my friend's gay gloves

A man attacked my friend Josh last night. It was not in some dark alley in Lilydale or the backstreets of Sunshine but on the corner of Elizabeth Street and LaTrobe. He was on the way to meeting me at the Arthouse to see a local hardcore act called Identity Theft. The man dressed in a suit came up without provocation and threw my friend into the wall screaming something about the faggy green gloves he was wearing. The man who was with his one hand still holding his mobile phone remarkably talking to fuck knows who, telling them that he was going to kill Josh, was with the other trying to bash my friend's head in. In combination with this distraction and Josh's artful dodging allowed him to break free and leg it, running full pelt but it was several city blocks before his pursuant gave up on chasing him, still screaming into is mobile phone about how my faggot friend was dead.

Josh arrived at the Arthouse unsurprisingly shook up and spent the next half and hour, upstairs in the cool of the night, venting as I talked and comforted him with my arm around his shoulder. It was a gesture that drew its own undesired attention in a venue full of men pashing women, touching furtively then with flagrance as the pots emptied of draught; a man with his arm around another man was something to be stared at and commented upon. "You're in man! He'll be putting out tonight for ya!" Some dick yelled at me, wearing a black bandana under black cap tilted askew, hatebreed emblazoned on his black t-shirt. It wasn't a friendly jibe, it wasn't meant to encourage my pursuit. But then what did we expect? I hear you say. Why were we even there? you ask as my hand detectably moved an inch away from my friend's back.

The bands were good, really tight and energised, and the local hip hop crew from out of Box Hill, Ascertain and DJ Bogues were a welcome relief from screaming vocals and heavy guitar. Yet I couldn't help but feel unnerved, my friend undoubtedly ten-fold at the general verbal abuse directed (and indirected) towards faggots and poofters in the masculated atmosphere. That hat is gay, this song is gay and I heard at one point one of the rappers from Ascertain style "clear the faggots off the dance floor." Thankfully not a reference to Josh and I, who had removed ourselves to the back of the room but to Melbourne's nightlife generally I think. I found the overt and hyper-exaggerated machismo increasingly nauseating as the night drew on: the fists in the air and on the ground, the shouts of abuse, the air guitars and the hugging and groping between men that could have been easily mistook as homoerotic but we'd only an hour before been singled out for less. Half way through a song called "A Poofy Start", Josh and I chose to leave. Now apparently a member form Identity Theft is gay so maybe the song was ironic but it was an irony lost not only on me but the I think the large majority of the crowd.

I am being too sensitive I hear you say. Perhaps. This is what my straight friends tell me when I complain about their use of language. "It's only a word dude, we don't mean anything by it. Everyone uses it. We're fine with your sexuality." Oh I am sorry for not taking your feelings into consideration. Yes it really my fault for going to an overtly heterosexual club and putting my arm around a friend after some guy had tried to bash him. Get fucking real! If it's just a word then stop using it.

i'm barely able to drag myself out of bed this morning, a stranger stares back at me from the mirror as i shave and apply deodorant, a computer screen just flickers at me white light and fuck it's eleven-thirty already. my skull echoes with the office fluorescent hum and i wish that i could only just play some music, put my earphones on and extract myself. it must be wednesday but i keep thinking it's thursday or maybe tuesday. bins go out on thursday, that's what my housemate said to me as i stood there positioning the recycling by the curb, "yeah, figures! kinda wondered why no one else was putt'n em out," i replied. i spend lunch in the park alone eating a shitty foodcourt sandwich that was wrapped in plastic like miss palmer while a duck glides over the surface of a pond in the carlton gardens, leaving, well, a wake in its wake. i feel my head expanding and contracting and i feel dizzy and unstable, emotionally. tears well up for no good reason on the train platform as i wait. waiting for my dinner, red lentil dahl i chat to the man i have a crush on about languages and garlic and leave without getting his name, cursing like the bee gees, all the stupid things that i said. fuck i hate wednesdays.

hometown baghdad

I've just spent the last 24 hours watching the 38 episodes of this web-doco series I found on YouTube called Hometown Baghdad. Filmed by two Iraqis, Director Ziad Turkey and Producer Fady Hadid with some camera work done by the subjects as well, Hometown Baghdad follows three young guys, Ausama, Adel and Saif, middle class Iraqis, as they just try to go about their day-to-day while their country falls further into shit. "It's a living hell but that's your home," says 23 year old Adel, engineering student and aspiring metal musician as he reflects on his life. "I only live in the present, I'm alive today so I do whatever I want to today and enjoy this moment... Could be one moment to end everything, you and your plans, and send you underground."

The first episode came online March this year and the last was posted on 17 June and it is good viewing. Each episode is mostly under five minutes and deals with an aspect of the guys' lives both maudlin and comic, from love and dating, to writing metal lyrics about the invasion and the disintegration of civil order into civil war.

It's easy to forget when you are barraged with images of car bombings ad nauseam, and terrorist body counts piling high, you forget that there are people actually living on the ground amongst it all. About the intersecting lives that cross in and out of our two minute snatches on National Nine News, that the grandmother's house that is first raided by American forces once (no terrorists), twice (no terrorists) and then looted by the Iraqi Army, is also a place of cherished childhood memories now tainted; or the intermittent power supply that is three hours on and three hours off, cuts coverage of the football that friends have gathered to watch.

"Where's the liberation?" asks 20 year old medical student Ausama. "The American forces, they're not here to help us... I don't see anything good and it's been four years."

These guys are educated and thoughtful, moderate moslems mostly who are in far more danger from 'insurgents' and 'terrorists' (or the US forces) than we could every be, in a place where just playing music, western music can get you shot, well "... that's the reality, welcome to Baghdad."

Watch hometown baghdad

It was a nice afternoon today, don't you think? The sun warming me through the glass walls of the tram-stop shelter, keepin me from the slight chill winter breeze as I waited for the 109 heading down Vic Parade for a friend's birthday lunch at Quan 88. It'd probably would've been quicker to walk but hey, I couldn't be fucked and besides it was a nice day afterall.

I glanced down at my hand, noticing that some of the light that took all of eight minutes from the sun to reach me had refracted through the glass into a beam of its composite colours. Light itself has properties of both particle and wave, if I remember year nine science class correctly, although I still don't understand it. Humans can only perceive a small fraction of light, somewhere between 380 nm to 740 nm (nanometres) of electromagnetic frequency, which includes not only these reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and violets that I can see before me but infrared, ultra violet and goddamn fucking x-rays and gamma rays. I looked this shit up. Thing is, the colours are only an illusion. These cells in my retina like, called cone cells are sensitive to particular wavelengths of this electomagnetic spectrum and in consultation with my brain (no doubt with the assistance of millions of years of jury-rigging) choose to see 'em that way, in technicolour that is. Still, as I rotated my hand, palm up and around through the light I could feel the colour wash over my skin. Strange.

When light passes through something with a different density it refracts, from the air and through the glass, it changes speed. If it passes through, say a glass tram-stop shelter wall, wave forms with different frequencies can separate, refracting in different directions and thus through the funny little cone cells in my eye I see a rainbow.

be alert and very alarmed!

Fuck Osama Bin Laden, he can have his Tora Bora cave complex and well he's already got the North Western Frontier Province but fuck him. He's just another distraction from humanity's real enemy: the cephalopods! Octopi, squids and the like: they're fast and have big fucking brains, ergo they're intelligent and well maybe they're not Mensa intelligent, more of an alien versus predator kind of intelligence, but they can shoot ink and camouflage themselves and shit! they can fit through tiny little holes that otherwise would get us vertebrates fucking trapped. These fuckers have been biding their time since the late Cambrian Period (over 500 million years ago) when they ruled this planet, top of the shitheap as it were and they're just waiting for their opportune moment and give 'em a couple more years and wham-bam-goodbye-human-fucking-race!

Watch these frightening educational videos:

just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

ZOMBIES ATTACK!!!

While the risk of zombie attack on terra firma is well reported, we are largely blind to the danger that they all pose to us and god's fair creatures on and under the water.

watch out! disco attack!

Sure this blog doesn't have the readership of the Barco Independent and sure those that do read it are mostly friends and hell, probably have heard about it from Tim already but I'm nonetheless gonna spruik it in the hope that I can enlighten just one soul to the exciting new world of disco attack!

What praytell is disco attack! you ask?

disco attack! is a must, it's what we need, it's fun and safe. It's art, it's music and it is soul. disco attack! is genetic, it's inside of you and me. disco attack! is the best form of defence and is the closest we have to a super hero. disco attack! is a deadly adversary, a bomb that explodes in your head but is still the best insurance we have against terrorism and cancer. disco attack! is action not belief. It is the liberation of the proletariat. It is treason, the absence of all restraint and is not public policy. disco attack! is the opiate of the masses and is a secret conspiracy to take over the world. disco attack! is coming. disco attack is imminent and is upon you.

disco attack! is Friday 13 July from 9pm till late. disco attack! is at 51 Gipps Street Collingwood.

Hope that cleared up any confusion.... I suppose at this point I should mention that this is not an official disco attack! media announcement.

disco attack! is really: