QWERTY, AZERTY, BOHICA

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

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

“Hey Harry,

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

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

Hope you understand...

thanks

Mike”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Look!’ says Hess, ‘It moved!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grace Jones (versus the Automatic Telling Machine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You never told me you were married!’

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

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

‘Ah yes, about those lesions…’

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

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

Codpieceface (What did you say?)

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

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

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

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

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

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

OffyourFacebook (it’s on for young and old)

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

Free choice? Jack Johnson?!

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

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

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

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

Back at the crib…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

A fairwell to harms? (In praise of fags)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

Cindy’s tipping point (pumpkin hour)

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2006

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or if that gets tired… go the leBell.

© Peter Chambers 2007

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2007

I’ve had fun (and it wasn’t all that)

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

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

Why fun, why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Chambers 2005 (from the archives)

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

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

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

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

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

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



© Peter Chambers 2007

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

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

What is an errorist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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