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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

‘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)

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...

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?

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.”

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.