Ashers to ashes
Published in the Australian Magazine August 4 - 5 2000
He crosses the floor and every eye watches his passage through the crowded bar. He finds an empty table and tears the top off a soft pack, fondling the cool white stem of the cigarette. He places it to his lips as his eyes scan the room and fall upon a tangle of languid limbs. He sees her through a cloud, beautiful from the tip of her nicotine-stained fingers to the top of her pallid skull. She coughs twice in recognition and he knows in an instant that she shares his obsession. In a swirl of smoke he is by her side. He taps the box again, clears his throat. "Cigarette?" She nods and spits up a blackened oyster of phlegm into a serviette. She reaches for the durry, her lips parting slightly as she accepts the filter.
Smokers are a dying breed: they've been chased out, ostracised, victimised and not so long ago they were the most desired, the toughest, the sexiest. Cigarettes were once an essential part of the propagation of the species. As a non-smoker I watched as eager innocence fell before the aromatic power of the tobacco leaf and was bedded. In my youth, cigarettes were as essential to mating as alcoholic cider and Vat 69. They symbolised a successful coupling. Now smokers have become social pariahs and I, for one, am sad to see them go.
It's just that smokers were always more interesting. They were by far the most interesting people on international flights. And they were easy to spot. You'd just look for a column rising from the relaxed fingers of a suavely dressed socialite.
Sadly, contemporary smokers are shadows of their former selves but, thankfully, they're just as easy to spot. They're the passengers grinding their teeth down to stumps or twisting their fingers into knots or chewing the edge off their inflatable pillows in a desperate attempt to find oral gratification. They're the passengers who can't sleep, who have dark rings around their eyes and a look that could kill a steward if one dared to offer any more over-salted peanuts.
And what has happened to the sharing of cigars at the birth of a child? In days of old, how many self-congratulatory patters accidentally introduced their three-hour-old bouncing bubbles of joy to the wonders of passive smoking? And these days, how many free-thinking power-birthers are going to pop out the mini-them in the womblike warmth of the aquatic centre and then light up Castro's finest? I don't have any recent statistics but it can't be as much fun handing out the Wintermans on the exit ramp to casualty. And it is justifiable for us, and our politically correct, clean-air allies, to so proudly affect the struggling economy of Cuba?
Cigars and babies have always seemed a curious combination to me: fathers, proud to hold the proof of their pushing, standing about and puffing on. And yet, after achieving the perfect birth, what better way to understand the hardships and mysteries of life than by having a tanked-up, overly jolly parent blowing carcinogens into your recently aired lungs?
Why isn't there a backlash? Why haven't smokers banded together and hit the maternity wards? What's happened to their backbones? Where are the daring smokers - the ones who'd race to the end of a meal at a crowded table, spit out a rhetorical "Doyoumind" and immediately light up? Where are the ones who dangled a cigarette from their lips as they picked olives and fetta from the tracheotomy wound? The ones who had no care for anyone else's comfort? The ones who would sneer and say, "It's a free country", thinking they were in America? Where are they now? Well, tragically, most of them are standing outside.
We've defeated them. The army of ashers has been beaten. Restaurants have become "non-smoking" and people politely excuse themselves and step outside for a cigarette. The world has changed. The thin grey cloud that accompanied any social gathering has been dispersed.
It's amazing that as a society we've achieved something so monumental. It's one instance where a concerted effort has been made to change what we were told to accept in order to break the stranglehold that the tobacco giants exercised on governments around the globe. The little Aussie breather has prevailed.
I look with hope towards the developing nations. It's there, away from the harsh scrutiny of the surgeon general and beyond the reach of litigious self-interest groups, that the future of smoking is being born. It's there that babies and cigars are friends and you can still find interesting people on international flights.
Lords of the flies-on-the-wall
Published in the Australian Magazine July 22 - 23 2000
A tropical island paradise. Overhead, soft blue skies bleed gently towards the horizon. On one side, a column of palm trees marks the beginning of the bush and on the other, a beautiful, tranquil bay. Directly in front of me is a stretch of golden sand with two sets of footprints. I follow the footprints knowing one set is mine. Then, for a long, long time there is only one set of footprints and I turn to my companion and say, "What happened, was it then that you carried me?" And his eyes filled with love and he simply replies, "No, that was when you bludgeoned me to death with a coconut shell."
The world is racing headlong into the wild future with unprecedented growth in technical development and the completion of the human genome - a momentous medical breakthrough of indescrible significance. With the digital age established, there's an understable need to get back to basics. Survivor and Shipwrecked are two TV programs that exploit this desire for a return to primitivism, taking ordinary citizens from cosy and cultured environments and putting them to the test. It enables armchair adventurers to view this microcosm in safety and ponder the idea that our integrity could be compromised by a cream wafer biscuit.
These programs, and many fly-on-the-wall documentaries like them, blur the line between reality and fiction. The producers select people who they know will be volatile together. They're like the gods of old controlling destiny with a phone call rather than a tempest, setting tasks of increasing difficulty and orchestrating events to place an even greater strain on the tenuous relationships of these domesticated islanders. Thus far, our adventurers have built shelters together, found food and water, and organised their small societies along democratic lines. They've elected leaders, fought for control, and some have even fallen in love. In short, they've exhibited all the feelings and reactions of a normal society - except one. The one thing that sets us above animals - the ability to maim and kill each other with rocks. And this is precisely what we long to see, the breakdown of society in our televised bug-catcher.
How much more satisfying would it be to witness the ex-American Navy SEAL (hated for his arrogance) and the big-city chemist (hated for her inability to offer help in any situation, and her persistent PMT) slaughter each other with crab shells? How invigorating in episode 12, when everything is going well, if they release the dogs? Or in episode 15, pushed to the brink by a lack of supplies, impossible tasks, internal tensions and rabies, our noble savages practise a little survivor cannibalism? Or spice up the action during the initial selection process by finding a candidate with the emotional responses of Jeffrey Dahmer? "Twenty people marooned on an island; what they don't know is one of them is a serial killer with a hammer drill and an appetite for fresh intestines." And why just dump people on an island when you could recreate the' greatest survival stories of all time:
The Fields of Flanders - four years of hell, how would you cope?
Be part of the Donner group from the ill-fated Andes flight 617 - will you make it back alive?
Titanic 2000: they said it couldn't happen again.
We've only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reality TV - there are whole worlds of fun and horror to explore. It comes as no surprise that in the American version, the sole survivor becomes an instant millionaire. That much money is an added incentive to discover your true heroic self or to lie, cheat, cajole and kill. Imagine a show where the contestants are dumped in the desert, and those who make it back to civilisation get a share of the prizemoney. If only one person makes the distance, then he or she alone wins ail the lovely folding stuff. The message is: it pays to survive. Or a contemporary Swiss Family Robinson where a "normal" Australian family is placed on a deserted island (if you took the camera-savvy Sylvania Waters family it'd be unmissable TV - a kind of emotionally violent and monstrously perverse Gilligan's lsland.
it'd be wonderful if these new tribes defied the odds by building dynamic, self-sufficient societies that prosper within loving environments based on a knowledge of law, history and philosophy denied our ancestors. But it wouldn't make good TV. When we sit down in front of the box, we long for Utopia but we desire the spectacle of Sodom and Gomorrah. When our travellers return, will they be enriched by their experiences, born again or damned? As the sun rises on these hellish TV-paradises, will we be greeted by the Lord of the Dance or the Lord of the Flies? Or will all the footprints be washed away?
To know art, one must know how to hate
Published in the Australian Magazine July 8 - 9 2000
The "Sensation" show of young British artists scandalised New York. The opening of the Tate Modern in London created a media-fuelled fascination with contemporary and conceptual art. In Sydney, the Biennale is drawing record crowds. And the ever-controversial Archibald Prize kept toffee-nosed 'I don't know much about art" critics whining for months again this year. The world is once more enthralled by art in all its forms and with painting in particular.*
Throughout the centuries, art has been realigned, stolen, destroyed and praised. It has elevated and critiqued society, religion and politics.# While all other avenues of expression and entertainment eventually become repetitive and dull, great art continues to inspire. However, the source of this inspiration is not necessarily attributed to aesthetics, but also to the mechanics of animosity. Art is the realm of the creator, the aggressor, the provocateur. It's a world filled with as much violence, intrigue and deceit as cricket. We can talk about painting being all lovey-dovey but let's face it, nothing motivates like hate.
It's well known that when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he didn't even like God. Do you lie on your back for 20 hours a day with carcinogenic paint spilling into your eyes and dripping into your mouth because you love God? No - you do it because you hate da Vinci. Gauguin and Van Gogh are often portrayed as two great artists whose mutual respect and love for each other encouraged them to create ever more inspiring works. And yet, if we look closely at their lives, we discover this just isn't true. Tahiti, where Gauguin fled the drudgery of his responsibility, would've been like Prozac for Van Gogh. He could've lived to a ripe old age and died happy, with two ears. But Gauguin wanted Tahiti all for himself. He was over the moon painting nude Tahitian chicks and dying slowly of 237 different strains of syphilis. The last thing he needed on his island paradise was Vincent, with his erratic mood swings, freaking out the locals with a mouthful of cadmium yellow paint. Max Ernst, Magritte and Cezanne (or as we know them in Australia: Max Ernest, Margaret and Suzanne) all hated each other. Picasso, certainly the best known artist of the 20th century, was also the most hated by his peers. When Pabio went round to Braque's place, it wasn't just for a quick absinthe. He was pinching ideas. Braque, the oft-overlooked co-inventor of Cubism, was forced to hide his work from his Spanish "friend". Otherwise Picasso's eagle-eyed, bower-bird instincts and prodigious talent would have the new work painted, framed and sold before Braque's first layer of damar varnish had dried. It was said of Picasso that he could paint with his eyes closed, a skill that Pollock (who was hated by De Kooning) elevated to an art form. Bacon, Hockey and Freud all despised each other. In fact Bacon hated himself more than anyone else who ever existed on the face of the planet - and this is why his work is so damn good.
As artists continue to struggle and starve in garrets, as dealers line their pockets in ermine, making millions from renting out a wall, it's important to remember Picasso's dismissive response to an indelicate question posed in 1973. When asked why so many people felt bitter towards him, Picasso merely -smiled and said: "Look, mate, if you're gonna be great, there's gonna be hate."
* It's baffling that painting has become so popular in the year 2000 because its an aesthetically ugly number to place anywhere on a canvas. It's a number that's been stripped of its dignity. Exploited and crassly marketed for so long that it can never be divorced from 'end of millennium' hysteria. Paint that date on a canvas in Australia and you look like you're connected to the Olympics in some way. Artists who have realised the dangers inherent in these digits have chosen another option - two zeroes. While a convenient way of avoiding "2000", it does make you feel like the artist has rejected all of recorded history. It's as if they've swept everything aside and are just waiting for time to begin again (after all, it's doubling nothing, as if nothing wasn't enough). Unless we make it to next year (2001), then we don't really exist - we're trapped in an artistic limbo. Visually, the double zero is quite disturbing, as if someone had ripped out Mickey Mouse's eyes, scooped out the pupils and -shoved them on the canvas, leaving two little ghost retinas peering at you from the corner of the work.
# An understandable fear of art exists in many nations. It's a fear that causes rational societies to depict the artist as mad, a menace, or a bludger, and to claim that conceptual artists are semantics-obsessed wankers.
Getting sick for the common good
Published in the Australian Magazine June 24 - 25 2000
M.J. Fox, Christopher Reeve and many other performers have led high profile campaigns for medical research and funding. They've used their personalities, media experience and personal wealth to crusade for good. But would Mr Fox be searching for a remedy for Parkinson's Disease if he hadn't become ill? And if tragedy hadn't befallen Christopher Reeve, would he be hunting for a cure for spinal injuries or would he be starting production on Superman 8? Many spinal surgeons believe there's hope for quadriplegics in the work being done by Reeve and his foundation. Some are convinced that the first successful operation will take place around 2010. (They claim the first man to walk again will be Mr Reeve - after all, if anyone can do it, Superman can. They also suggest that by 2015 the operation will be inexpensive and common in the West.) Even if we question these predicitions, there's no doubt that through their courage in the face of adversity these performers have given hope to millions.
There are hundreds of actors out there and hundreds of diseases that need to be cured. Must we wait for a star to be struck down with a debilitating disease or should we engage in some sort of aggressive action? Think about it - if Leonardo Di Caprio was ever struck down with the common cold, there'd be a cure before he could sneeze. The outcry from prepubscent girls would be heard around the globe. The terrible wailing and gnashing of braces would make Krakato seem like nothing more than an embarrassing eruption in a bathtub. For years, actors have unintentionally made us mindful of hazards that surround us. Vic Morrow made us more aware of helicopters. James Dean cleverly highlighted the dangers of reckless driving. Grace Kelly drew world attention to the deadly combination of alcohol and the French Rivieria's winding roads. We're all more conscious of baldness because of Sean Connery and Bruce Willis. They've proved men of little hair can be virile love machines capable of Herculean acts of bravery and compassion. Sadly, many actors wait too long until they fall sick, are injured or die. Their messages of hope and salvation can be lost if they contract diseases in the latter stages of their careers. That is why we must act now.
Actors need to be constantly in the spotlight and many of them yearn for the popularity that would accompany an (as yet) incurable disease. Marlon Brando could be given McArdle's Disease, Meryl Streep could come down with multiple angikertoma and Don Johnson would be happy to have anything. What a wonderful world it would be. Once matched with their chosen diseases, there'd be a massive imperative on the part of performers to find a cure. It'd give charities the public awareness they so desperately need and offer the actors a chance to really "pull one out of the bag". Who among them could reject a 15-minute up-close-and-personal interview concerning their terminal illness on 60 minutes? Another bonus: because they feel comfortable around cameras, actors would have no qualms about having their operations filmed. In fact, many would see it as their most challenging role.
And why limit this pursuit of cures to the acting profession. Models have long been attacked by the media for their bad habits. Among the more obvious problems filling the pages of weekly women's magazines are smoking, drinking, earing disorders and substance abuse., It's often thought that a combination of all four is necessary to clamber to the top of this most demanding of professions. Society as a whole is appalled by this behaviour but in years to come models may provide a rich and profitable crop of diseases. Certainly, any one of these four offensive pastimes could cause illness in later life, from lung cancer to kidney and liver failure to numerous unexpected and delightful neurological problems. * So why wait? Let's get them while they're popular.
Then there's the music industry, where physical disaster and potential mental problems lurk around every bend. Haven't many of them warned us of the dangers of air travel? If Elvis had only spoken about his problems, aired his dirty linen, took fewer drugs and ate a lot less food, he might still be alive today. As a society we can calmly sit back and value individuals, or we can use them for the greater good. With so many performers in the world, will we really miss one of two if it all goes horribly wrong?
*One of the most graphic consequences of smoking is gangrene. In the fume-filled world of high fashion, this is a real worry. In the future, who knows how many models may be affected? That said, it certainly wouldn't be the first time we've seen Kate Moss legless.
Art House, schmart house
Published in the Australian Magazine June 10 - 11 2000
This is an old story. It comes from a time when miniscule art-house cinemas did battle for the lowly Aussie dollar against a tireless army of Hollywood giants. In those days I was a staunch advocate of European films and I loathed America's cultural emptiness, its overpaid actors and bloated sense of self-importance. These two schools of cinema were ideologically opposed. Where one was dark and brooding, the other was light and fluffy. Where one left you with a mass of unanswered questions, the other answered all your questions, even the ones you didn't think to ask. Where one went well with popcorn and soda, the other required a bowl of borsch, a raw turnip and the patience of a saint.
Where one ended neatly at an altar with a young couple vowing undying love, the other ended in a confusion of surreal images: an armless mother is laid to rest as hirsute dwarfs juggle the intestines of a white stallion while cobbled streets are washed down with a big ol'' bucket of cow's blood. The End.
They were worlds apart - as were the people who went to see them. On fortunate evenings when the art- house cinema finished at the same time as the cinema of frippery, the two groups would meet and ascend the stairs. Ours, dressed in fashionably faded black, faces set like stone, trudged solemnly out of another largely ignored Fassbinder classic. Our post-picture conversation was littered with uncertainty: Who's Maria Braun ? What did it all mean? That was great, but I wonder if anyone could tell me if I enjoyed it?
Meanwhile, the opposition, faces beaming, would stride happily out of the cinema. They would dance on the stairs and swing from the banisters. They couldn't control themselves and occasionally broke into spontaneous song. They had no questions. What was there to question? They made statements: That was brilliant. Dustin Hoffman was great as a woman. That Macaulay kid is going to be big. And when they returned home, they made love for hours fuelled by the memory of their big-budget American film experience. We, on the other hand. seldom made it home. With the themes of horror and estrangement fresh in our minds, we'd retire to coffee shops to dissect and discuss: It was so German, but -somehow universal at the same time. It spoke to us all - in another language. Even though it was set in Holland in the 1640s and everyone wore wigs, something about it reminded me of Queanbeyan.
I was happy in that world of angst, blissfully unaware it was about to change, Unaware my redemption was at hand. It was a cool Melbourne night and myself and two companions were at a loss for something to do. We scanned the cinema listings, and the dark and dire fodder that was our favourite fare was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a banquet of banality was stretched out before us - wall- to-wall American pap. Unable to make a decision, I washed my hands of the situation and left it to my friends. It was bad enough agreeing to see one of these offensively expensive and shallow films without being implicated in its selection.
The film they chose was Back to the Future and it was showing at a kitsch monument to excess called The Forum*. I kicked and screamed on the way in but I left elated. I had been saved. Michael J. Fox (who many considered at the time to be the Antichrist) led me into the light. He rescued me from the long, bleak corridors of European cinema, out of Tarkovsky's spiritual landscapes and Herzog's examinations of human suffering. And in their place he filled me with happy-go-lucky-gosh-gee- whillikers wonder. Since then I have taken every opportunity to indulge my passion for crap, My friends abandoned me, preferring to focus on Kieslowski festivals - Dekalog instead of Doc Holliday. I'm just grateful I'll never have to sit through foreign credits again, earnestly appreciating names I can't even pronounce.
'Shortly after my filmic Damascus, The Forum became a place of worship (perhaps the spirit was already moving in it) where a Christian outreach group performed musical plays every Sunday night. The interior of the venue housed a number of classical -statues. The new proprietors considered them offensive but, as they were part of a National Trust building, they couldn't be moved. It was strange to witness Charismatic Christian ceremonies surrounded by naked Creek and Roman figures but it gave the room a joyous pagan warmth. One could imagine, after a round of praying in tongues and bit of interpretation, someone would be sacrificed to 'Jasper, the horn'd god of fun' and a Bacchanalian orgy would ensue. Thankfully, in a room packed with corduroyed Christians,tings, it never happened.
Can't get enough dissatisfaction
Published in the Australian Magazine May 27 - 28 2000
We entered this new century obsessed with change. This obsession is mirrored in every aspect of our lives but has found its truest reflection in television. It's the reason programs like Backyard Blitz, Changing Rooms, Hot Property Ground Force and Better Homes and Gardens are so popular. On the surface they present easy, entertaining ways of improving our living spaces but the subtext of these shows is dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with our homes, our yards, our furnishings, our holidays, even our pets. Nothing makes us happy anymore (apart from the slim chance that a television crew and troupe of burley aesthetes might tramp dirt through our house and save us from our own bad taste).
The question is: why do we continue to delude ourselves that our rumpus rooms and backyards are the problem? This frantic desire for domestic improvement may well be disguising the real issue. It's all well and good to paint over the cracks and rip up the underlay but at the end of the day, when we look in the Tanya Todmanised mirror, we come face-to-face with what we can not escape. Jung suggested the home represents the unconscious self.
Bachelard believed various rooms within a home depicted different aspects of our nature. Why waste time with 24-hour revamps of prop" when we should be renovating ourselves? The logical extension of this trend would then be to take unsuspecting members of the public (offered up for televisual consumption by concerned family, friends or business partners) and radically alter them. The technology is available and with a few clauses to prevent lawsuits we could be away. Seven, 8.00pm: Jodie thinks she's a frump. In 24 hours we'll transform her into Jodie the Supermodel. Impossible ? Come with us as we find out. it -starts at Jodie's birthday party. Won't she be surprised when she discovers the party is just a ruse to 'knock her out'? Once she's away with the fairies, we'll take her to Australia's finest cosmetic surgeon for some much- needed rhinoplasty. When we achieve the button-nose she's always wanted, we'll swap wards to rip that unsightly fat out of her inner thighs and buttocks with -some high-powered liposuction. We have two new breasts from our good friends at Dow Coming. And as a special bonus, to give her those Formula One racing curves, we'll remove two floating ribs. When she wakes up she won't be able to recognise herself.
If you think people are surprised when they see the change to their backyards, imagine their shock after a head-to-toe total body makeover. lt'd be like watching a car crash, backwards, in slow motion. And why stop there? What about a show that physically transforms women into men and vice-versa? Many people feel uncomfortable with their gender but don't have the finances for that most delicate of operations. lt'd be a doddle for a TV network. There'd be kickbacks from airlines, hotels and product placements, not to mention experimental pharmaceuticals from the chemical giants and scads of free scalpels. It's a win/win situation for everyone involved.
Nine, 10.00: You may remember Jodie. She was uncomfortable with her beautiful new body and face. After extensive grief counselling, our psychiatrists found the answer - she's a man trapped in a woman's body. It's now our job to get him out. Jodie has agreed to let us fly her to Mexico, where she'll be pampered before being placed in a coma. We then bus her to Tijuana, the black- market plastic surgery Mecca, for a heavy-duty overhaul. It's here, at a secret location, that she'll enjoy all the wonders of gender reassignment. Be there to see her ribs come home.
Combine this personal version of Backyard Blitz with Love Rules and you'll have a hit.
Ten, 11.30: Lara is a 35-year-old mother of two with her own plumbing company. She's desperately -seeking true love and an honest relationship. We've decided to team her up with our most recent success story - Hank. Hank has gone from strength to strength after returning from Tijuana. Lara is totally unaware that Hank used to be a woman. Our hidden cameras will reveal the fun and games. And if we're lucky we could see ol' Jodie taking Hank Jnr for a test run.
And on the other stations?
SBS, 9.30: TVTV. A team of Hungarian footballers hang up their boots in favour of crimpled slacks and hit the town. Meanwhile, Olga is having trouble deciding which side to dress on. ABC, 12.05: A sensitive documentary about a couple who fell in love on a TV show. Hank thought he knew everything about Lara. But the one thing he didn't know, and the one thing the production company didn't tell him, is that his new wife used to be a man.
The diceman cometh...and goeth
Published in the Australian Magazine May 13 - 14 (Paul's Birthday!!)
Do you ever ponder all the different ways you could've lived your life? Have you ever wondered why you never became a monster-truck driver, a toothbrush designer or an escapologist? Or why you never worked your passage on a merchant vessel, turned to communism or raced weedy sea dragons for fun and profit?* Is it because mawkishly earnest guidance counsellors never suggested such marginal, yet marvellous, occupations? I'll wager my future happiness that a career adviser has never said: "You're good with numbers and have a great memory. Have you considered becoming a professional gambler?"
It's a tragedy of modern life that gambling has become so maligned. It was formerly a noble occupation and the high-stakes dice jockey was an inspiration to the young. He was the Errol Flynn of the roulette wheel, a mover/shaker on the craps table, revered as a chancer - a player. The sort of canny card shark that Kenny Rogers immortalised in song, that Tom Cruise, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen glorified on film. He was respected and admired. James Bond, that paragon of male perfection, was always hammering the tables, laying down the chips, winning big and impressing the lovely ladies. (And why was James always in the casino? Because that's where evil lurks.)
The gambler of old was an intense, charismatic hero who pitted himself against the forces of nature, plunging into the very heart of chaos. Picture the riverboat gambler, the fop of the gaming world#, dressed in the height of honky-tonk, Proud Mary fashion with a sequined trollop draped on each arm and a mind hell-bent on tempting fate. But times change. By comparison, the gambler of today is portrayed as a drably dressed, uncaring mother who, terrified of losing her favourite fruit machine, imprisons her offspring in a four-wheeled sauna.
Where did it all go wrong?
I'll wager about the same time it was legalised. In America they built an entire city to gamble in, but they had the good sense to hide it in the desert. When organised crime ran Las Vegas it was the style capital of the world, attracting such groovemeisters as Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Now the criminal element's gone it's just some perverse adult Disneyland attracting the likes of Siegfried and Roy and Britney Spears. Meanwhile, in Australia, we've put pokies on every street corner making it commonplace, vulgar and unavoidable. Gambling should be taken away from the government and put back in the hands of the people. (At least on the street you can recognise the villains. They're a lot harder to spot in a tuxedo doing the weekly washing at the Star and Crown Laundromat.)
There's an understandable fear that gambling will be permanently corrupted by government interference. But the simple beauty of gambling is that you can make a wager on anything. This is the one reason it can never be truly soiled by the state. They can try as hard as they like but gambling will never be contained by those nasty neon pubs or the candy-coloured clowns they call casinos. Even if they let if flood into our homes on the Internet, they'll never replace the camaraderie of a smoky backroom packed with stinky men laying a fortune on two rabid fowl. Wherever punters are gathered with two or more cane toads, gambling will be there. In murky back streets, with unmarked decks of Pokemon trading cards, it will continue to thrive.
In the lottery of life, so few of us get what we deserve. We gamble every hour of every day; would it be so wring to make it an occupation? To live life revelling in the random? To exist on the spin of the wheel or the luck of the draw? And there's one reason to become a professional gambler that outweighs all others - that once in your life you'll hear those glorious words, "You've broken the bank". And wouldn't that be a small victory for all of us?
* As a child, a friend of mine trained fleas to ride seahorses. It was the beginning of a lucrative industry with the potential to turn over millions of dollars. Sadly, in the third race, the Phar Lap of the aquarium was crushed by an ornamental water wheel. However, we did discover that one of the benefits of racing seahorses is that their fetlocks rarely, if ever, snap. This is fortunate, because having to put down a weedy sea dragon with a bullet to the back of the head doesn't leave a lot to bury.
# Never succumb to calling gambling "gaming". This is akin to saying that smoking is like sucking on a musk stick. While one may be an enjoyable pastime, the other's been known to rot away your lower intestine, allowing your lungs to drop out of your bowel.
Humanity: spare me the details
Published in the Australian Magazine April 29 - 30
Early autumn. Grey clouds. Rabid dogs dragging their infected hindquarters down a grassy slope with sexual delight. A distinctly unattractive child wailing, her mouth a combination of dribble, spittle, apple chunks and flies. Couples falling like dominoes into each other's arms, their probing tongues discovering the dental flaws of their partners. There was no doubt in my mind - the day was a misery.
I took the path less travelled, heading up a hill and away from the seething Sunday mass of fornicators, picnickers and fawning parents. I was anxious, troubled, overcome by an unexpected depression. To distract myself from the dark thoughts, I picked up a curious-looking stone. It possessed a fine, somewhat gravelly surface. I turned it over and over again in my hand and discovered it had a perfect spine for sliding my thumb along. For the first time on that curios afternoon I felt a measure of comfort. As I ran my thumb repeatedly along that coarse spine, the world changed. The enormous clouds hanging low on the horizon took on a pale-pink hue, and the entire sky appeared suffused with light. The cooing couples with their lock-jawed passion disentangled. Dogs, having sprayed their scent on stationary objects and unfortunate infants, paused to witness the end of the day. And well before I reached the summit I decided I had found a special rock - a luck stone.
High on the hill, I leaned on a rail overlooking the park and watched people as they swarmed across the ovals. And as my thumb ran along the rock I realised that sometimes it takes the smallest thing to see the bigger picture. That fragment of stone confirmed the validity of that old cliche: We all need a bit of distance from time to time. Distance from each other, distance from the world. *
Viewed in close proximity, people are repulsive. Even if we focus on the face (excluding the loathsome exterior of the body proper), what's so attractive? the thirsty pores, the black nasal hairs, the tired eyes, the wax build-up in the ears, blemishes, redness, swelling? The human face in all its natural glory is grotesque.
As I held my lucky stone and gazed down from the mountain, I realised something. Every step you take away from people makes them more attractive. If you've never tried this yourself, now maybe the time. Distance makes the heart grow fonder; even a few metres can help. Around 3m away, people are still a little offensive. Those unsettling physical characteristics are fairly clear. No, 3m is too close to get any real prospective. By 6m, people have started to lose a bit of definition. They've lost a certain harshness. They've lost that baked-on grit that our sun can produce. They're starting to soften. By 10m, they've gone all Doris Day, and at around 15, almost everyone is acceptable, even attractive. At 30m, everyone is beautiful or, at least, they exhibit the potential for beauty. Double this figure and something amazing happens. At 60m, the miracle of sameness occurs.
At this distance, physical differences like hair colour, facial features, colour of skin, shape of eyes, number of limbs, all are lost. Other potentially damaging features are gone as well: race, religion, personality, halitosis, obesity, anorexia, even gender, as we merge into the same sexless smudge. Once we have passed this important point, we never look dissimilar again. In fact the opposite is true. Given distance and a certain amount of density, we exhibit a unique homogeneity. Mixed together in this fashion we become a soft-grey mass - a blob of humanity.
I came down from the mountain and merged with the blob. As darkness descended, not only were we all the same but we were all moving in the same direction. We were all heading home. My mood lifted and I saw a multitude of wonder: love-struck couples hand-in-hand, satiated dogs, an angelic child whose radiant face could be seen once the food and flies were gone.
Is it naive to suggest the simplest solution to prejudice, xenophobia and hatred is just a little distance? It's something we should all do, but not at the same time, of course, as that would defeat the purpose.
Sometimes things are not what they seem. Take my lucky stone. It turned out to be a hunk of cement. A very comfortable hunk of cement.
* You might have noticed the exceeding difficulty in getting any "distance from the world". Even a plane trip skims the surface. Those who've managed to get a bit of distance from the world and have made the trip to the little stone in the sky have remarked that the Earth is too small for violent conflict, the moon isn't made of cheese and appearances are deceptive.
We've stolen your article. Any questions?
Published in the Australian Magazine April 15 - 16 2000
Describe what happened.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about the inescapable nature of school. It concerned the past which continued to dominate the present. The day after I submitted the article I received a fax that was part of the Year 12 curriculum. The students had to read and answer questions relating to an article that reprinted for them. the article was mine (It was published in The Australian Magazine, February 27-28, 1999)
How did that make you feel?
Like the Australian Education Department had sounded my death knell. I felt soiled, dirty. They used an article of mine as a test! I've become, through no fault of me own, a member of the Establishment, assimilated into the school system, the thing that I despise.
Who do you blame?
I blame society, and the individual who thought it was a good idea.
What kind of world are we living in where our children are not only allowed to read this sort of crap but have to answer questions on it as well? Where's Proust, Eliot, Burroughs and Sculz? And, to my knowledge, my permission was not sought. It leaves one to ponder the nature of the education system when literary theft is an acceptable part of the curriculum. Who can answer honestly on a stolen document?
What was the article about?
It was about construction and was "Deconstructing construction". The distrurbing aspect for me is to talk of disconstruction and then to pose questions about the author's intent. This undermines the notion of deconstruction, where the interpretation of the text itself is of utmost importance. I would suggest that this casual use of the term merely serves to muddy the already murky waters of deconstructionis. It is even more fallacious in this instance, as part of the intent was to get through it as quickly as possible so that I could get to bed after a night of frivolity and excess and nurse the hangover I knew was approaching. I now see it as my role to reconstruct the deconstructed construction.
What are your memories of school?
Gestetner, the scrape of chalk on blackboards, the misery of friendship, the loss of faith, soured milk, Phil Hammond's scab collection, and waiting - mainly waiting.
Where they the best years of your life?
From my first cautious step on linoleum floors in demountable room that served as preschool to that final run of freedom from a pebblecrete quadrangle at the end of Year 12, I could easily count them as some of my worst.
What can you do about it now?
I can attempt to subvert the course of education by offering these answers in a national newspaper. If any student has yet to hand in this assignment, then I hope the notes of the author concerning the authored work may be of some assistance. (It also means the Education Department will be less likely to try this shit next year). Here are the questions, with my answers....
What is the purpose of the article?
Financial - purely a way of making money. There was certainly no depth to it or any artistic need to fulfill. I remember sitting at the Mac with two hours until a deadline and scribbling notes of annoyance - nothing more. In more civilised times I would have been called a whinger and that would've been it.
Comment on the effectiveness of the following...
What follow are three examples of the writer's work that for reasons of personal shame I feel unable to reprint. Suffice to say that they take a Victorian approach, meticulously overwrought and selfconscious.
What is the tone of the article?
Dull and aggressive.
How is the tone established?
By using to many adjectives and antonyms of words like: beautiful, wondrous, picturesque.
What function does memory serve?
I can recall there wasn't much memory in it. I had succeeded in eating most of that away with the night of "frivolity and excess".
How does the writer use personal experience to present his views?
There was no personal experience. I haven't been out of the house for 20 years. I invented most of it and plagarised the rest. In the real world you don't have to be good, you just have to be canny.
How effective does the writer use language to engage the reader?
Not that effectively. On a scale of one to ten (where one is the love songs of Bread and ten is the work of Flaubert), I would say around three.
You might consider structure, vocabulary, mood and any other features you consider relevant.
Why consider? It's all there for you. Go outside and enjoy the day before they start taxing the air.
Any questions?
Old school ties
Published in the Australian Magazine April 1 - 2 2000
The days spent in school govern the rest of our lives. How many of us huddle around the water cooler at 10:30 because of some trace memory of "little lunch"? Or at two in the afternoon start looking at the clock, tortured bu the laborious movements of its hands? Or by 3:30 need to sink into a lime green vinyl bean bag and be reduced to a state of catatonia by some mindless American dyfunctional family-oriented sitcom? How many millions are still expecting Dr Who at six? This tragic Pavlovian response is the legacy of school. A great portion of our lives was spent listless in the labyrinth of those nauseating corridors. And, late in life, we can no easier escape them than we could out of PE class with a letter written in our own blood.
the reason for this is the structure of the school day. School was neatly compartmentalised into hour-long segments, which could easily be subdivided into quarters or halves. This regime gave life a rhythm that found devine correlation in the TV guide. the fact that school finished at 3:30 and by four children's programming was well under way seemed more than just mere coincidence. And, just as in school, the world of TV was based on hour and half-hour segments that dovetailed beautifully to form entertainment. the repetitious format of school suggested that the rest of life would be seamless. When it wasn't, many of us fell apart.
I believe, and recent studies tend to support this thought, that the celebrated Australian inclination to laziness is due entirely to school. There are two ways to attack this problem. the first is to adapt our working hours to regular school hours. this would reduce the working week to a manageable 25 hours (plus homework). The other option is to keep future generations in school a bit longer. It'd be a harmless piece of legislation to extend the school day from 8:30 to 6:30. That way, when the kids mature and have to hold down "real" jobs, they won't feel the urge to head home at three in the afternoon.
This could also open up a new world for disenfranchised teachers. Regardless of the fact that they educate and instruct our greatest assets, they'd make a great deal more money in private enterprise. To get the wheels in industry turning again we need prim authority figures armed with pieces of chalk walking around our workstations, forcing us to pay attention. If we're sluggish, a loving crack across the knuckles with a metal ruler. And nothing focuses the attention more than a blackboard duster hurled with ferocious intensity at the temples.
Large corporations could employ these Matrons of Mathematics and Dukes of Discourse to patrol officers ready to confiscate tennis balls, rubber bands and pornography. Leaning on a shovel would be a thing of the past if council workers had Mrs Deportment, the third-grade English teacher who was only ever interested in posture, on their backs. But it's in the area of cleanliness that teachers excel. How spotless would our cities become if teachers followed around sanitary wokers with that calm, commanding voice of authority: "There's one you missed"?
For most of us, our conditioning became ingrained with our primary education. We emotionally begin each day at nine, finish at three, with bouts of imagined educational boredom in between. I pity the poor individuals (you may have them in your office or perhaps they're members of your family) who failed to progress to the secondary stage and remained fixated on a time- management program dictated to them in kindergarten.
These are people who barely make it through the day without bursting into tears. They're normally a bit sleepy until 11 in the morning, by 1.30 they're overexcited and experiencing rapid mood swings, and by 2 they need a nap. At the sound of a piano they have an urge to lie down (which can make it difficult in a lift). After work they stand outside, looking maudlin, waiting for someone to pick thern up.
The rhythm of school was beaten into us for 18 years, most of them spent in the mindless pursuit of knowledge. We moved from halls of mechanical precision into an organic world of chaos. Is it any wonder we're confused? Unless we act now, of the future will be the the workers same. They'll sit at their workstations fondly remembering play lunch, joyously swapping Pokemon cards, mimicking The Simpsons and wondering, from time to time, whatever happened to Dawson? just like us, they'll find themselves daydreaming at work, staring out a window, overcome with nostalgia for the great TV of the past and waiting. Waiting for that final bell to release them.
Shot from the lip
Published in the Australian Magazine March 18 - 19 2000
It was mid-afternoon on a nondescript day in an ordinary back street of a common-garden-variety suburb when something atypical occurred. Nothing could have prepared me for what I know now. Nothing will stop the reverberations of horror and uncertainty that still plague me. Nothing will allow me to walk the streets without fear of attack. I have looked into the black heart of the new aesthetic of aggression.
In years gone, by the semblance of aggression was easy to recognise: 18-hole Docs, red bigot laces, stretch or stonewash denim, shaved head or mullet cut, men in groups of three or more often accompanied by a barely restrained, ferociously hungry pit bull. And if indelible proof is needed - the full-face spiderweb tattoo in prison-blue ink.
On this day there was only one of those signs. Three lads swaggering with intent, dressed deceptively in the height of slacker fashion. If it wasn't for the aura of contained mischievousness they could've stepped out of a Mooks catalogue. Beige three-quarter length cargoes, loose-fitting Ts with pertinent comments about the futility of existence and dark suede Camper boots. They looked like three of the butch members of Five, or like Mary Poppins, if she were alive and a man.
All that was needed to transform this quiet street was a catalyst. It arrived in the shape of a contented older gent. He stepped onto his verandah, senses dulled by an afternoon nap, vulnerable to attack. The verandah was his pride and joy, clustered with cacti and succulents in terracotta bowls. He rubbed sleep from his eyes, tipping a small amount of water on his Green Angei. Then k happened, before either of us had a chance to react. The leader of the slack, head tilted in a Jimmy-Dean- post-accident snarl, aimed his pristine teeth at the weary home owner. Then, in a voice just days from breaking, he spat: "Sandstone verandah sux. "
The householder stumbled back, shocked or wounded by the seeming stupidity of the insult. It was grammatically incorrect and misspelt.
I missed a step rubbernecking in awe. The two cohorts of the acerbic villain grinned. They patted their chum on the back, congratulating him on another superior slur. "Sandstone verandah sux." Surely a personal attack would have been more effective. Something about the man's failure in life, the stooped back, the sleepy look, the fact that his pyjama bottoms gaped. Why strike at the verandah? Why not throw a few "f" words in there and a couple of empathic "c"s? Those hard-consonant words are always effective and guaranteed to shock old, young, women, men, dogs and cats alike.
"Sandstone verandah sux.' The words repeated, looping around each other in a dizzying spiral of confusion and cruelty. And I realised it was clever, too damn clever. This insult would work its magic slowly. It would turn the old man's heart like a screw.
Most of us have forgotten fights of years gone by. The broken bones, scabs, cuts, bruises and abrasions have ail long since healed. But the words we said would never hurt us still do. The japes and asides, the clever, cruel and carelessly constructed lines, are still with us and always will be.
Under the stinging nettle of the taunt, my sense of civic duty evaporated. I was terrified they'd turn their wrath on me. (I was poorly dressed for any sour-tongued attack - my mother's hand-knitted poncho had left me wide open.) The lads owned the pavement. I walked on.
How can society protect itself from such garrulous assaults? Will our gardens, homes and floral arrangements be critiqued by wallpaper*-reading thugs? What if this is a trend, if flick-knives and guns become passé. and ridicule is the weapon of choice? Where could you hide? What protection can the police provide from a well-aimed, concise quip? Do we form vigilante groups of smart-mouthed do-gooders to counter this threat? How can you defeat the truth? For in the end they were right. The sandstone verandah did suck. It sucked big-time. The offhand comment enabled me to see the verandah for what it really was - it was sandstone. It was a sandstone verandah. I realised, with some sadness, the old codger would be feeding mushrooms before it came back in vogue.
I passed the house again yesterday. The owner looked dishevelled, older. He sadly shuffled in slippered feet to the edge of the verandah. I could see the loss in his eyes. His love of this verdant shelter with the overhanging pots and healthy plants was shaken and would never fully recover. He stood framed between the pillars in his own green-tinged hell, silently mouthing the words over and over again. "Sandstone verandah sux. "
Less than zero tolerance
Published in the Australian Magazine March 4 - 5 2000
Hopefully by the time you read this the situation will have changed. As it is today, there is nothing else I can think of. I attempted to divert myself with something inconsequential, something light and suitably Sunday; a mid-afternoon snack of words that was easy to digest and discard. But my mind continues to return to the topic of mandatory sentencing.
"Three strikes and you're out," was the conveniently sporty phrase that described a great American initiative. If offenders committed a third crime then, regardless of the nature of the crime or the reasons behind it, they were facing a jail term. It was thought that this hard but fair attitude toward repeat offenders would put an end to their antisocial behaviour and transform them into worthy citizens. The net result was more young villains entering the already overpopulated prison system.
Here in Australia, we mocked the new law in our nightly news bulletins and ridiculed it in our papers. We understood that something as backward and transparent could never happen in our country. Our distance gave us a certain objectivity. We agreed that good Christian people were entitled to protect their property, even if that property amounted to nothing more than a biscuit, coloured pencils, 40 cents or a tin o'beans.
This, after all, was America - the home of the brave, the land of liberty. Such a response was totally understandable in those states where crime was out of control and watermelon-eatin' redneck yokels and their white-bread-fed- banjo-playin' cousins would dance and fornicate all night to white-supremacist rap music, blissfully unaware of the irony. (Forgive the generalisation.) It was America, and these sorts of discrepancies made sense. We took the moral high ground secure in the knowledge that our country would never attempt something so shallow. After all, we didn't have the baseball connection that somehow legitimised the law with its Forrest Gump simplicity.
Now, years later, we have adopted this novel legislation, with devastating consequences. With mandatory sentencing it's a foregone conclusion that you will spend some time in the "big house". Why bother with the expense and artifice of a judge? Anyone could gavel you into jail. We could take turns. It'd be the gratifying and fun alternative to jury duty. Conscience-free condemnation.
And why merely follow the American system? why blindly adhere to their out-of-date method of dealing with the criminal element? There is an opportunity here for genuine creativity in lawmaking - don't give offenders the opportunity to become repeat offenders; after all, patiently waiting for a second or third violation is appallingly liberal of us. Anyone of right mind is going to have one or two goes if you're allowed three cracks at crime. If they do it once, they'll do it again. As surely as night follows day, a tiger can't change its spots, and one bad egg can spoil the whole barrel of apples. Let's join together to really shock the international community: one strike - you fry. It saves time, money and paperwork. It's only fair (although right now that doesn't seem to be a concern).
Given our own history, petty crime is something that should be applauded so it can continue to form the backbone of our cultural identity. More than 200 years ago, the foundations of white Australia were laid on petty crime. We might have been riding on the sheep's back but it's a near certainty it was pinched from some undeservingly wealthy landed gentry - narrow-necked, fine- nosed, high-society types born with a silver spoon in their arse and a colostomy bag wired to their mouth.
Crime has played an integral part in developing our much-lauded larrikin spirit. It has given us our universal identity as a nation of convicts. We were the hard-done-by, the underdogs. Our folklore and our pale songlines are steeped in tales and tunes of wild colonial boys, charming thieves and mother-loving murderers. Even our most famous ballad, our unofficial national anthem, is about a thief - a wanderer, a vagabond who stole a jumback for food. A song that arose out of a sense of injustice. A song we sang to comprehend our place in the world. Our history lessons spoke of an underclass that prevailed against all odds and triumphed in a harsh and alien environment.
And yet, now that those scars are healed, rather than learning from the wisdom of the ages, we have chosen to inflict the same brutal punishment on the people we believe are under our power. What sad songs will we write now? And how many more ghosts will waltz before we acknowledge the error of our ways?
A brief history of time (and money)
Published in the Australian Magazine February 19 - 20 2000
A pub is the perfect place for gambling. In fact anywhere with a bar is perfect. that edge of nervousness, often accompanied by the rush of risking one's life savings, can be dulled by the constant and varied application of alcoholic beverages.
I was lured into the bar by the aged. What were they doing here? What did they know that we didn't? What had 70-odd years of joy and sorrow taught them? Was this where the accumulated knowledge of a life-time had led them? Is this what their wisdom, like some long dormant instinct, has demanded of them? To sit on high stools for hours, riding the one flat shandy, pumping machines they claim are "theirs"? We have so much to learn from the older members of our community. I wanted to learn why they love the pokies.
I found a quiet corner of the bar. Elf Forest, Golden Apples, Big Safari, Mighty Pyramids, Jungle Adventure: No wonder the old ones were packed in like sardines. It was like a Johnny Weissmuller film festival. I settled on a pokie emblazoned with lions but felt uncertain, even slightly dirty, as I smoother my plastic money and slid it into the slot. (My only previous gambling experience had been with religion. It was the standard bet: a life of moral servitude and faithful adherence to the laws of the church for a crack at eternal life. I'm still waiting on the outcome.) At first my machine was reluctant to take the cash. It spat it back out with a groan. Maybe it was a decent bandit? Maybe it was giving me the option to walk away? I pushed again and, this time, it accepted the donation. That was when the world changed. By just putting the money in the machine I had leapt from a measly $20 to a phenomenal 2000 one-cent credits. I was already ahead. Maybe there was more to this than I thought.
The barrels began spinning with dizzy enthusiasm, taunting me with a small victory. With that minor win - the melody, the little song the machine sings to let everyone know you have won the battle of wills. But the machine is a relentless tempter. It tempts with the first bet, the amount you bet, and the number of lines you bet on. When you finally win, it tempts you with double or nothing, half-stake, spin again. It stretches the wealth of the world before you and asks you to choose red or black. And again. And again.
Gambling is emotionally addictive. they should take those cancer-ridden rodents off the shit-sticks (cigarettes) and give them a turn on the pokies. At every touch of the button, you embark on a rollercoaster ride of emotions. The giddy high when the uplifting chorus of chimes indicates you are a master of the buttons. The humiliating silence when Lady Luck turns her back and slinks off with some other punter. Between the histrionics and the heart attacks, the crinklies are having a ball.
I had believed pokies were a blight, mechanical maggot, money-milking machines. they transformed user-friendly pubs into inhospitable mini-Vegas landscapes. They were responsible for the destruction of the live music scene. They created monsters within families. But when my machine sang its little song, when I witnessed five scattered zebras with two pixilated eagles flying on a 50-cent bet over ten lines, I found I could forgive them everything. There on the credit counter was my dream numeral - 200,000.
Even as I watched my instant wealth drain away, I found it hard to harbour any feelings of mistrust toward them. Although it did cause me to cry out in a loud voice, "Father, Father, why hast thou abandoned me?" In the happy mid-afternoon bar-room limbo, no-one turned a head. This sort of pathetic petition to the heavens must happen all too frequently. With a feeling of resignation I was aware I had reached our new century, my starting point, on the one-cent credit counter. I found myself falling backwards through time - 2000, 1985, 1935, 1900, 1815. It took mere seconds for me to reach the Age of Reason, bypass it and tumble headlong into the Dark Ages. And still the credit counter fell - 800, 750, 700. Eventually I was down to a one-cent bet on one line. If I lost this I'd be present at the birth of Our Lord, year dot, nothing left in the bank. The electronic barrel turned and then there was silence.
The pokies may be pure evil but, when everything turns against you, here, sheltered from the roar of the world, you're capable of glorious, if momentary, victories. today I could walk away but there will come a time, when I'm older and wiser, when the shandies are cheap and it's happy hour in Purgatory, and then I'll stay. I'll stay to hear the song of the machines.
Random deaf test
Published in the Australian Magazine February 5 - 6 2000
I have recently discovered a particular type of person in the world, who I will name "the one that speaks to be heard". This variety of humankind depends on an aural audience for its survival. If its mouth is not moving, then it ceases to exist. If there's no-one to listen, it gradually fades into the void - much like the falling tree in a deserted forest. Its dependence on noise-making is such that it cannot restrict its locution to a mere individual. Rather, complete strangers must also, be privy to its incessant utterances.
We have all heard them in coffee shops, in the doorways to apartment blocks, in the darkness of the cinema. They lurk in the hush, ready to pounce. Whether it's the brazen-mouthed mobile phone user, or the full-throated passenger at the back of the bus, these creatures are ready to assault the silence. They recognise stillness and they're determined to destroy it. There is only one place to hide, only one sanctuary - the library. Their strategy involves preying on the meek, the ones who will not speak, those who avoid confrontation at any cost, those who will not but murmur, "Could you please shut your mouth?" *
The mouth is their weapon as their words are fired in all directions. If you're unlucky enough to be within earshot, the effects of the claptrap are all too violent.
We, those who listen, have no choice but to submit to this bombardment, to bear silent witness to the clatter of their overactive tongues. The sonic boom that resonates in the air is enough to scare anyone into a life of aphasia. Would it be more bearable if they spoke of politics or philosophy, if the volume of their words was a means to inspire? it's not the loudness of the loud I detest, it's that people can talk so much and never have anything to say.
I was once an eavesdropper. I'd become entranced by the snippets of information meted out by any unwary chatterbox. Their lives, their loves, their daily struggles held a poetic fascination for me. But of late a new desire has taken control and I find the banal conversations of my fellow humans pure misery. I have begun listening to the songs of the streets, the symphony of the city. I have discovered that every city has its own sound, its own aural identity, and it has become the purest form of music.
The idea was captured stunningly by Neil Diamond, at the apex of his lyric-writing skills, in the song Beautiful Noise#:
'There's a beautiful noise comin' in off the street l got a beautiful sound l got a beautiful beat. '
It's there, and Neil knew it. He understood the vibrant atonality of the street. Buildings that darkly hum, or crackle with intensity. Tuneless cars that become an orchestra of chaos - from the soprano of sirens to the dulcet baritone of buses, from the faltering tempo of rush hour to the thrum of gridlock. There is rhythm, timing, syncopation. Listen to the vibrato of an air-conditioning unit as it relates to the indiscriminate burble of the water cooler. Or the staccato beeping of the traffic lights as they urge us forward.
It's majestic, momentous and constantly changing, yet it's rigid in its structure overtime. The sound of rush hour lazily drifting into mid- morning. The compositional lull before lunch. Then it returns with a dynamic oscillation and a stampede of feet that storm the food hall is from 12 until 2. The waltz time of the late afternoon followed by the promenade of vehicles as they desert the city and raucously head home. The tired trumpeting of car horns signaling their frustration.
Even at the end of day, the recital continues: the breaking of glass in dumpsters, the distant sound of tireless phones and faxes, and in the wee small hours the occasional sleepless lawnmower rumbles into life.
It is all there if we care to listen with fresh ears. And when we awaken in the early morning to the clashing of bin lids, we may discover they're as soulful as any cymbal crash. We've created a musical masterpiece in every city, and the only trouble is people keep talking over the top of it.
* It's my firmly held belief that dedicated talkers, wafflers if you like, should take a moment to write down their thoughts. This would give us all a much needed respite from the babble and, as a bonus, something to read.
# Neil Diamond is one of very few popular music artists to have realised the true melodic genius of the random. This is evidenced by the fact that the years following Beautiful Noise were a songwriting desert for him. He obviously felt he could not compete with the musical diversity of the streets he so loved.
Hell on holiday
Published in the Australian Magazine January 22 - 23 2000
At every turn a fresh terror awaits. It's all merely part of the escalating stupidity of the silly season. Tiny tears are appearing in the fabric of life; individually they are nothing, but when combined they may rip this world apart. With this in mind I present three inconsequential tirades about things that do not matter:
1.Cinema policy
Some Sydney cinemas have adopted a new policy. The poor ushers (they must be rushed off their feet, standing there, tearing tickets) have now been given another thankless task by the dim-sighted gang, paranoid management. They're to patrol the aisles of the cinema three times during every screening. Almost overnight, these pawns in a much larger game have become the warders of entertainment. Their tour of duty takes them along the aisles and in front of the screen. They're in search of those who transgress one of the great laws of cinema-going - no feet on seats. All the other laws are mere by-laws: no speaking during the film, no mobile phones, twice the price of admission on the inflated perishables at the so-called 'candy bar". Surely it would show greater foresight to design a cinema where those who need to relax could put their feet up. For countless centuries now, people have taken this liberty in cinemas. These picture palaces are nothing more than safe houses for the slovenly Many feel that education, specifically focused on the negative aspects of slouching, is the way to stop this pandemic. It's my belief that it would happen regardless, and the best cure is tolerance and acceptance. Besides, it's almost certain that once this practice is allowed, it will lose its allure.
There is an immense feeling of betrayal when ushers make their presence felt. Ours appeared when the world was being destroyed, and his annoyingly coiffed head became part of the greater tragedy - a silhouette engulfed in a blaze of friendly fire. These pathetic minions of the dark forces of film deprive us of the basic joys of cinema (which I have deemed fit to list):
a) to sit in the all-enveloping dark;
b) to drift away on the dank perfume of stale popcorn and Pepsi permeating the carpet;
c) to watch the screen;
d) [and of utmost importance] to be the spectator. Surely when the watcher becomes the watched, and the spectator becomes the spectacle, it destroys the very nature of the medium.
2. Department store policy
Why are there never any sales before Christmas? All the major department stores join in the frenzy of Christmas with ecumenical zeal but they never offer anything in the way of a real gift. Their catalogues are filled with the overt signature of the silly season: red, green, reindeer, snowflakes. But we must be aware that papier-mache ice castles and Santa are only there to lure innocence,and innocence's guardians, to their fiscal doom. It'd be more convincing if the charity- loving stores of the world, who claim they want nothing more than to bring the joy of giving to the masses, marked everything down around mid-December. There is nothing more unjust than discovering the financially painful pre-Christmas purchase, now lying broken and discarded in the top room, is a bargain come the start of January. When you witness that poor purchase bundled up with a thousand other loser gifts, when you see it stretched out on the Flanders field of commerce, when it lies significantly reduced under the red flag of the all-conquering store, it's too much even for the meanest heart.
3. Big business policy
The banks, and big business across the globe, spent billions ensuring they'd not fail victim to Y2K data corruption. We'd all heard the message, "Your money is safe". In the past few post-imaginary holocaust weeks, there's been another development. The ones who must beware the bug's bite are small business and the home computer users - the unprepared masses. It's us who'll fall before the monster the commercial empires have brought to heel. Now, ask yourself why this makes perfect sense. When there's a discrepancy, as surely there must be, who'll be at fault? The banks who have safeguarded their systems with countless billions from their over- inflated interest rates and criminal fees, or Mr. and Mrs. Nobody? The answer is obvious. This may prove to be the most cunningly devised global conspiracy ever - years in the making to skim a few more dollars from the deserving poor. Damn clever.
After this work of holiday whimsy I'll leave you with this thought: Sometimes you kill crickets thinking they're cockroaches. The time has come to tread carefully.
Millennium buggery
Published in the Australian Magazine January 8 - 9 2000
Is it over? Has it ended? Were you loved? Were you left? Were you lost in a haze of skyrockets and friends? Are the streets awash with debris and orange memories? Happy you stayed in? Annoyed you went out? Are you nursing internal wounds with a Berocca? Are the words lifting off the page? Are you perfectly centred? Are you sitting in an underground shelter with a methane generator and a box of dried shrimp singing "Glory to Him on High"? Let's be honest, this whole millennium thing was fatally flawed from the start of recorded time.
For the last few years our fear of the unknown has been racing along at dangerously high levels. Y2K has managed to strike terror across the planet and it's only a cheap acronym. The loss of financial records, global systems failure, the imminent destruction of all we hold dear, a third world war...It all seemed a heartbeat away. We managed to put a curse on the beginning of the future - the millennium's buggered. How could we look forward to a bright new tomorrow when we believed the power stations were going to fail? How could we boldly travel into the New Age with planes falling from the heavens? Our fears might have come to nothing but, thank God, we have the lists.
As that date approached there was a frantic scramble to get the historical house in order. The greatest, the best, the worst, people, fashion, films - it didn't matter what it was, so long as it could be placed in the context of good, bad or ugly. You'd think the world had never experienced the passage of time before.
For all the complaints, these lists offered a unique insight into humanity. It was astounding to discover that the best songs of the millennium were all recorded in the last 30 years. That the greatest historical figures of the last 1000 years are all still alive (or only recently dead). And that the worst fashions of all time occurred simultaneously in the mid-'70s.
Some cynics had the audacity to suggest these lists were unabashed navel-grazing. They claim they were a complete waste of time, but let's not forget that they said the same thing in 999. The good thing is if all the electronic systems did crash, if all the heating went off and we had to keep warm in a blistering Australian summer, then we could burn some of the crap that has been produced in the last year. Throw all these lists on the blaze, along with the telly, and the bonfire of the vanities will keep us warm for another 1000 years.
This is where it begins. Not the start to the new millennium - the start to the most annoying question you'll ever have to answer: "Where were you that night?" the countdown to the big mistake has commenced. On January 1 we received the greatest Christmas gift of all time - the gift of hindsight. As we stumble into this new century, those of us who survived will be continually reminded of the mistakes we made in the final days.
We'll have to endure endless dinner parties where triumphant motor-mouthed wags describe in detail the glorious debauchery or heavenly innocence of their celebrations. Where they went, what they did, who they locked tongues with in an unrestrained orgy of saliva as the clock struck 12. Tragically only a treasured few went to the right parties. Only a treasured few have those sickening "I'm so good, bet you're jealous" anecdotes. Those boastful tales of NYE exploits that make the Marquis de Sade look like Mother Teresa. The tales that'll fill you with shame and envy at every gathering until you're rescued by dementia...."We celebrated the birth of the Earth Mother and the Age of Aquarius in Taipei; everyone who was anyone was there."
"We were naked on an unreachable hilltop in the Andes, whacked on peyote with 4000 other tripped-out hippies, partygoers and refugees from reality. They came from all around the globe to contact botulism. What better way to greet the next 1000 years than by purging the stomach?"
"Stonehenge, man. The Druids and those in the know have known about it for the last 10 years. It seems so obvious now: Meet at the big stone clock."
"We were in Sydney*."
Thankfully, due to the unimaginable amounts of alcohol consumed, only a handful will remember that night of nights. And for many of us that'll be a good thing. It was the night the whole world looked forward to. Now we can look back at it and wonder.... what the hell happened?
*Sydney was predestined to be the first city of the future. Is it mere coincidence this city has the same postcode as the new year? Sydney 2000. excitement in Melbourne is running high as they begin preparations for 3YK. And Perth be patient - your time is coming.
Body of evidence
Published in the Australian Magazine December 18 - 19 1999
It's going soft in its old age. It's begun to accumulate creature comforts. Cone is the back-break cotton-wadding spirituality of the futon, replaced by the life-replenishing inner-spring. Cone is the search of adventure, replaced by lethargy a contentment. Gone are the late-night alcohol-fuelled descents into grease culinary disaster, replaced by a need to find foods that don't cause heartburn, bloat or gout. Gone, too are great chunks of memory. At the end of a ludicrously long day at work, it needs to throw itself down on a recliner rocker. it wants a private foot spa. It longs to be massaged with fragrant oils. It desires fresh clothes and store-bought shoes. It wants to bathe in the glow of the cathode ray and fall asleep with its slippers on.
My body has begun to betray me. It happens to all of us who live long enough. There are pains in my joints that never used to be there.
My meagre muscles feel like over-stretched elastic. I've begun to sag. I'm losing the slow battle against gravity. There's a wax build-up in my ears that could provide the raw materials for a lucrative candle business. My body is covered with countless freckles. It's only a matter of time before one of them shows its true colours and admits an allegiance to the sun. The only thing I can look forward to in old age is bifocals.
I've discovered I need to scrub my teeth with something approaching an interest in oral hygiene. It's no longer effective to run a brush across the rancid pegs or rinse with a splash of contaminated tap water. There are other smells, things I dare not mention, things that remain a private moment between myself and my medical practitioner.
I can say this: the bone machine that has served me so well for so long, without ever complaining, has begun to complain. The entrances (or exits, depending on your point of view) of my body have begun to need attention. They itch, they ache, they dribble, splutter and ooze. They require a soothing balm, a touch of ointment, emollient or unguent.
Once they performed their various necessary, if off-putting, functions with a minimum of maintenance. Now, after years of abuse, they're reacting with something resembling resentment. There is something else, but I can't put my finger on it. Not because I can't explain it, I'm just terrified of infection.
Another terrifying aspect of this perversely slow rate of decay is that I've begun to realise how important a chemist is. As a younger man, there was only ever one reason to visit the pharmacy. Now I hang at the counter with the other survivors of youth, the vitality-challenged, script at the ready. I envy them - at least their afternoons are filled with the heart- threatening action of lawn bowls. 1 remain in the store, allowing my hand to trail along shelves of Spirulina and Metamucal. I crave antihistamines. I wonder what I'm missing out on with Ponstan. I've found a temporary home between the corn pads and sports bandages and I can loiter in front of the vitamin racks for hours.
I'm divided; my mind and body have begun to squabble. My body keeps trying to convince me that lawn bowls is a terrific way of meeting people. It maintains the all- white outfits worn at competitions are a pretty good look. When I try to reason with it, my body won't stand for it. It has no concept of common sense, and why should it? In the overpowering realm of the heart's hysteria, how pathetic is the rational? But my mind, belligerent monstrosity that it is, keeps trying.
My body has responded to this by allowing black hairs to sprout from ears and nostrils. They're like a dense foliage of twisted vines annoyingly seeking the light. They're primarily the reason for these feelings of decomposition. I was stopped by a proudly fawning couple in the street recently. The reason for their happiness was the Vogue fashion- plate five-year-old they'd created together. I leaned forward to examine the fruit of their loins just as his prying fingers found my nose. He tugged at some loose hairs and exclaimed that I was "a wombat, an old man wombat". His parents were deliriously overjoyed with this observation, while all I could remember was the old saying: "Out of the mouths of babes comes half- digested food and dribble."
I allowed the five-year-old his moment in the sun because I knew something he didn't. It comes to us all in time. We're built to gradually self- destruct, to wind down slowly, to corrode. The human body, this marvel of creation, the pinnacle of earthly perfection, has one fatal design flaw. So laugh while you may, spoiled designer-label-leather-jacketed child.
I forced a smile, my yellow-grey teeth inches from his chubby, cherubic face. And I allowed my rancid breath to engulf him as I wheezed: "They're cute when they're that age."
Glove interest
Published in the Australian Magazine December 4 - 5 1999
Our hermetically sealed life is under threat. We're being poisoned by our own naivety, by our belief in a myth. Its mere presence can instil confidence or fear. It's worn in virtually every walk of life, from the anaesthetist to the zookeeper. It's the rubber glove. How can we continue to trust that, by seeing a rubber glove on someone else's hand, we are protected? If a Customs official approaches you with grinning teeth, fingers splayed, talc'd gloves at the ready, is it to protect you or them?
When doctors drag out another set of disposable "medical mittens", are they interested in your health or their own? I tell you this in all honesty, we've been sold a lie. We have to accept that the only thing the rubber glove protects is the hands of the person wearing them.
Probing, prodding and puncturing is one thing, but it's the other end of the problem that interests me - the short order cook, the kitchen hand, the miscreant wielding a tub of lard. I'm concerned about food preparation.
I once believed in the sanctity of the glove. I believed that by merely covering grubby hands we created a brave clean world. I believed, because years ago I experienced an emasculating moment of fear. A fear that forced me into becoming an advocate for the glove. it happened in Canberra. An acquaintance of mine was working his way through university making lunches at a popular sandwich bar. I visited him once and it was there I witnessed the horror. He was an extraordinarily jolly young man. He'd entertain the workers with his infectious good humour as he sliced great wedges of wholesome white bread. He told wonderful stories, lewd jokes, and was so popular that people would queue to have their specific orders made by his hand. The thing they didn't realise was that these same hands were in quite bad shape. if they had only looked down. if they had only seen the terror lurking behind the counter. If only they knew. as his hairy knuckles descended into the guacamole, that he had dermatitis.
I witnessed dried slivers of flesh, like benito fish flakes, curl and fall from his fingers. The blotched redness of his palms. The split, dry skin. The matter that oozed up through the fissures and cracks vainly trying to mend the tiny tears that crisscrossed his palms. I could almost smell the pungent aroma of decay drifting across the bain-marie. There he was, shedding his snake-like skin into the health salads and strength-restoring sangas of our public servants. Does I make a lot of difference to your wellbeing if you have white or brown bread with a handful of human crackling. It was nauseating to discover cannibalism. albeit on a minuscule scale, in the corner deli. When I asked why he didn't wear gloves. he was offended. Apparently it aggravated his dermatitis.*
Over the past week, I have changed my mind on the need for the glove. Three terrifying events caused me to rethink my position on our sanitary practices. The first occurred at a restaurant when a gloved hand came to grips with an annoying rash before tossing a salad. The second was at the "function of the year": a cook efficiently stopped her nose running by stifling the flow of mucus with a polythene finger; the same finger she, moments later, used to wipe away a spillage of gruel from a partygoer's plate. The third was at a pizza parlour, where a nonchalant scratch dislodged a large ball of wax that was kneaded into a dough.
These incidents made me realise that what we need. more than protection, is understanding and education. Our hands perform certain functions (itching, scratching, fiddling) and I fear that they perform those functions whether or not they're housed in rubber. Let us look past the gloves and see what the hands have been doing.
I believe I speak for all hygiene- minded Australians when I say, Give me an anally retentive "the germs are out to kill me" cleanliness freak with bare hands rather than a arse- scratching, nose-picking gutter dweller with rubber gloves on. If we're ever to take our rightful place on the world stage it must be with clean hands and a clear sense of personal hygiene.
Let us continue to wear rubber gloves, but let us also continually remind ourselves why we're wearing them. They're there for the health and safety of those we serve, not to ease our own momentary discomfort or the continual irritations of our diseased limbs.
* Canberrans: I don't wish to.instil in you a perpetual fear of your daily bread, but the sandwich bar in question is still operating and Mr. Dermatitis is still serving himself as part of a BLT. His name is Alan. I can say no more.
As popular as sour milk
Published in the Australian Magazine November 20 - 21 1999
I'm sitting in a dark room. The room does have a light in it, like every other room in this place. There's no reason why this light shouldn't work, apart from the fact that it's my light and it's in my room. I'm the reason the light doesn't function.
I first read about the unnatural order of things in the Presbyterian Ladies Handbook of I906. Four years later I was able to cross-reference the rather graphic material there with a chapter in Happy Homemakers: A Religious Guide to Modern Living, from 1872. However, it wasn't until the publication of The American Journal of Interpersonal Relationships in June this year that I was able to correlate the information in the other two books. Information that suggests everything is not quite as it appears.
It's often been asserted that we influence our surroundings by our moods. But to suggest this has a physical effect on the world has always been a matter of some dispute. Just as certain people radiate joy, there are those who radiate something else. We're all in a state of entropy, but some of us are degrading more rapidly - we may even be degrading others. The much-loved human touch is fiercely corrosive. the sweat and weight of our hands can smooth marble or polish brass. We've seen the damage our grubby, acidic fingers do every time we touch each other or ourselves. But there are some who have this effect on their environment without the need of touch. they may do it through words or ideas, and sometimes just being there makes things spoil. The Ladies Handbook demonstrates this beautifully by listing three different types of people in the world.
The first group comprises the "peacemakers". Armed with life affirming platitudes, cute button noses and screamingly sincere auras, they skip along the street arm in arm in wonder. These people create harmony wherever they go and their mere presence brings a sense of peace. It's important to not they're relatively scarce.the second group is where the bulk of humanity resides. Homer Simpson is revered as the archetype and worshipped in some circles as a god. Here people are content, addicted to chocolate or alcoholic pacifiers, and joyous inert.
In the third section there are those who, through no fault of their own, have a tendency to break things.
I belong in this category, but it's been a long, hard journey to get me to this realisation. I have questioned it, examined it and found no other solution. The common denominator in the wanton destruction that takes place around me is me. I am the epicentre of menace, the focal point of failure. I have finally accepted the fact that when an object is placed in close proximity to me it will age more rapidly, expire, corrode, self-destruct or have an emotional episode. It doesn't seem to make much difference what it is: food will spoil, jams will sour and farm machinery will fail. Silver becomes tarnished, gold turns to lead, watchbands putrefy on my wrist. Computers break down when I touch them. Toasters explode in dazzlingly surreal displays of light. Animals seek any avenue to escape from me. On occasion, when I have been stationary, domesticated beasts have urinated liberally on my lower limbs in order to display their disgust.
To discover where you belong, there's an easy test: Keep a freshly opened cartoon of milk nearby as you work. If the milk, within half an hour of exposure to you, sours or begins to form a putrid skin, seek help. (For your own peace of mind, try this on a cold day) If you can't find any milk, try asking yourself these questions: Is your TV's remote held together with sticky tape? Does your mobile phone still have an aerial? Do you have a seemingly insurmountable problem involving unwanted body hair? Do you think open fires are infinitely more fascinating than human beings? Do you ever drive by sense of feel? Have you ever been mistaken for other members of your family by your parents? Do you have two bags permanently packed and ready to leave beneath your eyes? Do you ever think the reindeer is a dispensible animal? Why can't you be bothered finding the milk? Do you work for Telstra?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you probably belong in the final category. this is nothing to be ashamed of. We're the bacteria of social interaction - we break down the mulch of society and turn it into fertiliser. We're as essential as negativity. Without us, people would have nothing with which to compare their happiness. So even if you're a total failure, a black hole of abject misery, don't be concerned, for you fulfil an important role in the grand scheme of unnatural things.
Now, and at the hour of my death
Published in the Australian Magazine November 6 - 7 1999
Two swallows raced past my window. They circled each other in dizzying spirals before returning to their nest. In the backyard, flowers courted bees and two kittens tumbled together, blissful in their play. Everywhere I looked there was new life: unbridled, robust and determined. It was a beautiful spring day when a close friend told me the hour of my death.
She had visited an Internet site that makes a calculation based on the average life expectancy. You type in your basic details and it gives you a date. What morbid fascination had drawn her to the site eludes me still. It also distressed me that her date for departure was a good 30 years after mine. She had 30 years to party on in the wonderful world of the future. The other unsettling aspect of the prediction was that I am destined to leave this Earth sometime mind-morning on December 25, 2036* I didn't want to abandon this ball of dust and spit. I didn't want to accept the fact there was an end to all this sorrow and frivolity. there's just too much to look forward to.
Our knowledge of ourselves has changed dramatically over the centuries. Especially our concept of age. Children are pubescent these days around the age of eight. the teenage years of wonder, narcissism and sexual exploration can last well into the twenties. While, if you're determined, you can now make your twenties last until your fifties.
In our times, people are less inclined to be responsible. Our marriage and birth rates have declined as we tenaciously pursue fun. We're living longer and enjoying life more (and if we're not enjoying life as much as we could be, there's an awesome arsenal of antidepressants to cheer us up). Who wants it to stop? What other age has offered so much? How hellish would life have been before the invention of spectacles in 1303? And when we could see clearly, what was there to look forward to? The abolition of the poll tax (1381), radical advancements in pulleys, another bout of scurvy?
In 1777, Dr Samuel Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London he is tired of life." Yet it was proven by the Burton Society in 1857 that you could be tired of London in just under three weeks if you had no money. Thus we arrive at the Victorian age, and now what is there to entice us? The last instalment of Bleak House? Seeing an ankle before you die? Inventing a new and fascinating way of eating a potato?
Until the beginning of the 20th century, life idled along from one generation to the next. Apart from the hem of women's skirts and facial hair on men, nothing much changed from on lifetime to another. In days gone by it must have been a pleasure to get your marching orders in the next world. Even if technologically advanced West, going to the toilet has become an enjoyable experience only in the past 50 years.
Over the centuries these discoveries have been fascinating but, compared to the rate of change over the past 100 years, they're nothing. Every day there are more questions. what will happen in the fields of biotechnology, genetic engineering and virology? What will Voyager discover beyond our solar system? Will we ever achieve a united peace for all peoples of all countries based on egalitarian systems of government, economic reform and decent TV?
But these are the mere tip if the ideological iceberg. What about the eternal questions? Will Macaulay Culkin ever make a comeback? Will there be a Notting Hill 2? Will someone assassinate Jerry Springer?
This is the worst age to be alive; give us physical pain of the past, not the mental anguish of never knowing the answers. The future is here, now, tumbling around us constantly. We can no longer stop it than we could stop the sun from rising. No other age can compare to the trauma it inflicts on the human heart. Imagine what wonders await us in the next ten years, the next 50, the next 100. Imagine never knowing what these are. Each new discovery opens hundreds of doors to possibilities we've only ever dreamed of. Almost daily, the mysteries of life unravelling before us. We're learning more, understanding more, and thus we'll miss out on more when we go to the great beyond. Is it any wonder no-one wants to leave? For me there is only one remaining question: what will happen after December 25, 2036? I'd give the world to find out.
*The other unsettling aspect was being told I'd go belly up on Christmas Day. That's going to make a hole in anyone's holiday. To think, after a lifetime of moderate struggle, I will be remembered as the selfish old goat who ruined the family Christmas of 2036.
The tea of Life
Published in the Australian Magazine October 23-24 1999
The Australian tea ceremony ranks as one of the truly beautiful antipodean traditions. Even when there is no food in the cupboard, a family can be brought together around the pot. When this society, bitter with rage, disheartened by the transience of political promise, baffled by the current state of affairs and doomed to repeat the mistakes of its forebears, sit down and has a cuppa char, suddenly, silently, all is right with the world. This humble leaf is the gateway to truth. It transforms into a brilliantly scalding brew that can burn lies off the roof of the mouth.
There is nothing more seductive that the early morning brew. The first sip that brings with it a measure of warmth, understanding and purity that can only be imagined with other legal beverages. It's the truckdriver's friend, the housewife's companion, so heavy with tannin it'd rip the enamel off your back teeth. We are first among the great tea-drinking nations of the world. Our tea ceremony has an earthy honesty about it. It is a ceremony that doesn't stand on ceremony. There is nothing like a decent cuppa to resurrect the heart of the downtrodden, to fortify the weak and find the lost. Yet the meek divinity of the Aussie tea ceremony is under threat.
Look at the coffee-slurping multitudes with crusts of foam solidifying on their upper lips. Is there anything more disturbing in the early hours of the morning than finding an acquaintance who's brown-nosed a mocha? Or bent the ear of a barista until it is bleeding with countless infantile instructions on how to construct a particular morning pick-me-up? It's this desperate need to be noticed that has resulted in thousands of variants of the bean-based libation. Does a taste that truly satisfies continue to elude these devotees of the Coffea arabica? Where has their torrid search left them? With agitated limbs, blood-rimmed eyes lurching from skulls on vein-ridden stalks, and talking nonsense until the shaking stops. Consider now the drinker of tea: restrained, contemplative, and sure of his place in the world. Tea has always had a spiritual basis while coffee has merely greased the wheels of industry.
Coffee houses sprang up in the 17th century as centres for business. In Europe they formed in conjunction with insurance companies as a way of seducing customers, while in New York's Merchant's coffee-house, treason was discussed*. Coffee continues to fuel business to this day. The tedious habits of the addicted coffee consumer have mocked and ridiculed to such a degree that I believe there is nothing constructive I can add. Suffice to say that in the inner city, the ordering of coffee is as emotionally deadly as a descent into the circles of hell.
And yet the coffee is not the only enemy. Today, tea is also under fire from a diverse range of supposedly healthy, lifestyle-enhancing, spiritually robust herbal substitutes. Trading on the illustrious history of the one true leaf, these pretenders to the crown, there usurpers, claim to cure every ailment form acne to xenophobia. They're sealed in designer boxes and are available in the "better stores. They're festooned with pithy comments, justifications and copious notes on their application or digestion. they're alchemic combinations of dried flower stems and overzealously pulped fruits, and they have the taste of watered-down incense. If nature had a bowel, this is the sort of crap that would collect in cancerous pools along the alimentary canal. To harvest it, to seal it in a flow-through bag, to call it "tea" is anathema to all real tea drinkers.
In the East it's suggested the first teapot was formed by Prince Bodhi-Dharma;s eyelids. He removed them to stop him falling asleep while he was meditating. Here in the West, tea is just as rich with religious resonance. It's common form in this country has three equally powerful components, and thus mirrors the unity and diversity of the Holy Trinity: tea, water (the eternal life force), and full-flat milk (life is too short to skim). As St Thomas Aquinas completed his glorious argument for the existence of God, The Five Ways, he is said to have cried: "All life, thought and excellence flow from the spout."
A decent cup of tea, white or black, can soothe all society's ills, real or imagined. there's no need for sticks and twigs claiming to be panaceas for the spiritually deficient, or the jittery caffeine-induced panic of the latte drinker. In this life let us always thirst for the truth, and in that thirst let us be sustained by tea.
*Would this great nation be any wiser had not hundreds of boxes of tea been dumped into Boston Harbour?
Vote with your fingers
Published in the Australian Magazine October 9 - 10 1999
It approaches. the scaremongering campaigns of the opposing sides are in full swing. There is, however, an aspect of the upcoming republic referendum that's escaped the notice of the general public and has been stealthily avoided by the mud -raking protagonists - the archaic method we employ to cast our vote.
It's a dire state of affairs that in the new millenium we will be forced to acknowledge that our grandchildren's fate was decided in a cardboard box.
Polling day is an overrated and outdated exercise. A day on which you're forced to mingle with members of opposing political persuasions to assert your democratic rights. Entering a cardboard booth that has just been vacated by a total stranger cannot be healthy for ourselves or our children. that last voter could have come from anywhere. In light of our lax judicial system, it might even have been a convicted felon. Make no mistake, in this less populous land of the free, many of those voters are indeed thieves and murderers.
You'd feel safer voting out in the country - knowing half the folks who came to vote and being related to the others. The problem with the city is the large diversity of people sardined into a relatively small area. On the day of the referendum, when we're called out to do our patriotic duty, are we placing ourselves in incredible danger?
Thanks to the thoughtless design of the cardboard voting booths, our hips end up jutting into no man's land, presenting the perfect prize to the petty crime. While you, noble citizen, are obsessed with the dilemma of our future and momentarily dazed by the YES/NO question, filthy fingers may be primed to pilfer your possessions. Cardboard offers little protection for your valuables, or from the vicious thrust of a knife.... not to mention the virulent sneeze of a passing voter. This is the other great, yet oft ignored, danger of communal voting. How many times have you entered a polling booth to be confronted by an unusual smell, an uncomfortable stickiness, a mess of paper or mound of dead skin?
After years of voting, I can say in all honesty that the following day I feel sick. Sick to the stomach and wracked with anguish that I had once again failed to divine the populist sentiment and a pick a political winner. At least that is what I believed until a moderate amount of research revealed the true cause of my sickness - cardboard boxes are breeding grounds for disease. The last great outbreak of salmonella poising in Canada came from a bacteria-laden hotdog on polling day. Let us not forget that the typhoid epidemic of 1872 began in a polling booth. We need only look to our northern neighbours to witness the dangers inherent in voting. It is worthwhile, even for the sake of liberty, to be exposed to tuberculosis, consumption, numerous venereal diseases and the possibility of theft or death?
Voting must move with the times. We should cease these feeble attempts to make it a community event and hone in on comfort. Why leave the security of our homes to cast a vote? We have the Internet, phone lines, and the ultimate product of freedom, television. If this century has been about anything, it has been about the struggle for freedom. The humble box has spread the plague of democracy more effectively than any othe method. It filled the vacuum left by totalitarian states and communist regimes with a seductive world of wonder. Who could resist its dizzying array of colours, it's distorted view of reality and it's seemingly endless, yet almost affordable, range of products?
The quality of freedom us directly related to the number of TV stations one can receive. In Australia we're relatively free compared to some developing nations who are now only fully understanding these concepts with the help of MTV. Americans, on the other hand, enjoy rubbing their excessive cable-loving freedom in our faces. In this original Land of the Free, there's so much high-quality television it's hard, if not impossible, to leave the home.
It's my belief that contemporary cultures should vote by remote (the technicalities we can leave to the CSIRO). Everyone who is anyone has a remote. The only people who don't are the poor, the homeless and those who have rejected TV as the most culturally significant icon of the late 20th century*. These people, through their own action, or inaction, should be ineligible to vote anyway. It's time to accept the future, to embrace a new nation. In short, its time to vote by remote.
*Tragically, in Australia, some country areas have limited freedom due to the placement of transmitters.
Space Invasions
Published in the Australian Magazine September 25-26 1999
We are facing a crisis of epic proportions in this great country. There's a sickness in our cities that is becoming a cultural pandemic - council-approved street art.
It's our civic duty to maintain the artistic integrity of our cities. The very reason we have art galleries is to keep this sort of stuff off the street. What sort of world are we creating for our children when bad "art: can flourish anywhere? If it's good enough to be inside, it should be inside. It should be protected from the elements and the vandals.
If we must endure street sculptures, can they be made more practical than glorified seating? Could they be shelters for the homeless? By day a lifesize replica of the Trojan house, by night accommodation for 20.
Our cities have always been the sites of artistic atrocities. Do you remember when green was an offensive colour? When enormous communal areas were paved and pebbled, when trees and shrubs were removed in favour of pile-encouraging concrete seats?
Grey was the approved tone and drab, lifeless city squares sprang up everywhere. These amazingly sterile and inhuman spaces look magnificent on the drawing board. Sparse, architecturally sound monuments to Bauhaus, and so dysfunctional that people avoided them like the plague. In those days the streets bristled with life, mostly because people were trying to avoid the abrasive nature of council-approved open spaces*
The mood changed and colour became important again. Any innocent building fell prey to a bunch of rabid, paint-wielding do-gooders. Murals began to flood the street-art market. You couldn't round a corner without feeling guilty as another two-storey monstrosity accused you of not caring for the poor or supporting multinationals or hating ganga or having lost the child within. Why do murals always have to point the finger? What allows a wall of paint to have so much self-righteous indignation? As a medium for social change, they're about as effective as cabaret. Did a painting of a dove on a wall ever stop a tank?**
For I0 years I was forced to walk along unpainted back streets to avoid feeling ashamed, and as a means to scurry away from the murals with my bitterness intact. These days murals have given way to sculptures, probably because you can't paint much on thin air. Empty spaces, much loved for their lack of pretence, are constantly being filled with functional sculptures: shards of pastel glass you can sit on, bronze parodies of business-suited men, mosaic bins bristling with bright summer colours and maggots.
The intention of these structures is to humanise the emptiness and beautify the surrounds. However, to my mind, this "beautifying" is as effective as tinsel and Christmas lights around a toilet seat. If we want to make lasting and exquisite structures, and artistic statements on the streets, then it seems rational that we return to the old ways.
For instance, the clock in the Old Town Square in Prague (opposite the beautiful Tyn Cathedral) was commissioned by the council of its day and yet it's the most serene and wondrously beautiful creation.
It's also one of a kind, because when the work was finished the council dragged the designer aside and struck out his eyes to ensure no other town would build a better timepiece. A similar story exists for the Taj Mahal: artisans had their hands lopped off so they could never again produce such a splendid vision.
To my way of thinking, this is a small price to pay. It would also force the artists involved in fashioning these buildings/sculptures/murals to really think about the worth of their work. Is this elongated bronze of two turkeys sleeping worth my right hand? Is this charming mosaic of two mauve divers chasing a limegreen starfish worth my eyesight? Is this biomorphic puddle of sepiatoned turn-of-the-century snapshots encased in resin equal to my life? If the answer is yes, then throw caution to the wind and create.
*The only thing that can live and thrive in these environments is the skateboard. Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, these are often the only things banned in such areas.
** I have no record of a dove, living or painted, stopping a tank. However, there is the tale of the church that houses da Vinci's recently restored The Last Supper. When German bombs fell, every other wall was damaged or destroyed, and yet The Last Supper remained untouched and intact. Proof of God or evidence of man's poor aim? Still, its a very, very good mural.
Go! Go (Johnny), go, go, go!
Published in the Australian Magazine September 11 - 12 1999
We see it in the press every day. Other nations tumbling headlong into violent struggles. Struggles fuelled by ideology, economics, religion and greed. Struggles that result in the death of innocence.
In times of peace there's always a war raging somewhere. Can we continue to believe we're immune to this type of terror? We live in a paradise and the time has come to defend it. The first step in this process is finding a suitable catchcry. A rallying call to bring the young people together and, frankly, "For God, King and Country" just doesn't cut it anymore.
There was a time when I would have killed and maimed others for the greater glory of God, and for Queen/King and Country. It began around I066 and ended with the Charge of the Light Brigade. Incidentally, my early education could be at fault for lending this period of combat a chivalrous feel. But the Kings of the Old World are not the Kings of the New, and it's difficult to commit acts of atrocity for your king if you're uncertain about his sanity and aesthetics.
In the future, with Charles in charge, I might have second thoughts about going "over the top". And the battlefield is no place for second thoughts. At least that's what I am led to believe, having never been on the battlefield. Can one procrastinate on the Field of Glory? Before one rides into the Valley of Death, is there time for quiet reflection?
After some consideration I thought the dilemma could be resolved if we ripped out the word "King" like an abscessed tooth and replaced it with a new, shiny antipodean reference. Something that filled our Australian hearts with pride, something that would push us forward in times of hardship.
That replacement phrase sounded in my head like a thunderclap. It was so obvious: For the Prime Minister. I went to sleep armed with a battle cry that would take us into the new millennium.
And then I woke form a terrible dream. I was a cloud passing over the violent landscape of Gallipoli. Young Australian soldiers were pinned down by Turkish guns. A sour-faced sergeant, little older than his men, stalked the trench looking for the first wave of volunteers. He knew he was sending them on a suicide mission.
His powerful words could not disguise his trembling voice. "Who'll go over the top for God, Howard and Country?" At this point in the dream the soldiers looked at each other. they shuffled uneasily on their feet. There was uncertainty in their eyes.
Like the soldiers in my dream, I suddenly realised I was doubtful about going over the top of John Howard. It isn't a political thing. I have qualms about "going over the top" for Beazley and Lees as well. And no-one coming up through the ranks is inspiring me to kill, either.
Some of us may live in a world of candyfloss and daydreams, but those realists among us know that war is an ever-present danger. And in the times of war our brave lads and lassies will rally to the call. For God, Howard and Country. It's stirring, it strikes in your chest...but something about the middle part just doesn't ring true.
Faced with this hurdle we're forced to reduce the statement to For God and Country, leaving out the messy, uncertain political bit. The problem then becomes the belief or non-belief in an omnipotent being who overseas and governs all our actions.
Assuming our war to be just one, we'd be in mortal combat with His other less politically sound creations who also believe this fickle God is on their side. we live in a multicultural society with a host of different creeds that must be supported by this sweeping statement. What about all those noble Aussies going into battle for Buddha, Krishna, Osiris, Odin, Mars and a host of lesser known deities?
Will the powerful Satanist lobby, always well represented in times of war, be upset by all this talk of God? What about the pagans? Going over the top of Howard, woodland sprites and faeries would be even more embarrassing.
In the end we are left with For Country, which sounds a trifle brief. Ye gods are fickle, and kings come and go. All we have in common is the country. It's our responsibility to pass down a battle cry to future generations. It's not going to be easy. There's no doubt it's confusing trying to discover a cry that unites everyone, especially when you've multiple personalities, communities and agendas to deal with.
But until we reach a resolution we'll have nothing to cry out in times of war. We may even be forced into the impossible situation of having to try to solve disputes with dialogue and compromise.
We really must get out more
Published in the Australian Magazine August 28-29 1999
1967: A half-finished stone wheel is found in the Lascaux cave in the Dorogne region of France. It's an interesting artefact because it has minute traces of dried blood on it's surface. Under forensic examination it's discovered the blood is human.
Was this wheel some crude weapon? Was it used in some barbaric rite of passage 40,000 years ago? The patterning and distribution of the blood indicate that it was split while making the tool. The only conclusion that can be reached - that it was an unfinished stone wheel made by one of our clumsier forbears.
To this day, most accidents occur in the home. A recent survey has suggested that a staggering 87 per cent of injuries happen in the safety of our domiciles. It doesn't matter if it's the single-storey brick veneer, a weatherboard bungalow, and abode hut, and igloo or a million-dollar mansion on the shore of Malibu - people trip over and knock their heads in all of them.
Our homes lull us into a false sense of security, and this is when fate strikes. It's my belief - although more research is desperately needed in this area - that most of these accidents in the home occur in front of the TV. We take eating and ironing in front of the telly for granted and yet both are fraught with danger*.
Other activities I would suggest to be wary of while watching the box: wood turning, drilling, using semi-hallucinogenic wood glues, repairing seagoing vessels.
There are ways we can avoid accidents in the home:
1. Stay at work longer.
2. Stay away from your home longer.
3. Live in hostile, cheerless flat and never get comfortable enough to call it a home.
Alternatively, the quantity of accidents that occur in the home may be significantly reduced if we relocate our homes to the vicinity of medical centres. Some people are fortunate enough to live right next door to hospitals. So when they do have an accident in the home, they can just walk across the road (unless, of course, the accident in some way limits the use of their legs).
On a subconscious level, our fear of the home is the reason we go out. Our fears fuels the economy. We huddle together in coffee shops, pour into sports stadiums, enjoy mass entertainment and linger in the lobbies of casinos purely because we're too terrified to go home. Who in their right mind would stay in their hazardous house when they know outside the front door lies the safety of the streets? It is something our homeless are only too aware of. According to a recent government circular, the homeless aren't homeless for any socio-economic reasons. They're often just too scared to go home. These people roaming our streets are merely neurotic. They're overcome by the fear of going home to await the inevitable calamity.
Another recent survey has shown that nomadic people seldom, if ever, have accidents. the reason for this may be the fact that they are always on the move and thus do not have a place they call home. It may also be that because they're never home they never get to fill out any surveys.
As for myself, I have gone several weeks without any domestic mishaps, and instead of filing me with a sense of achievement it is having the opposite effect. I realise that it's only a matter of time before something hideous comes to pass - before the oven attacks me, a box drops on my head or the toaster makes a grab for my soul. Each step across the threshold brings with it a sense of foreboding and dread. It has led me to this conclusion - we must broaden the accident base and try and get some accidents happening out there in the open, on the streets, and in the workplace. why should our homes have to bear the brunt and cope with the emotional turmoil of being known as the heartland of mishaps?
Across this wondrous Earth, the only aspect of our nature that truly binds us together is our clumsiness. Forget music, philosophy, and those constant talks of world peace. The only fact that we can be sure of, as we stumble and fall into the next century, is that we, as a people, are incompetent.
Although we have progressed in almost every other facet of our beings, we're still as clumsy and awkward as the Neanderthal who cut his finger open on shards of stone in the safety of his cave as he tried to make a wheel
*To illustrate the horrors of ironing in front of the telly..... A gentleman in Dubbo was engaged in this task when the phone rang. He answered the iron rather that the phone and managed to steam-press his ear.
Poetry and motion
Published in the Australian Magazine August 14 - 15 1999
I am in the back of a taxi hurtling through unfamiliar streets. I have my laptop computer open and I am trying to type a tale about the influence of movement on writing. Unfortunately, due to the proximity of a reversing truck and the jarring motion of the cab, I have become unsettled.
Add to that the faint odour of vomit (unmasked by copious applications of lemon-scented freshness) and you have the perfect ingredients for motion sickness. I have decided to close down the computer before I bring up my breakfast on the active matrix. It would be impossible to remove the stench from the keyboard. But as I have learned, this is the price you pay when you embark on an experiment in writing.
It's a crime against the laptop to allow it to languish in one stop. To tether it to a wall and render it immobile is against its very nature. The laptop lives to move, it thrives in open spaces, and is only truly happy when it's out in public.
However, although these environments are perfect for the laptop, they may be less than perfect for us. People tend to function at their optimum level when they are in places that are familiar and unmoving. For instance, something written in the stillness of the home has a different feel from something written in a car or aboard an aeroplane, or on the upper deck of a wind-tossed ferry.
With this piece, I have attempted to write a coherent essay on a variety of transport systems and in a number of unfamiliar places to establish the effect on the written word. These are me initial observations:
1. As a passenger in a car it's possible to write in a steady, if occasionally distracted, manner. If you must write in a car, find a long, flat road with little scenery. I wouldn't advise driving and writing at the same time. In fact, I think there's a law against it.
2. The bus was a comfortable, unobtrusive place to write until peak hour and then it became virtually impossible. Luckily I gave up my seat to an elderly woman who was so touched by my actions she allowed me to balance my PowerBook on her head.
3. The train. If you are attempting public transport, a train on the city loop is the best. It gives consistency and familiarity, and it may tie into the cyclical nature of your story - you begin where you end, end where you begin.
4. The aeroplane is fine as long as strangers beside you do not feel inclined to talk. Once they have begun, there is no stopping them. They may even pour out their life stories because of fear and a shortage of oxygen. If they do, don't take notes in front of them - write it up in the car on the way home from the airport.
5. The ferry. I'd prefer not to talk about this experience. Suffice to say that it is difficult to get the smell out of the keyboard.
It's also the height of bad manners and considered exceedingly poor form to work on the laptop at the cinema. I only mention this as I once saw a critic review a film on his laptop as it was screening. This two-fingered typist from the local rag hammered away in row H illuminated by the glow of his screen and oblivious to the discomfort around him. * Normally even the most arrogant critics will restrict themselves to a pen and unobtrusive notepad. Currently there's no etiquette governing the use of the laptop.
I would suggest that it's also unwise to use one if you're in a confessional or on any type of rollercoaster ride. All other environments are decent enough if you can find a way to isolating yourself and being unobtrusive. Even coffee shops can e tolerated if you can cope with the constant murmurs of "wanker" every time someone passes you.
The only conclusion I managed to reach, after all this self-induced pain, is that it's unnatural to write and travel in any direction at the same time. It's disorientating and disturbing, and this is precisely why it should be explored.
People have always done what is unnatural and this is the reason we've progressed, while other beasties in the field have done what comes naturally and, as a consequence, we are still in the field. As we continue to push ourselves beyond the limits, it's important to know that the laptop will be there to record it all with it stinking keyboard.
* I was positive this self-glorifying freak was writing a review. the only other explanation is that he had attained his highest ever score at Tetris and would not stop for anything, including a film.
Laugh? I almost died
Published in The Australian Magazine July 31 - August 1 1999
The terrible thing about life is that it comes to an end. We never know how or at what hour we'll be taken from this glorious wonder. The only thing that's certain is we will die.
The other day I sliced open the top of my left forefinger with a scapel. It was pure clumsiness on my part that led to this incident. I was feeling happy and momentarily distracted by the TV, and the next thing I knew a torrent of blood was jetting from my finger.* This minor injury led me to ponder my eventual demise. It's something we all think about - how will it end?
For some, brooding on possible deaths is seen as negative or expressing pastime. For others, it's as enjoyable activity to while away a dull afternoon. I tend to fall into the latter category. It need not be a solitary activity but something the whole family can enjoy. Who has ever managed to repulse themselves by thinking of a truly gruesome demise? The imagination is a richly textured environment with which to explore that unimaginable moment. There is great diversity within these imaginations (many desired ways to expire are fanciful Leary-esque options too chemically complex to investigate here) but there is general consensus on three points:
1. Fire would be a lousy way to go.
2. Drowning would be OK.
3. No-one wants an embarrassing death.
An embarrassing death is any death where, if you had lived, you'd have said, "What a stupid thing to do." He was checking out a gas leak and didn't have a touch so he lit a match. He attempted to remove his own appendix with a grapefruit spoon. He sought to breastfeed an orphaned piranha. He had a heart attack, with his trousers round his ankles, while he was linked up to some B-grade filth on the Internet.
They're the stories we come across every other day. The embarrassing death that makes the afternoon papers and has people chortling on their way home from work. The sort of death that brings joy to strangers. The sort of death that makes an amusing short film. The sort of death that is preceded by the exclamation. Oops!
The sort of death that becomes the focal point of after-dinner conversation, with groups of bloated, coiffured dandies discussing the intimate details of your final gasp. It's bad enough to have your name bandied about while you're living, but imagine the shame once you've gone. Of course, it's something you don't have to live with, but the idea alone is enough to cause you eternal pain in the afterlife.
Almost any death could lead down that avenue to shame. An old gent slips on a banana peel in the shower. Suddenly there all these questions left unanswered. What was a banana peel doing in the shower? What happened to the rest of the banana? What was the old man doing in a shower miles from his own home?
I have always believed that an embarrassing end lies in wait for me, because whenever I am ludicrously happy I tend to become life-threateningly clumsy. (Oddly, it is only after spending days on end contemplating my death that I excel in the art of living.) I have witnessed this type of pathology with many other people and I'm grateful it's not mine alone (though I must confess on occasion the "ludicrous happiness" is a byproduct of alcohol, which may affect my motor coordination).
In this way, moments of unbridled joy are often accompanied by the proximity of eternal rest. It might have something to do with the vulnerability we experience when we're truly happy. But happiness is deceptive. It's no defence against a car careening out of the night. And there is no way mirth can protect you from falling crates. And, if you have an uncontrollable giggling fit as you're pursued across the Kalahari by ferocious beasts, then you'll get torn apart.
Evolution has seen to it that only the sensible survive. Happiness momentarily distracts us from the difficult tasks of living, the difficult task of self-preservation. This is why wild animals are wary of giggling and you rarely, if ever, see them laugh. Humanity, on the other hand, has created secure environments so we can cack, snigger and guffaw in relative safety. When we laugh we let ourselves go and, in that uniquely human moment, we become most vulnerable.
* Every time I have to type these letter - r,t,f,g - I feel a moderate amount of pain. When I am forced to bend my slowly heeling finger back to reach the c or v keys, I am in serious danger of opening the wound afresh. For this reason there may be a deficiency of words in this article using those letters.
The blind leading the naked
Published in The Australian Magazine July 17 - 18 1999
We are only too aware of the dangers of mobile phones. Every week there's a new revelation, another test, some more results from a respected laboratory in Sweden that confirms what we all know. That the ultimate evil in society is an ever-shrinking movable means of communication. We know that they may (or may not) cause brain tumours, glaucoma and debilitating constipation. We have irrefutable evidence of exasperation, frustration and occasional envy. We know that when we get that one call, the call we have waited our whole lives for, the signal will drop out. We have heard the stories of cartloads of mutated rodents sacrificed on the altar of research, we've witnessed the desperate campaigns of terror used to sell these devices, and we've heard of loving families destroyed by outrageous bills. There's already been so much written about the effects of the mobile that I am loath to add to the swollen dungheap of hyperbole, conjecture and speculation. But there is a hitherto unexplored phenomenon connected to the mobile phone, and insidious side-effect that has not been properly recorded. It is this - it has allowed emotions, once contained or invisible, out into the open.
People can be seen on any street corner pouring themselves and their intense, untamed feelings into these dark plastic rectangles. The only thing that separates them from the incoherent banter of those poor souls who are certifiably insane is the assumption someone is listening. If the mentally unstable carried mobile phones, no-one would look twice. You could be smeared with chicken giblets and carrying a chilled flagon of meth, but it you're speaking into a mobile you're considered sane.
Like the woman I witnessed the other day who decided to squat in the middle of a busy pedestrian thoroughfare because she'd received a call. She gesticulated wildly, laughing like a creature possessed, and had it not been for the phone she would have been carted away. Or the construction worker who blew wet kisses into the phone and spoke to his "frothy, huggy, lovey dove bear" as he pushed to the front of the queue.
When we see these incidents we only witness the effect, not the cause. We see and hear people speaking to the void. The full range of emotions are employed but we only understand half the story. Gone is the balancing image of two or more people relating physically. What we have is one person crying, swearing, singing or smugly flirting with the emptiness. It is the ultimate nihilism.
This aberrant, antisocial and offensive behaviour we're seeing with mobile phones is being accepted as normal. And there is a fear that it is spreading. Once, to use a phone on the street, you were encased in a booth. The metal and glass or moulded plastic served to distance and protect you from public scrutiny. You could bang on the glass in frustration, weep into the receiver or sing or universal happiness with relative safety. The mobile has no such barriers. You're vulnerable and connected to a disembodied voice, an electrical spectre, through space (and, with a long-distance call, through time as well). You become displaced because the mobile has reduced your awareness of your surroundings and you begin to reveal your true self. And, as anyone knows, the reason we hide our true selves is because we are essentially repulsive. the phone call has forced naked emotions, raw and natural out on to the streets. And raw and natural emotion is, more often than not, fairly ugly. The paradox is that this marvel of technology strips you of the artifice of civilisation.
Over centuries we have managed to house our emotions, shielding them from prying eyes in workplaces and homes. We've confused the beautiful and the brutal - but at the end of the century, it's seeping out. Who knows what joys or horrors this will bring? If you've had the misfortune to find yourself out there on the streets, take a look at the madness we've accepted as rational.
Is there some way to make the mobile less mobile? Can we take away its essential nature, capture and enclose it? Can it come with its own protective booth? Or better still, be chained to a fixed point in the home? At the end of all the research, we may discover that the mobile phone has changed our behaviour more than it has corrupted our brain tissue. *
* All this being said, it's rude to listen to other people's conversations just as it's considered impolite to stare at them while they weep openly in public. Mind you, it's becoming acceptable to employ a moderate amount of aggression and vulgarity if a mobile goes off during a film.
Let it go, for keepsakes
Published in The Australian Magazine July 3-4 1999
We wrap them carefully, conscious we were once close, we seal them in boxes. We tape down the tops, knowing they can never get out, but we secure them in there, anyway. These boxes, these little coffins of trinkets, that are never let go. We fill them with broken toys, old gifts, letters we cannot bear to read, photographs we cannot bear to see. A mausoleum of memory that grows slowly over the years. Hidden beneath the stairs, tucked down behind the couch, at the back of the cupboard are all the things we once loved. In these confined containers of memory, laid out like so many exquisite corpses, are the fascinations and playthings of the past. They're the old friends we've locked away, buried beneath the house or starved of oxygen in carefully stored black garbage bags. It's time to set them free. To release our inert hostages, to experience the garage sale of the soul.
Do inanimate objects have a sense of being? Do they have an independent sense of self that exists outside the investments we bestow upon them? Before we discover them, are they waiting for us? Is there destiny in the life of inanimate object? And is their life slowly worn down at our fingers? By the grease and the muck, by the acid of our touch, do we eventually kill them?
It must be very difficult for them - these inanimate objects that live and die on our whims. they could be anything, from the crappiest piece of mass-produced nothing that was ever coughed up by a multinational, to a stick with a nail through it. *
When they first enter our lives, fresh and new, we're attracted to them, obsessed by them. We devote time to them, carry them everywhere or hurry home to see them again. We breathe life into them. We give them purpose. Then, one day, without warning, our mood changes. Overnight, we've grown bored with the toy or that piece of jewellery or that stick with a nail through it and we need something new, another distraction. As quickly as it was embraced, it's discarded. Some months later we may pick it up again, remembering the good times before we consigned it to oblivion in a box. We all know in our hearts that the humane thing to do would be to get rid of it. But in the back of our minds a voice keeps murmuring: Who knows when a I960s Ben Hur plastic sword could come in handy, or half a bottle of putrid soap bubbles from Finland, or a commemorative belt buckle from the Munich Olympics?
How inhumane and callous it is to hold these inanimate objects in the purgatory of our attics. We must give them a chance to live again. To be dumped and discovered by a stranger who'll love them and nurse them back to life. To keep them locked up is as perverse as hanging on to dead skin. If we continue to hold on to the past, it places a limit on our possible futures.
To illustrate this point: there was once a renowned second-hand dealer who acquired his fame because he would never sell anything. His store overflowed with junk. There was so much wonderful rubbish, he was often forced to sit outside the store on the street. It was here he'd perform his often protracted and bizarre business dealings.
You encountered the first hurdle if you saw something you liked. You'd have to get it yourself. This often meant digging at the dirty coalface of his shopfront cave until you priced your treasure from the shelves. Finally, with the trophy in hand, you'd inquire about the price only to find that the article was not for sale.
I'm sure he had every intention of flogging all his wares when he woke up of a morning. It was just that, when confronted with the reality of the situation, he couldn't bear to be parted from his goods - from the things he loved. I couldn't fathom if he was a guard imprisoning the merchandise or a guardian protecting it from harm. In all the years I visited his shop, I was never allowed to purchase anything and I never witness a single sale.
The shop became more and more bloated and still nothing was ever removed. He eventually went out of business.
* I held onto my American Motorcycle Cop with Real Siren Action until there was virtually nothing left of it. The dog chewed the head off the motorcycle cop, then the wind-up engine rusted, the Real Siren Action failed, the rear wheel went missing and the headless cop lost his right leg in a n experiment to test the blades of a blender. Years later I saw him again, looking better that he had in years. He was in a second-hand shop but for some reason the idiot owner wouldn't sell him to me.
Square me the details
Published in The Australian Magazine June 19-20 1999
There are words or phrases that occasionally win favour, gain popularity and eddy about us. They rise from the mire of the everyday, buoyed to the surface by films or ads or popular sentiment. For a while they form a sonic background to your existence. we overhear them on trains, muttered in the street or shouted in restaurants. They spill from the lisping palates of the cultural elite, and the slack-jawed dialects of the socially inept. They are mimicked and repeated in all forms of media. They become commonplace mantras.
Who has ever witnessed a small accident immediately accompanied by Homer's "D'Oh!"? for a while, a day did not seem complete until this small homage had been paid. Groovy, life wasn't meant to be easy, it's beyond my control, like wow, get outta here, I'll be back, high five, be chill, greed is good, wicked, take a photograph it'll last longer, all experienced a time in the sun. the film Wayne's World ignited a plague of dullisms. "No way" - "Yes, way" became the dumb-dumb chant for a nation looking for instant linguists fulfilment.
The phrase that's currently experiencing unprecedented popularity is "think outside the square". The original expression was "think outside the circle", but it was appropriate for the Freedom Furniture as where they ingeniously changed the geometric shape from a circle to a square. An ad exec was probably paid a fortune for that squalid lump of lateral thought. In the past few weeks I've heard it everywhere. A waiter used it to suggest that a habit-entrenched patron try a pimply herbal tea rather than a heart-starting, sure fire short black. A thespian said she was trying to "think outside it" to develop personality traits in her latest creation.
For someone to say this to you, he's made the assumption that you don't already think outside the square (circle). He'll also assume you must be crazy with jealousy over his ability to juxtapose conflicting ideas to create harmonious concepts: "Look at that clever bugger sailing along the outskirts of thought. Look at them, way out there beyond the square. God damn their canny lateral thinking process." What is it with these people? Have they had a pep talk from Stormin' Norman? Have they been listening to that fat-necked freak who balloons onto the TV at three in the morning and rants about self-improvement? Have they had a look in the mirror lately?
And yet, even with it being everywhere, it would never crossed my mind that it could happen to me (that might be my restrictive thinking problem). So when a multi-hat-wearing mid-80's cliche managed to spit it in my direction, I went into an audacity seizure. I stood there, upright and rigid, with a comatose mouth. Why is it that we can never think of the appropriate thing to say at the appropriate time? Why does the best response to a stupid question or a smug comment take so long to brew and percolate up to the lips?
For the better part of a day I was consumed with finding the perfect pithy response. I've listed some of the less offensive replies below. In the likely event that you're requested to "think outside the square", it may help to have one handy. Feel free to use any of them, or if you're feeling adventurous, try a mix-and-match.
1. The only square I see around here is you (pause for effect), buddy!
2. I'll think outside the square if you stop plagarising a furniture ad as the innacle of contemporary thought.
3. Don't you find the square itself limiting. Can't we try thinking outside the rhombus? Or the tetrahedron? Or what about thinking "inside" Penrose's five folded symmetry?
4. Why don't you take the square in which you live and ram it up the circle you're going around in?
5. How many fingers am I holding up?
6. F*** you, arsehole (Arnie's defence).
7. (Visual) Take the lead from the great apes and rugby league players and hurl your dung at them. Its not only extremely upsetting but can be justified intellectually: "The coarseness of your suggestion merits this degrading physical response."
I have always supported the notion that dialogue is the best way to deal with disagreement - rational, coherent ideas presented in an environment of trust and acceptance. Although I must confess, as I grow older I am swatted by the concept of overly violent responses to seemingly harmless situations. The one thing your adquoting, condescending opponent would not be expecting would be a cheery knuckle sandwich. In this way you would doubtless prove that you were well outside the square.
A minor miracle
Published in The Australian Magazine May 22-23 1999
The wind was whipping along the length of Collins Street, leaving in its wake an avenue of brittle leaves. As the evening began I made my way to dinner, head bowed, determined. It was about this time that the first small miracle occurred. The miracle of the angel and the sailor. I was transported to Albert Tucker's view of the '40s, but gone were the Victory Girls and the pain of war - replaced by a scene of peaceful beauty.
Sitting atop a guardrail beside a tram stop was a woman. She looked resplendent in a full-length blue coat and from her back, pale pink lucent wings emerged. The membranes quivered as she craned forward towards a young sailor. Their mouths were inches apart. As they waited for a tram, they almost kissed. It was a magical vision of restrained passion.
Along the street trams rattled, igniting the air with electrical sparks. Then, as I turned the corner into Russell Street. I was confronted with the second miracle: the miracle of the contumacious cars. Two vehicles had approached a single parking space from opposite sides of the road. Each driver must have seen the opening and, overcome with relief, cruised into the available space. Imagine the sense of disappointment when another unseen suitor for the gap nudged one's bumper, challenging for possession. It was a standoff, a stalemate.
They stood their ground inside their cars, breath frosting on the glass. It was just a matter of time. Eventually one of the combatants would prevail and the other, nursing his wounds, would have to pay for a commercial park somewhere in a well-lit labyrinth of concrete. The perfect park, like the fish that got away, was lost to them forever. I was impressed by their stubbornness. I applauded their stupidity.
After this incident I enjoyed a pleasant meal, interspersed with hasty conversation. But what happened to me is largely unimportant, for when I trudged back up the road an hour later I discovered nothing had changed.
There sat our protagonists exactly where I had left them. It was clear that this was far more than a mere battle of wills. It was the archetype of confrontation. This was the age-old struggle between father and son, experience and exuberance, maturity and youth. In one car was a young couple, in the other an older man.
The car closer to me was a Mini Minor, and it contained the youngsters. The guy might have recently acquired a backbone because of the object of desire who sat beside him. She was Helen of Troy, his Cleopatra, empires would fall and car parking spaces would be won in her name. How could he retreat when he was only the sum total of what she believe him to be? Besides, he was young, he had time on his side. If he waited long enough, perhaps the old guy would die.
The other car, which sat diametrically opposed in perfect symmetry with the Mini, was an Australian classic: a rat-arsed copper Fairlane and, visible through the bug-crusted windscreen, a well-worn Aussie face. The driver had a brow so furrowed, small creatures could have passed unnoticed between his temples. He had waited all his life for this park and was not about to let it be lost to some dole-bludging show-off with his fancy-dancin' lady friend. After ill it was Sunday night in the city, therefore this was the most fun he could have. He could wait forever.
This was not road rage; it was passive-aggressive parking, auto-antagonism. In America, someone would already have been shot. And what thoughts were tumbling through their heads? If only I had left home a minute earlier. If only I'd driven faster. If only I had an 18-wheeled monster truck to push that miserable dungheap into the oncoming traffic. If only I had a gun.
I would like to believe they are still there, adhered to the moist Melbourne road. Belligerently battling on, with a small crowd of onlookers feasting like vultures on the dumb display. Concerned people would be bringing food, welfare agencies dropping off blankets, and the continued inaction splitting society down the middle. Brawls in pubs, and heated coffee-shop conversations: "Are you for the Ford or the Mini?" If only one of them had been a Holden, it would have been exquisite.
And in years to come, a shrine would be erected to the "Miracle of Russell Street": a plaque and a bronze statue of two men with the combined brain power of Greyfriars Bobby who wasted away their lives in their bucket seats.
Elsewhere, life had moved on. The sailor and the girl with angel wings had disappeared into the night. That was how the evening ended: two miracles without a moral.
Anzac Day 1999