One Year Gone

It's been, give or take a week or two, one year since I started this blog. I guess it's a time for reflection, but for the life of me I can't find a steady trajectory over the last twelve months. It's just been whirling and wandering and losing all conceivable sense of direction in a forest of mishap.
There was an EP.
There was a job.
There was another year of Uni.
There was an apartment.
There were other things.

And all of them collapse in a tumble of inadequate words. Fuck words. I'm not writing here anymore.

Me and my friends, we're all misunderstood

There are some people who will tell you that youth in mass is an inherently animalistic, base and destructive thing; that, given a chance, young people will make life worse for people because that's what their idea of a good time is. There is a subliminal cultural mentality, I think, that has always been around, that decency has to be forced on the incoming generation.

At Andrew's 21st last week, I witnessed one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed. Given the very chance I have already mentioned, allowed any and all sorts of shenanigans (as is the custom of the twenty first birthday celebration), the not-inconsiderable mass of youth that I was in the company of could think of nothing more enjoyable or worthy of their time than to gather on the dancing floor and sing along with drunken and endlessly good natured luster to Go West's The King of Wishful Thinking.

I was genuinely, absolutely awed, and monumentally proud to be young.

Stanza

We were incensed
by martyrs against
admitting we were sitting on the world's ideological fence.

That Measured Melbournian Poetry of Jordie Lane

I knew Jordie Lane tangentially in high school as the senior king of guitar, and indeed he was in those days something of a technical and musical wizard. What the young performer has grown into, however, is an artist of astounding tastefulness, one whose poetry is fused into treasure somewhere between the beauty of music and the bare honesty of lyric. The more that I listen to his reflective ballad I Could Die Looking At You, the more I become disturbed by the certainty that it is, however obscure, one of the great Australian songs of our time.

Have a listen for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bMBquVKnYo

Robin Wood on "Taxi Driver"

While rushing to finish a belated essay on famed film critic Robin Wood, I came across what I considered to be a rather interesting factoid. Wood contends that Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver (1976) is an exemplary work of what he calls 'The Incoherent Text' of the seventies. Basically he argues that the movie avoids success and never finds equilibrium on its own terms because it is fundamentally 'incoherent'. I don't want to go on qualifying the words of someone else, but I have to: he doesn't mean that the film doesn't makes sense, merely that "it doesn't know what it's trying to say."

Now, I must thank Mr. Wood for discovering and illustrating for me probably the main reason I think Taxi Driver is such a great film. He didn't mean to, I don't think. He doesn't think it's great, only interesting, and he chalks up its ultimate incoherence to the auteurial collision of Martin Scorcese and Paul Schrader. But in doing so I think he's hit the nail on the head for us yea-sayers.

Taxi Driuer is absolutely an incoherent film; such an amazing, stylish and masterfully created incoherent film that it couldn't help but tap into the innate incoherence of the human condition and become the artistic champion for our disillusionment, open-nerve-anger and fucked-upness. In fact, I would probably describe the film as schizophrenic; it's a Hellish, urban confusion in which every scene has nearly opposite but equal motives running through it; a dash of light shed on the inner most turmoil of every young man's soul; film noir on acid. It's not just Travis (Robert DeNiro) that lends the film these psychotic qualities: they are tied to and revolve around him but sink deep into every facet of the film, from direction to music to editing to the reactionary performances of Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel. I'm sure the film struck a chord with a certain nation still shaking from the rude awakening that was the Vietnam war, but I think its significance does deeper and further than that. I think this is a film whose incoherence only sweetens it, whose confusion over "what it wants to say" results in a overarching message that can only be felt and that only confusion can bring: I hurt and I want it to end.

To hell with what Wood thought Taxi Driver's incoherence meant: I say it was fucking integral to what makes the film an immaculate cinematic prayer and goodnight to everyone who ever felt like "God's lonely man."

"Getaway Car" by Audioslave

Is a supremely sexy, suave and sad song.

For my money, it was the group's finest hour.

And the movies, like the world, turned black...

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes even more to explain exactly what the beast that is film noir... is. The historical story, as I see it: film noir, as it would later be named by the French when a big glut of American films hit them after the war, was cinema's adolescence. It was the period when the injustice and agony of the world came tumbling down on Hollywood's head and it no longer had the guilelessness of newborn innocence to protect it. And like do us all at that troubled time in our lives, it lost its mind a little.

Because they were the most convenient and appropriate examples of the "social fantastic" (Tom Conley), the things you have to look out for are:

• A Hard-Boiled Detective Who Has Either Never Loved Or Loved So Strongly It Broke Him And Now There's No One Home
• A Rainy City
• A Dame With Big Eyes Who's Not What She Seems
• One Or More Guns
• Hats And Coats
• Complication After Mind Bending Complication To The Central Case That The Detective Is Working On
• Edward G. Robinson
  
• An Unhappy Ending

Aside from that, the spirit of noir lives on, no matter the vibrancy of color. We're not talking about pictures on a screen here, but a way of life, perhaps the oldest and most seductive of all. The term may technically translate as "black movie", but film noir means Shit Is Fucked Up. It looks like its going to take a whole semester of explaining all the intricacies of the matter, the societal disillusionment that washed America white after the Second World War, the pop culture of the nation consistently blaring the worst nightmares of its nuclear-family, bomb-shelter-conscious, gosh-darn-steak-and-brussel-sprouts audience right in their face. But I think James Naremore summed it all up nicely when he spoke simply of the faded night-club star, as she "imagines again the dazzle of her debut through the bottom of her bourbon".

The Thing About BATMAN

What for me vampires are to the world of ghouls, Batman is to the world of comics. They are both the key to unlocking the value of their respective mythological forms, because they exist so distinctly on a foundation of human struggles. They are, in their most fundamental form, elaborate symbolic stage plays for the innately pompous but nonetheless fascinating concepts of good, evil, belief and redemption.

Chris Nolan's recent rehauling of the Batman franchise is quite simply the best thing that has ever happened to comic book cinema. Reimagining the filmic introductions and conflicts of Bob Kane's magnificent creations that were first attempted by Tim Burton in the eighties, Nolan gives us, at long last, the Batman of noir, quasi-morality and metropolistic tragedy that we all need. The issues of societal and sociological complexity that are broached are, admittedly, handled with groaning heaviness, but at least they're fucking there. And there's plenty more that the latest film, The Dark Knight, does perfectly.

The foremost is, of course and no prizes for guessing, Heath Ledger. It's at once a shame that the young actor, who had only just begun to show that he had potential to be an icon of DeNiro caliber, must leave behind a comic book villain as his legacy. But, in his defense, I believe that Ledger has pretty well changed the world of film villainy forever and ever amen. His haunting and extraordinary performance as The Joker, Batman's ultimate comment on the dark side of human nature, hooks in with frightening and tragic power to the instability of The Abused Child, The Feared Leper, The Angry Anarchist, and most importantly, The Lonely Man.

Although Aaron Eckhart turns in a very nicely arced performance as Harvey Dent, who is manipulated into a horrific fall from grace (from Gotham's D.A. Angel to "Two-Face"), it is Ledger's Joker that steals the show at every turn, because he is such an intriguing dark symbol. We do not and shall never know who he really was, before his disfigurement and ensuing insanity, but that's the way it should be, because his purpose is not to show the dialectics of the human soul, as "Two Face"'s is. The Joker's only signs of humanity are the bad ones - resentment, cruelty, loneliness. He is a live wire of negative response to a cruel world, an exposed nerve of conditioned disdain and anger. He exists to show us all the kind of monster us mortals can create from one another, much the way Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter did, in his first (and only his first) film appearance.

Not only all this, but he's there to show that Batman is only a hero through the murky morals of Gotham city. They aren't so different, these two immortal characters. They walked the same miserable paths all their lives and then, as if by the flip of Two Face' mythic coin, came to different conclusions. Their "battle for the soul of Gotham", as The Joker very rightly puts it, is founded on nothing more than a conflict of beliefs... and an emblematic town that will do what its ruling giant tells them.

The thing about BATMAN is quite a simple one. Kane's vision and Nolan's synchronize with beauty in this latest feature, for they both take a distinctly gothic, tragic and metaphysical view of their seemingly pointless craft: The Dark Knight tells the tale of a lively philosophical debate, taking place far too late. The delicious ambiguity of the Batman universe created Gotham City, and it's because nobody spoke up one way or the other that it did. Batman and The Joker are taking their stands - they ask that each of their citizens do so as well. Suddenly I can't seem to stop thinking about that damn coin of Harvey's; spinning, spinning, spinning into the dark night.

*Thanks to Martin Kingsley for an editorial note on the finer points of Thom Harris.

Vampires

I'm wide awake on the bathroom floor

I’ve never felt this cold before

I must have let the day slide in

Cuz the dark is gone and light sits thick and ready to begin

I fear the stake

Is too high to waste

And all man’s slothful efforts were in vain

I forgot the way you do it here

Blind and mad with fear

Of the Lord

But I’m never doing that again

To live scared stiff of my own end

Amen.

I feel my love

In my blood

Flowing fast to where there’s not enough

I hear the prey

Call my name

The Plan

1. Convince the Woolworths institution that I am, in fact, privy to the intricate and delicate art of STACKING SHELVES that they have thus far deemed me unfit to do, and accept their apologetic job offer.
2. Subsequently work that job any and all hours that I am not sleeping or attending classes for higher education.
3. Use the money saved to visit New York City and enjoy it
4. Obtain another job upon return with the highest of recommendations from Woolworths
5. See 2
6. Find a place to live and move there
7. Become moderately successful with the music caper or do a PHd and teach University punks what for.
8. Be Happy
   

And Song the Fourth

A working model for poetic meditation on the intense pathos of insanity and the insanity in pathos.


Tuesday Pills

I heard a voice on the wind

She said, ‘The danger’s over.’

But there was no one, so then

I’m hearing voices again.

I saw a man on the road in town,

saying, ‘If you need a cry, then here’s a shoulder.’

But when he spoke, there was no sound

So I’m seeing things now.

The newspaper is full of messages, and

It's all tantamount to me being missed

And wanted home. “You’re not alone”.

The secret people, they’ve heard my tapes

And they love what I do and the way that I play,

They tell me so on my phone,

Their code is in the dial tone.

Oh, and I’m not so bad

What did you expect to have

Happen?

Oh, and i’m not that scared

I know I’m almost there

So it might not happen this afternoon, but

The whole world is going to love me

The whole world is going to love me soon.

My friends are getting married

I didn't think I'd have to confront this for at least another five years.

El Orfanato... y por qué Películas Espantan

It isn't very often that a film experience is enhanced by a vocal and expressive cinema audience. I've only been privy to about three instances of that happening. The first two were due to the communal sense of fandom and wonder that came with seeing Harry Potter and The Simpsons on the big screen amongst others who felt the same way as I. The third was last night's cozy nine o clock gathering in Nova Cinema on Lygon st, where a few dozen Melbournians, myself included, came to see Juan Antonio Bayona's El Orfanato (The Orphanage).

I have yet to hear so many screams in a theatre in my life. And each, I would say without fail, was closely followed by a very genuine and warm laugh of delight. It was the sound of a people desensitized by shock value and real societal terror discovering with joy that they could still be scared by a movie. It was a beautiful, wonderful sound.

The Orphanage is not a terrifying film, not in the way that films have terrified audiences in the past (mostly in the sixties and seventies). It is, however, profoundly creepy, and this thick, pervasive foundation of creepiness, which takes on a cinematic delight all its own, strips away the audiences' defenses so that when it punches us (which it wisely seldom does) , we are knocked to the floor. But, as I say, we are happy to be there. That's what we paid for.

Perhaps the physical presence of other filmgoers, the dark cinema and the atmosphere of engrossment thereby produced made the movie seem better than it was. But I say no film can be better than one which flowers in the environment just described, which is exactly what The Orphanage does. It is a film with such a wicked understanding of how horror works. It takes both its protagonist and its audience on a steady and solid regression back to our days as children, when horror was not an abstract filmic concept, but a living breathing thing in our hearts that flared up at midnight when we heard a noise we couldn't account for. There is a scene in it toward the end when our heroine unearths a descending staircase into pitch darkness. This reveal provoked laughter from the people around me that was not at all inappropriate. It was the unnerved, self conscious laughter of people who can't believe they've been manipulated back to this horrible place that they thought they outgrew when high school started.

It was laughter, because we are more or less adults who are in on the illusion. As adults, it's the only reaction to give: "Ahahaha they totally did it. They totally did it right. That's scary." It's our helplessly intellectual nature shielding us from the reason we're laughing: we're scared. Really, truly. Our terrified inner child is standing right there with the heroine, staring down those steps to nowhere, coming to shaking grips with the realization that there could be anything down there in that darkness, anything, anything at all.

Northern Wisdom

The greatest thing about Northern Exposure was that it was a series that simply should not have worked. The fish-out-of-water premise is solid enough, but the Kaufmanesque, profoundly bizarre and ahead-of-its-time eccentricities in every other specific should have left it dead in the water, an unpleasant blotch of debris that never had any cohesion to rely on. And yet, as if by magic, the ship floats, the show engages and a miracle takes place: we learn to love it. Northern Exposure is a clanking, Wells era contraption that somehow still manages to fly, and on the strength of this simple boost of faith proceed to tear up the sky.

Few would argue with the series' own analyst and philosopher, worldly ex-con and radio personality Chris Stevens, when he inadvertently summarizes the series motto: "It's not the thing you fling, but the fling itself." This is the most beautiful way of contextualizing and and rationalizing Northern Exposure's dizzying depth of insanity, expressed in a quintessentially Northern Exposure decorum. But tonight my gratitude to the show's writers is caused simply by this gorgeous and poetic paraphrasing of the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche, articulated by Chris toward the end of a dream-episode whereby Rob Morrow imagines he has a sleazy Jewish twin (played by Rob Morrow). The quote is as follows, and could stand in its beautiful blending of modernity and classic romantic philosophy to be one of my favourite quotes ever:

"It's like brother Nietzsche says: being human is a complicated gig. So give that old dark night of the soul a hug... and howl the eternal yes."

Dylan Newport Folk Festival; 1965

Have you ever actually seen Dylan's performance at this infamous event? It is, quite simply, the best live performance the man ever put in. The band was tight; there was a band, not just him rattling around on an out-of-tune guitar; he was singing more-or-less in tune; there was more going on musically than there ever had been before and it was engaging. And the audience threw it all away for a change of instrument, and actually booed him. Ladies and gentlmen, there's only one word for that: fucktardation.

A Striking Stranger

I saw a girl on the train tonight.

She had a pretty, buoyant, intelligent face and short blonde hair.

She had on an eskimo coat, a flowery skirt, yellow stockings and black leather boots.

She didn't say a word and she got off a few stations before me.

I wish that I knew her.

Something

First blog since the sadness.
I don't think I want to talk about it in my usual stupid way.

But here's something: I'm going to start playing solo gigs next month. It's a pretty big deal for me, a terrifying one, but I'm at a time where I really feel it would be destructive not to do it, for a number of reasons, and every person I've told about it has thought it is a good idea.

I was kind of running on apprehension last night about the whole concept of playing by myself in front of other people, and I ended up writing this song about what I realized is the state of my life. Strangely enough, it's pretty much the first time i've ever done that. I usually end up writing songs in really abstract ways, but this one was pretty direct and personal and just fell out. Anyway, I'm really happy with it. I think I'll open with it at my first solo gig (:S).

Song the third

Those Weird Kids (In Primary School Who Cared About Things)

I believe in kids
who never called in sick,
making plans to fix the world.
Cuz I don't know 'bout you,
but I could go a few, so honey
tonight let's let the kids do the work.

Dancing on the table is not a wrong thing to do
near as I can tell from the queue;
lining up to take
the Normal Person claim,
putting down on paper why it should be you


I believe in luck
fucking people up
and the worst cases aren't here to get drunk.
So see these times as ships.
parting ocean lips.
Baby, we're among the rips

But swimming in the water is not a wrong thing to do
near as I can tell from the view;
standing on the shore
of how things were before,
rubbing myself raw and through


I believe in sweets
being good to eat.
There's this place down the street: it's cold.
Oh, please don't give me that "no" smile,
you can stay a while,
The kids have everything under control
The kids have everything under control.

An Old Blog

I'm destroying the source, so I thought I'd give this blog a good home. I wrote it about a year and a half ago.

So this couple was sitting behind me on the Bus...

So this couple was sitting behind me on the Bus back from my mother's coastal town residence. And this isn't as easy as it sounds, cuz I was way up the back, like a black guy in the forties, and there was only one pair of seats behind me but there this couple was anyway. The guy was American, and I had that weird feeling when you hear a yankee accent talking in person, not on TV. He seemed kinda humble and passive though, so maybe he wasn't American. Maybe Canadian. The girl was Russian, or at least part Russian cuz she spoke English fair good. But her accent was as strong as the American/Canadian. I remember I thought 'Hey, I don't know any Russians', (Russky's, like Slim Pickens says in Dr. Strangelove, man I love that movie, thank god for Wason showing us movies when he should be teaching) but then I remembered that a friend of a friend of mine is part Russian and then I realized that the only reason I figured this girl behind me was Russian was that her face reminded me of the other Part-Russian girl I fractionally knew. I really should call this couple Man and Woman, not Guy and Girl, cuz they were easily in their late thirties. Come to think of it, maybe they weren't together. Didn't see them kissing or anything. But they did have that manner, that we're-together manner. Plus they left together, got up and went down the front of the bus.

Maybe they actually got off (the bus, you dirty fucks) but I didn't see them. I mighta paid more attention but I was sort of somewhat distracted by this kind of tingling, nervous (literal, as in, body-nerve related) anxiety in my lower left leg. That had pretty much been buzzing away since last night, when I had been reading Misery, and this description of an axeblade squealing as crazy-Kathy Bates lady wrenches it out of her favourite author's shin bone (three tries and she got the whole foot off) had been annoyingly persistant. It had the kind of effect that happens when guys see another guy get his balls shattered and instinctively reach down to protect their own - most of the busride I every-so-often had to check my shin wasn't secretly in pieces.

See now, this shit was published in 1987, shit it took a couple of Melbourne punks seventeen years to work into their Saw movies and become filthy rich off of. But King isn't a petty guy, I'm sure he knows he has the last laugh.

And I realized I was listening to Linkin Park, and I was thinking of skipping it because Linking Park have their time and their place, neither of which were here or now, but then the guy who had been in the toilet came out. I forgot to mention I was also sitting really close the bus toilet, but it was fully discreet and everything, just looked like a little booth for, something. And the guy who had been in there was pretty fucking wasted. Either that or he had cerebral palsy, but I'm pretty sure he was wasted cuz his eyes were out of it and he had a bottle of something. Maybe he was he was drinking his cerebral palsy away.

So then the drunk cerebral palsic (that's not a word, pretty sure) went somewhere down the front of the bus, maybe to visit the YankRussky couple, and I remembered there was a girl on here with her 9, maybe ten year old sister before who was strangely attractive for a bogan (the older one, I mean), and I thought maybe she came from a family of bogans and she's trynna fit in but it's not working cuz you just didn't believe her as a bogan, she wasn't right for the part. But she was gone now and that was a drag because she was attractive and just having attractive people around, even when you can't see them cuz they're facing away from you and there's bus seats in the way, make you feel just a little better than everyone else, including the version of you sans (without) attractive stranger.

But the next stop a really, really old couple got on and the man, maybe 90, 95 had fucking horrible burns on his face and his face looked like a mask. I don't mean horrible like to look at him but horrible cuz you knew it meant at one point in his life this guy's face was on fire. But this really old woman was like, still with him, getting slowly on a bus to dandenong and I remember thinking, what the fuck, why are they going to Dandenong? Why is everybody on this bus going to Dandenong for heaven's sake.

And then I remember thinking, oh man, I'm never gonna be a Russian or an American or even a Canadian, I don't think I'm ever gonna have that manner, that manner that couple have and the old couple have, and I mean I hope so but I don't think I have it in me. And then I thought but I'm lucky, I'm lucky, my brother's sitting next to me and he can't hear properly, and I don't have cerebral palsy and I'm not trapped in a manic psychotic's house with shattered legs and no thumb and no soul, and I could be an alco maybe later but I won't, I won't drink that much cuz I can't hold it, and I hope my face doesn't catch fire, cuz I don't know any one that's not family, (i don't suppose attractive psuedo-bogan strangers account for anything at all) that would get on buses to Dandenong with me, but jesus christmas at least i can thank my lucky stars I dno't live in fucking DANDENONG!

And then Linkin Park stopped and I remember thinking, you know, this has been a pretty strange couple of minutes. And then I remember thinking, you know...

this has been a pretty strange eighteen years.

No Fun At All

is offering the same academic opinion in front of a class room of people that has just been proposed by the tutor himself not thirty seconds ago while you were out of the room.

I recommend instead having someone put a 'Kick Me' sticker on your back without your knowledge. You will slightly less of a fool.

Song the Second

I think a while ago I may have put some lyrical ideas up here or something. Which is why I proclaim this to be the second. If I am wrong, I apologize.

The following are lyrics I wrote in accompaniment to music very quickly and viscerally. They are what you call lies, because they claim that I am a person that I am not with many experiences I don't have. I thought it over, and it doesn't bother me. I'm happy with the result.

I hope someone in the interverse thinks they are decent.

Untitled (I Will Title It Later)

We were always down and out,
just never wrote about it.
So it all came out
in fights and fucks in dirty bars,
where they all had to shout
to even tell the girl
the poison they need, and now,
before the sober world
wakes up.

But then we found that place
just down the street
that's always open late,
where we could play for free.
I could pound on wood,
and you could sing, but good.
And there was silence when we stopped, our ideas sucked, but...

If nothing came, then we'd trade fours
til the owners came to lock the doors.
Then we'd go home with a melody
stuck in our head,
until we fell asleep instead.

We forked out fifty bucks
to buy a crap guitar
and beat it around like the fucks
we know we are.
But we found a couple of chords,
we wrote a couple of words,
and sung them to each other while we fucked
in our broken car.

If nothing came, then we'd trade fours
til the owners came to lock the doors.
Then we'd go home with a melody
stuck in our head,
until we fell asleep instead.

I'll bet the weather's warm wherever you are sleeping.
Here we're expecting storms - I bet they'll be real strong.
But some guy on the tv show
said rain is good for the soul
It might be shit, but it sounds nice; I should put it in a song.


There it is.
I'm not wild about having so many 'fuck's in there, I feel it diminishes the effect a bit. But they all work in their context, and I don't want to move any of them.