So Rita, one third of the weekly Standing There Productions meeting conglomerate (just three coffees thanks, and do you do freshly squeezed orange juice?) is going overseas.

One of her films, a short film called Hugo, has made it into the Palm Springs film festival and the Rhode Island film festival.

This means she is going to New York and LA. Anybody who has any interesting friends/multi-billion-dollar philanthropist buddies/recommendations re: best hot dog stand or most exciting interpretation of the words "fresh coffee", please do let me know because I am attempting to be the authority on all things American since I lived there for nine months in 1999 and therefore I am obviously almost a citizen of the place and am hip to the groove regarding Best And Most Exciting Things To Do. For example, I remember:

- A stationery shop in New York City. I can picture it now but cannot for the life of me remember where it is or why it was so exciting. I simply recall contemplating ways to hide oneself in there overnight.

- The galleries. O! The galleries! New York of course but also LA, where one is driven up an enormous hill in a small tram to the Paul Getty museum with its cactus garden overlooking the piano-shaped pools of the brat pack.

- The smell. (Not very helpful to Rita)

- Soho..

- Dean and Deluca. Omogod etc.

- 5th Avenue.

- Central Park.

- Pollution (sorry LA but honestly).

All of which leads me to believe perhaps I should do a "scoping visit" to LA and New York just in order to better equip Rita for her foray into the unknown.

Now, if I could just find a philanthropist in my size...

Things Writers Like

- Eavesdropping (someone wearing headphones near your interesting conversation? If that person is a writer, there is a 98% chance the ipod is on pause).

- Book launches (free food, free drink, someone reads a section of the book so you never have to read it but can opine with authority).

- Describing the act of searching "funny animals" on youtube as not only research but a tax deduction.

- Hearing about other people's day jobs (you did WHAT for eleven hours? They told you off for wearing WHAT? etc).

Things Writers Do Not Like

- The fact that other people get paid actual money for their day jobs (you did WHAT for eleven hours? They paid you HOW MUCH?)

- Dreadful television shows made with public money and used as an argument for importing ready-made TV programs from overseas.

- The fact that membership of the Australian Writers' Guild, which is apparently designed to support Australian writers at all stages of their careers, costs more than a second-hand laptop, a freelance paycheque, or, you know, searching the internet for tax-deductable funny animals for two months.

- People who think any word ending in a vowel must have an apostrophe insterted between the vowel and the letter 'S' in the event of the word being plural. Hence tomato's.

Tomato is, says the writer. Tomato is what?

Then the writer realises that sometimes, there is another thing the writer doesn't like:

- The writer does not like the writer.

This only happens briefly and is usually solved by going outside and eavesdropping. Hence:

Workman 1 to woman walking down street: Oop. Sorry.

Woman: No, you're right.

Workman 1: No, no, after you. Beauty before... what are we?

Workman 2: Brawn.

Workman 1: Feckin brawn. Beauty before brawn.

See? Everything's better after those little moments.

They say a red sky in the morning is a shepherd's warning. Red sky at night is shepherd's delight.

What about the writers?

Sometimes we like the rain. Sometimes we like to go outside in the sunshine. Most of us are against global warming.

Why don't we have portents assigned to us?

Dear The State Library of Victoria,

I heart you.

I heart your new slapdash cafe that you've thrown together in what was essentially the locker room. I heart that it's cheap and unpretentious and doesn't sell anything "on a bed of lettuce" or "drizzled in oil". I heart that it sells nutella and banana sandwiches and can all be packed away at the end of the day as if it wasn't there in the first place.

I heart that there were two girls eating their own food out of a lunchbox (they were sharing) in your little locker room cafe and you didn't go and arrest them or anything.

I heart that there is still a posh cafe and bar next door where you have to go if you're after a chai or a beer or something drizzled in something else.

I heart the boys who work there and I particularly heart the girl who works there who always looks like she's had a massive night out but she could probably surf a wave or run a marathon if you just gave her the right sort of lycra.

I heart the new system that discriminates against people who make noise by subdividing everyone into categories.

I heart that one of the quiet rooms is the arts room.

I heart that the arts room obviously used to be the outside bit of the library and there is an enormous downpipe that makes a racket when it's raining.

I heart the queue for the free internet that includes a sign at the front of it saying there are more free internet computers in the back room. I heart this particularly because the back room is always virtually empty whereas people in the free internet queue in the front room are confronting internet users for "CLEARLY HAVING BEEN HERE FOR SEVENTEEN MINUTES".

I heart the chess room. Chess!

I even heart your ridiculously early closing time on a Friday night because I am obliged to go outside and experience other people, and dinner, and drinks, and this means my primary experience of the outside world does not consist of a downpipe belting out a banjo-like arythmic overture to the quiet arts room, and me.

It's good to be back.

Rita, Stewart and I are the three central members of Standing There Productions. This means we meet regularly, drink tea, argue over the layout and tardiness of meeting minutes, and have ideas about what Standing There Productions wants to do next.

We have quite a bit of trouble explaining to other people exactly what it is we all do. I write things, that much is clear. But then, so does Rita (see The Receptionist for example, although there is more where that came from and in fact she has won script awards and has directed things and has a cameo or twelve in I Could Be Anybody). Also, I direct things like our comedy festival show this year, none of which I do without the help of Rita as casting co-director and Stew, whose withering gaze is cast over all things visual, and who also takes all our photos and does all our technical work.

To confuse things further, we met Stew when he performed in our play, People Watching in 2003. He has, as he delights in reminding me, never been on stage since. Even that isn't quite true because Stew stage-manages most of our projects. Rita handles the financial direction of the company, with Stewart and I asking her once a week to tell us what the budget means, and she generally has her ear to the ground and knows about funding opportunities which I completely fail to write proposals for.

What I think all this means is that we are all, according to a loose definition, producers. Or maybe Rita is our executive producer and we are all producers with various different roles. The problem with any of these definitions is that nobody knows what any of them mean.

For example. Please tell me what any of these mean (thanks to Wikipedia for your enlightening descriptions):

A film producer, or filmmaker, is a person who creates the conditions for making movies.

The primary role of a television producer is to coordinate and control all aspects of production.

A theatrical producer is the person ultimately responsible for overseeing all aspects of mounting a theatre production.  

According to these descriptions, a producer is a control freak who does everything. Ergo, I suspect we are all producers, in some way or another. Having said that, the definition "control freak who does everything" is perhaps too broad, because if this is the case, the following people are also producers:

1. My grandma

2. The woman at the Smith Street post office

3. The Australian Prime Minister

In fact, that's not a bad point. You'd be mad not to give my grandma funding. I might give her a call.

It's been a while since I've discussed the joys of reading Anthony Lane, film reviewer of The New Yorker, but having suffered painfully through the Spew and the City movie the other night (It was that or walk through the rain - I should have walked through the rain) I cannot recommend him highly enough. Here he is: Lane Review. Enjoy.

So I've been missing because I've been doing law-talking work to pay the bills. This means I haven't been writing and I haven't been producing or organising. What I have been doing is enjoying coffee in Wangaratta overlooking the river while talking about community development with people who know things I never thought I would find out so long as I lived.

Huzzah!

Back to real life in a minute.