September 2003 Archives

Nate used to be a client of mine at Microsoft. Now he's busted out of the coop and let it be known he's doing cool shit. Wow.

Arrived in the mail today: Vijay Prashad's Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Nice. Perhaps I'll be able to pull myself out of this goddamn inertia.

Watching a White Stripes video. I'm into Hipster New Rock as much as the next person, but gawd, those guys have got nothing on that true original roots-punxter duo from the 1950s, The Collins Kids:

A brother-sister outfit that'll raise the hair on the back of your neck. Lorrie and Larry Collins. They'd eat Meg and Jack, the Kills and whoever else for breakfast. Kill 'em dead. (Perhaps I'm reading too much into their super-heavy, wholesome yelping -- perceiving an edge that's not there. But who cares?)

This is a conversation that my father recorded when I was about five years old, after I'd had a dream:

I fell down onto Hell. There was fire -- it was all red.

Did you see any people?

I saw some skeletons.

Were the skeletons moving?

No... they were dead people.

Did you see anyone else?

Oh yes... I saw the Devil! He had blue lips.

Did he have any teeth?

Sharp teeth. He made a fence of a his teeth.

A what?

A fence. Well, I was lying down on Hell, and the Devil -- he had sharp teeth. Then he took out his teeth, and made them into a fence, around me.

Amongst all the crap, at least some things cheer me up. This is my niece, Sarah. I think she knows that it's endearing to refer to herself in the third person, but that's perfectly okay with me.

Edward Said is dead.

Today I bought a DVD burner. (I bought my Mac about a month before the DVD-burning SuperDrive was introduced, and this really rankled.) Of course, this third-party consumer burner isn't supported by Apple software, but all it took was editing a couple of characters in a device file, and boom, instant workage! The hardest thing was getting the old drive out of its enclosure -- the power cable was stuck in its socket. I eventually had to use a door key to lever it out. Again: I used a fucking door key to unlock a blockage in my computer. How cool is that?

Are you the Gatekeeper? I am the Keymaster. Okay, okay, I'm going to bed now.

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Before I fall asleep: tomorrow I am going to buy some GUITAR STRINGS. This, of course, has NOTHING to do with any nonsense about a Christina Aguilera hardcore cover band. Not at all. (I'm just stringing you along, Shane. Or am I?)

Okay, okay, I've finally gotten around to supplying a free download of the "Magneto Was Right" t-shirt. The Omega Gang symbol on the back of the original is supplied separately. You can use these PDF files as the basis for a screenprint, or else print them on positive-reading iron-on-transfer paper (i.e. the stuff you don't have to turn over to iron on). If you only have access to reverse-reading transfer paper and your printer driver doesn't have the option to reverse your printouts, then download these here files. As so many people have noticed, if you're going to iron it on, use a type of transfer paper that's NOT billed as "appropriate for dark t-shirts", otherwise you'll be stuck with a white background.

Dream #1
Superhumans in captivity: a closed circuit television system watches a bunch of variously-powered people in caged enclosures. A zoo. Click. Some kind of fish-man. Click. An impossibly nimble Chinese woman does a reverse tumble along the top of a thin wall. Click. There's an unspoken understanding that their biographies are like those of characters in a beat-em-up game like Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat. Suddenly I've become the Chinese woman, and all hell breaks loose as the captives all break through their individual enclosures and into each others' habitats. I'm face to face with the fish man -- his torso looks just like a salmon fillet -- and I suddenly discover my Special Attack Move: like Mr Snow from Planetary, I extend my hands and freeze Salmon Fillet Man dead.

Dream #2
It's Virginia in the 19th Century. An aristocratic Skeet Ulrich, in bumpy demon-face, strangles a 15-year-old boy, who slumps to the floor of the courtyard, lifeless. Blood sweating in a strange pattern from his palms, Ulrich places his hands on what seems to be some ornamental gothic masonry and pours energy into them, creating two Hellhounds. These slavering beasts, whose eyes are horribly black and round, are made to kill his wife. My party of men arrives, though, and somehow this changes Ulrich's schedule, even though we appear familiar. His demon-face receding, he pronounces his Hellhounds imperfect and corrrupted, and hands me two droppers of poison. I stand nervously on an upholstered armchair as the Hellhounds snap upward at me, and I let small droplets of poison fall into their mouths...
          Hours later, in silhouette: the boy's body lies on a wheeled stretcher in a morgue. Curtains part, and a woman leans into view. She whispers:

          "Whore! Whoreboy! I need a piece of you."

Still in silhouette, we see a pseudopod blossom out of his back and through the stretcher on which he lies, and it faces upwards, listening, flowering into some kind of sensory organ, like a huge orchid. It is here we realise that he is a kind of doubled being -- his tentacled monster-half always on his back, but usually hidden. Perhaps we are all like this. The woman leaves. As she moves out of frame, more silhouetted tentacles extend from him like a plant growing at hyperspeed, tending toward her as young shoots do toward the sun, in a kind of inhuman desire.

In a strangely self-orientalising turn, last night I bought my mum some Chinese journal-writing books for her birthday. You know, with intricate gold patterns stamped on the cover. How "Chinese-y". Where will this self-fetishisation of culture end? God, next I might actually make good on writing my epic hip-hop/kung-fu novel of an alternative "racial history", Soldiers of the Margin. (Imagine a Wu-Tang-ish cross between Crouching Tiger and Samuel R Delaney's Tales of Neveryon.) My brother bought Mum an exquisite orchid, and took some long minutes deciding between what looked like identical plants. I mean, he actually knows people who appear in Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. (They didn't make it into Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, tho, sadly.)

More death dreams: while parking the car in a dark alley, we accidentally crush the head of a homeless man who'd been sleeping in the gutter. His head actually breaks open!

Now that I'm kinda on a roll with the whole t-shirt thing, I thought I'd make available the one the kickstarted my whole pop-politics trip... Buy! Buy now! (Bwa-ha-ha...)

My latest t-shirt. I've always wanted to rebrand Cosmopolitan as an ironically crazy-radical fantasy mag called Cosmopol. Imagine!

New at the Antipopper store. Until Marvel's lawyers start knocking.

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Record hits! Slavering fanboys R us, it would seem. I felt naughty at the prospect of making some cash from Grant and Frank's work, so there's no markup on these t-shirts. The only person making money is The Man! Only, it's the wrong Man! Death to profiteering!

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Update: now available for free!

Watching the Twin Peaks first season box set. Yes, I know Lynch is a reactionary fetishist, but it plays out very nicely, don't you think? The nostalgia in Twin Peaks for an imaginary age of National Innocence -- implied by a kind of pre-'60s portrait of American town life -- isn't simply a pat nostalgia. But neither does the show's knowing invocation of this in order to deal with an assumed "underside" of corruption somehow exempt it from challenge, since all this playing with binary caricatures really does tend to reinforce them, rather than subvert. Which is the horrible problem with most of Lynch's work -- there seems to be no escape from these tacky symbols of good and evil. But at its best, this flavour of troubled innocence recalls the bittersweet Americana that the Beach Boys mined in the late '60s and early '70s. It's no wonder, then, that Van Dyke Parks (the Beach Boys' lyricist for the unfinished Smile album, which gave us the Americana epic "Heroes and Villains") plays Leo Johnson's lawyer in the second season! Also: the DVD commentaries are all couched within the techniques of working within an ensemble, which I found really interesting, since most DVD commentaries seem to be auterist musings. And Audrey Horne rocks. And what is it about sassy headgear? Lara Flynn Boyle in a cap is almost as good as Sarah Michelle Gellar's beanie in Season 3 of Buffy!

Real Life Tie-In: Amber-from-Microsoft's dad owns the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks! It's just north of Seattle -- makes sense. (And speaking of Strange Microsoft Women, Jyoti-from-Microsoft is in a band! She gonna send me some MP3s!)

In the meantime, I feel like I'm really running on empty in terms of anything that could possibly Mean Something. Am I bored, or stuck in a well? Perhaps it's time to panic.

Well, this is at least interesting: more violent dreams. A couple of nights ago, a World War II historical thriller: I'm torn apart by a bunch of refugees on a boat for being a Nazi collaborator. And I think I was! And last night, it's open season in a huge mansion. Guns, planks of wood, you name it. And again, I'm mortally wounded by a team of people... for some kind of revenge.

Wow, I totally forgot that the video store doofus in The Lost Boys was the Big Bad! Lena didn't remember either, but felt it almost immediately anyway -- sometimes I'm so utterly naive in my entertainment spectatorship... What, X is really M in disguise? Huh? (The thing is, I actually enjoyed that aspect of the contentious New X-Men #146; what really shat me was the strange lapses in pacing and layout, combined with that awful trad-Marvel dialogue. I know it's probably high-camp parody, given the revelations in the content, but it still strikes me as Lazy Morrison.)

Funny Lost Boys things: the guys in your comic book store are actually vampire-slaying, survivalist nutters. Kiefer Sutherland in vamp-face! Incredibly bad music! Incredibly good music! A weird feeling about Richard Donner and Joel Schumacher being your typical, workaday entertainers-without-signature of '80s Hollywood, who actually entertain... sometimes. This lack of "style" explains how Schumacher could have given us both the camp classic Batman Forever (a great, lunatic up-yours to Tim Burton's "sound" but ultimately laboured vision) and the flaccid mess that was Batman and Robin. Sometimes there's a great dumb popcorn movie, other times it's "death to Joel Schumacher!". A shrug and a whatever. This lack of overarching auteur "vision", which on a philosophical level was probably reason enough to incite the fanboy jihad, is actually rather refreshing on some levels.

Whenever I visit people's homes, I always go for the bookshelves, noting the books we have in common. It'd be interesting to imagine what people make of mine. This morning I was reading an essay by John Fowles, in which he excuses his indiscriminate, magpie-like approach to book collecting with a great line: "a bad novel tells you more about the age it was written in than a good one". Cool: now I don't have to justify the "whateverness" of my bookshelves. Bride of the Rat God lies nestled next to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations. Jack Williamson's Trapped in Space! next to Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Punctuated by a stack of sheer uselessness: I don't really play computer games, but I went through a phase of obsessively collecting a gaming magazine, EDGE, because I loved the turn of its form. The Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan "photonovelisation" next to Henri Leferbvre. Bizarre and average and wonderful stuff, all put together with a great shrug. (Same with my music; I'm sure all you musicbloggers would be horrified by the ill considered guff in my large pool of mediocre tunes.) I'm notorious for refusing people's recommendations, which I'm sure are quite reliable. But I really can't be bothered -- I like to rant about how much I'm against literature, but perhaps this resistance to canons is not so much a positive radicalism than a kind of lazy indifference on my part. And I like it this way. Anything too consistent isn't tangential enough for me.

Dream #1:
He has discovered us disposing of the body. So he has to die, too. She begins bashing him with a lead pipe. Blood and brains spraying everywhere, all over us, all over the walls. I'm hysterical: "How are we going to clean all of this up? We can't clean this."

Dream #2:
I have unwittingly created some mutant monsters in the kitchen by exposing ordinary creatures to toxic chemicals. It becomes a legal scandal, and I have to present the monsters in a court of law. First, Exhibit A: the screaming slugs. I open a jar of these disgusting creatures, take one out with a pair of chopsticks, and place it in a parabolic metal dish, like a wok or a set of scales. It starts to scream -- a high-pitched squealing -- and begins to slither out of the dish. I have to repeatedly pick it up and set it back down in the centre of the dish. The screaming gets a bit much, and frustrated, I place the slug between the pages of a thick book and start to squash it. The screaming stops, and I release the pressure, somehow under the impression that I shouldn't kill it, that I have some duty to keep it alive, but one at which I'm utterly incompetent or negligent. Exhibit B: the bitter ants. My chemicals have transformed ordinary household ants into large killer ants that are full of hate. Of course, my reflexes in this dreamworld are shot to shit, so I'm always slow to close the lid of the ant jar. They're running free and biting me and I think I bite them back and they taste awful.

Joss Whedon to write and direct Firefly: The Motion Picture.

Reading Susan Buck-Morss' The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, which Laleen Jayamanne recommended to me about a billion years ago.

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Silly fanboy moment: the Cuban Sentinels in this arc of Mystique (which I actually haven't read) are basically Evas from Evangelion! Brilliant! And also interesting, given that the Evangelion Evas are actually a kind of mutant human.

Doctor Who returns to Australia: 6pm Monday–Thursday, from 15 September on ABC TV. Note to self: buy fuckload of VHS tapes.

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Dropped in briefly to the Balloon Factory* Shop squatted social centre on the weekend, and props to those in the thick of it all. It's a struggle to create and defend spaces of radicality and fun, especially in a part of the world that just doesn't have the convenient critical mass (in terms of both sheer numbers and weight of various radical traditions) that Andrew's been blowing my mind with of late. So the fact that this shit happens in Sydney is worth celebrating even more!

* Okay Shane, but all the world's a social factory -- it's so sexy! :)

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After my brief "sectarian" (anti-Labor) contribution to the Tampa Day event, I nicked off to the movies and saw Morvern Callar on Flux's recommendation. Fuck! The endless line of compounded, inappropriate choices made by the main character in the wake of her boyfriend's suicide left me dazed. Her behaviour wasn't "immoral" or inconsistent; rather, it just really strayed from the kinds of moral gestures one expects from "well formed individuals". Which is interesting. And which fits in with the way the audience's sonic space could move from Morvern's walkman, out into the world, and back again, almost randomly. Leaky headphones, a subject in flight. Contrast this with the continual emphasis on her name, and the spaces that occupies. Interesting. Samantha Morton's performance was great, but I was more taken with the excellent non-actor Kathleen McDermott (who's actually an apprentice hairdresser) as Morvern's best friend Lanna. I don't think I've seen a performance so keenly, uh, mammalian. She rocks!

Jenny Everywhere is everywhere (via Plums). I feel like saying "oh Parker, well done!", 'cept that'd be silly.

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Been listening to the Pogues this morning, strangely enuf. In the early '90s I had some dealings with some earnest types who thought the glorious socialist future would be heralded by Celtic folkpunk and a bit of Billy Bragg. How wrong they were. Upon relistening, none of it's bad at all -- it's just the constellation of all that stuff as a kind of nostalgic identity politics that's so lame, and almost offensive. (I can just see those clueless boys, after a good day's macho antics to cover up their faithful tailing of social democracy, gazing into the distance and musing, "I just wanna find a good working class gell" in some fake "socialist worker" accent, and then start quoting tearily from Trotsky's last testament: "Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard.. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall...". Feh.) Although now the songs play in my head rather differently:

Kissed a grrl by the factory wall
Dirrty old town
Dirrty old town