saltandcarbon

The democracy of age

2009-05-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen a woman for a distance - hell, even a few metres away - and thought "I have no idea how old that woman is"? She's fit, classically dressed and has terrific hair - she could be anywhere from 27 to 48.

Then you get a little closer. The key is in the lips.

Because you can tell a botoxed pair of peckers. A little too taught, looking like lymph and globby fat is about to ooze out the seam between regular face skin and the pink mucous membrane of the lip. A Madame Tussaud's kisser.

And for reasons known only to dermatologists and witches, the lips are the first part of the body to show age. (Actually, the aged appearance is due to lip skin being particularly thin, and not having the usual protection layer of sweat and body oils which keep skin smooth. Thanks Wikipedia. Wink.)

Simply put, the lips don't lie. You can't dress them up in black cashmere or crust them in foundation. Like rings on a tree trunk, the wrinkles on the lips give the game away. And if you think you can beat the system, the only remedy - botox - is so glaringly obvious you may as well wear a spangly tracksuit and a bum bag.

Embrace the age, people. Love the lip wrinkles.

..........

When Geeks Go...Geekier

2009-05-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

I'm lucky enough to see previews of films from time to time with the premise of reviewing them. The films generally aren't the studio cash cows, but a surprising number of times I see an out-of-the-way release that is genuinely extraordinary. Fanboys - the ode to ritualised Star Wars obsession - is not one of those films.

It is reasonably entertaining, but I haven't quite resolved the contradiction that a film celebrating the appropriation of Hollywood by the suburban masses could be so, well, Hollywood. It is a classic teen road movie superimposed with a particular kind of nerdiness, where the Holy Grail isn't a tumble in the back of a van with a high school fantasy girl but a sneak peek at the new Star Wars instalment.
If you're a fan, you'll love it. If not, you'll be entertained but be left feeling a bit uncomfortable with how the filmmakers managed to feed their hard-won obsession straight back into the machine.

Anyway, the screening was noteworthy not for the film but the company in the cinema. There were two guys behind me when I arrived - not reviewers but possibly bloggers - both in Star Wars T-Shirts with one sporting a Lucasfilms bomber jacket and the other a long black trench coat.

They were talking about the new Star Trek film - the revamped, youthful, effects-laiden, sexy new Star Trek film - and one guy said to the other:

Its like they took all the nerdy stuff about the original series, put it in a separate folder and pressed CTL, ALT, DEL.

I was paralysed. Gobsmacked. The layers of irony were more than my puny little man could handle. More than the filmmakers of Fanboys could ever have pulled together.

It was, quite simply, the most awesome moment of my cinema-going life.

..........

Grizzly Air

2009-04-23T01:26:00.000-07:00

I’m not great with flying. The vast improbability that thousands of tonnes of metal and people won’t fall out of the sky always plays on my mind. But when the alternative is eleven hours sweating it out in a jalopy on the Hume, I can suspend my disbelief. Especially for the bargain price equivalent to two tanks of fuel.

What I find less easy to resolve myself to is why budget airline seats have a recline function. This isn’t long haul, deep vein thrombosis territory – this is a morning jaunt up the east coast in time for a breakfast meeting.

No one needs to sleep. No one needs to recline. There aren’t any gold-leaf clad virgins coming to feed anyone peeled grapes.

The fact is that on a standard domestic flight I have between ten and fifteen centimetres space between my knees and the seat in front. With the seat in front reclined the space disappears. I can’t wriggle forward. I smell the Rogain on the guy in front’s bald spot. I have to suck in my gut to get the tray table down. And I’m not even particularly large. It. Is. Ridiculous.

I just can’t understand how the market research geniuses paid six figure sums to lure passengers haven’t figured out that the small factor of comfort afforded the asshole that reclines the whole flight is infinitely negated by the frustration of passengers pinned to their pleather seats like unwitting UFC warm-up acts.

Or maybe the responsibility is less on the airline and more on the individual who places their own luxury above others’ comfort. People who might well hold the door open for an elderly shopper at the department store will crush a fellow flyer on the Melbourne to Brisbane without so much as a thought. For some reason the air is sanctified space. It’s like flying is still such a novelty, such an unlikely way to casually travel, that passengers have an entitlement complex reserved for the privileged few.

Whatever people. It is time to herald change. Enough of the Me First culture of the air. For the price we’re paying there isn’t much space. We all have to manage.

Suck it up and keep it upright.

Thankyou for flying.

..........

I finally realised why I hate Napoleon Dynamite so much...

2009-04-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

How many super-cool kids did you see wearing 'Vote For Pedro' t-shirts in the early noughties? Behind the velvet rope at every nightclub sidewalk line on a Saturday night, among every clutch of faux-hawked and bleck-tipped lads at least one deliberately-distressed tee emblazoned with the Napoleon D reference. If you listened in carefully to those trendy kids, over the course of the night you might have even picked up the odd "GOSH!" among the homophobia and expletives.

Napoleon Dynamite made nerdy cool. It crossed cultural and sub-cultural divides, and had everyone cheering for the hopelessly daggy. And along the way, while the kids were laughing and rooting for Napoleon, nerdy got appropriated by cool. It isn't bona fide nerdiness, but that doesn't seem to matter when t-shirt sales are at stake.

And I'm not ok with it. I'm very fucking un-ok with it. Nerdy isn't cool - nerdy is the antithesis of cool. The existence of nerdy defines cool. Geeky might be able to straddle the gulf of cultural improbability into cool, but nerdy is and forever will be outside of cool. Those punks in their nightclub lines have no right to nerdy. Even the vasaline-lensed, quaint and redemptive kind of nerdy that 'Vote For Pedro' symbolises.

Cool kids get everything else. They're not allowed to have nerdy too. Not on my watch.

..........

Growing old gracefully...

2009-04-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

How many gazelles die of natural causes?

Has there ever, in the history of the wild plains of Africa, been a gangly old leaper who met its ultimate demise through old age (which apparently is something like oxidization poisoning enough cells that the whole system just gives up)?

Probably how they get their reputation as being graceful - they never get all geriatric and farty and crooked and slow.

They just get eat'n.

..........

Super Amazing Vocabulary Time!

2009-04-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

SUPER AMAZING REAL WORD: Fecundity.
I've seen this word written and heard it used a bunch of times. Maybe at some stage I figured out what it means by the context in which it was used. I hear it now and still think of the bulkheads of tankers, or the rusty iron filings in a jar. The correct usage however would be to describe the fruitfulness of something or the high level fertility of animal or vegetable (not so much mineral).
In a sentence; "The fecundity of the Belgian countryside goes some way to redeeming the barren cultural landscape."

I-CAN'T-BELIEVE-ITS-A-REAL-WORD WORD: Ironical.
Apparently, it means EXACTLY the same thing as 'ironic'. And it sounds stupid.

NOT, IN FACT, A WORD: Alcopop.
You can't just pick two words, put them together to describe something new, and then talk about the new thing in parliament with a straight face. You just can't.

Words are cool. Tell your friends.

One HD - Best. Station. Ever.

2009-03-30T20:34:00.000-07:00

When one is a creature of leisure (as is your good author at present), one must be careful to avoid saturation in the inane drivel of daytime television. Cliff-like cheekbones and brick jawlines can only distract anyone for so long from the stupefying abortion of the senses that is the procession of Soaps and Talk Shows.

With all due respect to Ellen (who acquits herself with wry humour and admirable understatement considering the hoards of screaming banshees populating her audience), every time I manage to extricates myself from the vortex of daytime programming, I come away at least 9% dumber. Yet somehow, just when I thought I was out (of this terrible and intellectually corrosive habit) they pull me back in.

Well, no more my friends! The merchants of hype and hysteria and celebrity decorating tips can find a new bunny to boil! For I have One HD!

Sport, sport and more glorious sport. Hours upon hours of basketball, football and surfing by which to whittle away the daytime hours. Why, just this morning I was choking back the sick welling in my throat watching Dr Phil crucify some already-beleaguered simpleton when, during a fortuitously placed commercial break, I flicked to the replay of a 2008 ASP world surfing tour event.

The joy! The sanctuary! I could marvel at the skill and camaraderie of elite athletes sunning themselves in the South of France instead of peeling myself away from revelry in the desperation of a blinkered world.

Sure, I could read a book. I could sort out my tax. But some days are consolidation days. Getting back on top of life, mentally and physically. Now on such days I have an option for mindless entertainment that won't surreptitiously leech my moral and intellectual fibre.

Thank you One HD. Thank you for the time we will spend together.

...........

Do YOU know the Muffin Man?

2009-03-25T15:43:00.000-07:00

I don’t. Not any more. He’s dead to me.

I’m not sure when it happened, but it happened in my lifetime. The humble muffin is an endangered species.

I don’t mean the flat, yeasty, fork split panacea of English afternoons. I’m talking the deliciously portable baked treat of the wholemeal or cornmeal or branmeal with chunks of fruit and nuts and bits of foliage – has become nothing more than a glorified teacake. A bland, dry, processed sugar laden, crusty-topped teacake.

If I wanted teacake, I’d grab it from the Tasteless Shit fridge. A few strategically placed blueberries or a smear of tinned apple doesn’t magically transmogrify sugary bread into the innate awesomeness of true muffin-ness. Lipstick on a pig people, lipstick on a pig.

So, all you purveyors of baked goods. No more sneakily funneling the left over cake mix into muffin tins! The people on the street know the difference!

We’re onto it!

WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!

...........

Holiday. Celebrate.

2009-03-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

I bluster and I huff and I puff and I practice my sardonic glare, and most of the time I have a handle on the world enough to have a point, I think. The world – this life – is ridiculous and arbitrary and comical and fierce, and going in with eyes open is the best buffer. And when the status quo of our immediate world is held, we can carry away to thinking awareness is a defence.
But the universe has a habit of spotting the sprig of hubris.

The universe loves to wield an axe.

I am supposed to be overseas right now, adding the final glaze of tan in the kiln of a Pacific island. It was to be a four week reward to myself for having busted my ass for ten months running a business – a business that in so many ways I loved but that killed my creative urge and netted me substantially less of a salary than I had managing a video store a few years back. It was a reward to myself for having the courage to let go of security and pursue my dream to write. I was thumbing my nose at the financial doom and gloom because I had a higher calling. I’d made enough false starts – now was the time for me to make a fist of the freelance life. The Pacific jaunt was symbolic of that resolve.

I’m fundamentally a disorganised person, but with the departure date looming I was more shambolic than usual. I had failed to make so many of the necessary preparations for an overseas trip. The big things were taken care of – I sent in my passport application with plenty of time, and got injected with a handful of arm-numbing vaccines against unspeakable diseases. But I hadn’t booked any accommodation let alone done any research on the place, didn’t have a backpack, and had nothing resembling an itinerary. I hadn’t even finalised who would look after my cat two days before I was due to leave.

I wasn’t ready for this trip. And, it slowly dawned on me, I wasn’t looking forward to this trip. Even to an island paradise, travelling on your own is hard work. It takes gumption and a certain optimistic, cavalier approach. I was feeling more anxious than cavalier. I didn’t want to go.

Then my passport didn’t come through. For no apparent reason the passport office fucked up my application and it hadn’t turned up a fortnight after it was due. I called to track it down and wasn’t given any explanation, just excuses. Sometimes it happens. There are no guarantees. The dog ate it. You can’t hurry it up. You can’t come and get it. Sorry. So despite the fact that 99% of the population get their passports within the time specified, due to powers beyond apparently anyone’s control my passport would not arrive until the week after I was due to fly out. I was their monkey of the month. Since the tickets were a bargain-basement once-ever-special deal I couldn’t change the booking or get a refund. I couldn’t go on holiday.

Relief swept over me like locusts on a wheat field. I was surprised at the release I felt. I had been pressuring myself so much to let go of my uncertain future and have fun no matter what.
I wasn’t anxious about travelling on my own overseas, but the trip had come to represent the line in the sand between my old life and new, and I wasn’t ready for that definitive break. I was – and am – terrified of the next stage of my life, the one where I grind away at a future that will probably never pay off, ending in poverty, depression and in all likelihood my own prostitution. The trip became symbolic, a initially supposed to be a celebration of the decision to move on and a reward for being brave enough to make it. Time will tell, but I know myself and the uncertainty over my future would’ve made the kava especially cheek sucking.

Of course I might have been anguishing over nothing. My future might be brighter than I could dared to have dreamed. Perhaps I would have touched down in Tonga and felt the weight of the world slip seamlessly off my shoulders, revelling in the local hospitality and the tranquil pace of island life. In hindsight the trip away might have been the best thing that could possibly happen to me.

Still, holidays shouldn’t be so hard, particularly before they even start. It does seem like poetic justice that while I was busy turning a relaxing holiday into a metaphor for the worst case scenario for my future, forces outside my control were conspiring to take the option away from me anyway.

Update: Crazy geological tectonic shenanigans in the Tongan archipelago – earthquakes triggering deep sea volcano eruptions sending fierce plumes of smoke and ash into the air, according to some reports totally blocking out direct sunlight across the whole chain of islands. I take it all back universe. Sometimes you know best…

My Friendz Got Mad Skillz

2009-03-14T06:28:00.000-07:00

My friend Sam made a velociraptor. A real big one. Like, three metres tall and a thousand billion metres long. From plywood. He cut it with a laser. This is so many kinds of awesome to my grown up self, it is unspeakable the level of awesome my child self fells about it all.

The piece was part of an exhibition/collaboration of painfully hip fashion types and artists and creating people, and was a beacon of playfulness shining brightly in an ocean of cool and shimmer. The velociraptor was awesomeness in relief.

I'm pretty sure Sam wanted to create something that was visually and spatially striking, provided we were struck to remember the joy of discovery and the excitement and wonder of childhood. Or he just likes velociraptors heaps.

And you know what - even if his only motivation for spending 60+ hours cutting and sanding and slotting together a three metre tall plywood velociraptor is his irrational love of wooden dinosaur toys, I still love it. As an object and as bona fide art. Because altogether too often art gets self important and terminally earnest, and everyone forgets how fundamentally awesome velociraptors are.

.........

The Social Conscience Episode

2009-03-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking for a while that this web log feels a bit – how should I put it? – grumpy? Negative? Bashing this, complaining about that, sardonically humiliating the other thing is entertaining – and enormously cathartic, believe me – but saltandcarbon has been in existence for long enough that the time has come to give back to the community.

I’m not one for grand gestures (a la gala ball), or jumping on the bandwagon for organized community wide initiatives (although Movember warms the cockles of my usually-stone-cold-heart every time).

Instead I’m going in to bat for a condition that affects hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians every year – a secret killer, a little addressed scourge in desperate need of a higher profile.

Make no mistake; this blog post is just the start of my campaign. Posters, advertisements in print and radio, T-shirts and door knocking, I plan on going all out to give back to the society I love and treasure.

But let me get to some statistics:
An estimated public health bill (primarily from psychiatric care) in the billions.
86% of Australians suffering related trauma before the age of 16.
Profiteering pirates raking in over 6.5 million dollars a year.

The list goes on.

White Linen Pants must be stopped.

The vision of flesh coloured underwear vainly trying to remain inconspicuous under the translucent billowing of tailored white linen is enough to induce stroke. Desperation to make the horror stop induces suicidal tendencies in the most balanced and affable individuals. Liberace is veritably demure when compared to the eyesore – nay, violent offence – that is the WLP.

But there is a cure. Simple and, unbelievably, free. All we need as a society to banish this affliction to the curios of history is a collective, concerted effort. I urge everyone to join me in saving aesthetic decency and avoiding any more unnecessary spontaneous hemorrhaging.

Every time you witness the WLP, follow these four safe, simple steps.

1. Stop dead.

2. Point dramatically with one hand, cover the mouth in an expression of repulsion with the other.

3. Hold.

4. Keep holding – be strong – until the offending WLP clad creature has scurried back to whence they came.

Together, we CAN make a difference.
…………………………………………

Would the real Mr Eastwood please stand up?

2009-03-11T04:24:00.000-07:00

How much could I reasonably expect from Clint Eastwood?

His directorial debut, Play Misty For Me, featured compelling performances and hideous hair, and ground down to a predictable snoozefest before half of the hundred minutes were up.

His iconic Dirty Harry performances have dated appallingly - in no small part because their rampant chauvinism is now not even ironic.

Of course his wry humour, humanist touch and political conscience give his work as a director relevance beyond the quality of each film. Nonetheless his back catalogue is liberally littered with overly earnest misfires (Blood Work, the second half of Million Dollar Baby), genre clangers (The Rookie, Firefox) and out-and-out head scratchers (Space Cowboys).

Still, he has earned his reputation as a director always worth watching and deserves the benefit of the doubt with projects that seem fraught.

Which is why I was disappointed with Gran Torino. As a film, its...fine. The wonderful acting evens out the implausibility of the story, the excellent cinematography disguises the issues in pacing, the satisfying ending halfway substitutes for real empathy while the thematic intent covers most of the distance left. The problem is that every positive of craft is undermined by a negative of storytelling - in the end everything evens out so that it becomes eminently forgettable. I'd just come to expect more from Clint. More of a visceral experience. More of an emotional kick in the guts.

Maybe because this is his last film as an actor, he was too focused on going out with the same snarl as he started with. He's earned that right I suppose. It just doesn't make for a very complex film experience.

Homework

2009-03-05T03:26:00.000-08:00

1. Compile a playlist of the songs most under your skin at the moment. Forget cool or hip - only the ones that really do something to your mitochondria.

2. Burn CD.

3. Label with an adjective.

4. Drop in a letterbox at random.

5. Wonder. Enjoy the wonder.

[Not new, but lovely.]

So You Think You Can Beyonce?

2009-03-03T23:57:00.000-08:00

So, I'm pretty late on this. Like most things bling and/or popular culture. But after much urging from fashion-ally knowledgeable and hip-ly pulse taking friends, I tracked down the film clip to Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) by Beyonce on the interwebs.

It is. Mind. Boggling.

Not mind blowing - the dancing is phenomenal and the design impressive, but not totally out of the projections of mental possibility for a film clip. But what those three posterior-centric dancing girls are actually doing, as in the meaning of their bumping and grinding, makes the mind truly boggle. It borders on porno mime. Think about that. Miming pornography. What's the point? Are they trying to tell a story? Sexless titillation? Liturgical dance in the church of booty? I have no friggin idea.

In any case it was absolutely magnetic. And I felt like I needed to apologise to some women in my life afterwards. Any women. For no particular reason. Like I said, mind boggling.

Postscript: Apparently Beyonce talks with a completely straight face about her stage alter ego Sasha Fierce. Umm...okay. Sasha. Ms Fierce.

Beyonce will refer to a particularly raunchy sequence as Sasha's idea, and credits/blames Sasha for the consumerist blingbling post-feminist parts of her work. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that doesn't make it alright. Although it does make for some fascinating crazy-watch time.

GFC? What GFC?

2009-02-25T00:55:00.000-08:00

An astute student of fashion and cool - such as your humble author - will have noticed a recent resurgence in the adornment of lapels and pleats with wooden brooches, matte pins and spangly clips. Retro glamour or cutesy handmade seem to be the favoured poles of this world of adornment. (See how well I've noticed, all by myself? Fingers, pulse. That's all I'm saying.)

Anyways, this renaissance of accessorising - presumably a renaissance from glamorous 50's Hollywood and obnoxious 80's - got me thinking of one of the highlights of my misspent youth. Tony Barber. Ok, not Tony Barber without a context. Specifically Tony Barber excitedly offering the bewildered runners up on Sale of the Century a take-home cardboard version of the game show they just lost, and a commemorative teeny tiny sterling silver pin from Germani Jewellers. A commemorative pin! Of an iconic and retro cool TV show! These pins must be worth an absolute fortune to the fashionistas clamouring to add some detachable pizazz to their outfit. And Sale was a long running show - there were thousands of losers! And thousands of losers means there must be thousands of commemorative pins! Tens of thousands even!

And I, dear readers, will buy them all! I will sell them to a pop-culture-hungry public at hugely inflated prices! And I will thumb my nose at this so-called Global Financial Crisis!

[Cue maniacal laugh] Muah hahahahahahahaha!

Jonesing for some joy

2009-02-17T04:29:00.000-08:00

Now, I realise basketball isn't for everyone. God knows given my Jekyll/Hyde affliction I understand the aversion to competitive sport in general. But I implore, nay vehemently urge, every one with a zest for life to have a look at even a single one of the podcasts put together by a trio of Canuck chaps under the moniker The Basketball Jones.

The fact that the name of the show is a reference to a dodgy Cheech and Chong "comedy" record is alone testimony to their awesomeness.

But these guys, five days a week during the eight or nine months of the US NBA season, haul their asses out of bed into the Canadian frost to deliver twenty odd minutes of analysis, mockery and musings on happenings in the league.

How three guys not getting paid to do this can have so much fun is beyond me. Even further beyond me is how much I wish I was doing exactly the same thing. Just downright revelry in what they love.

So check it out. http://www.thebasketballjones.net/

And - as they say on the show - embrace the day, people.

Favourite chitlins

2009-02-15T21:15:00.000-08:00

I've heard some word of mouth reviews of Poor Boy, the debut offering for the new fangled Melbourne Theatre Company. (Well, the building at least is new fangled. And how!)

Anyway, one of the repeated criticisms of the show is that while the songs of Tim Finn are pleasant enough on their own, they have been crowbarred into this magical realist tale, and their unsuitability serves only to highlight their beige-ness.

It got me thinking about the senior Finns. Mr and Mrs Finn. New Zealandish Ma and Pa Finn.

I'm not a particular fan of either Split Enz or Crowded House, but I think it's patently obvious to all but the most zealous Tim devotee that Neil (the driving force of Crowded House) is a vastly and consistently more talented songwriter than his bigger bro. I can't shake the feeling that as much as they love both their musician sons equally, the senior Finns have every single Crowded House album on display, but only show the Best of Split Enz. How could they not play favourites a little bit?

Come to think of it Joe and Katherine Jackson probably own all of Michael's catalogue, and most likely Janet's too, but I'd be damn surprised if they ever gave La Toya's solo outing a spin these days...

Oh, the burdens of parenthood.

Did you shear the one about...

2009-02-09T03:18:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else wondered if pinking shears are named because of their unnervingly utilitarian design for cutting off little fingers? The serration. The size. The sturdiness.

As an object they nestle right at home in Rold Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, or the Triad in Rising Sun (I think that's the film - Wesley Snipes, right?).

Wikipedia cites the etymology as originating from the serrated edge of the carnation mirroring the blades of these kind of shears often used to cut flowers. Or something. I'm calling bullshit. It's because they cut off pinkies. Messily. Beware the shears...

With friends like these...

2009-02-04T04:45:00.000-08:00

"A close friend of the Tomb Raider star says that Ange was furious with Jen's repeated attempts to cosy up to her man Brad."

"Friends are worried the couple might have bitten off more than they can chew with the recent rapid expansion of their family."

"Sources close to the couple confirm that the relationship is on shaky ground."

...These guys definitely need to get some classier friends. Fo real.

In-seamed whimsy

2009-02-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

I have only ever owned two suits in my life - one for my year 10 formal and the other for my year 12 formal. Both times I made a mockery of the tailoring profession with how I filled out those patches of cloth.

I had cause to rent a suit once since then, at the beautiful summer wedding of two of my best friends. The beautiful but swelteringly hot wedding of two of my best friends. My squirming through the sweat did no justice to the snappy cut and fancy weave.

For some reason now, for the first time in my life, I want to own a suit. I want an occasion to own a suit. Several occasions to make it worthwhile.

Unfortunately I think I have maybe a three month window between being grown up enough to want a suit and still having any kind of shape to wear one with style. I'd better get cracking. Any ideas appreciated...

Taking it personally

2009-01-31T19:53:00.000-08:00

I’m a pretty passionate guy. I get fired up over small injustices, I get carried away with points that don’t matter, and anyone who really knows me is right now choking back indignity at the magnitude of such an understatement. I take things to heart and then stitch it all to my sleeve. I rant. I rave.

Someone close once suggested I could take life about one thousand percent less personally and be just fine, not to mention immeasurably less stressed. I protested that you don’t make friends with salad. A bit obtuse to count as a serious rebuttal, I went on to argue that they were mistaking my cynical realism with taking the world too seriously. Just because I think things by and large don’t work out and the universe is overwhelmingly disappointing doesn’t mean I don’t think it is worth trying for a better world. I lost the argument.

The thing I’m interested in is the inconstant but very real threshold of frustration where playing competitive sport changes from healthy catharsis to compounding anxiety. I love – really LOVE – playing hard on the basketball court. There are few things more satisfying, win or lose, than leaving every skerrick of energy out on the court. Having had a difficult week or personal disappointment can be fuel to channel so much negative energy and transform it into focus and drive and release.

But there is a point, an unknowable point, where the negative energy overwhelms the possibility for transformation. No matter how much I want a game or how hard I play or how determined I am to leave all the other shit at the door, I’ll never play well. I’ll never feel the release. Those games are always bluntly personal. And of course there is an exponential relationship between the possibility of playing well and the possibility of letting go of everything else. Like compound interest in the worst tangible way.Those days I just shouldn’t play, but the promise of relief is so seductive. I just don’t know any way of coming down far enough on those days, to a calm enough headspace that the game will just be a game. I mean, it’s all well and good to WANT to take life one thousand percent less personally. Much harder to do when life is so damn personal…

Review: The Wrestler

2009-01-30T18:08:00.000-08:00

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m a fool for a quietly rendered story of existential crisis, human failing, and the arbitrary casualties of life. It just…it hits me. In my heart bone.

So there was every chance I was going to fall for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. For one – as is well documented – Mickey Rourke is a living, breathing, slightly angrier real life manifestation of this kind of tragedy. After being touted in the early 90’s as the saviour of the cinema ‘tough guy’, he spectacularly fell from grace, bang into a wall of drugs, alcoholism, abominable plastic surgery and other acts of disastrous hedonism. He plumbed the depths of personal and cinematic disgrace, until Tarantino and Rodriguez threw him a lifeline by controversially casting him in Sin City. On the back of his bristling, electric performance, Aronofsky fought tooth and nail to have Rourke play Ricky ‘The Ram’ Robinson in The Wrestler. Several financiers spooked and abandoned the project but Aronofsky wouldn’t budge on the casting, meaning the scale of the film was seriously downsized.

Rourke paid back that faith with interest, delivering a muscular, nuanced and utterly compelling performance. Pathos, you ask? In spades. Heaped, fresh spades. He is revelatory and utterly convincing at once, and deserves more than his Oscar nomination. Rourke deserves to hold the statue aloft.

Robert Siegel’s script is deceptively simple – essentially a two hander between lost souls, wonderfully reminiscent of the Marlon Brando classic On the Waterfront. Evan Rachel Wood makes a stunning turn in a handful of scenes as Ricky’s estranged daughter, but the real revelation – even more so than Rourke – is the usually beige Marisa Tomei delivering a performance of gravity and charm as a single mother stripper striving for a better life.

Ambition and desperate loneliness birth each other as the arbitrary turns in life throw these beautifully tragic characters through the alleys of life. The Wrestler is pessimistic and unapologetically bitter at times, but rarely have I spent such satisfying time in the cinema.

Life doesn’t have to be pretty to be spectacular.

When its been over 40 degree for three days in a row

2009-01-29T22:14:00.000-08:00

How great is it when people can't resist commenting "Gee, its hot out there" or a rhetorical "How hot is it?"

Seriously. I'm aware of the heat.

Sheesh...

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-29T22:01:00.001-08:00

Why is everyone so enamoured with the turgid, slight, flawed romance of Slumdog Millionaire? The protagonist is largely inactive, devoid of empathy and seems incapable of anything but a bewildered glare. Satisfying character development is shelved in favour of cheap plays at the heartstrings with scenes of poverty and violence. Of course it is tragic that millions – nearing billions – of people, many of them children, live in abject poverty and squalor. But in a narrative sense, showing flashbacks of a child’s mother beaten to death or his friends deliberately maimed for begging does not actually explain his present day motivations or necessarily create a connection to the character. Bad things have happened but the guy is still a motivation-less dead fish on screen. Likewise we see how he knows these ‘impossible’ answers. But why he is so desperate to prove himself and why this girl is the answer to his happiness – what should be the driving questions of the film – are so hastily pasted into the clever tapestry of sights and sounds that they disappear into insignificance. (And no, “It is written” as a plot justification isn’t remotely strong enough to hold together a feature film. It is the cinematic equivalent of an eighth grade creative writing task hastily concluded with “Then I woke up”.)

The shambles that is the script is a crying shame for many reasons; Danny Boyle is a supremely talented director; the central story structure of showing through flashback how this poor boy circumstantially knows the answers to these questions is novel and interesting; and the child actors are compelling if raw talents. In the end the central character is uninteresting and the central romance is flat out disappointing. No mean feat for a character driven romance.

Other elements of the film were frustrating – the jarring motion-blur of the action sequences and the distractingly frenetic editing masking the plodding pace of the story to name a few. Still, these are personal aesthetic preferences rather than inditements on the movie as a whole.

But returning to the central frustration, why is this film so loved and lauded? Does it tap into Western guilt over the state of a former colony, offering an unthreatening, rise-against-the-odds protagonist to purge our discomfort? Do we so desperately need to believe that the people we indirectly oppress every day can be saved by a bit of determination streak of improbably luck? Are we willing to absolve the sins of the world in romanticism so easily? Slumdog Millionaire is a feelgood film, but given the chasm between its cinematic quality and its reception, I suspect it is feelgood for all the wrong reasons. Proceed with scepticism…

Film: Bustin' Down The Door

2009-01-18T23:54:00.000-08:00

The pop culture feature documentary is a strange beast. More so than other big screen documentaries, chronicles of movements, events or trends within living memory are faced with a greater than usual question of subjectivity and a resulting need for editorialisation. Is the purpose to nostalgically relive the good ol’ days or to use the luxury of distance and hindsight to make a point?

Bustin’ Down The Door is an energetic and unashamedly fond account of the turning point of surfing from a pastime to a legitimate professional sport in the mid 1970’s. The film focuses on a handful talented Australian and South African surfers who took up residence on – and took over – Hawaii’s North Shore in the winters of 1974, ‘75 and ’76. While there are codas glimpsing at the private lives of surf royalty Shaun Tomson, ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew, Mark Richards and Ian Cairns, the film focuses squarely on the pursuit of these guys to make a living out of what they loved, gain respect as the best in the world, and legitimise surfing as a professional sport.

Director Jeremy Gosch is at pains to show the motivation of these mavericks was a kind of fame above fortune. They wanted to make money, sure, but only enough to support their lifestyle of surfing the globe. For these guys it was about respect and acknowledgement and adulation. Rabbit and Cairns and Peter Townend (PT) found themselves prime targets for the angry, pride-wounded Hawaiian locals because they were so zealous in pursuit of this fame rather than fortune.

How this tension played out – the low key Hawaiians being publicly insulted in the surfing media by the upstart Australians – is easily the most compelling part of the film and provides a fitting climax. And yet something rang hollow almost immediately that the credits began to roll.

The whole premise of the film is a celebration of the achievement of these guys to legitimise their sport and make a living for themselves. Then for a few, gaudy moments, we see what their legacy has become. The oversized cheques for ridiculous sums of prize money being doused in champagne at the prestigious Triple Crown presentation. The rock-star lifestyle of tour surfers, sponsored by multi-billion dollar surf lifestyle companies. The film even opens with a shot of Kelly Slater rocking up to the ASP (Association of Professional Surfers) awards night in a black Maserati.

Yet none of the men this film was created to celebrate – not one of the central figures that, according to the doco, were directly responsible for the current state of the sport – is shown to comment on what their legacy has become. And I want to know damnnit. Gosch shows the contrast between what these guys wanted to achieve and the circus it has become, but doesn’t have a single comment on how they feel about that evolution. Don’t bring it up, leave the film as a rose-coloured nostalgia trip, or ask the hard questions.

In a similar vein, while most of these pioneering guys seem to have survived the years relatively unscathed, South African charger Michael Tomson is clearly, painfully worse for wear. Tomson always played second fiddle to his more successful and well-liked cousin Shaun, but Michael was one of the most influential figures in the surf wear and surf lifestyle industry. He founded Gotcha and set the design tone for the whole industry for most of the 80’s and early 90’s. He sold the brand in 1997 after it lost it’s way financially and ideologically. The same, apparently, could be said for Tomson. Michael lived hard, partied hard and bought into the lifestyle he was selling – sex and drugs and waves. His face, and his broken voice, shows it. Although still well respected and relatively well off, Tomson still qualifies as a casualty of the industry these guys gave birth to. But not a single hard question is asked of the man. Just fond, embellished backslapping.

Although not immediately apparent even to the relatively informed viewer, the sense that these incisive and important questions are left unasked is still tangibly frustrating. And no amount of hard-childhood stories from a likeably-greying Rabbit or earnest tones of Edward Norton’s narration can paper the cracks of this jumbled together doco.

2.5/5

So...

2008-12-24T00:13:00.000-08:00

What a rancid, runtish, queasy, gormless, stillborn hash of a year that was.

Time to do practically everything differently.

Top 5 reasons High Fidelity is the best. Ever.

2008-12-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

John Cusack. Rob. Talks to the camera with the most candour and insight of any first person narrative comedy ever. Beating Woody Allen at his own game. I think its something to do with the dramatic irony of his voiceover self having so much more insight than his in-character self. Whatever. Rob is warm and funny and frustrating and stubborn and vulnerable and just plain brilliant.

Soundtrack and pop-culture references. The love of music oozes out of every frame.

Quotability. I have a theory – not fully formed – that the immediacy/success of comedies is directly proportional to the durability of its most salient quotes. “I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains”, “Get your petioli stink outta my store”, “Kathleen Turner Overdrive” and “WHAT. FUCKING. IAN GUY?!?” are genius.

Jack Black as Barry. The man has always been parody of himself, but every performance for him since this once is a pale mimicry of the nerdy verve he brings to the store-clerk-come-crooner.
It is honest. Love is hard. It is shit. It is a grind. It sure as shit isn’t glamorous. We do dumb stuff in pursuit of it or flight from it all the time. But it is the thing that is at the end of what we strive for in every other way, every day. High Fidelity is a celebration of that whole maddening mess.

Finding Neverhappenedland

2008-11-24T00:11:00.000-08:00

So I was working on a Saturday. Quiet day, no one much around. Two guys walk in - early thirties, weekend trainers, one guy thinning, the other all vanilla.

I could tell they were from Landmark. Their coming as a pair. Their uncertainty in the gallery. Their printed name tags where the first name is twenty points larger than the surname.

They order some coffees. What with it being a slow day and all, I had to set the grinder on. Between the crunch of the beans and the shrill of the video work in the foyer I coudn't hear the conversation the two guys resumed.

I poured out the coffees, unappreciated rosetta and all. Then remembered to click off the grinder. It just so happened to coincide with a break in the artwork noise. I caught the tail - or what would be the tail end when they clocked I could hear them. What I heard was this:

"And I had always thought I had a good relationship with my mum, but..."

But?

BUT?!!!

But because of the mental manipulation of an ostensibly empowering 'education' program you're now going to foist the blame for a catalogue of regrets and frustrations for decisions you've made as man of free will onto the woman who until now has overall seemed to do a fine turn of raising you?

Well how d' yeh like them apples?

Way to save the planet y'all

2008-11-21T22:23:00.000-08:00

Someone I know drove the 3 km or so to go to the Walk Against Warming rally, before going boutique shopping and driving home. Seriously.

Searching for answers in the library of life...

2008-11-17T22:57:00.000-08:00

Does anyone know where the demarcation of literature into 'Fiction' and 'Non-Fiction' came from? Why implicitly give 'Fiction' more legitimacy in that it's counterpoint is it's negation? Why not 'Fiction' and 'Factual', or 'Fiction' and 'Actual', or 'Fiction' and 'Assented Supposition'? It just seems odd, particularly since if any primacy would be implied - given the investment of our society in 'truth' - it would be to the fact-ish side of writing.

And don't come at me with the 'we can never really get a handle on the truth so it's best to leave it unspecific' argument. We peddle dubious facts routinely in everyday life, let alone academia. I don't buy it.

But damnnit if it ain't buggin' the goddamn shit outta me.

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bue...

Monkeys with balls.

2008-11-13T16:48:00.000-08:00

Basketball is not a non-contact sport. Putting it in anywhere near the same category as bowling or darts or even tennis given the volume of directly transferred sweat is laughable. Still, reclassifying it as a contact sport would lead to bedlam. There needs to be a middle ground - something like a pushy-shovey-but-no-grabby-hitty sport category.

Anyway, my point is there are always players on teams who will test the limits of the sweat-transference to see how much they can get away with. If they swing an elbow and don't get called, swing some more. Then try an out and out shove. Or a kidney tap. And so on. That team's general aim is to steamroll to victory putting brawn before finesse.

There are good ways and bad ways to play this game of limits. An oversize team can play to its strengths by being physical, but respect the limit the ref imposes, playing hard and tough but essentially fair and in good sportsmanship. If the other team can't take what is being dished out it isn't personal, it's just a tactic. I love a game like that. I revel in it. I'm competitive, I love playing physical and scrappy defense and fighting for position on offense. If the ball is on the floor, I'm diving on it. And in against these kind of teams, regardless of who wins, I'm proud that I played hard and will commend the opposition for doing the same. Nothing personal - just a healthy channeling of aggression.

Then there is the bad way to play tough. It involves a lot of scowling, even more complaining, and lashings of snide comments to the opposition and ref. This team wants to break you - to bully or intimidate the opposition to submission or distraction. Every non-call on their end is a national travesty and every call on your end is the grossest perversion of justice ever known. They drop the shoulder a few times to start, just to let you know they're the boss, pushing and shoving off the ball where it's less likely to get called. They try to dictate the tone, and the tone is U.G.L.Y.

After not too long - on my team at least - this shit just will not stand. It becomes not about just basketball, but about having a little pride in yourself to not get pushed around. So you sign their offer sheet of shoving and niggle, finding your own ways to grab and wrestle and push a bit back. The problem with these kind of jackass, self-inflated teams is that they can dish it, but they sure can't take it. Soon the whingeing and crying over calls turns into direct threats on you and your loved ones. The elbows are thrown with that much more intent to harm. They hate you, literally, not just for this game but for their girlfriend holding out on them, their car accident last week, the unfairness of the world on a guy trying to fight his way through.

It all seems ridiculous, but it is amazingly common. Sport as violent catharsis.

So, we played one of these teams in my bottom grade social league last night. They thought they should beat us. They weren't beating us. They tried to impose their physical dominance. We imposed right back. One guy - a good four inches and 20 kilograms bigger than I - decided to make an example of me. I kept shutting him down or pushing him out. He got shittier and shittier, no doubt compounded by my weapon of choice in these situations - being patronising. He tried to throw me to the ground for a rebound and ended up falling over himself. I patted him on the back and said "Don't worry mate, next time" with a cheap grin. That put him over the top. He ran at me full pelt, dropped his shoulder and caught me in the chest, sending me flying. I sank the free throws and he was shamed into uselessness for the rest of the game. We beat them 35-17.

It wasn't a satisfying game in the usual way, but I just get so furious when people start things they don't want to finish. I don't like hostility on the court. Hard play, but not hostility. And the idea of someone making me an arbitrary target for their aggression - makes me want to prove a point. Makes me not want to back down. Maybe I should, but damn, it just doesn't seem right.

Monkeys with basketballs, man. Monkeys with balls...

Yes We Can (muthafuckas)

2008-11-11T03:42:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else noticed that the snappy kitch way to herald the coming of the 44th Prez of the US - "Obamarama" - fits semlessly into the tune of Shaggy's 1993 chartbuster Oh Carolina. Although it doesn't shed any light on any of the rest of the lyrics of this abysmal worm-ditty, it does nicely reference the way Barack has a knack for rhythmic lilt and finding the seam of popular culture.

Dear got I hope Obi Wan has more longevity than Shaggy.

Anyone for dessert?

2008-11-02T03:58:00.000-08:00

HUNGER (2008)

Dir: Steve McQueen

Writ: Steve McQueen, Enda Walsh

Star: Michael Fassbender

Belfast prison. 1982. Irish freedom fighters protest their status as civilian criminals by undermining the system however they can – refusing prison fatigues, smearing cell walls in shit, pouring piss into the corridors. The inmates are hungry for validation. The prison staff are hungry for Irish blood. The IRA are hungry for martyrs. And the world was hungry for meaning. The world is still waiting.

British video artist Steve McQueen’s feature debut is an arresting, visceral and brave take on this landmark moment of Irish history. His quasi-narrative, visually stunning video works flagged a major talent behind the camera, but the path from visual artist to filmmaker is paved with vile symbolic hyperbole and terminal lack of actual story. In short, judgement was reserved as to whether McQueen’s obvious potential would translate into a satisfying feature.

Well, satisfying and more. Surprising and bold. How many debut filmmakers would have the confidence to hold a single camera shot – no pan or tilt or zoom or trickery – on a conversation in a bare room for near on ten minutes? How many would know that it was exactly the right shot for the moment? How many debut filmmakers would lead off the story following a supporting character, switch to another bit player before finally settling on central figure half an hour in? And how many would be able to avert the audience feeling cheated and instead have us loaded with empathy for all? A stunning achievement.

There are so many more superlatives, but just go. Go and see it. Go. Now.

Sour Cinema

2008-10-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve been lucky enough lately to score some gigs writing for Australia’s best (and second biggest, circulation-wise) movie magazine Filmink. Yay for me. Among some feature articles and interviews I’ve had the supremely awesome task of watching movies on preview and writing what I think about them. Since there’s practically nothing I’d rather do than watch movies and I have an opinion on everything, this is pretty close to that magical, mystical land of loving work. McLovin’ work.

So anyways, one of the preview discs popping its silvery, binary, plasticy length through my letterbox recently was the Palestinian/Israeli drama Lemon Tree. I watched, I scribbled, I opinioned, and I cobbled together the rough shape of a review. When I write, (allow me to digress again), when I write I make a few notes, undoubtedly indecipherable to anyone else, and then I walk away. I wait and see what sticks with me – ideas or films or gripes – and roll it all around in my head until I see the angle open up. If I can’t shake an image, a phrase or a theme, that’s the point through which I approaching the subject. What resonates. What inflames. What connects me and allows more than a cursory glance.

Blah blah blah. The point is that in the few days between my hurried notes and the angle emerging I was diverted to working on a more pressing article for the mag, and by the time I came back to it, the review had been handballed to another willing writer. All, good – I ended up with both an excuse to watch a movie and a feature article. I’d forgotten about it, moved on, adios West Bank muchacos.

That was until about a week ago, when the film got its general cinema release. Tom Ryan from The Age, David Stratton and Margaret Pomerantz from At The Movies, and a host of other mainstream media gave this dreary and uninspiring offering four stars. Out of five. A high distinction. A film in the top 20 percent released on the general public. Uh, no. It isn’t. Not by a long fucking way.

To set the record straight and even up the ledger, what follows is my review of the film. Enjoy.

Based on a true story, Israeli-Palestinian co-production Lemon Tree has at its heart the noble if naive ideas that we must make a stand for what we love and that compassion has the possibility of crossing cultural divides. If that sounds like a twee lens through which to see the Middle East, it is.

There are some charming performances and engaging moments, but the whole experience is a bit…cold. The symbolism of the eponymous lemon tree is dreadfully laboured. Even the most casual observer of world affairs would realise that some situations are beyond such simplified metaphor, and not a useful lens through which to view the conflict. But not only is the land of the Arab Israeli conflict rendered simplistic – worse, in cinematic terms, it is made mundane.

It is a cruel shame that the acting talent obvious here is applied to a loaded and emotive subject with so little filmmaking subtlety. Nostalgia is shown by the tearful fingering of the outline of a face on a computer screen. Deep secrets are unearthed when Polaroids are discovered conveniently left lying around on an office desk. It becomes obvious that the creative impetus behind this film is far too invested in the sentimentality of the message the film aims at than the crafting of a compelling journey. Unfortunately, it seems most reviewers will steer audiences down a frustratingly fruitless path as victims of the same sentimentality. I’m all for resolution to the devastating West Bank conflict, and agree with the spirit of Lemon Tree that the way forward is likely to come from the grass roots – between neighbours and shop owners and unlikely personal empathy. But please, don’t see this movie. Opposite to the fruit at the centre of the story, Lemon Tree has a sweet start and a bitter aftertaste.

2 / 5

The End of the War

2008-07-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

I hereby present my Extensively Researched Irrefutable Reasoning of the Superiority of PCs over Macs.

The drummer from Def Leppard – a beacon of hope and inspiration for maimed and disabled creative geniuses everywhere – could not use a Mac. Or at least not a Mac mouse. There is no way that the one-armed percussion juggernaught could possibly respond to his kilobytes of fan-email, cut and paste live action snaps for the Revival Tour promotional material, or complete his personal tax return online without the benefit of the right mouse key.

Apple-key plus single-button click? Puhlease.

And those talking head ads with the kid from Third Rock were amusing for about half a second, but can anyone at Apple say “dead horse”?

So kids, save yourself a few pennies and support limbless technophiles everywhere. Say NO to the sexy little milky white knobule. Say YES to the ugly grey rock with two buttons.

And speaking of...

2008-07-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

And speaking of words that conjure drastically inappropriate and unrelated images...

"FLANGE"

Sounds like a calcified vagina to me...

Big Brother revealed

2008-06-30T04:51:00.000-07:00

So I think I've finally nailed what is behind my uncharacteristic and admittedly perverse enjoyment of the low-brow bile-fest that is Big Brother.

The way people on the show behave when the cracks in their glossy forced relationships begin to show and the whole fabric begins to unravel, when they are at their basest - even accounting for the fact that the tensions are mostly imposed and the rifts mostly constructed - that behaviour validates and confirms my inherent cynicism about the world. Beneath all their gloss and polish, most people are repulsive, albeit entertaining.

Don't get me wrong. I spend most of my time trying to overcome this pessimism and make the most of life. But every now and again the wry and bleak heart of me needs to be indulged. Enter Big Brother. Quiet the soul. Return to making an effort with the world. Simple.

Memo to all office workers enamored of catching public transport in trainers

2008-06-29T05:10:00.000-07:00

You look like fucking morons.

I should qualify that I am in no way shape or form against wearing more comfortable shoes for the commute - slip ons or sneakers or flats of some description. I'm sure small mercies are the only thing keeping you from going completely postal as you grind out shitty sameish day after day in recycled office air. You got a few blocks to leg it each day, your footsies get sore in patent leather.

Cool. I get it.

But hi-tech scientifically calibrated cross country running shoes are complete fucking overkill. I have owned running shoes and am firmly of the opinion that they are ridiculously impractical footwear for everything except said sporting activity. Not to mention the fluorescently white plastic/mesh poking out from under a snappy tailored new wool suit looks like dress-yourself day at the special school.

Actually, lets face it. That earlier ramble about trainers being unsuitable footwear was a smokescreen. You could wear concrete heels studded with razorblades for all I care. But for the love of god it is a crime against fashion and general decency to pair weekend activity-wear with button-down week wear. Seriously, it looks nothing short of retarded. I don't like thinking that insurance is brokered and stocks are traded and orders processed and deals made by people who could see themselves in the mirror and find that look acceptable.

So stop it. All of you. There is a whole section of the shoe department dedicated to "casual". Please go and check it out. Or at least start running to work so there is a point to all this shameless eyesore. Honestly, who throws a shoe...

Judges uphold 'right to bear arms'

2008-06-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

American mayors and legislators are closely studying a Supreme Court ruling today that clarifies the constitutional right of an individual to have a gun and may make many cities' gun control efforts invalid.
The 5-4 landmark ruling is the first time the Supreme Court has clarified what the second amendment means. The majority concluded that the "right to bear arms" extends to the individual, not just the rights of states to maintain militias, like state guards and police forces.

I don't even know where to start with this one.

The frustrated cynic in me says "Fuck 'em. If their educated leaders are this retarded about it all, let them shoot each other on the streets."

The frustrated optimist in me says "At least they're looking at it - maybe this will make the whole issue clearer and everyone can move forward. Or maybe people really can be trusted to look after themselves and deserve the right to do what they see fit."

Then the frustrated cynic in me punches the frustrated optimist in the throat and screams "Wake up to yourself!"

Yeah, the cynic is right. As usual.

Australia and Zimbabwe Test

2008-06-22T23:12:00.000-07:00

Jane McGrath did so much to raise awareness of breast cancer and provide financial and institutional support for the people who work to treat it. She conducted herself with grace and dignity. Her death is sad and newsworthy.
But I am fucking disgusted - no, outraged - that her passing is the front page news item on every major newspaper and news website when an entire country is on the brink of collapse and wholesale genocide. The leader of the opposition in Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew from the run-off election race because of escalating violence, persecution and blatant corruption by the tyrannical Robert Mugabe's ruling regime. According to Tsvangirai 82 of his party's officials and sympathisers have been murdered and thousands in hiding or displaced since his party legitimately outright won the elections in late March but were robbed and bullied of that victory by vote-rigging by Mugabe who manufactured a result the would require a run-on election, giving him enough time to orchestrate the reign of terror he has exacted on his opposition.

Tsvangirai has lead this party through from one wave of violence to the next hoping that if he got close enough to a win within the national system, the rest of the world would finally pull its complacent thumb out of its ass and back him. He got so close as to have actually won election, but still the international community sits on its big grubby hands. No oil, no gold, no bother. How could a man continue in the face of such abuse of his supporters and brutal global apathy?Tsvangirai is saving the lives of his supporters by backing down because the lives that have been lost in support of him and his party have literally been in vain. Mugabe is the new Hitler, and we are herding people onto the trains.

Today I am disgusted to be a human being. And I'm disgusted to be Australian.

The one where we look for a job

2008-05-05T04:44:00.000-07:00

Admin superstar? Can-do all-rounder? Data entry wiz? Do you thrive on challenge? Looking for a way in to media? Inbound calls only! No cold selling! Do you enjoy the Great Outdoors? Want to work with children without early mornings? High profile national organisation! Potential for promotion! Make your own hours! Work with the latest technology! Passion for sales? Sick of commuting? Be part of a small team! Perks galore! Get paid to travel! Realise your best! Immediate start!

The successful candidate will have at least 5 years experience in a similar role with asexual species, some knowledge of arbitrary heirarchical systems, and be willing to suck it up. Experience in quashing moral objections is not essential but will be highly regarded.

This is a unique opportunity to launch your career with a highly regarded consulting company in a part time role. Applications only in writing, addressing all the self-devised key criteria listed, to the Managing Executive Director of Senior Operational Advancements. We are watching and you will learn to like it.

The employment sector - when did the world get this fucking convoluted?

The one where the question arises "What The Fuck Is Wrong With People"

2008-05-01T00:47:00.000-07:00

The PROBLEM is SHANIA TWAIN'S UNKEMPT POODLE.

The one where I curse Jimmy Barnes for fucking with my sex life

2008-04-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

In 1990 I was a long way from having sex. Too long, I thought in my later teens. Nonetheless, the particulars of what to do in the bedroom - apart from pull on your PJs and hit the hay - wasn't even on my list of things to discover.

I was also a long way from understanding metaphor and hyperbole in pop music. But even through the ignorance of childhood, some messages from the blanket of pop culture make it to the subconscience to lay in wait.

And what does this have to do with Jimmy Barnes?

LET’S MAKE IT LAST ALL NIGHT

THIS COULD BE THE LAST TIME I MAKE LOVE TO YOU

LET’S MAKE IT LAST ALL NIGHT

BABY GIVE ME SOMETHING TO HOLD ON TO

EVEN IF WE CAN’T MAKE IT RIGHT

BABY MAKE IT LAST ALL NIGHT

Let's Make It Last All Night - Barnesy’s stomping ballad off the classic gruntfest album 'Two Fires' - was everywhere in the summer of 1990. And nowhere more than from the shiny-red-plastic-shelled two speaker radio cassette deck perched above the faux-wood-panelled microwave in our family home kitchen. My mum had the commercial radio blaring from sunup to sundown, and the pained romantic ambitions of Barnesy and Farnsey and Ninah Cherry and Lionel Ritchie all leaked into my little putty brain somewhere.

Jump cut to years later. Through a series of cruel circumstances and what could be only called ‘bad luck’ I was a frustrated 17-year-old virgin. I realise eminently now why the turn of phrase insists you ‘lose’ your virginity, since not only was I a changed manchild after that blustery dusk on the beach, but I also cannot remember a single detail of the actual event. It’s lost. Gone. In a haze of relief and confused expectations. But one thing I do know – it didn’t last all night.

And as my unlikely sex life sputtered along, this simple fact plagued me. I could NEVER make it last all night. Even if by some magical alignment of the stars I managed to make it last over 15 minutes, I was near clinical exhaustion. And sometimes those sitcom-length dalliances were worth the effort for the other party. Yet lurking inside me somewhere, sabotaging my sexual confidence and undermining my mojo, was the belief that if I really, really cared I should make it last all night. Especially since at that age I believed that every night could be that last time I could do it.

And in my mind was a picture of Barnesy circa 1990 – looking like a man who could undoubtedly make it last all night. For several on the trot if his lady-friend demanded.

I’ve since realised it isn’t possible. At least not without Viagra, a drip and some serious tantric training. I’m not sure when I finally, consciously acknowledged that perhaps Barnesy wasn’t speaking literally and I could relax the expectations I’d put on myself. Maybe it was in the scarce moments of honesty between my male friends where I realised more than 15 minutes isn’t a bad innings. Maybe it was discovering more valuable things to a relationship than a superhuman sexual stamina. Or maybe it was just seeing Barnesy looking really fucking old.

The one where I beg for clemency

2008-04-26T02:42:00.000-07:00

Every relationship I have ever gone into and everything that has happened in those times I've had only the best intentions. Regardless of how miserably things might have fallen apart, how far I might have turned away or how much I might have undermined the course of things, I was never cynical or calculating or cruel. And no matter how empty I left anyone, I never meant to take anything.

Is that so hard to come at? Is it possible to resolve such ruin with honest, hopeful intent? Is is possible to forgive?

Maybe. But I'm not so sure who is to be forgiven.

The one where my inscrutable pleb voyerism is given further fuel

2008-04-22T16:45:00.000-07:00

Good news fellow trash hounds! Great news in fact!

The teenage try-hard suburban-terrorist serial-pest sensation Corey Delaney is joining the presenting team of Big Brother 08.

I had heard that after his infamous Ringwood 'party' - blown outrageously out of proportion - The Corey had wrangled himself a publicist. "What the fuck for?" I thought. The kid held a lameo high school party that got crashed by a hoard of bored deadshit punks who trashed the manicured whitewash neighbourhood. The fact that the party details went viral through myspace isn't testament to his part planning savvy or his marketing nous, just proof of the saturation of internet social networking sites and evidence that the term 'friend' has been correspondingly made a laughing stock.

But, kudos to his parents. The whole situation reeks of a frustrated stage mother smelling her longed-for vicarious dream waft by and seizing the chance with all her wily spirit. I guarantee you The Corey wasn't the brains behind his media saturation. So, well played mum...well played.

And when he's gracing the screen as a BB host or special commentator or running joke, don't jump to cussing the yellow-sunnied one himself. Spare some vitriol for his elders behind the scenes.

There's nothing like suburban opportunism, is there?

The one where I ruefully pre-empt my descent into shameful trashdom

2008-04-19T04:56:00.000-07:00

It's coming again. That time of year when the putrid bottom-dwellers of society are shepherded cooing and drooling into a theme-park box and - fed on carefully rationed humiliation and each others' unique bigotry - and encouraged to pet and prod each other in an attempt to elicit even more evidence of objectionable breeding.

Big Brother '08.

And I'll be watching.

Against my better judgement. Against the integrity and culture and intellectual grooming efforts of my parents and friends. Against everything that is worthy and sacred in this world, I'll be watching.

I used to go to lengths hiding my irrational fascination. Program the VCR. Invent false appointments. Deny, deny, deny. I would whip myself with rusty barbed wire after every episode, feeling like a horny Catholic boarder guiltily cleaning himself up under the mothball-crusted blankets seeing the Virgin Mary waving vaguely down towards him. I was ashamed.

Then, something changed. I realised that as an anthropological record of the perverse phenomenon of B-grade fame, as a celebration of the spectacle in the inane, as evidence of the power of the pack mentality on both sides of the voting lines, and as a chance to out and out ridicule bogans, Big Brother equals entertainment.

Where else would a turkey slap be possible on national commercial television (even as a reference)? Where else do cattle drovers and uni dropouts transcend their station to be known to the wider public - albeit briefly - by their first name only? Where else would a mother/daughter pair celebrate their anointment with matching silicone surgeries? Where else do hoards of applicants pine for the chance to humiliate themselves and others to the basest level? And where else are we implicitly given license to heckle and deride the contestants from the comfort of our own couches?

Nowhere!

It is our right - NAY! our duty - to embrace this exposé of the vile and the cheap surrounding us. To watch so we can understand the lowest common denominator that drives our economy and our politics (these people vote! they shop!). To watch so we may find glorious self-righteous comfort in the primary fact that we aren't them.

Well...for the most part. Pass the poultry there, would you?

The one where we turn that frown upside down

2008-04-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

Feeling beige? Need some colour? Thinking of trying to sniff that eon's old bottle of Clag just in the hope of feeling something new?

This should flush your cheeks with freshly oxygenated blood!

I present to you, dear cyberspace, the full, unexpurgated, verbatim Mis-Sent Booty Call Text Message.

Drum roll, please...

Hi! baby gal its u boi T,

bn missn u lately + wana make lov 2 u wif oil massage al ova ur body,

jst u n me,

am tnkn bout u wif me unda da blnkt.

Am also holdn ma dick tnkn dat he shud b slipin through u're sweet thais

n 2 u're pretty tight, juicy blak pussy ud u "sayn

baby T want u evry nite on bed wif me makn me cum few tyms n say u're name

+ dat u lov me so mach.

lol

ey naw i @list snd u sam nasty jok dat u wana it?

Holla sxc

I hemorrhaged. Then I had conniptions. Not just because of the crassness and complete lack of subtlety, somewhat resembling a caveman slaughtering a polar bear and affixing the jaws to his crotch in an infantile display of breeding superiority. Not just because of the gob-smackingly atrocious spelling and grammar, or the collections of letters I just flat out don't understand ("sam nasty jok dat u wana it?" Where is the question there?! Who is Sam?! What the fuck is "wana it"?).

No. All that pales in comparison to the startling fact that some educationally stunted man-whore sent this cringeworthy tome to the wrong fucking number. I needn't point out - although I will for clarity's sake - that the eponymous T of the message was NOT me, a hysterical coincidence of names though it is. This message was sent after midnight on a Saturday night only to arrive at the phone of a young lady who didn't recognise the number and does not now - nor ever has had - a blak pussy. Too bad for our hero T-boi, who may have felt rejected by the lack of reply and had to go home to finish his horny self off, all because of his incorrect digiting.

Although I can't imagine T's chances would have been significantly increased had he keyed in the correct number for his "baby gal".

Or maybe the chump would've got laid. Who knows. I just don't understand the kids today. But ridicule?

You bet I can drop that boi.

The one where we celebrate the death of the self-important gun-toting asshole

2008-04-06T00:43:00.000-07:00

What kind of total fuckhead has a charmed career, is adored by millions, leads a gold-spoon life in retirement and then becomes the president of the National Rifle Association? Keeping the circle of violence alive from behind gated property walls.

Congratulations Charlton Heston. The karma bus took its time getting around, but it finally stopped at your door and sucked your filthy life away. I can only hope that you were shot repeatedly in your impotent cock and bled to death rather than died peacefully in your sleep as reported.

Adios fucker.

The one where we fill in the blanks with make believe

2008-04-05T23:34:00.000-07:00

"I'll squash a fucking grapefruit in ya fucking face ya moll"

That's what I said to my memory after it again failed to summon up the resemblance of what I did only two days ago.

"How has your weekend been?" asks a well-meaning friend.

Ummm... No idea. Can't remember. Even though the oldest memories I'd have to dust off are in the region of 48 hours.

"Hey! I'm the fucking boss here Chachi - you're here for my benefit! And if I say jump to and remind me what Friday night consisted of, you goddamn well jump! Capishe?"

But no dice.

So what chance do I have over years, or decades. When I'm trying to piece together a picture of What Has Happened To Me So Far for the benefit of a new doctor or nurse (wink wink), for example.

The emotional continuum is there, and by all means that is one - very valid - kind of history. But it isn't rated as much authenticity as factual, chronological continuum. Unfortunately the facts are more elusive than they seem. Just because it is the historical truth doesn't mean it is privileged in memory.

Most of my accounts of the past are accurate on emotion and vague on detail. Does it matter? Not to me, but people think they can know you by what has happened to you.

So on the occasions when it is necessary to tell the stories, and my memory puts up doughnuts, I have fleshed out my reliable emotional memory with some unreliable 'facts'. They may be historically accurate, they may not.

But people want a story to hang their ideas of you on, and emotional honesty often doesn't cut it. We'd love it to, but we hunger for a narrative of events for our picture of people. I'm admitting that sometimes I fudge it. Some things might be too painful to accurately revive, others so subsumed by the associated emotion that accurate accounting has long been rendered moot.

But in the end, if it is true to how it felt, do the details matter so much? Well, maybe they do, which is bad news for a chump like me with a monkey behind the memory desk.

Most Definitely

2008-04-03T04:43:00.000-07:00

The Beethoven of the spoken word. The Picasso of rap. The Brando of hip hop. This is the humble face of the most talented recording artist of the last 15 years. Every genre. Flat.

I can't make you listen to music you don't want to listen to. Only despots and school principals have that power. But if I could, I'd jam a boot in your mouth, gaff some headphones on your scone and play this man's catalogue. And you would see a light. Maybe not the light, but there would definitely some sort of illuminatory process.

Mos Def, I salute you.

The (not so) Modest Mouse

2008-04-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

*(This guy is not in Modest Mouse. Read below for clarification of his origins.)

They sure are a weird rag tag bunch of guys. A Ronny Wood lookalike on one end, a bulging punker at the other, Mormon twins on two huge drum kits and a drunken sailor in between – but god damn did they make a spectacular wall of sound. Yes they did. The sonic orgy that is Modest Mouse played to a packed out and spellbound Palace Theatre last night. As a magical surprise treat I was among the rapture. Gloriously supported by the soaring pop of Sparkadia (keep an ear out peoples – these kids are going to go MASSIVE) and belting post-something rock of Hot Hot Heat, it was mystifying and satisfying and automatic and hydromatic. It was greased lightning.
But I was left troubled by some questions. Questions beyond music and spectacle, beyond bleeding ears and cooing souls. Questions that probe at the very essence of who we are. When is a moustache no longer ironic? Is frontman Steve from Hot Hot Heat directly related to Lionel Ritchie? Does crazy help sell art?

And do you think I have an answer?

Well, I do actually...

!. A moustache is no longer ironic as of 2006. Now it's just dirty lip hair. Some people dig that, but it sure isn't an ironic "how bad were the late 70's" or "I'm cool enough to pull this off by the very fact I'm doing it" statement. FYI.

@. Yes. Steve is biologically half Lionel Ritchie and half Bob Dylan. Unknown to most of the musical and gossip-column world, the two ageing musos are unnaturally infatuated with each other, and have been for some time. They formed a secret genetic research and IVF laboratory many many years ago, and Steve Bays is the result of their labour of love. DNA strands from Ritchie and Dylan were fused, injected in a hollowed out egg, implanted in an Innuit virgin and delivered to the loving arms of a Canadian adoptive family. True story.

#. Crazy has, and always will, add to reputation. And reputation, as much as talent, sells art.

There. Cracking night out overall. Any questions?

So You Think You Can Host?

2008-03-26T17:28:00.000-07:00

Natalie Bassingthwaighte is an embarrassment to soap-star-turned-electro-pop-front-women-come-reality-TV hosts everywhere. She might be the worst host full stop since David Letterman's 1995 Oscars travesty.
Not that I don't like the girl. By all accounts she's a real sweetheart, and as much as I'd rather fingerbang a rhino than listen to a Rogue Traders album, I think she's pretty damn good at what she does in the musical arena. Charismatic, sexy, the vocal skill to carry it off live. Leader of the pack, if that's what you're into. And as far as her turn as Izzy on Neighbours, she was cheeky, sultry and compulsively watchable. For a while there Natalie was the reason Channel 10 at 6.30 was many people's dirty little secret.
But something happens to the poor girl when she isn't playing make-believe. There's more wood in her face than on a year 9 school camp. Maybe she's upped her botox intake. Maybe she's still genuinely stunned by the vastly inane contributions of the so-called judges. Or maybe the poor poppet is just plain out of her depth. My money's on the latter. All the evidence is there. She doesn't blink. She speaks v e r y s l o w l y. If there's a cliche within arm's reach, she'll find it.
I feel for her, and feel embarassed for her, and ache for her to find some animation and pray she finds her groove. But then the less sentimental part of me reaches for the remote and blessedly changes the channel. And writes a strongly worded letter to the powers that be, begging them to leave Nat to the world of fiction.

To Tatt, or Not To Tatt Too (or To Shut Your Pie-Hole)

2008-03-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

Other than the dude on the right, a lot of people have tattoos. I contribute to that fact. The difference between LizardMan and I (and, presumably most of the rest of the tattooing community) is that I didn't get my tattoos to completely subvert my ink-less identity. Oh, there are degrees of intended subversion, and intended augmentation, and intended cool-ification.

But assuming that Lizzo's head-to-toe inking (and bone grafting and piercing and stretching and slicing and levering) is a meaningful and defining transformation is probably fair enough. And given the literal nature of the transformation, it's probably fair to assume he was comfortable with the general public making assumptions about - or even asking - what it means and how it defines him.

On the other hand, for the general public to feel entitled to ask what my clearly symbolic markings mean is just plain fucking wrong.

I seem to have reached my limit of boozed-up retards in pubs grabbing me by the wrist and examining my tatt like it's public property, then demanding to know what it "means".

How about "choke on my scrotum, you socially-stunted silverback".

Maybe its purely an exercise in aesthetics. Or maybe since it isn't literal means it's private i.e. it's none of your fucking business what it means. If I had've wanted all and dipshit sundry to "get it" I would have had a prose paragraph written there and a nice brochure printed up for visitors to take home.

The End of the Internet

2008-03-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

A good friend of mine and I were discussing cyberspace. The weird ether of thoughts and fears and data and 1's and 0's. How many people have poured themselves into an intangible mess of instructions and light.

And we got to talking about the End of the Internet. He let me know there is a site (in fact there are many) claiming to be the End of the Internet. Pretty pedestrian, but there you go.

And he told me he was disappointed by the End of the Internet.

Rightly so, I argued. It would be like finding the end of an idea.

But he corrected me. It wasn't the concept he was disappointed with. He just thought there should be some girls.

So I claim this post to be nominally the End of the Internet. And here, my friend, are some girls.

The Way to Fame

2008-02-28T20:33:00.000-08:00

The mysteries and wonder of the creative process are not limited to those who by innate talent or arbitrary circumstance or some combination of both become successful. We can take successful anyway we want – the spectrum swings from being able to eat more than bread and cheese off the sole income from art to powdering your asshole with coke and fucking beautiful people. But is it only when you can rub two blank canvases together and sell the pair as an installation that one may call oneself an artist? Is it just to inhabit the state of mind that one is an artist to be an artist?

Of course not. Art is more than just a state of mind. It is a state of minds. Every artist touches themselves in the greatest feint of happiness and shyly mutters, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. Because even a wide as the widest circle of family and friends cannot buy enough of your work or show up at openings to make any human in being an artist. Not enough minds, y’ see. It takes a stranger’s opinion, an unknown quantity, to validate their deepest wish (see: creating something of influence and permanence and intangibility. See also: “Sticking it to the Man”). It is the kindness of strangers to care enough about the not-yet-art and top see value (perhaps with a red dot sticker) that has the inertia to begin the trajectory toward aforementioned artistic debauchery with the surety of the title ‘artist’.

(Note that not all ‘artists’ need to want to rim their assholes with coke or commit adultery – it is enough that the precedent has been set.)

And of course not all strangers are literate with art – apparently there are billions in ‘other’ countries that can’t even read – so it helps if the not-yet-art has some sovereign signifiers or features identifiable by the stranger-masses as acceptably belonging to the enterprise of art. I pity the fool who tries to claim the weather as their art (as inevitably someone will some day). Simplistic I know, but is any other sense of not-yet-art any more real?

So in the interests of safety and in a blatant attempt to exploit arbitrary nature of who makes it and who doesn’t, the time has come to publish a tome on a total unknown.

But I must digress momentarily to the concept of an ‘arbitrary nature’. Many may be tempted to – once it is known that outcomes are arbitrary – give up one the whole enterprise and take to the bottle. More fool them. Arbitrary does indeed mean random, but implicit to arbitrary is resolution. And a resolution means some course of action, some shunting of circumstances. It’s a numbers game. Increase the percentages. Like a lottery, the more ways you are open for the arbitrary (but inevitable!) thing to happen to you specifically you, the more chance there is that your particular circumstances will be shunted. Remember that word – shunt. So if you want to shunt, the only way is to whore yourself out to the milieu of coat-tail-riders that spin like satellites around the truly talented. Luckily most don’t know talent from bin juice so someone is always willing to pander to a little whoring. Whoring is not cheap, nor is it shameful. It is the oldest profession and its necessary to beat the urge to reproduce, and don’t artists want to be the last in the line of history, or at least have something of them survive to the last. So whore without reticence. Play the numbers. Aim to get shunted. And if you can, put it in a frame.

Who in this Brave New World can make things anew? The Artist! Who can draw blood from our modern hearts of stone? The Artist! Who can hear rhetoric and see a fluffy white clouds and a crocheted cosy? The Artist! Who can dress up terror in a snappy suit of grey tweed? The Artist! Who can see past the end of their nose to the end of their family unit? The Artist! Who among us can still box clever? The Artist! And all without drugs or hitting the bottle or scarring or little plaques on white walls that go so little a way to peeling away the layers – these are all Optional Extras. At root is the truth that like a succulent to the sun the artist must turn to the darkest corner of the human condition and there light a candle (or aim a blowtorch).

And no less an artist is s/he who shines that light in a button down outfit with a box of brownies to share. After all, everyone likes brownies. They look like the rest of the shit but that sugar hit sure does take the edge off.

Chewie Loves Leia

2008-02-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

Indeed!

(and we all thought incest was her crime...)

“I Started at the Top…”

2008-02-28T15:54:00.000-08:00

"...and I’ve been working my way down ever since."

I’m gonna say it. Just come right out there and say it. The opening shot of Touch of Evil is overrated. Technically impressive, artistically forgettable. There. I said it. And I have never been able to appreciate the rest of the film because Charlton Heston as a Mexican is so ludicrous (and massively offensive) in so many dimensions – especially given Heston’s latter-day real-life gun toting – that I can’t begin to comprehend how anyone made such a casting blunder, even in the studio days.

But enough of that…

There’s no doubting that when within the first decade of time in features you write/direct/act in such cinematic genius as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger and The Lady From Shanghai, you are among the all time greats.

But where do you go from there?

Well, you voice the nefarious intelligent planet-eating cyber planet Unicron in the 80’s animation genius that was the Tranformers Movie. Few cinemaphiles would many reviewers would acknowledge the merit in this kind of role – especially for a giant of the medium like Welles. But not only is the film one of the truly brilliant of it’s genre, Welles lends a chilling menace and moral ambiguity to his part that confirms his versatility and downright genius.

And a decade earlier, in some of the most bruising and intriguing autobiographical moments ever committed to film, he made the obscure classic F For Fake.

Beginning ostensibly as a biopic of the great 60’s art faker Elmir de Hory, the film moves on to chronicle the rise and fall of fraudulent biographer Clifford Irving and the ‘art’ of the fake in general. Implicit along the way is Welles’ fascination with trickery, which blows out in the latter parts of the film to a categorical questioning of his own career and his part in peddling illusion.
The brilliance in the crafting of the film and the heartfelt immediacy of Orson’s confessions cannot be overstated. For this film jockey, F For Fake heralds the legendary status of the big O more than any other film. See it (and the Transformers Movie too, naturally…).

Letter To Michael Leunig...

2008-02-20T19:10:00.000-08:00

Dear Michael, you smug fuck,

How many more centimetres of column space will it take before you will be satisfied in your mission to smuggle cynicism and your patronising superiority complex into the zeitgeist of the little ‘l’ liberal public under the cloak of cute and quirky insights.

I’m baffled at how you’ve seeped in so ubiquitously, but bravo for identifying a fault line in the bullshit firewall of the Australian upper-middle class. And bravo for exploiting this collective psychological weakness for wallowing to your own financial ends. Who else would’ve thought that selling us back our own neuroses and paranoia as harmless new-age witticisms would bear such fruit of fame and fortune. Who would’ve thought that such mean spirited and condescending triteness would be happily read as sincere insight.

How are you the self-anointed St Paul of modern society? With a depressed, impotent muppet and his duck? What gives you the right to illustrate our failings, offer none but the tritest consolation, while placing yourself so squarely outside the glass house? Do you really know any better than the audience you ‘illuminate’? If so, please for the love of god, don’t be such a grandiose fuck and spend your time doing something constructive rather than holding a filigree one-way mirror. Peddling cynicism and misery is not a career.

Nothing you say is revelatory. Most of it is actually pointless, and the rest is too fundamentally too mean-spirited to be worth taking on board.

I urge you Michael – kill Mr Curly and the duck and go and work in a shelter. Or at least shut the fuck up in the media. I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know not what you do. But that’s no excuse.

Yours humbly and curly-ly,
Trent Griffiths

What Atticus said...

2008-02-15T00:37:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine told me that a bar we were going to had changed it's name from Plan B to Atticus Finch.

I thought, "Well of course. It's the same thing".

Atticus Finch - or some divine intervention like him - is the Plan B for all of us.

Plan A is to act like a tool, ignore any advice or help, dive headlong in on assumptions and half-truths, pre-emptively parade around like king shit while everything invariably fucks up behind us. We don't mean it - sometimes we're even deliberately lead astray by malign forces - but the mess doesn't care for justification or excuse. It just ripples around, poisonous.

Then we desperately hope for a transcendent someone to save the situation and our pride. A knight in shining armour; a superman; an Atticus. And as he passionately, defiantly cries "In the name of God! Do your duty", we might be tempted to believe in a deity, an omniscient being with Finch as it's messenger. But only for a moment. Because Atticus was played by Gregory Peck. And Gregory Peck prided himself played good courageous men who conquered evil in the face of impossible odds. Gregory Peck was a celluloid God. And Gregory Peck died of pneumonia. So much for God. So much for Atticus. There goes Plan B...

The first rule of Fight Club...

2008-02-14T18:40:00.000-08:00

I've fucked every relationship I've ever had. Each of them could be qualified. Like Anti-Tyler to Marla as the back of his head is hanging by a thin strip of skin and Y2K is being hastened with homemade explosives - "You met me at a very strange time in my life".
But that's bullshit. It doesn't get any clearer, any more sure, any less strange.
I've been reciting in my head the lines I've given - the "reasons" - from over the years. Somethimes I can't remember, but I can guess.

I don't need a mother I need a lover (because, heaven forbid, someone cares).
It's just moving too fast (by my decree).
I just don't feel like you understand me (or at least the version of me I'm citing now for the purposes of this excuse).
I'm at a place where I need to focus on me (but actually need to get out of my own head).

Blah blah blash etcetera you know the drill...
Petrified.

Evening On the Ground (or Regret)

2008-02-07T21:14:00.000-08:00

(Lilith's Song)

I've covered the best line from a love song ever written. I've heard a lot of Iron & Wine's work - a clutch of albums and a handful of EP's - and although he has a lyrical romanticism, I don't think Sam Beam will even be considered for entry into a love song category. Even fleetingly.

But dammnit, the man is a wordsmith. And on the final track of the cracking Woman King EP - dense with tightly wound, almost spiteful folk songs - he drops what I consider the greatest line in a pop song ever.

Evening on the Ground is a loaded song. To me it feels as though it is an exercise in self-loathing, shouldering and issuing blame because of the loss of love. It hints to me that the lost love might refer to a dead child. There is the explicit reference to "rocks and baby bone", but that isn't conclusive in the context of the song. But for some reason the repetition of the "broken lock"to a garden is so evocative of children. Anyway, literally or metaphorically, the lyrics are powerful.

Especially this line:

We were born to fuck each other

One way or another

I'm not sure why, but it reminds me of a friend Ionce knew - a girl I was very very close to in junior high school. She was fiesty and funny and cool-headed and had the biggest heart you could imagine. And she was beautiful. And I was in love with her. I didn't need to be with her, I just needed to be around her.

When my parents broke up and I was angry, angry, angry, I would stay at her house for a week at a time, sometimes sleeping in the spare room and sometimes in with her. We never hooked up, we were just there for each other. Or mostly she was there for me. She lived with her mum - her dad had disappeared years ago - and her mum understood our connection and opened her arms to me like I was her own.

Then we moved to a new school - senior high - and we started drifting to different circles. We tried to stay close, but when she dropped out of school (it never did suit her style), she disappeared from of my life altogether.

Then years later when I had just moved to the big smoke I saw her on the street. In the dodgy part of town. She looked strange - sort of drawn - but we were genuinely so, so happy to see each other. We went for lunch. It was wonderful catching up, being around her again.

She asked me to go shopping with her - she was a dancer and needed some new gear. I said sure. She lead me into a sex shop. I'd been in one before, but didn't know what we were doing there. She showed me six-inch plastic fuck-me boots and asked what I thought. I should have put two and two together before, but I was still shocked. She was stripping. "Dancing" she insisted it was. Dancing with no clothes on.

I pulled her out on the street and asked her to be straight with me. The mask started to strip, but she kept insisting she was living her childhood dream of being a dancer. Buying the line she had been forced to sell to herself, and that club owners and punters had happily sold her. I asked if she was doing drugs. First "no", then "sometimes", then "no more than anyone else does". If anyone else does it every day.

I realised that on some level she wanted help. And by showing me her world in the way she did, she wanted me to help. But she wasn't ready enough to actually admit that she needed help, let alone accept it and make a fresh start. And I was a nineteen year old student, a dumb kid new to the city with no money of my own, and no balls to be the strong one.

I said I had to go. She asked me for my number - she wanted to hang out more (to try to lever herself into a new direction?). I didn't give it to her. She started to break down, the mask gone. She never wanted this, but she didn't know a way out. I didn't know what else to do. I walked away from her.

It is the greatest single regret of my life. I still don't know what I would have done. I wish I'd done something.

But I guess we were born to fuck each other one way or another...

SWEENEY TODD: The Battle of Impossible Bone Structure

2008-02-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

Stunningly sumptuous staging, breathtakingly beguiling bloodthirst, compelling characterisation, beautifully black...
Mrs Bonham-Carter's production of Sweeney Todd is about as perfect a rendering of this bastion of Broadway that anyone could ask for. Even the warbling imperfections of Johnny D's singing voice and piercing shrill of Helena are folded so beautifully into the texture of their characters and the mis-en-scene that to Lindsay-fi them would have been criminal.
But the problem still remains that this is a musical. And the time it takes to get to the point in musicals is so fucking arduous. The spoken parts of the film romp along at a crackingly engaging pace. Then someone starts to trill and the whole thing grinds to a halt. A colourful and well-montage'd halt, but grinding nonetheless. For the time it takes porcelin-boy Anthony to warble to us the extent of his love for the comatose Johanna he could have robbed a guv'ner, hired a hit and disposed of her protector the Judge. Get on with it!
Admittedly I've never been a fan of that particular sub-plot. Altogether to much waving of silk handkerchiefs and sterile indignity for my liking. The grot and grime of the Sweeney/Lovett mess is much more compelling.
Then there is Timmy B's casting. Brilliant on paper, but on screen... If you cast Johnny Depp as your money man - the living definition of ridiculous bone structure - for the love of God don't put Helena Bonham-Carter opposite him. It looked the whole movie like they were going to have each other's eyes out with their cheek bones. Then Jamie Campbell Bower as Antony looks as though he's taken one of Todd's blades to his jowls in an effort to mirror Depp's face-scape. Despite the colour and flourish and swell of the production, at times all I could do was stare in disbelief at the miracles of genetics in front of me.
Does that make it a good movie? No. But it doesn't make it a bad one either... Just one in which the big punches connected from unexpected places.

DEFIANCE In The Face Of CRUSHING LONELINESS

2008-02-04T01:53:00.000-08:00

I realised something. That everything I did today - and every other day - is in the quest to be loved. To have love.
The jobs I have had, the friends I keep, the money I have spent and coveted, the places I've travelled and every single other action of my life is an effort to be loved more. To continue to be loved. Yet in every way I have ever been active in my own life is also a reminder of the crushing loneliness of experience.

Britney is hot.

2008-01-31T15:45:00.000-08:00

Seriously. Stark raving mental is the new black. Which was the new yellow for a second but thankfully that was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it phase.

But seriously, she's only getting hotter. Her star is only beginning to rise.

She'll be like Jesus, with less hair (you know what I mean...huh, huh).

She's set for such massive stardom that she'll eclipse the importance of our own families and jobs, and the Western world will grind to a halt. Then we'll get taken over by Britney-proof commies and we'll be sold for slave labour. THAT'LL learn us...

The Cinema Files Part 1

2008-01-29T03:23:00.000-08:00

Just saw No Country For Old Men (2008). By myself. Behind me were two girls of the 'repeat-the-plot-out-loud-and-ask-dumbass-questions' moviegoing variety. Like "Is he the guy that killed all those other guys?" Y'know what sweetheart, we've been watching the same f*%king film as you - no one else knows yet either. So shut your cakehole and assume we're going to find out.

How you can go into a mystery film and ask those kind of questions is beyond me, it really is. Is it that these people have such a track record of missing the point that they're conditioned to think they must have missed some crucial piece of information glaringly obvious to everyone else? In which case, I should have more sympathy. Clearly then they've had a hard-knock life. But I suspect it is more a case of having no basic social manners and liking the sound of their own voices.

And the even worse culprits (although mercifullyy it didn't come to this tonight) are the ones who are indignant when you tell them to can it (politely of course). The I-paid-my-hard-earned-cash-to-be-here-so-I-have-a-right-to-act-like-a-tool mentality. Like everyone else in the theatre paid to hear their dim commentary.

As for the film...I didn't get it. Was it about the futility of pursuit, whether on the side of criminal or justice? Was it actually representing what it is to get old (a bit shambolic and very, very bloody)? Or whas it a great existential western on the page that didn't quite translate the gravity on screen? Despite near flawless performances from the entire cast (although I'm not sure Woody Harrelson has any scrap of acting credability left, even in a Coen Brothers movie), I wasn't on anyone's side. I wasn't afraid for anyone or frustrated with anyone or impressed or shocked or moved by anyone. The plot rolled along, people came and went and stuff happened in between. Strangely distant. A mystery without suspense. Or maybe just No Country For Generation Y.

The Earnest Guy

2008-01-27T01:20:00.000-08:00

I realised from rereading my last post that I come of as one of those patronisingly earnest people who smuggle in doomsdaying and righteous pessemism under the cloak of upbeat irony or observational humour (although assuming my last post resembled humour is a stretch).

Think John Butler (of the John Butler Trio) or devil-spawn Michael Leunig. Both emotionally manipulative peddlers of depressing guilt.

So I'm nipping my membership to this rancid club in the bud with this simple segueway. How good are boobs. Discuss.

There. I feel so much better now. As you were.

How many roads must a man walk down... (hint: more than seven)

2008-01-26T04:11:00.000-08:00

The mighty US of A has around 300 million legal registered residents. (According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 01/26/08 at 10:15 GMT (EST+5) is 303,309,531.)

And I’m not gonna go bashing them. Any of them. Well, not right now at least. But I discovered a US fact today that I couldn’t help but judge. (Just so we’re all clear, judging isn’t bashing. Its much more haughty and condescending than bashing.)

The mighty US of A has around 5.5 million roads. Roughly 5.5 million planned and constructed, engineered and named vehicular carriageways. One length of tar and paint and compacted earth per 55 people.

Think about that. How many people live on your street? How many people would live on a street in New York City? A lot right? So somewhere, in the burbs of the Midwest or the keys of Florida, there’s one family per street. And laying a street is no mean feat. I’m no engineer, but I’ve seen the army of machines roll in to level a patch of dirt into a gleaming strip of bitumen. It’s a lot. A whole Tonka range. Is it necessary? Even in the lap of luxury developed world, do we need to have everything so freaking accessible? Or should that read segregated?

Now I’m not sure if the ratio is any better in Australia (god bless google, but some searches just weren’t meant to be fruitful). The figure is probably similarly shocking. And I’ll admit there aren’t even any direct conclusions to be drawn. But for some reason this figure – one road per 55 people – brought home the grotesque affluence of the West more than anything else in a long time.

I take my life for granted and complain about the government and get road rage and lose myself in petty squabblings routinely. 1:55 pulled me out of that. Maybe for just a while, maybe for longer. But at least for now I know how lucky I am, and I remember the guilt of privilege, and hopefully some conclusions will come to me…

Umm, Like, Love Songs and Shit

2008-01-24T19:46:00.001-08:00

Joan Wasser is responsible for what I rate as my favourite album of all time. Coincidentally (since I am not known for my musical taste or prowess) said album may also rate as one of the best albums of all time, according to some objective scale I'm clearly only guessing at. The album - under the moniker Joan As Police Woman - manages to be both wonderfully soaring and disarmingly intimate; playful and earnest; obtuse and immediate. At every turn it is utterly compelling.

Think Fiona Apple covering Springsteen's Nebraska, or PJ Harvey backed by Burt Bacharach. Actually wait. Don't. Joan is much too good for such facile projections.

And although the album is lyrically and musically miles away from [inverted commas] "ballad" territory, it boasts the most heartbreakingly beautiful love song I've ever wrapped ears around. The opening (title) track Real Life is shimmering and alive, reeling you in with the perfectly simple opening piano chords and opening up to gliding strings and almost tangible emotion. Close to the perfect love song already. But skirted over in her delivery, hiding behind grander lyrics, is the line that elevates this song above any other I have heard or can imagine.

i've never included a name

in a song

but i'm changing my ways for you,

jonathan

Stop the press.

No other names on the rest of the album. No other direct references to love specific. Just this simple, stunningly honest declaration. And every time I hear it, I wish I was Jonathan. Not Joan's Jonathon. Just someone's Jonathon - that I was the person they'd change their ways for.

Yep, I'm a sap, and Joan brings it out in force. I recommend you let her seduce you too. And crack out the tiny violins of love...

Don't ask me why it matters...it just does.

2008-01-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

Sport.
Specifically, following a professional team.
Some people will never get it. Some people don't like exerting themselves in that kind of way. Or at all. Some people are so passively non-competitive that they shrink from the idea of any activity with scoring (although they may be content to pound themselves shorter legs on kilometre-plural runs, something I confess is completely beyond me. There are those who find a nice urban family game of soccer in the park on a Sunday - Secret Life of Us style - fun and diverting, but still can't understand the rabid, violent passion of a true sport fan.
My New Orleans Hornets (basketball) are 29 and 12 with the third best record in the league right now. MY Hornets. I've never been to New Orleans. I've never been to the US. I play basketball, but not terribly well. I just think its a cracking game to watch, and I chose to follow the Hornets because I THINK I'd dig New Orleans, and they have some great players, and I fancy myself as an armchair saviour - supporting the team trying to make it work in a hurricane ravaged city from the other side of the world.
The trouble is, even knowing how arbitrary the foundations of my support are, I am now a full-blow, obnoxiously passionate supporter. I've got the jersey. I listen to the games online. I check the scores of every other team to see how they compare. I read every related blog on the net. I exalt and I seethe. I blame refs I can't see.
And I wonder through it all "Is this healthy?" "Am I channelling some other buried and destructive frustration or passion through the artifice of professional sport?" "Am I a little bit mental?"
I know I'd get a lot more done if I stepped back from my flag-waving, but I'm unsettled by something deeper. I think I'm missing something. Seriously. Help me. I need an explanation. I need to know. Please...

What do you do with a drunken sailor?

2008-01-21T22:34:00.000-08:00

So, I got fired. A month ago, but I'm only really gathering the steam to be truly, deeply pissed about it now that I'm back from holiday and looking for a new job.
The reasons given me when I got fired were almost verbatim the reasons I was told I was hired for three months before that.

Thinking outside the box.

A fresh take.

Passionate.

A little bit tongue-in-cheek.

Had become:

Too far outside the box.

Not on the same page.

Argumentative.

Cynical and patronising.

The steel they sought me out for turned into the sword I was to fall on.

Of course politics played its part too - whenever a superior repeatedly calls you 'bolshie' and 'cocky' without a trace of endearment, something is clearly rotten in the state of Denmark. But I digress...
I am now more pissed than ever before because I'm facing the very sobering prospect of returning to retail work. Or worse still (god help me) hospitality. I was dumped with no warning, and before I'd been at this monolith long enough to have a showstopping resume or the contacts to nepotise (?) my way into another gig.
But I've had the taste now, and the only work I ever want to do again is writing. Like half of the rest of the Western world. But I've had a taste dammnit! A taste!
Ah well, what do you do with a drunken sailor, eh?