dysconnect

the chimp is dead (but man was he an ape to man)

2009-03-31T08:42:00.002+11:00

Hey all,

well, dysconnect is going to be taking a break for a while...

...but the ranting continues month-to-month over at mnml ssgs...

...

Fire May Destroy (but Munt springs eternal)

2009-02-18T08:18:00.002+11:00

It was a funny picture, I’ll give you that: sitting in a candlelit pub in Alexandra in a Ren and Stimpy t-shirt with a VB tinnie in a neoprene stubbie holder, reeking of smoke. The candles and the holder were because of the lack of power. The smoke was because of…. the fire, of course. And the Ren and Stimpy t-shirt, the one I usually only wear around the house? Well, that was what I was wearing at six thirty pm when we evacuated the Marysville house we’d been staying in, about two minutes after we realised it was two streets from a tsunami sized wall of flame.

I was sitting there in the guttering dark of the smoke-filled pub, feeling a bit sorry for my ipod, which I had forgotten in the mad rush. What does it say about me, human nature, and ipods, that this was the one object I was really upset about?

But it was hard to feel sorry for myself or my iPod once I talked to some of the other people stranded in the pub, real refugees, people who’d evacuated the only houses they had. People who only had ‘the shirts on their backs,’ and not even one t-shirt, like the woman who came up to me, saw my loud Ren and Stimpy number, and said, ‘Oh, I had that t-shirt. I wanted to save it… but there wasn’t time.’ Nor was there time for her to save the sixty or more reptiles and dozens of parrots that had to be left to the flames. Or the neighbours’ dogs, locked in the house next door.

Then, one hour later, the munters arrived. There were two of them (‘cos they always roll in twos, minimum). The Muppet hair, the slack jaw, the visible underpants, the Corey Delaney/Worthington slouch. In fact, one of them was just wearing a pair of hot pants style Bonds undies… and a pair of fluoro Nike high tops, natch.

‘Did you hear anything about Taggerty?’ asked the husband of the woman who’d left Ren and Stimpy behind?

‘Taggerty? Taggerty’s a shithole,’ the munter replied.

‘Not if it’s your home,’ came the rejoinder, which hit a face that…. this was the weird thing. It was a face that knew full well what had happened. And maybe it was a really good coping mechanism. But from where I was sitting, it looked more like the face of someone who not only couldn’t give a fuck, someone who didn’t even know how to go about giving a fuck. A person who wouldn’t know what that was or what it was for, even if you demanded one point blank.

Right on cue: ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ cried munter number two. ‘If this place burns, I’m gonna go in to the city and go clubbin’.’

‘Ye’ can’t go fuggin’ clubbin’,’ said the leathery lady behind the bar, ‘the highways are all fuggin’ closed, ye’ idiot.’

‘Yeah, well I’ll go to Shepp then,’ he said, without skipping a beat.

They stuck around, they got more drunk, they shot some shadowy pool, they called for Jagerbombs, then the big one in the pink said, ‘I’m havin’ a pool party at my place in Eildon. Anyone want to come?’ The bar full of faces, many from places that no longer existed, just looked over at him quizzically. What can you say to something like that?

Fires might kill, destroy whole towns, and change the lives of communities forever, but in the midst of it, there are still munters, and they still just want to party. The irrepressible power of the munter springs eternal. Is this cause for hope, or the best evidence of our doom?

Detox Retox (with a hose in your buttox)

2009-01-30T13:40:00.001+11:00

So you’re on a detox. How long’s it gonna last? All year? Yeah right. I know you’ve heard this one before, but detoxes are stupid and they don’t work… The best proof of this? Americans are into them. In Tokyo I used to work with a bunch of off off off off Broadway Americans. Every year around Thanksgiving, most of them would go home to the US of A, returning in early January after Christmas with an improbable tan.

‘A lot of sun in Maine this time of year?’ I would enquire.

‘Oh no!’ Ken would reply, with freshly rinsed enthusiasm, ‘I just got back from Thailand.’

A quick glance around the staff room revealed several other equally tanned specimens. They all had that ‘glow’, which (don’t tell the detoxers) is actually caused by smugness, not brimming health. But they were tan, I will say that, a brown that took on a rather different hue in my widening eyes as Ken explained, blow by blow, the total wash out that was. Some people go to Thailand for the hoes; my co-workers went for the hoses.

‘Man,’ he’d say, ‘you wouldn’t believe the stuff that came out of me.’

Two weeks later, Ken and all the other irrigated Americans were back on the burgers, tucking in and porking up. At this time, Atkins was still the craze diet (so burgers were fine, natch), but there was another woman who was carrot stick deep into a vegan raw foods regime (including for her three year old), and several others on their own private Idaho diet yo yo. Omaha oh my. When I first started working for the company, I’d worry for their health, but gradually I realised that most of these regimens would last about three weeks, after which (metabolism now bruised and confused) they would return, nostrils a-quiver, to the barn-laid, corn-fed bombardments of Electric Weinerland (with extra sauce, and mad isms). Come next thanksgiving? Gobblers are back home for more stuffing. One guy used to yo-yo 30kg over the course of the year. Of course, such stupidities aren’t the exclusive province of Americans, but when you see them in a group, you get to witness the neuroses of the rich West, rendered with a technicolor intensity lacking from the ‘yeah nah yeah’ land we call Oz.

Since returning to yeah nah yeah, I’ve counselled baker’s dozens of January guilt puffs about their detoxing. Never mind insulin, the thing you notice most of all is how fact-resistant detoxers are. The only thing more stubborn than their Christmas kilos is their conviction that they can expunge it all by a weird mixture of abstention, irrigation, guilt, brown rice, and laxatives. You can say ‘just eat and drink in healthy moderation, exercise, get plenty of rest and drink lots of water’, but nobody wants to hear it. Why? More exercise and smaller portions can deal with the kilos, but only the infliction of unpleasantness (foul tasting thistle, growling stomach, spasming cramps) will keep the guilt at bay. People really, really, really want to punish themselves. The only way to feel good about yourself… is to feel bad… Detox, retox, wax on, wax off. Hey, it’s a neat way to live, really. It gives you something to hate and something to look forward to, ‘cos guess what? Next stop on the salvation merry-go-round is sin, and if you still feel guilty, you can smash yourself so hard jacking up fried chicken nico-martinis and transfat-enriched methamphetamine greasewashed tequila bombs that you won’t notice a thing, until the next moaning. Then you can stick a hose up your arse, and feel better.

Well Hungover

2009-01-16T20:34:00.002+11:00

If the silly season sucks, at least you know you’re going to get blown out the other end. And here we are, far, far from the pointy end of the year that was only yesterday, last week, or… sometime. It’s difficult to remember. In fact, I’m finding it difficult to remember almost anything. And this is because I am, in seasonal style, well and truly hungover.

Today, the hangover I have given myself is damp, foggy, and right behind my eyeballs. I don’t feel that I’ve been hit by a bludgeoning object so much as I’ve become one myself: man as mallet. The other day, it was a head full of rusty nails scraping down the raw folds of swollen brain meat hard against my temples. A few days before that, I had a hangover that was like a succession of hot knitting needles being pushed in one ear, then pulled out the other. Then there are the throbbers: I had a soft throbber on NYE, and a hard banging throbber on NYD.

In the week before Christmas I twice suffered from a particular favourite: the motion sensing hangover. Turn your head to the left even just a bit too quickly and the suffering comes at you in a surging, rushing toxic lurch. Shake your head in a way that might express emphatic refusal (say, at the sight of another tequila shot, ever), and you’ll be spraying acid-washed technicolour chunks through both nostrils with such great pressure and volume that the stinging stench it leaves in your nose an mouth makes you…. retch again, inducing more shaking, which causes more retching, etc, etc…

Then there are the weird, once in a lifetime hangovers. I had one that was like a massive gas-filled zeppelin inside my head cavity. The engines were on, and it was trying to fly west (the direction of my eyeballs) but, being prevented by the head cavity, was rendered ineffectual, left to buzz and bump its soft head against my tender one with a dull machinic hum. I once had a hangover that didn’t hit until 2 o’clock, and when it did, it was like being bashed by a cucumber (just one decisive blow), with enough force to break it, leaving sticky cucumber juice to trickle down my scalp… until beer o’clock.

But I like hangovers, and not only because they’re almost the only ‘memorable’ things of this time of the year (in that they’re about all I can remember). Why do I like them so much? Well, there are so many things in life where the punishment is deferred, implied, indirect or merely possible. Smoke your whole life, and the odds of cancer are good. But you might be one of the freaks. You probably won’t, but you might. It’s possible. And in the interim, you can kinda sorta kid yourself, kick back, and enjoy one sly fag after another. With anything like this, there is the added need to punish yourself for what you’ve done. You’ve been a very naughty boy; feel bad about yourself for a while. Not so with the hangover. There it is, your head on the plate. No need to feel bad… the hangover will do it for you. It comes on like a curse and passes like a blessing, reminding you with exquisite horror what your wallet already knows: how much you’ve lost, what a fool you were, and how much fun it all was. There there.

_

I want it that way (guilty pleasures)

2008-11-26T09:06:00.003+11:00

When people talk about the musicians that influenced them, they’re mostly talking utter nonsense. It’s not to say that they’re lying – those musicians probably did influence them. But in most cases the names we cite pale in comparison to those others we keep hidden away, the guilty pleasures we all disavow and hide.

By the late 80s plenty of kids at my school had been hooked onto ‘rap music’, mostly through cassettes of NWA, Public Enemy, Run DMC and Tone Loc, borrowed off older siblings. In my case, it was the last of these artists that had the most profound impact, and I still rate Loc’d After Dark as one of the finest hip-hop albums ever made. I mean it: if you’re ever at a flea market and you see an old copy on sale, buy it on sight. It’ll be the only three dollars you’ll spend this year that might change your life.

Tone Loc was fine and good, and has aged well. He certainly didn’t have anything like the street cred of NWA or PE, but it was okay to admit you liked him, for sure. Thing was though, I first heard Loc on the television, when Funky Cold Medina was in the top ten. And – as it was in those days – Loc would appear alongside all kinds of other artists, some unpardonably, unmentionably bad. Being a kid, I listened to them all, with an openness that’s almost impossible for me now. My favourite thing to do was to dub Top 40 Australia off the radio. I’d like to tell you how I always made edits from these tapes, but the fact was that most of the time I would just listen to the whole countdown – 40 to 1 ad nauseum.

But a hush fell on my childhood mixtape adventures with the advent of high school, a time when the music you listened to became the intimate marker of who you were, what you stood for, and what that was worth. Metallica might still have been considered cool (to the metal kids), but what about NPG-era Prince, Betty Boo, Vanilla Ice, Roxette, Ace of Base, Enigma, and Partners in Kryme (remember ‘Turtle Power’)? A blanket of shamed silence fell on all for the next six years. But I was humming the tunes under my breath the whole time.

It’s when you do karaoke that you see how most people have lived with their very own repressed top forty: given enough booze full-grown adults – who normally want to avow their sophisticated taste in obscure genres – will be clamouring for the mic when George Michael’s ‘Faith’ comes on. But it doesn’t mean that all repression has ceased, no siree. Recently, I uploaded a friend’s copy of David Bowie’s Lodgers onto my mp3 player. The first few tracks played as normal. Then there came an unexpected piano intro, followed by high mid-90s production values… and the opening lyrics, spoken in a saccharine male voice: ‘You are/my fire/the one/desire....’ I double-checked the screen on my mp3 player, which read: David Bowie, Lodger, ‘Red Sails’. But it was none of these things. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the Backstreet Boys I Want It That Way.

You thought Ministry of Style sucked? Meet the Drainpipe Vampires

2008-11-22T10:36:00.001+11:00

(NB: apologies for the relative blog silence of late. Been very busy. A whole backlog of posts will follow over the next month, so stay tuned and check back regularly...)

Walking down Brunswick St after an early morning errand, I was struck with fresh force by how much the streetscape has changed in the past fifteen years. But one thing remains stubbornly unbudged: Ministry of Style.

‘Who the fuck is a raver these days?’ I wondered to myself.

Just as it’s possible that ‘Magic Happens’, I’m willing to concede that there are still ravers around, even that there’s still the odd rave happening – but are there still enough people to justify the existence of a shop that proclaims that the past ten years never happened?

I got home and switched on the TV to catch the last few minutes of Rage. Oh my God, it’s Guru Josh! The sax, the synth, the strobe lights – but more than anything else, people dancing their arses off. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘the early 90s: a time when people thought they could change the world just by dancing…’

Moments later, JTV started and I switched off and logged in to my email before ‘the Doctor’ had a chance to insult my intelligence. My sister had sent me some youtube clip with footage of southern American Gospel congregations going absolutely crazy ape-bonkers to Jesus, which in turn had been wedded to a soundtrack of maniacal drum’n’bass. Back in the 90s, you didn’t have to do a cut’n’paste job to achieve the same effect. You just let the track play. I’d been to raves where people dressed head-to-toe like unrepentant fraggles would dance for hours on end to music they didn’t recognise, pausing only to reapply Blistex, water and ecstasy. There was a time where whole rooms full of people used to abandon themselves to dancing – precisely the same people who shopped at Ministry of Sound for their wardrobe.

My next email was from 3000, that wannabe digest that lands, drainpipes-first, in my inbox every fortnight, full of all the latest ‘cool/fool’ info and desirable objects I’m not sure I could ever be coolsie enough to want. But this, of course, is part of being cool: you must never, under any circumstances, appear to want, do, or be anything with all your heart. That’s why there’s so much suffering involved in trying to be cool – you have to try incredibly hard, but you have to do so without being seen to try at all. This also means you can never abandon yourself to anything, least of all a dancefloor full of strangers in swishy fur pants and a track you’ve never heard of, without a chorus or a record deal on Domino. No, you must keep your cool distance at all costs. Make sure that your glossy surface is ironised flat, and that your edge stays pressed.

The 90s were optimistic for all the wrong reasons: they were dreadfully naïve, and the clothes were appalling. But there was also enthusiasm. In the slow move from Wednesdays at Filter, Thursdays at Teriyaki, and Fridays at Centriphugal to a week of Thursdays spent preening and aching at niche bar/gallery openings, Melbourne also forgot how to dance. Ravers were shallow, but coolsies are two-dimensional: they have to be, to get into their pants. And once they’re in them, they can barely move. Drainpipes are vampire trousers, and they’ve drained the hot blood of enthusiasm out of the city’s night. It’s almost enough to send you back to Ministry of Style.

Over is as over dose (you know what I'm talkin' about)

2008-10-14T11:03:00.001+11:00

I overdosed just the other day. I’d administered a big whack not ten minutes before, cooked up in the usual way: filtered, mixed, then ingested through glass. Five minutes later I was out the door, on my bicycle, feeling the surging rush and the way it made the sunshine sharper, made everything click into keen focus. But only five minutes later the dose had started to turn, and by the time I reached my destination – a few minutes after this grim realisation – I was so shaky I could barely pass the u-lock through the spokes of my front wheel. The feeling was a familiar horror: socks soaked with a cold sweat that also covered my brow; jaws clenching repeatedly over the big wad of chewing gum in my mouth; hands and eyelids all a-twitter; a big, balling headache behind the brow; and last of all, a temper at twig-snap tension. Should anyone so much as snicker at me the wrong way, they would know the deep, sudden, scarlet flail of my wrath.

I gave myself five minutes on the lawn to calm down, letting ebbing washes of tense rage run their course, waiting until the uncontrolled urge to stab sockets and bite sinews subsided, to be replaced with a much more controllable queasiness and a dull thumping headache. I sat there, silently bemoaning the clam of my socks, and I thought: gosh, coffee is such a horrible drug sometimes. For a good few minutes there, I was so engorged with shaky anger that I could easily have lost it with anyone who so much as sneezed a marmoset-size sneeze in my direction. I really, really ought to cut down.

Two generations ago, Australians were mostly tea drinkers by day, beer swillers by night. Then, in the 70s, boomers began to swap swill for an AM plunger and some PM vino. Nowadays? Nowadays people are drinking caffeinated drinks day and night: a heart-starting coffee or three for breakfast, another at eleven, a coke with lunch, another coffee at three-thirty… then energy drinks with booze until vomit or complete neural collapse covers your evening in stench and darkness. But maybe not before you’ve punched, glassed, kicked or otherwise pulverised someone around you. Or at the very least raised the ambient aggro levels to just below boiling point.

It’s easy to see why crystal meth and binge drinking get the spotlight – the effects on sufferers are pronounced and profound. But at the same time, with all the talk of epidemics tearing at the social fabric, very little thought is given to the one drug that almost everyone is on, almost all the time. And it’s not only that everyone is on it, it’s also that they’re on it in ever bigger doses, in combination with massive whacks of sugar and alcohol. Hence the aggro. Not out-and-out anger, but just moments and people – on trains, in traffic, at the bar – right on the edge, and a city whose whole demeanour is a big fuzzball of undirected rage. If you can see the china quivering on the mantelpiece, it’s because there’s a very, very nervy elephant in the room. And its name is caffeine.

The Click Clique Clan

2008-10-06T12:04:00.002+11:00

The usual malarkey: go to a house party with some friends, finish the six packs we’d brought, steal someone else’s beers, get stuck into the host’s whiskey, then (finally, triumphantly) muscle in on the stereo, hip-house brimming iPods in hand. A crushing discovery on this tip: Gen Y appear not to understand the KLF. At all. Parliament, Prince and MJ still in floor-working order though….

A wee boogie, then it's a short stumble to 3am carnage, with nothing for company other than a bathtub full of soggy cardboard and meltwater, huge tables full of half-consumed bevvies and a floor festooned with that sticky black muck that I’ve been told is the residue of an evening’s hopes and dreams.

The normal unfolding of the night, but nonetheless a weird party because of the vibe generated by the gaggles of partygoers, all of whom formed clumps and thieved booze from each other, while not appearing to want to talk to each other, not for much more than a bummed fag. Some mixes just don’t mesh, and this one was a mash.

You think you go to a party to meet people, but who exactly? The very next day, my friend summed it up. ‘Do you remember that girl that X introduced us to? The one with the flesh-toned wedge heels, the jaunty baseball cap and the mouth stuffed full of teeth?’ I said I did – how could I forget? Then he said: ‘She was nice, but… no sooner had she spoken about three sentences, I just knew we could never, ever, ever be friends… and I knew she felt exactly the same way about me.’

Discriminating is inevitable and necessary, even though it is inevitably and necessarily incorrect. Most doctors have your diagnosis sussed to within three possibilities in as many minutes. In a lot of cases, what you actually say about your condition doesn’t matter that much. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Why? The doc’s already got a hunch. After that, she’s just matching and fitting everything about you against it.

The party was not that different – take the hunch off the doctor and stick it on us and our fellow party-goers. Even before actually meeting other people, we’re already sussing the scene: clothes, sure, but also posture, height, complexion, voice – one girl even got ticked right off my friend’s list for nothing more than a piggy guffaw. Okay, so we subsequently found out it was more like a horrendous cackle that ended every upper-inflexed sentence, but hey…

People click, clique, and clump – and this clannishness is fine, provided the feeling is mutual. That’s what love is: stalking in which the feeling is mutual. And it’s nice to find the people you like, the people you’re like, and who (are) like you. But the other side of seeing eye to eye and finding like and love is how wrong we are about our assessments of each other. But this takes time to realise, which is why you mostly only hear people exclaim ‘We were totally wrong for each other’ at the end of a relationship. Could have been that Ms Tooth Mouth (or maybe even Ms Ugly Guffaw) was the right one for you, but you ticked her box off your list, stole her beer, and then totally and finally alienated her by singing along to ‘3 a.m. Eternal’.

Tattoo… you?

2008-09-09T08:30:00.001+10:00

I’m part of that growing minority of people who have no tattoos whatsoever. Partly this is because I am covered in a fine coat of the most majestic fur and have no need of such common things. Partly it’s a lack of imagination. When some people are wasted, they go to the brothel. Others go to tattoo parlours. I just keep getting wasted, a one-trick pony with a one-track mind.

I nearly got one once, though. I’d been drinking at the Newport Arms with some primary school friends (by which I mean people I went to primary school with, not a clutch of pissed nippers in uniform). I was with Murray, my friend from the country, who’s the hardest bastard I know. He wears blue singlets, shoots roos, shears sheep, and drives a Falcon XR8… with throw cushions in the back seat. Okay, so he’s a man of contradictions.

Now, Murray likes a good tattoo – or he ought to, ‘cos he’s got a few. At any rate, once we’d had a few too many drinks, Murray said, ‘Ga’an, let’s go to the Cross and get some ink.’

On the forty-five minute drive, I had time to get a little sober and reflective: what would I get? What was it that was really, really meaningful to me? Even as we got out of the cab, I was still drawing blankety blanks, yet there I was in the tattoo parlour. Murray knew straight away what he wanted: some drops of blood for the barbed wire on his right arm, and a bit of green shading for the snake crawling through the skull on the left.

Meanwhile, I was frantically scanning the stencils on the wall for one, just one, which was even vaguely approximating what I wanted. But, like most pissed eighteen-year-olds, my mind was totally blank. After half an hour, the bikie with the tattoo gun just said to me, ‘None for you tonight mate. You don’t know what you want, so I’m not doing one for you.’

Ten years on, and that’s still the closest I’ve come to ‘getting some ink’. Mine is not the pride of the person who survives a fad without succumbing. Rather, it’s a sense of relief. It’s so easy to get a tattoo, but so hard to get a good tattoo. Most people have bad tattoos. A lot of people have the wrong tattoo. Nearly everyone has a dated tattoo. The only good ones, in my book, are the big fuck-off tattoos, and that’s simply ‘cos of my admiration for someone willing to really go the whole hog.

Maybe one of the reasons why we want to get tattoos is because we’re looking for some permanency in a world where everything is a short-term contract, formed on an ad-hoc basis and subject to change. But even so, think about your favourite t-shirt. Then imagine wearing it every day for a year. Would you be sick of it? Now imagine wearing it every day for the rest of your life… in fact, is there anything of yours that’s ten years old that you’re still into? What we really need are modular tattoos – something that, like Ikea furniture, can modulate and keep pace with your ever-changing lifestyle. Murray, if you can hear me, I need help.

Squeeze and Release

2008-08-18T09:07:00.006+10:00

I recently started attending BodyPump class, after being made curious by my lady’s repeated entreaties. ‘Pump?’ I wondered. ‘It involves weights… how bad could it be?’ It turns out that BodyPump (Pump) was expressly designed to get boys afraid of emasculating choreography into the aerobics room. But still, for many a young man intent on making claims on ‘Australian masculinity’, going into any aerobics room still places your lad in peril. Thus I initially twinkled into Pump with tip-toe trepidation – fifty minutes later, I was converted, nay, re-assigned. A doubt-filled novice had been changed into an enthused initiate, and a week later, I had already begun proselytising, trying to get my out-of-shape male friends into the operating room. It wasn’t necessarily Pump that I liked. What I liked, and – judging from the noises they make – what the instructors like, is the squeeze… and the release.

Pump is a great way to give you fantastic contractions. Life, as we know, begins with the painful contractions that herald birth, and continues spasm by spasm until the final relaxation. In fact, from a certain point of view, all life (and definitely all [re]production) is a matter of contraction, regardless of whether you’re talking about being an organism or having an orgasm. As Arnold Schwarzenegger said in Pumping Iron:

‘The greatest feeling you can get in a gym… is the pump. Your muscles get a really tight feeling, like your skin is going to explode any minute. It’s really tight, it’s like somebody blowing air into it, it just blows up and it feels different. It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, as having sex with a woman and coming. Can you believe how much I am in heaven? I am getting the feeling of coming in the gym, and the feeling of coming at home, the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up – I am coming day and night. It’s terrific. I am in heaven.’

But you can have too much of a good constriction. Pump too much, too hard, too long, and you’ll be Arnie with Aneurysm. Squeezing is only the half of it. There’s also release. You could say that Arnie’s approach is unbalanced – hence the absence of neck. Or, as an enthusiastic onanist once said: ‘Don’t choke it… stroke it.’ As with Onan, (and unlike Conan), with Pump you slowly build the pressure up until it becomes unbearable. Almost unbearable… then you release it. It’s this magical combination of squeeze AND release that’s the pleasurably painful secret of Pump’s success.

It’s not rocket science, just the imitation of all of life’s essential processes, each of which is involved in this rhythmic squeeze and release. This is not restricted (or constricted) to ‘the pump’, BodyPump, or even the aerobics room. You can get it striving, you can get it driving, in fact, it doesn’t matter whether it’s chewing, gurning, breathing, skipping, cycling, swimming, dancing, hugging, pissing, wanking, drumming, scratching, poking, sucking, blowing, farting, or whistling. Life is constantly caught in the painful, pleasurable ebb and flow of squeeze and release, contraction, expansion, tightening, relaxing, holding in and letting out. Until the final relaxation, life is both expenditure and reserve, squeeze and release. And it feels good.

Inner Monk, Stinking Drunk

2008-07-22T09:51:00.001+10:00

Like many of the people around me, I struggle with the tension between my inner monk and my stinking drunk. The notion that your body is a battleground is equally true for suicide bombers as it is for crash dieters, though admittedly they struggle through very different abuse curves. But for me, like a lot of friends my age, it’s not a belly full of chocolate or a waist wrapped in explosives that’s the worry – it’s the demon drink.

I’ve done all sorts of stupid things. I once pissed in my girlfriend’s shoe. Or so I was told, because I have no memory of this. I thought I’d made it to the toilet. Apparently, she awoke –horrified, naturally – to find me quietly micturating in the corner of the room. She screamed at me to stop, to which I replied, ‘You’re mean.’ Oh the horror, oh the shame. Another friend of mine was recently discovered by his girlfriend passed out asleep on the toilet (snoring), pants around ankles. Later, as a way of saying thank you for being undressed and put to bed by her, my friend… vomited in their bed. Yet another friend of mine used to regularly complain of waking on post-bender Sunday afternoons with sore knees and incredibly dirty fingernails. ‘The only thing I can conclude from this,’ he told me, ‘is that I crawl home from the pub, and don’t remember.’

I struggle with binge drinking like a lot of people; I’m not as good with it as I’d like to be, but I’m better than I was a few years ago. Most of the time, being broke, busy and needing to be on-the-ball is enough to keep me out of trouble. Occasionally, there are lapses. Sometimes, once a year, there are catastrophes. But it’s getting better – these days, my girlfriend’s shoes get to stay piss-free. Man, I’ve been so good, I deserve a reward… cheers! But the other night, I met a man drunk enough to keep me out of the gutter for… a good couple of months, at least. The other night, I met Barry.

I was drinking in one of those inner-north pubs in which the question of ‘a quiet few’ or even the possibility of ordering a shandy or light beer is rendered absurd by the atmosphere of studied, practised and (for the most part) incredibly skilled and deliberate heavy drinking. Let’s call it the Mayflower. The Mayflower is the kind of place where drinkers go to drink: the kind of people who’ve ruined their livers, their love lives and their pension plans in pursuit of the deep, abiding, reliable comfort of Australia’s most trusted pain reliever. I like the Mayflower: the beer is cheap and fresh, the place is full of ‘characters’, and provided you don’t piss in anyone’s shoe, nobody minds if you’re drunk.

But Barry was something else: a medium-built man blown balloon-wise by diabetes and booze. He walked up, tapped me on the shoulder, introduced himself, then started talking at me. I could tell straight away that this guy was tanked, soaked: the kind of deep, whole-body drunkenness that only a five-decade alcoholic can endure (and still keep drinking). He started at me, and straight away you knew that the guy was pretty much on autopilot, but what little there was left that was conscious and volitional veered dangerously between self-pity, aggression, self-congratulation and maudlin teary nostalgia interspersed with spasms of self-hatred. Barry was the pretty much the walking, talking, reeling id of White Australia – and it ain’t pretty. So anyway, Barry asked me for a sip of my lady’s water bottle. I poured him a beer from the jug and said, ‘Just have a beer, Barry.’
‘Nah, ga’an, give us a sip of yer water.’
‘I’m sorry, Barry, but it’s not mine to give.’
And his whole face turns. He rounds on me.
‘Yer all the same, you know. You fuckin’ Arabs.’
‘Excuse me?!’
‘Where ya from?’
‘Sydney.’
‘Don’t gimme that shit. You’re all the same, you foreign cunts.’

I somehow kept my cool, saying things like, ‘Barry, that’s quite strong. You don’t actually know me.’ Sure enough, two minutes later, Barry was profusely apologising, even begging to buy me a beer. I just said that I’d prefer if he left me alone… and of course, he got aggressive again. So when he went to the toilet, we moved to the other end of the room. For a while, it seemed as if he’d totally forgotten about it: me, the water bottle, and the insults. But then he tried it on again, with me, then with several others there. He was awful, despicable, pathetic – then when the bartender politely asked him to leave, he turned on her, growling,

‘Yeerrrrr a DOG. A DOG! A FUCKIN’ DOG!’

After twenty more minutes he got the message, but only after the regulars in the bar turned on him, yelling, ‘Go home Barry, get the fuck out!’ I caught flashes of myself at my worst, and although I’d never shown drunken abuse to anything more sentient than a souvlaki (at least as far as I remember), I thought, good God, this is where it ends up. Three more decades of bingeing, and that’s where I’ll be. It was a sobering thought, a frightening thought. Enough to drive you to drink. So that’s what I did. As soon as Gary left, I picked up the twenty dollar bill he’d foisted on me (during one of his apologetic moments) and I bought my companions a jug. And it was delicious.

Wild With Style

2008-07-14T13:16:00.002+10:00

One of the interesting things about living in a big apartment block like mine is getting to watch people come and go; on the days new tenants move in and out, you get boxfuls of inkling about how a whole room is taking shape couch by table, poster by painting. Taste is a funny thing – I know that mine’s better than yours and I believe it sincerely, but don’t we all? And, of course, I only think so because of all of the prejudices I’ve been brought up with about what’s cool, what’s funny, what’s thoroughly un- (mentionable, wearable, thinkable) among the company I keep.

A couple of years ago, I got to know this guy called Adam. Adam had fled the kibbutz he’d grown up on in order to move to Berlin, become a cabaret drag performer, and be fabulous. And he was: imagine Bjork in a ball gown with a neatly trimmed beard and you’re some way there. He had long nails, a dangly earring, and a high titter. Adam was working in the hostel we were staying in, doing a half-arsed job of cleaning up the joint, eyeing off the cutest of the guests, and doing just enough work to not get fired. Then one day, he was gone. But before he left, he told me some stories. One thing stands out above all. We were talking about dance music, and, inevitably, the subject of Israelis and psytrance came up. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but all that fluoro, all those pictures of aliens and mushrooms, all those kids with dreadlocks and bell bottoms off their face on acid on occupied land or stomping down some rainforest? Excuse me, but it’s just so, it’s just so bad taste.”

My lady’s good friend once had a flatmate called Kiara, and boy, did Kiara have bad taste. Kiara was into dolphins, patchouli and the colour purple (no, not the Whoopi Goldberg film). She was also into some pretty dodgy stuff, and one day, like Adam, Kiara was gone, leaving my lady’s friend with the rent, the room and her car. But what a room! Kiara’s room was a temple festooned with glittering trinkets of the kind you get at St Andrews market or in Byron Bay, or in the Fountain Gate approximation of same: dream catcher for the window, purple tie-dyed bedspread with woven plastic gold thread, and the pièce de resistance, an enormous picture of two airbrushed dolphins jumping a loopedy-loop over a silver moon above a black and silver sea.

Seeing Kiara’s room made me doubt everything – there was absolutely no levels of po-mo ironising at work: she wasn’t living in irony, she really meant it. Kiara really thought that a three-by-two-metre canvas of airbrushed cetaceans was what tied the whole room together – the beautiful, crowning jewel in a space filled with smaller, bottle-nosed sea mammals. There they were: in soapstone on the mantelpiece; in stained glass by the window; in laquered plastic jewellery boxes by the dresser. I never checked, but I know from what I saw her wear that the jewellery boxes were likewise full of dolphin earrings, dolphin bangles, dolphin necklaces.

I hadn’t thought about Kiara for years, when just the other day I stepped outside my apartment to check the mail, and there it was by the bottom of the stairs: a removalist box with the unmistakeable snout of a plastic dolphin protruding from the flap. ‘Kiara?’ I wondered. But no, it wasn’t – it was my new neighbour. From day one (being the bottle-nosed snoop that I am), I noted all the things that were going into the house: first the hints from the mess of boxes, and then the window sill, which was quickly and liberally adorned with trinkety bits until it was chock full of plastic tack. My neighbour’s style (let’s call her Kirrily, written with love hearts over the each ‘i’) is different to Kiara’s: gone is the aggressive emphasis on all things purple and porpoise; muted are the most strident New Age overtones. In its place is something altogether cheaper, nastier and more suburban – it’s like Kirrily went past the New Age shop at Fountain Gate and made for the $2 shop two doors down. You know, the shops that sell finely painted statuettes of grinning pugs as well as shampoos that make your scalp burn. It looked like Kirrily had gone there and cleaned them out of everything she could possibly hang in the window: green plastic bead curtains; black, glossy flower pots and lairy plastic flowers… and, of course, the aforementioned dolphin.

Then, a day later the music started. First there was the Spice Girls. Then there was something that sounded like the Vengaboys covering funk metal; then there was the unwholesomely whippety Celine Dion… then there was something else… I don’t know quite how to describe it. Imagine Evanescence singing a duet with Wendy Matthews, then remixed by Tiesto – kind of Hi-NRG EmoMoR… it was truly monstrous, but, you know, it fitted perfectly with the trinkets… in fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realised –there was a highly developed aesthetic at work, and it was being applied judiciously, consistently and selectively. Just like Adam’s psytrancers and Kiara’s purple patchouli dolphin universe, Kirrily has bad taste. Terrible, appalling taste. Adam was right about the Israeli hippies and he was right about bad taste. But, you know what? In their own way, they’ve all found their universe. All of them have built themselves a world to live in, and however misguided it might seem to others, that also means they have style – in fact, I’d say they’re wild with style. And that’s more than I can say for most of us.

Choose Your Own Adventure

2008-07-11T12:11:00.001+10:00

What’s best about a night out? Or no, I’ll ask a different question: where do the best nights end up? Well, I don’t know about you, but for me, the best nights are those that swerve toward somewhere completely unexpected. The ones you end up having cherished (if hazy) memories of years later are always those that hovered somewhere indeterminate (between the first rosy flush of drunkenness and the grumbled half-desire for last transport) before sidewinding back to hit you in a way that’s so absolutely daft and unforeseen that you still have to scratch your head and wonder. Nights like these are true adventures.

Some people go out for the routine of getting wasted; some go in the hope of getting laid. Some dickheads’ idea of a good night out is all about getting into a fight. But if you ask me, all the wasting, all the flirting, all the expenditure of time, money, and energy is all in vain if it doesn’t contain a possible adventure. In fact, I’m coming to the conclusion that the possibility of an adventure is really the only good reason to go out. The day that possibility shrivels up and dies, I hang up my mead horn.

But adventures are hard to have, simply because you can’t make them happen. They happen to you – it’s an ambush. You can’t very well book yourself in for an ambush in the same way you make a doctor’s appointment or a reservation at a restaurant. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of a good dining experience, where things get better the more they meet (or even exceed) your expectations. And probably, if you’re eating out (or going to the doctors) then a ‘real adventure’ is probably the last thing you’re booking for. True adventures can’t be reserved – they’re a risk, they’re unexpected. If you have your reservations, you won’t have your adventure. But at the same time, they only happen if you’re prepared for them. They can take you by surprise, but if whatever happens shocks and frightens you, you’re more likely to turn tail and head for home. You have to be up for it, even if you don’t know what ‘it’ is.

And even if you are open to ‘it’, some nights the stars are out of alignment. Sometimes it just ain’t flowing adventure’s way – swim against the current at your peril. In fact, having a talent for adventure is also about knowing how to quickly disentangle yourself before it’s late, you’re bored and your wallet’s empty, or (years later) before you’re an alco, an addict, or sad loser who can’t or won’t let go of fun, even when they’ve had so much that it’s no fun at all. For most of us, this is a work in progress – but at the same time, it wouldn’t be an adventure without the ever-present risk of boredom and strife, and a would-be adventurer has to be open to this.

But as a bulwark against baulking and a safe bet against the forces of pike, the prospects of adventures are also enhanced, and even ensured, by the company of other, likeminded adventurers. Everybody knows one – an adventurer is a rare species: the enemy of habit, inertia, boredom, regularity, and repetition-compulsion, the adventurer proposes, invokes, suggests, and even ensnares you with possibilities, even as they involve you in things which can quickly turn back into the very things they’re against – habit, inertia, boredom, regularity, and repetition-compulsion. Nonetheless, the likeminded adventurer remains the opponent of the kybosh, sworn foe of the naysay. The likeminded adventurer is the embodiment of ‘up for it’: (s)he comes shooting out of his or her comfort zone like a hell-bent homunculus spat high out of a cannon. To a would-be adventurer, this is a great and precious thing, and a welcome sight to behold.

More than anything, embarking on an adventure involves taking control of your own surrender, a gesture captured by the dangerous phrase ‘ah, fuck it, why not’. Say these words and straight away you expose yourself to a weird combination of knowing very well what you’re doing while simultaneously letting yourself run with the rapids, without really knowing whether there’s a lake or a waterfall waiting at the end. Yes indeed, it could turn bad, it might get hairy, it’ll probably cost you dearly – but if you’re worried about that, not only will you’ll never find out, you wouldn’t have enjoyed it if you had. But if you think you might, all you’ve got to do is find your fellow adventurer, then do two (contradictory) things simultaneously: seize the strong current of feeling, and (at the same time), totally give yourself over to it. That’s the beginning of all adventure. With folly close behind.

Sexy kids?! (standing nakedly in Bill Henson’s creature workshop)

2008-06-09T11:39:00.008+10:00

In life we experience all kinds of nakedness: the prosaic nakedness of the bathroom; the passionate nakedness of the bedroom; the shameful nakedness of exposure, ridicule or medical examination.

As with a lot of other things like eating, shitting, fucking, giving birth and dying, nakedness is something so fundamental that it goes without saying – it’s something that’s an inescapable part of being one of the naked apes we are. We can’t not be naked, just like we can’t stop needing (and wanting) to eat, shit, fuck and die – all we can do is try to cover up these underlying facts of life. Don’t we though? One of the weirdest things about our (already very weird) species is that we’re ashamed of most of these things, the very things that make us who we are. You can’t imagine a prudish chimpanzee, a snobbish dog or a bashful guinea pig – and yet, homo sapiens spends a huge amount of time, effort and money trying to cover up the bare facts of its existence.

But not only are people freaked out by their own bodies – a lot of them will do everything in their power to control, cover up or otherwise censure the nakedness of others. All this at the same time as most people expend the overwhelming amount of their energies either directly or indirectly trying to get naked with somebody. It’s the war we are: if homo sapiens has an instinct that’s stronger than the desire to cover up and force others to cover up (for shame, for shame), it’s the instinct to expose ourselves to ‘that special someone’ as well as see them and (everyone else) stripped bare. The only thing stronger than our discomfort with nakedness is… our desire for nakedness. In fact people will pay anything, build anything, risk anything (including the lives and minds of others) just for the opportunity to experience their preferred nakedness.

The weird ironies of all this are compounded by the fact that, even though some nakedness is so scandalous and overpowering that people can lose their job, their lives, their careers and their families over it, other kinds of nakedness are considered so normal that to even to mention it would mark out the finger-pointer as the weirdo. In the change-room of my gym, the majority of men seem not only happy but in fact incredibly eager to get aggressively naked, and will think nothing of towelling their ballbags (with one leg up on the bench) while carrying on a conversation with another mate (also starkers) about ‘fully blown hemis’, ‘eyeleted rims’ or the best way to ‘re-lube yer bearings’.

In some cultures, the sight of a human leg is considered so shocking that it warrants a beating or imprisonment, while, among certain other groups of Australian men, genitals are mentioned every second or third word, and it’s not uncommon for some men to even name each other as a ‘mad’ set of women’s genitals as a term of endearment.

But in Australia (as in almost every other part of the world), the one thing that we must never do is make any connection between the nakedness of children and the sexual desire of adults. Nude kids aren’t sexy, dude. And if they are to you… well, you’re in trouble… especially if you’re involved in anyway with depicting naked children in a way that’s deliberately sexual. This is called ‘child pornography’ – you may have heard of it. But what’s pornography anyway? Well, pornography is a representation of erotic behaviour, one designed to excite sexual desire. If this involves children in any way, it’s a crime in this country and an abomination in the eyes of most. I guess you could say it's the worst of the worst. Getting steamed up right now? You may well be a monster.

But there’s a full spectrum of porn out there that’s not considered quite as monstrous: from soft porn to scat porn to snuff porn, the people’s demand to see whatever depraved representations of sex/nudity turns them on is unfathomable and endless, and its use as an enjoyment is more common than many codes of football. But what about things that neither depict erotic behaviour nor are designed to turn people on? Think of, I dunno, Disney cartoons, or David Attenborough documentaries. You may well be turned on by either: but if you were, that would make you a pervert – at least in the eyes of most people. Normal or not, it’s probably uncommon. Hell, the internet might show you that you’re not the only one – who knows? And if you’re not interfering with other creatures in any way – who cares? If you find meerkats or Bambi particularly nasty, that’s up to you. Just take my advice – keep it on the low low.

So what about material that is a representation of nudity? And, moreover, a representation of a child’s (partial) nudity? Well, let’s ask: is Bill Henson’s topless thirteen-year-old a representation of erotic behaviour? And/or is the image intended to excite sexual desire? If the answer to either was no, then you’d have to ask yourself…. if it’s not a representation of erotic behaviour AND it’s not designed to turn you on, then what is it? Well, it could be a lot of things to a lot of people. It might be art, it might be controversial – but it’s not pornography. That is unless all human nakedness is sexy to you – something rather hard to fathom with all the late night footage on TV of the naked roadside corpses in Burma. So what if you do find an example of nakedness sexy, and it’s of a figure that is neither a) of erotic behaviour b) designed to be sexual AND c) under no circumstances allowed by law to be sexy… where does that leave you? I’ll ask it another way: do you make any connection between the nakedness of a child and your own (adult) sexual desire? None? Good. You do? Well then, that makes you a pervert… and maybe even a paedophile. For shame! And on that note, here’s a joke:

Q: What’s the biggest cause of pedophilia?
A: Sexy kids.

Melbourne: the world’s most liveable city (under siege)

2008-05-19T20:14:00.002+10:00

If I said ‘city under siege’, where would I be talking about? I might be talking about somewhere like Baghdad, Khartoum, or Harare, all places where different kinds of curfews have been imposed as a tactic of martial law. What about Melbourne? Could ‘the world’s most liveable city’ be described as a city under siege? Hardly, you’d think, but then again, the state government has just taken a step in this direction with the 2am lockout. I have no doubt it will bring some positive side-effects in its wake, but I’m not going to talk about those here. Nor do I want to argue about the effective impact on us punters, which might actually be milder than a lot of alarmist (business-owning) commentators have suggested. All I want to ask is why has an issue – binge drinking – become a crisis?

No doubt you remember the ban on smoking in bars and pubs last year. A reasonable move, you might say, justified on the basis that it was a public health matter. We’ve been experiencing the direct benefits (less cancerous air) and the side-effects (toiletty smells, empty, empty dancefloors and smokay corrals) ever since, but the reason that I draw the comparison is that, as with the smoking ban, the government pushed through an agenda by framing an issue as a ‘crisis’ –‘cos crises, as we know, require immediate and exceptional action, which these days usually goes by the name ‘intervention’. In the case of the lockout, a second (but not secondary) argument has been tacked on: not only is binge drinking causing a ‘health crisis’, it’s also a ‘security problem’. And if a health crisis requires immediate action, then a security problem necessitates that an intervention be made ASAP using whatever force necessary.

We should also remember that governments never claim that there’s a crisis without talking about how it’s going to be managed by the experts… who are, surprise surprise, the government, its agents, or people authorised to do the work on their behalf. You gots to remember, folks: in politics, any claim of a crisis is also a play for (even more) power.

Under the Howard regime, the ‘crisis’ to be managed was immigrants, an issue that was connected with the spectre of Islamist terror, thanks to the opportunity presented by 9/11. It’s a textbook classic of politricks: create an internal enemy; demonise it in the press for a few months; wait for a crisis/event in order to declare ‘war’ on it; request exceptional powers; crackdown; appear tough, decisive and effective. Oh, and if the opposition says anything? Wedge ‘em, denounce them as unpatriotic, or even suggest that they’re on ‘their side’. Stay on message, and watch your numbers soar in the polls. There’s nothing voters love more than a spectacular crackdown by a government who appears ‘tough on [insert enemy object]’, which is why all effective politicians these days love (and need) jackboots as often as rubber stamps. Politics is all about stamping.

Thankfully for Australian Muslims, the Rudd regime appears to have substituted stamping on stigmatised minorities with stamping out alcopops. At the very least, this change of direction might prevent a re-run of the Cronulla ugliness (or, at the very least, confuse some bogans), and surely this is a good thing. But nonetheless, two things are striking: the first is how quickly any PM can galvanise one of many issues into the Problem that all Australians must be concerned about. The second is how quickly most people will bend over and accept whatever measures the self-appointed ‘problem managers’ suggest.

But, going back to the beginning, does it really make sense to say that binge drinking in Australia has reached crisis point? Lest we forget, almost exactly 200 years ago in wild colonial Sydney, the government was overthrown in the Rum Rebellion. According to legend, the Rebellion happened because Governor Bligh interfered in the enormous profiteering going on among NSW Officer Corps, who were running a tidy informal economy with rum as the currency. In actual fact, it wasn’t a matter of rum, although this was the view that Bligh tried on, and one made popular retrospectively by Christian historians hell-bent on portraying the ‘evils of alcohol’ and ‘the bad old days’. There was a lucrative business going in bootlegged rum, sure, but it wasn’t the cause of the rebellion, which was actually all about… guess what? Turf wars and power plays between the interests of business and government. Michael Duffy wrote this about it in the Sydney Morning Herald two years back: “The early governors wanted to keep NSW as a large-scale open prison, with a primitive economy based on yeomen ex-convicts and run by government fiat. In contrast, a growing number of entrepreneurs wanted to build a vigorous economy, and sought political influence for themselves… the rebellion is important as the first major crisis in the fight between government and capital in Australia.”

Don’t believe the hype: it wasn’t about booze then, and it isn’t about booze now. Just as the 1808 Rum Rebellion wasn’t really about rum, the 2008 lockout has precious little to do with alcopops, and a lot to do with tussles between political power and business interests. The government needs to stay (alco)popular to keep power; publicans need to sell booze to stay in business. Any of you goddamned cocksuckers thinks otherwise? Please watch Deadwood and report back. Basically, Australia has always had to deal with the hangover of its alcoholic romance, but if you ask me, it’s one problem among many, and certainly nothing like the kind of ‘crisis’ that the government, the Hun, ACA and TT would have you believe. Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t pissed idiots occasionally picking fights and generally causing mayhem on the otherwise liveable streets of Melbourne. There are arseholes out there – it was always thus. Some of these arseholes are the ones stumbling pissed witless in the CBD of a Sunday morning. Then again, some of them are respected business owners and popular politicians. And if you ask me, it’s the stampier of the two groups who are the ones besieging our good city in this case. Perhaps it’s time we rose up and repelled these barbarians? No? Too pissed to care? Yeah, me too.

Good Neighbours, Good Friends

2008-05-18T01:29:00.003+10:00

As odd as they may seem, the weirdest thing about Tokyo is not the locals. No, it’s the ‘people like you’ that you’d better watch out for. When you discover that ‘gaijin’, the local term for someone like you, means ‘alien’ and ‘outsider’, you take umbrage; but the bristles subside when you meet a few living, (mouth-) breathing gaijin and realise that, however offensive the term may be, it was probably the most appropriate choice. At the extreme end, ask the Friedmans, or anyone of the poor sods discovered in that unspeakable Austrian basement: it’s always those you’re closest to who are the real monsters.

Take our old neighbour in Tokyo (no-one else will). From our first day in Toko flat A #101 we were convinced that we were living next door to a very, very odd German. I will never forget opening the door to our flat to have him say, just like Herr Lipp from The League of Gentlemen, ‘So it is true you are my neighbour, ja!’ before suggesting we start swapping sci-fi novels. I politely declined the swap offer, and thereafter Herr Lipp was noticeably colder toward me. I put it down to fussy ‘German’ sensibilities, or some other half-arsed stereotype. Nine months later, he was gone, never to return. About three months after the departure, we asked our other (local) neighbour –a maniacal greenfingers we nicknamed (imaginatively) ‘Flower Lady’ – about Herr Lipp, his whereabouts, and, frankly, his oddness.

‘I suppose he’s gone back home – tell me, do you know if he was Austrian, or German?’
‘Heeeeh…’ Flower Lady responded in that ascending bray peculiar to J-ladies, ‘He was from England.’
‘Are you sure? He always spoke with a thick German accent.’
‘Hontou, hontou’ [I’m sure, I’m sure], she replied, ‘He sent me a postcard from England – hora.’ And she went and got it to prove the point. Sure enough, he was from Cornwall in Britain. But had he lied to us gaijin, or to Flower Lady? Were we all a victim of his naughty, sneaky dissimulation? Germans, eh? Can’t trust em…

But what about neighbours: who the hell are they? And what do they want with us? As papa Freud once said, the phrase ‘love thy neighbour’ is both the hardest and cruellest of all the commandments: why should we? How could we? And what good would it do us? Love is valuable – why would you throw it away on Herr Lipp, or even Flower Lady? If you love someone, they must be worthy of it in some way or other – how are you supposed to love somebody who is not just a stranger, but also really, really strange? A stranger than strange sci-fi buff, one who would fake being German in order to set up an elaborate joke ending in a punchline with an audience of one?

Or what about snowdroppers, those neighbourly types who poke their business into other people’s underpants, after lifting them by moonlight? Last week, I talked about ‘hanky Pops’, my next-door neighbour with mucous and anger management issues. A week ago, Pops may have been merely repulsive – this week, he’s a potential perpetrator. That’s because, over a course of days, weeks, or even months (until we realised), some smelly little nonce had been lifting my lady’s smalls. After the discovery, we told all our neighbours about the theft, and, as it turns out, all of the women in the building had experienced their very own snowdrop. How long had this been going on? How much is it going to cost all of us to replace our lifted smalls? And how many pairs of knickers does a pervert need to get their jollies?

Thing is, I doubt the snowdropper is Pops – unless he’s using panties as hankies… but no, I don’t think so – he’s slow-moving, and I’ve never seen him out at night. Being snowdropped is expensive and inconvenient: to the replacement cost of the underpants is added the inability to comfortably hang out your washing of an afternoon ever again. And this connects to the worst aspect of the whole thing: the breakdown in trust. Every person who passes by my window is now a suspect, and seeing the world of my neighbours through such squinty, suspicious eyes is enough to get your knickers permanently in a knot. All it takes is one arsehole with peculiar masturbatory habits and the idyllic, naïve vision of a happy, sunny neighbourhood is wrecked.

A recent, popular ‘solution’ to the existence of snowdroppers and the fear of worse is the erection of walls and the flight behind them into gated communities. In a gated community, so the story goes, each of the residents is carefully vetted, while each visitor must pre-arrange a visit with a resident in order to be admitted. Gated communities are screamingly successful in the US, and they’re gaining popularity in Australia – Sanctuary Cove, our very own Truman Show on the Gold Coast, is the most well-known example. But here’s the rub: according to a recent study, you’re actually no safer living in a gated community. Sure, the walls are high, the lawns are cut – if you’re lucky, the guard is even awake. Problem is, gated communities are based on the flawed assumption that the criminal/devo/madman is an outsider, when in fact, the perp is more likely to be a neighbour, or even a family member. Crime rates are at least as high, or higher, inside gated communities than they are in the free-flowing neighbourhoods in comparable places – in a gated community, the weirdos aren’t locked out, they’re locked in. Unfortunately, there are freaks – I wish it were otherwise. But at least if the doors aren’t bolted you can escape. If it’s a choice between bricking myself in with those I think I know so well, or taking on the risks of strangers that I don’t, give me the fear of the unknown any day. That, and an indoor drying rack.

Blear Glut? Less, please.

2008-05-11T00:37:00.002+10:00

Remember the TV test pattern? Back in the olden days, there wasn’t even enough TV to fill up twenty-four hours worth of programming. That, and the people who worked at the station had homes to go to, families to see, lives to lead. Likewise with Saturday trading: time was, shops would close on Saturday afternoons, and not open again until Monday morning. Trading hours were 9–5, the pubs closed at ten, and on Sundays the high street was a ghost town. There was no broadband, no Google, no mobile phones, no EFTPOS; credit cards were a luxury, and crystal meth was only available in the military. How boring, you say. Yes, perhaps, but…

Look around you: everywhere you look there’s too much too much. It’s a blear-making blur, enough to make you squint. Hell, keep eating and your cheeks will rise to the occasion on your side-bottomed behalf. There might be a world food crisis going on, but you’d be hard pressed to see it through the fog of abundance (of all kinds, not just food) in this neck of the woods. And that’s because, while the lack attacks elsewhere, Melbourne is ‘suffering’ a blear glut.

As always, if you want to see the most ‘Melbourne’ evidence of this, you need to go to our CBD laneways. That’s ‘cos Melbourne’s alleys are apparently full of culture and cool little bars. Sure, on Friday evening. Come back on Monday morning (as the fug of blear is lifting like those notes from your fat-ass Friday-night wallet) and there’s more than the vibrant world of cool bars and underground culture. There’s also the sticky residue of puke and piss, the crystal spalls of broken glass and stinking piles of waste.

What ever happened to portion control? We’ve replaced it with control briefs and expanding appetites. I freely admit I’m as guilty as anyone here, but there’s something really grotesque about Melbourne’s blear glut when people in Port au Prince, Dakar and Cairo can’t afford rice. There’s too much, too good, taken too lightly in this city. Australians have a strongly entrenched culture of ‘gettin’ yer money’s worth’, and being at the pointy end of the global shitheap means that we can usually put this mother-load where our overstuffed mouth is. Of course, we’re the ‘lucky ones’, and I think that most of us would fight tooth and nail to retain our privilege (if we could be bothered getting off the couch). But we should also remember the reap that comes with the sow: a huge part of our blear glut has been financed by paying it forward – and you can only keep borrowing from the comfort of the couch before a man comes to take it away. Live beyond your means for too long and sure enough, the repo depot will come knocking. But does it have to get that bad?

Maybe ‘The Big Problem’ is so big, so systemic, that it’s beyond anyone’s control now. When people talk about the great extinctions, they usually mention three models: the dinosaur, the house of cards, and the runaway train. Well, picture a dinosaur building said house on a speeding caboose – that’s us! Is it? Well, we can just keep on partying like it’s 1999 and find out. But for ourselves, each other and the decisions we have some influence over, I’d say that one of ‘the problems’ (our little problem, if you will) is an inability to appreciate the quality of our quantity, and to really savour the flavour. When I was in high school I would devour the latest album by my favourite artists with lust and relish. When the new Fugazi album came out, for example, I would spend an hour a day with it for days, weeks, even months, working through and savouring every single detail. I feel like maybe we could start to get rid of our glut by applying something like this to the way we eat, the way we drink, and the way we listen to music.

Maybe we can heed the implied threat of the card playing train commuting dinosaur, avoid the reaper and the repo depot, and turn this into an opportunity to enjoy less – and by doing so, to enjoy it more. Why not stay home, do the dishes, or ride your bicycle to the park and read a secondhand book? Or how about having a slow conversation with somebody you like, over tea. Turn off your mobile for a day. Have a month off downloading. Go for a long, leisurely walk. Think about it: in a country where the blear glut is also an enormous source of profit (for businesses) and tax (for governments), taking a quiet stroll is actually one of the most subversive things you can do.

Like, get out of my face, bitch (tram of thought)

2008-04-28T14:40:00.002+10:00

So there I was, sitting on a tram into the city thinking about gay-mers when my tram of thought was suddenly interrupted by the following stream:

‘And she was like, like, I don’t like her, and like, I like said to her, like, listen bitch, she like, she doesn't like you either – like, you know… yeah, totally, like…’

A typical public transport infliction. The interruption was total – all thought of gay-mers (I’ll tell you about them in a ‘sec) went out the (unopenable) window, and now I was forced to sit there and endure the silly little troll’s endless tirade against whoeverthefuckitwas. Talking loudly on a mobile phone on public transport is one of those things. While you include people in the sordid affairs of your private life, you exclude them from the space of your public life. They’re free to talk, you’re forced to endure listening, but, all the same, you’re unable to join in. It’s the telephonic equivalent of the VPL: you’re trapped in the Audible Panty Line of their sordid business, unable to do anything but squirm.

It’s hard to be nostalgic for ‘the good old days’. Imagine a world where you had to say ‘the right thing’, marry ‘the right man’, wear ‘the right clothes’ and avoid every thing, place and person that was ‘wrong’ because of faith, occupation or skin colour. And this on pain of being ostracised and bringing shame on your family… and not just for ‘like, a week, or whatever’, but forever, for the rest of your life AND the rest of your family’s life. For as long as the beady-eyed elders remember. But most of us who live in Melbourne these days have gone from living in a world that emphasised ‘have to’ to one that emphasises ‘want to’. We’ve gone from duty (with its right and wrong), to a world of desire (with its likes and dislikes). That’s why the girl says ‘like’ so much – in her own inarticulate way she’s expressing being a fully paid-up member of her own private Empire of Like™, a world that’s all about excluding everything and everyone she isn’t and doesn’t like.

Which brings me back to my original tram of thought, and gay-mers. I recall a friend’s friend (a gamer, but not a gay-mer) telling me over a teary beer that ‘You’re better off telling people you’re gay than telling them you’re into role-playing these days.’ He may have a point… but never fear! Because even if you fall into both categories, these days, if you have broadband, a same-sex directed horn, a polyhedral dice and an armour class of -3, you can meet other people who like to dice with the same kinds of vice. We live in a world where every orc has her equal, where every simulator of battles among sentient sea beasts can find similarly inclined creatures to practice dictation, lactation, or any form of delectation with. A good thing, surely...

But the side-effect of such a meeting of minds and manatee empires becomes palpably, nakedly obvious when you get on public transport. Now, although PT is neither properly public nor effective transport, it’s still one of those few places where you’re likely to brush mandibles with creatures who exist outside the bubble of your own private Empire of Like™. You might be on the way to meet friends at a little bar where everyone else has exactly the same taste in tattoos and Jimmy Choos as you choose (hey, nice shhh…hoes), but before you bump pumps with your chums, being on the tram forces you to cross paths with conspicuous udders.

But what do you find when you get there? OMG, the social fabric is a crud-filled semi-colon made up of multi-cellular phone users, texting h8 mail to their XXX partner (who they’ve never met). Everybody’s standing (or sitting) in their very own real and imagined circle of friends, only displaying the body codes they wear (clothes) in order to be differentially decoded depending on level of initiation…

Of course, this means that a gay-mers can spot each other, but unfortunately, it also means ‘we’ (the people, remember?) have nothing in common except our indifference. We’re becoming less and less able to see and hear anything we don’t ‘like’ – everyone who’s not on our Facebook is faceless. I like you – come sit on my face. I don’t like you, so…
‘Get the fuck out of my face, bitch!…’
‘What was that?’
‘Oh, nothing, just…’
‘So, like, what were you saying?’
‘I’ve like, totally forgotten, ‘cos like, this rude bitch on the tram like just totally interrupted me, and shit.’

GSA A-OK? (the titillating taboo of the illicit)

2008-04-23T08:46:00.002+10:00

When considering coupling with another person, most people would tell you that it’s important to like one another. More than that, it’s even important to be like one another. Meet your friend for girly chats about new beau and hear her coo that ‘we’re so alike’, ‘we have so much in common’, ‘we really see eye to eye on most things’. Two months later, and if they’re starting to fall in love, then they’re probably going through that phase where they almost become one another, losing themselves in a kind of symbiotic swallowing that can seem… well, pretty gross, if you’re not a part of it.

But there’s such a thing as too similar, just as there’s such a thing as too different. I can say this with the compact directness of two words: incest, bestiality. Easier said than done, you say. Too right – just ask the copywriter who came up with the GSA (Genetic Sexual Attraction) Association of Tasmania’s latest rip-roaring slogan: ‘You’ve had the ‘cest, now try the best!’

Australians might snigger at Tasmanians for enjoying the kind of map of Tassie that’s just too close to home. Likewise, we might cock a snoot at certain New Zealanders who believe that the grass looks greener on the other side of the species divide. But whether it’s ‘cest’ or ‘best’, the issue is no laughing matter, especially when it involves kids of either kind.

But what about GSA, you say? No way? A-OK? GSA, ‘Genetic Sexual Attraction’, is the ‘friendly uncle’ of incest – its victimless, unwitting sister act. GSA has a venerable history: Oedipus Rex and Jocasta, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia… in fact, it usually involves royalty or Gods (and their wrath). But it has its banal practitioners too, and no doubt some of you will have been hearing a lot about GSA recently because of the 60 Minutes story on John and Jennifer Deaves (of Mount Gambier).

John and Jennifer live together, fuck each other, and have even had a child together. So what makes this nice, scientifically sound GSA and not nasty ol’ motherfucking incest? Well, the decisive fact is that they didn’t ‘know’ each other (in either sense) while Jennifer was growing up. This, apparently, makes all the difference. They ‘met’ as adults, and when they did, they ‘saw’ each other as a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’, not a father and daughter. As Jennifer said, “I was looking at him and going, ‘oh, he’s not too bad – like someone across a bar at a nightclub.”

So far, so good… but hang on – when they (nearly) kissed, Skywalker and Leia didn’t know they were siblings. And when Oedipus finds out he’s been doing his mum, he doesn’t high-five her or spark up a stogie… he cuts out his own eyes. The cultural impact of both these stories might say something about acceptable resolutions to the vicissitudes of GSA in each case: the ancient Greeks would dash out their eyes; Americans would palm the girl off onto Hans (Solo). But it’s the reaction, the progression – what John and Jennifer did after meeting each other ‘like someone across a bar at a nightclub’ so unwise. Or wrong?

In Leviticus, God (or his note-taker) talks about the abominations of incest (no GSA in those days, so no excuse). The King James edition of the Bible says that you shouldn’t commit incest, “for theirs is thine own nakedness.” It’s not too different from what the Old Testament has to say about bestiality: “Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.” It is. It really, really is – and if you’re a Jew or a Christian, the consequences are pretty bad: “And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.” But I’ll leave the right and wrong of it to believers and tut-tutters – what I’m interested in is the silliness, nay, the grand folly of their actions, in this order:

Folly #1: They boned, then they shacked up, then they kept boning (without wearing a rubber), and as a result

Folly #2: They had a child, after which

Folly #3: They took money from 60 Minutes (apparently) in order to tell the world about Follies One and Two.

Jennifer and John might think they’re involved in a normal relationship between consenting adults, one that’s harmless – an unoriginal sin, a victimless crime. But judging from the vandalism and abuse they’ve already suffered, a portion of the good people of Mount Gambier don’t share their views. And now their kids (who have to attend the local school) are the ones who are going end up with egg on their face. I’m sure the subtle fact that Jennifer’s school age children aren’t part of the union will probably be lost on the victimizers. And, indeed, the hate crimes have begun in earnest. But Jennifer’s still bubbly about it, even though the family are now contemplating moving after their car was vandalised. “People obviously know where we live and they could do this sort of thing again – hopefully not again, but you never know.” Well I dunno, Jennifer, I’ve got a pretty good idea you’re never gonna live this one down.

More than anything, what this whole shebang shows is a complete inability to think things through, to consider the consequences – but try telling this to someone who fucks their dad, then brags about it in primetime. Depending on your worldview, incest might be abominable. According to statistics, it might be more common than we’re comfortable admitting. But regardless of the facts of her figure, at the very least, if you discover that you shared a bit too much MDMA, GBH, S&M, and DNA with the hottie you scored at QBH – it might be wise to keep it on the QT, eh? For your own sake. GSA may well be the appealing new fragrance of the Olsen twins, but on national TV, the consequences for your family are abominable.

Of bingeing athletes (and binge aesthetes)

2008-04-12T14:53:00.001+10:00

Somewhere between Wayne Carey’s PR-schooled (but actually quite ballsy) mea culpa and Matthew D’Arcy’s apparently unschooled but obviously very sharp left hook lurks something so big that no-one seems to be able to nail it. The people behind Australia’s Olympic team can easily apply the phrase “bringing the sport into disrepute” to censure the violent little D’Arcy, but this doesn’t get close to the real issue. Likewise, Carey can say he’s very sorry, sober up, and stop sniffing up, spewing up, screwing up, and slapping slappers around. But it still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. There are Olympic Games and there are football games. There are also drinking games, but drinking itself is not a game… or is it? Or is it a hobby? That usually presumes accumulating skills. If you include ‘holding your liquor’ then yeah, I ‘spose it could be a hobby. It might also be a pastime, an activity, or a pursuit. But actually, I’d say that it’s much, much deeper than that. In fact, I think it’s one of the only things that all Australians share.

Think about it. There is death. There are taxes. For some, there is even real estate. But no matter who they are or where they live, all Australians are affected by binge drinking. And this is why, along with the other things just mentioned, it’s one of the only things we all have in common. Tell me what else reflects the reality of the lived experience of the entire community. Everything else is just imaginary… ANZACs? Only for skips. AFL? Only in Victoria. The beach? Whiteys again, but this time only the ones who live on the coast. The bush? Come off it. We’re a bunch of overweight ex-boat people who live in the suburbs. We love real estate, cars and petrol – and we’re unsustainable and abusive in the way we use all three. During the week, we drive our cars to our jobs, where we work to pay off the real estate we return home to in the evenings (in order to drink and watch petrol and housing prices rise on TV). And when the weekend comes and we have a choice with how to spend our time, most of us binge. And the ones who don’t? Well, they get to hide from, put up with, or serve kebabs to those of us who do.

Young and free? Nonsense! We’re fat and pissed. Girt by sea? Nonsense on stilts! Sloshed by tea is more like it. Paul Kelly’s ‘Dumb Things’ is the only song that could be used as our national anthem without dishonesty, ‘cos no matter who you are or where you live in Australia, you could tell me without distortion that getting very, very drunk is the activity that at least one member of your family takes to with gusto, regardless of age, gender, income, profession, or ethnic background. Even my cabbie the other night, who said, “You Aussies have beer; we have beards” is not excluded, ‘cos after all, he has to drive pissed idiots like me home. So what about mateship? Well, what’s a mate really? A mate is just someone who’s seen you really, really wasted. The mark of intimate friendship in Australia is getting to the point where you’re so pissed neither of you is even able to talk, which is also another handy way of solving the discomfort of emotional intimacy.

My friend Murray – a quintessential binger and a good mate – used to have a little saying, one that’s far more honest than most Australians are these days. It’s quite poetic, so I’ll quote it in full:

If you drink, then drive, you’re a bloody idiot.
But if you drink, then drive, and make it home okay?
Then you’re a bloody champion.

D’Arcy and Carey didn’t “bring the sport into disrepute” – they brought bingeing into disrepute. In other cultures, the mere fact of being very, very drunk is itself socially unacceptable. In Australia, provided you’re not hurting somebody, it’s heroic. And this is why every condemnation of a remote Aboriginal community, as well as each tut-tutting of an out-of-control athlete, is also an act of hypocrisy. If you so much as snickered at Murray’s ditty, you are implicated. K-Rudd has decided to frame bingeing as a ‘problem’. Some people have even gone so far as to say that it’s ‘part of our culture’. This is closer, but it doesn’t go far enough. Everyone’s happy to talk bingeing athletes, but what very few people are willing to concede is that, fundamentally, Australians are binge aesthetes. Bingeing isn’t a part of our culture, mate, it is our bloody culture. Cheers… oi, what the fuck are you lookin’ at?!

On hospitals, hostages and hospitality (the hostman always brings lice)

2008-04-05T12:09:00.002+11:00

It’s quite clear to most owners why dogs are man’s best friend. But try finishing this sentence: cats are man’s best… well? What, exactly? Whatever pleasure they might bring, like male nipples and poetry, it’s not really clear what cats are for. It’s not even clear that cats are ‘for us’ at all. In fact, I’d say the weight of evidence suggests that they’re against us. It’s one thing to wonder why we live with cats; it’s another to realise that we don’t own them, that they’re not our friends. Cats are just small big cats, and big cats are highly evolved killers. You think I’m wrong? Ask yourself, if cats were as big as golden Labs, would you leave one with the kids? Charlie the Wonder Lion? Aslan aside, you’d have to say it’s a dangerous proposition. The point is not to piss off cat fanciers (too late I’m sure) or even to say that there’s nothing good about ‘em. I like cats, just like I like my nipples, and even poetry. Well, some. But what I want to get across is this: you’re not ‘friends with’ the cat. You don’t ‘own’ the cat. You ‘host’ the cat. Cats aren’t man’s best friend, they’re man’s best parasite.

My good lady and I are hosting a cat at the moment. It works out pretty well for all parties. He’s undemonstrative, aloof and on the take. And we feed him milk. It’s a pretty simple equation: we’ve lost our staffie, and are so desperate for animal affection that we’ll even settle for the flick and whiskers of Bitchcakes – that’s what we call him. How would you characterise our relationship? Well, he takes, we give. He takes some more, we give some more. I’ve you’ve ever had friends in socialist youth groups you’d know the score. It’s all about caring and sharing: they care, you share. But the cat is a welcome parasite, because he’s a good one. And a good parasite, as anyone knows, is one who doesn’t kill the host. And, I flatter myself, we’re good hosts.

What does it mean to be a good host? People who work in pubs, restaurants and hotels are often fond of telling you ‘I work in hospitality’, but this is misleading. You pay them money, they serve you food or drink. You pay a little more, and the same thing happens, with the notable addition that the people are nice to you and call you ‘sir’. Give ‘em a tip and they’ll be your best friend in the whole world, perhaps even lick your arsehole. But don’t be fooled, it’s not ‘cos they like you: it’s a business transaction, they’re professionals, and you’re paying them money. Not only that, but if things aren’t to ‘sirs’ liking, then ‘sir’ can complain. So it’s not like they’ve even got a choice. They’re paid to bring you your date putting with aplomb, or else it’s the sack, simple as that. So this isn’t real hospitality.

Real hospitality involves sacrifice, expenditure. You inconvenience yourself for others. If you have a dinner party, you don’t call the guests ‘sir’, but nor do you accept their money or let them do the dishes. In most cases, it would be insulting if you insisted on doing either. This tells you a lot about hospitality, and a more than a little about ‘sir’: a word that actually means ‘fuck you’. So that’s hospitality. It always involves a little bit of harm – people put themselves out for you, they sacrifice their time and expend a portion of their limited energy and resources to give you something, and to give it to you in their space. As a successful parasite, all the guest has to do is not kill the host, bring a token gift at the beginning and a say ‘thank you’ at the end. Really, a ‘guest’ is just a parasite that you know is coming, says ‘please and ‘thank you’, and leaves before you have to excrete or expel them. And so, Bitchcakes, who knows how to do all these things in his own bitchy way, is not only ‘man’s best parasite’, he’s also a model guest.

Now if it’s common for a household to host a cat or a dinner party, then it’s usual for cities to host festivals or major sporting events. Melbourne has played host in this way a number of times, successfully – the guests are welcomed at the beginning and farewelled at the end, and in the interim, no-one gets killed and the inconvenience borne by the host is recompensed by the entertainment-value of the guests. Hello, ha-ha, bye-bye, ta-da – well hosted!

There’s an old Chinese saying: ‘House guests are a bit like fish – after a while, they start to stink.’ I can’t help but think that it’s one of the few Chinese sayings that the Tibetans would be happy to say they’ve taken on board. The Chinese government appears to have been doing a little bit of cunning linguistics themselves. They’ve refreshed our shoddy memories. For example, did you know that ‘Tibet is not a country’? Or that ‘hostile’ and ‘host’ come from the same Latin root? Or that ‘host’ can also mean ‘army’? Or that hospital is 72.72% of hospitality? The Chinese government have done a pretty good job of reminding us, and the Tibetans, of all these things. Maybe when he arrives K.Rudd can lay down some Mandarin and add a bit of Aussie expertise: only among Australian surfers is ‘hostage’ considered an appropriate situation for a dinner party (along with beerage and sausage). Or that the word ‘corkage’ was coined by a surfer…

How can the Chinese be playing host when they don’t understand the meaning of hospitality themselves? Rule number one: you must be invited. Rule number two, if you are invited, don’t kill the host…. and is it possible to even be a host if you’re in the process of killing one? But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – they weren’t even ‘invited’ in the first place. Hospitality? We only got as far as hospital, remember? But seriously, if you were Bitchcakes, or, I dunno, the Australian Olympic Team, would you go and stay in the house of an entity like that? And what would be your reasoning if you did? ‘Oh don’t worry, the cats (the size of golden Labs) they only attack monks, not athletes.’ That seems to be the Australian Olympic team’s explanation so far… that and gold medals… But I keep asking myself: how would man’s best parasite act? To wit: what would bitchcakes do? I’ll tell you. Bitchcakes would boycott.

Kick, push, kick, push (mind the gap)

2008-03-27T14:09:00.007+11:00

Nothing is ever quite how you imagined it would be. As a thirteen year old on the cusp of puberty, I feared my own pubic hair and hankered after a skateboard with equal intensity. I used to sit around at my friend Alex’s place, watching the Bonez Brigade videos (Future Primitive is still my favourite), first of all just eating hot cheese rolls and making cups of coffee, later adding ‘sneaking out for a cigarette’ to our repertoire. Around about the time I took up smoking (Camels Filters – blech), Alex and I started hanging around the local shopping mall, which was my area’s equivalent of Fountain Gate or Knifepoint. I dunno how we did it, but we really managed to eke a endless hours of entertainment out of that horrible place: we played Mortal Kombat, we stuck McDonald’s pickles to the roof, we racked pornos. Once, for no particular reason, I even lifted an enormous candle from the furniture department of David Jones, which I hid in my enormous Kepper jeans. What larks, what larks. And between all these activities, Alex and I would dream of skateboards, squirreling away a tenner here, a dollar there, until finally the day came when I asked mum if she’d help me pay (the remaining two hundred dollars) to get a deck.

I chose an Evol slick, with Venture Featherlites and teeny tiny Real wheels that were little more than a loincloth for the bearings hugging the axle. At that stage, kickflips were all the rage, and the argument with the pissant wheels was that it made pulling tricks (and maybe even girls) easier. Perhaps, but it also made riding the skateboard a real biznatch, especially when you hit the inevitable pebble and ended up arse over tit. I feel like the same thing is happening at the moment with the whole fixed-gear craze, where you have hipsters (who’ve never really ridden before) negotiating unpredictable traffic on track bikes with no brakes – and no, I think you’ll find that locking up the wheel does not count when it’s raining and you’re running slicks.

But I got my skateboard, and there I was, suddenly the proud owner of the friction-regulating object I’d been lustfully jonesing after for the past nine months. Now all I needed to do was learn to ride it. In six months or so, I thought, I’d be Ed Frickin’ Templeton.

Three days later and I’d already learnt one thing: riding a skateboard is difficult and dangerous. I kept thinking of the truism of L7’s album title: Bricks are Heavy. They really are. And conrete is hard. Really, really hard. Falling off… well, it really, really hurts. I was (and am) extremely unco, but with three months daily practice, I could jump puddles, I could ollie gutters, I could do shove-its, I could drop-in at the baby size quarter pipe. BUT! Something was rotten in the state of Denmark… it just wasn’t quite right… somewhere in all of this (even after I worked out how to drop a stair or two) there was this pesky sentiment that just wouldn’t stay silent, that kept buzzing around me like a mosquito in a sleepless bedroom. Skateboarding… it just wasn’t how I’d imagined it would be. It was good, yes, it was enjoyable, true, but it simply wasn’t exactly as I’d hoped, and, fundamentally, it wasn’t what I needed it to be. There was a nasty little gap there, and it wouldn’t budge.

Smoking, meanwhile, was all I’d hoped for (and more). Yes, in fact, smoking was exactly what I expected it to be, and I liked it, even though, if it becomes a drug you do every day, it doesn’t work (and if it does it only makes you feel bilious). But it was helping me to meet girls, who, as other smokers, tended to be… well, more advanced… or were trying to be… more fun, at least – you know what I mean. But within a year or two of pursuing my new hobby, the ‘gap’ returned, with a vengeance. I was listening to a copy of the Basquiat soundtrack that a girl friend had lent me, and I heard PJ Harvey singing that Peggy Lee song ‘Is that All there Is?’ You know the one? Her dad takes her to the circus, she sees the clowns and the elephants, BUT! Well, I’ll let Peggy and PJ tell you the rest: ‘And as I sat there watching/ I had the feeling that something was missing/ I don't know what/ But when it was all over/ I said to myself/ “Is that all there is to the circus ?”’

Is there something missing, or is it in your expectations? Is it the skateboard? Is it her? Is that all there is? Is it you? ‘NO, it’s not you, it’s ME!’ Well, whatever – in my experience nothing is ever quite how you imagined it would be. There is always a gap. So what’s the best thing to do? Deal. You’ve either got to persist, or accept. You’ve either got to just keep on with the kick, push, kick push (and keep an eye out for pebbles), or just learn to mind the gap. And maybe ride a fixie with no brakes and smoke a few cigarettes while you’re at it, so you make sure you reach your destination nice and early.

Believe and Achieve (or just keep on being pathetic)

2008-03-17T21:32:00.005+11:00

As a child I once became incredibly depressed. Not from the usual childhood stuff (ennui, Ambien, and hard liquor) – the thing that really got to me was Mozart. I was reading an illustrated biography of the composer, and learned (to my juvenile chagrin) that at seven Mozart was already publicly performing minuets that he’d written at six, pieces you or I would have struggled to play badly at nine. ‘Good God,’ thought nine-year-old me, ‘I’m hopeless. Over the hill. Past it. Useless.’ Then the biography ended, the feeling dissipated, and I went back to playing Space Quest II. By the following Tuesday (the time of my piano lesson), I had almost cracked Space Quest, while the minuet… it’s too depressing to think about.

From this experience (Mozart, not Space Quest), I developed a deep hatred of prodigies. I’m not talking about people who are talented and hard-working, I’m talking about those people who appear to float on a flooded river of talent: winning fame, bursting dykes and floating cattle with power that’s as overwhelming as it is oblivious to the devastating swathe it cuts through the world.

Prodigies are irritating because they are not only so inhumanly good at whatever it is they do, but they’re also almost indifferent to their advantage – they appear to produce excellence with the same natural, unclenched ease that the average human produces excrement. Incidentally, did you know that the average human produces twice their own body weight in shit each year (more on a leap year)? Humbling, isn’t it? For some of us this is the greatest thing we will ever produce, if not in quality, then almost definitely in terms of quantity… (Bear in mind that this is the average human – what of digestive prodigies?)

But worse than the prodigies are the do-gooders, who should (if there was any consistency in a world that also includes ‘woodpeckers’), be called ‘good doers’. Do-gooders – Bono, Mother Teresa, Young Rotarians – are infuriating not just because they remind us of our limited abilities, like prodigies, or even because they remind us of our narrowness, our complacent self-satisfaction, our deep selfishness and our inability to ‘take action’ or ‘give generously’. More than anything, they’re hateful because they have this horrid whiff of certainty about them. They really believe, and they really believe they can make a difference. If the prodigy shits us with their talent, do-gooders do it by their privileged possession of ‘the truth’. Art worships the former, religion the latter… meanwhile, maybe you’re somewhere in the middle: confused, despondent, dubious of your talents and doubtful of the truth… so what are you to do? The answer?

Don’t be pathetic.

To me, the only thing worse than prodigies and do-gooders are pathetic people, the kind who carry with them (and live by) the following unfortunate combination of sentiments: on the one hand, they think, ‘What I do/say/think makes no difference’; on the other hand, they behave like they are the most important thing in the world. What you get from this is that unfortunately typical combination of egotism and apathy, the kind that marks (and mars) lives. Never mind smoking or drink-driving: being pathetic is the real killer, and the worst thing of all is that this is a condition that leaves its victims apparently unharmed. Worse still is that some people will never even realise they’re sufferers.

I wish prodigies would realise the swathe they cut (or at least be really, really bad at something), just as I wish do-gooders would show a little cynicism and self-doubt – but more than anything, I wish that pathetic people would realise that they’re far less important than they think they are, BUT, at the same time, I wish they’d recognise that what they do is more important than they give their actions credit for. Fact is, everything a person does, says or thinks makes a difference – it’s just that it’s a tiny one. ‘Making a difference’ is much more subtle than people give it credit for, and this is why it so often passes un-noted. This is what good parents, great musicians and the best school teachers understand… the way you treat your kids, no less than the hi-hat you choose or how you dilate the minds of your pupils – it matters. No, more than that – it saves lives. Be sure to be reading next week, when we’ll be looking at the roll that Body Thetans play in preventing you from achieving this.

‘Tis the Season (to talk timing)

2008-03-15T23:03:00.002+11:00

Wedged as we are between Fashion Week and the Comedy Festival, I thought it might be the perfect time to talk timing. In fashion, there’s a time and place for everything – just not here, not now… please? The teased victims of faux pas should understand and take comfort, it’s never an objection to butt floss or loon pants per se, just context and placement. If you want to be in fashion, all you really need are deep pockets, a huge closet, and… a perfect sense of timing. Same goes for comedy – Ross Noble can use the repetition of the word ‘satchel’ to get the audience in stitches, but you just try re-telling one of his ‘jokes’ to someone. Or remember Eddie Murphy’s joke about people fucking up his jokes while trying to re-tell them… whoops…

It’s the incubator on the egg, the fruit on the vine: the moment of ripeness is only reached for the briefest sweetness. Sit too long on that egg and the chick is a chucker; wait too long for that banana and you’ll be on the receiving end of a mushy mess. I have a friend who takes too long: the magic prize has always passed to other hands by the time he finally plucks up the determination to reach whatever it is (whoever she was). By that stage, she already really, really values him ‘as a friend’. I often wonder if it’s a species thing – among the giant turtles of the Galapagos, he’d probably be considered rash and o’er hasty. I have a friend who leaves the fun too early and never hears the silly giggled confessions that keep the friendly glue stuck fast – and then he wonders why he feels alienated. I have a tendency to linger longer than anyone sensibly should, past the tipping point: and I get shot down by drunkenness and left to drag my sorry self home in a way I can’t afford. But at the same time, I have an undiminishing hatred of encores…

Try this, all you would-be genii out there. Whatever it is, whenever it is, start before you feel ‘ready’, and finish or leave before you’ve ‘had enough’. It’s a toughie, and it goes against your beast, that slow and speeding part of you that demands satisfaction (but can’t get none) no matter how long or how much it takes, while in actual fact, by the time you start to feel full, you’ve always already had too much… no doubt you know this from the bitter fact of experience, but you probably need reminding. Almost everybody does.

There are a few proven ways to do overcome your beast. In the East, Zen calligraphy masters do it with stillness and speed. They meditate in front of the blank paper for days until it hits, then they finish the character in a Mcflurried second of strokes. In the West, we’ve developed the rhythm method, but unfortunately it’s notoriously unreliable – as James Brown’s calls of ‘I got ya’ demonstrate. You gots to have muscle memory, Mary. Another friend of mine’s tactic is all about dry-humping the pant leg of your giggle repeat button. Because we’re slow, or just because we may not have heard it right the first time, he tells the same anecdote twice, word-for-word. Somehow, it works for him, but…no, I don’t suggest that. There’s simpler ones, too, so maybe try these (for a change or a start). Sit still. Shut up (and listen). Practice. Rush in. Then get the fuck out of there. Before it’s too late…

We always hesitate, then linger. I can only imagine how puzzling we are to the sloths and otters, with our jets and credit cards and cameras. No other animal has such a skill for racing ahead of itself while simultaneously dragging its heels in everything it does. That’s why we’re so in awe of the most seemingly talented people. More than anything, they’ve just got better timing than you and I. Maybe genius is just good timing. And deep pockets. And a huge closet.

Saturday Night Rage (and a nice cup of tea)

2008-03-15T22:57:00.002+11:00

Recently, a friend of mine ended up getting filmed for Channel 7’s shiteful, xenophobic, ratings-winner Border Security. But not ‘cos they’re one of the ‘heroes’ (read: patronising rednecks) who ‘star’ in the show; nor ‘cos they were a sprung mule or some unfortunate gentleman with the wrong eyes or a false bottom (in his suitcase). Nope, they got filmed because it’s a ‘condition of entry’ – just like it is for you, me, and everyone else. Is this a waiver that anyone ever signed? Or could sign? And how could you, I, or anyone else effectively refuse? You want in, you gotta submit.

At the airport, passengers submit to a suspension of their civil rights and a level of intrusive surveillance the likes of which exist in few other places on earth – you’d be amazed what ‘they’ are allowed to do to you. But hey, it’s all ‘necessary’ for ‘our security’, right? And as any conservative will tell you, ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear…’ Because, of course, the a) system is infallible, and b) the staff administering the system are perfectly well-trained, incorruptible, and would never in a million years do anything arbitrary because they were morons on a power trip… But what about a place where the kind of ‘national security’ argument which justifies such conditions does not and should not apply? A place where people don’t have to pass through, but in fact, choose (and pay) to enter in order to forget about their worries, let go, and relax?

Yep, I’m talking about Nightclubs, lad(d)ies. In your average Melbourne nightclub, not only are you under constant surveillance (which I guess most of you knew or assumed), but the place where you think you’ve gone to ‘cut loose’ is actually one of the most repressive places you could visit in our fine city, a place where you appear to have no rights, where you are vulnerable to arbitrary treatment and the possibility of physical violence at any moment…

I’m not talking about being busted in the bogs doing lines or anything like that. That does happen, and while it’s proof that the toilets in a lot of larger places are on CCTV (smile), it’s tough to make an argument against it when you’ve been busted doing something illegal. ‘Bang bang bang, come on, get out!’ Okay, fair enough. Even if you are in a place where Melbourne’s finest reputedly hoover buckets and buckets of the gak out back (with the owners, natch), you haven’t got a powdery leg to stand on. The owners are guarding their arses, and you’re endangering their licence. Fair cop/sniff. But what if people try to chuck out of a club, not for doing something illegal, violent or anti-social, but just for minding your own business? Well, that’s precisely what happened to me on Friday night. Twice.

The first time it happened, I was sitting on a couch in the back room, nursing a beer and recovering from the all-out assault of the main floor. The conversation my friend and I were having lapsed, and so we were both just sitting there sipping. I think I was nodding my head in time with the music. Next thing I know, two bouncers are standing by me. One of them beckons me over. ‘What?’ I ask, staying seated. The guy beckons me like he’s calling a pet to heel. I stand up as he walks up looking ticked off, then I ask the guy, ‘What’s up? What do you want?’
‘You have to come with me.’
‘Why?’
‘Just come with me.’
‘Why? What have I done? Come where?’
And so on, with no explanation offered, round and round, until my friend intervened and we managed to convince him… of what exactly? This was the weirdest thing of all –I was doing nothing but minding my own business, and some bouncer (because he was bored, or a moron, or needed glasses) thought I’d passed out, or just decided to hassle me, or something… who knows? The scary thing is, I don’t, and the thug didn’t even feel the need to explain what I’d apparently ‘done wrong’. Anyway, I didn’t get kicked out, but only just, and it talk three minutes worth of soothing pleading. But what would have happened if I had questioned assertively, or resisted? And who would I call if I’d been headlocked, beaten up, or worse? Fact is, if you’re ‘having fun’ in one of our city’s nightclubs, you’re not only totally at the mercy of these arseholes, you’re paying top dollar for the privilege.

Three hours later, and my luck had worsened markedly. Different venue, but more or less the same scenario, with two differences. In this case, my friend had gone to the toilet. It was very late/early, and we were just about to leave, so I took a seat close by the bogs. Now, I may have closed my eyes for a moment, but no more than that. As far as I was concerned, I was awake, self-aware, and minding my own business. This time the formalities had been dispensed with.
‘Out! Out buddy! You’re out!’
It was the same penis who was being a complete arsehole about moving people in and out of the smoker’s corral an hour or so earlier. I realised at this late juncture that it was pointless arguing, and I was just about to leave anyway, so I said, ‘Yeah, I’m just leaving, but I’m waiting for my friend who’s in the toilet, would you mind – he’ll just be a second.’
‘No, you can’t – I don’t give a fuck, you can wait for him outside.’ And I was promptly escorted from the premises by penis & sidekick, both of whom seemed more than willing to give me a quick demonstration of their brutality if I resisted.

What the fuck is wrong with the nightclubs in this city, the staff they’re hiring, and the security policy they’re pursuing? I for one resent paying my hard-earned money to go to a place where I’m treated with contempt, patronised, bullied and threatened with violence, and this, moreover, appears to have become the unfortunate norm in most of the more popular venues. The normalisation of this state of affairs has created an environment where, just like the immigration queue at the airport, all clubgoers are desperately trying to ‘BE NORMAL,’ on pain of expulsion and assault. All that has to happen is that one thug doesn’t like the look of you, and you’re out, or worse… Who would voluntarily put up with this state of affairs? Fuck Saturday Night Fever, you can keep it. The way things are going, Saturday night Rage (and a nice cup of tea) has never seemed like a better idea.

Broadband Lapband Lapdance (love thy neighbour)

2008-02-25T13:44:00.004+11:00

So there I was, doing what so many of us do these days: half-watching television and browsing on the internet, toggling between three windows and watching (like some kind of slo-mo po-mo horse-race) the taskbars on the three downloads run past each other.

But it was the television that was really grabbing my attention: a documentary on Prader- Willi syndrome, which is nothing to do with acquiring an over-priced designer penis and everything to do with a chromosomal disorder that tricks your brain into thinking you’re starving. Left to their own devices, people who suffer from Prader-Willi will eat themselves to death. Yeah, real nice.

Hovering between the cover of NW, the food ads in the commercial break during the broadcast of The Biggest Loser and the open door (and locked pantries) of the eating-disorder clinic stand you and I: born in a country of hyper-abundance, the ultimate badge of mastery is the slender figure. It’s a sign that indicates (with pleasing sinew and long, lean muscle mass) a mastery of consumption, the one thing that those poor Prader-Willi sufferers (with their tricky, dicky hypothalamus) or those poor kids (with their icky, sticky sweatshop) who stay skinny stitching ‘big and tall’ size blue collars for export can't manage.

So I was thinking as I looked back at my laptop (itself part of some drive to be ‘skinny’)… but things had gone pear-shaped. Dear god no! The taskbars (not the taskbars!), which only moments earlier were stumbling over each other in an effort to be the first to offer me (the hungry, hungry data hippo), his total data dump delivery, were practically stalled.

I recalled the echo of a comment over my shoulder from five days previous: ‘We’re at 80% of our data limit”, said she. I think I was too busy downloading to notice. But now it had finally happened – what Telstra used to do to me every month as punishment for doing the one thing that broadband is for, my current provider had now done for the first time ever. My broadband had been given lapband: they’d pinched my tap; the’d kinked my hose – I’d been ‘shaped’.

‘Shaping’ is the internet equivalent of what’s called (in Newspeak) ‘an intervention’: the benevolent internet provider, who formerly allowed the data to flow like sweet milk from the endlessly pink teat of novelty, is now withholding love (until ‘further notice’, ‘you pay us’ or, if you’re lucky, ‘the end of the month’). Those of you who’ve worked in customer service call-centres might have been on the other end of this complaint. Yes, I too have heard a man of 50 reduced to blubbering whimpers (and not being able to see the man, I always imagined Harold from Neighbours’ quivering jowls) after being told that his service had been suspended. ‘But… but you… you can’t…’ ‘Oh yes Mr Popinfresh, I think you’ll find that we CAN!
‘No… please…’
‘Maybe you should learn to CONTROL YOURSELF!’

Etc, etc… by this stage, the documentary on Prader-Willi was almost over: one of the people the doco followed had been institutionalised, and had lost weight. For the other, the one trying to live his own life, things weren’t looking good…

…Three days later, and I’m in my neighbour’s pantry, stealing sweeties. Like a lot of people who live in units, many of our neighbours have wireless. And, as I’m sure the guilty among you would know too well, many of these networks are unsecured. I started off by logging in furtively, ‘just to check my email’. A day later I was reading the paper. Then, on Thursday, I cracked like an overladen plate… and downloaded three DJs sets off a blog. I was violating my neighbour in the quintessentially 2008 way – in fact, stealing wireless may be the perfect crime of the rich world’s 21st century: it’s anonymous and mostly undetectable, but still underhandedly cunty in a sneaky, snaky way, especially because the kind of people who would have left their network unsecured are the kind of people who are good, kind, sharing people who too good-hearted (or even just naïve) to suspect their neighbours of anything so dastardly. Not only that, but it puts you into this weird intimacy with the person who’s allotted share of the bandwidth you’re munching into: I mean, it’s hardly fucking their spouse, but there’s something sordid and naked about the fact that you can easily get into their hard drive; go through their photos; pinch their mp3s; even watch their porn collection. You’re right in there, and they’re lying on the bed in a kimono, just letting you… or even… I start thinking… maybe it’s a trap? Maybe they’re weirdos and they’ve been stuffing with my broadband, then just left this wireless ‘open’ like it’s a backdoor to a cooling pie in an empty kitchen, I’m the Prader-Willi sufferer from next door, and they’re waiting, breathing heavily in the cupboard, kimono gaping, with a hard-on and (improbably) a pair of binoculars…

In reality, I only made it half way through this train of thought before my binge was over: all 278 megs-worth of DJ set had downloaded. I logged off my neighbour’s LAN, feeling disgusting and disgusted, both for feeling unable to control myself and for effectively consuming the set through the data equivalent of another person’s digestive system. Then, later that afternoon when I’d listened to and been underwhelmed by the DJ set, the empties came along to hollow out the yuckies, and suddenly I felt dirty, void, and in need of new music… do I need to tell you what I did next?

How to make it as a Playlist Nazi at a BBQ party in Melbourne, 2008

2008-02-18T14:14:00.006+11:00

‘I have a problem,’ I confessed to my friend in the backyard of a friend’s friend’s party on Friday.
‘What is it?’ they asked.
‘Well, we’re having a party tomorrow too, and I’m worried about the music…’
‘Oh, not you too!’ she said.
‘W… what do you mean?’ I stammered.
‘Another Playlist Nazi!’
‘What?’
‘You’re about to tell me you want to hide your iPod so that nobody can
touch it.’
‘Y… yes,’ I confessed, bashfully. Gosh, were my symptoms so obvious? My friend then explained that she’d had the same fraught, exasperating conversation with the host of the party we were at only a few hours earlier. Oh dear, I realised, I had come to epitomise the contemporary twat. She was right. I was a Playist Nazi.

When my father was a teenager, he once committed the ultimate party crime of his generation by vomiting on the record player. Hey, they were playing Jefferson Airplane, so who can blame him, but… In the 90s, by the time I’d started binge drinking in people’s backyards, things got a lot simpler: you just had your five CDs (usually Triple J Hottest One Hundred Vols I through IV and the Rage ‘Most Requested Videos’ double CD) which you left on shuffle. By the time the Cranberries ‘Zombie’ played, you were too busy holding your girfriend’s hair back while she vomited off the balcony into the cactus garden to be able to change the tune, even though it was stuck on repeat… which is enough to make you vomit on a cactus garden, repeatedly (trust me).

But these days, it almost always comes down to an mp3 player on shuffle. One little box, and the shuffle function that rules it. It’s either that, or let drunk people near your laptop, where you risk a helluva lot more than a stylus and a Jefferson Airplane LP.

So anyway, I spent most of Saturday loading up my playlist, with the ‘playlist nazi’ conversation ghosting my thoughts the whole way. I named my list (imaginatively) ‘Megamix’, with an enormous list of 6 days worth of tunes that I figured nobody could reasonably object to at a party. The strategy was to have so much good music on board that all I’d then have to do was hook the thing up, hit play, then hide the wee bastard out of sight.

But thing is, playlists are never quite perfect. The big ones are never specific enough, and even the best contain at least one song that’s ‘not quite right’, or enough to inspire a would-be John Peel with a skin full to think that a better track is only a quick jog and click away. I got cocky, basically, because I was thinking in terms of ‘gigs’, not songs. I foolishly thought that by including six days worth of favourites (with the sad, downbeat and introspective tracks removed off every album), I’d have all my bases covered. Something for everybody, and all that.

I was wrong, of course, because all that goes pear-shaped once the ‘average party intake’ reaches 7+ beers. Then you’ll have the aforementioned drunk bastard, as mentioned above. Well, I frightened him off by being a completely rude prick to the guy (and hey, whoever you are, I’m sorry, but I was being egged on by two friends who were whispering to me ‘Pete, the playlist – quickly, quickly!’).
I went up to him and said, threateningly: ‘Hey, whatever you’re choosing, it better be good.’
‘I was just…’
‘I mean, you’re going to have to take responsibility for it… you understand?’
‘I wasn’t…’
‘You have until the end of this song…’ and said, then wiggled my clipped moustache, clicked my heels, placed my riding crop under my arm, and marched off.

At the end of the song, silence. Hah, victory! Actually, I think it was through no fault of his, just a long fade out, but I used the opportunity to pounce.
‘Sorry mate…’ I said.
‘But I hadn’t chosen anything…’
‘Sorry mate, there’s a playlist and I’m happy with it.’

Thing is, once it gets to eleven, the last thing people want is the astonishing display of breadth that you’ve provided. What they want is to dance, but not to anything that: is instrumental; has an open groove (i.e. no house, unless it’s Daft Punk); that they haven’t heard before. This really narrows things down a bit. No it doesn’t, it narrows thing down a lot. Despite spending hours attempting to make the ultimate variety playlist, I had neglected (or been living in denial of) the reality of what nearly every BBQ party becomes. I was so busy getting hung up on filling gigs with songs that I neglected to think about the right songs for the gig. I forgot the one playlist that every summer BBQ in Melbourne actually wants, and ended up having to make it happen with the clickwheel, track by track (leaning heavily on one compilation of mine from ’94 called ‘Rap Attack’). But because I’m such a nice guy (except when you touch my playlist, fucker) I’ve included the list of every single track that I’d neglected to include, tracks I thought were too clichéd, too played out, or too tired to work, but that actually constitute (more or less) the tracks that drunk people in Melbourne in 2008 actually want to dance to. Ignore it at your peril.

Deee-Lite ‘Groove is in the Heart’ (the cliché that never gets old, apparently)
Salt’n’Pepa ‘Push It’ (same as for the first)
Tone Loc ‘Funky Cold Medina’
Stevie Wonder ‘Superstition’
Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince ‘Boom! (shake the room)’
Faith Hill ‘Love like This Before’
Beyonce featuring Jay-Z ‘Crazy in Love’
Justin Timberlake ‘Sexy Back’ (or ‘My Love’)
Tina Turner ‘Nutbush City Limits’
Miss E ‘Get Ur Freak On’
Outkast ‘Hey Ya’
Jacko ‘Don’t Stop (‘til you get enough)’ [or anything off the original version of Thriller]
Prince ‘Kiss’
Parliament ‘Flashlight’ (a bit of a risk, but sometimes works a treat)
George Clinton ‘Atomic Dog’ (but it’s very long, be warned, you might lose ‘em)
INXS ‘Need You Tonight’ (might bring ‘em back after ‘Atomic Dog’)
Stardust ‘Music Sounds Better With You’
Daft Punk ‘Around the World’ (these two are some of the only house that will work)
Depeche Mode ‘Just can’t seem to get enough’
Madonna (everything off the Immaculate collection except ‘Crazy for You’, ‘Borderline’ or ‘Live to Tell’)
Soft Cell ‘Tainted Love’ (doesn't work as well as it used to)
New Order ‘Blue Monday’ (or the Shep Pettibone mix of ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’)
The Smiths ‘This Charming Man’
B-52s ‘Rock Lobster’ (and/or maybe ‘Love Shack’)
The Cure ‘Lovecats’
The Cure ‘Close to Me’
David Bowie ‘Let’s Dance’

Everything old is… you?! Again? (old bags are sooo old hat)

2008-02-11T12:53:00.000+11:00

When I was just a wee lad, I was taken to see Halley’s comet. Remember? All through ’86 we had comet fever, not least of all because it only comes once every 76 years (and you thought Santa’s sack was big). Viewing the comet was considered the quintessential ‘once in a lifetime’ experience. For me, hearing of the comet’s tail was the first time I got my first inkling of the limited ink of the human story arc, when I realised that I might not live to see the celestial anticlimax a second time. Tragic, isn’t it.

For Halley spotters in olden times, there must have been other transitional moments: imagine being born on the cusp of the decline of the neck ruff; watching the codpiece die out; seeing the public wearing of sabres fall into disrepute. For so many of our ancestors, there must have been the sense of something slowly becoming extinct, of moments (and accoutrements) ‘never to be repeated’: monocles, pith helmets, mutton chops, moustache wax, pipe smoking… all of them, slowly fading, then gone.

But sometimes these days, it feels like we’re dealing with the death of eras in nanobits and flash memories. Four years ago, I was shooting film, playing records and thinking nothing of it. In 2008, it seems silly to buy into C-DJs or even Final Scratch when the ultimate ‘integrated mixing unit’ (with onboard flash drive) is nearly upon us. It should make me quiver in anticip…….. pation, but actually, the pace of change makes me really, really anxious. I have two wired functions to help stem the flow, but it’s more like sticking your pinky into a bursting dyke than dabbing a tear. So I ‘download’ and I ‘delete’, and between these two essential functions, I try (at least) to contain the torrent of content. As far as hardware goes, I don’t even bother – who’s got the money? Even the thought of it makes me feel so enervated that I want to lie down and give a half-arsed squeak of ennui (if I could be bothered).

Even the return of the Olympics makes me feel depressed. Leap year again?! Devil take you! Was it really four years since Athens? And eight since Sydney?! I suppose that’s why people (in rich countries) update their televisions for the Olympics. You feel sad, you get depressed, you go shopping to compensate, and you come home with something that makes you feel, for once, like you’re surfing (the safety grip of) the cutting edge, with the hard bite of the credit crunch only the distant inkling of suspected deadly masticators.

But then on Friday night a beautiful thing happened to me, something calming and energising, an event that gave me strength and hope.

You might have noticed that Oakley has sensed its wave is about to break again, with the re-release of Frogskins, the mirror-lensed Californian mutation on the Wayfarer. ‘No way,’ you say like Point Break Keanu. ‘Way,’ say I as Wayne. Go to my family photobox, you can probably find a picture of me wearing Frogskins, with a Bad Billy’s top in red acid wash, a pair of quick-dry boardshorts, and a pair of Puma Cats, the same as they used to wear on 21 Jump Street. I was the Hypercolor portrait of a pre-pubescent, flourescent knob end… come to think of it, when will they re-release Hypercolor t-shirts? Now’s the time, fo real.

Anyway, so they’re re-releasing Frogskins, just like I used to wear in the late 80s. ‘Big whoop’, as we would have said back in the day. But then, on Friday night, I came home and warmed up the family telly, an old Sony Trinitron that my dad had bought in 1988, probably to coincide with the Seoul Olympics. I have this memory slice of watching Bryan Brown get his head chopped off by the ‘Japs’ in Blood Oath, the very first night we used it. The blood spattering the sand was a much richer red than I’d seen on our old Philips (purchased when Beyond 2000 was still called Towards 2000). Suddenly, new and far more colourful violence seemed possible, and with our remote control, we could flick quickly between channels- and channels-worth of rich, vibrantly rendered horror. We were ready for the nineties.

Cut to Friday last and the colour on the old Sony now seems distinctly flat and full, compared with the positively ‘Oakley’ colour range on some of the new LCD tellies, but despite the dullness and the high-pitched whir of the old tube (and the pots and pots of Carlton sloshing around inside me), I could still make out that I was watching Meatballs… Meatballs IV, the tagline to which is: “There's only one thing wilder, crazier and sexier then last summer – this summer.” There, in a pair of Oakley Frogskins and a fluoro wetsuit (that would have perfectly matched the colour schemes of my BZ bodyboard and Peak springsuit), was Corey Feldman, doing his best impersonation of an over-the-hill manchild giving the cashteet of Goonies fame one last squeeze before checking into the world of has-beens (which, in case you’re wondering, is over the hill right next door to the rehab clinic).

‘Good God,’ I guffawed at Corey, ‘There is no avant garde!’

It all hit me at once. Last year, Amy Winehouse lost the Mercury Prize to the Klaxons. Their lead singer, who I can imagine sporting not only Frogskins but most of my ‘88–‘90 wardrobe, was quick to point out that “her record is a retro record, and we have made the most forward-thinking record since I don’t know how long.”

Now, Winehouse might not have much to look forward to given the way things are going, (get Corey Feldman on the blower, I say), but without a doubt, the Klaxon’s near future is a myth. What does it mean to be forward-thinking in 2008? If you ask me, the flipside of being in a world where nothing is old is that nothing is new (and vice versa). Constant change means that nothing changes. The other side of redundancy is the eternal novelty of rememberabilia… I’d weakly thought so for a while, but it was seeing Corey in Meatballs IV, no less than viewing Halley’s Comet, that reminded me what life has become, and what kind of world we’re living in, more a memory-go-round (or a comet’s tale) than a edgy shuffle into the never-never.

‘Yes yes,’ you say, ‘things go in cycles, in the way that Bobby Brown is just ampin’ like Michael.’ But no! We’re far beyond (?behind? ?below?) that. This year, Jacko is re-releasing Thriller as a NEW album – he’s just re-recorded it, with new guest spots. It’s the ultimate ‘guaranteed hit’ as well as the perfectly 2008 ‘new album’. Take the tip, 2008 is a year to relax: just choose your favourite combination of historical modes and roll with it, or go back to whatever you were doing and wearing then, with the self-assured pride of an Elizabethan at the height of codpiece fever. Sooner and later, mark my words, thou wilst be at the very heighth of fashion, O my brothers.

Champagne for my true friends...

2008-02-06T10:15:00.000+11:00

In every one of the world’s cultures, there exist social protocols, manners, and etiquette that guide us on how we can learn to get along without pissing each other off or making each other cry. Whole streams of literature are dedicated to people’s navigation of the rocky rump of human affairs: satires like The Office and Borat relentlessly expose the squirming nudity of faux pas within and between cultures, teabag by teabag.

And why not? Some form of shared manners, however loosely they be conceived or expressed, remain vital if we’re not to misinterpret the shaking of the sack, the kissing of the venerable digit, the blowing of the spittle and the winking of the waddle.

In any country you go to, the culture’s got nearly all the actions covered: from greetings to farewell, from births to deaths (and marriage in between) – we’ve all got some idea how to behave toward one another. Well, most of us do most of the time. Or… well, some of us do, some of the time.

But one kind of social interaction remains, to the best of my knowledge, completely off the map, a kind of quasi-global social black hole into which our best intentions and most hurt feelings are sucked year after year, without any clear idea of the outcome. Nowhere in all the world, at least as far as I know, is there a culture that has worked out the etiquette of ending a friendship.

If you think about it, it’s huge. Everybody has friends, and most people work their arses off reading between the lines and showing patience, forgiveness and care to people they don’t quite understand, who don’t quite understand them, but who put up with each other. Who inconvenience themselves for each other and who respect (or at least feign respect for) each other.

But shit happens: times change, good friends turn odd, become knobs, or test that patience of yours once too (thousand times too) often. Whether it was the slow, sorry feeling of drowning in scat, the nicky prick of the thousandth cut or the hump-splitting straw that broke the camel’s back, the time comes in all our lives where we should (if we have any self-respect), do the proper thing and tell our ‘friend’ to go fuck themselves, properly and for good.

But how? If you were having regular genital contact with your friend, this is easy… but then, they wouldn’t be your ‘friend’, they’d be your ‘boy/girlfriend’, ‘partner’ or ‘spouse’. In such a case, one part of the couple often ends by asking the other if ‘we’ could ‘still be friends’. You’re saying, more or less, ‘I want to end this habit of genital contact we’ve been having. I don’t like where it’s taking us.’ Getting to this stage in your own words is easy… well, not easy, but at least it’s possible. There exists a panoply of social scripts you can read off. There are roles to play and there are recognised code words, ones that anyone but a complete sociopath (oh, hang on) will understand exactly what you mean when you say (touché cliché), ‘I think we should start seeing other people.’ Or any of the hundred-and-one other wooden heartbreakers we deploy in such situations.

But beyond this point, the black hole opens its ugly maw. There are breakups and there are breakups, but I’m sure I can speak for most of us when I say that there were also BREAKUPS, and that, when ‘it’ happened, you hated the person’s guts and wanted to never see them again under any circumstances. Usually, circumstances intervene on your behalf – they move interstate or overseas; you’re on different tram lines; neither of you have friends (in common).

But let’s just say you’ve never had any genital contact, no-one’s moving anywhere, and the person remains part of your larger social circle? I spoke to half a dozen people about this over the weekend, and the majority (yes, well, four) confessed to being in this situation at the moment and not having the foggiest idea about what to do. Who really breaks up with friends? And how would a friend react if you got all socially experimental and blazed that trail? Last year, a friend of mine wrote a letter to a ‘friend’ of theirs who’d made their shitlist. My friend showed it to a third party who knew the ‘friend’, and the third advised (wisely, in hindsight) them not to send it. ‘Every word of it is true,’ third said, ‘but if I got that letter, I’d throw myself off a bridge.’

So my friend kept the letter, said nothing, and dribbled on with the wreckage of a friendship, without trust or hope for re-building something. Only last week, I experienced this firsthand: a ‘friend’ of mine appeared out of the past and reminded me of everything I was trying to forget about why it was probably for the best if we never see each other again… if we had been a couple, it never would have happened, but because we’re ‘friends’, we’ll never break up. It’ll just wheeze on, and in ten years they’ll wonder why I’m funny about them calling me out of the blue and asking if there’s a place they can stay (which they will, natch).

A friend of mine (and a true one) would often say: ‘Champagne for my true friends… and pain for my sham friends.’ But (like most curses), this is a toast of the powerless. What can we do in this situation? Anyone? Bueller?

DJ 2018: A Clockwork Vanilli?

2008-01-28T10:54:00.000+11:00

Djing. What’s it all about then (say it aloud in your best Mockney)? What are DJs for? Why, indeed, do we need them? In the 1920s, the screen gradually replaced the stage as the major form of public entertainment… we have the technology, so why hasn’t a parallel revolution occurred in that other black box?

The other day, a friend asked me to DJ at her party, first and foremost because it stops drunken idiots (and their inevitable iPods) from bickering over the selection. Given the ridiculous requests I’ve received over the years while behind the decks in bars (Troy Cassar-Daley was a recent pearl) this is probably a good idea. Most people haven’t a clue what song to choose (watch those drunkards kill the floor at your average BBQ shindig trying to follow up to INXS’ ‘Need You Tonight’), but add a few drinks (or more) and even the most unmusical guest becomes assertively assured that theirs is the best and only selection (as they do the jog-wheel equivalent of a doughie), before saying ‘Wai wai wai wait… nah, put this on, put this on!’

So on the most basic level, the DJ prevents these kinds of scenes. Go to shitty eastern suburbs pubs and the singer-songwriter performs a parallel function with their slice of ‘American Pie’. If you thought that some ex-Camberwell Grammar footy player with big arms, a tight pink t-shirt and a trebly six string was bad, well, go down the road where they have open mic – or further down the hill (in all senses) to where they’re allowing stage karaoke. Suddenly, Macka’s rendition of ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ is starting to sound pretty good… is that... your not cryin’ are ya, ya wuss?! (Incidentally, isn’t it funny that the song that gets real Aussie blokes all misty-eyed effectively describes giving someone a headlock?)

But anyway, I guess the idea (usually valid) is that you’d better have someone who appears to know what they’re doing, ‘cos otherwise you’re going to have, well, everyone else. But what about alll those other things DJs are supposed to have/do/be? Well, there are other 1990s interpretations, such as:

‘A DJ is someone who…

- takes people on a journey

- can mix records (and does)

- has access to soul (or something resembling it to people on drugs)

- brings the party’

But which of these ideas makes sense in ’08?

Well, the smoking ban has pretty much killed the first one… the constant flux and huff of people moving to and from the big-tobacco bankrolled (and smoking) balconies in most venues in our liveable city has pretty much meant that the set is in the toilet, while the party is out on the sidewalk and (with the drinks and DJ getting spiked and lonely inside).

What about mixing records then? Well, DJs don’t have to have to mess around with either ‘mixing’ or ‘records’ anymore, what with sync buttons and mp3s. Maybe it’s a folly to invest effort in anything that a machine can do better than a person. Autofocus is undeniably better than manual in cameraland, allowing you to get on with the business of framing and capturing that magical moment (and if it’s rubbish, now you can just delete it). Yes, analogue technology was wasteful, cumbersome and expensive, but it also gave DJs (and photographers) the ability to proclaim mastery of fiddly skills that eluded the average punter, while giving equipment-driven hobbies to thousands of dilettantes the world over.

Okay, so DJs no longer take you on a journey, they don’t have to mix, and they don’t play records… what is left to them that the iPod’s shuffle function couldn’t achieve with similar results?

Well, not much. In a lot of bars these days, the bar’s mp3 collection outspanks many a DJ’s hard-drive, and while shuffle won’t be guaranteed of coming up with the winner every time, it’s surprising how good some of the selections can be (often much better and usually more surprising than most DJs). Not only that, but if the next track is crap, you can tell the iPod to skip it without causing offence (something which 20C DJs [still made of meat] struggle with).

Hmm, so, what are we left with? A whole lot of not much (and everything), really, just ‘access to soul’ and the ability to bring the party. The veteran/innovator DJ can fulfil the former function just by showing up – it doesn’t matter if they’re wasted (either on booze or on the audience) and so can’t mix (Juan Atkins) because now they don’t have to. It’s just show up and put up…. But bringing the party? That’s something that no shuffle-button can do as well as a shimmying great ape with a laptop, or so it would seem. Yep, presence, personality and personal appearance are pretty much our only remaining edges over the machines. And this means that, in 2008, the DJ is a visual performer who uses their body as the centrepoint around which the whole party swings. Let Corey do it – seriously. Any gimmicky look will do – witness the financial fitness of all those female Russian DJs who play hard trance while taking their kit off. Nobody seems to mind.

In fact, DJs in 2008 have more and more in common with two kinds of people: IT nerds and drag queens. It’s getting all Warcraft and Mimeart around here. The former aspect is necessary in order to keep abreast (and stay interested) in the geeky, geeky technology that facilitates everything; the latter aspect is essential from the point of view that the DJ now has to inhabit the rendition they’re performing. They don’t have to sing (or mix) but they do have to move their lips (and hips) in time with the datastream in a way that drives the punters wild… and that’s no easy thing. But yeah, I reckon Corey could do it…

I had a nightmare the other night about the DJ of 2018 – I call him/her ‘Clockwork Vanilli’. (S)he’s the bastard offspring of Alex from A Clockwork Orange and Milli Vanilli, with sweet chilli lashings of Noiseworks, Ru Paul and Ziggy Stardust. (S)he sports tights, big sunnies, and a weird device (a cross between an iPod touch, a mobile phone and a dildo – and indeed, probably all these things and more) from which (s)he directs the action, waving the silly thing like a baton and so whipping the crowd into a frenzy (resulting in much wailing, and gnashing of teets). It was frightening, almost frightening enough to drive me squealing and bawling back to the pub for another slice of Don MacLean and Cunters and Hollectors… almost. Or maybe Clockwork Vanilli could do a ‘Throw Your American Pie Around Me’ remix… egad.

“I’ll say sorry, but I’m not taking of my glasses.”

2008-01-18T11:24:00.000+11:00

A week ago, nobody cared about whether Corey’s family name was Delaney or Worthington. Hell, a week ago, nobody cared about Narre Warren, the place that raised Corey in obscurity until last weekend. In a month’s time, Narre normal will have re-asserted itself, and the vast majority will have forgotten about Corey, his five hundred or more rowdy friends, the police helicopter, the dog squad, and the run-ins with the media As you read this, people are already forgetting to care, or they will, as soon as the next self-generating media story arrives.

On some level, Corey must have known this, must have known that he had approximately five days to flash in the greasy pan of 21C stardom, and that’s why Corey Delaney/Worthington is one of the most media-savvy people in Australia, and deserving of at least some respect. It all happened at that moment when ACA femmebot Leila McKinnon asked him the following question.

“What would you say to anyone who wanted to party while your parents are out of town?”

If that had been you or I or most people, we probably would have said something pathetically conciliatory – a mumbled apology. Something lame. When most of us were teenagers, we all had our Ferris Bueller fantasties, our Parker Lewis fantasies – but very few of us had the balls and stupidity (balls is often a kind of stupidity) to actually make the tree of madness bear ripe fruit. We were lame. At my school, we spent six years regaling one another with the muck up day exploits of previous years: the vice-principal’s Mini, carried up four flights of stairs and put on the roof. A neighbouring school, placed on the market and sold to a Hong Kong real estate speculator. Five tons of sand placed on the pedestrian island in the middle of the main street outside, to facilitate an all day beach party. But when our turn came, we produced no more than a handful of chicken eggs, the odd water balloon.

What we lacked, what the overwhelming majority of us lack, is that instinct to reply in the way Corey did, to say what he said. What did he say? What would Corey say to anyone who wanted to party while their parents are out of town? “Get me to do it for you.” For that moment, if for nothing else, Corey deserves the respect of all teenagers, past present and future. And hey, it’s a better news story than that cricket one from last week. Am I the only one who couldn’t be bothered working out what happened in order to care?

But there was also something admirable about the way Corey understood the role of his outfit in general and the sunglasses in particular, the way he quietly but defiantly refused to take them off, until they became an obsession to his interviewers – with that Tilley knob from Fox even trying to manhandle them off him. Corey knew, he knew he had fucked up in grand style, and he knew that all teenagers have but one chance to transition this kind of idiocy into an art. Corey had the space of five days and the airtime for perhaps two well-placed replies in media interviews. And he acquitted himself like a seasoned pro. Say what you will about his taste in parkas and parties, his poor parents, but Corey could teach us a thing or two about what it means to grab the spotlight by the balls (while mixing metaphors), not to mention showing the media the fluorescent reflection of its own ghoulish opportunism. Corey, I half-heartedly salute you.

And just in case you had any doubts, here, for the last time, is a list of what Corey can do for you and your party….

$200: For two hundred bucks I’ll get a bag of chips, some cruisers and maybe a strippa. It’ll be awesome. Everyone says so.

$500: For five hundred bucks I’ll get a six bags of chips, a group of sixteen year old girls who are really easy (my mate reckons he’s banged like five of them) heaps of cruisers and UDL’s coz they’re awesome and a TV Rock album because they make the party GO OFF.

$1000: For $1000 I’ll get all of the above, plus fireworks so that the police will be called and you might make the news.

$20,000: For $20,000 I’ll make you internationally famous by getting 500 idiots to attack police cars. Of course, you will have to pay $20,000 to clean up the mess but shit happens and it’s not my fault.

Jun Isaka: Thinking inside the Box

2008-01-14T13:45:00.000+11:00

When I first met Jun seven years ago, he was just another one of the hundreds of struggling minimal DJs living in Tokyo, working a casual job seventy hours a week just to pay for his vinyl habit. But now, things are different. Now, Jun is a master.

The transformation began a little over four years ago at the karaoke complex where Jun was working, cleaning the rooms and bringing jugs of beer in to drunken groups of young people hour after hour. One night, as he was delivering a drink up to a box on the fourth floor, a customer asked him if he would help him by singing the backing harmonies on Extreme’s ‘More than Words’, a notoriously difficult number. Apparently, Jun’s singing was so impressive that the customer, who happened to be a well-connected ex-gangster, instantly dubbed him ‘The Master’, then demanded his mobile number, pressing him into service for the most difficult songs. ”I could hardly refuse,” Jun explained, “it might have been dangerous. So I just went with it. I agree that it’s a strange way to find your career.”

After three months, Jun was able to quit his official position at the karaoke complex, as his client list, as well as the range of services on offer, dramatically increased. “I suppose you could say that I quickly became a ‘box artist’,” he offers, trying to explain what has become his full-time, professional role, and a strange one, even by Tokyo standards. “These days, I am on call twenty-four hours a day, like a doctor. I provide a full range of services. Of course back-up singing, but also track selection, booth-minding – and also private services."

Jun seems cagey when I press him about what he means by ‘private services’. “It’s mostly just counseling. You know, girls who have broken up with their boyfriend, they rent my services in the box. I just talk to them, we sing a few songs… sometimes it gets a bit heavier, it’s true, but I am called the Master, so… If I fail to provide a satisfying experience for my clients, then my reputation would be called into doubt. I have to be prepared for anything.”

In the past year, Jun’s ‘box artist’ services have become so popular that he has taken on three junior staff, and is now even considering creating a full-time office – in a specially designed karaoke booth, naturally. “The original concept was always based on the idea of me delivering my services to people personally, like pizza or call girls” he explains. “But the success has proven that there is a demand for people who can provide entertainment in this way. In the same way as many successful DJs open their own club, I want to open my own box… To me, it’s no different to DJing – actually, it’s much better. I would never go back to playing minimal and struggling like that. As a box artist, everybody listens very carefully to each of my songs. My selections are always respected. If people ask for a request, then I can fill it, of course. Some fans even bring their own recorders and make bootlegs. I get much more attention this way. To me this is the future of DJing in Tokyo.”

New Year, New Regime (January Jihad)

2008-01-07T20:28:00.000+11:00

Any new years’ resolutions? For formerly buff ex-extremist misadventurer David Hicks, it’s a fairly safe bet to assume that ‘Renounce Jihad (ASAP)’ is fairly high on the list, especially in light of the fact that the poor bastard is going to be under surveillance (ASIO) for the next umpteen years. I wonder what John Howard’s might be? ‘Learn to say sorry’? Fat chance.

Come to think of it, now that they’ve both got considerably more freedom (well, free time at least) than they’ve had in recent years, maybe they should rendezvous, mend some fences, play bridge. Johnny can explain what it’s like to be in the stressful position of being PM for over eleven years; David can explain what it’s like to be in a stress position being beaten for eleven hours. But I digress – that’s all in the past. John Howard, David Hicks?! How very ‘07, Kevin. Now here we are in ‘08, and oh how I ate. Oh yes, it’s the January Jah Wobble, and oh my jah, it wobbles.

When I misplaced my exercise regime in late November, and I had this crazy notion that if I just kept on eating that somehow I wouldn’t put on weight, and that the endless stream of booze, snags and turkey would just pass through me, without leaving a remnant of their sweet succulence as a reminder of their rich flavours and ample portions. Well, I was wrong about that, too. Not as wrong as David was when he saw the bombs falling in early ‘02 and thought, ‘you know what, I’ll stay in Afghanistan, that’s the safe option.’ And certainly not as wrong as Howard was when he chose his parasilk tracksuits of a morning in preparation for his daily stroll.

Okay, at this point, you’re probably thinking how disgusting it is that I’m comparing bald men in parasilks and putting on weight (thee symbol of a peaceful life lived in the rolly-polly lap of luxury) to five years of indefinite detention and torture by one person allowed by another who had the power to call the whole thing off at any minute. And you’d be right. This isn’t Maggie Alderson, motherfucker. If you’re reading this and you relate to the bit about the flab and the turkey but not about Hicks-y, check your head. So you put on a few kilos, so what? Go outside into the ample sunshine and start walking – at least you can (without being tailed by men in white vans). Fight that daily battle, get out of bed and stride forth like little Johnny with your chins up high – this will also make you look proud. As you pound that pavement, you might even want to close your eyes and imagine the sound of Alexander Downer’s voice saying, emphatically, ‘He’s just got so much energy, Kerry.’ Feel the power. And keep on walkinｇ, like you're on a big, fat mission from God.

‘Cos this is the thing – fitness, weight control, it’s just another kind of jihad. And like all ‘wars without end', once you start waging it, it’s very hard to renounce. Your ‘hardcore’ friends will say you’ve gone soft, for one thing. Maybe Howard saw ‘Beazley 08’(and 8 and 8 and 8), was terrified, and resolved to make himself a regime. Get some control, get some purpose. Stride forth. ‘Cos Jihads, more than anything else, are about (re)gaining some control over your existence, giving yourself a purpose, a mission. Renounce the jihad, and sag back into mediocrity. Loosen the belt, lose the never-ending battle of the bulge. Remember how strapping Hicks-y looked in the singlet with his arms crossed, or with his shaved head and the bazooka? Say what you will about training to be a terrorist, but at least it gives you chiselled abs, wiggleable pecks and prominent cheek bones. Your old regime may have been brutal, but life without any regime at all is depressing and chaotic enough to make you crave a new one that’s even more punishing than the one before – just ask the citizens of Iraq, five years in.

So here’s to resolutions, roadmaps and vain hopes; here’s to a new year and a new regime, with no cellulite and no quagmire. Let’s hope it’s better than the old one. And when it fails in December? Well, that’s where January jihad comes in.

Say onara Santa clips: scenes from stunts (Bonsai Christmas)

2007-12-26T23:28:00.000+11:00

And 'cos I'm going away for a few weeks, and 'cos I'm going back to J-land, here's a vintage article... I wonder if this has aged well...

Like most traditional Japanese art forms, bonsai is Chinese. But in embracing it, Japanese culture submitted it to a radical transformation. Whereas in China bonsai were grown in the shape of rare animals (as an appetite stimulant), early adoptees the Japanese nobility refined their creations. First, this manifested itself in the painstaking search for the ‘perfect tree.’ The smaller and stranger the better. Oh, and of course, only native species. Then, after taking pains to find the perfect tree they the took pain to the trees. They trained them to within an inch of their stunted lives, cutting and binding them until they revealed their bare essence. Get the idea? Bonsai is bondage for trees. Pain builds strength of character – and besides, anything else would feel strange and un-natural. Check this translation of an explanation of the pleasures of bonsai from the Kamakura period:

“To appreciate and find pleasure in curiously curved potted trees is to love deformity."

Some older Japanese people have tied themselves in knots explaining to me the unique appreciation the Japanese people have for nature. But not just nature as is. Yuck. Disgusting. No, where the local heart beats is in a life with the messy randomess brought to heel, with steel. Just like a robot has always been the vision of a perfected person, Aibo the perfected dog. The way of trees, rather than just trees the way they are. It’s better than a tree, it’s treedom transcended.

At least bonsai live a long life. Westerners on the other hand, now we like our nature sawn off at the hilt. Chainsawed. What childhood Christmas memory is complete without a nostril full of pine sap? Ah, the lifeblood of nature draining away in my living room! Doesn’t it remind you of...Jesus? Who? You know, our saviour, the lord Jesus Christ. Apparently, the ‘Christmas tree’ began in Germany, as long as a thousand years ago. As you can imagine, it was no laughing matter. The chosen tree was hung upside down from the roof as a symbol of the trinity, and sometimes in shop windows as an example to other tree species to keep quiet and mind their own business. This habit of hanging trees upside down continued until the nineteenth century, when a group of Germans who’d spent some time abroad (the English royal family) took to sticking trees tip-side-up in a pot and festooning them with baubles and tinsel (also German inventions). Trendy Bostonians thought Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s stump decorating was a hoot, and before long Americans modernised, streamlined, manufactured, and electrified them (the trees, not QV&PA). Come to think of it though , doesn’t that horrible picture of the hooded man in Abu Ghraib look a bit like a Christmas tree? ‘Me and Cleatus was jus’ decoratin’. Wasn’t gonna hurt ‘im none.’ Christmas is hazing for fir and pine trees. Stress and duress, Merry Christmas.

I can’t draw a perfect triangle without coming to the inevitable, but google it – there is no such thing as a Bonsai Christmas tree as far as I could find. Just a lot of American gardeners who keep talking about wanting to make one, and this is important – the Japanese would never take to making real native bonsai into Christmas trees (this is where you find and show me one to invalidate my whole self-serving rant). In Japan, style is substance, and conflating the two images would ripple that stagnant fish pond called purity. Japanese culture is pure, remember? No, there are no bonsai Christmas trees, not that I’ve seen. But I have just been through a bonsai-ed Christmas.

What the fuck am I talking about, you ask? Japan has drained and chained and chopped and bound Christmas. It’s kurisumasu, boys and girls. What does it mean? A student once asked his teacher:
“Sensei, what’s the true essence of Kurisumasu?”
“Be silent, watch the flashing lights and I’ll explain. Okay, first, Western religion gives people very difficult feelings and large noses. so we should prune that back to Kurisumasu carols - preferably those of George Michael.”
“Sensei, what about Jesus?”
“Jesus? – he was an Arab and a Jew. No no no.”
“Sensei, what about Santa Claus?”
“Santa – well, he looks jolly and I do like the Germans, but I’m sure he eats and drinks too much, and besides, what if he comes on to my daughter – we should just keep the hat. Now that’s cute!”
“Sensei what about gifts?”
Presents – well, we can market and sell those, and they create an uncomfortable obligation to reciprocate. We should keep that.”
“Sensei, What about KFC?”
“Yes, that’s a nice Kurisumasu tradition...okay, we keep that too. Kurisumasu is one of the most beautiful and romantic festivals for couples. What better way to show our love than by sharing a delicacy such as she Colonel’s finest? By the way, did you know the Colonel and Mr Claus were related?”
“No I did not. Oh sensei, how did you come to know so much?”
“Look at their faces – they’re exactly the same. Anyway, there you have it – beautiful!”

And so in every tunnel, in every department store, in every flea bag office, Christmas is piped through as musak and advertising. It’s no coincidence that the kanji for control and manage means ‘to pipe’. Piped Christmas is a happy, hygienic, obedient Christmas. That, and the shop clerks all wear Santa hats (they get the sack if they don’t) but with the brands of their respective company emblazoned across the front, just to the left. But no pants. All Santa hat, no Santa pants. Not til you’ve got yer bras fastened, lads. But more of that later...
The whole archipelago is a network of pipes pumping - shit through the sewers and Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ through the speakers. In one (r)ear and out ‘the other.’ Everyone knows the lyrics. But nobody knows what they mean. The other day I saw a woman on TV crooning a ballad (‘cos Christmas is for couples, right?). The chorus was bold and it was full of the pain and beauty of love and she sang with tears in her eye, and she sang:

Holy holy Kurisumasu
Hold me hold me Kurisumasu

Sound and vision...and flashing lights - it’s called illumination. At this time of year shopping areas and department stores (the only ones who can afford trees) light up our lives. Whole avenues full of leafless Tim-Burtonesque trees, topiaries and slow-moving salary men blazed blue and red in flashing LED. People travel the length of train lines for a look at the best illumination. Look, but don’t touch. No, it’s nothing you could put presence under though, don’t linger (there isn’t anywhere to sit anyway) just oooh and ahh and point ‘Ah, kirei desu ne.’ Ne. Okay, now let’s go to KFC. Ah look, there’s Rudolph the Robot Reindeer. Oh, kawaii!’ Ne. Did you know he was related to Adolph the Rightwing Reindeer? Shh, which textbook did you read that in? Give me that!

But it’s not all frigid consumerism. Christmas does come in from the cold. If there’s one place Rudolph lets his hairpiece down (even if he leaves his hat on), it’s the office Christmas party...

Preparations began at my English school in earnest one sunny January afternoon. One of the staff asked me,
“Peter, we’re trying to get some input from the natives (that’s what we’re called) about the Christmas party.”
“The natives are restless are they?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You mean, what did I think of the last one?”
“No, for this year.” Oh, silly me.
“Do you really want my ideas?”
“Of course.”
“Well, last year, everything was...”

Flashback!

I’m standing in the sweaty corner of a basement in Shinjuku. The walls are covered in rock’n’roll memorabilia filched from the closing-down sale of the Hard Rock Cafe in Riyadh. A clock with swingin’ Elvis feet is plastered to the walls, and I’m just plain ol’ fashion plastered. On stage, a fully costumed Rocker twists his boney hips and shouts a skinny shout, five feet of Fender, nylon suits and coiffure. It’s two thirty in the afternoon on a Sunday. And the halls are decked with students, desperate to practice their English but horribly scared I might say something they won’t like or understand.
“I want to go to America.” One says.
“Me too.” I say. On stage they’re crooning Blue Moon. I’m ready to scream blue murder. I drain another glass of beer. It’s working.
“Do you like Christmas parties?”
“Yeah. I’m being paid by the hour.” Blink. Pause.
“Are you American?” He asks.
“No.” I smile.
Fear. Loathing. Discomfort. “I went to Las Vegas.” Says a second student, trying to save the moment.
”Oh really?” I say, “He’s from Las Vegas. That guy over there.” I point to the far corner across a sea of thick black and high brown hair. They just nod.
“And to Disneyland! Do you like Disneyland?” the second guy asks.
“Oh yeah!” I say. “And did you know Walt Disney was a Nazi?” I’m such an arse.
“Sorry?” He asks.
“A bit Mickey Mouse.” I say.
“Can you speak Japanese?” He asks. It’s the fifth time I’ve been asked that day.
“Ma, chotto hanasemasu.” I reply.
“Wow! That’s amazing! Your Japanese is great.” It’s the fourth time I got that reply. The other girl just blinked, with a face that said ‘ooh, it speaks.’ At that point, a ‘native’ co-worker approached me. I jabbed the student.
“You should talk to this guy. He’s as American as porking mum’s apple pie.”
“Really?” He exclaims, with what seems to be deep and genuine amazement. My co-worker is standing there looking at me and shaking his head.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Peter C, Peter C. You won’t believe this. Un believable. Un (pause) believable.”
“What? What happened?”
“Osaki made me take the presents back from the students.”
“She fucking what?”
“I gave them out before it was time. She went and got them back from the students and gave them to me and told me off. She said I couldn’t give them out until present time.”
“Minnnnnnnnnnasan!” Screams a little man from the stage. He’s wearing a long blond wig, a Santa hat and red lipstick. “Itsu presento time!!!!!!!”
“That’s my cue.” My co-worker sighed, knocked back his beer and shouldered his sack.

Flashforward!

“Any ideas?”
“Well, I dunno. Why don’t we have something more casual this year? Like – no games, no timetable, no cross-dressing, no dance?”
“Uh huh.” She says, and crosses off something on the clipboard she’s holding to her chest with a thick black marker. By early November, the official NCB timetable was posted on the staff room noticeboard, with the following information:

“2004 NCB CHRISTMAS PARTY !!!!

Teacher’s Information
When: Sunday, December 19th, 2004
The party goes from 1400-1600
Where: Alife (the building is covered with pale-blue tiles)
Nishi Azabu Roppongi

Schedule
12:15 Staff Arrive
12:30 Teachers due to arrive at this time
12:45 Pre-party meeting

13:15 Doors Open
14:00 Opening (Katabe san & Patrick AA)
14:15 Team Forming Game (Ameta MGR and Tokuoka san)
14:30 Fun Time! (Kitagawa san & Patrick AA)
14:50 Impersonation Contest (Wakao san & Matsushima san)
15:15 NCB Staff Dance (Wakao san & Matsushima san)
15:20 Dance Time
16:15 Christmas Carols/Drawing/Best Xmas Spirit (Tokuoka san & Patrick AA)
16:40 Closing (Ameta MGR & Patrick AA)”

The staff members had formed groups and action comittees and were regularly training for the Christmas party, doing unpaid overtime, staying in the office until the wee smalls writing scripts and choreographing dances. Meanwhile the teaching staff and non-Japanese staff were rigorously and systematically excluded from the whole process. The only way I could tell things were coming along nicely was the occasional piece of glitter stuck to an in-office eyelid or the shy end of a feather bower protruding from a LV handbag in the staff room. That and another Luis Vuitton shop back filled with Santa hats. One day in November I had the temerity to ask,
“How are the preparations going for the Christmas party?”
“Good.” the staffer told me, with a look that said in no uncertain terms, ‘I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.’

Tickets went on sale around mid-November. 5000 yen a pop, or 5,500 at the door (over sixty bucks AUD). That’s no guest list, no exceptions. I tried ‘Donna and Blitzen plus one on Rudolph’s list’ last year to not avail. The door-elf just rolled his eyes. I even offered him ice and snow and sung him a Slayer song, but he just looked at me with beady little eyes and cold pointy ears. I can still hear horrid tinkling of the bell on his hat as he shook his head.

Even though the party started ‘officially’ at 1315, you can see by looking at the schedule that we were expected to arrive at 1230 (presumably that was considered sufficient to mentally prepare ourselves for ‘fun time’ from 1430 to 1450). I deliberately arrived half an hour late and was greeted by my manager wearing a pear of antlers telling me earnestly, “You missed the meeting. Are you okay?” Am I okay? Osaki (the one who took back the pressies last year) looked at me darkly from under her Santa hat with an expression filled with the loveliness and softness of a noh mask, and tapped the glass face of her watch.

I made my way into the main room. It was one of those Saturday Night Fever jobs – all black vinyl booths lining the walls, a square underlit dance floor in the middle, pink neon behind the booze racks at the bar and cocktail chairs with candles inside whiskey glasses up the back. Lined against a padded rail like the poon gallery in a Bangkok brothel were all the teachers, smoking and sighing. It was now ten to. Nobody was allowed any booze yet. “Why were we brought there fourty five minutes before the start? And no booze!” One na(t)ive boy exclaimed. It was his first Kurisumasu. But up the end of the room – Hubbub! Commotion! Wailing! Gnashing of Teeth!The staff were assembling and telling in-jokes. One of the guys was adjusting the straps of a bra he was putting on outside his Santa costume while another helper was stuffing the cups with oranges. Ichi ni san shi and the music starts, and suddenly they’re all dancing in time. For the first time all year they’re smiling. Sure it’s the waterproof smile of synchronised swimmers, but it’s a start. It all looks like it was a real pain in the ass to learn, but it’s no fun to watch. Perfect! No wonder they’re enjoying themselves so much. Boozeless minutes pass like wounded snails as I lean on the rail. Then (synchronised watches) Ameta MGR – who is cheating on his wife and two young kids with one of the staff- informs us that we may now wet our whistles. He pushes everyone into a nice neat queue. I’ve just got my shaking hand round the paper cup o’ beer when the first students make it through the door. The clip-clopping of high heels fills the room. Stampede!

But joy of joys! Unlike last year where both the rockers and the staff had a raised stage from which to inflict their acts on us, this time they’ve only got a six inch rise on the sea of students now mingling in their way. And when you’ve been bonsaied since birth, that’s not enough. Everything gets hazier, and through the tunnel of my mind I can see bright flashes. I can hear ‘Minnnnnnnnasan!’ but I can’t see anything but the protruding incisors of the girl I think I’m talking to about playing snowboard. She tells me, “Your nametag is upside down!” Bad sensei.
“Indeed it is. My father was a white Russian.”
“Are you American?”
“Yes, I’m from Disneyland. My father was Walt Disney’s robot.”
“Really?”
I remember getting to the front of the stage, and the oddest thing happening – all the students were totally ignoring the staff, who continued to dance. “Gosh, that’s so humiliating.” I thought aloud. But the staff couldn’t have given a toss if anyone was watching. It was absolutely fascinating. Now two men dressed in blonde wigs with bras outside their Santa suits were on stage. They’re impersonating someone. Maybe me. And the audience were all there, the one that matters - the staff hover behind the spotlit duo, totally immersed in their perfectly trimmed, trained and pained performance. Ameta and the other male staff were about to split his sides with laughter. Another man with underpants outside his Santa suit jumped screaming ‘ahhhhhhhhh’ in to the scene ninja style, knocking the other to the floor. The staff explode with laughter.

I’m really drunk by four pm. Using my one good eye and my best squint, I can just make out Ameta (MGR) in his bowtie and cumberbund pushing students out of the way- he’s making an exit that nobody’s following. It’s all for the students. Yeah right, just like the dance and drag show. NO, it’s so that students can exit quickly and hygienically, silly. I stand in his way. ‘Move out of the way.’ He tells me with a smile that melts like a stuffed suppository when I don’t comply. He goes up to the next person to push them out of the way. ‘Why don’t you get the fuck out of the way?’ I ask, but luckily he won’t understand unless I turn everything to katakana. I should have said, ‘Wai donto yuu getto za fakku outo of za uei?’ Maybe I did. As I said I can’t remember too clearly.

Five minutes later the students are starting to file out. I’ve been given a stack of Christmas cards to hand out to the students. NCB is too cheap to afford Hallmark, so these are folded red card with shitty photocopies on the front. Inside, stuck in with Uhu by the lowest ranking staff as part of their rotating roster of menial tasks is the paper I’d been ‘asked’ (read told) to fill in ‘for the students’. On the left side is a bunch of promotional material selling reading courses and seminars to the students in the New Year. ‘For the students.’ But the right side is my side. I leaf through the pile until I find the ones I’d written. I picked out my favourite, and handed it to one of my best students, Eri. Four feet tall and a face full of sharklike teeth. She opens it and attempts my handwriting.
‘Are you dreaming of a white Christmas? If so, I hope your dreams come true! Cheers, P’
“What’s pee?” She asks.
“It’s a traditional blessing.” I say. “Golden showers. It’s a family thing. ”
“Oh.” She says. I point at the cover. The photocopy is so degraded that the image of a Christmas tree has been deformed.
“Oh look. Looks like a bonsai.” I smile, “Bonsai Christmas tree.”
Eri giggles. “No. It is Christmas tree.”
“Mm, yeah, bonsai Christmas tree.”
“Bye bye Peter.” She says, and is gone.

© Peter Chambers 2004

Listmas (this Christmas, say it with a list)

2007-12-26T23:26:00.000+11:00

Listmas (this Christmas, say it with a list)

I saw the spirit of Christmas at the supermarket over the weekend. She was standing there in front of the pasta sauces, with her ‘little white earbuds’ in, and a scribbled, uncrumpled list in her hand. The list might have been shaking in her hand too but perhaps I’m just adding that for dramatic effect. But once she turned and looked at me, there was no ‘perhaps’ – the truth was scrawled in those tics that mark the edges of madness. Those headlit rabbit eyes, that lunatic twitch – oh dear, it’s Christmas time, and by the looks of things nothing more than the hard-clutched list in her hand was standing between this girl and a short drop into the surging whirlpool of chaos that is. Ah, Christmas.

List, list, o list. Santa is presently in the process of making a list, after which he’s going to be engaged in ‘checking it twice’, in order to discover ‘who’s naughty’ and ‘who’s nice’. As a child, these lyrics would send me into a yuletide tailspin. How could it be that Santa Claus, a man magically able to ‘know’ who of all the world’s children were naughty or nice, would need to double-check the list he’d made? This could only mean either that A, Santa had an anally retentive streak that bordered on OCD, or that, B, he was never quite sure who was good or bad in the first place. If option A was true, this would mean that Santa might take days, weeks, even months checking the list, getting stuck on the vowels (which he’d have to repeat out loud seven times then cross himself in a figure of eight pattern, or be forced to start again) or get bogged down counting and re-counting the number of ‘little Tobies’ in Hampshire who actually really deserved their imminent firetruck. But if, on the contrary, option B were true and Santa was just a tyrant making it up as he went along, then there would be no way of knowing whether the presents I received every year without fail were indeed any accurate measure of my ‘niceness’ – any one of us could be as naughty as we liked, and we’d be just as likely to end up with the goods as not.

As a way of resolving this intractable dilemma, I resolved to stop believing in Santa Claus, which simplified matters no end. But now, looking back on the problem that had so preoccupied me as a child, I realise that my problem was a false one. Santa was neither an arbitrary tyrant nor an obsessive maniac, but probably just somebody like the strung-out girl in the supermarket, a person who was ‘just coping’ (and only just) with the Silly Season. Maybe what the lyrics in the song were really meant to convey was that Santa, the poor, overworked bastard (paunchy, out of shape, and with dangerously high blood pressure), was doing what any panicked (normal) person does at this time of year: make a list, then checking it, then remembering to breathe deeply. Poor Santa.

But no matter who you are, the Silly Season is list season. From Hipster website’s imfamous ‘100 coolest unlistenable/name-droppable noisecollage/afrobeat record from Brooklyn hipster band featuring annoying Japanese female vocalist’ list to the shaky, scribbled sanity-saving shopping list in the hand of the strung-out peeps in the supermarket, December is a time where we use lists in order to avoid having to crouch under the kitchen table and rock… House is a mess, brain is a mess, life is a mess… guess who’s coming to dinner… guess who has no credit left on the third of their daisy-chained cards… guess who’s got no days off until Christmas… guess who’s boss has shafted them out of the shifts they were relying on to pay for Christmas presents (after promising them heaps of hours when they took the McJob two months ago)…
So you’re bugging out, what do you do? You take that mess and make a list to control it; you bring the world to heel, bullet point by bullet point. Like spiking a bad haircut into a makeshift Mohawk, it might not improve things, but at least there is the feeling that decisive action has been taken. ‘Yes,’ you think, ‘everything’s going to be alright.’

Thing is, as much as I find my own lists help me to cope, the way the internet’s going, Christmas has also become a matter of coping with everyone else’s. I spent ALL yesterday trawling the ‘best of’ lists on the internet, trying to find a guesstimated average of the top 10 ‘most lauded’ albums of the year. Here’s the fruit of my efforts (with my two cents added):

LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver (very over-rated)
MIA – Kala (good)
Radiohead – In Rainbows (great)
Panda Bear – Person Pitch (great)
The Field – From Here We Go Sublime (extremely over-rated)
Robert Wyatt – Comicopera (more of the same, but okay)
Battles – Mirrored (over-rated)
Feist – The Reminder (haven’t heard it)
Liars – Liars (arguably the most name-droppable)
Burial – Untrue (great, over-rated nonetheless)

But now I had a list made up of everyone else’s list, what about my own? And what about Christmas…?! The panic started to rise again… then I thought back to the girl in the supermarket, to her list, and to her little white earbuds, and I thought, ‘What’s the ultimate 2007 Christmas present, one that won’t cost the earth, be thrown out in a day, or contribute that much to landfill?’ The answer, of course, is a playlist. Here’s an idea for something that could replace the ever-irritating Kris Kringle (although by the time you read this, it’ll probably be too late). Anyway, if you want to help invent a tradition, it’s called Listmas, and it goes a little something like this: each contributor makes a CD-R with a personal playlist of tracks that help them to cope with Christmas. They then bring the disc (which would be left unmarked, or with a symbol that made it identifiable to its owner and no-one else) into work and place it in a box, from which each person would then take another disc. The lead-up to Christmas could then be spent swapping the playlist discs, during which time any of the participants could make copies of the lists and songs they liked the best. Considering how lousy Christmas compilations are, how wasteful and pointless most gifts are, and how many people are on the edge of penning a final, fateful shitlist of their own at this time of the year, I humbly submit my idea to the list of possibilities, and this as my list:

Ravi Shankar – Tala Rasa Ranga
DJ Koze – Cicely
Kassem Mosse – Untitled (Workshop EP)
Dave Aju and The Invisible Art Trio – Be Like The Sun
Ricardo Villalobos –Baila Sin Petit
Al Haca – Banana Split
Eluvium – Intermission
Bruno Pronsato – What We Wish
Pawel – Salta
Cassy – Somelightuntothenight
Eluvim – Hymn #1

It’s on me! (How to become Lord of the Flies)

2007-12-17T16:38:00.000+11:00

In Tokyo’s Nishi Shinjuku, only a few hundred metres from the Grand Hyatt featured in Lost in Translation, there’s a cocktail bar called ‘It’s on me!’ When choosing the title, the owners no doubt had in mind the cucumber cool of the cashed-up drinks shouter. The scenario involves you and date heading to the bar, you pulling your purse out of your manbag and offering a plaintive ‘Do… do you want some… money?’ before (s)he waves it away, declaring (with the effortless mastery of the Milky Bar kid), ‘Don’t worry, it’s on me.’

But everything changed with the two simple paint strokes that added the exclamation mark to the sign. Far from evoking breezy scenes of Dean-Martin-cocktail-bar cool, the chosen title (which was already in italics) always read as ‘It’s on me!’ Think Gremlins fed after midnight, think neck-sucking alien succubus, think unwanted advances from a large, distant, predatory species… with tentacles. Every time I walked past ‘It’s on me!’ I thought of a room full of men in leisure suits, their screams strangely muted by the heavy carpet, as they were suddenly and violently attacked by mucoid things with suckers, a beak, and a taste for human blood. Was it a shock to them? Perhaps it’s what they’d ordered. Knowing Shinjuku, there probably are bars where one can pay (through the nose, or with a proboscis) to have sucky, beaky, blood-thirsty monsters thrown at your head; a place where the upper eschelons of society pay hundreds of squid just to get a bruised, bitten hard-on, in tentacular, private luxury.

But for most ‘normal’ people, an attack such as those ordered in my (imaginary?) Tokyo bar would be truly horrific because of its sudden and total ambush of your quiet dignity. You’re just walking along, minding your own business, when… wait for it… AAAAAARGGGH!! It’s on me!!!!’ This is, no doubt, what so alarmed me as a child about the ‘drop bears’ that my uncle convinced me lived in the copse of trees on top of the hill near his farm. Or the later (and apparently true) rumours about tree funnel webs in early Sydney: it was said that tree funnel webs, extinct since the 1830s, would drop like ripe fruit onto your neck and bite, repeatedly. Their venom was apparently several times deadlier than the banal funnel webs of many a Sydney backyard. Only Roald Dahl’s description of the black mamba in Going Solo (a deadly snake that actually chased you in order to bite you to death) had as much power to frighten and appal me as a child.

But this spring, I, and no doubt a lot of you, have had to relive similar moments of ambushed horror. Some say they came from New South Wales. Others say it was horseshit. One expert reckons it’s lawn clippings. Who knows, and frankly, who cares how it’s happened? Maybe you were strolling to get some milk; maybe you were quietly enjoying a tasty beverage at an outdoor café; maybe you were just scratching your balls and waiting for the tram, like the girl next to you and her pet mandrill. You know, nothing out of the ordinary. Then suddenly, without warning…

‘AAAARGH! PLLLERGH! PTH! PTH! HHHHHOORRRK!’

No, it’s not the angry insults of a Cairo cabbie. It is in fact the closest I can get to representing the unspeakable noise that came from the mouth of my lovely lady when a rogue fly flew into her throat.

There is nothing so ridiculous, so pitifully helpless as a person who has been earbombed or gulletsmacked by a rogue fly. You play sniggery tittery bugger bystander for a moment, as your friend or loved one scrambles to regain their composure, but then:

‘zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!’

No, it’s not Ryoji Ikeda’s new minimalist ‘sound art’ masterpiece – egad, you’ve been earbombed, and now that buzzy little fucker has lodged itself in your earhole. You scream ‘Argh! It’s on me!’ You whinny, you slap your ear. You shake your head back and forth with the force of a carwash brush, knowing that if you mash your finger into your earhole, so goes the fly with it.

All over Melbourne, I’ve heard reports of people being mobbed and attacked by the little furry-footed fuckers. There have even been rumours of picnickers engaging in panicked fanny swatting... but then again, it was St Kilda, so who knows?

The flies! The cursed flies! What do they want? What do they see in us? Are they heatseeking? Do we smell of dung? Don’t answer that. But seriously, let’s imagine you’re a fly and you’ve got three days to live and breed before buzzing your last hum: what do you do? Where do you go? You go where all the cool, upper-class flies are at: that rotting seal carcass on Portsea Beach; the fresh Great Dane turd on the lawn; the skip out the back of Dave and C(l)am(m)y’s. Or to something which in no way resembles a human being. Honestly, are human beings so like a carcass, a turd or an old, half-chewed ex-dumpling? Hmm… food for flies? Food for thought. At least the food for sharks living through Jaws-plagued Byron Bay can see the bastards coming. Admittedly, being smacked, bombed, swarmed or otherwise attacked by the winged fuckers is far less deadly than being chomped by a great white, but try telling that to the poor bastard in the first terrifying throes of ‘Argh! It’s on me!’ lodgement. Just hope you don’t have a heart condition.

The thing is, you will never, ever, ever be prepared for the horror of the attack, but you can reduce the risk of it occurring. With this in mind, I humbly submit my few hard-won defences against the plague that is.

1) Airswat three, four times: a fly that has found your fragrance irresistible will always try to land more than once, always. A good pre-emptive half-dozen usually does the trick.

2) There is no such thing as ‘one fly’, however, it is always the ‘one fly’ that hassles you: watch the guy walking in front of you, and the orgy of flies piggy-backing on his t-shirt, rubbing their little mitts together with glee. Like Pauline Hanson’s ‘silent majority’, these flies seem quite content to perch in the flat, barren parts between the redneck and his arsehole. But watch – there’s always one extremist fly who’s indefatigable, giving those other ‘honest’ flies a bad rap. What’s true for flies is often true for people. Buzz buzz.

3) Cover your ears: if you are planning to read this paper on the beach (don’t even think about attempting a hamburger or fish and chips), get a towel or t-shirt and drape it over you, Bedouin-style. This can make all the difference. If you also happen to be reading a map when appearing in public in this garb, double-check for nondescript white Commodores. Yes, that’s right, ASIO.

4) Keep your trap shut, fool: a warm mouth and a long-winded explanation is an open invitation to an aerial parasite. Not only fools rush in.

5) Drape your friends in dung or meat: self-explanatory. If the flies still prefer you, well then, y’all betta aksk yo’self.

Owe Ho Ho Ho (no free gifts)

2007-12-10T07:47:00.000+11:00

Every year, or so it seems, the price of icy poles rises, Mars Bars get smaller and Christmas begins a week or two earlier. You could say that these changes are ‘constant changes’; always differing, but in exactly the same way, at a regular rate, and just enough to really fuck with your head. But one thing that never changes – a ‘constant constant’ of Christmas, if you will – is the rising sense of dread at the cheerless thought of having to buy gifts for people who have to buy gifts for you: your sleazy boss; your (emotionally) distant aunty with halitosis (and her despicable crazy rat dog); your aggressively dull thieving brother in-law; even your bushbeast step-mother who, no doubt, has had to offer a little something more to make you smile than the soft grunt she issues every year after gutsing the last of the potato salad, only moments before dropping her annual bad boy in your toilet.

This ‘constant constant’, the yearly feeling of rising dread, is caused by an openly inadmissible fact: none of this is done freely. If you think you give because you want to, close your eyes, think of those in your social world, and then imagine its death by way of the following scenarios: refusing to give, refusing to receive, refusing to reciprocate. Think about a failure to give, receive or reciprocate, and consider the offence it will cause, and what it will do for your social standing with your friends, your extended family and your workmates – even those you are indifferent to, and especially those that you hate. Owe ho ho, you’re trapped, muthafucker! It’s as inescapable as the credit card debt you’re about to plunge yourself even further into buying all those gifts (and the far more expensive ‘coping compensators’ you get for yourself). This is precisely what gifts are for – they’re designed to bind, to forever Mary J. oblige you to something you would rather not have been involved in to begin with. If Christmas makes you feel trapped and depressed, there’s probably a good reason why.

Those of you presently working casual jobs (in anticipation of an impending debt) who have been ‘informed’ about the workplace Kris Kringle will know the score. You may not want to receive something you don’t care for from someone you don’t care about. Who does? Nor do you want to give something you chose with care to someone who doesn’t care for it. And you certainly don’t want to reinforce such a system by supporting it, further strengthening the endless web of reciprocal present-giving with people you only spend time with because you have to. And yet, unless you cite a peculiar religious taboo (which will itself mark you as the abominable office ‘alien’), there is no polite way to refuse. These days, it’s not enough to have to do a poorly paid, difficult job you dislike without complaint – you’re supposed to be cheerful about it. To the maniacal workplace goody-goody (the one who takes it upon his/herself to organise and micromanage infernal things like Kris Kringle and that stupid system where everyone is obliged to put in for everyone else’s birthday gift), any sign of scroogy gripe is a signal of imminent mutiny that calls for a slow rolling of the eyes, a patient sigh, or maybe even a lecture on the spirit of giving.

Operating in such a system, the only sane response is one of cheerful resignation. The whole stupid cycle is as inescapable as the other ‘constant constants’, so take my advice: don’t grumble, go along with it, open your wallet, give a little Mars Bar (my, that is a little Mars Bar) and smile. It’s either that, or the cuckoo option of joining the wild-eyed maniacs in the ‘organising committee’. Anything else is social death and will see you mistrusted, despised and eventually shunned. Your workplace may be a cuckoo’s nest, but the ‘refuser’ and the ‘grudging co-operator’ are the ones who flew over it in the eyes of Ms Kringle. You’re the oddball, you’re the cheerless bitch, you’re the grumblebum. Essentially, if you want to stay on good terms with everyone, you have NO courteous choice in the matter. Gifts are not freely given, they are the least free things in the world. They are designed to enmesh you in infinite obligation toward people you would (in many cases) never voluntary choose to spend time with. And they do a bloody good job.

How to unfuck a duck (or anything else)

2007-12-03T15:01:00.000+11:00

This isn’t a political column. In fact, this week, due to the state of my head after finishing exams (Friday), hearing the result and hopping between elections parties (Saturday) and celebrating my birthday (Sunday), this probably won’t be column about much…. well, even less than usual. Last night, my friend emailed me with a pertinent question: ‘will Rudd be able to unfuck the things Howard fucked up?’ This morning I woke up, re-read it, and wondered if I would be able to unfuck the things I fucked up over the weekend, not least of all my bank balance and my liver…. blech… Only time will tell whether Rudd is in fact the überHoward (remember that disturbingly accurate graphic on the cover of the Age showing Howard fading into Rudd?) but to me the most interesting part of my friend’s question was contained in that little word, and the eerie, almost supernatural possibilities it promises… unfuck. Could it be done? Can that which has been ruined (buggered, stuffed, rooted) ever be unruined? Is it possible to unfuck, well, anything? This is the Silly Season, remember? So given that you’re probably about to embark on a season of self-ruin and get ‘completely fucked’ in the name of festivity, maybe we should think about whether it’s possible to undo ‘the damage’…?

Maybe a few examples might help illustrate the idea:

Political unfucking: ‘In Washington D.C. this afternoon, US president George W. Bush announced a new strategy to unfuck Iraq. ‘We fucked it good and proper,’ the President said. ‘Now in due course we will ‘shock and awe’ you with our ability to unfuck it – don’t misunderestimate me.’

Personal unfucking: ‘Harvey Higginbottom, 37, unfucked his life last night, which was until yesterday completely ruined.’

Frocked unfucking: ‘The priest said he was extremely sorry, and will personally unfuck every one of the seventeen altar boys involved.’

Think about it – when somebody says that ‘Such and such has been completely fucked by so and so’ there’s usually the sense of something irreversible. Those altar boys are altered boys. Or have you ever met someone who’s drug unfucked? Wise man once say: that which is fried will never be unfried. Are you guys listening? This is what Johnny Depp was trying to tell you with that ‘your brain on drugs’ commercial, the one with the egg? Remember? It’s all about the difference between a physical change and a chemical change. It’s like this: physical changes are changes of state, changes of form: in the process of transformation, no new substances are made, and none change their substance. Chemical changes, on the other hand, are changes of substance, changes of form and content: during this kind of change, the reactants are totally transformed, and form new compounds through the making and breaking of chemical bonds. In most instances, chemical changes are irreversible… ask Dead or Alive. Ask Ozzy Osborne. Ask Bez. Ask Michael Jackson. Ask that lady who’s had so much work she looks like a lion. Or think about your own head… now think about setting fire to it, and the number of times you will probably be able to enjoy that fateful act. Christmas party season is upon us… you may not be able to unfuck your reputation… you definitely won’t be able to unfuck your workmate. Or the photocopier. In front of everybody. I’d say that’s almost definite. Sorry.

Unfucking is a miracle, or it would be if miracles existed. This is the whole idea of Jesus’ return. The second coming is the original unfucking – we fuck everything up, then Jesus jets in on a cloud (Monkey Magic style) and unfucks everything. Yay Jesus. But let’s think about this… who are the people in this world who believe in such an unfucking? I’ll tell you. Certain priests, President Bush… and Harvey Higginbottom. In fact, if I were to have eerie powers, I think the ability to ‘unfuck’ things would be top of the list. But given that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else I know possesses such a miraculous talent, and given that neither Iraq, nor altar boys, nor lives, nor workmates nor photocopiers can or ever have been unfucked, let’s just try not to fuck things up to begin with.

Bouncers (don’t mess with ‘em, have mess without ‘em… or not?)

2007-11-20T09:35:00.000+11:00

Judging from what I’ve heard, I’d always fancied that people would try to fight their way out of the Viper Room – then came the recent news of the dude who pulled a piece on the bouncers when he wasn’t allowed in. Didn’t somebody tell him that if they’d let him in… he’d be at the Viper Room? But then again, this is like trying to talk sense to a person… who wants to go to the Viper Room. You can’t reason with the unreasonable.

All across Melbourne you hear similar stories: enraged footballers, coked up to the eyeballs, going on rampages at Crown… trannies with knives in their garter belts (Dome R.I.P.) …or the rumours of ‘Mad Cunts’ barred from another famous Chapel St nightclub returning with plenty of cousins… and lots of baseball bats. Bouncers. Don’t mess with ‘em, have mess without ‘em… or not?

In their defence (as if they can’t defend themselves), bouncers, like cops, deal with the constant threat of grisly violence and the daily reality of one of the most boring jobs imaginable. But more than cops, bouncers have increasingly been written a blank cheque for the use of whatever brutality in their pursuit of social pest control – Parklife. At least cops have to write reports and ‘use phonebooks’. Without a doubt, bouncers do a thankless, boring, dangerous job that most of us would be unwilling and/or unable to do. But, on the other hand, a lot of them are sadistic fuckwits who enjoy nothing better than bullying people and abusing their authority. Basically, it’s a job that attracts a certain type of person, and I think we can safely say that it’s not the kind of person who you generally find working in kindergartens or caring for the elderly… oh, well, not working in kindergartens at least… sorry grandma.

But bouncers are nearly everywhere these days, representatives of the push for ‘private security’ that’s massively increasing in rich, paranoid countries like Australia (who live in the comfortable gap between the imagination of terror and the reality of peace and plenty). Even the cops have been turned into ‘event security’. Look at the joke that was APEC. Who was being protected… and from what? And don't let the ‘uniform’ fool you – a fair portion of private security goons are little better than the ‘ogres’ and ‘trolls’ they’re paid to protect ‘us’ from. ‘Goons,’ as the Simpsons quote goes, ‘Hired goons.’ Thing is, even goons are subject to economics – it’s the law of supply and demand. As the paranoia increases, the demand keeps increasing, in a kind of ‘Viper Room hoopsnake’ effect, and the security companies, who make their profits by providing ‘meat in uniform, on delivery’, are going to have to look harder and further to find enough boof. Just like all their competitors. Whoops, there goes the supply… Now, let’s say I run a private security firm. Am I gonna surrender market share and profits… or am I gonna lower my standards?

The net effect of this has been that a lot of firms are hiring people who are un(der)qualified, incompetent, or even dangerous psychopaths. Extreme examples like the recent Blackwater massacre in Baghdad demonstrate in an extreme and tragic way what this demand for private security is doing. These ‘professionals’, the chosen ‘private security providers’ (mercenaries) employed by the US government in no bid contracts to provide ‘security solutions’ in Iraq, murdered nineteen Iraqi civilians – and this is only the latest and best-documented case. We have our banal examples here, too, like the guy whose heart stopped after he got sat on outside Star City a few years back. Or that cricketer who got his lights punched (permanently) out in St Kilda not so long ago. The question that emerges is this: what is ‘feeling secure’ worth to us? Do you really think that the bouncers are there to ‘protect’ you? Their interests are their own and their company’s (first and second), and the venue’s (third).

At a recent party in this fine city, a tiny portion, a mere pebble of the emerging cost in having these gorillas in our midst was graphically played out, when the venue’s bouncers first kicked the headlining international off the decks mid-set, before proceeding to eject the gig’s promoters (if the rumours are true) and others from the venue. I’m sorry, but whose party is this? It used to be you had to call the cops to get a party shut down – now the people hired to ensure its smooth running are doing the same thing. Whose interests are served by this kind of malarky? And what happens when this becomes the ‘new normal’ at every venue in town? For the time being, this is exceptionally poor form by Melbourne standards, as well as being amusing, in a farcical way – but in Sydney, with its dearth of enlightened venues and small bars, treatment like this has become the norm. And unless you yourself are a ‘mad cunt’ with a pistol or a VL’s worth of bat-toting cousins only an SMS away, you are completely at their mercy…

Where does this end up? I’m always drawn to the example of the infamous Rolling Stones gig at Altamont, in which a man was stabbed to death by one of the Hells Angels, who were recommended as security… by the Grateful Dead. As Keith Richards famously described it in the article, in.... Rolling Stone:

‘"The violence," Keith Richard told the London Evening Standard, "just in front of the stage was incredible. Looking back I don't think it was a good idea to have Hell's Angels there. But we had them at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead. "The trouble is it's a problem for us either way. If you don't have them to work for you as stewards, they come anyway and cause trouble. "But to be fair, out of the whole 300 Angels working as stewards, the vast majority did what they were supposed to do, which was to regulate the crowds as much as possible without causing any trouble. But there were about ten or twenty who were completely out of their minds -- trying to drive their motorcycles through the middle of the crowds…
Really, the difference between the open air show we held here in Hyde Park and the one there is amazing. I think it illustrates the difference between the two countries. In Hyde Park everybody had a good time, and there was no trouble. You can put half a million young English people together and they won't start killing each other. That's the difference."

While Richard was satisfying the British press with his incredibly naive view of Western civilization, Meredith Hunter lay dead.’

Such is Life and Horse (Kissing Cousins)

2007-11-18T07:39:00.000+11:00

In most cultures, kissing Cousins is considered incest. But in Australia, over thirteen thousand ‘friends’ in a Facebook group want to do just that. Or just ‘party’ or ‘parlay’…. or ‘something’. But whatever they want to do, it better be done quickly, before it all goes horribly wrong. Get in for your chop, there ain’t gonna be any sloppy second Cousins – he’s one of a kind. Ah, Ben Cousins… The sporting establishment condemn him, because they have to. The media do, because apparently ‘you’ (or some viewer like you) enjoys knocking in others what you’d be incapable of yourself. It’s true, let’s face it. The only difference between Cousins and any of the 100,000-plus pissed yobbos at the racetrack last week is that they are pissed witless, sunburnt and broke by 3pm, while Cousins, on the other hand (and on the other side of the thickly-racked dateline), apparently just saw the fifth sunset of a rehab-breaking coke bender. Cousins? You wish. You haven’t got the ticker, you avvo yobbo. Go back to vomiting on your tux and growling some bird in a hat behind a bush. It’s all you’re capable of. Cousins is the überyobbo, as much a champion off field as he is on. I’m serious. If you subscribe to yobbo values, then he’s the best we’ve got, a true champ. We ought to love him while we’ve got him. People keep saying ‘When’s he gonna behave?!’ ‘What an idiot!’ ‘Can’t he see he’s depraved?!’ But you know what I think? I think we’ve got the wrong end of the horse on this one. I think we should look to two other Aussie heroes for inspiration or alternatives: Ned Kelly and Phar Lap.

Ned first got a taste for a nice bit of horse after stealing one. Well, he said he didn’t know it was stolen when he galloped into town on it – he’d just ‘borrowed it’ from a friend… a friend who had stolen it from a constable up the way. As legend would have it, the policeman who tried to arrest him ended up getting ridden like a horse by said bushranger. Not long after that, Ned officially became notorious: sticking up banks and shooting cops. Ned became a problem…. and the societal solution? Ned was hanged, thus ensuring no further hold-ups and eternal notoriety. This is obviously not the way to go – maybe Phar Lap offers some better ideas?

Horses are not hanged, they’re hung (like horses). Or shot (like cops, by Ned). But not this one – he was poisoned. Apparently. Phar Lap, after a racing career of little more than a few years, died a mysterious death. Some say it was arsenic, but then, according to another veterinarian, all horses were given arsenic in those days… as a tonic. Yes, arsenic, the ideal ‘pick-me-up’. We all know the phrase ‘they shoot horses, don’t they?’ And you know it’s a rhetorical question, don’t you? Were he not poisoned, Phar Lap might have sired some young stallions, after which he would have been put out to pasture, where he would have been able to enjoy the grass until such time as the little click of the rifle cocking was heard in between a fly-swatting tail switch and a quiver of the ageing rump. But, because of the poisoning, Phar Lap’s death became mired in controversy and ‘shrouded in mystery’ (as the cliché would have it), and this is the kind of thing that’ll get you necroscopied (autopsied), dissected, and donated trans-Tasman stylee. Phar Lap ended up a hanged horse: his mounted hide is displayed at the Melbourne Museum, his skeleton at New Zealand's National Museum, and his heart at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

Now, we know that Cousins likes a bit of horse, not to mention ketamine, which is, notoriously, a drug for horses. And here’s the lowdown…they say it was the arsenic, but if you ask me, it was the pressure… Phar Lap, the hero with the big heart fell into a big daddy k-hole, as big as a racecourse and darker than the inside of Ned Kelly’s helmet. Who knows, maybe he’d been at it for years? Maybe they tried to make him go to rehab, but he wouldn’t go (neigh, neigh, neigh). If he had thumbs, maybe he’d have left a note. What would it have said? A lot of people have even been suggesting that this recent ‘Horse Flu’ epidemic is nothing other than a massive wave of ice addictions, introduced by Yakuza-owned Japanese horses who gave the locals a taste for the ‘shabu’. Perhaps the phrase should be: ‘Horses shoot up, don’t they?’

Given the circumstances, I think Cousins deserves the ‘Phar Lap’ treatment. Like the snuffed sniffer with the big ticker, he’s had his four years at the top. He’s won both the Brownlow and the Leigh Matthews trophy. As an athlete, he’s probably past his best. I say, let him go for it, Phar Lap style. Let him run, let him whinny, let him bray, let him snort. Let those nostrils flare in glory. Why not? Cousins has obviously found the one thing in life he enjoys even more than being a football hero. If he dies doing the thing that he loves (which probably won’t take that long, considering how much of it he’s rumoured to love), then so be it. ‘Such is life’, as Ned (or Cousins’ torso) might say – or as Phar Lap might have said, if he had thumbs. In fact (dare I say it), the sooner the better, before his torso begins to sag – while he can still say it with a sixpack. Then we can all come to pay homage by kissing the glass around his remains. I think he’d like that. He can be mounted, as Phar Lap was, as Kelly’s armour is. We can mount his hide at the Melbourne Museum, his skeleton at the National Museum in Canberra, and his heart at the Museum of Western Australia. As befits a champion and a hero.

So you think you can flail?!

2007-11-06T18:18:00.000+11:00

Controversy has erupted this week at the 53rd conference of the European Artform Committee (CAE), the body that rules on the classifications governing specific kinds of officially recognised European artforms. Every year, the body meets to re-define what is and is not an artform, and this year, it was the turn of flailing to be thrown into question.

‘Flailing’ may not be the first thing that springs to mind when we think of artforms, but in parts of Scandanvia and the Baltic states, flailing was traditionally considered a way to keep warm and has become a common pastime, with people competing in public displays, known as ‘flail-offs’.

The controversy apparently erupted on the judging panel when a faction emerged, intent on differentiating between the two recognised types of flailing, ‘uncontrolled’ and ‘controlled’.

Other panel members, protesting the distinction, asserted that there was ‘no such thing’ as controlled flailing. “It’s ridiculous,” said Sten Carlsen, the Danish representative. “Everybody knows that this so-called ‘controlled flailing’ is nothing other than dancing. Even my senile mother-in-law knows that.”

The faction’s counter-assertion held that all flailing involved some level of motor control, and that this was the necessary condition distinguishing it from involuntary or even autonomic motions such as ‘tics’, ‘spasms’, ‘shudders’ and ‘seizures’, none of which can be officially classified as artforms under the guidelines of the CAE.

“It takes years to learn to really flail, to do it with skill and flair,” the faction spokesman said, reading a statement prepared by members of the faction. “A person who attempts flailing without adequate knowledge of the appropriate techniques risks embarrassment, injury, even death.”

Carlsen’s argument against this classification rests in one simple idea. “It’s not rule-governed movement,” he explained. “To say that one can be taught how to flail, as if these are a set of known techniques that can be transferred from teacher to pupil or acquired through demonstration and practice, this is absurd.”

A faction member, speaking on condition of anonymity, asserts that Carlsen’s outspoken criticism of the move to distinguish between ‘uncontrolled’ and ‘controlled’ flailing was motivated by specific Danish interests which had remained undeclared. Anna Halvorsen, who was for three consecutive years the European champion, was recently stripped of her medals after the discovery that she, and others on the women’s team, all suffered disinhibition disorders – neurological conditions that allowed them to flail far more violently than other competitors. “There was a sense of total abandon. Their flailing gave you this impression of chaos and intensity that had won them favour with judges – and I was one of them,” our anonymous panel member confessed. “Discovering that Anna and two of the others suffered from disinhibitions disorders, this has had a devastating impact on the sport. It’s imperative to know who is really flailing, and who is just suffering from spasms.” Carlsen was quick to neutralise these allegations, however: “Anna is simply a naturally gifted flailer. There is no penalty for talent where I come from. The whipping violence of her body is sublime.”

There have also been allegations of ‘vote-buying’, with the other Scandanavian representatives (who are supporting the Danish protest) attempting to push key member states Spain and Britain (both of whom have powers of veto) to oppose the motion. Meanwhile, the Spanish delegate Pablo Borges – an unexpected ally of the Scandanavians – has weighed into the debate, controversially accusing American choreographer Mia Michaels of hit US TV show ‘So You Think You Can Dance?’ of being what he calls ‘the world’s number one ‘controlled flailing’ expert. “If there is something called ‘controlled flailing’ then she’s the queen of them all,” he said. “This ridiculous assertion that you can somehow include ‘controlled’ movements in the definition of flailing – well, why don't we just get that woman to come here to Geneva and teach us all. We’ll be flailing like controlled professionals in no time. I’m sure that would make all the judges weep like young girls.”

Mia Michaels has so far refused to offer any comment on the remark.

In search of lost time at the Smokay Corral

2007-10-30T09:33:00.000+11:00

So you wake up one hungover Sunday in October. The usual fug and yawns, the clutching at a glass of water, the wondering what happened. The first of many terrifying memory flashes… the wishing for not remembering what happened. Maybe (if you’re lucky) the fridge is keeping the last slice of pizza cold for you, a slice which now awaits your mouth, which tastes and feels like the inside of Casey Stoner’s motorcycle glove. Your teeth, your teeth have socks on. It’s nasty, but hey, you’ve done it before, right? Probably the night before last. Odds on the week before that. Perhaps following a crippling pattern grooved deeply you're your routine over the course of a decade. You might not be getting better at it, ‘improving’, if you will – imagine if you’d poured all that money, time and energy into piano lessons instead – but you have survived. You live. And this might even be a fact worth celebrating, perhaps with a greasy breakfast behind sunglasses, followed (in no set order) by a half-assed wank, a DVD and a snooze.

But then that horrible little ebb smacks you in the fug – egad – it’s an hour later (even) than the midday you thought you’d managed. You don’t scream, you don’t cry (it would trigger a headstab) but there’s the feeling of something gone, irreparable. You spend the rest of the afternoon in your recovery pattern, but even as the haze lifts around the very, very late sunset, a realisation settles to replace it, one heavy with the sense of something little, yes, but gone totally. Never to be repeated.

Now think big chunk – close your wrinkling eyes and imagine being told with certainty that a decade had gone. How would you feel? I imagine the same sad settling would take place, on a crippling scale. A whole decade… never to be filled with the half-memories of hungover Sundays: no more cold pizza, no more half-assed wanks. No more Mondays back at work wondering where it all went pear-shaped and turned professional. It’s a depressing thought, surely. But oddly – despite the overwhelming evidence – smoking does not have that effect on people.

Indeed, walk past any of the new smokay corrals across our fine city, and you’ll see them out there: by themselves they look lavender soft and wistful – they’re thinking misty thoughts. In groups, they’re positively jolly, wheezing and rasping through a joke, sharing a light, rolling, lighting, and chatting each other up.

I saw them at my local, while I was on my way to rent some DVDs – they smiled at me. Could someone please explain why they’re so brimming with ashy smiles and tarry-eyed confidence? I wondered… and then I thought about Darwin and the Beagle. After returning from the Galapagos islands, Darwin realised that isolation would have a profound effect on the emergence of a species: separated populations, each in different microhabitats, and each with their own genetic inheritance and peculiar mutations, would, over time, create new species utterly unlike those on the next island, though separated by nothing more than several kilometres of sea.

‘Dodos!’ I thought, ‘what have we done?!’ In an effort to isolate smokers (and so further stigmatise and marginalise that original, mentholated, extra-mild ‘dying breed’ in our midst) maybe we’ve ensured their triumph over the deadly effects of their preferred harm. Maybe, rather than ‘bagging the fag’, what the ban has created is the conditions for eternal smoking. It goes like this: we know that people may be genetically pre-disposed to addictive behaviour. We know that only certain groups of people have the genes that increase their likelihood of getting cancer from smoking. And we would speculate that, generally, those people ‘still smoking’ are more likely, overall, to be the ones who have survived their habit, or at least for long enough to reproduce, inflicting their genes, their habits, and their tendencies on their offspring… but where will such offspring come from? Acts of reproduction, surely, but with whom? Well, given that smokers are now all concentrated in a small, isolated area with other smokers (small areas that now exist all across Australia, and, indeed, in the UK and elsewhere); given that smoking is social (many people smoke just to be able to start conversations with other people); given that, despite their poor fitness and lowered sperm counts, smokers can still sire children (and might even do a whole lot more siring than non-smokers, given their addictive tendencies) and given that, more than anything, that natural selection and mutation would tend, over time, to favour those who weren’t killed by their habit… can you see where this is going?

All this flashed ran through my mind while at the video store. On the way back, despite the sunny afternoon and the sound of the bees in the bottlebrush, I couldn’t stop thinking about daylight saving, my stabbing head, and all that lost time. It made me blue in thought. Then, as I passed by the pub again, I noticed a man in his fifties, red in face and leaning against the rail of the smokers’ corral. He had nicotine-yellow hair, gold chains, and a twinkle in his eye. It was not the face of a man meditating on lost hours, it was the face of a man winding his way through the repeated highpoints of an extremely enjoyable afternoon. He saw me looking at him, then turned and offered the requested cigarette to a grateful looking woman in her twenties to his left. Then he turned back to me, and winked.

Visualise This (the horror, the horror, the horror ☺)

2007-10-23T09:11:00.000+10:00

At all times, in many different ways, music needs spectacles. Every time I keep hearing some purists talking about a return to ‘authentic substance’ – you know, ‘real’ musicians making ‘real’ music for ‘real’ audiences who ‘really’ appreciate their work, I feel like disabusing them of this twentieth century fiction of ‘authentic substance’ and directing them to the reality of ‘appropriate content’ which the overwhelming majority of people infinitely prefer, THNK U VRY MCH ☺

Anyone who went to Parklife the other week will know the score. Apart from being oversold by thousands of tickets (and thus even more rammed to the gills with flouro and tan floozies), the one (and only) other distinguishing feature (apart from the conspicuous brutality of security) was the obvious fact that almost nobody could give a rubbished electro-shouty fuck about the music. Which was a good thing, considering that most of it was fucking electro-shouty rubbish. Horrible stuff.

After the horror of a plane crash, the forensic crew (or whoever has the expertise in these macabre matters) go hunting for the black box – no, not the Italian techno-pop group that gave the world ‘Ride on Time’. I’m talking about that little bomb-proof brick that records ‘the truth’ of the accident. But what kind of truth? Surely not the death-screams of the captain, the tears of the crew and passengers, the melting of the LCD panel, or the sound of the electronic equipment crackling and burning as it bursts into superheated, avgas-fuelled flames… or is that the new Mstrkrft single? Hmm… maybe it’s just a matter of being able to read the signs, like that joke:

What did the blind man say about the cheese grater?

(wait for it)

That’s the most violent book I’ve ever read.

Probably the black boxes spit out data that looks like the inscrutable way chess games appear when ‘written down’ in newspapers. The forensic guy hooks the box up to his laptop, then waits until something like the following appears on his monitor:

‘^&[OMG]8X96!--- 35Y5{LOL}4Z5$%|^ --“= ….. !!!’

After which he giggles (due to the subtle joke the box made in the first phrase) and calmly concludes: ‘Catastrophic Pilot Error’. To ‘laypeople’ who don’t get the joke or the horror, that’s the extremely weird thing about those black boxes – we rely on them as the thing that mediates between us (comfortably vegetating on our couches in front of the news) and the ‘truth’ of the horror of the crash, but it’s a truth they only convey by excluding almost everything about a plane crash that makes it so viscerally horrific.

Nightclubs are the exact opposite – anyone who’s been the first person to arrive in that empty black room will understand that the profoundest horror imaginable (and not only for the promoters) is to be left in a black box of a room with absolutely nothing between you and the music coming out of the speakers.You race to the bar for a drink, a prop. You fiendishly message tardy friends: ‘Where RU?! There’s nobody here! ☹’ No, it’s worse than that, actually there is somebody there (DJs don’t count)… It’s YOU – left alone to the horror of your own company and the music. The horror, the horror, the horror.

Unmediated experience (if it’s even possible) is something between a terrible shock and a horrible blur – spectacles are the comforting mediators. With glasses, I can drink the scene more clearly; among friends I can avoid the things I fear more than anything else, silence and myself. When you put your glasses on, you don't see glass, you see friends. When you flip open your mobile, you don’t see phone, you see new messages – a person who loves U and UR hand enough to write: ‘Where RU?! There’s nobody here! ☹’

Parklife, as the wolfmother of all spectacles, has nothing to do with music – and thank God. Props to the props, I say. As a friend remarked: ‘Nobody was listening to the music. Everyone was just standing around in stumbling, clammy circles, utterly munted with their phones in their hands, texting or posing for pictures of themselves and their mates, which they then just sent to each other.’

‘People Who Still Go Out to Listen to Music’ are no longer even a sub-species, they’re just a minor group on Facebook. They’re a deeply unpopular, weird, old-fashioned, and (if you’re under twenty-one) slightly sinister reminder of clubland’s contemporary sequel of the Blair Witch Project – a harbinger of the horror of a lone munter trapped in a black box, frantically texting, only to find out that, being underground, there’s no signal…

The Man in the Mirror (who wears the Pauline panties)

2007-10-15T13:40:00.000+10:00

After the most recent of the many shootings at a US high school, one of the students interviewed for the soundbite said something revealing about the guy who went postal:

‘Yeah, he used to come to school every day and say ‘fuck the world’ and all that shit, but we never thought he really meant it.’

Yeah, funny that. But quite often the people who end up with blood on their hands have been trying to tell you ‘I really, really meant it’ all along. Michael Jackson is a perfect example. Think back to his song and album titles: ‘With a Child’s Heart’, ‘I Can’t Help It’, ‘Bad’, ‘Dangerous’, ‘In the Closet’, ‘Childhood’, ‘Give in to Me’, and ‘Scream’. I could go on. Of course, it’s our job to retroactively inscribe with pathos and hidden meanings all those ‘perfectly innocent coincidences’, now that we know what we know… but were they ever coincidences? Maybe the bigger mistake was just to dismiss the evidence that was staring us in the face the whole time.

Given his penchant for plastic surgery, wacko Jacko’s ‘Man in the Mirror’ has taken on a particularly sinister aspect. Jacko, after declaring that he’d been the victim of/a selfish kinda love, sung something like the following: I'm Gonna Make A Change/ It's Gonna Feel Real Good!/ Come On!/(Change . . .)/ Just Lift Yourself/ You Know/ You've Got To Stop It./ Yourself!/(Yeah!-Make That Change!)/ I've Got To Make That Change,/ Today!/ Hoo!/ (Man In The Mirror)/ You Got To/ You Got To Not Let Yourself . . ./ Brother . . ./ Hoo!/ (Yeah!-Make That Change!). I always wonder if dictators mutter similar ditties to themselves when they comb their beards or wax their scalps of a morning. Unlike most, Castro seems perfectly comfortable to live out the last of his days in a parasilk tracksuit befitting a retired Broadmeadows smack dealer, but most dictators (past and present) seem to indicate that they too are looking at ‘the man in the mirror’ and saying ‘na na na, na na na, na na’ to their reflection. But is this just what gives them a stiffy?

Certainly, When John Howard looks in the mirror, he’s unlikely to see any resemblance to Jacko, or a dictator – but the funny thing is, he’s looking increasingly like a weird blend of Michael Jackson and Robert Mugabe. Howard is a man who spent the past decade betting on white (and hating on black) after seeing the solid gold opportunities issuing from the mouth of that rural, redneck, racist redhead – the one who actually unapologetically expressed the deeply felt anxieties of Australian white trash – and he’s been cashing in her (fish and) chips ever since. The strategy is simple: you just take the most vulnerable groups in society (refugees, aboriginals, homosexuals, the poor), then you set them up as thee threat to the majority. You then say that this majority (who you represent), have been ‘silent too long’ and that you’re sick of being the ‘held hostage by your own decency’. Then you victimise the ‘threat’ (while saying that you, the victimizer, are the real victim, even to the point of saying that your victimization is something ‘they made you do’). Once you’ve softened the threat up in this way, you defund and eliminate them. And when they fail, you blame them for their failure and say to your supporters, ‘See, I told you so’ while stressing your unwavering concern and benevolence for them. You tried to help, but they wouldn’t listen.

But the tried-and-true recipe doesn’t seem to be attracting the punters, not when ‘the other guy’ does a better impersonation of you than even you’re capable of, these days. So what’s an aging leader to do? Mugabe-like, you clutch and grasp – anything but lose the thing, the power. Anyone who’s ever known junkies or watched Rocky and Bullwinkle will know how the riddle runs. ‘I’ve changed’, ‘this time it’s different’, 'This time for sure', ‘I really mean it’, ‘I know I’ve stuffed you round, but you gotta trust me’. ‘Just one more time… I love you, you’re the only one I can trust, etc’. This is also part of the abuse, you see (if you’re reading this and hearing your lover’s words, heed mine and leave).

It’s a fine performance (back to Howard…errr… Jacko): “See The Kids In The Street/ With Not Enough To Eat/ Who Am I, To Be Blind?/ Pretending Not To See/ Their Needs/ A Summer's Disregard/ A Broken Bottle Top/ And A One Man's Soul/ They Follow Each Other On/ The Wind Ya' Know/ 'Cause They Got Nowhere/ To Go/ That's Why I Want You To/Know/ I'm Starting With The Man In/ The Mirror/ I'm Asking Him To Change/ His Ways/ And No Message Could Have/ Been Any Clearer/ If You Wanna Make The World/ A Better Place/ (If You Wanna Make The/ World A Better Place)/ Take A Look At Yourself, And/ Then Make A Change/ (Take A Look At Yourself, And/ Then Make A Change)/ (Na Na Na, Na Na Na, Na Na,/Na Nah)”

Honest John even seems to have difficulty believing what he’s seeing in the mirror as he sings for salvation… but maybe that’s because the real money shot is hidden. He said (about reconciliation), “Some will no doubt want to portray my remarks tonight as a form of Damascus Road conversion.” About two thousand years ago on Damascus Road, Saul – who was formerly the cruellest and most brutal persecutor of the Christians – thought better of it, and became Paul, Christ's most zealous supporter. Around eleven years ago, little Johnny became a bit Pauline himself, taking the ruder parts of Hanson's imagination of the ideal body politic and secreting them about his person. Howard’s real ‘dirty little secret’ was that one day in 1996, while appearing to publicly smack up the Ipswitch bitch, Howard was secretly changing’ his pitch up by snow-dropping her flag-themed undies and putting them on underneath the grey suit. Shhhhh…. Never mind Elle Macpherson intimates, singlets and thongs are our national dress in a way far more intimate and unnatural than you previously imagined. The swing to the right began with the little dangle that John packed tightly into the sexy, snug satin of Pauline’s dirty laundry, and these are garments he’s never stopped wearing, simply because, as rude and dirty as they are, no matter how much you try to smear them, they’re impossible to spot.

From being like a virgin... to learning how to like aversion

2007-10-08T12:33:00.000+10:00

Now you’re all grown up, you know the brownness of avocadoes can’t hurt you – but don’t you still cut those ‘bad’ bits out? Bruised bananas taste perfectly fine, but how often have you removed the bad bits or even thrown away the whole bent banger, simply because of the way it looked? Aversion, the power of yuk, is the second technique a baby learns to use in order to manipulate the world around it. The first one happens when the baby realises, ‘If I cry long enough, they come back.’ Shortly after that, it realises that you cry, they come, they give you ‘what you want’, then all you you have to do is reject what they’re trying to feed you, and voila, you’re the boss. You’ve learned that ‘no’ beats ‘yes’ every time, and now you can rule dinner. They don’t call it a high chair for nothing.

The power of yuk survives into adulthood – essentially, ‘picky eaters’ are just trying to regain or retain some influence over an out of control world in which makes them anxious, using one of the first techniques they ever learned. The second oldest trick in the book. A technique that has served them for many years just like they like it, with all the pickles picked out.

That’s one interpretation.

The other one is more direct: the shit really does taste awful. Beer, liquor, cigarettes… all the ‘adult pleasures’ taste disgusting to most kids. I remember male friends of mine ‘forcing’ themselves to drink beer until they liked it, simply because they’d realised early on in the piece that both their social life and their masculinity depended on it. Bottoms up, Aussie blokes.

So what is it? Martinis, caviar, oysters, truffles, cigars and cocaine are all supposed to be signs of class, the very stuff of that distinguishes the finery of high living monied adult sophistication from the ‘greasy kids stuff’ of chicken, chips, sauce, lollies, chicken noodles and icecream. To kids, they all taste yucky. Does this prove that kids have ‘immature taste’, or that adults have ‘bad taste’?

It’s worth thinking about in terms of what we know of the cruel honesty of children. If a kid calls you fatty, it hurts the most because you know that, from the child’s perspective, it’s true. That’s what makes them such great bullies, and why their meanness hurts so much – they really mean it. They’re not capable of those other hallmarks of adult behaviour – hypocrisy and disavowal – they call it like they see it. ‘Colonel Blimp’ is not the respected CEO of a Liquor Empire, he’s just a big fatty boomba getting even more enormous by eating slimy food and smoking gross cigars.

I think back to my sister and cousins, dancing around the living room to Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’, blithely mouthing lyrics they would not grasp the adult meaning of for another ten years or so. Lucky them. But maybe what Madonna was really treating us to was not a description of a petal-browning deflowering so much as a subliminal lesson. Maybe what she was really singing was not, ‘Like a virgin’ so much as ‘Like aversion’, a hidden version contained within the virgin version…

The song would make a whole different kind of sense, one that I think carries a truth – most of the things that adults do are really, really yucky. Maybe this is what Madonna was really saying when she explained how she’d ‘made it through the wilderness’ – after a lot of practice, she’d come out the other end enjoying the very things that caused her so much disgust and distress as young’un. Or maybe this is why thugged out, blinged up rappers are so keen to show themselves enjoying a number of disgusting pleasures at once: Cristal, XO, LV, Escalade, bling – their mastery is a matter of juggling eight yuks at once with the practiced ease of an old pro. Look mum, no hands, ice grill – say cheese.

So listen here, kiddo, this is the world you’ve been offered: you can either show your aversion and reject it with an ‘I don’t want to, it tastes yucky’ attitude and ostracise yourself for having ‘kiddy tastebuds’. You get to keep your icecream, but you’ll never make it in this industry, baby. If you wanna do that, you’re going to have to learn to do what all the successfully adult men and women have learned to, and actually enjoy eating, drinking and doing the most disgusting things. Bottoms up, chin chin – say 'yum, blue cheese'. Learning to enjoy what formerly repulsed you – that’s what it really means to become a (wo)man, kids.

Busted Flush (how [not] to polish a turd)

2007-10-01T12:47:00.000+10:00

We’ve all caught ourselves doing it at some point, always much, much too late. You think you’re on a winning wicket. You’re the wiggling, jiggling, singing, whistling, version of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character on the prow of the Titanic. You’re barking ‘I’m the king of the world’ at the sky. At the time you were thinking: ‘I’m the shit. This is the shit.’ Now, you look back and think: ‘I was (full of) shit.’ The busted flush, ladies and gentlemen. ‘You can’t polish a turd’, as the saying goes. But the thing is, you wouldn’t if you knew you were doing it. This is the living tragedy of the turd polisher – you buff and you wax and you think, ‘Gee, this is pretty good. I’m pretty good. She’s pretty nice. These people are all friendly, talented, and not at all manipulative, talentless and evil.’ Nobody knowingly polishes a turd. And this is exactly why there’s so much turd polishing going on, and why the whole sticky, stinky process involves people so much. For so many people, a what might seem to you or I like a sticky date with the less than magic pudding could be a dream date with destiny, fame and fortune.

Every week, Australian Idol brings into our homes condensed samples of what a ‘polished performance’ looks like, performances that could be either pungent or poignant, depending on where you are in the polishing process. Australian Idol is all about offering the world the most ‘polished performance’ possible. But of what? Think of any of your favourite singers, the ones who have something truly great about them. Or any that have personality. Or that are just odd. Kate Bush, Björk, Joanna Newsom, Cat Power – all famous for their weird and wonderful voices. And none of them would make it past the casting. And they can sing at least – what about Bob Dylan or Lou Reed? Idol is practically a turd polishing machine, a guaranteed, patented process that week by week, in countries all over the world, whittles its specimens down to a finished product that is both incredibly polished and undeniably shit.

Celine Dion is the quintessence of this idea – her accumulated work is a veritable backlog of the unspeakably awful, all sung with enough polished perfection to shatter every crystal on board the Titanic. It’s actually hard to be that shit, if you’ve ever tried. Celine is so good at being so bad that her lung busting chords would stretch even the most adept karaoke buff, leaving them virtually prolapsed, gasping and spluttering for air and octaves as their rendition of ‘the one about ship going down’ sinks into the mire. Dion’s most famous work is associated with Titanic, and this is no coincidence – especially given that Dion would not only easily win Australian Idol, but that she is in every way the exemplary specimen, the very thing they’re all looking to emulate and exceed. As far as Idol is concerned, she’s the shit.

The successful Idol contestants, like Dion, will be doomed to a lifetime of sitting in their mansions polishing their trophies, those gold-plated reminders of their prize nuggets whose gleaming, steaming presence makes them wonder how on earth people listen to wretched shit sung by people who can’t. Probably they’re so rich they can employ someone to polish their awards for them, allowing them to focus on the release of their new fragrance, which their fans will (of course), buy and spray all over themselves, hoping that a little of that magic will rub off on them. And no doubt a bit of it will. Ah, the sweet smell of success.

(M by Mariah Carey)

All Hat and No Pants (pitbull on the pantleg)

2007-09-28T12:03:00.000+10:00

When we say something is ‘all hat and no pants’ this is usually not a compliment. It’s a judgment about something that looks as it should but limps where the lacking counts. Pants themselves may be signs of an effort to achieve the pleasure of satisfaction, but ‘pants’ is the bottom of the barrel, as the phrase ‘a complete load of pants’ shows. But even as we dismiss pants, we remain obsessed with them – we have become panthounds, always always sniffing after a bit of leg. Dogs need four, but humans are doubly depraved: a mere pair of legs is enough to keep us erect and on the hunt.

What our contemporary trouser fixation also shows is our worship at the church of latter day confusion. Like a leg-humping Cocker, we are panting up the wrong leg. And while we remain fixated on the pants at hand, we’ve inevitably forgotten what’s going on upstairs. We’ve become all pants, and no hat – a society that has forgotten its hat for so long it is now no longer able to wear it. The very sight of a real hat among the young would cause an outbreak of fear and loathing: even if kids these days knew what one was, they wouldn’t know where to put it. You can imagine the headlines on the day of his promised return:

Headline: ‘The Cat in the Hat has Come Back!’ (or maybe just ‘Cat in Hat: Back’)

Kids (these days): The Cat in the… Hat? What’s hat?

Imagine the contemporary confusion of ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’. In our disenchanted, hatless world, who knows what he would have mistaken her for – this season, it would probably be leggings, or those godawful spray-on jeans. ‘The K’d up Coolsie Who Mistook the Girlfriend he had Mistaken for a Hat for Leggings and Adicolors’ – now that’s a mouthful – let’s thank the man upstairs we weren’t there to see that case of mistaken identity in the second-degree, whose sordid acting out would have to look something like George W’s ‘ten gallon twat’ message to the voters during his governorial campaign a decade or so in the state of Texass:

‘I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity’.

Oh, you poor, sad, pant-munching pitbulls. Whatever happened to you? Some say that it’s mans erection that distinguishes him among the apes, but the truth is that it’s hats that have, until recently, distinguished us among ourselves. And with the final piffing of the lids, we have doffed our caps for the last time to any kind of legitimate authority. We no longer know who we are, because we no longer know who ‘they’ are.

Once upon a time, real men wore hats, while men with authority wore really, really stupid hats. Silly hats were serious business. The bishop’s mitre, the judge’s wig, the palace guard’s bearskin, the king’s crown – the sillier the hat, the more serious the business. Back in the good old days, if you were brought before a panel of men, the ludicrousness of their headwear was a fairly accurate indication of how much trouble you were in. If you were ‘judged’ by nine old men wearing truly preposterous hats, you were doomed.

But with the removal of the silly hat from public life, the distinction they lent the wearer has likewise disappeared. These days, we resort to saying ‘(s)he wears the pants’. It’s something we admit with more resignation than reverence. Why obey the pantwearer? Out of love? No! Just because of your lowdown panty needs. If you want to get into someone’s pants, you’ve got to allow them to wear them first – hence. But maybe it’s not even for our benefit, so much as just indifference and boredom – because there’s nothing else to do, and no-one else to obey, simply due to the fact that there’s no-one left willing or able to wear silly hats anymore.

Maybe this is why people are increasingly drawn back to the extremes of religion and tradition. For your average ‘hatless wonder’, (who could never wear the silly hat; because the silly hat would end up wearing them) the sight of a bunch of men not only wearing dresses, capes and stupid hats but pulling it off with splendid calm evokes a remnant of that ancient awe our ancestors must have felt at the sight of two odd foot of be-jewelled bearskin on top of a bearded Pharisee. Maybe the commitment of Islamist terror groups to jihad is not based on the prospect of virgins in the afterlife at all, but a quiet reverence for the successful wearers of silly hats. For these are men who are not only willing to die for their cause, but are willing to do so while sporting (and supporting) silly hats, hats that actually suit them.

If this is true, then war the war on terror will never be won by the US until such time as its leaders realise: dying for the flag is nothing compared to dying for the hat. They don’t need a ‘strategy’, they need a really, really, really stupid hat. Until they know that, they will remain as they are: witless, hatless, dogged rutters despondently trying to find a leg to hump somewhere on the barren expanse Osama’s robe-covered pantleg.

Sexy, sexy guineapigs (is it all over my Facebook?)

2007-09-17T14:10:00.000+10:00

I saw a funny thing the other day. I was riding my bicycle down Swanston St, avoiding the Zombielike gaggles of international students who seem to have interpreted the new bike lane as ‘what you stumble onto’ when you’re sick of the boring old footpath. But this tram said something that nearly made me prang it without having one of the ‘full-fee undead’ stagger into my path. It was a piece of government propaganda, and it read:

‘Talking online can lead to stalking online’.

Now, I was someone who started fragging their friends when I was just fourteen, around about the same time as I was racking pornos from the local newsagent to sell at school for a profit: enough to buy fags. Remember fragging? You kill your friends, well, virtually. Over a modem. It’s a game – I think it was Duke Nukem. Or some early version of Quake that my 486 could just barely handle. It was hardly Warcrack, but it was all we had (along with the B&H Extra Mild from the porno proceeds) so we took it for what it was and loved it as we found it.

Flash forward a year or two though, and a more adult realisation hit me: if you can’t get laid doing it, what’s the point? I fragged and I fragged, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t getting me any(where). In fact, a lot of things are rendered absurd if you remove the whiff of coitus… try nightclubbing when you’re in a loving relationship and go there ‘for the music’ – idiot. Basically, the problem was precisely that fragging online didn’t lead to shagging offline – and so I hung up my joystick and headphones, picked up the cordless phone, and dialled her number.

In the years before Facebook, Myspace or even blogs, online networking was a thing of nerds being orcs in order to get pussy (and a lower armor class). Blogging online lead to flogging online, at best. Or new chainmail. And ‘orc pussy’, as everyone knows, all too often turns out to be nothing more than some nerd(’s) arsehole. Who knows, maybe that’s your thing. Beauty is The Eye of the Beholder?

A few years later, it’s precisely arsehole that becomes the plat du jour, with sites like gay.com offering the young and the breastless (as well as ladies who munch) the opportunity to hook up anonymous sex faster than you can get from shared postcode to postcoitus. Suddenly, chumming online lead directly to bumming offline, and the internet began to make sense for people who don’t paint miniatures when they’re not battling dragons or being bullied by the ‘all too real’ trolls of the playground.

Five years later, and Myspace offers playmates a’plenty – it is entirely possible conduct a diverse and interesting sex life through the internet. For many, it’s the first time that such a thing has been facilitated. Fact is that until the internet came ‘of age’, for the majority of people, it was actually really, really difficult to get laid. But now, there’s so many likeminded people online that every monster can find its equal. Depending on your perversion, talking online can lead to porking offline (bushpigs, mud-trolls, you name ‘em), just as thanking online can lead to spanking offline.

Facebook takes the fantasy one step further, bringing back into spunking distance all your old flames and half-cocked romances from yesteryear. It’s the ultimate ‘wait and see’ approach: you keep them up your sleeve, they keep writing on your wall, and who knows? All under the pretence of friends, you nurture new secret longings as formerly unavailable (s)ex partners suddenly (and simultaneously) add themselves to the deck of question marks and long shot money shots. If you’re in a standard relationship, your monogamy is (mostly, still) not-negotiable: there’s only one person you’re allowed to sleep with. If you’re single, there’s probably still not very many, and this is the depressing ‘reality’ of being a free agent: once you remove the socially unacceptable and those repulsed by the sight of you, you’re usually only left with a couple… that’s right, very the person you’re sleeping with, if you still are. But once this does become a depressing thought, provided you have Facebook, you just hit on everyone. Even if it’s a hundred to one shot, Facebook means you’re bound to hit it off with someone. The numbers fantasy trumps the ugliest reality. And from what I gather of the growing carnage and excitement mounting around me, this is something that people find more exciting than frightening. We are in the grips of a world-historic social experiment, with ourselves and all our (potentially) loved ones the sexy, sexy guinea pigs. Ooh, err.

In fact, the other side of the government’s ‘stranger danger’ campaign is that a lot of people want to be stalked, in a certain way. By the right person. Gently. Lovingly. To them, the worst thing, the truly unimaginable horror, is not that ‘somebody is watching’ , it’s that ‘nobody is watching’. If nobody is out to get you in 2007, then you’re either not online, you have a disease, or you’re one of those weirdest of perverts who gets off on being lonely. As I’m sure little Johnny himself will discover, once he becomes a private citizen with a computer and time on his hands, ‘Big Brother is watching you’ is not the forewarning of 1984, it’s the fantasy of 2007.

Square Mint, Round Hole

2007-09-11T19:56:00.000+10:00

In the late eighties, Allen’s ran a campaign for Kool Mints. The ad was full of lipsticked mouths popping those fresh-tasting lollies. It was captivating. But then there was the tag line:

‘You can’t put a square mint in round hole.’

Now, to a seven year old who’d been a regular consumer of Minties for some years, this came as quite a shock. I was, in fact, just in the process of polishing off a lollybag I’d been given on leaving a friend’s birthday, and among the other sweet things (toxic bananas, snakes, milk bottles, and even a redskin) were several Minties. What could this mean? In what sense was it possible that I couldn’t put a square mint in my round hole? Was my taste for both Minties and Kool Mints somehow abominable? Would my ‘unnatural’ tastes somehow ruin my health? Was I still loveable? Would I mutate? Would I die?

It was a shock to thought, and for some reason it has never left me. I’ve been unpacking and re-packing the message of that ad ever since. A year or two later, I discovered that Kool Mints aren’t round, they’re spherical, and that Minties, when it’s not summer, are a kind of blobby bricklike pellet. So what were those copywriters trying to say? Not only had those delicious, minty shapes lost an entire dimension, but, according to them, it was somehow unnatural and wrong to enjoy what had always tasted perfectly delicious and caused me no obvious harm. Was it that you couldn’t do it? No. What the Kool Mints ad was really saying was not ‘You can’t put a square mint in a round hole’ but that, on some level, you really shouldn’t. Because… ‘we say it’s unnatural’.

Ten years after the initial impact of all this misinformation I was waiting at a tram-stop. It was one of those late January Melbourne scorchers, one so hot that even the most stubborn ‘round’ Kool Mint would not only stick to, but melt into, the nearest ‘square’ Mintie. A sticky lolly afternoon, if ever there was one. My shirt was half-soaked with sweat, and the clipboard in my hand was getting slippery in my clammy mits. To make matters worse, I was sharing space with two incredibly skanky English backpackers, each with a slippy clipboard of their own. They both stank of BO, booze, smeg and patchouli.

It was that bad: I had sunk as low as it’s possible for a gainfully employed person to go – I was selling long-distance telephone contracts, door-to-door. A friend of mine, and a good one at that, had just come back from backpacking around Australia, where desperation had led him to contemplate the horrible work I was now, for some stupid reason, involving myself in. Who knows why? I know why: we were young, we needed goon, and we had no money.

With no training, no authorisation and no experience, it was possible within the space of hours to be added to the horde of Dutch, Israeli, Irish and British backpackers doing their best to keep themselves in the manner to which their greasy locks and lice had become accustomed: at the bar (on dollar pots night) and in bunkbeds, tally-hos and rubber johnnies.

There we were: me and these two skanky Stellas. One of them looks at this muscle Mary at the tramstop on the other side of St Kilda road and says: ‘Look at them. It’s disgusting, innit.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
And she told me, in graphic Cockney (with more emphasis on the cock) what she thought of ‘them’, and what they apparently like to do to each to each other of a sticky summer evening.
I said: ‘Well, if they like doing that, then you’re probably not going to be involved, so what do you care?’
‘Well,’ she said, indignantly, ‘It’s not natural, innit?’
Suddenly, my brain was full of a cavalcade of mints, of all shapes and sizes, streaming like bullets out of my mouth in her direction accompanied a brainlooped quote from the Simpsons, screeching ‘Freshen yer drink, govna?’
I recovered, and asked her, ‘Don’t you use contraception? And smoke? And didn’t you fly here? On a plane?’ (I tactfully omitted what I knew her mate told me about her pole-dancing, and probably pole-smoking past – initially as an [enthusiastic] amateur, if her chum could be believed. For someone who’d sucked a such a lot of cock, she sure had a weird attitude to it)
‘Yeabut, that’s different, innit?’ She retorted, just as the tram pulled in. We spent the rest of the afternoon bothering people in their own homes, trying to get them to sign up (barely legally) to something they already had for a similar price. In ‘the industry’, it’s called a churn: and boy, it was enough to give you indigestion. Like a whole stomach full of something… unnatural.

Needless to say, the next day all the English backpackers wasted no time in expressing surprise: ‘I didn’t know you were gay, man – but that’s alright, I’m cool with that.’ This is what I heard, in variations, while we were handing in our completed ‘churns’ from yesterday and re-stocking our clipboards. ‘Neither did I…’ I replied, ‘But you learn new things all the time, working here, don’t you.’

So Stella was choked up with hate – and given what I knew about her past (assuming she wasn’t just another victim of the hostel rumour mill), we can say that it’s probably a rebuke about those things she’s done (with men far less fit, gentle and attractive) in the dark corners of her Saturdays past. But why say it’s unnatural?

It’s simple: natural claims are legitimate claims. So ‘unnatural acts’ are illegitimate. Natural activities are reasonable activities. Unnatural pastimes are unreasonable pastimes… you get the picture? For the record: human behaviour is conventional. It doesn’t matter if Onelove is on Friday or Saturday, as long as all the munters know when and where to queue and pop. Or as a Pakistani Muslim taxi driver told me the other night (and I think he was quoting this from somewhere else): ‘You Aussies have beer. We have beards.’ Fine, but conventions are fragile to begin with at least. They need something to lock them in, to make them difficult to disagree with. They need to be naturalised. In becoming ‘natural’, they become part of the order of the universe – and so they become sturdy, and hard to disagree with… Never forget, the way it is is the way it is because that’s the way it is, because that’s naturally the way it is. And if people think otherwise? Well then, make laws and arm a group of people to enforce them, and beat or lock up anyone who disagrees. (Oh, and make sure you remove your identification, so they don’t get you on camera doing it).

So this is what I want you to do. I want you to go out and buy a packet of both Minties and Kool Mints… I want to you get one of each, and I want you to put both of them in your mouth, and suck on them. Suck on them, enjoy the delicious flavour, and think about every dingbat who’s ever stared at your tits; sneered at the people you love; or tried to convince you that the way they hate is somehow part of the cosmos. Eat both whole packets all together at once, and then go and find the person who said those things, and do what comes naturally after ingesting so much ‘unnatural’ material: vomit all over them.

Remember to Forget to Remember (old school cows)

2007-09-03T11:43:00.000+10:00

As a young man, Nietzsche was jealous of cows. It wasn’t their splendid horns or udders that moved him to fits of envy, or their ability to enjoy (for a second time) the food they regurgitate back into their mouths. It’s just that, well, they don’t remember. Without any sense of Tuesday or ten years ago, cows live a life that’s neither boring nor painful: a life that could be loosely described as happy. As Nietzsche himself wrote, “A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say: 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' – but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering...”

Lumbered with memories, we humans are unable to forget and condemned to remember, so most of the time, our “existence is only an uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself.”

But bingeing changes all that. Booze, drugs, whatever your poison, they’ll wash away painful memories in the sweet tides of oblivion. When some old Dig reminds you irritatingly that ‘A man is not a camel’, what he neglects to mention is that us munters may not be camels, but we’re not far from Nietzsche’s cows. But non-remembering not confined to munters. I just got back from a school reunion, and the weird interplay of remembering/forgetting is something that will stay with me… at least until the booze starts flowing again. That’s why you drink a toast to absent friends… but is present company excluded?

“I feel like I’ve definitely done damage to my short-term memory,” an ex-raving school friend of mine confessed. He’s now a psychologist. “I sit in a room with a patient and suddenly, I forget their name…” He comforts himself by remembering another friend (who forgot the date of the reunion, and couldn’t make it) whose short-term memory has been so bad for so long that he started recording every single drug he’s ever taken, apparently something approaching 1,000 units… This is a horrible thing to want to remember, especially when you still can’t remember the number of the rehab clinic, or you’ve walked into the bedroom with a kitchen knife (again) but can’t remember why…

But apart from short-term memory loss, most of my old school ties had done other kinds of damage to themselves: getting the wrong one knocked up; becoming bull-necked and boring; getting chained to some ‘hell hath harbour views’-type job they seemed to want to resign from… and yet were resigned to… or had even re-signed to… or finding God – good lord. Why do they call it ‘seeing the light’ when it’s much more like a warm, soothing (and sanctimonious) darkness? Ignorance is righteous bliss. God seems to have all the effectiveness of crawling under blankets to stop boogymen (what you can’t see can’t hurt you, right?). But that’s the funny thing about oblivion. For something so frightening, it’s scarily popular. And back at the reunion, oblivion was chilled in bottles, marked CUB.

I got panicked seeing everyone standing there, with their wine and their name-tags. But only half of the panic was because of the memories. The other half was because of the complete lack of memories. Truth was, I didn’t really know who most of these people were. I barely recognised them, even with the name-tags on. Even after they told me who they were (again). So I kept drinking. It worked: by 3am, a wonderful thing had happened. All the people I couldn’t remember had gone… somewhere… home? Back to school? To be replaced by my close group of friends, who, because of all the drinking (just like old times) I could barely remember (just like old times). It was… um… just like old times… stop me if I’ve told you this one before… sorry, what did you say your name was again?

And by the time it was within sipping distance, oblivion had become incredibly cheerful. It was a thirsty, tasty thought. Yes – the fact that the memories of a huge chunk of my life ended up teetering between twenty standard drinks and total personal oblivion was a source of great comfort to me… yes… the grass really was greener on ‘the other side’… It’s true. By 3:30 I was as happy as a cow in the sunshine of the smokeless pub (whose spushy carpet smelt like vomit)… it’s just that I just can’t remember why.

QWERTY, AZERTY, BOHICA

2007-08-27T18:54:00.000+10:00

If you’ve ever travelled across different countries in Europe, one of the most frustrating things can be sending emails home. If that sounds like a strange thing to say, well, you’ve probably never been travelling in Europe. This is simply because most countries in Europe use a variation on the US-standard QWERTY design: the infamous French AZERTY, or the just slightly less annoying AZERTZ, the standard German layout. The first few internet café sessions are hell. It’s not as if it’s impossible to get the words out, but the little differences and absences are all the more frustrating for being apparently minor. Just like cutting your thumb, you realise how often you use certain keys, and how thoughtlessly, almost automatically, your muscles are programmed to write things in a certain way, in a certain order. But given a few sessions, your neural pathways seem to re-wire themselves, and what was once frustrating becomes as natural as buttering monkeys… stay long enough, and you’ll even have difficulty getting used to QWERTY again…

Each culture/language claims their keyboard is the most efficient, but this is far from clear. What is certain in each case is that the keyboard arrangement of any given culture is a ubiquitous fact, and one that was there long before you sat down to start typing. The system precedes you, and you have to adjust to it. Of course, you could insist on using the apparently more efficient Dvorak arrangement – yes, I’d never heard of it either, until I wiki-ed it. It’s Norwegian, it’s apparently much better… and it never took off. But try demanding one of those puppies in any internet café, or when you order your new laptop. Then imagine training yourself how to use one, only to have to use QWERTY, AZERTY or AZERTZ every time you were cross office floors or borders and needed to shoot of an email or three. It would take hours for you to hunt and peck your way through an email, even one as short as this one here:

“Hey Harry,

We actually ended up receiving another review of this album that was a little more positive, so I think we're going to have to go with that one instead.

This was a great piece, and definitely insightful, but as you guessed, we do try to steer clear of negative reviews.

Hope you understand...

thanks

Mike”

This is actually an exact paste of a message that my friend ‘Harry’ received just the other day, in response to a CD review he’d written of X’s new (and slightly disappointing) album. Harry had been excited to get the hook-up writing for the prestigious website, and had spent the week carefully thinking up and typing out his review, taking care to critically describe and access the relative merits of the work. I read the review – it was well written, thorough, and critical. And this was exactly the problem. After spending so long thinking exactly what to type and how to arrange it, Harry had failed to do the most important thing of all: he hadn’t read between the lines.

Just like the QWERTY keyboard he used to type his rejection, Mike (from his airy NYC loft office) was keyed into a process he, like all the magazine’s employees, were subject to, but not wholly aware of. And, unless he was one of the mag’s founders, it was a system that was already in place when he was in Harry’s position, nervously submitting his first carefully-considered review.

One of two things probably happened on that day. Either Mike submitted a gushing, effusive review of the album in question, or, if he was a little more brave or foolish, he might have submitted something less than positive… What do you think would have happened? In the former case, it probably would have been accepted without fuss, and Bob, seeing how few changes had been made to his work, probably would have ‘taken the hint’ and kept churning out reviews in the same style. Much loved and respected, Bob soon becomes an authority on his genre of music, possessing a knowledge and style that becomes the benchmark… often emulated, but seldom surpassed. Molly Meldrum is a (sad old) case in point. Just get yourself a recognisable style or look (a silly hat will do nicely) and praise everything, and you’ve got a job for life.

But what would have happened in the latter case…? Well, Bob would probably have received an email not dissimilar to the one above. You’re a young wannabe freelance writer, and this is your first hook-up with the aforementioned ‘prestigious music magazine’. What do you do? BOHICA, that’s what. This is not a kind of keyboard. It stands for ‘Bend over (here it comes again)’. If you’re in a new job and the boss is asking for your flexibility and understanding on this matter, this exactly what’s being tacitly demanded.

This is how it happens. Just like the frustrated American backpacker mashing the ‘foreign’ keys frustrating the formation of his digital loveletter to Candy back in Ohio, you either give up, reject the system, or acclimatise. You adapt, you cope. And who knows, in time, you probably even begin to identify with AZERTY and BOHICA, their easily accessible accents and exclamation points… you’ll probably defend the systems against criticism and change, and you’ll definitely install them in your office, your home, your schools… get ‘em for your kids and teach carefully teach them ‘how to’. Eventually, you even come to enjoy it. You end up loving it so much, you can’t wait to be the one who gives the newbie their initiation… and so it is with swift-moving fingers and a strange, almost nameless joy, that you shoot off the email…

Yeah, I’d sell my soul for total control…

2007-08-21T09:30:00.000+10:00

My parents indulged my super power fantasies for several years. This is what good parents do. Cloaking devices, x-ray vision, you name it, I lived them all. This was because my folks, knew (hoped) I would follow the ‘normal’ path of development and grow out of it eventually. In fact, half the skill of being a good parent could be nothing more than working out how to disillusion kids without shattering their confidence. You don’t bring kids up, you let them down – but you do it gently.

My parents were justified in their beliefs – my comic book hero delusions faded by age ten – well, most of them. The socially unacceptable ones, at least. But what about those who never ‘grow out of it’, like Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler’s number two? The one who looked like Henry Rollins’ craggly lovechild. No? You know, the one who ‘escaped’ the third Reich in a fighter plane in some hair-brained (and hair-oiled) attempt to negotiate peace. But peace was not forthcoming for Hess. He crash landed the plane in rural Scotland, where he was apparently met by a non-plussed local with a pitchfork – the ultimate reality check.

It’s hard to know what Hess thought would happen, but then again, it’s hard to know what Hess thought about anything. This is, after all, a man who thought that he had psychic powers. Apparently, he was convinced he was psychokinetic (PK). For the Deputy Führer, PK wasn’t just ‘a freshness burst that refreshes your breath,’ it was also the ability to send glasses skating across table-tops, a skill that he would practice while surrounded by his personal guards. Given what we know about the arbitrary manias of the Nazi elite, you can imagine the pressure on the guards:

‘Look!’ says Hess, ‘It moved!’

‘Yes, Herr Deputy Führer!’, says the lowly guard, quietly muttering, ‘crackpot!’ under his breath.

The infallible belief in one’s own super power is analogous to what happens to rock stars who’ve been living inside the bubble of their own success for many years – surrounded by people who pander to their every whim, and who are desparately afraid of their (David Lee) wrath, should they shake the gilded cage of illusion. As ‘parents’, these terrified employees are failing their ‘children’, but the best bet is just to nod, smile, and take the money: for the Mariah Careys and James Hetfields of this world, it’s probably too late. The only type of ‘parent’ a rock star wants is the one who’s going to let them continue to sup the warm milk of the bottle of their fantasies.

But if you’re not privileged enough to be cosseted in a world of make believe à la Axl Rose or Rudolph Hess, it’s very difficult to maintain these kinds of fantasies. If your partner is any kind of ‘normal’ adult, then the reaction to your indulgent ‘Look, I can fly, I’m a plane, I’m superman…’ outbursts is probably a cold hard dose of reality. (S)he is the pitchfork-toting farmer to your Hess plane flight. And this is why you love him/her, strange as it may seem. (S)he’s prodding you for a reason: ‘reality’ might not be really real, but as a couple it’s all you share, it’s the essence of your ‘common ground’. Either you ‘ground the plane’ of your fantasies when (s)he asks you to or the whole thing crashes and burns. It’s either that, or (s)he joins you in midair…

Super power fantasies can consume your life to the point where you find yourself faced with a pitchfork or face down on the asphalt, but ultimately they’re all inside your head. However, somewhere over the North Atlantic in 2005, a new fantasy landed… and one which is scarily omnipresent. Mixing between two vinyl records, perfectly sufficient in 2003, suddenly became an unpardonable brake on creativity, and the search to take ‘total control of the creative process’ with a transparent, all-parameter controller began to possess the imaginations of people like Richie Hawtin and Robert (Monolake) Henke. Enter the custom control surface. Richie Hawtin describes it thus: The biggest thing that I’m looking for, or hoping for, is/are new control surfaces and interface devices for computers and technology… We need a new way of human/technology interaction.”

Unlike Hess, Axl or Mariah, Hawtin et al are not the only ones living in the fantasy. The idea of total, almost magical control has swiftly percolated through the industry, so by 2007, the distinct impression I get from interviewing producer/DJs is that everyone wants a fat controller of their very own, to have one and to be one… In becoming common, the shared fantasy has formed the new shared reality of electronic music. Jazz Mutant, makers of the ultra geek-chic ‘Dexter’ controller, sing the manic hymn from their website, and they only thing about them that’s depressed is their caps-lock button:

“HASN’T EVERY MUSICIAN OR PRODUCER FANTASIZED OF CONTROLLING THEIR FAVOURITE DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION BY TOUCHING THE ACTUAL USER INTERFACE DIRECTLY ON THE SCREEN? JAZZMUTANT HAS PARTNERED WITH LEADING SOFTWARE COMPANIES TO MAKE THIS DREAM A REALITY.”

And here you were thinking that DJing is still about mixing records? Who’s the deluded one now?

Grace Jones (versus the Automatic Telling Machine)

2007-08-14T09:03:00.000+10:00

A friend of mine has this fantasy about his perfect night out. Well, don’t we all? But I’m going to tell you about his, because I prefer it to mine. Justifying his expensive and wasteful pursuit of folly to a quizzical homebody friend, he explained his jackpot thus:

‘I just have this idea that, somehow, I might end up at the end of the night in a hot-tub with Grace Jones’.

Gamblers (the literal, money-spunking kind) dream of their own ‘jackpot-to-come’: the one big enough so they can shout their whole family dinner at Crown. Probably a weird dinner when the day comes (if it ever does) with the family’s own dinner-set at the hock shop and everything, even the children’s toys, down at the repo depot. But go on, press the button, pump the one-armed-bandit one more time – c’mon, your luck’s bound to change. It has to, sooner or later. Right? Well? Of course not. ‘Everybody knows’ that this is impossible. Electronic pokies are programmed so that, if you play them regularly, you will lose. I know this is hardly news, but it bears repeating. Winning is statistically impossible. The ‘jackpot-to-come’… well, it can’t. Just like my friend won’t end up in a hot-tub with Grace Jones.

But I wonder though, if there was such a thing as an ‘Automatic Telling Machine’, what difference would it make? I mean, instead of just the normal ‘Automatic Teller Machine’. Picture yourself prior to the moment of folly… but instead of inserting your card, you somehow swipe yourself… like those magic 8 balls, the Telling Machine could tell you your real chances of hitting that jackpot, winding up in that hot-tub, landing that sexy dancer (with a click of the fingers, without the clap).

It would be disastrous. The only thing you need more than the cash advance from the teller machine is another blanketing layer of drunkenness to cushion and comfort your cherished illusion. In this way, a pokie machine is the opposite of a Telling Machine – the one thing it refuses to do is actually give you the whole truth straight away. And that’s just the way gamblers like it. It keeps on repeating part of the truth, over and over. And your job is just to ignore it, every time it appears. This is actually the key reason why people spend time playing the pokies, but not ATMs.

But the gambler’s mistake is not that they fool themselves, it’s that the machine doesn’t. You’re playing, but the machine isn’t. You don’t play the pokies, they play you. But they’re not playing - they’re just doing exactly what they’re programmed to do. Which is to rob you. But people are something else entirely. You can be sure that the pokie machine will screw you… but the person you’re plying with drink and chatting up – how can you tell? Fact is, there is no telling with people:

‘You never told me you were married!’

‘You never told me all there is to know about the Crying Game!’

‘I never told you about my years in the foreign legion…’

‘Ah yes, about those lesions…’

‘Did I mention I also share a bed with my axolotl?’

And you’ll never even know about the Rohypnol… But as little as we can tell (or do tell) about each other, and as dodgy as we’re capable of being, we’re still able to do something no machine can… and this is the magical, wonderful thing about people: we can bullshit ourselves. Okay, sure, so there’s no way of telling what the other person’s thinking. But then again, who knows what you’re capable of? You do? Hah! What you did the other week, that’s only an inkling. Who can tell really? Human beings are more like machines for misrecognition than anything else. But it all blends perfectly, because (while a pokie machine is a pokie machine is a pokie machine), a human being with a wad full of machine-warm cash and a belly full of liquor can convince themselves of anything, and maybe ‘him’ or ‘her’ too. Given enough to drink, you could even convince yourself that (s)he (five foot nothing, blotchy and white, with an underbite) was Grace Jones and that ‘that’ (a child’s wading pool in a cold suburban garage filled with dubiously murky liquid) was, in actual fact, the hot-tub of your fantasies. Well, you can tell yourself that’s what it was. That’s what makes you different from a machine.

Codpieceface (What did you say?)

2007-08-06T21:18:00.000+10:00

As a child I was frightened and excited by a lot of things in Labyrinth. It wasn’t just Jennifer Connolly’s peach-fuzz moustache or the soft whorls of her unplucked eyebrows, although these things did stir a primeval longing I’m still dealing with… But more than Connolly’s budding charms, the Bog of Eternal Stench, Hoggle, or ‘Dance Magic Dance’, the thing that left the deepest impression on me as a child was David ‘Goblin King’ Bowie’s tights, and the magic lunchbox they carried. In the cinema, where I was first ‘exposed’ to its glory, that crotch was ten feet high. There was something truly monstrous about those tights, something that revealed more of their contents by ‘hiding’ them in sheer grey nylon than any kind of ‘revealing’ would have shown. All they did was cling, but with this one simple act they proved that some kinds of clothing are capable of producing something more naked than naked… a kind of supernudity.

Flashback to ‘93, and everything’s cut of a decidedly different cloth. These are days in which it is conceivable to have an undercut, an ear-ring and a goatee and still be just behind the curve of the cool. Cobain was still alive, JJJ still played interesting music, and Porno was for Pyros. In ‘91-‘92 there were Stüssy beach pants (which my music teacher called ‘harem pants’) which produced in the wearer two very pronounced buttocks and a soft whooshing effect when walking. By ’93, people were still wearing them with Doc Martens and flannies in some horrible condensation of ‘Big Audio Dynamite’ and ‘The Year that Punk Broke’, but by this stage, skate culture had already claimed more than a few hips (and cracks) with baggy jeans, which reached absurd proportions with rave-influenced atrocities like Kepper and Cross-Colours. It was a great year for those of us with stubborn paunches and stump ankles. For skinny people, it was a disaster. Whole groups of people seemed to flail in their clothing like panicked children trapped in a collapsed tent. Fat pants peaked somewhere in the Western suburbs in ’95, but the influence of their bluntness traveled down the pantlegs of the culture so that, by 1999, people were wearing skate shoes like Osiris that looked like the wearer had on a scuffed pair of Audi TTs. And looking back, I can’t help but wonder whether a whole generation were living in a fashion universe whose bagginess was conceived due the repressed trauma of seeing David Bowie in tights.

But now we’ve come full circle. In the past week I’ve seen two young gentlemen wearing pants tight and tapered enough to make David ‘Goblin King’ Bowie wince and grimace, showing his teeth in characteristic fashion. One guy appeared not so much restrained as propelled down the street by the pants themselves, as if the tightness had passed a critical threshold beyond which a constant elastic effect meant that the duds walked the wearer. He looked proud and helpless. In the 70s, Bon Scott and Robert Plant faced the daily dilemma of ‘which way to pack’, but the tightness of some of the latest pants is far beyond the old-school simplicity of ‘to the left’ – I can only imagine they require the absorption into the body cavity of a young man’s delicate parts, a technique filched from sumo wrestlers and the Russian ballet and whispered into eager ears at point of purchase. Comfy in our ‘harem pants’ in a ‘94 classroom, we tittered like pre-teen Japanese school girls at the in-class presentation of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ - we called each other ‘codpieceface’ with the confidence of total security. We thought, ‘no, it could never happen here.’ Then on the weekend, we took comfort watching a Clockwork Orange smugly imagining (from the warm, voluminous folds of our baggy trousers) that a world in which men wore tights was nothing but the crazed imaginings of film directors from a bygone era. Tights? Hah! The neck ruff seemed an equally plausible contender for ‘most unlikely fashion comeback of the century’.

But this is another century, and in 2007 on High St in Westgarth I saw a young man having to clamber onto a tram as if he had prosthetic legs and his pubic-hair super-glued to his inner thighs. Such, such was the tightness. And now the girls go one step further, and actually wear leggings. And ladies, I’d really think twice about that. If you’re white, that means you have cellulite, even if you think you don’t. In fact, unless you’re a black and field athlete or a pro cyclist, I’d recommend the following: never, ever ever wear leggings. No buts. But maybe you can’t help it, maybe it’s a similar trauma at work in your world – maybe you’re part of a generation of baby brothers and sisters who’d stood by helpless as their skinny elder siblings allowed themselves to be totally engulfed by baggy trousers and round-toed skate shoes. So now you’re imposing the revenge fantasy on their stump-legged others. Or… you don’t honestly think it suits you, do you? Maybe you need to admit that you’re the victim of something. That you’ve survived something awful, codpieceface… sorry, no it’s not just you. Maybe we’re all victims. Come to think of it, maybe it’s the experience of childhood horror like this that is the true beginning of all fashion.

Thingdom: the thing is king (and the king is a thing)

2007-07-31T07:55:00.000+10:00

So you paid your money to get into a ‘nightclub’. Sexy boys, screaming bitches, sweaty bodies. Life, heat, movement. Right? But when you got there, it was something else…there were all these weedy, unfriendly guys hanging around, arms crossed and heads nodding, whispering in each other’s ears. Oh dear, you’ve found yourself at Club Sausage. How did that happen? How does this happen? And not just to nights, but to whole musical genres, whole scenes? Whodunnit? What made the sausage sizzle flag, then sag? The nerds did. The otaku. And their infernal equipment.

What’s an otaku? I think William Gibson’s description sums this up nicely (and I think he’d love that I swiped this off wikipedia in five seconds). An otaku is a Japanese word for nerd, that can be roughly translated as a 'pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit'. But who are these otaku? What do they want? And what do they get out of their obsession? How does it start? And what are the side-effects? It’s not the equipment they want – at first. At first they want to capture ‘it’, ‘the thing’. Or to become something. They think, ‘I want to be an (insert equipment-mediated hobby here) enthusiast’. A connoisseur. An expert. So in the first phase, there is the ideal, and then there is ‘the thing’ that can be had through it… but then there is ‘the equipment’ that helps you get the thing. Otaku start with some idea or ideal they want to capture (or maybe it’s just the idea of capturing, again and again) but somehow, they end up totally focussed on the means of capturing it. Obsessing over the equipment. And then relating to other otaku through the equipment. Then, after a while, ‘it’ is never even mentioned, it’s just presumed, a background. Eventually… maybe the thing is no longer necessary, or just so obvious it doesn’t even need mentioning. And then, further along, what happens is that the equipment itself becomes the thing. You end up using microscopes to analyse microphones. Maybe that’s when you’ve really got a sausage club on your hands, when you get a bunch of guys who no longer even remember the thing. They just want to exist in the land of the best possible equipment. Like those men who don’t even take photographs anymore. They just collect cameras.

There’s that old phrase that ‘the difference between the men and the boys is the price of their toys’, but I think this misses something fundamental, something that only becomes clear once you put it up next to that other shopworn phrase ‘money is no object’ and make it rub up against a third sentiment, which can be most clearly expressed with the following phrase: ‘I like nice equipment.’ But otaku don’t just like ‘nice equipment’, they identify with it. Truly. Madly. Deeply. IT nerds relate much better to (and through) computers than they can to people. Sad but true. To them, computers are somehow warmer, zanier, cuter and funnier than people. They hum you calm. That’s why electronic music is always threatening to ‘turn sausage’ on you, because, well, it is the sound of ‘nice equipment’, a way of comparing the sounds of equipment, through sound equipment, with sound equipment. But maybe all music (asides from a capella choirs) is susceptible to this, can all become another sausage club victim. Anything involving men and equipment is always threatening to turn sausage.

Of course there are female otaku, too, but for most women, relating to other people is about, well, just that. Relating to people is actually about relating to other people. But, in a way that most of the women I know find baffling, or maybe just a little bit sad, for the otaku, relating to people is just another way of relating to equipment. Or maybe it’s just that they’re unable to do anything else. In then end, there is only the hum of equipment. And this is actually something the otaku finds deeply comforting.

OffyourFacebook (it’s on for young and old)

2007-07-23T23:44:00.000+10:00

My friend’s mother has become obsessed by Myspace – but not in order to get laid (I hope), or even to add Kevin Rudd as a fiend. No, not a bit of it. She’s not even a member. What she is (like the lion’s share of boomer/3LO listeners) is ‘deeply concerned’ by the ‘growth of social networking sites’ among youth. It’s something she finds both alarming and captivating: the idea of teens hooking up to gatecrash, bully, stab or fuck each other is something that exerts a morbid fascination for her, like many of her generation. This is something, after all, which is off limits to them. A whole generation who make do with key parties, stagflation, negative gearing and ‘sniff and stiff’ watch in horror and envy as their progeny accomplish acts of mindbending depravity and anonymity, achieving hard-ons with mouse-clicks in a way previously unimaginable. But I tried to explain to my friend’s ‘concerned’ mother that, contrary to what John Faine would have you believe, Myspace is utterly passé. Totally last season.

Straight away you say ‘Facebook’ – but you’d be living in the past too. And here you were thinking you were widdit. Down with the scene. When all the time you’re losing your edge (“to better-looking people, with better ideas and more talent… and they're actually really, really nice”).That’s right, Facebook is *like* so last minute, ‘n shit. What you want is its newer, better, evil cousin: OffyourFacebook. OffyourFacebook is a social networking site, just like Facebook, but with one essential difference: where Facebook is for people you remember from your past lives and selves, OffyourFacebook is for people you don’t remember. The people you don’t know you know. Because you were off your face. Hence the name.

The way it works is simple – all you need is the magic dongle. Members pay a small annual fee to join and are sent a small device in the post, not unlike a Tamagochi. You simply fit it to your keyring and wear it on you when you go out. Simple as. When you come within range of another member, the dongle (with its internal flash drive) stores the details of the other member. By pressing one of three buttons, members record how far the relationship went, but as a failsafe (this is for people off their face, after all), both the proximity of your partner’s dongle and the duration of the contact are measured and averaged. The next day, you just stick your dongle in the USB, login, and the website updates all your info for you.

Of course, a lot of people get off their face in order not to remember the things that being off their face enabled them to do to/with others – and Offyourfacebook is sensitive to this. Rather than bombard you with the full details of the other person, the site will only send you the person’s details upon request, and even then, it does it gently, reminding you of the other person based on eye colour, choice of perfume, colour of t-shirt, pubic hair and so forth. A further innovation is the use of avatars (called ‘off faces’) which enable two satisfied partners to ‘face off’ in complete anonymity. Either partner can indicate their availability with the ‘face off’ calendar, which indicates how randy the person is as well as their probable whereabouts on their ‘time off’. One member, who describes herself as being in a ‘loving, caring and otherwise monogamous’ relationship, explained her double-life like this:

“Look, I love my fiancé, but come on – you can’t show every side of your desire with one face. Ensceneoman (her partner’s face off partner) does things to me that my fiancé would be afraid to say. But at the same time, we both know that this is something that will never spill into our ‘face on’ life. We both have our limits, and we both respect that – we keep our 'on face' and our 'off face' separate, like business and pleasure. Besides, his boyfriend and his whole peer-group would be furious if they knew he was sleeping with a woman. The sex is amazing, but it’s more than just that: this is something that has helped us strengthen our on face relationships and get in touch with other parts of our desire that we wouldn’t be able to access. In five years, I reckon everyone will be on it. For me, this is the future of human relationships.”

© Peter Chambers 2007

Free choice? Jack Johnson?!

2007-07-16T13:22:00.000+10:00

You know, a lot of you are living under an illusion. Ask people why they’re doing what they’re doing, the people they’re doing it with, and the place they’re doing it in, and they’ll tell you they ‘chose’ it. I suppose that’s fine up to a point, but it pimps a distorting image of the whole situation, once you get to thinking it’s a ‘free choice’. Let’s go through this and ask ourselves about those things in our life that make us who we are, and then wonder which of them we chose, freely or at all:Parents? Country of birth? School? Friends? First job? Pregnancy? Marriage? House? Dog? Children? Disease? Death?

Some of these fundamental life-events contain absolutely no element of choice, either free or restricted. You didn’t choose to be born, where to grow up, or even the school where you met the people who you grew up with. What did you ‘freely choose’, really? Maybe you chose to do physics instead of chemistry? Maybe you chose to sleep with Bob, instead of Jenny… but then again, maybe Bob was the only person who could overcome their repulsion to sleep with you. You ‘chose’ to do commerce, but then, maybe you were too gutless to do social work or creative writing, and you didn’t want to go against what all your friends were doing, or disappoint your father (like you seem to do, no matter what). Did you ‘choose’ to get pregnant? Again? And even if you did choose to have ‘a’ baby, you didn’t choose the actual baby you had… odds on they weren’t quite who you’d hoped for… Or even that mortgage – okay, so you chose that particular house, but could you choose to not have a home, to live in a tent, on a boat, by the side of the road? You’re not even allowed to do that. Probably the only thing you really ‘chose’ were your consumer choices. Bog roll – scented and embossed, unscented, unbleached…hmm… or the colour of your toothbrush. Or the brand of batteries for your vibrator. Or your dog. Maybe you chose your dog…and you chose a labradoodle?

DJing (the old-school kind, with records in a box) presents us with something far more like life than the flattering picture we like to paint of ourselves as ‘empowered choosers’. As any DJ who has experienced the following conversation can testify, people (drunk people) seem to think that the person behind the decks has the entire history of dance-music packed into her box. A box that, in fact, can fit no more than about one hundred records.

Deck pest: Do you have…Mylo?
DJ: No. (I pack my box carefully, and I think about what I’m playing. I thought this track was appropriate for right now, but obviously not, thank you – now fuck off)

Back at the crib…

House guest: ‘Do you have… Milo?’
Host: No, only tea. (I asked you if you wanted tea because I only have tea.)
House guest: Oh…
Host: Do you want tea?
House guest: No… that’s fine. (I’ll just sulk)

Back at the foot of the booth, think about the DJ for a change (please desk pests, think of the poor DJ who’s trying their guts out to play the best music for the moment). Let’s say I have 100 pieces of vinyl, with an average of two tracks per EP. That’s two hundred distinct moods, each of which opens up new possibilities and closes off others. But I can’t just play any of them in any order – at any given moment, there’s probably only really about ten mixes to move into from the track that’s playing, at best. In any given set, there’s probably only one ‘golden window’ for you to drop Hall and Oates from without clearing the floor. Maybe. At critical points in the set there’s only one or two ways to move – because as it all rolls on, the selections are depleted, the choices diminished. The stakes get higher, and you’re playing with less time, less music and less potential. Not only that, but you’re also dealing with any bad selections you’ve already made. It’s as much mess as chess. And sometimes, when you’re tired and people are pestering you to play Jack Johnson or Tupac, you really get to the point of wanting to a real choice... the choice to KILL – ‘cos it’s either you or them, when you’re talking singer/songwriters.

Fact is, DJing presents us with a far more appropriate metaphor for our very limited life selections than the bullshit we’re fed about ‘free choice’ – the difference being that, in life, we make selections with individual pieces that we often didn’t choose at all. A large part of our box was pre-filled by our parents, really. Imagine that – having to DJ under pressure to a crowd full of drunk Jack Johnson fans with a box of records chosen by circumstance… or by your mother. No wonder that, most of the time, most people are ‘just coping’. Or just coping. That’s what we do, mostly. We cope. We’re presented with a half-made mess, and we’re told we ‘chose’ it – then when we try to turn it into something good, somebody comes along and asks for Mylo, or Milo, or Tupac, something which is both a reminder of how appalling other people’s taste is, and how badly they’d be doing if they were the one trying to transform their very limited selection into art. Now there’s a comfort. Think of the mess they’d be making of your life. You’re doing alright, kid.

Tear a hole in your habit! (and other cunning stunts)

2007-07-09T12:41:00.000+10:00

Last week we looked at the slow death of smoking. Are you still a part of it? How’s that working out for you? That bad, huh? Well then, maybe you need to ‘give it up’ and try something different. Maybe you need to experiment, do something new. As one fun nun once told me, if you want to pull a rabbit out of your hat, you need to tear a hole in your habit – have a crack at experimentation. Rutting is fine as far as it goes, but there comes a time to roll off your repetition and try, do or be something different, or differently at the very least.

Just like Warren is Rabbits forming, life is habit forming – you can’t live without habit, but at the same time, habit gets to living off you. You’ve got to re-balance the hard cheese of habit with a hot squirt of experimentation. Habit? You gotta have it. But without dehabituating yourself and your surroundings, you’ll suffocate, choke, croak. That’s the other reason smoking makes you cough. It’s a reminder. Take drugs (for example): drug taking starts as risk taking, which then becomes pleasure seeking, then habit forming, then death making. In a sense, drugs don’t work – they start by doing what you need, but they end by being needed. Two thirds of needle is need. Drugs are needy and unruly. They don’t do what they’re supposed to do, but you (as a user) have to. Who’s using who? You start off doing them to turn on, then you do them to turn off, then you do them because that’s just what you need to do to get back to zero. And so many things can be drugs: Warcraft, Jihad, porno, menthols – take your pick, prick or joystick, cancerstick, bomb belt or scissors and run with them, see where it gets you. You never know, but you can probably guess.

Why not do something different? Try your hand at someone new. Take a random walk. Achieve the kingdom of mandom through a bout of the randoms. There have to be cracks, openings, a parting... these are the channels through which creative thinking flows. If you want to make omelettes, you don’t have to break chickens or be chicken, but you do need to crack eggs. So use your egg. Sometimes you have to untie the knot, even if it's what's keeping you 'strapped in'. Or just loosen it. And mix metaphors.

Sometimes you can do this with a negative feedback loop, something that brings everything to heel, puts the structures back, make sense and simplifies, frames, names and borders. It’s amazing what doing the dishes does for you – rinse those thoughts clean. But on the flip, there have to be positive feedback loops that are all about disordering, introducing randomness, flux... These are what set off the chain reactions in the first place, the ones that created the knots that are now in your head and chaining you to the desk in your orifice, the needle in your harm, the phone in its cradle (and the formerly silver spoon). Don't be scared about what you’re not doing – it’s probably the things you’re most comfortable with that are actually going to kill you. Go on, run outside, make a call, make a mess, spring a leak. Do as the nun did, tear a hole in your habit.

© Peter Chambers 2007

A fairwell to harms? (In praise of fags)

2007-07-03T08:18:00.000+10:00

Yes yes, it’s really great that smoking is banned in bars, clubs and restaurants, blah blah blah. Think how much nicer it’ll be not to die… hang on a ‘sec. Okay then, how nice it will be not to die of cancer… well, that’ll probably still happen, but it’ll be in another part of you, caused by your addiction to plastics of one kind or another. Alright, but think about how nice it will be not to be stinky, have pongy clothes, and nasty ashtray breath. But knowing you… anyway, the point is, smoking is rubbish – granted. Harmful to you and those around you. But given the ban, I thought I’d remind everybody about all the good things smoking did for us. Well, I know it did some great things for me, I’ll vouch for that.

In the first place, smoking gets you talking to people. Think about everyone that’s important in your life. Well, unless they’re your Siamese Twin, you ‘met’ them, in one way or another. Chain smoking is not just one fag after another, it also ties you to the pack, and all the other people who are in it. Blow smoke circles, chain cigarettes, wear wedding rings – the ties that bind, the dies that cast (and vice versa).

A lot of my best friendships were made through smoking. Would we have met otherwise? In some cases, the answer is (undoubtedly) yes, but in others… imagine if (s)he wasn’t packing props – striking up that first skittish conversation would have been that much more difficult. How to begin, without striking a light?

Smokers are also generally more interesting people. They’re the risk-takers, the obsessives, the hedonists, the creatures of ‘fuck it, who cares, let’s…’ Rather than feeling smugly superior all the time, smokers prefer the ‘little pleasure’ of the cigarette’s warmth, and by sharing cigarettes with others, we all take part in the greater dying, conceding our frailty, our folly, and our need of a minor comfort. The cigarette is a ten minute metaphor for life.

Forget about the pathos, what about health? What do we know? Well, we know for certain that smoking can kill you, but there’s no way of knowing whether smoking will kill you. It could be Alzheimers, it could be a truck. The crack in your pipe, in the road, in your head. Or your heart might stop in the middle of the night, as happened to a friend’s brother, a 27 year old triathlete who never even drank coffee. Without a doubt, smoking wouldn’t have helped matters – but would it have made the decisive difference? Smoking might kill you, but will ‘not smoking’ save your life? And how can this be measured against the interesting life possibilities enacted by all those great people you met over all those years, and all the pleasure you got from smoking while you did?

At least smoking can be pleasurable – what fun is it getting strung out on stress? Work-related stress is just as big a health-risk (and makes you a miserable, unhappy, shit), but do you see the government cracking down on overtime? Nope, they encourage it. It’s all about ‘being flexible’ (which is just another way of saying, ‘bend over’). AWAs, Sunday trading (without penalty rates), the yearly revulsion of Christmas shopping – these things are all heartily encouraged. As are junk food, binge drinking and gambling. Basically, the government couldn’t give a half-arsed fuck about people’s health. Fat? Horny? Strung out? Excellent! As long as you’re scared of losing your job, keep doing the overtime, and consume the pain away. Your ‘flexibility’ is appreciated, team player. For many people, smoking is their fixed fix, the one reliable pleasure in a grey scene of joyless, shifting chores – and the bastards would grudge you that, too, sticking their horror-show pictures all over the packets.

Smokers’ behaviour is considered selfish, anti-social, unjustifiable – but will our kids, who are the ones set to deal with the environmental devastation of our unsustainable petro-chemical based consumer-culture, really put smoking at the top of the deck of hates and horrors? A lot of Australians supported our participation in a war with no justification, no clear, achievable objective, and no exit plan. Between sixty-six and seventy-three thousand civilians have been killed as a result. Who’s supporting the death-dealing, really? Fact is, the governments don’t care how many people die, as long as they’re the ones doing the killing. That’s the nub. Die for them and you're a hero. Cause your own death and you’re scum. And as a form of suicide, smoking represents one of the few real choices you will make during your life, one that wasn’t just a matter of going along and getting along with your family and peer group, especially now that they’ve all stopped and have now made you a pariah. Probably you started smoking because of peer pressure, or because you wanted to talk to boys/girls at the bus-stop. Most likely, you kept smoking because of habit and inertia (the two things that are most likely to kill you, or turn you into one of the undead). Maybe you keep doing it even though you don’t like it. Well then, you’re a bloody idiot. But if you really enjoy it, and you’re really, really willing to accept the consequences (and don't bullshit yourself, you’re probably not really) then keep right on puffing, Billy. It’s probably the thing you’re best at, or at least what you’ll be remembered for. You might even get away with it… but don’t hold your breath.

© Peter Chambers 2007

Putting the fun back in fundamentalist (despite his injury…)

2007-06-25T22:55:00.000+10:00

It was one of those stories you e-mail to everybody. The one about Mr Blair. No, not the soon-to-be-ex British PM, the other Blair, the one from Brisbane. The masturbator. But not just any old masturbator – this isn’t your typical Brisbane wiggin technician. This guy was a real artist. An extremist. A person who’s really willing to go the whole hog, and hang the consequences. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, you obviously didn’t read the article, so here’s a very basic re-cap.
Mr Blair arrived at his (female) friend’s house, smoked off a few rocks, then felt the rise of the horn (as many a meth freak has). Not one to be put off, he apparently informed Kylie (the ‘friend’) that he was just going to have a shower. Cut to thirty minutes later, and the guy’s still pounding his parson – first in the shower, then rolling around on the bed, then back to the shower again. All over the house, as out of control as unmanned garden hose. According to the article, she asked, then begged, then pleaded for him to stop, telling him she had to bathe her kid. But he just kept right on going, hammer and tongs. The details are a little hazy at this point, but apparently Kylie then threatened him. And when that didn’t work? Well, she stabbed him in the shoulder with a kitchen knife. Twice. And what did he do? He put on a pair of shorts, went out to the garage… and kept on wanking, which he was still doing half an hour later, when the cops arrived.

"Despite his injury,” the prosecutor said, “it seems Mr Blair continued to masturbate while in the garage."

Of course, ‘in reality’ this sorry little tale says more about the terrible effects of ice on human relationships than anything else, but…I couldn’t help but feeling, well, admiration for Mr Blair. I mean, it really puts the fun back in fundamentalist, don’t you think? Like James Brown, Stanley Kubrick or Moby Dick’s Ahab, there’s something wonderful about a true extremist, somebody who ‘really means it’. A person who’s really willing to go the whole nine yards, no matter what reality says or what the consequences might be. I’m not saying you should go around to your mate’s house and beat off on their rugs or in their rumpus room, but just think. Think of everything in your life that’s flying at half mast – the limp things, the lame things you do. Reflect on them all, then give yourself a tenth of the gift Mr Blair gave himself, amply. We’ve all got a little bit of the fundamentalist inside us somewhere. Unleash your inner extremist – on your guitar, on your drum machine, on your wok. Let him loose on your floppy, flabby bits. It needn’t be hard, it can be fun. Have a good stab at it, go on… indulge yourself. You know you want to.

© Peter Chambers 2007

Cindy’s tipping point (pumpkin hour)

2007-06-24T11:29:00.000+10:00

Fairy tales are deadly serious things, and not just ‘cos the brothers were Grimm. There’s messages inside, if you’ve got the bottle to uncork them. Take Cinderella for example. You know the classic readings – she’s oppressed, her two-step sisters are ‘wickid’, she had ‘lil feet. The lessons? People who wear glass slippers shouldn’t mount thrones? A little bit of magic wand goes a long, long way? Princes hold their balls late at night? Okay, these are all legit, but the sticking point for me was always the tipping point for Cinderella – Pumpkin Hour.

Pumpkin Hour isn’t just about when the Fairy Godmother’s ‘magic dust’ starts to wear off, although that’s a sign that it’s time to be scootin’ before boots get pointy and curl, where the ‘streets have no shame’ and the girls grow big warts, scaly dicks and sharp teeth. You gots to know, there’s an appropriate time to get the hell out of there. A friend of mine calls it ‘chasing the dawn’ – for him, getting to bed while the daylight is still deniable means the difference between a neat night out and an outbreak of the very, very, very, wrong indeed. I have it on good authority that ‘Pumpkin Hour’ at Revolver of a weekend is 11am – but that might say more about those shunned nuns and their habits than any sensible depravity. Club der Visionaire in Berlin gets pumping at around 4pm ‘the next day’ (whenever that was when it’s all the whole weekend is all the same baggy monster). Blech. Another friend of mine famously seems to go too early – everyone comments on it.

‘Where’s X?’
‘He just left.’
‘Already?’ Chorus the fools.
‘Yup - he said to say bye.’

Cut to 4pm the next day, just as the horrid flashes of memory begin to assault your mind, slowly crawling out of the fading fug of last night. ‘Where did I leave my…? Not my … oh (horrid flash)… dear god, not that? Dear God…(opens wallet, sighs)… and the beer monkey stole my money again, on top of everything.’

You shower, but the dirt won’t come off. Poverty, shame, regret… then you remember X. His two o’clock glass of water. The way he wound everything down, before everybody wound up getting wounded. The polite good-byes, the discreet slipping away into a 3am taxi… this is a man who truly understands the tipping point that is Pumpkin Hour. How to get away before there’s any mention of glass slippers or the joining of those words, those sordid words... ‘pump kin’. Look at yourself in the Sunday mirror, and see the Jack-a-Lantern that you made yourself when you did just that (you did, you actually did), and remember Cinders. Remember the tipping point, just before it all got sour and spillt (and that ain’t milk, even though there’s no use crying over it). Before the cost you count becomes the sad measure of everything that could have been otherwise. Heed the tipping point and learn your very own Pumpkin Hour, or live (and live with) the folly.

© Peter Chambers 2007

The Golden Age of Wi-Fi (Listen like Thieves in the Night of the Long Files)

2007-06-19T21:48:00.000+10:00

Once upon a time, whole families would gather around the wireless, rapt in radio plays and hanging on every word – Goon Show in dumb show: awestruck, pipestoked and slippered silence.
Not long after that, recorded music became affordable. By the seventies it was possible to listen to an entire symphony of your choice without having to tune in at an appointed time, without even getting up off your poof more than three times to change sides. These days we can call upon any of those ‘good ol' days’ at will, complete with snap, crackle and pop captured as perfectly as flies in amber.We can download a record collection that would have taken an entire family a decade to amass, and we can do it in a matter of hours and listen to any parts of it in any order, at any time, in any place. A revolution by any other name, surely. But what are we losing?

Apple calls their proprietary compression system ‘Apple Lossless.’ It’s the ultimate promise of something for nothing (or nothing from something). Even mp3 sounds pretty good now, good enough to allay the fears of the majority of music lovers and even fool some DJs – so what if you lose those frequencies, they’re inaudible, right? Maybe they are. But what we have lost, what is more significant, is an entire way of listening. Is it such a bad thing?

I’ve just spent the past week at my dear lady’s house, minding all four walls from robbers and silence while the mamas and papas get all B&B in the rurals of Taswegia. Brother younger meanwhile was most definitely home, and I’ve been watching him listen. Ryland, the son of an accomplished musician (and no bastard trumpeter in his own right) has almost never heard the end of any of his tracks in his downloaded music collection. In the midst of waiting for something to happen – a meal, a phone call, a knock at the door – he skips. Not with a rope, but with a minute of each track, enough to get the intro, the hook, the chorus, then onto the next one. I tried to tell him that the best bit at the end of Van Halen’s Jump was where Eddie has a spack attack near the end of the nine minute skat solo. I was justly disbelieved. But the point stands – the days of sitting down and listening to a complete piece of recorded music from start to finish or even (shock, horror) a whole album by an ensemble artist are over, rover.

It’s a sign of the times – bye bye bitdepth, hello bandwidth. Like all our communications, we’ve forgeone quality for quantity, bit by bit. More and more communication that says less and less.

‘Are you there? What? I’m on the train... You’re breaking up... I can’t hear you... I’m losing you...’

How perfect that our mobiles can now play AV files. We’re all Jazzy Jeff Mills and the Fresh Prince of Dexter Flex now. No sooner were the theoretical implications of sampladelic flava savoured than they’ve been downloaded and incorporated in to the collected habits of millions of listeners. Hell, I do it too. In an audible sense, mp3 is about cutting out the stuff you don’t need. But the way it allows you to control music is the same in another sense – you piff the riff that leaves you cold, you skip the dud track, you delete the version with the guest rap that doesn’t tickle your fancy. Same goes for friends, family and love, so I’ve heard. You live and listen like that asshole testing their ring-tones on the choo-choo train.

And believe it or not, that makes you a DJ.

© Peter Chambers 2006

It’s shit, don’cha reckon? Talking shit (and saying shit all)

2007-06-12T12:54:00.000+10:00

Australians, so the stereotype goes, don’t beat around the bush (unshaved or otherwise). We call a splade a splade. We call a yobbo a mate. And we call an arselicking liar a ‘Prime Minister’. The point is, I guess, that we’re supposed to be a nation of ‘straight talkers’ who ‘tell it like it is’, who ‘cut the crap’. Wrong. We don’t cut the crap. We dribble it. Like warm honey off a nozzle. Out of our slack-jawed, open mouths. Travellers, you might get Bali belly in Kuta or Montezuma’s revenge in Guadalupe, but if you really wanted to cope a face full of verbal diarrhea, where the bloody hell were you?

People who suffer from this all-too-common disease love the sound of their own (loud) voice. The world is their thunder box. They’re ‘expressing who they really are’, which actually means they’re just exteriorising their internal (interminable) monologue – inflicting their inane, trite thoughts and observations on, well, whoever’s there at 3am on the couch at the club. And boy do they talk. It’s amazing how much they talk. How much they talk, and how little they say. Not only that, but there’s all these weird inversions – they won’t bother to remember your name (and they don’t really care if you know theirs) but they’ll happily tell you about the contents of their love lives, their underpants, and even their lower intestine. At length. In detail. Ad nauseum – and without listening to your comments on their contents. Because (like any conversation-as-bowel-function) it’s an ‘out’ function. ‘Taking a load off’ yourself also means ‘dumping a load’ in someone’s lap. Sufferers couldn’t really give a rats what you say – they don’t want to listen, they don’t even want to have a conversation, they just want to talk… and talk… and talk… so they feel better – about themselves, their precious feelings, their stupid lives. Oh, and you’re supposed to feel sorry for them too, ‘cos they feel sorry for themselves. Or whatever. In other cultures, low self-esteem makes people shy and shame-filled, but here, self-loathing and boredom all-too-often results in loud, frantic boofheads (male and female) who structure their whole social lives around getting wasted enough so that they can flip the dump switch… ah, a hard-earned thirst deserves a big, long dump. From tap beer to free-flowing faeces, us Aussies have got the whole range of human experience plumbed, tapped, and refreshingly served up as a blithering, blabbering binge-and-purge fest. Australia, your name is ‘Hargh….bllerrrrrrrrchhhckhhhh… ckh……………….ckh… blrkhch.’ Try saying this as you imagine an alien ‘hatching’ and you’ll get the idea.

In large sections of the ‘youth community’ (the whole rave moment, for example) verbal diahorrea is what passes as bonding, and is the perverse basis of friendship. It’s one that says: ‘you know about my dirt, intimately, I let you have all of it last night…. (Therefore, let’s be friends.)’ Getting dirt on each other becomes the basis for life-long chumminess (so chumpy you could carve it), except for a wee problem. Basically, because everybody dumps when they’re smashed, nobody can remember the deets (Hmm. I remember a warm feeling, and something… on me… no, that can’t be right, I wouldn’t do… oh no!) And ‘stiff shit’ if tomorrow (when those drugs have worn off) (s)he goes back to the same old uncommunicative turd (s)he was, a person who’s still constantly shit-talking, but who’s now uncomfortable blurting out any of their feelings (the corn chunks in the whole horrid flow that in hindsight were the only highlight) and so now just talks about, I dunno, stuff, and shit. Yeah… nahh….

You’ve probably seen those ads on the telly recently, you know, the ones with the big worms, urging us to ‘Declare or beware!’ ‘cos ‘Quarantine Matters’? Declare your worms, boys and girls, or the beagles will have you! Well, if Customs are intent on seizing your coke at the airport, then I want to urge Quarantine to do unto verbal diahorrea as they do unto worms. ‘Cos which one is causing more damage really? I’ve seen people without verbal diahorrea on coke. I’ve known people with worms. It just makes them a bit annoying, but very happy. And skinnier. But here? Let’s face it, if there’s a ‘plague’ affecting the wellbeing of this country, it’s not caused by the drugs (they’re just the catalyst), it’s caused by the shit talkers – and they’ve got a disease that, above all, not only the sick suffer from.

© Peter Chambers 2007

You do not have a Yoda complex! (You will take me to Jabba now!)

2007-06-05T15:50:00.000+10:00

George Lucas’ crypto-racism may have finally been laid bare in ‘episode one’ with the inexcusable Jar-Jar Binks, but the helmet-haired hack had been at it for some time. It’s well known that the whole ‘Jedi’ thing was a half-arsed reading of Japanese samurai ‘jidai’ (period-piece) dramas, and Yoda? Basically, Lucas and Henson just got together and painted their imagination of a ‘Master’ green, and accentuated the ears. Work it did. Successful it was. Rich are they now. Hrrrn?

But along with the Karate Kid’s ‘Mr Miyagi’, the image of Yoda the ‘wizened and small, yet wise and powerful’ master with ‘eerie powers’ has had a nasty effect on a whole generation of nerdlingers convinced of their psychically-enhanced martial arts abilities. One guy at my school suddenly started wearing a trenchcoat and a wrist brace. There were even rumours about that he could cast fireballs (hence the wrist brace, I suppose). I kept pestering him to do one for me, but he said he ‘wasn’t allowed’ to show me. By whom?! The scariest thing of all was that he was obviously deeply sincere.

There are other examples. Take this classic monologue from the Office’s Gareth:

"You know the phrase ‘softly softly catchy monkey’? …I could catch a monkey – if I was starving I could. I’d make poison darts out of the poison off deadly frogs. One milligram of that poison can kill a monkey. Or a man. Prick yourself, you’ll be dead within a day. Or longer. Different frogs, different times."

Gareth’s whole imagination is a little different – it’s all about ‘survival of the fittest’: SAS manuals, assassination fantasies and so forth. The Yoda complex is unlike this, due to its strong ‘spiritualist’ undercurrent. People with a Yoda complex are often convinced that they can ‘see’ ‘feel’ or ‘do’ things that you and I can’t. Like the Jedi mind trick. Or casting fireballs. And don't be fooled by their small stature, you see? Fireballs, I tell you. You've been warned.

I blame Ueshiba Morihei, the founder of the Japanese martial art Aikido (you know, the ones who wear skirts and flip each other). Ueshiba was a crackpot, involved in a religious cult that considers the inventor of Esperanto (invented as a ‘universal language’) a God. After beating up a guy with a wooden sword one day as a young adult (without harming him, of course) Ueshiba confessed that he felt the following:

“Suddenly, the ground began shaking. A golden vapour wafted up from the ground and enveloped me. I was transformed into a golden image, and my body felt as light as a feather. All at once I understood the meaning of creation: the Way of a Warrior is to manifest Divine Love, a spirit that embraces, loves, and protects all things.”Yeah right…

But no wonder – as a kid, he’d watched his father get the living crap kicked out of him. This was a guy who was deeply traumatised about his feelings of helplessness and insignificance. Steven Seagal is an aikido follower, which is interesting, because by all accounts he’s a nasty bully who enjoys hurting people on set. Or he did, until (Judo master) Gene LeBell put him in a choke hold on the set of ‘Under Siege’ (the one where Erica Eleniak comes out of the cake). Apparently Seagal ‘bet’ leBell couldn’t put him in a choke hold, as Seagal would be able to use his ‘ki’ (force) to prevent it having any effect. Well, leBell did, and Seagal went down like a big sack of jowls… falling unconscious and soiling himself in the process, apparently. Seagal claimed later that his ‘ki’ wasn’t flowing that day. I’ll bet.

Seagal is proof that you don’t have to be literally ‘small’ to have a Yoda complex, but it is something that affects people (mostly guys, but not always) who are worried about being small and helpless, and who feel the need to overcompensate as a result. Violent computer games, HSVs, Hummers, bodybuilding, the ability to cast fireballs – these are all ways for people who fear impotence to feel omnipotent. It's the small man's fantasy of bigness. You can see this happen every time you’re standing outside a nightclub; being stood over while you’re having your ticket checked on public transport by some fuck-knuckle (who thinks he’s in the Matrix ‘cos he’s wearing a trench-coat and Oakleys); or being ‘dressed down’ by your (Warcraft-and-anime-porn-addicted) ‘team leader’ at the call centre. What should one do when confronted by someone with a Yoda complex? My advice? Play up to it. Make like Bib Fortuna in Return of the Jedi, and ‘fall for Skywalker’s trick’:

Skywalker: “You will take me to Jabba now!”
Fortuna: “Aku takyu du Jabba, now.’”

Or if that gets tired… go the leBell.

© Peter Chambers 2007

For those about to go on a gender-bender? (we salute you) [The Tripitaka Moment]

2007-05-31T00:42:00.000+10:00

We’ve all been there. You think you know all there is to know about the crying game, but nothing can prepare you for the feeling when it hits. I’m talking about the Tripitaka moment. Oh yeah, that’s right girlyboys and manladies, remember Masako Natsume? She was the actress who played Tripitaka in Monkey Magic – and she is wholly responsible for scrambling the minds of a whole generation of Australian youths who were exposed to her ambiguous charms.

The character of Tripitaka effected a three-way headfuck: the story said she was a prince; she was dressed in tights and robes; and the woman who over-dubbed her voice had a sexy gravel in it that was suspended dangerously between either of the assigned genders. It wasn’t just that Masako Natsume was an attractive woman playing a prince, or that she had a shaved head – it was that she was also convincingly Tripitaka, the young prince, who was… hot. Go to Tonga and see the Fafafinas; watch the filmclip for Von Südenfed’s ‘Fledermaus can’t get it’; hire out Priscilla and see Terrence Stamp’s cock in a frock on a rock – none of them can pull enough wool over their frog’s eyes to hide the shadow of the man, and they don’t really try to. Tripitaka’s character wasn’t drag, no siree, it was something far more disquieting, the figure of a person who was attractively male and female simultaneously – not either/or, not androgynous, but somehow both male and female. You ‘knew’ she was she, but somehow, you also felt that she was he. It was thoroughly and disagreeably uncanny. And it was good.

But it was also something that (for me as a boy) was a permissible perversion that never forced me to beg any deeper questions about the angle of my dangle, and this is where you can catch your own brain fooling you. You know how it is, it happens at the gym, on the dancefloor, in a dark room – you catch sight of a neck, a leg, the curve of a buttock – straight or gay, your brain matches and fits the visual information against a catalog of ‘hot’ or ‘not’, ‘permissable’ or ‘impossible’. I sprung myself the other day, riding through traffic behind a cyclist in lycra. We stopped at the lights, I realised she was a woman, and then I gave myself persmission to find her ass attractive.

The flipside of this is something like your own personal equivalent of the Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’ filmclip. You’re at the beach, you see a girl in a bikini and think, ‘she’s hot’… but she turns around and it’s your mum, your sister, or Richard D. James. I can’t imagine what life must be like for the vision impaired – how much longer would they have to squint and doubt before the awful truth turkey slaps into focus? In all these fanny-packing, bush-whacking instances, the common factor is not attraction, but what you let yourself be attracted to – not that admitting this makes the ‘moment’ itself any less disturbing. The only thing I can suggest when the moment hits? Enjoy your symptom! Tripitaka’s character was trying to seek enlightenment – but the ‘Tripitaka moment’ can likewise teach us all something about ourselves.

© Peter Chambers 2007

I’ve had fun (and it wasn’t all that)

2007-05-25T18:49:00.000+10:00

‘Watcha gonna do when you get outta jail?’
‘I’m gonna have some fun.’
‘What do you consider fun?’
‘Fun, natural fun!’

Listening to the Tom Tom Club lit the synapses. Ah, memories... remember fun? Once upon a time, fun was one of the most enjoyable of all the three letter words. Better than bat, stickier than bun, more valuable than oil. Fun could be anything, and eveything was fun. That was then. I just don’t feel the same way about fun as I used to. Ever since... Oh God, it was heartbreaking. I came home from the disco, and there on the couch, copping it the ol’ fashioned way from the law of diminishing returns, was my most beloved concept.

Why fun, why?

Fun’s been sleeping on the couch it so sordidly soiled ever since, and although we’re on speaking terms, it’s only so I can call fun horrible names. Here goes:

Fun, you’re a limp, stale crumpet, a shrivelled abstraction - and a lousy root.

It’s a crisis that’s taken a while to come to a head. I should have read the signs. Some people have even told me that it serves me right for attempting to have a meaningful relationship with a concept. But I don’t care what they think, ‘cos the truth is that fun just isn’t as much fun as it used to be, hasn’t been for a long time. And fun doesn’t seem to wanna have fun with me anymore, or when I wanna have fun, fun has a headache (and vice versa).

It’s me, too, I think I bear some responsibility. I’ve changed. I began having my doubts, and spent many a sigh-filled languid afternoon tootling around from amusement to amusement, jealous of the kiddies down the local park or disco with their bouncey balls and their unbridled, shrieking joys. I began to feel sorry for myself and my creeping numbness, caused by the deadening weight of carrying around that growing shitlist of things I can no longer enjoy. The heaviest addition to the list was only three loved letters long.

I miss fun, I do. Fun was my main squeeze, my big banana, my ripe, rosy tomato. But now there’s no juice in the fruit (aint it pithy). And meanwhile, fun doesn’t have any time for leisure, being too busy earning its keep. You don’t want to know how it earns its bickies...
... And that smile that used to be a joke, that I found so endearing, now it just reminds me of synchronised swimmers. Fun’s whole repertoire is wan and calloused, and its formeerly charming patter holds nothing of value or charm, just the laboured, grunting humourlessness of porno. Like all XXX these days, it’s all so horribly earnest. With all the mystery gone, and us just going through the motions, it was a matter of time before one of us either ended up dumped, or even worse, dumped on.

So I’ve left fun, trapped in its rigor mortis of cool and forever trying for happiness, and started seeing other concepts. Not for good, but for play. Yes, rather than focussing on squeezing the last drops of juice from those saggy old fruits, I’ve decided to take up juggling them, or planting their seeds where something might grow. I’m not talking about uphill gardening or running away with the circus, but I am playing with play again, and I’m loving it. Me and my old pirennially pert sweetheart of yore. It’s a beautiful thing. Play likes to experiment, fool around. Play focuses on the act, rather than the outcome. Play, leading me to the floor, says, ‘Fuck art, let’s dance!’ Play even reminds me of all the things I liked about fun, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously or demand that I spend all my money and time on it. Play, I love you!
To whoever of you is with fun now, my sympathies, and the best of luck. Just be honest with yourself, and don’t forget for a moment what fun is, and what it will always be.
I just don’t want you to get hurt.

© Peter Chambers 2005 (from the archives)

Who’s the Dogg? (Snoop shows Ruddock the pound)

2007-05-23T10:29:00.000+10:00

You know what? You’re wrong about Snoop Dogg. Sure, he’s an ex-crim and a misogynist thug, but these things are all relative. Woman-hating asshole? Compared to whom? That’s worth asking. Well, what about compared to Isaac Hayes and Tim Buckley, two of electric ladyland’s most beloved rakes? We could say there are a lot of other mitigating qualities, too, maybe ones that flip the script in favour of forgiving either the scalp-wax abusing Scientologist pants technician or the junkie honeyman. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is simple: Snoop Dogg’s hateful attitude toward women possesses a rare honesty and a willingness to take responsibility for his mind-set and actions, two qualities that Hayes and Buckley lack.

Cop a load of Hayes on ‘One Woman’. The guy drives home, kisses his wife, then gets up in the morning and drives back through gridlocked traffic… to have breakfast with his mistress. There’s nothing in the song that suggests any discomfort or remorse (just the fear of getting sprung with yolk on his cuff and the pain of having to choose once he’s busted double-dipping). Not only that, but Hayes manages to twist the situation around so that it’s both women’s fault somehow: ‘One woman’s making my home/ while the other woman’s making me do wrong/ I didn’t intend to let it get that strong/ Now I’ve got to decide where I belong’ Note the use of the expression ‘making me’, as if the women have Alan keys and claw hammers, and he’s a piece of Ikea furniture. Hayes reckons he’s having the whole situation ‘done to’ him – he’s as passive as a Rohypnolled mormon copping a love shampooing from a shaft-strapping widow with cruel intentions. Now that’s a mouthful.

Exhibit two in this atrocity exhibition, Mr ‘Crooner’ Buckley the first, is no better. You wanna know why he cheated on you? It’s the classic ‘Neanderthal defence’ – cop this: I’m a predator, baby, and, frankly, you wouldn’t let give you one a là Backstreet Boys. And honey, ‘I want it that way’. In his own words (‘Sweet Surrender’): ‘Well I had to be a hunter again/ This little man had to try/ To make love feel new again/ ‘Cause there’s just a few things, honey/I’m not old enough to do for you/ And there just the kind of things/You just never care to show me.’ Again, it’s the same pattern, one that says, ‘Hey, I sure screwed the pooch, didn’t I, but after all, I can’t control myself… and you don’t satisfy my needs… biyatch.’

Compared to this, Snoop comes up smelling like (suspiciously musky) roses. From the get go, he lays it on the line – I’m a total dogg, with no respect for women at all. If you ‘step into the ring’, you’re gonna lose your halo, baby. And if you come with me, knowing what a vicious cad I am, well, maybe you don’t respect yo’self either. From ‘Aint no Fun (if the homies can’t have none)’: ‘When I met you last night baby/ Before you opened up your gap/ I had respect for ya, lady/ But now I take it all back/ Cause you gave me all your pussy/And ya even licked my balls/ Leave your number on the cabin/ And I promise baby, I'll give ‘ya a call/ Next time I'm feelin’ kinda horny/ You can come on over, and I'll break you off/ And if you can't fuck, that day, baby/ Just lay back, and open your mouth/ ‘Cause I have never met a girl/ That I love/ in the whole wide world’. The lyrics show utter contempt for ‘her’, but at the same time, there’s four counteracting gestures: Snoop is honest about his bastardry, up front about his needs, willing to takes responsibility for the consequences and he’s conscious enough to mourn the fact that he can’t relate to women. By every measure, the Dogg is a more sensitive, responsible and mature adult than both Hayes and Buckley, who (like children), want to make a mess, not have to clean it up, and blame the other person for the scat lodged in the teeth of the fan. My mess, your fault… biyatch.

Now, compare Snoop to Phillip Ruddock, a man prepared not only to defend Snoop’s ban from Oz, but also to abandon David Hicks to five years of solitary confinement and torture, blame Hicks for his own predicament, then bend over and cop the $500,000 charge the US government wants to shaft Australian taxpayers with for flying the jihadi-tourist home, on the same day that he issues a statement saying he’s happy Hicks is home, and that he never really supported the US anyway. Yeah right. Nobody knows (and has approvingly enjoyed) the hilt of US power more than Ruddock. ‘Oooh, Bushie, what a fat, throbbing sword of Damocles you have. It’s so glistening, so… evil. Oooh, yeah, dangle it above our heads. Ooh, yeah, I like that.’ His disgusting little press conference was more or less the Liberal party equivalent of saying, ‘Aww, shit, pimpin’ ain’t easy… biyatch’. I’m gonna call it – Snoop Dogg, for all his pimping, dealing and hateful views, is a more humane and responsible adult than Hayes, Buckley or Ruddock – let him in, give him citizenship. Hell, give him a job… hey, maybe we can swap him for Ruddock? I’d like to see that – Snoop at the airport in a pimp suit giving a press conference, like ‘Yo, we had enough o’ this biyatch, fo’ shizzle’. And Ruddock in orange overalls, being herded onto a waiting plane full of CIA thugs, all eager to show him their extra special Dogg pound, the one with no windows. Oh dear, I think I’ve just gone too far.

© Peter Chambers 2007

The Errorist Disorganisation (versus the functional, preventative, security organization)

2007-05-14T10:36:00.000+10:00

With all this talk of terrorism, it’s easy to forget that there are actually other, far more subversive, subtle and less destructive ways of fucking with people to get your point across. Ways that will blow them away, without ripping them apart. That will mess with their heads, without making a mess of their heads. In a world with so much destructive violence and confrontation, it’s important to try to think different. And that’s why it’s time to introduce the errorist.

What is an errorist?

Simple: an errorist is someone who uses error to get their message across. Think about the typical spaces where there are high concentrations of people: airports, train stations, nightclubs, shopping malls. In all these spaces, surveillance and security is used to pre-empt you. ‘No alarms and no surprises’ isn’t just the chorus to a sadsack Radiohead song, it’s also the new motto of security. When you go to a night club, they really were expecting you, you know? But it aint hospitality, lads and ladies. The whole structure of the nightclub is designed to anticipate any kind of misbehaviour –it forces you to behave a certain way by preventing you from behaving freely, at pain of bouncer, of staircase, and of footpath. That’s why most nightclubs are actually incredibly conservative, conformist places – try getting naked, try getting up on the speaker stack – you’ll be ejected. They’re not spaces of free expression, they’re spaces of permissive repression. The fact that a man was shot at the Viper Room and no-one noticed does not diminish the point. I’m talking about places where humans go. And this is where the errorist comes in.

Because any successful errorist understands that if you create direct, visible confrontation, then the goons will spot, block and toss you. Look at what happens every time the Chaser tries one of their corporate lobby appearances. The system knows how to deal with disturbances that directly confront it. But what the system can’t deal with is noise, error. That’s why you’re not allowed to joke about the contents at your luggage at the airport check-in counter. And that’s why it’s important to keep cracking that very joke. But not just that joke. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, should be to introduce errorism into every space where you can hear the melody to ‘No Surprises’ playing. Anywhere you see people being ‘alert, but not alarmed’, muck with their heads. Scramble them. But do it subtly. It doesn’t have to be ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife’ to get the message across. Example: blokes, wear a skirt. Just a skirt. No no, I mean – with all your other regular clothes. You would be amazed how much this ruins people’s heads. Or women's perfume. Or sunglasses. You can think of better examples, be creative. The point in every case is not to create direct confrontation, just to make 'noise', create that wonderful cognitive dissonance. Do a redundance. Never ‘identify yourself’ – straddle the identifications. Get under their radar. Get up their skirt – but do it gently. Spray on the scene, like a glitchin' machine. Make them wonder whether it’s you, or just a tickling breeze, an ocean spray. In this day and age, with more and more of our shared spaces becoming infected with this whole bullshit security mentality, this gentle art is our best weapon.

I believe the children are our future (Jagerbomb them well and let them lead the way)

2007-05-11T09:24:00.000+10:00

I promised myself I’d never let this one slip out, but it’s too good. I have this idea for a book, you see (followed by a film after I’ve sold the rights for millions). You bastards better not bite this one. The idea goes like this: two blokes sit down to nut out a better way to ‘do’ terrorism. Explosions? How very last year. Thinking backwards, the duo think about the ‘evil doers’, then wonder about how to find a method of destroying them, and only then – maximising the impact whilst minimising ‘collateral damage’. The idea they hit upon is genius (if I do say so myself). Poison the cocaine supply. But not just any poison either, ‘cos if it took effect immediately, the offending gear could be binned before any more than a few lusty nostrils became the dust-bringer of doom. No, this stuff would have a delayed effect, say, six months. Imagine who would fall victim…

But behind the fascinating victim list that would result from this calamity would be a simple motivating the idea that drove my two terrorists, namely that ‘bad people’ would be slain and ‘good people’ spared. It’s hardly a new thought – read through the book of Revelation and you’ll see: the apocalypse is basically a nightclub queue.
‘Sorry lads, private function tonight…’
‘Nah, I’m on Papa’s list… plus one’
‘How do you spell that?’
‘P-A-P-A… The Bishop assured me tha-’
‘Sorry mate, no papa here… I’ve never heard of the Bishit or whoever…’
‘Bu-’
‘Mate, I don’t wanna hear it. Don’t make this difficult…’

It’s exactly this idea, of sorting the ‘goodies’ from the ‘baddies’ which was behind the recent foiled attempt by a groups of zealots to blow up Ministry of Sound. As Jawad Akbar said of his thwarted plan, “No-one could turn around and say, ‘oh, they were innocent’, those slags dancing around.” Even London’s chief of police said more or less the same thing in a responding press conference: "If you have 2,000 'decadent' Western youngsters in a dance club on a Saturday night; drinking, drugs and sex are all in there," the London police chief told defence journal Janes Magazine in January 2005. "If some sort of organisation wants to target a location, what better place to put a bomb?" he warned.

But the question that hit me straight away was: are they the guilty ones? Can they even be guilty? What does it take to be guilty, guilty enough to be judged and killed? Well, in most places, you have to be an adult, and of sound mind and body. Only Americans in some states kill people with mental disabilities, and Rumsfeld’s controversial plan to torture and publicly electrocute ‘young punks’ as young as ten never made it past the first round of discussions. But aside from the violent, sadistic excesses of some US states, if you’re a child, if you’re intellectually handicapped, or if you’re criminally insane, it diminishes your responsibility. It’s not to say that you ‘didn’t do it’, just that you have less control over your actions, and punishment is adjusted (or waived) accordingly.

Now think about what it means to be in the Ministry of Sound. Really think. Could you honestly be considered a ‘responsible adult’ and even want to go there? I’m not just being flippant, I mean it: in a very real way, there’s no way you can say that you’re acting and behaving as a responsible adult AND be wanting to wiggle at the MoS. This becomes true from the age of eighteen, but it is also a truth which intensifies as the years roll by. We’ve seen the sad-cases with our own eyes: a forty year-old who’s at Revolver on a Sunday could be said to be in every way infinitely more childish than a twenty year old taking their first tentative steps into the world of ‘slags’, ‘fags’ and amphetamine-enhanced folly. Hasn’t our generation witnessed the final collapse of child and adult into a juvenile heap? Children are becoming more adult, true, but adults are also becoming more childish, more childlike. Our whole culture is infantilised, we are all ‘his majesty the baby’ turning our lives into a series of impossible demands, tantrums and endless attempts to defer responsibility, defer adulthood, pretend we’re still carefree and that there are no consequences to our actions. Adults? Show me one. I don’t know any under the age of fifty. Basically, it’s as simple as this: where there are Jagerbombs, there are no adults. So how could you bomb them?

The Rebirth of Fool (Foolsies: a user’s guide)

2007-05-04T11:44:00.000+10:00

“Beware,” I tell you, “he’s a foolsie.”
A foolsie is not an idiot. Foolsie is unto fool as ‘tricksies’ is unto Gollum, geddit? Foolsies can infiltrate friendship groups, spoil relationships, ruin lives and defile bed linen. If foolsies sound awful, well, that’s ‘cos they are – but you can stop a foolsie, if you know how to spot one. But how can you spot one? Basically, a foolsie is your typical male chauvinist pig, or at least, these remain his core values. The difference between a foolsie and a fool is in the veneer – like the superior shapeshifting ‘T-1000’ in Terminator 2, foolsies are clever enough to have developed elaborate ‘cloaking devices’, and can thus blend in. At the bar, in polite conversation, the foolsie always seems like ‘one of us’, no matter who that ‘us’ might be. He might wear Nudie downpipes, vintage Wayfarers (real vintage, not retro!), a Ksubi t-shirt and a ‘Make Poverty History’ bracelet. He might use ‘product’ and be able to tell you about his cleansing, toning and moisturising regime in lurid detail. He might be au fait with being recognised as outwardly metrosexual, or even pleasingly ‘just gay enough’. But make no mistake, none of these things are an expression of his being sensitive and in tune with himself and the needs of women. Beneath all the skin and jewellery, he’s the same asshole he always was. He might appear at home in his own skin, but that’s only ever because he wants a piece of yours (and not just any piece, either). This guy doesn’t just want a pound of flesh, or to pound the flesh – the punchline rolls in three years later, three years too late, when you realise that he set out with no intention but to fool you. Had you, didn’t he? That’s it, you see – everything, the whole elaborate routine – just to fool you. The joy of utter contempt. Not just to pull the wool over your eyes, but to deal you and your self-esteem the mental equivalent of a turkey slap. To the foolsie, the mindfuck is the sweetest of all sweets.

Foolsies are necessarily difficult to spot. Unlike vampires (and their nocturnal habits) or witches (with their wigs and spit), foolsies could be anyone. Hell, maybe your dad’s one… but never fear, in some cases there are telltale signs. Some foolsies emerge from a background they’re trying to define themselves against – meet his friends and family and you might see what I mean. Or when you say something ‘off the cuff’ and you glimpse deep, magmatic violence flashing across his eyes, cross-reference that against the Saturday you met his ‘mates’ and remember how they talked about other people to each other – when you weren’t supposed to be listening. Investigate. The way he laughs, really laughs (high-pitched devilish laughter) while watching the Footy Show. His garage, full of free weights, FHM, Jessica Simpson posters and a collection of bowie knives… But no – the most terrifying fact for any of you out on the town looking for love is that only the most careless foolsie will leave his toys lying around, or let you hear how his boys talk about you when you’re not there. And actually, a lot of foolsies are characterised by the fact that, well, there’s nothing exceptional or unusual about them. They’re just your average pig. They really are. You’ve just got to see through the stage props, people – ‘cos if there’s one thing a foolsie can’t operate without, it’s his ruse. See past the ‘stuff’ and you’ve spotted the dick. That’s all you’ve got to do. Remember, a pig who moisturises is no less a pig for having soft, supple skin.

Of nasty mums, sad beavers, and the FLAC-copping community [Pt. III of III]

2007-04-24T09:16:00.000+10:00

So we’ve heard about the needle, the laser, the flash-drive and the damage done. And last week I scored a few cheap points (cheap, ha, they were free – I downloaded them!) against the recording industry.

Speaking to people (as opposed to record execs), one of the refrains was the idea of not wanting to harm the ‘little guy’. Mr Footstool is the friend of the little man… can we be too, and keep downloading? Forget about the ‘big, bad’ recording industry, what about indie record stores, small distribution networks, boutique labels? The ‘bad’ industry will look after itself, and has – collapsing celebrity, marketing and genetically-engineered spectacles into an interminable rutting circus, a media orgy (available on iTunes) of pole-dancing, pole-smoking Pussy Cat Moles who will nip, tuck and grind for your tweenage delectation, provided you’re willing to pay through the hose. So much for them. A lot of people just want the latest fad single, the latest ring-tone – and they’re willing to pay to download it, as the success of iTunes has demonstrated.

But what about the ‘good’ industry? Well, the first point to be made on this tip can be summed up by the (mythical) idea of ‘lossless’ files. There’s no such thing as a lossless file, just like there is no such thing as a ‘war without casualties’ ‘sin without God’ or ‘calorie-free food’. There are no gains without losses, and although we can minimise harm and loss, we can’t get rid of them all together. As a perceptive friend pointed out, “It's almost like the cries of sheet music publishers when radio was introduced: ‘what will we do now that songs can be heard for free?!’ But in the end their songs were heard by more people, and a new era started.” Or recall the British recording industry’s 80s campaign: ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’. Just like home cooking is killing hospitality. Or home damming is killing beavers. What nasty mums. What sad beavers. Indeed.

So if this a new era, a new reality, and we can’t eliminate loss or harm, then how can we minimise it?

I’ve spoken to downloading addicts, I’ve spoken to DJs, I’ve spoken to gigging musicians, and I’ve spoken to record store owners. A lot of people mourn ‘the loss’ (wherever it may be), but there’s only three aspects of the industry that are absolutely under threat: record stores, the recording industry ‘as is’, and medium-sized producers or bands who can’t, don’t or won’t perform live.

To musicians who won’t perform – well, you should. Musicians were performers. And so should they be. If you can’t perform, then DJ. And if you won’t do either? Well, okay, then you’ve got a problem. To the recording industry – change, or perish. But I get the idea that this has already happened, although not without ‘casualties’. And now we come to small record stores, and the joy of buying a work of dedicated creativity from a passionate expert who is themselves dedicated to creativity, one of the guardians of the archive. This is where I’m really sympathetic. Without knowing the details in each case, in the past three years Melbourne has seen the closure of Rhythm & Soul’s city store, substrata’s wonderful online service, Slap records and more recently Synaesthesia (although this was apparently for other reasons). It can't be a mere co-incidence. These are all very real losses whose impact will be felt as a loss of expertise, a loss of the joy of buying music (even with all that entails) and, perhaps most importantly, as a loss of community.

Online aesthetic communities, the so-called blogosphere, they’re all very well, but it doesn’t amount to much. The flipside of being free to discuss music is being free from any kind of embodied relation. The blogosphere can create weak links between two people anywhere in the world, but it struggles creating strong links between you and the girl next to you on the tram. As I’ve said, she might be the only other girl in Melbourne who likes sleeparchive… but how would you know? Forget money, forget records, forget music. If we can’t relate to each other face-to-face, then that is a great loss. And a real challenge.

Dirty Sanchez in El Dorado (the returning of the screw?) [Pt. II of III]

2007-04-16T17:27:00.000+10:00

Last week, we looked at the world of Squibznik (private tracker extraordinaire), a world that is El Dorado to downloader-members, and Dirty Sanchez to the recording industry. I finished the column begging the question, (thee question if you’re wearing chocolate face fluff): why would I buy a CD?

‘Because it’s illegal not to,’ squeaks Sanchez the rec. exec, ‘downloading music is stealing!’

Is it stealing? Hmm…

In that irritatingly unskippable ad on a lot of rental DVDs, downloading is equated with stealing people’s ‘things’. ‘You wouldn’t steal a handbag… so don’t steal movies!’ Is the irony of the fact that this appears on rental DVDs lost on these eedjuts?
Whatever the case, the ad is wrong for two reasons: downloaders are not thieves, and they’re not stupid. Let’s say I steal your manbag, full of cash you earned dishpigging of a Saturday eve to pay for your tweakend shenanigans. It’s ten o’clock on Saturday night. The phones are running hot. You’re all gee-d up. And I took your money. There goes your lost weekend. I’ve taken from you, past and future: your projected fun and the time it took you to earn that cash, which you’ll never get back. Those five hours, those precious moments of your life you sacrificed washing dishes… I’ve robbed you of something you can never replace.

But mp3s are different – ‘almost’ nothing, just information telling your vibrator how to vibrate (yes, your iPod is just a fancy vibrator for your mind). Now, if I learn Japanese, I’m not depriving anyone in Japan of his or her language (imagine poor little Kenji, reduced to a lifetime’s grunting and signing because the nasty foreigner ‘stole’ his Japanese). Similarly, sharing music files doesn’t decrease a finite, scarce amount of something owned by an individual. Artists (well, living ones) ‘retain’ their music – they keep their own copies, and sometimes even the rights to its reproduction (if they’re lucky with the record deal). And they get to keep their unique ability to ‘perform’ their music face-to-face, which is something that nobody can take away from them, even though cover bands try.

The downloader hasn’t deprived anyone of ‘music’ – they’ve actually contributed to its abundance. It’s dishonest to say you’re ‘stealing music’ – historically, only record deals have had the power to steal an artist’s own music from them. What you’re actually doing is stealing ‘revenue’. Copyright, intellectual property – these are just ways of protecting profit. Because record companies see artists as sources of profit, it’s easy to see why they get confused. But, by their logic, why not sue all cover bands? Or attack second-hand record stores, who contribute nothing in royalties, and actually profit from selling other people’s music (unlike downloaders)? Or ban cassettes? But they’ve all been tolerated, because the record companies knew they retained their monopoly. Really, if you wanted to acquire a collection of music, it was impossible to bypass them. But now it is. Hence the panic. You’re not just stealing milk… you’ve Squibznicked their cashcow.

So there are two ‘real’ issues: providing a way for living artists to continue living as artists, and refusing or allowing the recording industry to retain its monopoly over the means of distribution. To me, this is a no-brainer: provided we can look after musicians and their entourage, the labels can go jump. This is an industry that ensures artists get no more than a few dollars from the sale of their own work; that has been happy to sell re-packaged versions of dead artists’ work at full price and take all the profit; that ‘forced’ digital on consumers because it was lighter, cheaper, and smaller. This aggressive, possessive parasite is screaming blue murder, now that they too have been rationalised by the same logic they forced on us… is it time to return the screw?

But what about ‘good’ record stores? Live venues? Independent distribution networks? The artists who’ve made all that incredible cover art? And the studio heads? Isn’t downloading kind of like A-bombing the temple, just because there are some thieves in it? Or is it that now, for the first time, we have to ‘think’, because we finally have a meaningful choice to make?

That’s what we’ll look at next week…

© (he he) Peter Chambers 2007

From Napster to Squibnik (‘Heaven on Earth’ vs ‘Our Worst Nightmare’)

2007-04-12T19:06:00.000+10:00

Remember Napster in the ‘good ol’ days?’ When that puppy peaked in late 2000, almost everyone I knew was getting their first real taste of downloading. I’ve kept one of the first compilations I made on CD-R: it’s full of brittle, thin-sounding obvious ‘copies’ of each purloined piece. The volume and intensity of each track varies wildly, and a lot of them pop, click and glitch.

Fast-forward to ’03 and everyone’s on Limewire and Kazaa: mostly singles, lots of corrupted files, badly or incorrectly labelled tracks, no cover-art or proper tracklisting, and still no good for complete albums, very underground artists or up-to-date singles/EPs and remixes. That, and the spectre of dodgy spyware attached to a program that crashed and hung constantly. Certainly, it was no substitute for purchasing music, if you were serious about collecting.

Two years later, and people are getting whole albums off BitTorrent, ripped at 320kbps or even encoded with ‘lossless’ codecs, supplied with comprehensive tracklisting and cover art, and even (in some cases) pics of the original disc. The download speeds are still erratic, and you can’t get anything you can think of. But you can get almost anything. And suddenly, it’s almost possible to acquire a decent collection of music without paying a cent more than the cost of your broadband subscription.

But all that malarky, that’s just greasy kid’s stuff compared to Squibznik. Ladies and gentlemen, enter the ‘private tracker’. Private trackers like Squibznik (not its real name) are the private gentlemen’s clubs of the internet. In order to gain access, you have to be ‘invited’ by an existing member of good standing, who risks their reputation on you. Once invited, a new user is asked a range of questions, similar to the T&C everyone skips when downloading software. Having agreed to the various rules of the site, the new user is then allowed access to the Squibznik’s complete list of torrent files. But in order to keep downloading, you have to guard your sacred ‘ratio’ – if you don’t share torrents with others by allowing them to upload from you, you’ll eventually be barred. Like being discovered drunk and disorderly at the bar of the Melbourne Club every Saturday. It’s strict to the point of irritation, but users inform me that virtually any piece of recorded music (yes, really) can be had at 320kbps (at least), and all within ten minutes or so. Yes, really.

Basically, technology and sociability has ‘solved’ the distribution problem. Provided you’re wealthy enough to have broadband (or even live in a country with such luxuries), and are then invited by an existing member, you can have ANY music you want, without having to pay for it. For the music consumer, it’s heaven on earth. For the recording industry? It’s their worst nightmare. But given this situation, a profound question arises for your average cash-strapped and time-poor punter:

Why would I buy a CD?

What the entertainment industry is asking the consumer do is to pay AU$30.00 for something that can be had for about a dollar. The retail CD might be a bit prettier, but really, is it $29.00 prettier? Is it thirty times better? ‘But that’s illegal!’ you squeal. ‘That’s why you should buy the CD. You’re stealing from the artist.’

'Am I? Should I? That’s what we’ll be exploring next week.

© Peter Chambers 2007

My Life in the Bush of Mnml, Vol I

2007-04-12T19:04:00.000+10:00

The first thing you should know is that mnml is nothing. We were never mnml, and neither should you be. And especially if you say you are, you’re not. So there.

With that in mind, MLBMnml is pleased to report the following trendencies:

1) Tools: No, not you arseholes. A lot of artists are releasing tracks that are openly designed as loops and sampling tools. Whilst this will make the (un)genre even more perplexing to the uninitiated (imagine paying forty bucks for a double EP with four sides of ten minutes of an unchanging groove, outrageous!), but it does put more creativity back in the hands of the able DJ. (Un)fortunately, this means both an increasing scope for hands-on, balls-out, multi-layered mixes and the inevitable ‘don’t you get it?!’ scenario of idiots playing a four-bar-loop for ten minutes. That means you folks are hearing that beat around 1300 times before (s)he mixes. Argh. Some EPs to check on this tip are Luciano’s fabulous ‘No Model No Tool’ package, Donnacha Costello’s 6x6 series or Onur Özer’s ‘Red Cabaret’ EP on Vakant, which is totally unsatisfying as a composition but chock full of ‘cool, spooky horn noises’ which fade in and out of the mix.
2) Dubstechno: some commentators are convinced that it’s a fringey, nerdy thing that won’t take off down the disco. Certainly, this music seems to be appreciated (mostly) by nerdy boys in bedrooms dreaming of sexy girls (attested to by the bedside piles of tissues). But from Shackleton’s atmospheric mesmerisers on Skull Disco to Surgeon’s recent convergence of his old abstract, banging style of techno with dub-techno and dubstep rhythms (check ‘Whose Bad Hands are These’ Pts I & II), an fascinating cross-pollination is afoot. Interestingly, both dubstep and techno seem to share an imagination of romanticised urban decay, alienation and dread that’s allowed them to cross-mutate without any friction their stylistic differences might have caused.
3) Banging (vs. deep house): A lot of German floors are in the grips of a (re)discovery (and re-interpretation) of a lot of classic house, especially deep house and even (apparently) wild-pitch. Berlin label Diamonds and Pearls seem to be riffing on some of these ideas. Check EAT’s wonderful ‘upbuilding’ tracks. Not that it ever existed, but I have it on good authority that mnml is, like, so three years ago, and not even worth disavowing anymore. All this as M_nus’ Magda explains, “When I think of minimal, it's not what we play, you know?” Then M_nus goes ahead and releases two records that are, well, quite banging and old school, like the recent Tractile and Baby Kate remixes. Meanwhile, another thread in the bastard tapestry appears to be going right into the bleep/sine-wave techno of old, as you can find in full effect mixed in with the usual gems and oddities on JG Wilkes’ (of Optimo fame) amazing ‘Walkabout’ mix, definitely my mix of the year so far.
4) The continuation of trance by other means: If Misstress Barbara’s recent (and appallingly bad) release on Border Community is any indicator, the interesting if muddy intersection between clicks’n’cuts, micro/tech house, mnml and prog/trance that the label instituted has withered and turned into a parody of itself, re-spawning an openly regressive ‘trance’ turn but (hopefully) enabling more than a few former trance-allergists to follow the word and the idea without shame into dark and mesmerising territories. All this as (formerly incredible) Aril Brikha drops another trance-as-dishwater badboy on Kompakt, simultaneously proving both that Kompakt are the ‘Ikea of techno’ as someone suggested, and that Detroit is sooo dead. AND that dodgy trance will never die. Meanwhile, stay tuned as trance’s ‘bad camper’ self returns, muddier – expect lots of hard, trippy tech-trance reminiscent of the Air Liquide days, but returned repackaged as… mnml. Donato Dozzy, Modern Heads and even some of the recent Metope tracks like ‘Braga’ are really worth checking on this tip, and Dozzy’s ‘dozzydozzydozzzy’ mix is well worth the free download from Mental Groove’s website.
5) Fossils, nerdscapes and Ksubi party monsters: Meanwhile, in the absence of an organising visual principle (a la Modular), mnml’s fractious trendencies appear to be fated to attach themselves to (then be disavowed by) a range of genres which are fossilising, being re-born, or just plain miscarrying (again). The nerdscape/blogosphere/production microverse keeps on revolving and evolving new, hyped sounds every few months, but so often these days this only seems to have a (ahem) mnml relation to what the ‘kids on drugs in clubs’ are dancing to, or at least how they understand what they’re doing. Younger peepz, unfussed by the sharp genre-specifics of 90s partying, appear to be picking, mixing and re-arranging parts and pieces of mnml into an overarching ‘style’ unified by visual cues – so the successful parties are increasingly those which offer a wearable subculture.
Nano’s recent successes (offering a vision of mnml to a dedicated audience) seems to have ‘proved’ (at least temporarily) that the music is viable in Melbourne. And why not? The parties are great, especially in the openness of Miss Libertines. But time will tell whether the style, which seems to yearn for stylistic purity, is at odds with Melbourne’s innately rockist, eclecticist music culture (on the one hand) and an increasingly visualised clubbing culture that subordinates content to coolsie kids in Ksubi jeans who cut their musical teeth on Triple J Hottest 100 comps in the suburbs… shhhh.

© Peter Chambers 2007