So, I have recently applied for jobs in Shanghai, Dubai, the Maldives, New York and plenty more here on the domestic front, which is currently New Zealand. As regular readers of this post will already know, that’s where the so-called Jet-Set Hobo hails from. From December 1965 in a little seaside town in the South Island called Timaru, to be precise. These weren’t exactly ‘hobo’ origins. Yet make no mistake, there wasn’t anything remotely Jet-Set about them either. The Jet-Set Hobo is a total creation, because its author is an actor who read what Michael Caine once said about the secret of success. How it lies in inventing oneself.

Well, I invented myself a long time ago, as a bon viveur and man of letters, and a habitué of stage and screen.

Since then I’ve worked for companies such as Fox Networks, Channel 5 (UK) and The Sc-Fi Channel. That’s just in television. I’ve also penned guidebooks and reviews for people like Time Out, Fodors and Dorling Kindersley. As a performer, I’ve played a crafty Russian spy in a KGB mini series and supplied a monster voice for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.

In any case I’ve just seen a job description advertised that I probably could have written myself. This was at an employment information resource called Media Match. It’s a good little networking site for film and TV professionals and the companies who wish to employ them.

Plotting and scheming mode now, so must away to formulate that killer application letter. Wish me luck!

Yesterday I finished writing my children’s book, The Wildcats Of Piran. Well, the first draft. There are bound to be a few revisions, but it’s pretty close to its final form methinks. So now to look for an illustrator.

So in a moment, some inspirational images for potential illustrators, plus there are some very good 3D representations of the town here.

All interested inquiries to the author, thanks very much!

Signora Fortuna's Terrace

More pictures after the jump!

Spot the cat

Dusk on the waterfront

The Venetian House

The Devil's Fiddler

The Sea-Monster

The Jet-Set Hobo can, from now on, be found at http://trueslant.com/scottyoung

Putting down roots

And here he is, putting down roots at the new site, which appears to have got off to a roaring start.

This page will still be updated from time to time, but please do check out my page on True/Slant.

The Intergalatic Empress’ holiday message! Not self-explanatory? Well, those of you who grew up anywhere in the so-called British Commonwealth will remember that every year since 1957, Queen Elizabeth II has broadcast an “address” by radio and television; a tidy, polite little homily for all those millions of people who aren’t often referred to as her subjects these days, and that’s everywhere from Nova Scotia to New Zealand, where I grew up around the same time the counter reformation was going on in Italy. The Queen’s Christmas message was certainly compulsory viewing in my family’s living room back in the year dot. More recently, in a recording studio in London it provided inspiration for a voiceover in a series of animations called the ”Space Cadet Reports”. I wrote and with my phenomally talented brother Craig Young, voiced 26 of these 2-3 minute long interstitials commissioned by the British Sci Fi Channel. You can see 10 of the 26 episodes here if you are game for an inter-galactic giggle – or just click play below for a special Christmas treat. It’s actually Craig doing all the voices in this one – including the garbled screaming and clicking of the Laburian Empress, Chanwick Wahtoosie III, heard here in a rare and brief recording.

The Jet Set Hobo has to shout out his most ferociously sincere self-admonitions because he has failed to post, for weeks and weeks now. The alternately frustrating and exciting explanation is that I am blogging as fast as I can elsewhere, for a paid still-under-wraps website backed in part by Forbes Media. From what I gather, the pre-launch trial I am part of now, will be as to blogging as the Manhattan Project was to weapons of mass destruction. I’ve also been writing hotel reviews for Time Out Buenos Aires lately, and I am in the infancy of creating a website that will be called The BA List.

What this means is that this blog wille be updated er, rather sporadically until March 1st, when I can finally direct you to The Jet Set Hobo’s new home in cyberspace at True Slant dot com. I will try and post something once a week here though. Anyway, it’s my birthday on Monday and that always makes me maudlin.  So let’s cheer ourselves up with these photos I took of Recoleta cemetery.

Dead gorgeous no?

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”

William Wordsworth 

So wrote protean romantic William Wordsworth, talking about the early days of the French Revolution. And look where that all led. (That pre-Hitlerian, empire-line demagogue Napoleon with all his evil works, in case you didn’t know). 

Self coronation

Well, the euphoria greeting the Obama victory was a little like that. If you believe in the man, and you’re under 25, then you’re more likely to think that hallelujah, the new Messiah has stepped onto the world stage, and possibly also that Americans everywhere can once again be proud of their great country. As if the result of one election wipes the slate clean for all the suffering caused by America’s bogus imperialism, something tolerated and even endorsed for decades by a shockingly self centred and apathetic populace, all driving around in SUVs and tuning into the home shopping channel to order more fitness equipment they’ll never use. But I digress: Obama’s older supporters and admirers (count me in the latter category) are still very upbeat about the election, but that optimism will be tempered by experience, skepticism and cynicism. Or in my case, by pessimism: Think carefully and cast your mind back to a time around eight years ago. Americans were, for a giddy winter in 01/02, all pretty crazy about Bush. And who is George Walker Bush if not the father of the next President. As a talented young actor friend said to me, “It took Bush to get us to Obama”.

And personally, I think Americans love their presidents in an oddly anti-democratic style: Which is to say, it runs against the grain of the essence of democracy to put so much faith in any one person. Think about it music lovers.

It was in that spirit, that on my Facebook status line for November 5, the day of Obama’s landslide victory, I wrote: “Remember, remember, the 5^th of November, Gunpowder, Treason & Plot”. It was my ‘virtual commemoration’ of Guy Fawkes Day: An anniversary celebrated in New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s when I grew up. It was and always will be my favourite holiday; for its pyrotechnic qualities obviously, and for its almost complete historical irrelevance to the South Pacific. Fawkes was of course a radical Catholic who was caught trying to blow up the British House of Parliament in 1605. He was burned at the stake for his trouble, and the festival observes this with an effigy burned on a bonfire, and as many fireworks as Mr. Trevor Young could afford on his printer’s salary back in 1969.  

That icon of cool, my Dad.

To bring us back to Mr. Obama, some of my best friends are American, and looking at that Guy Fawkes Facebook status line, I can imagine some of them thinking “he just doesn’t get it”, and they’re probably right, up to a point.  But even if I were a ‘Norteamericano’ I don’t know how much a change in the administration would mean to me. Thinking it over, I suppose I’d probably be about as excited as Charles Bukowski might have been when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected. “Yeah, great, guy: seems really idealistic and focused, but what’s he going to do help out hard drinking, unsuccessful writers?” With Obama, there’s a lot of talk about reaching out to help hardworking nurses with husbands in the army and a hockey team of kids to support, but I don’t hear much about my constituency. Insolvent, obscure and with prodigious appetites to buttress: When is someone going to do something for us?

I am a sucker for it. That’s one of the reasons I like this city so much.

Deco in San Telmo

So, somewhat unusually for this blog, a few snaps taken on my habitual Sunday stroll: The one that was sidetracked to the Gibraltar Pub.

Mini-Chateau in San Telmo

A renovator's dream

Going out of business sale

18th century Mission

It's curtains for this hood

The utterly mad Palacio Barolo

Steak & chips

A short time ago, one David Sheppard, a well-informed and creative Englishman living in Auckland, wrote me a charming letter, in which he suggested that this move of mine to the Argentine capital might not so badly timed after all: “It’s a good time to have nothing to lose” as he wrote. Yes indeed. David had begun his chipper missive with a comment about the shortage of small change in Argentina. As I replied, sometimes the shortage of small change actually works in one’s favour, as in when the Subway ticket vendor can’t give out the correct change, and just waves one on through. It’s less convenient when trying to travel on a bus, when the vending machine only accepts coins and the minimum charge is 90 centavos. Apparently, the centavo literally hasn’t been worth the nickel it is engraved upon.

English pub in BA

Anyway, earlier this afternoon I repaired to the Gibraltar pub (pictured) in San Telmo for a few cleansing ales washed down with Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud. The publican and I got chatting, and he told me that the latest news on small change was that the authorities here had discovered a warehouse of tin drums, all packed with coins, which somebody was hoping to sell at a profit. I’m a sucker for a good yarn, and I’ll believe just about anything about the Argentine economy, but can anyone confirm the veracity of this?

Was I ever so svelte?

Hola from Argentina. I’ll have more to say about this place presently: Oodles, in point of fact. For the moment, let me say I am staying with a well-to-do Porteno friend, in a beautiful apartment in ‘Belgrano’: the ambassadorial district. Essentially, I have my own quarters; seperate bathroom, regular maid service, etc. This I could get used to, haha. The city is every bit as great as I remember it; kind of New York and Paris meshed, and still not too hard on the wallet. Prices overall seem to be around 65% to 70% of what they are in New Zealand for example. After 11 months back in N Zild, I was a teeny bit nervous about launching myself back into the Expatriate lifestyle, with all its challenges (language, working visa etc) but that’s probably as good a reason for doing it now, instead of staying put in Auckland and becoming at once comfortable and kind of permanently disappointed at the same time… And actually, I am already conducting simple transactions in Spanish, which for me is a cakewalk compared to Hungarian or Polish.

Of course, starting soon I have to beat the warpath on a search for work, and in point of fact I already have some meetings lined up. But this weekend is a long weekend in Argentina, and that’s a good reason to catch my breath, explore some of the city’s pleasures and so on. On that note, I’m off to Recoleta this afternoon – where among other things, Evita Peron is buried. The mad cow.

Meanwhile, one from the vaults: The video above is a clip from a short called The Killing of the New Romantics, which I both scripted and appeared in, waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1992. It raises important questions, such as: “Was I ever so svelte?”