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:

8 things you unlikely know about me but nonetheless might’ve guessed (or maybe I told you)

Thanks Richard for meme-ing me on this. So here you are: eight things you may not know about me (or you just might).

1. I’ve never read Milton’s “Paradise Lost” but I keep it on my bookshelf because it makes me look smart.

2. As a kid aged 12, I planned my suicide to look like a break-and-enter gone horribly wrong. Suffice to say my schemes were logistically unsound and I never carried it out.

3. At my year 7 camp some blonde haired thugs pushed me into the urinal wall while I was still pissing. The rest of the camp I tried to keep a low profile and was very secretly relieved when these same guys turned their attentions to my roommate. I felt guilty that I never said anything instead of laughing along but my god did he fucking snore.

4. I am currently downloading a porno called “Here cums the bridegroom”

5. I have a very hairy back.

6. As part of our bi-centenary celebrations my grade-three class had a fancy dress day. While most kids came dressed as convicts I insisted on coming as Captain Arthur Phillip.

7. I get far too much satisfaction out of popping pimples.

8. I have a healthy sperm count.

I am in turn tagging Strummer. Good night and good luck.

Admiral Arthur Phillip (1786 portrait by Francis Wheatley, National Portrait Gallery, London)

21.10.2002

The cold steel sky filled with the black beating wings of a large flock of ravens, the sound of their calls and the clutter of thousands of wings as they beat against the wind, dominating the space between the Menzies Building and that of the Union as they circled round the twelve storey eyesore. Standing on the concrete walkway that divides the lawn, I watched as one then two and many more of the birds broke formation and began to land. Quickly I find myself surrounded by the ravens, hopping around, settling themselves and seemingly pausing to wait. Silence falls all around me, waking me decidedly unsettled.

A few days later, on the morning of Monday 21 October 2002 Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang entered his fourth year econometrics class with five loaded hand guns and opened fire, yelling "You never understand me," killing two of his classmates and wounding another five. He was supposed to be giving a class presentation.

The two students who died were Steven Chan and Xu Hui "William" Wu. In his trial it came out that Xiang believed Wu to be an agent of evil who intended to destroy him academically and it was his own destiny to kill him. This gives some insight into his mindset that day and it is not surprising that he has since been diagnosed with paranoid delusional disorder and is serving a possible twenty-five year sentence at Thomas Embling psychiatric hospital.

The class' lecturer Lee Gordon-Brown who had already sustained bullet-wounds to his arm and knee, with the assistance of a student named Alastair Boast were able to wrestle Xiang to the ground while he attempted to switch to another gun. They waited fifteen minutes for the police to arrive and by that time Gordon-Brown had already passed out of consciousness.

I was finishing up my honours in history that October at Monash University Clayton and the schools of history and archaeology shared the sixth floor where the shootings took place, with economics.

I was not at uni that day.

wikipedia - monash shooting

northside / southside

I was first told about the northside/southside divide a year or so back at some friend's house party. I was drunk and so was he, some guy I'd just been introduced to, and we'd propped ourselves up on elbows talking on a housemate's bed about sex and politics and Melbourne queerdom.

Melbourne's gay world is divided in two, he tells me, by the Yarra river running between; it's cold war shit: East and West. Soft electronic music beats away in the background played by some graveyard community radio station volunteer. Nothing overt like but understated power plays go on in what is in essence a battle for cultural hegemony. You have Commercial Road, el centro del sur, switching briefly to spanish and back again, where prissied up pretty boys parade around with no shirts on, dancing to house remixes of Kylie Minogue. It's all top 40 and homogeneity.

Northside you've got overeducated art students sipping lattes on Smith Street reading Foucault's discourses on Sexuality and agreeing so emphatically about politics that you'd think they were arguing. Wankers on both sides I add. Generally speaking, he continued unfazed, the North pays more than lip-service to inclusiveness than our Southern brothers; and I do say brothers as I can't think of one lesbian bar South of the border.

Q & A has been the stalwart, a steadfast partisan in the defence against encroachment from the south, he said. Playing good music with a mixed atmosphere that allows you to be yourself but even it's creators admit that it's become increasingly coopted by a younger more vacuous crowd, crossing the border under the cover of night with their vapid requests to hear Madonna or Shakira or some shit.

......................

Yes Q & A is ending after eleven and a half years and I'll miss it but then as a comment on Richard's blog says, quoting the man himself "it'll force people to come up with something new." I wish I could say gay life in Melbourne has become pretty stagnant of late but I don't get out enough and this feeling may have more to do with me that the homo-world. There is after all Trough Faggot Party and Witness Protection Society but they are irregularly placed and I do have to say that I find the former a little too andocentric and I haven't attended Witness enough to comment.

But but but... on Sunday I went to the very first Sweaty Betty, part of the Camp Betty festival described on their site as a "radical weekend of sex and politics". A reaction to what the organises state as a certain sense of malaise or apathy within the community. I don't wish to understate my feelings about my evening but the party was fucking ace. Held in Crystal T's, a less-than-gentleman's (stripclub) on Sydney Road, it was full of all the colours of the homo-rainbow including a nice smattering of straight people ta boot. There was good music and some live performances including one woman exposing more than just her exquisit tats of jaguars adorning her torso. The tease culminated in her sim-masturbating a rather generous pink dildo that she was wearing: a definite eye-opener.

There is hope.

......................

"So which side are you?" he asked.

the peel vs straights & lesbians

I am not sure I feel entirely comfortable about the Peel's exemption to the Equal Opportunity Act that was reported in the papers today. The exemption would allow staff of the Peel to refuse entry to the venue on a perception of an individual's sexuality as apparently the gay male clientele had expressed concerns about the number of heterosexuals and lesbians entering the venue, all prompting management to apply to the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission for this exemption. Tom McFeely, owner of the nightclub was quoted in the Age as saying that the move was necessary to ensure that the gay male patron felt secure enough to express his sexuality freely. 1 Cate McKenzie deputy president of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) who granted the exemption said that "[s]ometimes heterosexual groups and lesbian groups insult and deride and are even physically violent towards the gay male patrons" while others just came to gawk, acting as though the gay male patrons were animals in a zoo. She said, "To regard the gay male patrons of the venue as providing an entertainment or spectacle to be stared at, as one would at an animal at a zoo, devalues and dehumanises them." 2 Indeed the gay bars in Melbourne are few and far between argues McFeely, "We're the only one out of 2,000 venues in Melbourne. Those heterosexuals have other places to go to, my homosexuals do not." 3

But regardless the idea of prescribing behaviour to a person on the basis of their sexuality is blatantly discriminatory. To imply that an individual who identifies as heterosexual or as a lesbian will engage or is likely to engage in violence or verbal abuse or whose activities while inside will upset the clientele of that establishment goes wholly against my moral fibre. Could one of the 'straight bars' that McFeely refers to legitimately apply for an exemption on the basis that gay men make their patrons uncomfortable? I sincerely doubt it.

I personally feel that a gay man who is intimidated by a straight man or a woman, whether she be gay or straight, for who they are, is at best hypocritical and worst pathological. If a person's behaviour in any club, pub or bar is inappropriate surely then security have the right to eject them. As a community we should be engaging and open, not hiding in closets.

Now I do not pretend to know what evidence exactly was put forward to the Tribunal, something I believe you have to apply for, but I wonder whether this application for exemption has anything to do with the mens-only 'upstairs' section of the Peel that staff enforce with such admirable efficiency. In the decision by the Tribunal that it handed down there is no mention of the sex-on-premises above. Cate McKenzie states that men should feel safe to engage in activities such as "kissing, hugging, or expressing love, attraction or affection in a physically intimate way" that might be frowned on in a ‘straight bar’. Now unless you are ready to describe what goes on up there as expressing love and affection (and I’m not) then I would wager that engaging in sexual acts was left out of their application.4 With the Greyhound in St Kilda and an apparently "as-yet-unopened gay bar on Smith Street" both applying for sex-on-premises licences in order to attract 'punters', one wonders how much the Peel's concern for a safe and comfortable atmosphere is really there to allow gay men to have fuck and suck. 5


1 'Gay pub defends 'straight' ban,' The Age, 28 May 2007.
2 Matt Doran, 'Gay pub can out straight patrons,' Herald-Sun, 28 May 2007.
3 'Gay pub defends 'straight' ban,' op. cit.
4 Peter Rolfe, 'Sauna bid `sleazy',' Port Phillip Leader, 8 May 2007.
Danny Corvinni, 'Nightclub sex rooms and saunas,' samesame.com.au - forum, 23 May 2007.
5 Peel Hotel Pty Ltd (Anti Discrimination Exemption) [2007] VCAT 916 (24 May 2007)

homeline twilight - a long distance haunting

When I was fourteen Telstra or Telecom as it was called then, sent my family an international telephone bill. Not so unusual you say? Except that is that it was addressed to my father who'd been dead for two years. I know that Telstra prides itself on their wide range of products and services but I was unware communication with the dead was among them, then or now. But what if they did?

Do you have aged relatives who expect a call every Sunday without fail? Can you imagine if this chore didn't end with the grave?

If you think outsourcing call centre jobs to India is bad well picture yourself sitting down to your microwaved healthy-choice dinner (fiesta chicken by the way) when you get a call from a telemarketer selling life insurance FROM THE LAND OF THE DEAD.

bible fight - ring side seats

Ever wondered whether Moses, the jew raised an egyptian king and saviour of his people would knock down Noah, sailor and zookeeper extraordinaire a few cubits to be called the biggest baddass in the pentateuch? No you haven't? Wait, wait, please sir. Obviously you are looking for a little more titillation of the five senses than two old geezers throwning their weight around, and there's nothing like two women wrapped together in combat; there'll almost certainly be mud. Picture it Mary, Mother of G-d clawing it out, hair tooth and nail in the garden of Eden with Eve, the mother of humanity. How 'bouts it? Both in their pert prime and there's someone flinging clay and it ain't the Holy Mother I tells ya.

Ah-hem. Well.

Clearly I have here a most discerning and cultured gentleman. Well what you're no doubt looking for is some real endtime entertainment, top notch judgement day extravaganza: Jesus, son of G-d and our Saviour in the ring, in Hell opposite Satan, father of all lies in a battle for the Universe.

Oh come-on... there's simply no pleasing some. Jesus!

Sir, sir.......




play bible fight

leaning to the left hand

I had a dream last week where I found myself involved with a group of radicals pushing for a halt to growth in global population to save our much afflicted ecosphere earth. This group were committed to a most controversial public action that to be honest never sat too well with me, advocating masturbation and not procreation, staging unannounced wank-ins in select public places flying their movement's ensign, a veined engorged phallus gripped by a closed fist imposed on a picture of the globe, held aloft by members not otherwise engaged.

Never actively involved in any of these protests I stood as the group's cameraman charged with filming the demonstrations, then blurring out faces with my editing suite on the hq-computer so as to upload onto the group's website. Suffice to say I quickly became disolutioned with the whole thing, its activities, the politics and soon left, concluding that they really were a bunch of wankers and quite frankly found the whole protest thing a little strange.

So it goes - Vonnegut dies at 84

Pehaps he has simply been caught in a chrono-synclastic infundibula set for his next corporeal appearance on earth (along with his dog - not a humanist), in another 59 days. Or perhaps not. Kurt Vonnegut died last week so it goes from a injury to the head sustained a few weeks prior.

He had fallen at the age of 84.

He was (is/will be) one of my favourite authors who might I add was recommended to me by a mad man who thought I was god, yes yes who I was visiting at St Vincent's psyche ward at that particular time maybe eight years ago. It's a true story but I digress.

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" were the words written on Billy Pilgram's epitaph, the soldier/optometrist who travelled back and forward in time in his best selling Slaughterhouse five. It mightn't have been true but it did sound awfully nice.

It's been a difficult week it has. Tuesday especially hitting something of a dark spot, intense magnetic/emotional activity characterised by lower than usual temperatures... and what can I say? I lost it. And for the rest of the week I've been picking up my shattered little pieces, feeling immensely fragile as a result and snapping, huffing and puffing like a certain dragon by the seashore. I am left now with anxious butterflies that I am worried will find a way to burst out, through my stomach, my mouth and through my head.

Coming back from lunch last week circling down down in my desperate melancholy, I asked the universe what exactly was I supposed to do with all this. This mess, this noise: my head. And well it answered...

While crossing the driveway of a multilevel carpark I absent-mindedly strayed into the path of a truck pulling out. On its hood read the word COPE in bright bold lettering.

So I guess I had my answer.

Easy for it to say.

sunshine - preview @ hoyts melbourne central

Last night I attended a preview screening of Danny Boyle's Sunshine at the Melbourne Central Hoyts with a q & a featuring director and actor Rose Byrne following. What a fucking travesty!! Never in all my years have I seen a cinema fuck up a screening so badly. We were maybe a third of the way through as we cut to what I thought was an overly obtuse dream sequence: Capa the ship's physicist played by Cillian Murphy (that man has crazy blues eyes) dreaming his death in reverse, ambient music playing all through as you watched the final moments of the mission. It dragged on. And on. And on. Boyle what are you doing I asked myself? Sure Kubrick set a high standard in sci-fi incomprehensibility but this makes no sense. It's as if the film is playing backwards. Fuck it is playing backwards!

I looked to my left and right searching for my friends' expressions: Mike to my left leaning in towards his boyfriend and Darren passively watching the screen. Am I not arty enough, it that it? Is this doubt a sign that I am missing the point, not getting it? No seriously the film is playing backwards, they're fucking ruining the film as I watch characters dying as the end game plays out or in or something. Whispers grew to open protests as the lights come up and there are apologies as apparently the reel was wound backwards but everything would be up and running in say five or ten, so take a toilet break or grab a snack at the candy bar or some shit.

A fucking hour we waited before they offered us the choice to watch the rest of the film or leave with a full refund. A few opted out but the vast majority stuck around to watch the rest of Doyle's much anticipated space adventure to the sun. It was three years in the making and it has been hailed by April's Empire magazine as breathing new life into a tired and banal genre of sci-fi cinema that had suffered so much after years of brainless blockbusters offered up to us by hollywood a la Armageddon. Well yes... and Hoyts fucked it up or someone did, maybe the distributor I don't know and I don't care. Call me a purist but I think a film should be watched first time straight through in its entirety and the right way round and maybe I'm a traditionalist jump-cut Jean Luc Goddard shaking your head at me but fuck you I don't care.

The film came back on without the sound and not from where we left off, missing who knows how much. I had finally settled in and began to absorb myself in the story again when they stopped the film. Apparently the reels were mislabelled and out of order and it was impossible to continue.... fuck.

The q & a continued anyway with Boyle and Byrne perfectly apologetic and friendly but it's really difficult to discuss a film that the audience hasn't seen and while they'll be mailing us out replacement tickets to see it at some later date they've destroyed the magic. And I know it sounds trite but I think there is something sacred about the movie going experience. There's something deeply freudianly mirror-stage (thanks Roland Barthes) about sitting there in the dark losing yourself in other worlds and when you consider the premium price of tickets and the five-fifty I paid for M&Ms what I lost isn't made up for by a replacement voucher.

confessions of a hypochondriac

Perhaps the hypochondriac in me that is a little concerned, a little worried about all this, I thought to myself as I lay there passively through an ultrasound on my testicles today.

"Can you hold your penis up on your stomach please," instructed my not too unattractive ultrasound technician as he pushed back my gown smearing gel on the probe and he began to move it around on my balls, first my right and then my left. I tried to think of anything that wouldn't end in me getting an erection and further complicate what was already a pretty awkward situation. This considering the week I'd gone without wanking-required for another test tomorrow- and this I suppose the most action I'd seen in nearly four months.

His name was John, my technician that is, as I made special mental note to remember it, thinking it's important to know the name of any man with his hand on my nutsack. I stare at the ceiling. Nothing like the dentist's office where there are all those calming posters of rainforests and deserts and far away places where they hope you'll be as they drill cavities and root canals. There is no noise, nor traffic or din of other doctors and patients in the room to distract me, just the hum of the machine. The room is on basement level of St Vincent's hospital and I'm the last patient of the day, just John and I and I think the receptionist somewhere about turning lights off. So I turn my attention to the machine and wonder at the different size probes next to me and what they might be used for ... he sure is spending an inordinate amount of time around my left testicle as I notice the soundless vibrations and the warmth the machine is generating.

"Do you normally feel any pain in your left testicle?" he asks me. Why? What's wrong? "No, not normally," I reply. He hums recognition without giving away anything and hands me a towel to remove the excess gel. So I thank him, get dressed and leave.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You couldn’t help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed—so you were a good man just the same.”

Said a dying Mary Kathleen. Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird. p226

If our souls are the stars projected onto earth then which star is mine?

the point - think about your troubles

On February 1971, early evening, the American TV station ABC broadcast the 74 minute long "Movie of the Week" called The Point!; a story about Oblio the only round headed boy in the Land of Point, who feeling 'different' goes on an epic journey of the mind, body and soul, accompanied by his dog arrow, to get the bottom of it all. * It's a tale all about diversity and tolerance and a lot of other hippy crap but don't let that scare you, from what I've seen it looks kinda cool. Here's a clip from the film and I must admit it's made me feel all intuned to that deep hum the earth makes as it flies around the sun and well yes the music is by Harry Nilsson who, I'll be honest I only know because of that song from Midnight Cowboy "Everybody's Talkin'" but yeah, I'm sure I was going somewhere with this.

Anyway I think I want to track down the rest of this film. Yes yes, well enjoy.

turn that frown upside your head

I keep forgetting to take my medication. It took me almost an entire episode of heroes, tears rolling down my cheek, to realise there was something wrong. Hey this really isn't all that heartbreaking I thought to myself and now I feel sick and I am nearly out pills, maybe a week left and I all I can do is pace this room, bouncing off all these ideas five or six at a time. So is this how it felt like before? I think this aloudly to myself as I remember I don't want to speak to a doctor about any of it and I really do wish people would stop pointing out my failings like I can't think of them on my own and so many more accelerating like some cyclotron throwing particules around a vacuum chamber.

I have a death wish maybe... I sometimes sit on the train to work imagining that I'm sitting opposite the next Sid riding the westbound Circle line as he stands up bag strapped to his back, just another number, what would it be? The Melbourne February 27 bombing, g-man body 2 or 3. Just a number, a body count where no one but the families remember the faces or the names, just the numbers as we compare, counting fingers in some macabre tally that death scratches in the dust: 52 is less than 190, which are both less than 2,974 in NY or 655,000 in Iraq.

When the end comes I sure hope I'm listening to something good on the i-pod... bopping along to "float on" by modest mouse, smile on my face as I am engulfed in flames with the last thing I hear "bad news comes don't you worry even when it lands/ good news will work its way to all them plans..." ... and we'll all float on OK.

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000, Washington Post October 11, 2006

g-man's valentines day message

To quote Phillip J. Fry "Oh crap! I forgot to get a girlfriend again," (correct that: boyfriend) and yet another lonesome Valentines Day to notch up on the belt. So how many has it been? Well to date... let me see, mumble, mumble *pencil scratching paper* ummm, carry the 5... I don't know maybe all of them... yes this day holds a special place in my heart to say the least and every year I like to prepare a little speech to commemorate this bubbly holiday of love.

I was chatting a while back with my spanish teacher on the topic of love and sex and the many things in between and this came up: "Crush? What is a crush?" I tried my best to explain, asking whether there was an equivalent concept in spanish. She seemed perplexed. To me there is a whole colour in the love spectrum dedicated to having a crush on someone; think of all the pathos and the tragedy of knowing... just knowing that they don't feel the same.

"No, I don't think there is a word for *crush* in spanish," stressing the word like one might hold soiled underwear: with as few fingers as possible. "Must be an Anglo Saxon thing," she said after a moment's consideration, laughing to herself.

Pobre de mi.

dark lord of the australian right

A fucking ceremony? A goddamn fucking ceremony? Yes well I have sensed a great disturbance in the force padawans, it's as if a thousand voices cried out in joy only to then be silenced. Our very own Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Attorney-Generalus Phillip Ruddock, deformed by dark side powers that flow through him like electricity flows through copper wire, dark black-red viscous electricity, has used his evil Federal powers to block this new hope, the ACT's The Civil Partnerships Bill, that had it become law would've provided same-sex couples in that territory (should they have chosen) with similar rights and recognition to that of heterosexual couples. But Ruddock refused it, he says on the basis that the law required a declaration be made before a notary and witness, placing it too close, he claims to the institution of a marriage. A "ceremony" that even its patron ACT Attorney General Simon Corbell described as similar to signing a statutory declaration in the presence of say a fucking pharmacist.1

Now in June last year Ruddock struck down the ACT's Civil Unions Act based on his belief that it would "likely undermine the institution of marriage." An institution that is defined by its role of bringing children into the world, he said. The territory has since been making changes hoped at passing it through without Federal government opposition, who have the constitutional power to remove territory statutes from the books. And well Ruddock wasn't satisfied.2

So what can I say? Marriage: based on its ability to pop out children? He makes it sound like some monstrous war machine for baby production. What about all those marriages, that despite their best of intentions cannot bear fruit? An old argument I know but why can't Ruddock just admit that the real reason he struck this and the Civil Unions Act down, is the same reason he introduced the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill, and refused Peter Kakucska a Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage and that's all because he just doesn't like gay people. Yes that's right, he doesn't like gay people and any rights we have are concessions.3 Just fucking say it without all the hooha. I mean seriously how will gay people damage an institution that heterosexuals have managed to erode nicely on their own? It's a really stupid argument trying to make homophopia sound reasonable and I am tired of it. Just like I am tired of all those Christians still making that stupid pun about how it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, and then still finding it fucking funny.... seriously these people are allowed to breed?

Tomorrow the Melbourne City Community Services Committee is meeting to take a formal written submission and oral presentation from the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby about why the City of Melbourne should set up a relationship register that would allow gay couples to publicly declare their relationships. Deputy Lord Mayor and gay, Gary Singer said that while it would be largely symbolic undertaking it would nonetheless help couples by providing them with proof that they were actually in a relationship.4
Despite this being but a "largely symbolic" register a lot of groups particularly some conservative christian types are feeling threatened by it and have been voicing their consternation and the plan is actually in danger of falling on its arse.

So I think I'll go and if you or anyone you know wants to lend your support and fight the good fight then attend:

Date: Tuesday 13 February
Time: 7:30pm
Address: Melbourne City Council Meeting Room.
Access via Level 2, Town Hall Administration Building, 90 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Note: Requests to address the committee for 3 minutes must be made to Council Secretariat on 9658 9707 by midday on 13 Feb.

Props go to Richard for pointing this out.


Govt defends block to same sex marriage, The Age, January 18, 2006.

ACT gay marriage plan rejected again, The Age, February 6, 2007.

Clay Lucas, City to open register for same-sex couples, The Age, November 18, 2006.

Kenneth Nguyen, Ceremony not for gays, says Ruddock, The Age, February 8, 2007.

c is for computed tomography

I feel like I am looking at some prehistoric fossil dusted painstakenly from a badland plains.

What we are really looking at is my spine. My spine damaged. It is only slightly damaged and this is good. Good because it should get better soon.

While on the multilingual theme…

I went down to a Blairgowrie with some friends the other weekend. There we spent two nights drinking, chatting and relaxing. A friend Mick brought down of all things a Mandarin phrase book, with which he popped out bawdy come-ons and pillow-talk in Chinese. Now this got me thinking about a mandarin bi-lingual dictionary that I’d stolen some way back while I was at uni off a friend after some falling out. It was published in 1978, two years after Mao died and makes for some interesting reading. So I thought I would offer my own brief lesson in Chinese, communist and red-book waving.

fàngsōng: relax; slacken; loosen. We mustn’t slacken out efforts to remold our world outlook.

Despite not being able to drink (much) because of the medication I’m on and a minor spinal injury incurred while foolishly trying body surf at the Sorrento backbeach it was a good weekend.

liánjié: bind; tie; join. A common revolutionary goal has bound us closely together. The ties of friendship join the two peoples.

It was just the eight of us down having started at the Midsumma opening in Federation Square extending through Saturday into Sunday at Cam’s beach house. I suppose you could say it was a gay boy weekend away, free from the chains of heterosexual patriarchal oppression and the like and as you expect we approached it with shocking abandon playing party games such trivial pursuit and mastermind.

We’d been at the beach most of Saturday and back at camp, the evening began with the most expensive pizza and a game of “never ever”, a variation on the theme of “truth or dare,” which never wavered much from talk of sex despite Cam’s greatest efforts.

Oh and then there was the skinny-dipping.

qiáng zhì: force; compel; coerce. People cannot be compelled to accept one particular style of art or school of thought.

The weekend was part of Glen’s birthday celebrations and he’d been talking about swimming in the buff since Meredith, early December. Now I was not totally against the idea, some part of me wanted the experience. Maybe I wanted a bonding session which’d draw me closer to a group that I sorta feel a little on the outer and maybe there was also the rabid homosexual in me who was a little bit curious about my friend’s bits. Yes well and you see this is the problem. Glen tried to sell it as a liberating experience, that the intense sense of shame that I felt about my body would somehow be dissolved in the water, amongst the waves, naked and around a group of gay men, sizing me up, judging me…


luŏ: bare; naked; exposed; stark naked and undisguised.


I stood there without clothing, water lapping at my thighs, arms crossed. I didn’t feel particularly free. Why was no one talking to me? Was this all in my imagination? Their eyes averted? Were they trying to avoid seeing me all flabby, hairy and pale as frigid cadaver?

This is why I never felt nudism to be particularly revolutionary. Clothes are not what I need to shed, social expectations and the baggage I carry ain’t so easily hidden amongst the bracken by the shore.

Why couldn’t we do something really liberating like karaoke?

yĭncáng: hide; conceal; remain undercover. A bourgeois careerist hidden in the revolutionary ranks. A counterrevolutionary who has succeeded in staying hidden.

blairgowrie jetty

Taken Sunday January 21, 2007.

el fin de todo

Hay una teoría de eternidad y un tiempo cuando los planetas y las estrellas han muerto. No hay nada, no hay ninguna vida, ni coches, ni arboles, ni fieritas lindas. Aún los agujeros negros han desaparecido y los atomitos han olvidado su fuerza y se han ido, no hay más sustancia o energía y entonces el universo se queda oscuro. No importa que cuan inteligentes somos o cuanta tecnología asombrosa tenemos, como Yeats dijó, todas las cosas se caen a pedazos. Es la segunda ley de la termo dinámica que todo muere. Pero no parezcas tan preocupado, si va a pasar, no va a pasar en un tiempo largo. ¿Cuantas años? Quiero que pienses en el numero uno, después que le pongas atras cien ceros.

Sin embargo, en lo oscuro algo muy raro va a pasar. Sin frequencia, casi nunca, hay pequeñas fluctuaciones al azar del "vacio quantum" pero en billones de años que pase, es posible que algunas partículas aparecen talvez aún un nuevo atomo o dos.

No voy a fingir que lo entiendo pero los cientificos nos dicen que en las eras del vacio otras cosas podrían aparecer, objetos más complejos que unos atomos. Desde nada podrían venir una roca o un nuevo planeta brillante. Cuando se presente con tanto tiempo las posibilidades son interminables. Podríamos encontrar vida talvez aún unas personas que han existido antes en la historia de la tierra, como Elizabeth Cady Stanton o Kubla Khan, quienes podrían jugando dobles con Jesus y Muhamed Ali. Aunque ahora estoy siendo tonto, Katherine Freese, una física de la universidad de Michigan ha dicho "En el tiempo infinito, un día, yo podría reaparecer."



http://www.exitmundi.nl/eternity.htm

workers unite - lets garden!

Channel surfing as a kid I'd often stick between stations and watch static like that girl from poltergeist but instead of seeing the ghosts or whatever I imagined the antenna was picking up TV shows from Soviet Russia. I would swear to you that I could see shots of farmers ploughing wide fields extolling their virtue through manual labour and while most likely the combination of sensory deprivation and an overactive yet geopolitically attuned imagination, I'd convinced myself that a chain of extraordinary events, a pigeon shitting on our aerial perhaps, a freakish meteorological electrical storm or some frighteningly superior soviet transmitting technology had allowed my family to watch, grainy and without sound albeit, a Communist gardening show from the far flung USSR.

acid tears

I've been seriously thinking of trashing this blog, deleting it. I had contemplated it. Put plans together and thought about what would be my farewell speech etcetera but here it stands and I am still trying to force blood from stone. Well things have been pretty dark of late; I'd be hard pressed to deny it. I've been self medicating, drinking mainly to feel normal and hell I even turned up the other week to a doctor's appointment drunk. And then there's been the mood swings and fits of uncontrollable crying while reading, watching tv, holding back tears while in queue at the checkout, dread and panic at the thought of leaving the house and then the same fears about returning there.

I took an e on the weekend, sunday night, new years eve and then I took another one a few hours later. Sure I make no sense, I babble, make noise just to fill the spaces but I feel alright yeah, well to do and well adjusted... relatively of course, the special kind. The electrical storm dissipates leaving the quiet, the oh so quiet that I can hear the old man in the room next playing solitaire. Well that and the screaming vocals of Martin Sorrondeguy from Limp Wrist, the queercore band I was seeing at the Arthouse with friends Josh and Richard. I can say of all the drugs I've ever tried MDMA has been my favourite. Yes most certainly.

Now cut to the morning, 7am as I am walking home from the house party Josh and I had ended up at after the gig having left Richard at the Arthouse. The evening had had a very high school feel to it, live music followed by a party at someone-or-other's house, beer and at least one stupid fuck on drugs (me for the less perceptive of you). There was chatting and flirting and confessions all around and neighbours banging on the fence telling us to shut the fuck up and yes again, I am walking home, still buzzing, left by the others zooming off in their cabs to the other sides of town, when my left eye began to cry. I stopped in the street as it began to burn: my tears were burning my eye, squinting, rubbing my eye with my sleave wiping it hoping the tears would stop. A sign perhaps. Of what? I don't know. Difficult things these signs and portents.

I went to the doctor yesterday. The results of a breakdown of sorts and an intervention staged by a good friend who'd been there on the phone when it'd happened. After a forty or so minute session with the shrink I was prescribed a drug known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a class of antidepressants that increase the available serotonin levels in the brain or something and funnily enough is chemically similar to MDMA, my bestest buddy e.

hobby

When I was a child I used to play with model trains. I remember fondly building railway stations out of lego and placing the little lego men and women on the platform to await their dreary nine-to-fives that approached with every tic-toc. I would set time-tables and interconnecting train and bus services and build customer service desks and little franchised coffee stands that sold overpriced lattes (50 cents extra for soy). Then there would be delays and cancellations that made these unhappy little passengers miss their connections and I would have to make the following announcements that would always come too late to be any use to anyone, raising tempers and blood pressures but I would always be apologetic, yes and understanding without accepting fault or liability.

tirade of self flagellation

I saw a woman on my way back from lunch today finishing off my last handroll from that sushi bar just around the corner from the Winsor Hotel. She was maybe Papuan, western pacific and walked with this haphazard gait from underneath her denim skirt almost touching the ground. A walk that suggested some sort of deformity or injury, perhaps polio paralysis or some other preventable disease of the third world that I suppose I should feel more passionate or at least more informed about. As I past her in the street I couldn't help seeing myself through her eyes or at least my objectified sense of how I thought she should see me or maybe more correctly projecting my own white guilt and self loathing onto another person based on poorly informed racial stereotyping. Geez!! This all makes me dizzy.

What a stupid world we live in where one of the leading causes of death in this country is obesity and its various related illnesses. When access to a nutritious diet, clean drinking water and adequate healthcare is no longer a problem we find disease and death in plenty. Just to walk around, just for a second, and see through the eyes of someone else and look upon the absurdity of it all.

Well that feels a little better. Thank you for humouring me in this little tirade of self flagellation I hope I haven't offended too many of you.

cigarettes

I started smoking the other week frustrated at a particularly awful day at work, it seemed like a good thing to do satisfied that what I was doing was slowly killing me. All very noir. Smoking a lazy three cigarettes a day I was on my second pack - Marlborough Lights with a ghastly grin of someone with mouth cancer, ulcerated and teeth a rotting green-yellow- until I was forced to stop. I had been revelling in displaying the pack to work colleagues, holding the pack centremetres from my ear, smiling wide showing my teeth in comparison. At lunch I caught up with a group of fellow smokers, conscious of their siege-like comradery that I was hoping to be part of when I was told by the heaviest and most nicotined stained smoker of them all "You do know you're not even doing it right. Smoking, I mean you're not even breathing it in."

I was heart-broken, publicly humiliated before my peers as a hack, an interloper. Running, almost in tears, back to the office I left the pack in the top drawer of my desk with the remaining cigarettes unsmoked.

Fuck-em I say and today I joined the gym.

melbourne sunset

The view from my window at work this evening 31 floors up. I just thought I like to share.

Even when things are getting pretty dark there is still something to be thankful for.

How I closed my eyes and prayed to Jesus

It's hard being a christian in this day and age after living under such darwinian oppression for hundreds of years or so I can understand why they feel they need to stay in the closet, why the Family First website doesn't mention jesus even once, even when their policies are directly informed by faith. Oh I mean every christian has their coming out story: to their friends, their family and work colleagues, having to watch their faces drop in shock and horror. I can relate, I truely can. I understand why they need euphemisms like "family" this and "family" that instead of "the bible says" this and "God smote" that and why they need to lie in order to hide their shame: their faith and their business interests.

Seriously. They talk about the hidden Green agenda but how can you take a Party seriously that pretends it's secular when they're all basking in the light of jesus? How can you trust a party who talk about defending families but have such the narrow definition of what a family is that unless you're the family member of some director of a large corporation you can bite their shiney monetarianist asses[sic]?

this state election sure is hotting up

Leaving my house this morning on my way to work I discovered my letter box open and a letter from my state ALP member torn up and strewn across my front lawn. Now a quick glance aside I could see several neighbours' boxes also thus open... hmmm I wondered: stupid kids fucking with peoples' mail or a concerted anti-labour putsch?

snatched conversation

I love overhearing little snippets of conversation. For example, today I was walking past the two dollar shop in Barkly Square, Brunswick when this rather upstanding gent, holding two champaign flutes in one hand and another just above his eye level in his other hand, examining so as to catch the light, said "Query," addressing the store clerk in his very best aristocratic British accent, "do these come any stubbier?"

the definition of a bureaucrat

bureaucrats are "...men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired."

Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan. p. 56

mushroom cloud over chadstone

I went out with a few friends after work on Friday. We'd had dinner and finally ended up, two friends - Adrian and Cam - and I in Black Opal (a TAB joint in the city) playing a card game called cheat with a deck we'd won in some Heineken promotion; Adrian I've know since high school, some fifteen years now and Cam, well is someone I sort of attached myself to last year at the Meredith Music festival and suffice to say they come from opposite poles of my social circle. But it worked and I had and hope they had a fabulous time sharing stories from our various pasts between the devious ploys and counter ploys of a game that I am proud to say I won: where we had grown up, the shopping centres we had hung out. For Adrian and I it was Chadstone Shopping Centre and for Cam some complex in Doncaster.

* * * * * *

I was in the old stomping ground today, just driving through with my mum in the car on the way to Forster Road and the south-eastern freeway onramp. We were on our way to see Rachmaninov Vespers being performed by the Melbourne Chorale at Hamer Hall - her birthday present. We'd passed the 7-11 convenience store that Adrian and I had loitered outside on various summer evenings, the creek where we drank and smoked weed and the stormwater drain where these girls from our clique had graffitied some warning about a nymph of the sacred spring who slumbered there. I laughed as we drove past it telling my mum the story who in turn changed the topic. I don't think she was very impressed by this disclosure but then I suppose there are a lot of things about my life she doesn't know about, then and now and sometimes we're better for it.

It's been a big day. I was woken my the phone around half past nine.
"... an emergency. Your sister has gotten herself into a little bit of trouble," my mum said down the copper line.
"Say what!?!" I exclaimed finally waking up, wedging myself up on an elbow to give the conversation fuller attention. I'd gone out on Saturday night all by my lonesome to the Peel in some pathetic attempt to pick up and although I'd plucked up enough courage to eventually talk to this one guy, some accountant who worked for KPMG I could tell he wasn't in for anything more involved than a non-committal chat so I cut my loses and left.

"Your sister had a big night last night, a few too many glasses of wine," she said. "We need to go down and pick her up and that University car that needs to be returned today. I'll need you to drive my car home." My sister had been down at Phillip Island doing research for her PhD when somebody had tipped her glass one too many times and now she was apparently vomiting in a public toilet in San Remo.
"What about the concert this afternoon? By the time I get to your house it'll be midday; you think we'll have enough time?" As far as I was concerned she'd done the drinking and she could get herself out of it. It was all part and parcel of a hangover but my mum was insisting on being far more reasonable.
"I know, I know, look if we have to miss it, we have to miss it," as if repeating everything she said would some how sooth my rising irritation.
"Okay, I'll be around as soon as I can."

* * * * * *

We'd driven over 200 kilometres by the time my mum and I managed to take our seats B27 and B28 in Hamer Hall, oh so close to the front of the stage. The lights dimmed and the Melbourne Chorale walked on and for the next two hours we listened to the works of two Russian composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, a Soviet era composer who had gone in and out of Stalin's favour and Sergei Rachmaninov who had been writing chorale works for the Russian Orthodox church in the 19th Century. The Vespers by Rachmaninov were by far my favourite, truely beautiful, my mum later told me she had to fight back tears and while I can't claim such I did feel a chill down the spine. It goes to show I suppose that no matter how much power Stalin might have wielded he could never have inspired the kind of transcendence that faith in God brought out in Rachmaninov.

* * * * * *

I had a dream after the night out with Adrian and Cam. I was in the car with friends, old friends, driving through the old neighbourhood down Warrigal Road on our way to Chadstone Shopping Centre. I looked out of the window only to see a brilliant flash of light and a ball of flame barrel upwards into the atmosphere: the CBD below a roaring inferno. While I can't say why my friends couldn't see the explosion I nevertheless had to go crazy yelling at them to find a safe place. Acting on this the driver turned the steering wheel sharply and swung the car and us into the shadow of Chadstone Shopping Complex. We were safe.

* * * * * *

On the drive home from the city as the sky grew dark and the fat moon sat on the horizon, I told my mum that I was gay. I was shaking and could feel my stomach drop even though I had an inkling of what she was going to say.
"I kind of guessed that but I am glad you told me." She said but continued: "I don't claim to understand what homosexuality is all about but I am fine with who you are."

* * * * * *

I've been dreaming about the end of the world on and off for about six or seven years now, beginning just prior to the click over of the millennia and keeping me entertained since then. Sometimes I think they are more than some sci-fi obsession gone wrong but are actually building up to something. Oh... I don't mean in any kind of prophetic sense but a more internal, spiritual one. Because the apocalypse isn't about the end of the world so much as it is quite literally the revelation of a truth so profound that the world has no other choice than to undergo some fundamental change. And so I truly hope this one comes for the better.

my settler hat

I own a hat- yes I do - and I call it my settler hat, it's black felt and moderately brimmed curling all the way round and while not quite a fedora and more like a homburg I picture this hat on a dusty and probably illiterate Irishman staring back at me through the sepia toned photo-graph all the way from the 19th century- ay. It is thus my settler hat.

I was in diva bar last Friday waiting far too long for a friend to arrive throwing back a vodka and lemon- my second- listening to this awful pop fodder while watching some pretty somebody shake his sinuey shirtless torso to some top 20.... ah. Leaving my glass at the bar I pass my dancer friend on the dancefloor. "Say are you jewish?" Pointing to the hat.
"No, are you?" I asked, not being the first time someone has said shalom to me in a gay bar.
"Yes I am," he says taking me a little by surprise.
Hmmm. "Are you a practicing jew?" I ask. "Like are you going to synagogue tomorrow?"
"My parents bought be a property in Balaclava, if that's what you mean?" He giggled.

walk the line (of control)

I fell asleep last night reading Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, the book shutting, eyes shutting closed just as I finished the chapter on Kashmir and Jammu. And this is what I dreamt:

Surrounded by the sublime beauty of the himilayan footfalls I sling my rifle on my shoulder surveying the vast green land beneath. I am on duty, a Kashmiri dreaming the dream of an independent state not torn apart by foreign powers with their foreign motives and objectives, fighting with foreign weapons. As I enjoy the autumn sunshine in this reverie I am punctured through my woollen tunic, my phiren by maybe two or three or four bullets, one entering through my neck; there was red and then an overexposed white that bleached the land and the sky leaving only the man, the interloper that shot me; maybe he is Jaish-e-Mohammed or Harkat-ul-Mujahideen or some such but as I spit blood trying to breath I use my leeched strength to prop up my Kalish, aim and pull the trigger watching the bastard crumple, my weapon flashing without sound....

... and then I woke in such a state that I was convinced I was still breathing through the hole in my neck that’d been pierced through by a 39mm shell.

... a friend at work said she thought I dreamt a past life and well I suppose this is a comforting thought when maybe that this is all coming from anywhere but inside my head.

wrong side of the bed

Jolted awake by a mobile phone alarm that'd been thrown to the opposite end of the room the night before as I've the tendency to switch my alarms off in my sleep. It occurred to me early on that if I was ever to get to work/school on time the clock needed to be a good many feet away to make any such attempt by my sleeping otherself foolhardy. Now with my decaying wooden single bed placed up against the room's whitewashed brick wall I threw myself out of bed and like a stunned blackbird who'd flown into a glass window I fell back almost unconscious. Rubbing my head I laughed to myself as I had quite literally got out of the wrong side of the bed.

these red eyes - the mothman prophesies

I just re-watched Mark Pellington's The Mothman Prophesies starring Richard Gere and the beautiful Laura Linney and although it plays out like a made for TV adaptation of some article found in an almanac of the uncanny, I really dug it. It's a dark film that uses its lighting and soundtrack carefully so as to never really give you the mothman itself, a plus for someone who is tired of hollywood's tendency to overbudget and show everything when what we are really scared of is not the monster itself but a fear of the unknown that it represents, the irrational, the pale face at the window: death my friends, the undiscovered country (thank you mr spock). Although you gain a few brief glimpses of the mothman (or Indrid Cold) blurred or bleached out in overexposure, its nature, its intent are left dangerously outside our knowing.

Based on true events, or more correctly based very loosely on a book based on a series sightings of strange winged man/creature in areas surrounding Point Pleasant and Charleston in West Virginia between November 1966 and December 1967 culminating in the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River killing 46 people. After the disaster the occurrance of sighting began to drop off and the film claims that this entity is somehow tapped into and attracted to death and references are made to other sightings through out the world including eyewitness reports of such a creature being sighted just prior to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Now after doing a little research on the topic I stumbled on something a little unexpected, something that to my knowledge has not been widely reported in the media and I suppose not surprisingly. The photo besides was taken by NY resident Steven Moran on 11 September 2001 and appears to show a large winged creature flying near the smoke and debris of what were once the Twin towers. Now according to Wikipedia the photo has not to date been discredited or shown to be manipulation or fake and so I am left feeling, well.. what the ...? Now according to mothman.us there were reports of non military aircraft in the area in the minutes just after the attacks, a few mentioned "winged, flying-men". Doing it conspiracy/x-files style these reports have been largely been ignored or not investigated by authorities.

Sights/sites

The Mothman Wikipedia

mothman.us

02.10.2006

So it's my birthday and I am 27, having spent the evening with friends, dinner at Lentil as Africa in Brunswick and not satisfied with my three beers (to their apple frusion and three coffees) I buy a longneck at the bottle-o on the walk home as I begin to see my slow slip into alcoholism with an austere sense of humour that maybe I'm carrying some sort of generational torch, some family tradition. I think to myself, only had I my i-pod to distract me, how surprised I was to find a birthday card in the letterbox from my brother and that I didn't even have a number to call and thank him, then I think of how my weekend date was just another notch to add to a failed love life and my job something that I can barely get out of bed for.

I went to the doctor the other week about my panic attacks and he suggested I see someone, talk about it, open up to a professional saying "You see," he told me "it's all existential. You don't have to do or be anywhere or anything you don't want to be. It's an illusion that we are trapped, it's only convention that keeps us here." You're wrong I thought, I am trapped. It's all in here.

Happy birthday g-man

a not so evil empire

On this day, 17 September 1859, one Joshua Abraham Norton then resident of the city of San Francisco proclaimed himself to be "Emperor of These United States," printed in the city's newspaper the Bulletin it was sign Emperor Norton I. In a further decree the following January Emperor Norton I, citing corruption and the disproportionate influence of various lobby groups disolved the Federal Congress.

Now some have called this man eccentric, others have labled him crazy or even schizophrenic, but this failed business man who when he died on 8 January 1880 with no more than a few dollars to his name, tens of thousands of mourners attended his funeral and the procession that followed his casket was more than two miles long.

Indeed the man had his own currency and would eat in gratis at businesses bearing plaques reading "By Appointment to his Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I of the United States." Even the City allowed Norton a degree of recognition when in the 1870 census Norton's occupation was stated as "Emperor" and the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco appropriated enough funds to purchase new royal vestments.

In 1867 a police officer Armand Barbier arrested Norton with the intention of having him committed causing a public outcry. The then police chief ordered him released, stating that Norton "had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line."

Indeed while on one of his "Royal Inspections" it is said that Norton actually put himself between anti-Chinese rioters and a group of Chinese. Apparently he bowed his head and began to recite the Lord's Prayer, with which the rioters shamed dispersed.

Crazy!

Read about him on Wikipedia from which this blog entry is sourced.

Wikipedia - Joshua Norton

having major panic attack or dying, not sure

Home safe now but you know public transport is a very scary place when in the middle of a full blown panic attack. Yes tonight has been truely awful. I am chilling out a little now but about an hour ago I thought I was going to die as I sat hunched over staring our the window of a bus, watching my breath condense and evaporate. I did the same in the tram and finally the train, doing my best to ignore the crazies all around me, those real and imagined.

It all started during my spanish lesson which my teacher offered to end an hour early as I was sounding unwell and having a lot of trouble concentrating on her set lesson and might I say that this is no small thing as it basically meant she was letting go of half her fee. Now we got to talking as we do and conversation quickly turned to my work and as I began to recount my day I promptly forgot to breathe.... disorientated I inhaled deeply, shaking and at that I explained that I had to leave stumbling to the door I said hasta luego.

I'm not going to die. This is all in my head. This is not a heart attack. I repeated my little mantra as I made my way to the bus stop, top heavy and very unsteady as my mind accellerated to light speed counting all the ways this could go, were those late night joggers over the road likely to know CPR, had I paid up on my ambulance membership and where was the nearest hospital? HElp, breathe, breathe!!! Alone at the bus stop waiting, waiting I looked at my mobile, who can I call? Who can help? Do I have enough credit? Will these be my last words? Breathe deeply and I settled on a text message. "Having major panic attack or dying, not sure," I wrote. Oh fuck!, what a dick head I am!, I thought and called him.

"What's wrong? Are you by yourself? Oh that's not good.... ummm... want to catch up over coffee tomorrow?"
That'd be nice I told him, I like to think he didn't understand the immediacy of my problem so I made my excuses and disconnected just as the bus pulled up. Now having a man sit a few seats behind you on an empty bus and sing and whistle loud to some sub-continental pop anthem might all sound funny to you but I was truely terrified. He kept this up a good ten minutes before I got off near the arts centre and while he held a pretty good tune my nerves were frayed... and all I could do was breathe deeply in and out again and again.

An hour later, unable to see a doctor in what was a vain attempt to acquire valium I was home and as I said breathing and calming down but still strung high as a fucking kite.

nick berg

The fear hits taught the strings of my heart that beats so fast it just can't keep on going like this. Death can see me as the outside darkens and disappears and the walls blacken and I turn inside myself. The world is ending and my hands are bound my clothes wet with sweat and captivity. They talk to the camera lens of revenge as my lines of fate draw in like light streaking caught in a singularity and all I want to think about is those I love, joy and sunshine but everything just keeps on shrinking down until this last act of violence that I know has been coming will end all this.

Nick Berg was murdered on 7 May 2004 to the words Allahu Akbar, God is great.

don't party too hard mister grey-HAM-ser

As the twentieth century ticked over into the twenty-first I swore that I'd get my license before the apocalypse. My driving instructer was one very large Mexican called Marco who would turn up half-an-hour late if he turned up at all, explaining that he'd had the sort of family problems that required the paid employment of lawyers. Still he would sit there with his Mcdonalds meal deal and discuss his latest fad diet as I nervously merged into freeway traffic cutting off a beemer or a merc, and we'd bond in some odd way when he'd pick me up at uni on hot thursday evenings undressing the ladies through his dark ray bans while I did my best to stay gender neutral; listening to bad fox pop laughing as he switched the car's inside lamp on and off to the beat: our party's strobe light.

And at end of each lesson he'd tell me "don't party too hard mister grey-HAM-ser" and in all honesty in the past few days I've been thinking about these wise words as I recovered from what could be only described as malicious self abuse.

I drink too much. Yes I do.

padre de octubre

Well it's nearly that time of year again with Christmas just a few months away and before you know it all the tinsel and the reindeer and the shiney little baubles will be hanging from the rafters of our hermetically sealed shopping centres and what with all the various feasts and saint's days in between such as St Francis Day (October 4), the Presentation and then the following Immaculate Conception of Blessed Virgin Mary (November 21 & December 8 respectively) and then there's my birthday it's time I make some gift suggestions.

Now with World Youth Day to be held in Sydney in mid 2008 the building frenetic excitement is sure to make 2007 catholic flavoured and what better way to feel part of the action than with a catholic themed calender.

Piero Pazzi an italian photographer has been bringing out the Calendario Romano, full of very hansome Italian "priests" for a few years now, published chiefly as a souvenir for tourists visiting the Vatican it has been latched onto by a UK website which has been selling calendars with one pound out every one sold going to Food chain, a british charity providing nutritional services including home delivered meals and health advice to men, women and children who are chronically sick as a result of AIDS. Now as it turns out these priests in the calendar are actually models and while one apparently was once an alter boy none of them it seems will be offering communion come sunday. Pazzi's website has put a call out to interested clergymen wanting to appear on the calendar but I've not been able to find out whether there's been any ecumenical niblings on this. Nevertheless these guys are very very pretty (my personal favourites being October, March and June) and I do believe this calender would make any good (or bad) catholic's trinity sunday* and while the naughty little catholic in me** is a little disappointed about the authenticity the plus side is that at least these guys haven't sworn no oath of chastity.

"What about nuns?" I hear you say. Well if that's your thing then maybe Nuns Having Fun 2007 Calendar is for you. The black-and-white photos from the 1950s and 60s brought to you by Maureen Kelly and Jeffrey Stone, show Nuns "frolicking through ... waves (yes, in full habits), nuns at the bowling alley, nuns on a roller coaster, nuns singing, nuns in a chorus line, nuns playing jump rope, nuns on a road trip, nuns in bumper cars. Oh, and what fun they’re having!"

Also:

Nicole Martinelli, Italian 'Priests in Calendar Are Models. Zoomata, 2 March 2004.

*Probably not to be displayed in the same room where el papa is hung.

**By the way not catholic, but who can say that there isn't a little bit catholic in all of us.

digital zombies

During an ad-break for VideoHits last week my friend Adrian and I, both very hung over from the night before encountered a chocolate bar commercial endorsed by someone I would consider to be one of the twentieth century’s most iconic celebrities. Nothing out of the ordinary there I hear you say except, that is for the fact that this particular celebrity is dead and has been dead for over thirty years. The advertisement in question for Mars Bars included the footage of a late Bruce Lee, shirtless and skin glistening in sweat at his peak physical prime and utilising the latest in computer imaging like techno voodoo has the dead kung fu master with his lightening fast reflexes eat one of their chocolate bars with their chocolate-malt nougat centre, covered in a layer of caramel and coated in milk chocolate… I was livid and quickly lept to my feet in indignation.

To many of us the idea that we will be remembered after we die holds a central part to our spiritual lives, our motivation to procreate and get up in the morning, hell the ancient Egyptians believed that if people forgot who you were after death you would suffer a second one. But no need to worry, that is providing your name keeps getting mentioned, allowing you to party in the afterlife to you ba's content and similarly celebrity status holds a key to immortality. Think Mozart, Shakespeare and Leonardo Da Vinci and you have a few members of what could be classically termed immortals. Now Bruce Lee is just a modern day entrant and he's not the only one. Indeed celebrity status met dizzying new heights in the twentieth century and for some being dead was an excellent career move, in 2004 Forbes Magazine published a list of the world’s top ten earning dead celebrities to which unsurprisingly Elvis Presley took top billing and it can be argued that, and I will attempt to minimise the schmaltz, that the use of their images, music, artwork etc with all the cash that come from it functions in keeping their memories alive (so to speak). And fair enough. Concord Moon LP, a company owned by Linda Lee Cadwell and Shannon Lee Keasler (wife and daughter of Bruce Lee) hold the name and likeness rights for Bruce Lee and through the non-profit organization The Bruce Lee Foundation has this stated intention. The foundation’s mission statement says that they intend to “enrich lives, open minds and break down barriers through the active proliferation of Bruce Lee’s legacy of undaunted optimism in the face of adversity, unwavering humanism, mental and physical perseverance, and inspirational presence of mind toward the betterment of our global community.” This apparently involves selling chocolate bars and whether the man in question would have objected or seen this as furthering his legacy I am not in a position to answer however it opens an ethical question as to whether the images of the dead should be sold and leached off to build a company’s brand identity or shift units especially when a company’s philosophy or product is seemingly incompatible with the person or the lives that they led.

A perfect example is the Street’s Magnum Swinging 60s promotion that my friend pointed out to me there in my living room mid rant, where Streets introduced nine new Magnum flavours, all with a 1960s theme, among them were Jami Hendrix, Woodchoc, John Lemon and Cherry Guevara. Now I could understand an Andy Warhol flavour (suggestions?) but what exactly is it about the lives of John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix or god forbid Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that lends their posthumous support for tackily themed ice creams?

With the maturing of digital imaging technology and techniques in what I feel is becoming close to a virtual necromancy, where it is increasingly possible to have the dead talk and act as though they were still among the living. A situation where the dead are forced against their will, ripped from their peace to sell sell sell products and promote brands incongruent with the lives they lived: at the best distasteful and on the other extreme a form of electronic purgatory. Surely it would be more appropriate to attach the strings to those monsters of history like Hitler, Stalin and maybe Idi Amin and have them dance and make fools of themselves or maybe even have them apologise for all the wrongs they’ve done but then there’s no money in that, no parasitic brand can leach their je ne sais quoi and synergise.

Also:

Dan Glaister, Dead stars who rain money on the living. The Guardian 9 April 2005.

my last two dollar coin

I spend my lunch breaks alone and while I know this sounds awfully anti social well that's me I suppose, but really I just like to wander the city streets listening to my ipod thinking and humming to myself and am happy not to be bothered. And yesterday while doing this, standing at the lights near parliament waiting to cross I saw one of those AIDS trust fundraisers across the road just waiting there wanting to make me feel guilty for just passing by, looking all innocent and goodly made me rush rationalise why I wasn't going to drop a coin into her bucket. Look I give to them here and there, I even volunteer goddamn it and I mean solidarity and all but when you reduce it down to its basics I just don't know anyone who's positive and while that's not the limits of my generosity it is a deciding factor when handing over my last two dollar coin.

It was just then that an African couple, possibly Sudanese thinking I recognised the lady from Footscray, with their little boy approached the AIDS fundraiser in her plastic bib, the man stumbling around in his pockets for change as the pedestrian light went green playing some salsa hit by Ismael Rivera from the 1950s. The man took his son by the hand to cross, turning seemingly annoyed that his wife wasn't with him only to then smile with broad enthusiasm when he saw that she was hanging back rummaging through her purse for more change.

I don't mean to comment here on their financial situation even if it is true that many African migrants, especially those from places like Sudan are here in Australia because they have experienced extreme deprivation of their human rights but merely to say that I saw in a short seconds glance that to some people the statistics that I read about on BBC world are really a part of a plague that is of an irreducible immensity and even here in Melbourne on this sad cold and wet thursday of a horrible immediacy.

Regardless of all this and the fact that all I had to do was just get more money out of the wall I still didn't give up my last two dollar coin.

memed in

Thanks goes to Richard for the tag. The game's rules are this:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Now technically the closest book was El Principito, a spanish translation of that french classic Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, however as there was no page 123 I had to therefore settle for the book underneath it, the controversial Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.

Here we go:

'It was the Devil,' he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice. 'The last time it was Shaitan.' This is what he has heard in his listening, that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that's a bit of a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me.

midwinta protest

I went to that midwinta protest outside the VIC-state parliament on Sunday with a friend from work; we'd decided to add our shiney faces to the crowd demanding some public and legal recognition of our relationships should either of us ever find ourselves in one. It was my friend's first protest and well .... I'd been to a few here and there but nonetheless there were some first times there for me as well, such as the sight of a rather hansome hombre signing (AUSLAN) with a lisp and all those miniture purebreed such-and-such yap-yaps that only homos would think to bring to a political action. The crowd was bigger than I thought it would be with theage.com citing over 2,000 awashed in red, balloons and clothing. I wore red boxer-briefs beneath but kept this fact to myself.

On Wednesday last week in my lunch half-hour I'd walked past an anti-abortion protest on the steps on parliament and the day before that a freedom of speech protest that was nothing but a cover for various right-wing church groups who were fighting for the right to slander muslims. I stood there on Sunday, sun bright and sky cerulean with a satisfied grin on my face that our protest outnumbered theirs combined and then some. I was particularly moved by one minister who spoke on behalf of those christians who took Jesus' message about inclusion to heart, inviting gay men and women (single and in union) into the fold. It was nice to see the words of hate and exclusion and their adherents were down in the stats for once.

Labour and Liberal representatives were there and they skipped oh so merrily around the issues, voicing their support with one hand for the removal of discrimitory legislation but conveniently omitting the fact that both their parties oppose any formal recognition of same-sex unions: anything that resembles an adam and eve not adam and steve. The Greens were unequivocal and the Democrats took the middle ground.... but were we all there? There was something or someone missing... maybe?

Maybe it was the more outlandish among us, who were coming down from their saturday night... the drag queens were all sleepy heads in bed leaving it to the socialists, the red block to lead us into what was a very convoluted chant. Now don't get me wrong I like socialists, in fact I have my little secret activist boy fantasy but sometimes I feel as though they think the year is 1968. Let say they lack the pizzazz, the kitch, the glitter, and glam that I felt we needed as we walked into swanston street gawked at by so many happy snappy tourists.

Well... that said. Canada, the UK and various EU states have enshrined same-sex relationships on their books, are we so backward? If not now then when and will I have a boyfriend? I ask you.

i hugged a heater for warmth and got burnt

I am on my third set of pain killers today and my head just won't quit from hurting. I think it has something to do with the wisdom tooth that's pushing through the gum way back there in my food hole. Every year it does this... well at least the last three and reliable as ol' faithful, I say, come winter my mouth begins to swell and I start chewing check. But then as I get round to making an appointment with the dentist the pain dissipates and the inflammation goes down and I am made the fool and feel the hypochondriac.

the writing on the wall

"The lamb's teeth will be sharpened"

- scrawled on a rotting fence just east of Christchurch (city of churches), New Zealand circa 2004.

jogging on

My shorts are too short and tight I think to myself as I attempt to keep some semblance of pace as I jog around princes park. I hear the shocked and amused thoughts of those I pass in my head; the paranoid psychotic voices are always hard to filter out even when I am exercising but then again where else to go but inward. Strange weird swirly visual effect.

I find myself dwelling on a conversation I had with a friend of a friend last week at some homo party held regularly under inflation nightclub in geddes lane in the city. I sip on my vodka lemon/lime spritz spouting my usual crap, nonsense that comes out whenever I am nervous... which is most of the time. Imagine standing on the Bolivian plains of El Salar de Uyuni (something I hope to see next year) the world's biggest salt lake wearing pitchblack motorcycle goggles, the kind Tom Waits would be proud to wear... stillness and blinding light reflecting on the pure white lake contrasted by a deep breath of blue sky above. I say if only I could find the optometrist crazy enough (oh my, my poor myopic eyes) , say with the vision to undertake my patronage. Turning to me he grins in his sheepish way and without detectable venom "did you realise I stopped paying attention about five minutes ago." I am taken aback. Fuck you too I think and shut my mouth.

Disolve to a small cafe, a scene in which I sit with my soy latte retelling this to a friend; still a little put out by it all. His eyes light up, incredulous that someone had sought to shoot me down about this and we build together on my little fantasy stimulated by caffiene and we both dream of mad optometrists in lab coats surrounded by diodes as lightening flashes through tubes above.

My foot lands in a puddle on the path and mud splashes up my leg but I keep jogging.

Graduation Day 2002

On 14 February 2002 I stood with maybe a quarter of a million other people protesting the coming invasion of iraq and the Howard government's tacit (yet nonetheless full) support for it. I left work early and had driven in with friends joining an ocean of equally angry bemused citizens who were like me wholly unconvinced by the justification for any military action. Weapons of Mass Destruction? When was the last time you heard someone say that? If feels redundant now to even bring it up, the once sexy acronym rolling of my tongue. Terrorism? Well I could never understand how dropping bombs on a country the other side of the planet was supposed to make me feel safer. Why should I feel safer anyhow when some American 'smart' bomb detonates in someone else's living room fire and concrete... when isn't it better I feel a little bit nervous and let the owner of said living room continue watching the arabic equivalent to pop idol? Freeing the Iraqi people? From what? Saddam? According to BBC online an average of over one hundred Iraqis die now every day because of the violence. Yes we freed them alright. Freed them from this mortal coil.

Graduation Day: 20 March 2002. I woke up early to clean the house getting things in order for my little afterparty, my mum out shopping getting a few last minute supplies. The TV was stuck to the ABC watching the coverage and waiting for the expected... and when it came I stood in the hallway scrubbing brush in my hand, mouth open and tap running. The Americans were bombing Baghdad and I flooded my bathroom and bedroom.

Why did we go to war again? I'd like to say I told you so as if anyone was ever listening to me but that would denote some self satisfaction. I don't feel any. I would also like to tell you all the best way forward but I don't know, only that things look pretty fucked up and I am sorry for that.

deep-fried exorcism

The other night I witnessed (in a dream of course) the exorcism of a plate of french fries. Now I don't know the difference between one sort of potato chip from the next let alone one possessed by the devil... so I thus referred such prodding and pocking, decifering and deciding to the experts: the priest and laymen and laywomen who stood around the table that 'lay' this plate and its chips upon. I was just about to discover, truth revealed if the oil the chips were fried in had been unholy cursed when I was abruptly woken by my alarm... time to get ready for my office nine to five I said to myself, wrenching my tired body from beneath the covers.

My friend Darren who told me tonight, in response to this story that I have some of the strangest dreams around.

I tend to agree.

the last I dreamt

STFODC

I was at dinner with friends last sunday: shanghai dumplings off china town. A cheap and no-frills restaurant where melbourne's young creatives are increasingly drawn to dining by the low prices and chance of experiencing the authentic... that is until everyone else finds out about it and they are forced to move on like "Brunswick street used to be a community man, a hub of creative energy but now its soul is dead" unaware they are actually the cause of it.

Tim, the guy who did visuals for my friend's band Low Rise Estate, grabbed my camera. I had taken a few choice shots during their set at Loop and having finished my mushroom and veg dumplings was entertaining myself by pointing my camera at those left eating. He proceeded, most expertly to highlight its technical shortcomings and how other cameras more favourably compared (undoubtedly his). Satisfied that his male posturing had impressed he handed the camera back and began telling us about some new organisational technique that people on the web were buzzing about... I tuned out as he began as images of more entertaining telecommercial testimonials flashed infront of my mind.

What? I said, drawn back in. What the hell is a PAA Hipster? I asked. He brought out a wad of palm size sheets of paper held together by an bull clip, grining and like that yankee carpetbagger he called it macaroni. Apparently PAA stands for personal analogue assistant and is a technique being promoted by none other than google's Tom Limoncelli. This technique involves, now hold you breath: writing your thoughts down on paper.

Your kidding, right? I asked. It's brilliant and it really works. It clears valuable cerebral real estate for other thoughts, he said that now he doesn't have to think of things, he can think about things; upon which his dinner arrived and distracted, he accused the waitress barely maintaining composure, of bringing dumplings uncooked. You want them deep fried? She asked seemingly a little confused and without a hint of sarcasm. I was given the impression that she was unaccustomed to customer complaints.

I say to all you PAA Hipters out there: STFODC! It stands for stating the fucking obvious dumb cunts! It is actually called a notepad and not some exotic plant from the amazon that until the drug giant Pfizer discovered it only a few naked indians had heard of it.

It makes me want to punch myself in the head.

jesus is coming... loudly

Seriously kids, if the words gay and jesus put side by side on a page makes you a might bit uncomfortable, then the sentence "he slowly began to stroke my rod" is unlikely to anything to allay this anxiety. So if this is the case then I strongly suggest that you don't click on the hyperlink below.


http://www.jesus21.com/poppydixon/sex/gay_jesus.html

west bank story

Check this out! This article entitled "Queen Hussein" gives a snapshot into the lives of two gay men living in the occupied territories and appeared in the lefty rag Monthy Review earlier this month (orig. translated from the Hebrew edition of Haaretz).

Queen Hussein

what i wish i'd said

It's always the way that you think of something really witty to say five or ten minutes after having the conversation. Some side that would have stung or back hand so fabulously devised and delivered that your cool quota is spent in one blow...

I was booking a ticket today for the opening screening of Renaissance at the Nova:

- We only have three split tickets left so you'd be sitting by yourself.

- That's fine.

- I can only get you a seat on the front row, either on the extreme right or the extreme left.

- If I realise they are the same thing do I get to sit in the centre?

(what I really said: well I better take the extreme left then... hehe)

But I suppose I come out sounding a dick either way.

666

Did you know that fear of the number 666 is called hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia? No?

Does anyone else feel that the only reason that 20th Century Fox decided to remake Omen, a film that cost a reported $52.4 million was for the sole purpose of releasing it on the 6 June 2006?

this things a party... Grandmaster Flash @ the Forum 3 June 2006

Whatever it was, it was the best fun I've had at a live event in six months. Flash if nothing else played the crowd so well he even managed getting my most stolid of friends shaking their booty in what was as much a history of hip-hop as dance party. "I made the decks into an instrument, no one else can say that" Flash proclaimed with out a hit of humility as he took us deck by deck educating the uninitiate in the ways of hip-hop, beginning with some old-school beats mixing through tracks from the 70s and upwards from Gangstarr and Snoop Dogg to Phil Collins and Nirvana, he said that hip-hop knows no discrimination be it "pop, rock... black, white, Australian or Japanese, when I play it, it's all hip-hop."

Through our journey Flash gave props to lost friends, dead hip hop greats such as Big L, Easy E, TuPac and Notorious B.I.G, addressing the crowd "if you see see someone that you miss... that you remember... that you love then I want you to make some noise" repeating as each image swirled up on the projector screen in cheap digital effects stolen it seemed from a powerpoint presentation.

Noise I made and dance I did as we hit level three paying tribute to the four pillars of hip-hop: the graffiti, the breakdance, MC and most importantly the DJ... counting them off with his fingers. But with a patch of floor so sticky it nearly stole my shoe, unnecessarily agressive security and Flash's increasing frustration at sound levels the show lost a little of it's earlier momentum which was nonetheless powerful enough to carry me all the way home still buzzing.

(props go to my friend Aaron who also assisted in getting me home)