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?