May 19, 2004
We'll all float on anyway
It’s been a quiet month, I know — the reasons for that have been many. Partly, it’s been disillusionment with writing, combined with an insane workload and far too much drinking for a responsible young boy. There was also something about me realising the dangerous power words can wield, even if they weren’t meant for those who they hurt. I needed to take some time away and think about how a tool such as this is really best used. Upshot = inevitable. Result: introspection mostly out, moping to a minimum, discipline and a bit of stupidity back in. The new, improved, and altogether less indulgent Patrick’s Journal! Besides, you’ve all stopped reading so I can say what I please. Ah hah, hello empty auditorium, I’ve missed you well!
Burning hands and exit strategies
I was standing on a cold street corner this evening holding a candle, letting the wax drip down and burn my hand. Holding vigil with fellow Amnesty types to say that torture, under any circumstances, is the most unacceptable cost of war. And to remind those commuters on their way to the train station that we must never forget that war does have costs beyond dollars, and they are all too human. You wonder what difference such a small gesture as standing freezing on a corner outside a church can make, but it is better, don’t you think, to light a small flame on an insignificant street corner in an insignificant city than to go home early, turn on the television and curse the darkness the news radiates?
The last month has brought shock, horror and condemnation for a Western strategy descending yet another step deeper into hell. Are we all supposed to now say “I told you so”? Or is it time to stop worrying about how things should have worked and instead shift to the very real problems ahead? The Nation, where I often turn for reassurance that an American culture of dissent actually exists, contained some of the most beautifully articulated and compelling arguments against war, and has done for the better part of two years now. But looking forward, even the most fervent intellects of the left recognise that we must find a humane exit strategy to leave Iraq in less of a mess than we found it. Now that we’re there, as guiltily reassuring as it is to see the ringleaders crumble under the weight of their own lies, we really have to hope they start making the right calls. Iraq can’t be left in the mess we’ve created. Opposition is now useless, but as The Nation’s hastily convened forum of some of the biggest heavyweights in the debate (Schell, Zinn, Chomsky, etc) shows, it’s about time for some proposition. How, in practical terms, do we clean up this mess?
What, you wanted an answer? Go ask Chomsky…
Supersized courtroom battles
As bleak as the outlook continues to be, and as much as it feels like we’re only just in that ominous lull in the middle of a Montreal post-rock number, just before the guitars distort into apocalypse and the world threatens to fall in on itself (you know, the bit where you know you’re not safe at all but can lull yourself into a fall sense of security? And then, BADOOM! Riffage from hell) I thought it was worth turning to a positive development in an older and slightly more innocent war: the war on the multinationals. Remember McLibel? A postman and a gardener from darkest London photocopied some anti-arches flyers and handed them out at the front of the restaurants. Some friendly corporate lawyers with a taste for quarterpounders (hold the pickles) took exception, and slapped a libel suit on them. Rather than ceasing and desisting, they jumped right in and became notorious as the defendants in the UK’s longest running libel trial. Upshot? Years of corporate intrigue, spies, questioning of the very core of the British justice system. And, despite having little legal support, they proved about half of the claims their flyers made and it became legal fact that, f’rinstance, McD’s exploit children, pay low wages and are culpably responsible for animal cruelty. So it’s not libel for me to say that. And it also led to the launch of the McSpotlight website, which, many years ago, first started me down the path of responsible consumerism. Or at least, I thought, I’d never eat another McNugget. No matter how much that Hamburgler may try and tempt me.
Anyway, yes, old news — I’d suggest if you want to know more about the case itself, Franny Armstrong’s McLibel doco is worth seeking out. There’s also a great book written by Guardian environmental journalist John Vidal which documents the trial in painstaking detail, but I leant my copy to a lecturer at university and never saw it again. She did say it was for consideration for high school curriculum material, so I hope it went towards the greater good! The reason I write about it now, though, is that Helen and Dave have had their appeals in the case (they only half won, and still had to pay super-sized damages) admitted into the European court. The court has ruled that their argument of an unfair trial, and the general imbalance of the proceedings, at least is a case worth hearing. The ramifications are potentially huge if they are successful, particularly in their argument that a multinational corporation should have no right to sue for libel, as it is not in the public interest. Multinationals, they argue, should be subject to the same public scrutiny as governments. After all, they’re just as powerful.
Given that when cases get accepted into the European court, there’s at least a good chance of winning, and you’ve already proved your argument is at least worth consideration, the ripples of McLibel may yet spread further than McDonald’s ever feared, or Helen and Dave ever dreamed.
—
So, yeah, anyway, lookit! I’m making words again! More to follow, anon…
Posted by patrick at 09:12 PM
April 04, 2004
It's no real pleasure in life
I’ve often wondered what I found more reassuring about Alistair Cooke — was it his unwavering outsider’s committment, cynicism and faith in the country he had adopted? Or was it just that pure quality of his voice, a dignified bass rumble I can hear now from the radio in the other room — not the words but the gravitas. I can’t even make out what he’s saying from here, but it is still somehow dignified. Ahh well, vale, Mr Cooke, vale, that was quite the 95-year run.
Things I have learned this week: Sam Shepard is at his strangest when writing at the crossroads of rock and roll and the absurd (they say The Tooth of Crime is his masterpiece but maybe I’m just a traditionalist, I like the family dramas meself); A good Flannery O’Connor book is hard to find in Perth (hey, nice wordplay, boy, that’ll have ‘em rolling in the aisles); Programming sends my brain into strange places; Sufjan Stevens plays one hell of a banjo and, with Seven Swans has somehow managed to release an album just as good as Michigan (even if it’s a cheating diversion from his 50 States opus); I’m too old for all these nights that end in the morning; and, some weeks, you don’t need to listen to Songs: Ohia.
Rabid vampire bats killing 13 in Brazil — why does that feel like one of those things you might read just before an apocalypse? Do you think Lou Diamond Phillips showed up to shout are you saying some kind of bat did this? I really hope so.
And speaking of movies (a master of the segue, me), this article makes the interesting argument that most any arty film released in the last 15 years in Europe or America falls into one of two categories: David Lynch or Jim Jarmusch. O’Hehir’s being cheeky, of course, but it’s a damn good point, and got me to thinking, what the heck has Jarmusch been up to since Ghost Dog? The IMDB says he’s been doing more of his “Coffee and Cigarettes” shorts, which have those two things as a common thread (and a fine thread it is, nothing like a synopsis that begins with “Iggy Pop walks up to Tom Waits in a bar, and…”). But how’s about another film? The last decade brought Night on Earth, Dead Man and Ghost Dog, and here we are almost halfway through the next with not a sniff of a film. There was also Year of the Horse, which would be useful for a segue to more ranting about Neil Young, but I’ll leave it alone. I think I’m going to have to go on a Jarmusch-inspired trip to the vid store now…
Posted by patrick at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2004
The Breakfast Zoo
Woke up with fuzzy head this morning to a very highbrow debate on Radio National between George Monbiot, Christopher Hitchens and Lewis Lapham on the death of the Left. Three fundamentally different heavyweights of the global left, who all agree that their side of the political fence has been aimlessly meandering for a long time now (in Hitchens’ case, he’s crossed the floor). Of course, being half asleep and drifting in and out of consciousness, I started to imagine the three of them as a radio morning crew. Imagine Hitchens and Monbiot fighting over who gets control of the wacky noise button. Prank calls to Ariel Sharon. Hey, we got yo’ Left Bank over here! zinged! Meanwhile, Lapham plays the magazine-editor straight guy, asking Monbiot how many anarchists it takes to change a light bulb and spinning all the latest hits of the left (all the Billy Bragg you could dream of). I’d wake up to that.
Of course, they could have Dubya on as a special guest, seeing how he seems to have spent the week refining his comedy routine. Totally frickin’ hilarious, George. There’s a career for you in the Borscht Belt yet. It’s about as funny as banning terrorists from writing books. You know what would be a really great idea? Let’s ban terrorists from reading. Suspected terrorists, too. If we keep knowledge away, they’ll never realise how angry they are. I know a great place where we can start a bonfire. Get the temperature up to 451 Fahrenheit real quick-like. We can use fridge magnets for fuel.
Ahh, non-stop hits. I love the breakfast zoo. Boing!
Posted by patrick at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2004
They lived and laughed and loved and left
That I am a gadget-fiend is no great secret, and I certainly do think the iPod is the best invention since the home record-presser, but somehow I think New Yorkers take it a little further than I…
This is hardly a new idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot - is Wikipedia the anarchist realisation of the Library of Babylon? The Wiki might be the most perfect realisation of collaborative creation yet welded onto the infosphere, but only truly in the sense that its imperfections are its greatest strength. Imagine an archive of all knowledge, where each node of thought is nurtured by somebody who might vaguely know something. You search, and you find the information’s not quite right. What do you do? Just change it. Make it better. No entry on what you’re searching for? Well, buddy, go find out something and write a damn entry. If you want, you can change the entry on JFK to say nothing more than “CIA is jerks”. It will change, right there and then - no login or approval, the wikipedia is your knowledge to create. ‘course, if you write dumbass, somebody else will just change it back — every page keeps a record of every change (controversial pages such as al q’aida having very long history pages), and the idiocy is usually swiftly dealt with. Worthwhile contributions, however, tend to hang around.
As the pages are lovingly tended by people who care about their topics, the information can be much more in-depth than anything the Brittanica might offer. Or at least more passionate. Little gardens of knowledge where flowers bloom in strange corners. Prankster weeds with destructive opinions may come in at the edges, but a mindful gardener knows how to keep things growing healthily.
It is a model for shared knowledge that maps perfectly onto the net as a whole, a concept of theoretical brilliance that actually kinda works in real life — I’ve found myself going to the wikipedia not just to find the things your books of knowledge will rarely touch on in anything more than a “go ask a specialist” kind of way, from superstring theory to systems, but also the standard stuff, which is often passionately researched and meticulously hyperlinked (I like the entry on Joyce). And when it’s not? Change it. Add something. Accept that knowledge is your responsibility as much as your right. Ain’t that a nice, campfirey sort of thought?
Posted by patrick at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)
March 11, 2004
You remind me of baseball
I don’t think anything could sadden the heart of a long-time Northbridge local more than a For Sale sign stuck to the window of Caffe Sport. Yeah, nobody truly believed it was “closed for renovations” when that original sign went up, and I’ve heard the rumblings of mafioso intrigue (it of course not being just coincidence that the Cafe backs on to Fazio’s Gym), but I didn’t really want to believe that one of the last cornerstones of real Northbridge life had finally been swallowed up and vomited on William St like a bad felafel from that strange customerless kebab shop next door. The sign just makes it that little bit too real. What’s next? Kakulas Brothers moving to Dianella?
In an insular little place like Northbridge, the memories mostly live in the cafes (and die in the bars). Sport was witness to some great moments, such as the great gay kiss-in of nineteen ninety something. It has seen some of us at the end of our longest nights and most painful mornings, and has always been on hand with cheap pasta when the student bank balances start to bite. For me, I guess I’ve had to move on — its closure has led to the discovery of Kosta’s lovely little cafe on James Street, where you can get an amazing long black and anachronistically friendly service for a mere $2.50. But it’s just not the same. It’s not the sort of place for measuring out afternoons, or dreaming the kind of dreams that can only find their way into your notebook after three coffees with the clock hitting midnight. Ahh, what’s a boy with a need for a caffeine-drip to do? Guess it’s back to The Moon with me. Or, I could buy that cafe, and get all of my friends to work there, and we’d all live in a happy world of barista-fun, with all the beans we could ever need! A roasting good time…
This evening I am hypnotised by CocoRosie’s La Maison de Mon Reve. These Brooklyn sisters (by way of Paris) have a sound somewhere at the intersection of Portishead, Billie Holiday and Cat Power, looping scratchy slow hip-hop into blues with ever mutable tempo, while delivering horrid lines like “Jesus loves me/But not my wife/Not my nigger friends/Or their nigger lives” and “I’d wear your black eyes” in equal parts whispers and sultry old-world siren soprano. Combine that with tin drums, ever distant piano, samples of childrens’ farmyard animal toys and the tinkle of coins in a church collection hat, and you end up with a nasty trainwreck of a sound, but it is defiantly, glitchily beautiful in a way I just can’t put my finger on. Remember the first time you heard Portishead? When you thought you were hearing a sound that was both as old as music and at the same time so perfectly new? The more I listen to this album, the more I feel the same way.
Posted by patrick at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2004
A picture of lines on the universe
I lost yesterday evening to the poetry of the machine. There was a time when I was quite fascinated by machine-generated prose (I once attempted a project using Microsoft Word’s custom dictionary as found poetry), and the surrealist delight of asking the googlebot to translate something and then translate it back again (exposing all that which gets so easily lost in translation) can be quite addictive. I remember an old, old program back on the early Mac called McPoet which would generate oddly beautiful prose based on simple statistical algorithms. I’ve just discovered it has been reborn as Janus Node, and its insane interplays of statistics, probability and the fluctuating nature of grammar had me unusually mesmerised.
Janus was the god of doorways and portals. I suppose the author is suggesting something about the potential to uncover imagination unfettered by human consciousness — or maybe it just sounded good. Perhaps he asked the program to name itself. Ahh, stop me before I start ranting about aleatoric art, I might end up mentioning John Cage for the second time in a month.
I asked the Janus Node to write two sentences of alliterative art criticism. It obliged:
This work, at once demented and destabilizing, demands the deep distortion-based destabilizing delusion of dialectic, here cleverly construed as a super-Dadaesque mixing of destruction and demonology. At this juncture of history we must come to expect neither niche-oriented nudity nor nascent naked women.
This was too much fun, so I asked it to write a story synopsis. It called this one The Ancestor of Fading Addiction:
This story has two main characters. The first is a dogged cold acrobat named August. The second is named Anastasia. Anastasia is a kind Angel.
August and Anastasia meet in an awe-inspiring garage. Anastasia is tired of being kind and dying. He knows that August is neither kind nor dying. August is only after one thing: aromas. Anastasia needs to get aromas. The monstrous Angel mourns the ancestor from the misogynic dogged acrobat. August becomes more dogged.
There is an underlying programming language (TextDNA) that can be used to tell the computer just what kind of grammar it should follow. This can be of the simple “verb then adjective then insult” type of rule you find on those delightful web generators, but can also take on infinitely deeper levels of complexity, randomness and interrelatedness. Even more fun is its use of Markov chains to interpret the underlying style and structure of any given piece of text, and to create new, different works based on what it learns. There is a great example on the program’s website of feeding it the collected speeches of George W. Bush, from which it generated the sentence “I will have a nuclear weapon. Now, there are some fantastic pictures.”
Markovian probability is one of those fascinating statistical brainbenders that perfectly relates an element to that which immediately surrounds it. Patterns ripple fractally through the overall text, but each word exists only through its relation to those nearby (if this word is “n”, the word coming up is likely to be “y”), and I imagine prose in the shape of Mandelbrot bugs (any real mathematicians in the audience will be shaking their head at that, but hey, I’m just a writer who far too often secretly wishes he’d studied pure maths). My own trains of thought here lead me down some paths back to complexity theory, and software developed to program itself through emergent behaviour, randomly becoming more efficient through Darwinian self-selection and random probability. But that’s another entry for another day, and it may involve discussion of slime mold, ants and Sim City.
I thought I’d give it something a little more interesting, so I fed it my last journal entry, full as it is of references to God and physics, and told it to write me a little something in the style of e.e. cummings. Whether it comes from maths or from the soul of an aging laptop that’s had too much gin spilled between its keys, this just floored me.
But
these
theories still
ended
up
scribbling
down
pages
of God. I still
ended
up
scribbling
down
pages
of
laws
in others,
formulae
for
his Original
sin
.
Everything has
happened,
and
evil.
I feel
guilty for
that
was
j
us
t
one chanc
e set
of God.
In o
thers still,
we
live
in o
thers,
there was
the
past
half-decade,
the
energies and
a
picture
of
lines
on
the
univers
e.
Posted by patrick at 07:56 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2004
Summer comes and gravity undoes you, you're happy because of the lovely way the sunshine bends
At first they thought it was pigeons. Then, they realised they were hearing the sound of creation. They were hearing God’s absence.
I stumbled across an annoyingly cloying documentary on the ABC last night which I really wanted to hate for its pop science and “mysterious” editing style, but for some reason I still ended up scribbling down pages of notes. It was the old God vs. Science debate structured around the emergence of the big bang theory, and how in physics, ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. I’ve drawn a picture of a man with a beard and a hat that has “God” written on it, next to a big bang. He looks confused. It was late, and I’d been drinking.
Physicians, and for that matter all fundamental scientists, tend to construct the God problem as the God of the Gaps — that which will explain all which we can not. In the past half-decade, the gaps have shrunk at unprecedented speed, so that all may be explained with great confidence by quantum, and the uncertainty principle. But these theories still rely on constants which derive from assumed facts, harvested and nurtured in those gaps. Physics is at a breaking point, where relativity and quantum cannot both be right, but answers both make sense. The search for the unified theory of everything, that which will fill in the gaps and explain the constants, is most probably an endless one. It could be the old chestnut that we live in a multiverse of infinite possibility, where every sliding door decision is a decision that was made both ways. Everything has happened, and everything will. We just happen to live in a universe where opposable thumbs got us up the Darwinian ladder. In another unimaginable place, it is the lemur that carves out nation-states and kills millions in the name of lines on lemur maps. In others still, we never got past the primordial swamp. And in others, there was never a swamp to begin with.
Stephen Hawking said that to discover the unified theory of everything would be to know the mind of God. Others say it would to prove God’s death. Apparently, it all sounds a little like pigeons nesting. As somebody who sits comfortably on the agnost fence (a fence where a lapsed Catholic can absorb the energies and spirits science shall never explain but doesn’t have to feel guilty for his Original Sin), the scientific debate mesmerises me. Can mathematics define us more truly than the sacred texts of the world’s faiths? Most probably. But in an ever-expanding universe, I feel a little uncomfortable accepting a place as merely a variable, to be carried over and multiplied to-the-power-of. Are there formulae for consciousness?
Proposing an infinite number of universes had a startling consequence. It meant inescapably that our physics was just one chance set of laws in one chance universe. The only reason scientists were studying it, was that it had, by chance, created them. So instead of allowing God to have defined our universe, what those scientists are saying is that the universe is defined by our presence in it, and the implications of this are profound.
Us, at the centre of the universe. Rather a quaint notion, yes?
Posted by patrick at 06:56 PM
March 06, 2004
Window seats on bullet trains
When you think you’re well travelled, killing a few seconds on this rather funky map generator can do a very good job of showing just how, well, Western your airport-hopping has been. See how my journey is like a big red diagonal line through all the easy parts of the world? Except of course for hopping over that scary middle bit (there may have been an airport here and there but I decided not to count those). The website said I had visited 8% of the world’s countries. Next on my list is Sealand. I always wanted to live on an oil-rig.
For somebody who has grown up with the stench of oil dripping from filthy laundry, surrounded by roustabouts and crane operators (otherwise known as family), I’ve spent surprisingly little time on rigs. When I was young, I used to visit my dad on his rig when it would come in to dock for repairs. They are such awesome constructions. Mostly I remember giant burgers in the cafeteria and soft-serve ice cream from burly chefs with tattoos, but also there were the snaking metal corridors of the living quarters, all rivets and drab paint. Piping running in every direction, cranes swinging all around. A control room full of radio gear and machines making eight different kinds of ‘bing!’. I wonder if the residents of Sealand live on giant burgers and soft-serve ice cream. One thing that would suck is you couldn’t watch DVDs — they all seem to explicitly forbid viewing on oil rigs. Perhaps they worry that a few soft-focus sex scenes might excite a vessel-load of frisky workermen a little too much and they’ll not notice a gas pipe that hasn’t been sealed properly.
Speaking of another red country on my little map there, Franny Armstrong’s Drowned Out (the story of the Sardar Sarovar dam project) is on SBS on Tuesday night, renamed as The Dammed. It is an utterly horrid, rivetting documentary that caused me to rethink much of what I held as important in my own work. And, along with Arundhati Roy’s The Algebra of Infinite Justice, caused me to rethink much of what I hoped was true of India — a country where I first set foot, funnily enough, because of their burgeoning need for oil and desire to sell their soul to multinational industrial giants. My dad worked for one of them.
In conjunction with the increasing trend for handing over state-owned water facilities to private companies (in what a Mother Jones article claims is a US$200 billiion a year business), water is shaping up to be the next battleground for corporate justice and human rights. Fortune called it the oil of the 21st century. Like oil, the big players are already in place (Suez, Vivendi, RWE/Thames Water and Bechtel), and the riots and deaths in South American countries are now matter-of-fact.
I’ve been fascinated by the confluence of things in the story of the Narmada — spirituality, indigenous land rights, fascist nationalism, corporate rape, and a chain of tragedy that leads from the inner sanctums of the World Bank to the villages of Jalsindhi where the Adivasi people stand, the water to their waists, asking their river why it has forsaken them. Wondering where the gods go when the trees they’ve lived in are now six feet below the surface. Somewhere in there is the PhD I’m actually going to write. It’s about water, and how its politics and spirituality shape culture so fundamentally. The dams, the Indian bureaucrats say, are the temples of modern India. The gods that are worshipped there are the new ones, the useful ones, the ones that have no truck with aspecting as elephants and would much rather wear a fetching pair of Patrick Cox loafers and travel around on a Segway. They’ve actually been around for a long time, those gods, we’ve just given them new names and allowed them to keep coming back, under the illusion of Progress. But those temples that worship them spread beyond India, and the dam craze continues to spread throughout the IMF’s pet countries.
Posted by patrick at 10:13 AM | Comments (1)
March 02, 2004
Sometimes, a cowboy's just a man in a cowboy suit
Manic fractured days of pasting web code in CD layouts and wishing for at least three more arms — sometimes I think Ganesh would have been a damn efficient office monkey. Or elephant. Today I became an expert on Australian shipping rates and discovered that all four-digit postcodes are allocated except for a mysterious 99 between 9300 and 9399 — the inner tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy junkie was intrigued by this. I wonder if I sent something to these postcodes, would I have intimidating men with futuristic (in the 50s sense) weapons and oddly reptilian eyes knocking on my door? I fear this was not supposed to be noticed.
If you hear no further from me, my parcel has been received in echelons where it is not welcome, and I ask you brothers and sisters to spread the truth of the missing numbers to the world, simulcast it on the interweb and get the nerds to righteously hack the information mainline, so my meme of truth may infect the unwashed masses and we will never again live in ignorance. That, or they’re, like, internal numbers or something. Maybe they’re saving it for when we take over New Zealand (pfft, they only need 99 codes, it’s tiny down there and they say things funny).
Tiring days accompanied by much Neil Young (Rust Never Sleeps on obsessive repeat) and an extraordinary Leadbelly box-set the bluesman leant to me — four discs of his last sessions, one of which is entirely devoted to field hollers. Nothin’ like real primal blues to cure yr own. And lingering senses of tired sadness that cause the evenings to turn to Eliot. Call me a modernist wanker if you like, but sometimes ol’ T.S. on the back of an afternoon of Leadbelly is just what a tired mind needs to get through an evening that would be consumed otherwise by the imagining of faces and smiles you’re only likely to see again coated in anger and exasperation.
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Posted by patrick at 07:33 PM | Comments (0)
February 28, 2004
You were so poorly cast as a malcontent
Hold on a second. I smell burning!
I see a change coming round the bend
And I suggest to you that it takes just five seconds,
just five seconds of decision
to realise that the time is right
to start thinking about a little revolution.
— Spacemen 3, ‘Revolution’
Today felt like an oddly slow motion sort of day. Pushing through streets with earphones in, I was reassured to see the preacher with his poorly stencilled sign that promised that the righteous shall shine like the sun, as it has every weekend since I was 15. I’ve often wondered who amongst us shines that brightly, even as stars forever and ever. While Spacemen 3 squalled opiate drone into my eardrums, I saw but did not hear a girl in a wheelchair singing and a pissed off looking man (boyfriend? brother?) sitting on the ground next to her, waiting for the song to finish so he could do something with the money. And I saw a dancing girl who, as dancing girls do when you have earphones in, moved oddly in time to what my ears were hearing, as though we were both catching the same rhythm from different places. I remember once seeing a small boy dancing on the side of the road as I drove past, and he was moving so perfectly in time to the music on my stereo (I think it was the Flaming Lips) that I damn near crashed the car.
I bought CDs, Lambchop and The Shins, and ran home down back alleyways, but my running seemed slow still. I made real the best and most inspiring project I could possibly be doing, talked big plans, dreamed big dreams, and then bought some vegetables from the markets. I thought about people, seeing more than I usually do, but wanting to see very few. I made pasta and read Robert Christgau on minstrelsy and stories of suicide in Japanese art as kamikaze nationalism. I spoke to people from my past. I rolled cigarettes and cursed that particular brand of idiocy (a brand to which I have far too much loyalty). I turned up the Polyphonic Spree too loud and jumped around the house as though conducting an imaginary indie-rock orchestra. I played the harmonica for a bit and realised it’s probably time I had a lesson or two. The day seemed to go on forever, and still I wait for it to end. I thought about this city, and about the strength of ideas, and how it seems conviction always comes that little bit too late… I thought of those who shine like the sun, and wondered why I hide from their light.
Posted by patrick at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2004
Ol' Captain Ahab, he ain't got nothin' on me
I think the kind of day that starts with rock-melon and muesli on the beach and ends in the comfort of the Hydey watching Pete Stone and a dancing old drunk could, this week, be classed as quietly perfect (except, ya know, the work bit in the middle, and not being able to tag “I’m glad I spent it with you” onto the end of the chorus lines).
It’s funny how you can forget about the ocean when you live in and never venture away from the city, but then you end up out there and those waves catch your eye again, and the salt water shrivels your skin, you remember its pull, it brings you back on its currents; my dreams last night were underwater sorts of dreams, the Indian was calling me back. There is nothing like a morning under the brine to scrub clean a tired and mucky heart and head. The gunk builds up again quickly, but at least while the ocean swallows you, you feel almost fresh.
So come and swallow me, follow me
I’m trav’lin’ alone
Blue water’s my daughter
and I’m gonna skip like a stone
Posted by patrick at 07:48 AM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2004
The World Won't End
It can be a funny experiment to not shave for a couple of weeks — those random threats of beardliness make one appear a little absurd. Still, all it takes is a random Kings of Leon promo doco to show up on the television to make you realise just how unbeardly you truly are. That is facial hair.
This is about the time of night, after the kind of night, where I’d usually be wrapped up in a Jason Molina nightmare, nodding sagely to lyrics of tortured love and pained departure. Yes, Jason, that’s exactly right. Uh huh. With the animals and all. But this evening is more of a ‘fuck it’ kind of night, one where I refuse to feel sad or painful so will feel happy instead; I will listen to the Pernice Brothers, and I will listen to them loud. And I will ignore the lyrics of suicide and breakup and tortured love and pained departure and just listen to those fucking harmonies soaring into the night. My head prefers a harmony, and more invigorating kinds of sadness. Dreams will be of smiles, not of tears. High notes and choruses to die for. I think after this, it’ll be time for The Shins. But for now, a night on Scud Mountain is everything a boy could need.
To my great delight, Waiting for Fidel just showed up on the ABC. A couple of years ago, I tried to track down this film by every means necessary, and ended up getting a copy shipped to the Canadian embassy in London. It was an early missive in my discovery of home, and my need to find out more about the bizarre life of the man who defined Newfoundland, Joey Smallwood. Waiting for Fidel is an extraordinary documentary about the journey of Smallwood, Newfoundland Television magnate Geoff Sterling and filmmaker Michael Rubbo travelling to Cuba to meet Castro in the early 1970s.
Smallwood knew a little something about running a big-S Socialist rule over a tiny island population for what seemed like forever, and the man positively drips with excitement at the prospect of picking the brains of his idol. The rather Beckett-esque title probably gives you a hint that the film isn’t so much about Fidel in the end, or even about the modern Cuba it provides so many glimpses of, but about Newfoundland, and about a man and his political idealism. I will always remember my father’s description of his indebtedness to this strange old man who gave him his first job in the oil industry, dragging him from fishing village poverty for no reason other than the goodness of his heart and his belief in my dad’s work ethic. Yeah, I know, he probably made it up. But it sounded nice — I imagine a version of my father younger than me now, no more than a kid, sitting in a big oak-covered room filled with books of Marx and Althusser, and perhaps even a few unusual volumes of South American revolution, pleading for a job on the Churchill Falls projects. I imagine a portly old man with thick round glasses shouting ‘ahh jeez boy, you wants a job? you’re a good fella, i’ll gets ya a job’ in thickest impenetrable Newfie. It’s a romantic vision, which smells slightly of salt beef and pease pudding, as all Newfoundland visions do.
Smallwood was a staunch confederate (not a popular position for traditional Newfoundlanders prior to their donning the maple leaf in 1949) and an even stauncher socialist, modelling the country in the shape of an idealistic political dream he had for the twenty three years he was at the helm. He was a protege of the Fishermen’s Protective Union and a key mover in the development of the province’s labour movements of the 1920s. Newfoundland, when it had fish, was if anything a more savagely political and unionist outpost than it now is in the depths of uncertainty and redefinition. He freely admits in Waiting for Fidel that his ideas for the province’s university, MUN, came from the socialist models of Cuba. Constantly trying new ill-fitting suits and phrasing and rephrasing the questions he might ask, he is somewhat like a twelve year-old set to meet Justin Timberlake (or, well, you know what I mean — maybe we can be more highbrow and say he’s like David Foster Wallace getting ready to meet Thomas Pynchon, yeah?).
If you mention Joey’s name to the old folks of Newfoundland these days, you’ll see that odd kind of affectionate, nostalgic headshake which most people reserve for that odd uncle in the family who you can never quite pin down, or trust, but know you have to love like a member of the family anyway. You remember the good times, but you just wish he would have seen sense a bit more often. Joey made modern Newfoundland, but they know that modern Newfoundland isn’t, at times, that much to have made.
His obsession with connecting rural Newfoundland with the urban led to painful resettlements, unforgettably illustrated by pictures of families towing their houses across the water by boat, forced to leave the islands their families had called home for hundreds of years. My mother left such an island in the early 1960s, just before the government forced everybody else off, closing down education and critical services too expensive to ship out through the bays. Floating through Placentia Bay in a three person skiff a couple of years ago, past countless islands full of vague remnants of civilisation but populated only by moose, I wondered if Joey had ever done the same thing. I wondered if he’d set foot on those empty islands and seen the concrete doorsteps that so fervently bore his impression.
Posted by patrick at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2004
The million and first monkey
I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
— Solomon Short
This weekend, I’ve been writing on my old portable Underwood. Although the fingers may wear out rather quickly after so many years used to the soft touch of a laptop keyboard, and one has to revert to missile typing to stop the hammers from jamming, there’s nothing better than a bit of old-school typewriter work to slow you down and get real words out, not manic cut + paste digital ephemera.
I’d forgotten that feeling of knowing that every word you put on the paper was a commitment; that you needed to know its spelling and its meaning before you flagrantly created it from letters. On the typewriter, I find myself actually stopping to ask myself whether a word is perfect, before even beginning to type it. And to know that, you have to know the sentence ahead. It is writing as discipline, and it’s tough for the techno-fried fractured thought processes of kids like me. But I love it. Writing without fingertip access to the net and instantaneous red squiggly underlines forces one to rely on what’s inside, rather than what’s given to you.
And besides, I love that cliched feeling of sitting at the Underwood, scotch (on the rocks) at my side, with that bashing noise as the carriage shuffles along, the bell ring at the end of every line, the smell of the 1930s finish. It’s the romantic dream of being a writer, much more alluring than the glow of an LCD screen. Each and every one of us wannabe Kerouacs knows the secret that the great novel will never be written in Microsoft Word. I’ve recently taken to using a text editor that turns the entire screen black with the text glowing a soft yellow in the middle, no toolbars, no icons, no menus, nothing, not even bold and italic, just yellow writing on a black screen — it’s the most comfortable I’ve felt writing on a computer screen in years, maybe ever — for the first time the words have been more important than the eye candy.
I wonder if Roboceptionist would prefer to work on an Underwood? Apparently, almost 500,000 typewriters were sold in America last year — I wonder if they were all to overly romantic writers looking for new leases as luddites?
Posted by patrick at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2004
Lingering tropics
I know I’m caught in a loop of self-obsessed boredom when I spend an evening hitting the “send and receive” button on the email in the hope that something interesting will come through and knock the night in an interesting new direction. Instead, all I get is a bunch of viruses, many offers of penis pills, and two or three emails bearing the exciting news that somebody has set me up on a blind date. If you can define your life by your inbox, this evening I’m a spam-soaked sadcase. Even the occasional journal comment is some sort of odd piece of poetry with a link to levitra or some other such pill (those, I delete).
Sticky, horrible kind of day, where outside is as foreign a country as the past. The warm rain in the evening, though, was worth dancing around in — there’s something surreal and invigorating about that tropical kind of storm. I remember when we first moved to Darwin, being mesmerised by the steam rising from the kerb as the rain splashed down, unable to correlate heat with wet in my head. In Aberdeen, rain meant frowns and jumpers; in Darwin, it just meant lots of frogs fucking. I like it when Perth drops hints of that tropical climate — it reminds me of a bright-eyed kid with stupid NHS glasses and bad shorts looking for kangaroos and finding only frill-necked lizards and jellyfish. I swear this evening I could smell that languid stench of palm tree sweat and humidity that would run down the Mindil Beach while the market stalls hawked their coconuts and cheap tourist trinkets. For some reason I think of a Steve Irwin type guy who used to shimmy up our palm trees with a machete strapped to the belt on his Hard Yakka shorts, slicing the coconuts down from at least 20 metres in the air. I remember them hitting the ground, and smashing, and milk dripping across the pavement, and my first true understanding of the Australian use of ‘bugger’. That’s what tonight brings back.
Posted by patrick at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2004
Greetings, Professor Falken
bq. This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.
Watching the hilariously, deliriously bad Hackers on TV this evening (comfort food for a geek in a grump), I got to thinking about the whole hacker thing for the first time in a while. I was wondering about the real story, the one that’s not about performing ‘righteous hacks’ and getting all nekkid and sweaty with Angelina Jolie. A world of nerdy command lines and obscure nmap port scans, not psychedelic flythrough 3D spaces where everything goes at light speed (except, oddly, copying files to disk which will always, without fail, go painfully slow and involve much staring at a progress bar while tension music strikes up in the orchestra pit). In the real hacker world, the soundtrack and the war-cry is simply a dial tone, and the fractured crackle of a modem handshake, not a frenzied electro beat.
The filmmakers had done their basic homework, at least insofar as their quotation of The Mentor’s Manifesto — (worth reading in its entirety as a remarkable piece of prose from a very angry kid) but, out there in the darkened rooms, things ain’t quite so sexy.
If it were possible to make a truly great hacker movie, I’d start with Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner’s Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace — it’s got all the ingredients: bright eyed kids, in over their heads, caught up in a gang war fuelled by race tensions and testosterone. Smackdowns in the telephone switches. The players turning to the corporate dark side. Lives turned upside down with the editing of a few data records. The war between Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception took place in a different hacker era, when the network was not a vast public sphere, where we all wander and go about business of varying shades of intent, but rather a smattering of closed, corporate spaces jealously guarded by companies who knew less about their systems than the kids banging on the door, hiding behind laws enforced by officials who knew even less. Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown does a fantastic job of documenting the slow awakening of the authorities to the hacker subculture, and the devastating consequences of their overreaction.
In those two books, hackers are portrayed as somewhere between cool and naive, mostly white hatted kids getting caught up in their own games, unaware of (or not particularly bothered by) the real effects of their keyboard tapping on real lives somewhere else on the line. A much darker side of that same history can be found in Katie Hafner and John Markoff’s Cyberpunk in the stories of the “notorious” Kevin Mitnick, and Pengo, a German who ended up stealing secrets for the Russian mafia — the original black hats. Hafner and Markoff unashamedly take an angle of exploring computer “crime”, beyond that which the Manifesto claims. Mitnick is portrayed as a fat, annoying and somewhat evil man with few redeeming qualities. Hafner and Markoff don’t seem interested in humanising the kids at the keyboards at all. Maybe that’s why I’ve never really liked their work. The flipside of the German story can be found in The Cuckoo’s Egg , a fun hootenanny of a hacker chase written by an ageing hippy Berkeley sys admin with one heck of an obsessive streak.
And no, other than the Berkeley hippy’s girlfriend, not one female to be seen. Not even Angelina Jolie. Less rollerblading, too…
Posted by patrick at 12:43 AM | Comments (1)
February 05, 2004
Less than a whisper
Hey, waddaya know, mention the Olivia Tremor Control and as if by magic, Dusk at Cubist Castle gets rereleased. My observation for this week is that there is nothing like a deadline to get the house tidy. This evening, I find myself in the unfamiliar space of having nothing to stress about, no articles due and time to actually read a book. The concept seems so alien, I still drag myself back to the laptop as if through addiction, or the guilt of addiction fleeting. After a day carrying furniture and wrestling with some hairy web code, I’m not really sure what else to do.
If the proto-Beach Boys experiments of the Olivia Tremor Control aren’t what you’re after, you may be interested in buying silence for 99c a track from the iTunes music store. That’s silence, complete with copy protection, digital rights management, etc. Specifically, track 2 from Ciccone Youth’s Whitey Album. Hey, you can even download a 30 second streaming preview for free. Just don’t put that silence up on Soulseek for download, or you’ll end up on a Pepsi ad.
The first thing that springs to mind, as Chris reminded me today, is a delightful court case a couple of years back when the estate of John Cage attempted to sue a British composer whose “One Minute Silence” bore a substantial artistic resemblance to Cage’s own “4’33”. Arguments were heard in court as to whose silence was superior, but in the end Mike Batt (the man behind the music of The Wombles ) settled out of court, not succeeding in proving his silence as an original composition.
Is your silence more precious than mine? Does it hold more things unspoken? Mine feels heavy and full of whispers beyond earshot. Beckett would like these silences…
CURTAIN 1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about
five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light
together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and
hold for about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum
together (light as in 1) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as
before. Silence and hold about five seconds.CURTAIN RUBBISH
No verticals, all scattered and lying.CRY
Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical,
switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.BREATH
Amplified recording.MAXIMUM LIGHT
Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about
3 to 6 and back.
Posted by patrick at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2004
A mission of monkeys
Northbridge is sparkling tonight with firecrackers, car-horns and manic drumming. Chinese New Year is one of my favourite times to be holed up in this dank little corner on the inner city. Tomorrow I’ll get up and walk to work amongst dragon debris and exhausted teenagers crashed out in the back of those great little open trucks. From now up until the Invasion Day fireworks on Monday, its an extended season of explosions in the sky.
A while back I wrote a little about the reemergence of the net as the community space it once was, on the other side of the dot.com frenzy. My much-linked source Douglas Rushkoff has just released a small book (what’s the non-fiction term for a novella? I guess a pamphlet) which appears to touch very heavily on these themes. Appropropriately, Open Source Democracy is available for free from one of the net’s most venerable institutions, Project Gutenberg — a library that might make a more modern monk cast aside Eco’s monastic marvels and jump headfirst into the digital cathedral, what with its Joyce and Goldman lovingly rendered in widescreen ASCIIvision. Have not read it all as yet, but his argument ain’t so far from my own:
The communications revolution may not have brought with it either salvation for the world’s stock exchanges or the technological infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. Though one possible direction for the implementation of new media technology may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials beckon us once again. While it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire business and marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.
I seem to have been getting a spike in traffic lately from an unexpected nomination in the WA category of the Australian Blog Awards — pity that it coincides with me making absolutely bugger all entries this month, but there ya go. I also got an email today from a gentleman named Armand Frasco, who has set up a blog dedicated to Moleskine notebooks. No more worthy a topic than that leather-bound best friend to the obsessive scribbler. I was leaning against the bar at a pub the other night and noticed two musicians in different parts of the room both feverishly scribbling in battered Moleskines. It seemed just right.
Happy year of the monkey, I’m going to try and get some sleep amongst all these explosions. And I promise some real entries soon. Too many real world deadlines and confusions and long stories to get near the keyboard, not to mention the death of the second power adapter in 12 months for my trusty old powerbook - at $200, they’re not the cheapest of glorified copper coils, either. You wouldn’t think Apple might have deliberately built shitty electronics just to force us old laptop users to spend new money every year, would you? No, a man with turtle-necks as fetching as Steve Jobs would never do something so insidious…
Listening: Pyramid Electric Company. Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia) solo. Great line from promo blurb: “Remember the first time you heard the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”? Pyramid Electric Co is “Gimme Shelter” slowed down to 16 RPM.” Certainly lighter on the Neil Young posturing than Magnolia Electric Co, an album with which it shares a sorta yin/yang relationship, or perhaps more Charlie/Donald Kaufman. Wait, no, I’ve just read True West, and that makes much more sense: the two albums are Austin and Lee.
Nobody but Molina could so effortlessly drop a couplet like ‘she smells a little like a train / hauling lilacs through the rain’ in the middle of a song called “Honey, Watch Your Ass”. Jaw-achingly beautiful? Yessir, your jaw will ache.
Posted by patrick at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
January 02, 2004
The clanking of crystal, explosions off in the distance
Welcome to 2004, International Year of Rice. I made it through with memory intact, unlike last year, and surprisingly little regret.
If somebody tainted 2003 with that pseudo-Chinese JFK curse of interesting times, one hopes 2004 will be infinitely less interesting, for the world and for the self. So far, that’s shaping up to be a faint hope indeed.
Yesterday’s wind-down was spent watching Mystic River, which was both beautiful and oddly unsettling — Clint Eastwood’s machismotic presence (I know that’s not a word but it’s what I mean) hovers so compellingly above the film’s descent into grief and recrimination. Sean Penn acts his pants off as always, but somebody does need to show him the volume knob one day — steamy brooding tortured intensity causes premature wrinkles, I’ve heard. Perhaps he was making that face one day (maybe back in Carlito’s Way) and the wind changed. I thought Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins were much more powerful for their understatement in contrast. I wouldn’t be too angry if Penn got the Oscar this year, but I do think Bill Murray deserves it more. A good week for films, maybe one day I’ll rant longform about LOTR, but it’s too busy settling now and I can’t get past the gravitas and shimmery elves. Greatest epic cinema experience, though, we’ll leave it at that.
Currently listening to Lambchop’s double whammy album release, Aw C’mon! and No, You C’mon!. Soulseek delivers late xmas pressies (don’t worry chopsters, you get the cash when its released). Beautiful beautiful Lambchop delicacy, and Kurt’s mumble seems more fragile but more compelling than ever. One rocks out more than the other. What with those, and the new Mountain Goats, We Shall All Be Healed, it’s shaping up to be a great musical start to the year.
We Shall All Be Healed might just be the best thing John Darnielle’s ever done, musically if not lyrically. Goats purists bemoan all this flirting with bands and real recording equipment but John Vanderslice’s production and the full time addition of Peter Hughes et al to the old 8 track ethos has given Darnielle’s words the space they’ve needed to be fully realised. Good thing he got it out before getting an ipod for christmas as the poor man appears to be stuck in music classification hell. We’ve all been there. I’m currently staring at the pile of CDs next to my stereo which is in its year end mess of stacks and piles — random collections of mood, situation, and good old chronology; I ran out of rack space years ago, and the music now cascades across the room like a rapidly replicating slime mold. Perhaps it’s time to set aside a day and come up with a new classification system for this most grain-centred of years. Enjoy the rice, be it basmati, jasmine or arborio. There shall be plenty of it in the year to come.
Posted by patrick at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
September 24, 2003
Archival purposes
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
—Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
Some random entries lurking on pages of my trusty Moleskine (the only real notebook for those of us who grew up that little bit like Joan Didion - I mean, I know André Breton and Bruce Chatwin didn’t actually use my notebook, but it’s a damn nice notebook, and it has a great pocket for cards ):
Fear of laptop theft / fear of falling (for) / fear of writing grants / the wish for better handwriting (beer spill)
“The ornate Walther PPK” - I do not know what this means. Who had an ornate Walther PPK? Why? I suppose I was thinking about the death ritual, dressing murder up with a jewel-encrusted pistol. Did I see such a gun? I have no feeling for the context of this scribble.
There’s a Fellini retrospective on…
Do you think maybe you have no words in you? When did you decide you were a writer? When did you decide you weren’t?
When my first Moleskine was stolen at the turn of the year, I thought I’d miss my feelings stored inside of it incredibly. But there was something freeing about having a tabula rasa for the new year and being forced to set certain memories free. I enjoy rummaging back through the current volume and seeing scribbles of thought and dream. Strange drunken thoughts like
So there is the city, there is memory, there is a man stuck in an airport for eleven years. There are people on their way to Iraq. There is the human capacity to imagine the other — is this at the heart of self-awareness? Complexity, emergence, the urban space. The sidewalk + the brain. Mind. City. Art. Love. Give me gin or give me death.
Which apparently summed up my thoughts in early March. I have a feeling for me in early March as a more optimistic soul than the rather exhausted boy who sits at the September keyboard. It’s been a long six months. Maybe I should be drinking more gin. Like Didion, journeys back through notebook scratchings don’t take me back to specific memories of buskers busking for smiles or wondering where my laptop was. But those half-formed sentences can take me back to the pub where I waited patiently for an errant friend and remind me of the emptiness I felt in that basement. A shopping list from the 14th of June tells me little more than that I needed coriander and cordial, but the abundance of cleaning products on the list is intriguing. Flicking further through, I find lists of flowers for when I thought the garden was worth spending time on. A stick-man holding flowers, between skyscraper and river. Incoherent ramblings of Darwinism, mice and malamutes. Friends’ addresses in Melbourne and nights spent there on couches, running from beds elsewhere. Lists of books from Sydney bookshops where I spent hours sitting on the floor. Scribbles about a great essay I found in Gleebooks, “Reading in Bed” by Hermione Lee. A Mexican on a bicycle. Excited scribbles about puppy food, visiting the Association for the Blind. “The politics of being young”.
I wonder when this one will be stolen.
Didion again:
Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to effect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.
And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’ We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.
I wonder what she would have written about such a monstrosity as the blog. Well, you got this far, didn’t you?
Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
Posted by patrick at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2003
as long as I gaze on waterloo sunset I am in paradise
Forgive the manic amounts of blogging at the moment. Just exercising the old fingertips and exorcising an abundance of adjectives clogging the arteries. Things aren’t as bad as some of the entries below indicate. I’m just a writer. One who should pay attention to the name he gave his journal. Just consider yourself lucky I’m not writing poetry.
What’m I really doing? Rejoicing in Chelsea thrashing Wolves, spending afternoons working on Amnesty newsletters and funding applications, enjoying Sam Shepard immensely. And also obsessing over mixes and blocking the world out. But mainly the easy bits. The world is a good place when you allow it to be good to you. There’s just less internal drama to write about. And I’m a 25 year old with a life and a business and a brain and some beautiful people in his world. Not a tortured high school student.
Hey, maybe I’ll post some of the poems I wrote in high school one day! That would be funny. They’re mostly about skinheads and sex and violence and death. None of which I had experienced. Didn’t even know what it felt like to have kissed a girl, so wrote about how I thought it should feel. It occasionally feels that way. There was also some “Kerouac with the words changed” and “If Burroughs can do cut-up, so can I”. Then I went to uni and my tutors told me everything I had ever thought of was somebody else’s idea first. Fuck ‘em, I thought, I’ll be one of those unruly subjects. My early uni creative writing stuff is even funnier - it’s all about nightclubs and the grosvenor carpet and being in love with impossibly beautiful skinny indie girls (how life has changed!). Honestly, nobody else in the world had ever thought of these things. Plus, I thought I wanted to be Ray Davies. Sha la la.
For a long time, I forgot I was a writer. Well, I knew I was a writer in the sense that I was having stuff published in things that went through printing presses. But I forgot what it really meant. This year (of lightning, if you like) has rekindled my addiction to the more indulgent forms of the written word, and the more sledgehammer uses of the keyboard. It’s a problem when you realise your most comfortable voice is the elegiac. Although too young for a life of elegy, that’s what your fingers dictate whenever you get to work. If I had an ounce of musical talent remaining, I’d make songs 15 year old goths would just love. As it stands, my theremin and I keep our elegy to ourselves (and the few occasional readers of this public for no reason vomit of thought I call a journal).
And the unruly boy now has a million qualifications after his name, a broken backstory, so much ‘experience’ and ‘proof’ in the back catalogue, he wonders if any of it was truly original. He reckons so. Not the stuff about lightning storms though. That comes from the cliched section of the mind that does an end-run around the superego when you’re feeling a bit shut down exploded.
The next entry will be about politics or something. Maybe control of the world’s water supply by multinationals and fascist governments. Or perhaps some thoughts about the loneliness of Perth alleyways at night. Promise.
Posted by patrick at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2003
scrawled in the rockface
I kicked a stone all the way home today. Every time it ran out onto the road, i’d wait and retrieve it, put it back on the pavement, and start kicking again. It’s in my front garden now.
What a journey that stone has been on!
(And wouldn’t blogs be so much cooler if you could somehow quote Mogwai in them? Just a big blast of Like Herod right here to make you jump. That’d be cool)
Posted by patrick at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2003
greens and salt beef / this, man, is an island
Growing up, I never really considered myself Canadian. I was either too busy wanting to be Scottish in Scotland, or too busy wanting to be British in Australia, and then one day I blinked and suddenly I was Australian. Canada was always that secret other passport that meant I had to stand in a different queue to everybody else. A dirty secret drenched in maple syrup, disguised by a strance accent that was anything but North American. It was the place where I was born but wasn’t from, you know. Given that I’d never really had enough faith in a place to call it home, I’d never felt that connection to anywhere. But the older I get, the more Canadian I feel. I had a fantastic quote by Douglas Coupland I wanted to put here, from his Souvenir of Canada, but it’s not on the shelf - I am hoping somebody has just borrowed it, I don’t want that to be lost. But anyway, it was something profound about what it is to be Canadian, so just imagine you’ve experienced a brief sentence of profundity.
My mum sent me a massive history of Newfoundland in the post. A History of Newfoundland by Judge D.W. Prowse. The book is a truly monumental beast, written in 1895, and about 800 pages long. Judge Prowse’s arrival on the bookshelf signals the start of a journey for me. See, as much as the Pulitzer committee think Annie Proulx captured the spirit of Newfoundland in that book, the salt water and the stench of rotting fish that flows with such vigour in my veins tells me she was only writing about an idea. A metaphor. She wasn’t writing about the Newfoundland I know in my heart. It’s a place I was never in touch with as a child but only recently realised felt like home in a way I’d never known — the kind of place where you can feel the call and the struggle of your ancestors from the fog. So, the good judge’s fine history in hand, I set off on a long and occasional journey of discovery, to find out something more about dat jaysuz place. The rock. Defiantly just that.
Of course, Prowse takes us only to the turn of the 20th Century, so for the century following, I was also sent It’s Like A Dream To Me, a poorly written but nevertheless engrossing biography of Paddy ‘Iron’ McCarthy, proud resident of Renews — my fair home town — for the duration thereof. Like any book written by a grumpy old man, it has a great chapter on Newfie politics (often an endlessly fascinating socialist experiment, led most famously by joey smallwood, who I think deserves an entry of his own) but also has some nice stories about angry irish nuns, and much local character and colour. Tragedies and licking sugar from the bottom of molasses barrels. A full life should be filled with both.
One passage that particularly struck me described the local culture for singing, pointing out that most of the sungs they sung were of shipwrecks. Paddy’s family had a whole book of songs about shipwrecks. I guess shipwrecks are generally in some way about irresponsibility and folly, so they must need a warning song. The proud captain will never sink his ship. So heed that well, good children.
One day I should put some of the Newfoundland photos up on my photo page - they mean just as much if not more than any city wall painted by a wannabe radical hinding behind a stencil set.
Today was a day of strange interactions and not much productivity. it’s nice to see my guestbook being used to get friends together. I like. But hey, no hello to me? Hi Mel!
Found myself in the society pages of the Sunday Times on the weekend. Considering the various scuffing and shy nervous kicking of the floor I’ve done at the fringes of ‘society’ things over the years, it’s quite surprisingly the first time I’ve made it into Holly’s fine pages. yik. consider that the closest to society I ever want to get - but at least it’s not a daggy photo, given the several million people who appear to have seen it today. Just be assured that it was entirely against my will. Honest, guv.
Posted by patrick at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2003
storage space
I have forgotten my PIN. I got to the ATM last night and found myself punching in the office alarm code. Self-perpetuating loops of panic about this now mean that I am totally unable to recall the number and am as such unable to access cash.
Given my generally disturbing numeric recall ability (i can tell you my two passport numbers and driver’s license number without a second’s thought), this turn of events worries me greatly. Perhaps I have reached my internal storage limit much sooner than expected and have accidentally deleted an important bit of information to make space. Given the amount of useless crap and trivia stored in this head, there was plenty else that could have gone first. I just have to make my fingers remember the movements they make on the keypad, but I have to take them by surprise. All I see is the office alarm code.
Or, I guess, I could just go to the bank and change my PIN. But that would be accepting defeat.
Oh, and I’m fairly proud of this.
Posted by patrick at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2003
Truth from the pulpit
Am I a mindless linking blog monkey? You bet. A beautifully, eloquently worded primal scream to remind us of one thing and one thing only: the internet is shit.
Hopefully, there’s a meme that’ll catch to the point where I’m embarrassed to have linked to it. Then it will have done its job. Or consumed its own tail. Either way.
Posted by patrick at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2003
Sit Ubu, Sit. Good Dog!
And other variations. This is the best website I’ve found in weeks. Procrastination can turn up delightful riches.
Holden Caulfield is my hero of the evening. How cliched. Oh well, I can live with it.
Posted by patrick at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2003
Oompa, loompa, doompity do...
I’ve got another story for you.
Can there be anything more risky for a stage actor than a 90 minute solo show? Particularly when you miss a line ten minutes in, call for it from the stage manager (always a last resort) and throw your rhythm for the whole performance. It is weird, as an audience member, to suddenly see a powerful stage presence as nothing more than a nervous actor, getting further caught up in a tangle of lines the further into the hole he digs — a pity, really. (Play and actor not to be mentioned here, as I am sure it will be fantastic on any other night)
Tim Burton is apparently this close to signing up for a new film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. How much does that rock? So long as it features contemporary remixes of the Oompa Loompa songs, I’ll be happy. Mr Dahl’s estate, apparently, have given their blessing. I was shocked to learn that he was not a fan of Gene Wilder’s masterful portrait of Mr Wonka, in his time. Bah, the man may have been my childhood hero, but he sure doesn’t know good freaky-ass cinema when he sees it.
This afternoon, which was supposed to be for writing, was spent watching special features on Twin Peaks DVDs (an indulgence for a broke boy in need of eye candy). Little Mike’s lessons on speaking in the Red Room are worth the price of admission on their own. And Sheryl Lee’s hilariously well-felt discussion of her actorly soul-searching trip to Africa, the wild risks she took, the whole month she spent outside of LA. Along with Richard Beymer’s rants about peyote or some such on the Amazon, it’s certainly the oddest and most, well, Lynchian of DVDs I’ve come across.
And for some reason today I have an overwhelming urge to read J.D. Salinger. Might be something to do with Igby Goes Down and The Royal Tenenbaums floating into my line of sight in these last couple of days.
The world turns slowly, strangely, and well. I speak in obtuse cliches. It is fun.
Posted by patrick at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2003
Fresh lick of paint
New entry, new journal system (Movable Type!), new website. Lovely lovely. I have tried to import most of the old stuff over, but as you can see everything’s got a weird title. You get that. Hopefully this will work better in the future. Onwards and upwards!
Posted by patrick at 01:25 AM
January 07, 2003
love
I’m not usually the sort of person who would link to a dodgy and somewhat wacky scientific study, but what the hell.
Posted by patrick at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)