn't Tim Rogers' is here. He has a swanky album out.

Open Letter

Dear Ryan Adams,

I know you probably have your fair share of stalkers. And I am probably one of them, because I feel like we would be friends if I looked more like Parker Posey and you lived in Melbourne. I didn't think your Tumblr blog was bipolar, and you're right: reachin' out is what normal people do.

If I had a robot cat, I would probably call her "Daryl Hannah Cat The Robot" too. Actually, now I'm thinking about it, I might have called her "Rose McGowan Cat" because I saw Planet Terror recently. And any girl that can pull off having a machine gun for a leg and still look sexy DESERVES to have lots of things named after her.

Love Milkcrate's Unicorn. xx

PS: Ryan, I never had the need to Google unicorn before now, let alone find a link for the bitch! So I thank you for opening another faucet for The Big MC.

Related Link

PPS: And to quote stereogum.com, "From now on if you are going to slag off Ry's Tumblr, don't call it bipolar; its name is Foggy"

The Effect of Anthony Morgan on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

An hour with Anthony Morgan, is much like an hour with an uncle who doesn't visit the family much. He rambles and attempts to instil life lessons into you gently via stories all with fondness.

Anthony was a mainstay of the comedy circuit for ten years, and having a regular 'correspondent spot' on Channel 7's Denton before throwing it all in and running off to small town Tasmania to build sheds and feed chooks, woodworking and other farm activities before coming over on the ferry to Melbourne with his ute and dog for the Melbourne comedy festival.

Unlike other comedians where you can see them rehashing the 'stories' and you see the gag coming a mile away, Morgan starts on one topic, get distracted by another story before winding back to the original topic, usually with the help of the audience reminding him of what the first topic was.

In this year's show, 'Unrepentant' , Morgan started with taping his 'setlist' of topics to the microphone so the audience could remind him what he had missed and what was next. Topics such as his recent stabbing, Edmund Hiliary's death, travelling snake wranglers and Tidy Towns.

Much like an uncle he was disgusted and annoyed that the syllabus at school has now changed and we all hadn't read The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and how some things have change in his lifetime and we all listened in wonder.

He also talked a lot about small town community life. And being a country boy myself, it was a pleasure to be reminded of how things work in the country. Morgan made it sound so good I almost wanted to catch the next train home to see my folks.

The promotional photos for the show were photos taken 12 years ago. He gave an opening announcement 'this guy in the photos isn't playing tonight' and apologised if anyone was disappointed. I don't think anyone was at all.

Morgan may claim memory loss but he's sharp as a tack.



Anthony Morgan's 'Unrepentant' plays until 13th of April at the
European Bier Cafe
Cnr Exhibition & Lt Collins Sts, Melbourne VIC 3000

Blog of the Week

While our international correspondent Rohan is away on business (Romy and Michelle style!), he's so dedicated to the readers of Milkcrate he's still managed to ensure we have a new Blog of the Week!

Cast your browsers upon this baby: The Fail Blog. Marvel at the various failures of drunkards, woman drivers and bad signage! If you get addicted, like us here at Milkcrate, you might even scroll back further enough to see a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire struggle to determine whether and elephant is bigger than the moon!

Ground Up

Hyped literally to death, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's 1970s-style exploitation double bill Grindhouse flopped so disastrously in the United States that its release in Australia was delayed for almost a year. But now, finally, for just a few days more at the Astor, we're getting the whole enchilada: 193 minutes of blood, sex and all-round mayhem, complete with hokey censorship warnings and funny trailers for imaginary films from a range of guest directors.

On paper, Rodriguez's Texan horror-sci-fi hybrid Planet Terror might look like a full meal all by itself, with zombies, go-go-dancers, crazy babysitters, and a last-minute plot twist involving the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. But in practice the multiple hooks don't hook together: the film achieves but does not transcend the status of a disjointed B-movie best watched late at night in a venue where attention can freely wander.

Tarantino's infinitely superior, full-to-bursting Death Proof is many things: a slasher movie on wheels, a love letter to stuntmen and stuntwomen, an examination of the sado-masochistic drives underlying narrative. Every last detail is openly fetishised, above all when it comes to the actresses: Vanessa Ferlito's wiggling buttocks, Zoe Bell's New Zealand accent, Rose McGowan's smart mouth and platinum blonde hair.

Less sympathetic viewers may fail to realise that the point of it all isn't camp excess so much as a desire to return cinema to its origins, which means the 1970s only because this is roughly when these filmmakers happened to grow up. Indeed, Grindhouse in its entirety could be seen
as a treatise on the medium's two basic, opposed impulses: towards fantasy, and towards documentary.

Thus Planet Terror is built around a digitally-manufactured image - a woman with a machine gun in place of her right leg - which would have been inconceivable in the heyday of big-screen exploitation. By contrast, spectacle in Death Proof consists primarily of stunts performed in front of the camera by performers genuinely risking life and limb.

It remains slightly anomalous for Tarantino and Rodriguez should be campaigning to bring down-and-dirty thrills back to the movie theatre, given that cheaply-made action-horror is hardly extinct (the distance between Planet Terror and, say, the Resident Evil franchise is not that great). There is, moreover, a level of failure built into the whole project of recreating an ideally unselfconscious movie-going experience in the fussiest way imaginable, lovingly simulating every last scratch on a supposedly beat-up print.

The genius of Death Proof is that Tarantino grasps this perversity and runs with it all the way to the end. Rodriguez, for his part, seems blithely unaware of the problem. But maybe that's the reason the association between these two has lasted - because Tarantino knows, in
his heart, that his friend is the pure naive artist he could never be.

Grindhouse (MA) screens nightly at the Astor Theatre, Melbourne, till March 30.

Wot's Going On With The Stars?

Yep. Milkcrate is in on the pulse of celeb gossip. Don't get me wrong, we're no Perez Hilton, but we do like to keep track of what's going on with the stars. Aww, we're just like MX!!

I know Milkcrate's readers are constantly asking themselves 'How does Demi Moore keep her skin looking so youthful?!'. Well in true dedication to it's readers, Milkcrate brings you the answer -- it's leeches. Not just any leeches from a swamp though, these are highly trained medical leeches, cutting edge technology, according to Demi.

Apparently the leeches get 'super-drunk' on her blood, and it helps her 'detoxify'. Hot. Last I heard, once you remove blood it's gone, not 'freshened up'.

In other freaky face news, Priscilla Presley got a hit of uber-crap botox recently, when she became a 'victim' of Dr Daniel Serrano (AKA Dr Jiffy Lube), who apparently hustles poor innocent celebs out of their hard earned buck by infusing them with low grade silicon -- normally used to lubricate car parts!

According to Priscilla's site "Beauty and Priscilla Presley are almost synonymous". Almost. Not quite. I like to use the expression "Priscilla Presley is in the eye of the beholder".