Being the Adventures of Hedonism on a Budget.

2010-09-01T02:40:00.002+10:00

Hi. I moved here.

Ein Volk, Ein Reich

2009-12-15T19:16:00.003+11:00

Obsessive rewatchings of the video clip to Midnight Oil's 1990 single One Country made me realise that it's been a long time since I read or watched anything that beamed with pride for this country, in all its diversity and beauty. Parts of this song could have easily lent themselves to becoming the jingo's national anthem ("One Country / One Vision / One People / One Landmass"), were it not for Peter Garrett's politics and a keyboard accompaniment that isn't exactly given to Ride of the Valkyries-style patriotic fervour.

Much of the intellectual impetus behind Australia's last conservative ascendancy came from the "culture wars", which like most conservative doctrines popularised by the Coalition since the end of the Fraser Government, was imported to our polity from the US a few years after it was first fashionable over there. In its Antipodean incarnation, the central tenet of the culture wars was that progressively-minded people sought to rewrite Australia's history in an excessively self-critical manner, especially with regards to the treatment of Aboriginal Australians from the colonial era to the present. The Melbourne University historian Geoffrey Blainey coined the phrase "black armband" to characterise those he considered to be unfairly advocating a view of history which tarnished Australia's past out of all proportion to the facts available from the historical record.

The conservative side of politics charged that the guilt associated with this black armband had made the Keating Government beholden to the demands of special interest groups, scornful of the nation's history and its institutions, and unduly disrespectful of Australia's past by initiating debates on a Republican referendum and changing the Australian flag. John Howard's Coalition came to power in a landslide victory with the slogan "For All of Us", and in an interview early into his first term declared that he would like the Australian people to be "comfortable and relaxed" about their history, their nation and their place in the world.

One Country should stand as a refutation of the central conceit behind Australia's culture wars - the idea that an examination of the untoward aspects of our historical record is only motivated by cultural cringe or some other deep and abiding loathing for this country. This song was written years before the first faint mumblings of the culture wars in this country, and there's more pride and reverence for Australia than in any rugby team mouthing along the words to the dirge of Advance Australia Fair or any group of drunken yobs fronting up to the dawn service at the Shrine of Remembrance after pulling an all-nighter for the midweek public holiday put together.

Abbott Agonistes

2009-12-10T12:27:00.000+11:00

From ABC Online, yesterday:

"It is just more than two years since the so-called Howard battlers booted the former prime minister from office, and now Tony Abbott says he is all about winning them back. The new Liberal Leader says he will dub them Abbott's Army.
"Obviously if you are going to win the election ... you've got to reach out to the middle ground and Howard's battlers, to use that phrase, were basically working people who respected John Howard because he thought that in his own way he was one of them,' he said..."

From AdelaideNow, March 21st, 2008:

"...But among those hit hard in the bank balance by the Liberal election loss was former health minister Tony Abbott, who now is Opposition indigenous affairs spokesman.
Mr Abbott has daughters at private schools and admits to suffering from "mortgage stress" in paying for the Upper North Shore home bought in 1994.
In January he told The Australian, 'You don't just lose power . . . you certainly lose income as well and if you are reliant on your parliamentary salary for your daily living, obviously it makes a big difference.'"

This is Manly, where Tony Abbott's electoral office is located:

This is a typical house in the Upper North Shore:

As of September 2009, the annual salary for a backbencher is $131,040, not including an electoral allowance of $27,300 for an electorate of Abbott's size - together, that's two and a half times the average weekly earnings of adults working in the labour force full-time across the country. Let's not forget that by virtue of his time in Parliament, Abbott will enjoy superannuation benefits many degrees more generous than an employee of any other industry in this country, and will be entitled to free domestic travel for the rest of his life when issued with a Gold Pass upon his retirement.

That Abbott would bust out the old >"battler" chestnut - leaving aside the fact that Howard never used such a condescending word to describe his constituency - is futher testament to a career in public life which is profoundly devoid of any genuine empathy. If he's not insulting terminally ill asbestos victims and then offering a weasel apology, he's claiming that a mortgage and children in private education make him some sort of everyman. He's cut from the same cloth as Sarah Palin, all righteous outrage and ignorant dilletantism in every policy area imaginable, changing his mind on every issue because it's politically expedient or just because he felt like it, and getting into a huff and invoking the great ABC conspiracy whenever someone points out these contradictions.

EXO Records, love your work.

2009-12-09T13:17:00.001+11:00

A few weeks back I went to see Useless Children's album launch for Sky is Falling at the Northcote Social Club:

"Oh my God - it's full of stars!" (full disclosure: I get a thanks in the liner notes for being such a fanboy). A limited edition of 500, with 3D cover, the pressing number handwritten on the enclosed 3D glasses, the record itself on sky blue vinyl (Sky is Falling, geddit), an mp3 download card enclosed, and the cover itself unfolding vertically. The artwork for both is done by Xavier Irvine, who's put his talents to a number of EXO releases, including the final album of the label owner's now defunct band, Flesh vs. Venom:

I only got to see Flesh vs. Venom twice, including their final show at the East Brunswick Club last year. Their singer was terrifying to behold: picture a rather pregnant woman dressed entirely in white and looking every bit the cross between - after searching and failing to find with a metaphor that doesn't make me sound like I sit in a dark room with a belt around my neck, masturbating the day away - Cate Blanchett as ethereal, wizened, immortal Lord of the Rings elf queen and Cate Blanchett as Little Fish former junkie trying to make good in the western suburbs of Sydney while being constantly reduced to tears as a result of close proximity to multicultural childrens' choirs singing Cold Chisel songs about yearning for a childhood love after returning to your small town in regional NSW only to be confronted by your inability to bridge nostalgia and the tedium of reality without getting completely shitfaced at the local pub during happy hour. Yep, pretty much exactly like that. I didn't take my eyes off the stage for the entire hour of their set, and after the lights went up it took me a minute or two to realise that they had actually finished.

Which is what you want, really. It's a rare and an incredible experience to be lulled into a trance-like state for that long by four people, their instruments, the guy behind the mixer and the guy next to the lights, in an age where telecommunications technologies bear an inversely proportional relationship to our attention spans. Could I concentrate on anything else that long? Hell no! I smoked a cigarette in the middle of constructing the third-to-last sentence. I'm too neurotic for sex to be a panacea for thinking too hard. I read books to avoid eye contact on public transport. This band is a bulwark against my enslavement by the machines, I tell you, and if I had things like charisma, sex appeal and the ability to play keyboard beyond a Grade 2 level, I would definitely be spending all my time trying to emulate these guys. And every time I played, I would definitely be setting up a projector with subliminal messages telling people to kill.

To say nothing of how amazing Useless Children are (which I feel is self-evident, anyway), it's beautiful that EXO were willing to throw so much money behind a band they believed in. They picked up Useless Children halfway through the recording of their first EP, paid all the manufacturing costs, and bankrolled the album and its stunning accoutrements.

It certainly throws into stark relief the contempt with which the music industry at large treats consumers. Having grown up in an era where major labels would charge $29.95 for a CD in a jewel case with one sheet of shitty artwork (excepting the period of the introduction of the GST, where the abolishment of sales tax meant prices were reduced to $29.50 for about six weeks before shooting straight back up), it still galls me to no end that we have the Recording Industry Association of America throwing millions at mountinglegal action against music pirates in a cost-benefit approach to discourage a practice that is never going to end. Crying foul about lost revenue is hard to abide when the last big consolidation of the major labels - the acquisition of PolyGram by Universal and the merger of Sony and BMG - started in the late nineties, back when music piracy involved uploading fifty mp3s to an FTP site in exchange for half a Metallica album, downloaded at the revolutionary rate of three kilobytes per second. So there's been layoffs, so what? Between them, the Big Four still account for more than four fifths of music sales across the world. What's a few less A&R people when you have MySpace anyway? If anything, the internet should be reducing these sorts of overheads. What's a few less indulgences for your talent, when the whole history of artistry suggests that having a fuckload money is anathema to creative enterprises? Meanwhile, walk into any Sanity store and you'll still see rows and rows of shitty jewel cases, the ones where all the little pins that hold the CD will snap off in your bag on the way home, because all the money behind the project been put into an advertising blitz on TV stations that nobody watches and paying kickbacks to DJs on radio stations that nobody listens to.

The Dark Ages.

Meanwhile, a little label with fuck-all money run out of a Brunswick bar manages to scrape together enough money to constantly release musical and aesthetic masterpieces. Any expectation of profit is conspicuously absent, rather the venture is run to facilitate the artists they believe in. There's probably a wall somewhere in the East Brunswick club with a framed note signed in Kody's own blood, à la Tony Wilson but without the God complex. So, I reckon you should by this album. And if you do, you can use the 3D glasses to watch this other EXO wunderband:

Review: Frank Hardy's Four Legged Lottery

2009-12-08T02:21:00.000+11:00

I picked this up at a market immediately after reading what, unfortunately, is the only thing the author is remembered for these days besides his dreamboat progeny. Aside from being an artful portrait of Lord Acton's rule, Power Without Glory painted a lucid and lurid picture of turn of the century Australiana: horse racing, the back alleys and squalour of Collingwood one hundred years prior, the World War I conscription debate, the radicalism of the thirties and the Movement Against War and Fascism, and a half century of political influence peddling across the country. The book's closing pages prophesy the split in the Labor Party, as we see the beginnings of a thinly disguised Archbishop Daniel Mannix using the Catholic Church's influence on working-class politics to prevent the Communist takeover of trade unions in Melbourne.

The novel's subject, John Wren, was still alive when the novel was published in 1950. His towering influence over inner-city Labor Party and union affairs meant the book had to be printed in secret and at night in union offices by sympathetic Communist Party of Australia union officials. At the end of a printing run, the area was scoured to prevent any loose pages being left around, lest unionists allied or indebted to Wren caught wind of it. Once it was released, the book was sold behind the counter in pubs around inner-Melbourne. Later that year, Hardy was arrested and tried for criminal libel, the last ever such case in Victoria before the crime was abolished - Hardy was acquitted after arguing the novel was a mixture of fact and fiction. Amazingly, the prosecution did not contest the assertions that Wren had sought to influence politicians, set up a massive illegal gambling enterprise and order the murder of his rivals - rather, it was argued that the book tarnished Wren's reputation by implying that he had had an affair.

It is testament to Hardy's meticulousness that his portrait of John Wren is remembered by more people than the subjects of his novel. Squizzy Taylor might be an eager discussion point for those boring sorts who cream their pants over Melbourne's criminal history (it's thanks to you we have Underbelly, douchebags), James Scullin, Ted Theodore and Frank Anstey barely register as historical curiosities to the people of the suburbs and railway stations named for them (which is a shame, because Anstey authoring a book called "The Kingdom of Shylock" is always a fun fact to bust out during your run-of-the-mill discussion of anti-semitism in progressive political parties at your run-of-the-mill North Carlton dinner party), but Power Without Glory will always be central to the canon of Australian literature.

1958's The Four Legged Lottery is primarily a corollary to Power Without Glory: Hardy studied horse racing meticulously while researching Wren's beginnings as a starting price bookmaker, and its pages smell faintly of the author's catharsis. Paul Whittaker, an inmate of Pentridge Prison, regales us with the story of the tragic life of Jim Roberts, loveable scamp and charismatic punter, recently hanged for an unspecified crime. Whittaker takes us to Roberts' childhood in Richmond, back when that suburb had a socioeconomic profile comparable to downturn Durban and, sorry to say, Bridge Road had less than three gelato bars. Jim's dad Tom likes a flutter on the horses; Jim's mum Cissie epitomises Irish Catholic virtue. Early on, the family is nearly riven by Tom's gambling, which Cissie wearily tolerates until Tom bets well beyond his means - penitent, Tom pledges to give it up before quickly recommencing behind her back, having found nothing to fill the void in his life. Meanwhile Jim, seeking a paternal bond, begins to develop a vicarious interest in horse racing while being too young to grasp the deprivation it inflicts upon his family.

A few years later, the teenaged Jim is now an avid gambler in his own right, as his family grimly endures the seemingly unending Great Depression and stoically avoid the shame of going on the dole. (After getting to know more than a few proud Centrelink scammers in the last five years, I for one find it amazing that people in this country were ever prepared to starve themselves for the sake of maintaining society's good graces during an economic crisis brought about by the speculative frenzies of people living on the other side of the world, that only impacted the people most detached from its cause, and that only ended once hundreds of thousands of our best specimens were sent off to the slaughter in some of the most inhospitable places on the planet... but it certainly helps explain why the annual Gallipoli death cult is a public holiday. Frank Hardy would be proud of me!) Everything in Jim's life - his tenuous grip on his job at the local grocer, his courtship and marriage, his nascent artistic talents - are gradually marginalised as Jim channels all of his energies into the Saturday races. Several times he bets well beyond his means, raiding his football team's accounts and stealing a customer's bill while almost in a trance, his compulsion preventing him from understanding the gravity of his actions until the money is gone. His reputation is saved by a big win before anyone notices his indiscretions, but his wife abandons him with their young child after he squanders his army wages on a two-up school (based loosely on Hardy's wartime experience protecting the Northern Territory from the widely-feared but never-eventuated Japanese invasion).

Ten years later, Jim is now a 'professional gambler', making the acquaintance of the narrator when he opens an account for his winnings at Whittaker's Caulfield bank branch. Whittaker functions as the literary analogue to Edward Norton's narrator in Fight Club - uncomfortable with the rigidity of middle-class postwar life in the suburbs, utterly bored with his shrewish wife and yearning for a fraternal connection beyond his boozing and semi-competent manager. Whittaker is drawn to the charismatic Jim and his punting posse, starts lying to his wife in order to spend the weekend trackside, and slowly starts gambling beyond his means, precipitating the novel's denouement and Whittaker's proud confession that he has no regrets about his fall from bourgeois banality.

Where Power Without Glory was a story about the profiteer, The Four Legged Lottery is a story about the exploited. Here, we see the bitter adversity of people previously only glanced in passing as Wren's accusers. Hardy's own voice is strongest in the mouth of Jim's brother Gerald, a socialistically-inclined trade union official, but there is only one passage in the book where he is truly didactic:

"Under the system, once known as capitalism, now known as western democracy, gambling flourishes amongst the poorer classes. Commerce, industry, finance, advertising and gambling are all organised to drain the last shillings out of the working classes who produce all the wealth, I remember Gerald Roberts saying... Nowhere in the world is gambling more widely practiced than in Australia. Gambling is part of our national psychology, we proudly admit. Only the Americans can claim the dubious honour of gambling as much as we do. Gambling in Australia! Where else in the world are jockeys more revered than musicians and scientists? Where else in the world are the people's clubs dependent for their existence on poker machines? Where else in the world is a public holiday decreed for a horse race? Where else in the world is a famous racehorse stuffed and enshrined in a Museum?"

But that's about as overtly political as it gets - Gerald's occasional rhetorical indignation and a brief reference to the Menzies Government's attempts to outlaw the Communist Party serve more as a moral compass, an angel sitting on Whittaker's shoulder, than bombast. Hardy was a committed CPA member for fifty years until the party's dissolution in 1989; admittedly, my surprise at the subtlety and elegance of expression of Hardy's ideological hue probably owes a lot to the turgid stuff put out by his supposed successors. (Honestly, what the fuck? That article would make more sense if someone could introduce me to an SA member that wasn't perpetually flagellating themselves for their whitebread upbringing. By the way, for anyone with half an hour to kill, Paul Norton recently wrote an excellent history of the CPA on the 20th anniversary of its dissolution over at Larvatus Prodeo, with a namedrop or two for Hardy. Perhaps most surprising in Norton's article is his mention of the strong current of social conservatism running through the CPA's membership, and the party's resultant reluctance to embrace feminism, gay rights and the radical student movement in the 1960s - branding them "left deviationism" and "abandoning normal relations between man and woman". But I digress.)

Hardy manages to catalogue all of the most sordid features of the horse racing industry. The "urgers" getting all matey with mug punters at the track, encouraging them to bet on a horse sure to lose for a bookies' commission. The miserly bookmaker and the menace of his hired help. The doping of horses until their premature deaths. An enterprise built on human suffering, laid bare. And suffering we see, at its most abject. The book's final accomplishment is its psychology, not solely of gambling but its understanding of the mentality of addiction in general, though I'm not sure Hardy realised it could be extrapolated as such when he penned it. We see its most common antecedents twinned in Whittaker and the Roberts men, the archetypes of middle-class boredom and untermensch desperation. We see them steal, lie and manipulate to satiate their shameful needs, suspending their judgement to satisfy an unconscious urge and consuming themselves with guilt when their actions become clear. Whenever they appear on the verge of mental clarity, a big win saves them from certain ruin and the lessons are unheeded, edging them ever closer, sleepwalking, to their fate.

If only there were more like this, particularly at this point in time. Hardy would be outraged if he saw how much state Labor Governments had come to rely on gaming revenues in recent years. It's plainly apparent that both the major political parties treat the revenue stream as a primary concern and the social impact as an afterthought. In Victoria, where the state Government relies on gaming taxation for five percent of its revenue, the Liberal Party has dropped its opposition to an expansion of Crown Casino - already the largest casino in the Southern Hemisphere - after meeting with its owner, James Packer. The whole premise of the Liberals' reasoning is absurd. The problem gambling package proposed under the enabling legislation is about one percent of the revenue the deal is expected to generate for the Government and the Casino, yet the amount committed is praised as sufficient to reduce overall problem gambling. It's unfortunate that Tim Costello, Nick Xenophon, Stephen Mayne et. al. rely so heavily on numerical abstractions to make the case against a lassiez faire gambling regime (I'm pretty sure I've all heard them use the "one problem gambler affects seven people" figure). An intimate portrait of one's own ills is often their antidote, and while most problem gamblers these days have substituted Flemington Racecourse for cacking their pants on an eighteen hour pokie bender, Hardy still articulates the malady better than most.

Dr. Death and Mr. Rudd

2009-11-21T19:48:00.001+11:00

"Honey, I shrunk the kids":
Declassified Cabinet documents reveal that
Kevin Rudd has secretly ordered ASIO to dispose
of anyone who can corroborate evidence of his past life
as kooky inventor Wayne Szalinski.

Jamie Walker's 1995 biography of former Queensland Premier Wayne Goss has a few valuable insights, not least because Kevin Rudd cut his political teeth as Goss's Chief of Staff in 1988:

"Like Goss, Rudd resented the fact that his home state had become a national joke under [former Qld Premier] Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He said he would like the opportunity to do something about that. The only condition Rudd set was that he got Sundays off. Goss liked his attitude and hired him. The shift back to Queensland was a risky move on Rudd's part. The polls had Labor's primary vote down to 38 percent at the state level, almost 4 points below the bleak 1986 election result. Rudd had been granted leave of absence from his post, but he was still stepping off the career fast-track at Foreign Affairs. He had served in two missions - Stockholm and Beijing - and his work in Foreign Affairs' policy planning branch in Canberra was highly regarded... Yet after seven years in the department, he was restless. As he told Goss, he wanted to do more than write reports. Speaking like the diplomat he was, Rudd recalls: "I think I came to the conclusion that your ability to actively influence any direction of policies which resulted in anything actually changing was remote, so I began to find that professionally frustrating."

Yep, still prolix and aloof. Don't worry Kev, we find it frustrating too. Under a preordained relationship, the Labor Party's State Secretary Peter Beattie stepped down from his position in 1988 to nominate for a seat in state parliament (ultimately becoming Premier in 1998 after a brief period of National Party rule); Wayne Swan (now Treasurer in the Rudd Government) was elected Assistant State Secretary and served as campaign director during the party's successful 1989 campaign.

Rudd's first task after Goss's victory was the rationalisation of the Queensland public service, which had swollen to 27 departments and basically did little more than function as an appendage of the National Party's rural pork-barrelling. A fortnight after the election of the Goss Government, nine departments were abolished and 18 departmental secretaries had tendered their resignation. One of the truisms of three decades of public service reform in Australia: if you want a public service that is more malleable and less likely to leak and embarrass the Government, the best remedy is to make everyone shitscared about losing their jobs. Walker recalls:

"...His immediate concern was to impose the same, tight system of control that had been central to Labor's electoral success. Kevin Rudd would develop the fearsome reputation reflected by his nickname - Dr. Death - by ruthlessly reordering the internal workings of government."

Which is faintly amusing, in a morbid sorta way. The Dr. Death moniker was more famously applied in Queensland to Jayant Patel, a former doctor at Bundaberg Base Hospital who has been linked to at least 87 deaths at the hospital between 2003 and 2005. The state department responsible for the hospital, Queensland Health, was accussed of gross negligence in hiring Patel in the first place - he had previously been stripped of his licence to practice in the US - while senior bureaucrats in the department were accused of covering up complaints against the doctor and orchestrating a campaign to ostracise whistleblowers. Gordon Nuttal - then state Health Minister, now in jail on unrelated corruption charges - was investigated by the Crime and Misconduct Commission for misleading a Parliamentary Estimates Committee about his knowledge of the scandal.

Onward to the Gulag

2009-09-05T13:59:00.005+10:00

I picked this up a little while back at Trades Hall Council's annual Little Red Book Sale. Given the parlous state of unionism in Australia and its attendant image problem, you could be forgiven for thinking that naming your fundraising activities after a compendium of meaningless slogans that people had to carry at all times if they wanted to avoid being shot might be a tad counterintuitive... but oh well. Australia's Way Forward is the 1964 platform of the Communist Party of Australia (price: three shillings!) as ratified by the 20th National Congress of the CPA in Sydney. From the introduction, Australia Today:

"Australia's monopoly capitalist owners make their profit not only from investment at home. They increasingly draw profit also from the resources and labor of the peoples of New Guinea, Papua, other Pacific islands and countries of South-East Asia.

In this way, Australia has become an imperialist power, side by side with the United States, British, Japanese and other powers exploiting this region.
The class of owners of the Australian economy is dominated by about 60 very rich Australian families and various overseas interests with whom they are frequently allied.

These families are divided into several groups, the most powerful being that centred on the Broken Hill Pty. Ltd. steel giant, with headquarters in Melbourne.

The monopoly families, headed by the Darlings, Baillieus, Knoxes, Fairfaxes and their close associates, tied by mutual investments, intermarriage and their exclusive social circles, are the real ruling class of Australia."

Some of this warrants further comment. Papua New Guinea was a colony of Australia inherited from Germany at the end of World War I, granted independence under the Whitlam Government in 1975. Much to the chagrin of many of PNG's indigenous communities, the country's economy is still overwhelmingly dependent on foreign investment in mining, which has diversified from an Australian monopoly in the decades following independence. BHP's copper mine on the Ok Tedi river caused major environmental damage, and the 50,000 odd villagers living downstream from the river have had to contend with a water supply contaminated with copper and mining byproducts, which as you'd expect, killed most of the fish and impacted the wider ecosystem. While the community which lived in the vicinity of the Ok Tedi mine was consulted about its development, none of the people living downstream from the mine were included in the discussions.

After merging with rival mining giant Billiton in 2001, Broken Hill Pty. realised that Ok Tedi was more trouble than it was worth, and sold off a controlling stake in the mine to a development fund for the PNG economy. In 2007, a class action was launched against BHP Billiton on behalf of villagers living by the Ok Tedi river. The lawsuit is seeking US$4bn in damages; a 1990s lawsuit on behalf of a different tribe was settled by BHP for US$28m.

BHP Billiton has since divested itself of its steel and shipping operations to focus on mining, and why not? An old maxim of Australia's political classes, "What's Good for BHP is what's good for Australia", is reflected in the title of Alan Trengrove's 1975 history of the company. Obviously, not something you say aloud in Wollongong, Newcastle or any other place where the price of this corporate restructuring was thousands of job losses, chronic unemployment, and the economic devastation of the local community - and where the result of such an egregious faux pas is more often a karate kick to the teeth than a raised eyebrow and a chorus of Well I Nevers.

The Fairfaxes refers to the dynastic Fairfax media empire, nowadays publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, amongst others. It's easy to forget how stultifyingly conservative these broadsheets were back in the 1960s, as opposed to the heady mix of social liberalism and inner-urban circle-jerkism that we know them for today. (Case in point on the latter: The Sunday Age has a new reader-submitted section on the back page: "You Know You're in Melbourne When..."; a typical submission: "Your son's under 12 soccer team is sponsored by a coffee chain". Yes, we're cultural. Christ, we get it already.) After Warwick Fairfax tried to buy out the rest of his family back in 1987, the company collapsed, and the only tie to the company's familial origins is its name.

Baillieus refers to the Melbourne family of Liberal Party politicans and businessmen. The Baillieu dynasty was founded by William, a former Victorian Government minister and board member of Carlton Breweries, the Herald and Weekly Times (now part of the Murdoch stable), and Dunlop. The Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne is named for him and his philanthropy. Ted Baillieu is Victoria's incumbent opposition leader, and his life reads like the CV of your typical member of the landed gentry: brought up in the Vile Bodies wonderland of Toorak, educated at Melbourne Grammar and Melbourne University, an architect by profession before being parachuted into the safe seat of Hawthorn. Still, it's hard to give credence to the idea of an oppressive, scheming family in thrall to the boss class when Ted's sister is an anti-development campaigner on the Mornington Peninsula.

The second half of Australia's Way Forward deals with the CPA's agrarian program. Apart from this being the most urbanised country in the world, the utter futility of a bunch of commos pandering to Australia's deeply conservative rural bloc would surely not have been lost on the party's headkickers. The breakdown in diplomacy between the Soviet Union and Communist China led to wider ructions in communist parties across the world, with Australia being no exception. A few months after the publication of Australia's Way Forward, a breakaway group from the CPA formed a rival pro-Maoist party, ironically named the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), which had it's strongest base in the militant Builders Labourers Federation and the student population of my esteemed institution, Monash University - for most of the sixties and seventies considered the most radical university in the country (my, how times have changed...). Including a 40 page treatise about what the Glorious Revolution means for the farmers is an obvious last-ditch sop to those members on the verge of defecting to the CPA-ML.

Apart from little peculiarities - for instance, dropping the u in 'labour' in the tradition of semantic progressivism - the most striking thing about the booklet is how little has changed in the discourse of radical activists in the forty-five years hence. Swap a few of the names, update with reference to a few more (Filthy Imperialist) wars, and any extract of the book is the sort of thing you'd expect to hear coming out of the megaphone of, say, the campus-based Socialist Alternative or the youth wing of the DSP, Resistance.

It's a long-held truism of contemporary radical authors and academics that progressive voices have lost the means to be effectively heard as an opposition to the prevailing global order. Clive Hamilton's Quarterly Essay What's Left? is the seminal Antipodean version of this complaint. Yet after years and years of agonising, here we sit, still, where the first principles of any socialistically-inclined activist either involve pretending that the Wall never came down (and in case you were in any doubt, here), or bemoaning the fact that the word "bourgeois" can nowadays only be deployed with an appropriate ironic smirk, without understanding this and working within it.

Honestly. If someone who's spent the formative years in this decade suddenly gains a perspective on the world that leaves them deeply upset with the state of things - and deeply unsatisfied with any of the available means of redress - there's not much to be found from the distant days of Charles Dickens factories and the British East India company. And even if they want some kind of historical perspective, if they want to divine the sum total of grand insights that Marx shat out over the typewriter and cigars unflinchingly provided to him by his factory-owning industrialist BFF over a fair chunk of the nineteenth century, well. It's thesis number eleven, bitches.

Tim Holding makes for a shit Kesslee.

2009-08-30T17:35:00.014+10:00

Today, metropolitan Melbourne's water storage is at 28.3% of capacity, down five percent from this time last year and with more than twelve years elapsed since capacity was above ninety percent. Thomson Dam - twice as large as all of Melbourne's other catchments combined - currently sits at just over seventeen percent of capacity; further depletion will result in a number of logistical issues regarding the water's quality and the extra energy required to feed it into Melbourne's network. Here's a map of rainfall in Victoria over the last month measured against historical trends:

OMG, indeed. Now, you might be wondering why more people aren't expressing a level of concern on par with this chap:

Gratuitous use of caps lock, errors of fact (water wholesale, retail and infrastructure businesses in Melbourne are all administered by Government boards), weird semi-naked woman animated GIF and possible embellishments aside, fair enough right? Quickly vanishing water supply plus biggest population surge in forty years is cause for alarm, surely?

The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the Victorian Government is taking a remarkably chillax, bro attitude to the issue. Stage 3 water restrictions were brought into force on the 1st of January, 2007; a hurried mish-mash of restrictions in Stages 3 and 4 Stage 3a was introduced three months later as a means of reducing the chance that Stage 4 water restrictions would have to be implemented. (The impetus for this policy was of course Melbourne Water's nationally-acclaimed "Sit Around and do Fuck All" modelling, which forecast that on a long enough timescale, the probability of enough rainfall to end a decade-long drought would equal 1, so we're sweet mate.) Stage 4 was meant to be introduced once dam levels hit 29 percent. Water Minister Tim Holding ruled out applying Stage 4 restrictions when this happened at the end of March; interestingly, this time round Mr. Holding didn't use the potential harm to the state's economy (that old chestnut!) as an excuse for vetoing an implementation of Stage 4.

From Oct 26th, 2008:

"With such restrictions likely to have a huge impact on jobs, gardens and sports grounds, a government source last night said stage 4 bans would almost certainly not be implemented
'In these economic times, it's highly unlikely we're going to initiate a restriction that would have such an impact on jobs,' the source said."

Yes, bugger the drinking water, what about my jobs?! And my azaleas! From Mar 30th, 2009:

"Water Minister Tim Holding said the combination of Stage 3a restrictions and the new Target 155 campaign meant Melburnians were already facing tough water rules.

Melbourne Water policy states that 29.3 per cent is the trigger point for Stage 4 water restrictions in any month of the year. But Mr Holding said the State Government no longer used the trigger point formula to set water restrictions.

'We are not using trigger points because we need to take into account not only the level of water in the storages but the amount of demand there is on those storages,' he told 3AW."

Ah yes, the Target 155 campaign. Party political advertising masquerading as a public awareness campaign is so hot right now, it's easy to forget old mate Steve Bracks did for state-sanctioned agitprop what Hugo Boss did for the SS. The Target 155 campaign epitomises the Government's vacilating attitude to water resources even more completely than "3a" - try and use less than 155 litres of water a day, but no dramas if you can't. Credit where it's due though: the ads serve more of a public good than the irritatingly mindless "It's Part of the Plan" public transport ads. (Yes, and may we ask, now that it's been a good four years that you've been lauding your various plans over us, is it part of the plan to build a new fucking rail line, anywhere, anytime soon? Oh, right, the Federal Government's stimulus package is only going to infrastructure that expedites the whole process of shipping out brown coal and shipping in whitegoods. I'll walk then, shall I?)

The real trouble with Target 155, however, is the tone. Here's a sample of the latest round of ads (photography by the rather amazing Hugh Peachey.

(Subtext: "What's wrong? Aren't you man enough to take four minute showers?")

(Subtext: "...prick.")

(Subtext: "I am a dedicated family man. You are a drain on society and history's greatest monster.")

Have the Brumby Government's ad men really decided that this the best method of coercion? Surely they haven't forgotten the truisms of passive-aggressive behaviour:

1) We will start doing what you tell us, just to shut you up;
2) We will bitterly resent you for being such a douche about things;
3) We will eventually stop doing what you tell us for no other reason than to undermine you, for we are even more maladjusted than you are, and fantasising about punching you in the face has become the focal point of our existence.

Like up the top of the page, for instance. We got some Target 155 propaganda in our water bill, informing us that we were using 815 litres of water and offering a comparative chart. You've got to love the inference. "You're not doing your part unless you have at least six people in your house. And I bet you don't, you fucking degenerate!" Well, as it happens, thankyou very much, I'm one of seven in my household. Honestly people, all I want is a bit of positive reinforcement. Maybe the next quarter, you could send us something like this instead:

Then maybe I could feel like my poor standards of hygiene are a means to a better end (a better end than crotch rash, at least). Honestly, if they want us to feel like we can make a difference, this is the way to do it. There's nothing like a little self-esteem boost to stop you dwelling on the fact that household usage accounts for only eight percent of total water consumption.

Update 31/8: Oooh, bad timing.

Pardon me? What did I do all day? I am so glad you asked.

2009-08-19T23:12:00.003+10:00

Update:

M.U.A.! Here to Stay!

2009-08-19T11:38:00.003+10:00

This was sent to me by my dear friend Julia, who works for Unions ACT up in my glorious hometown of Canberra. Sadly, not an authentic relic of the 1998 Waterfront dispute - this shirt was made for extras in the ABC's 2007 dramatisation, Bastard Boys:

Gawd, a bit cringeworthy in parts, innit? Here's a basic rundown of the waterfront dispute. The Howard Government drafted major changes to industrial relations in its first year of office. In short, the 1996 Workplace Relations Act was designed to reduce collective bargaining and thus diminish union power. Because the Democrats had the balance of power in the Senate, the legislation was substantially amended and watered down from the Coalition's original intent (it wasn't until the Government achieved an upper house majority after the 2004 elections that the rest of the Coalition's desired IR changes were shunted through, this time in the form of WorkChoices).

In 1997, the Productivity Commission released a report into Australian shipping practices which showed that our ports were among the least productive and least cost-effective in the world. The majority of Australia's imports and exports passed through the ports, and thus the waterfront was having an adverse effect on the rest of the economy. The Howard Government was eager to test the provisions of the Workplace Relations Act, and the stevedoring company Patrick Corporation was eager to improve productivity at its ports. The Government colluded with Patrick to fire the unionised workplace and replace them with labourers on individual workplace agreements.

Cue strikes, violent confrontations on Melbourne's docks, and a High Court decision finding in favour of the Maritime Union of Australia. The dispute made the career of Greg Combet, who eventually succeeded Bill Kelty as secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and is now in the outer ministry of the Rudd Government. It also made Patrick CEO Chris Corrigan one of the most reviled men in Australia. In the longer term, the de facto MUA closed shop workplace on Australia's ports ended, productivity tripled, and the dock workforce was eventually halved through redundancies and the increase of casual employment. Patrick Corporation was subject to a hostile takeover by transport giant Toll Holdings in 2006 after bitter wrangling, legal proceedings and the intervention of the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission.

Bastard Boys was released in 2007, to the vocal condemnation of the Coalition Government; John Howard called it "One of the most lopsided pieces of political propaganda I've seen on the national broadcaster in years". More illuminating is the ABC's retrospective, The Howard Years, which chronicles the waterfront dispute in its first episode. Peter Reith, who served as Industrial Relations Minister for most of the first term, offers a defence of Patrick's actions in terms of the national economic interest, while repeatedly washing his hands of the affair or claiming that he can't remember - only to be repeatedly contradicted by both Howard and Corrigan in the following scenes.

I remain to be convinced that the Howard Government and Patrick needed to go to the lengths they did in order to reform the Australian waterfront; at the same time, I tend to agree that waterfront reform was needed. My dad spent most of the nineties working on iron ore tankers for BHP, and I'm inclined to believe his stories about the horrible racket and standover tactics for which pre-1998 Australian stevedoring was renowned. When the dispute was in full swing, the MUA approached his professional association, the Australian Institute of Marine and Power Engineers, to seek a sympathy strike. They were rather promptly and in no uncertain terms told to piss off. As I am unlikely to meet any dockworkers in the course of my casual strolls down Rathdowne Street, I guess his perspective on the ports will have to stand.

Above everything, I love that phrase "PEACEFUL ASSEMBLY" emblazoned on the front. Quite apart from the history of the Painters and Dockers (many members of which were later incorporated into the MUA during the Hawke Government's forced union amalgamations), I have vivid memories of the dispute on the nightly news from when I was eleven years old. Protestors linking arms and legs, the police forcibly removing people from the picket line, children as young as five or six crying hysterically while their sacked dockworker father gets bundled into the back of a paddywagon - not exactly a fucking candlelight vigil, is it?

Still, I can't wait to bust this thing out over summer. Thanks Julia!

This is Australia

2009-08-17T15:53:00.009+10:00

This was sent through to me by a friend who works in the electorate office of a southeast suburban state Labor MP. Apparently they’ve been plastered everywhere over Frankston over the last month and Mr. Harkness’s office has been inundated with calls.

Now, BoHo white boy that I am, I’ve only ever visited Dandenong and Frankston to raid their second hand stores of books, clothes and four dollar board games. I’ve been to both places four times. In Dandenong I see mainly a bunch of people minding their own business; in Frankston, I’ve seen groups of middle-aged white women passed out at the bus stop, with tourniquets still wrapped around their forearms, while scores of people walk past and redouble their own efforts at minding their own business. I’ve never seen a police officer in Dandenong; in Frankston, I’ve never been to through the station without seeing three cops milling about the entrance. Crime statistics on public transport show that the Frankston line is more dangerous than the Pakenham (and Cranbourne, which also runs through Dandenong, does not rate in the top four).

But let’s not rely on my folksy wisdom. Let’s see what our friends at the 2008-2009 Victorian Police crime statistics have to say! All statistics are for the Local Government Areas of the City of Greater Dandenong (including the suburbs of Dandenong, Noble Park and Springvale) and the City of Frankston (including Carrum Downs, Seaford and Frankston proper).

Rapes (per 100,000 population)
Frankston – 66.0
Dandenong – 34.8

Other sexual assaults (per 100,000)
Frankston – 147.1
Dandenong – 116.1

Assaults (per 100,000

Frankston – 957.6
Dandenong – 1050.7

Incidents of domestic violence [total charges / application for an intervention order] (total)
Frankston – 1439 [522 / 302]
Dandenong – 1323 [376 / 223]

Total property crime (per 100,000)
Frankston – 7333.3
Dandenong – 6444.7

Here’s some more numerical abstractions from the Australian Bureau of Statistics! Compare them, if you please!

City of Greater Dandenong

Unemployment (2006) – 6.9%

Average taxable income (2005) – $36 274

Percentage of population with post-high school qualifications (2006) – 42.8%

Unskilled labourers as a percentage of the workforce (2005) – 57.6%

Percentage of population born in Africa or the Middle East (2006) – 6.4%
Percentage of population speaking a language other than English at home (2006) – 59.0%

City of Frankston

Unemployment (2006) – 5.9%

Average taxable income (2005) – $39 203

Percentage of population with post-high school qualifications (2006) – 49.9%

Unskilled labourers as a percentage of the workforce (2005) – 46.7%

Percentage of population born in Africa or the Middle East (2006) – 1.4%
Percentage of population speaking a language other than English at home (2006) – 8.7%

So, not only is there less crime in Dandenong than Frankston – despite lower income and less job opportunity – the higher crime rates in Frankston are probably all whitey’s fault too! For the record, I’d like it very much if Frankston became more like Dandenong; the food would be better, there would be better stuff in the op shops, and I’d feel much more confident strolling the street after hours... but that’s by the by.

This T-shirt I spotted in one of the souvenir stores at the bottom of Swanston Street, the busiest pedestrian thoroughfare in Melbourne. The National Union of Students mailing list reports that a Patriotic Youth League-style organisation is posting flyers around the University of Sydney, blaming the city’s extortionate inner-urban rents on the influx of international students.

Let’s cast our minds back to the 2005 Cronulla riots. The most shameful thing – over and above the “We grew here, you flew here” and “Fuck off Lebs” jingoes, the beatings, the reprisal attacks – was the refusal of then-Prime Minister John Howard to acknowledge and condemn the racist sentiment behind the violence. (The corollary, of course, is Victorian Premier John Brumby’s tacit refusal to acknowledge the racial element of the long-running but only recently discussed violence against international students in Australian cities, and his refusal to let representatives of the Federation of Indian Students in Australia speak at a rally orchestrated by the government to reaffirm how friendly and not racist and multicultural we Victorians really were.) Indeed, no doubt mindful of the widespread undercurrents of hostility to Middle-Eastern immigration in suburban Sydney, Howard occasionally appeared to act as a dithering apologist for the perpetrators. During the 2007 election campaign, when the Coalition was clutching at every straw and blowing feverishly into every dog whistle, Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews suddenly announced drastic cuts to the intake of East African migrants. His rationale was the apparent rise in violence and unlawful behaviour by groups of Sudanese gangs. The news networks eagerly ran with the story and the Police Commissioner’s insistence that there was no evidence to back up the Minister’s claims. (The story was also refuted by Media Watch the next week, to little fanfare.) Given the Coalition’s use of racial politics during the 2001 election campaign, it seems the public were at least a little less credulous this time around.

Now we have a Prime Minister who’s even more of a media tart than his predecessor, who’s much more adept at providing those three-second moral intonations necessary to round out the evening news (he still gets points for being a little more delicate than labelling everything he dislikes as “un-Australian”). During a parliamentary sitting, his face must appear on a newscast four or five times in half an hour. At the recent Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns, when the bulk of discussion was the destruction of the South Pacific’s economic livelihood due to rising ocean levels and the consolidation of military rule in Fiji (again), the PM used the final day’s press conference to announce the people of Australia’s collective sadness at the death of a koala. After travelling to the fire-ravaged communities of Victoria and doing his best Christ the Healer impersonation, Rudd addressed the newly homeless and the relatives of at a special “Day of Mourning” in Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena. Frankly, both were egregiously religious in their sensibilities, but he looked much more in his element in the latter. National catharsis, the Anglican way! Our tragedy brings us closer together! Father Rudd is our shepherd! This way he doesn’t have to look awkward by speaking to a stranger who’s just lost two kids and had the family home disappear in a wall of fire!

(Interestingly, scores of buses travelled out to the bushfire towns of Whittlesea, Flowerdale et. al. to bring people along to the Rod Laver ceremony. At every town, all but one or two buses went back to the depot without being used. Morning talkback radio, mainly conducted live from the Rod Laver, reminded listeners every five or six minutes that there were plenty of seats still available at the Day of Mourning.)

Do you remember all those reports about the community outrage over planning approval for the Camden Mosque – with all the council meetings descending into shouting matches for weeks in a row, with all the TV cameras validating the demented ranting of whatever nutbag makes a hackneyed effort of disguising their bigotry by justifying their opposition on aesthetic grounds? (Yes, someone actually did this. For as we all know, the architecture of Sydney’s southwestern suburbs is rivalled in its beauty only by rainbows, the Mona Lisa and the Mandlebrot set.) Kevin Rudd didn’t say a thing, and so told us more about who he really is than we’d ever glean from something that came out of his mouth. And what have we got? An ideological bankrupt, only willing to channel the progressive spirit of his party if it’s uncontentious, solidly supported by the electorate, and not same-sex marriage. And what has he got? Record approval ratings. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.

The Lonesome Waltz of Derryn Hinch.

2009-07-25T12:59:00.007+10:00

Derryn Hinch with Playmate Allyson Best at the Hilton (1979)
Photo: Rennie Ellis

Derryn Hinch is the drivetime broadcaster for 3AW, Melbourne's highest rating radio station. The station's demographic is primarily the middle-to-old-aged battler class - that stratum of society that call up to lament how the Government is oppressing them, how much better this country was thirty years ago, the loutish behaviour of kids these days and how much better behaved they were when they were drunk, and occasionally telling all the darkies to go back to their country (and being indulged to various degrees by various hosts). 3AW mirrors the audience of the other talkback/infotainment metropolitan stations under the Fairfax Radio umbrella - 6PR in Perth, 2UE in Sydney, 4BC in Brisbane. All these stations follow the same basic format: news on the hour, roughly corresponding schedules for morning/afternoon/drivetime/evening comperes, a crude conflation of advertising and opinion, a roughly congruent pandering to the same social and political prejudices, etc.

Thankfully, Australia is largely free of the sort of demagogic, opinionated television that Fox has popularised in the US over the last decade (the trade-off, of course, is the insipid blokey conservatism of David Koch on Sunrise and his Channel Nine carbon copy) - though not for want of trying. In many respects, Hinch was the pioneer of bringing this formula to Australia, both to radio and television. HSV7 in Melbourne ran an evening current affairs show with Hinch at the helm from 1988 to 1991, which was eventually replaced by the precursor program to Today Tonight. It appears there was a conscientious focus, in the successor current affairs programs, on diminishing the personality-based journalism of Hinch while still preserving the host's moral intonations - an obvious ratings winner, given the dominance of the shock jocks and A Current Affair/Today Tonight in their respective markets. After Hinch moved to late nights on Channel Ten, he was eventually replaced by Alan Jones Live (aka How to Live Your Life, Presented by Australia's Foremost Self-Loathing Cottager), who the network apparently presumed would do a Fitter, Happier, More Productive job than the bearded New Zealander (he, in turn, was axed after three months).

Here's Hinch's final appearance on Channel Seven (Part One, 1:38; Part Two, 5:27).

Such pathos! I challenge anyone my age or older to not feel a tingling for the bygone era when hosts could storm off stage during the credits to the dirge of the Australian national anthem. A few contextual points for the retrospective clip. His court appearance and imprisonment from 1:35 onwards is a result of naming a Catholic priest who was suspected of sexual abuse, in contempt of court. Hinch was sentenced to six weeks jail, starting off at Pentridge Prison before being moved off to Sale. According to his appearance on Enough Rope, Hinch went to speak to then Victorian Premier John Cain about the charges; Cain poked him in the chest repeatedly and sung "You're going to jail! You're going to jail!" Hinch has been in contempt of court on numerous times since, reading out the home address of notorious paedophile Mr. Baldy while live on radio and publishing the names of people charged with padeophilia both on his website and at a public Victims of Crime Rally; criminal charges against Hinch are still outstanding on the latter. In his autobiography, Hinch describes being sexually abused as a child, a point he references constantly when discussing paedophila cases; speaking at a recent doorstop after his most recent court appearance, he described himself as "legally wrong, but morally right".

The chap impersonating him from 3:37 is Steve Vizard, a comedian and disgraced businessman who made himself a household name in the 1980s for impersonating Derryn and others on Fast Forward, before a rather nasty run-in with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission after some sneaky insider trading while a director on the Telstra board.

There are some things to admire about Hinch, and it's a shame that a more nuanced view of his impact on Australian journalism hasn't emerged from the "human headline" moniker, his often-parodied editorial style, the fourteen or so times he's been fired from a broadcasting role, the heavy drinking, bankruptcy, and the interminable self-obsession. His editorial slant is a welcome change from 3AW stablemate Neil Mitchell, or the inflammatory, bigoted venom of Perth's Howard Sattler or Sydney's Alan Jones; he'll shout down any caller that ventures a racist remark (as opposed to Jones acting as an AM frequency clarion call for the Cronulla Riots, or Sattler's infamous "three less car thieves" remark, and he doesn't have the same rabid enthusiasm for the intemperate ideological pursuits of Mitchell (the latter's relentless pursuit of the union movement, however justified in some circumstances, throws Hinch's usual focus on pedestrian bread and butter issues into stark relief). He prides himself on his personal integrity (which admittedly, only really holds up if you draw a distinction between his public and his private life), and he was one of the few broadcasters who could legitimately criticise the other Prima Donnas of the industry during the Cash for Comment scandal. As far as I know, he's the only news host in Australia to have an Amiga demo made in his honour:

"That's Life, Bitches."

Of course, it would be negligent to omit the fact that he played a pivotal role in transforming talkback radio and commercial television current affairs to the unspeakable shite that it is today; the loathsome Ray Martin, Mike Munro and others imitated his self-aggrandising style and moralism until it was progressively diluted to the point where the television still sits in damning judgement of its audience, but the only hint of personality in a current affairs anchor is gleaned from a leaked outtakes reel from a Christmas party. Jones, Mitchell, et. al.'s brazen abuse of callers who disagree with their opinions was only made possible by Hinch paving the way. Saying Hinch is better than his contemporaries and his predecessors is akin to saying Dr. Frankenstein is better than his monster.

It would be unfair to put this solely at the feet of Derryn, given how Australia's finest arch-conservative was transforming the media industry of Uncle America, and the emergence of talkback giants like Rush Limbaugh before that (presumably Hinch's eleven years in the US as bureau chief was the source of some inspiration). But he was still the standard-bearer of a radical change in the fourth estate that progressively began to treat the news as an adjunct to the personality. I'm reminded of Lewis Lapham's obituary for US Meet the Press host Tim Russert:

"...Speaking truth to power doesn’t make successful Sunday-morning television, leads to “jealousy, upsets, persecution,” doesn’t draw a salary of $5 million a year. The notion that journalists were once in the habit of doing so we borrow from the medium of print, from writers in the tradition of Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, H. L. Mencken, I. F. Stone, Hunter Thompson, and Walter Karp, who assumed that what was once known as “the press” received its accreditation as a fourth estate on the theory that it represented the interests of the citizenry as opposed to those of the government. Long ago in the days before journalists became celebrities, their enterprise was reviled and poorly paid, and it was understood by working newspapermen that the presence of more than two people at their funeral could be taken as a sign that they had disgraced the profession...

How ironic it is then that Hinch now stands out like a sore thumb in the depressing monoculture of commercial media! Free to air television in this country has ossified to the point where Channels Seven and Nine essentially run the same programs with different personalities, each and all devoid of anything that would hint some kind of belief or prejudice, emotion surgically removed and substituted with botox; each and all only thousand-yard-stares and someone else's opinions read aloud with dead eyes and drooping mouths, while Channel Ten picks up the scraps with cooking shows and softcore pornography. Shame! What's left but to yearn for someone who'll venture forth some kind of emotive gesture that hasn't been carefully contrived and filmed in five takes, even if they are half the reason that the public's foremost sources of information have become so unspeakably moronic? I can still faintly hear his voice over the airwaves, in amongst the static and the superannuation ads and Caller Roger from Wantirna South fondly remembering when the milkman left glass bottles on the doorstep and how everyone's front doors were left unlocked at night! Shame, come back!

Excuses

2009-07-18T17:42:00.008+10:00

A computational representation of my work ethic:

010 ACCEPT TASK
020 ACCEPT five other TASKS without regard for workload
030 Spend week getting drunk
040 Suddenly realise impending deadline for all TASKS
050 Breathe heavily into paper bag
060 Spend week getting drunk
070 Finally complete one of said TASKS after staying awake all night
080 SUBMIT TASK with a litany of grovelling and creative excuses
090 Start screening phone calls to avoid people chasing me up for completion of remaining TASKS
100 Spend week getting drunk while talking about how I should be completing leftover TASKS
110 IF TASK>0, GOTO 050
120 IF TASK=0, COLLAPSE into sobbing heap and loudly proclaim that you will never subject yourself to such horrible, horrible stress
130 GOTO 010

I've been working six day weeks for most of the time since the beginning of November, and I've still managed to fit plenty in around that, but I still tend towards overburdening myself without factoring in my inherent laziness. I was recently asked to do an article for the Budget edition of Voiceworks, which is looking mighty pretty since Bel Monypenny took over as editor (unfortunately I've only met her twice, so I am not yet familiar enough to refer to her as "Mish Monypenny" in a thick Scottish accent - nor enough to punch her in the face when she precociously challenges the patriarchy). What followed was a rather hysterical tirade about advertising companies pandering to the gloomy feelings of the global economic downturn by justifying outlandish purchases as smart economic decisions (c.f. Holden's "Times are tough, but Australians and Holden are tougher" a.k.a. "Please buy our fucking V8s so we don't have to close down our Port Melbourne factory"), and the sense of unreality that comes from watching panicked stockbrokers in the evening news bulletins being punctuated by more pleas to waste money on pay television for the good of the economy.

The article would've had some more posterity if the baseline economic indicators toned down from "oh fuck, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE" to Australia averting a technical recession, terms of trade slightly improving, the housing market holding up, etc. I don't think I did a good job of selling the fact that my experience of the economic downturn was entirely mediated by the TV news, and my whole man with sandwich board and large bell approach to the subject matter at hand seems a bit foolish as a result, but I got enough props to be asked to write something for the subsequent Postscript edition.

I decided to have a look at the lifelong literary Bromance of Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, from their days working together at the New Statesman, to their mutual support of the Bush Administration's foreign policy in the aftermath of September 11th. I've been interested in both men since Martin Amis' biopic of Stalin, Koba the Dread; basically, the book's central conceit is trying to find out why the horrors of the purges, forced collectivisation and the Terror are the source of laughter and derision while the similar horrors of Nazi Germany are constantly met with mortified silence (hence the subtitle, "Laughter and the Twenty Million"; it was also part of the inspiration for LOLOCAUST). The last third of the book is a letter to Hitchens which essentially amounts attack on his youthful flirtation with Trotskyism (Amis: "Trotsky was a thief and a fucking liar"), which the accused recanted around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in place of a more generalised ethos of anti-totalitarianism and self-indulgent polemicism. Case in point, his obituary for Jerry Falwell on Fox News:

"Let's hear from the Abramoff Faction!"
(Yes, it is safe to assume he is drunk.)

So I flipped through about twenty books authored by both of them, charting their gradual metamorphosis from their young progressivism (Amis was more aptly described as something of a left-liberal, an nebulous political position he only seemed to adopt in order to spite his father) to Hitchens' spruiking for the Iraq War and Amis' constant intonations against Britain's Islamic Diaspora (which, on the part of both men, seems to owe a lot to the persecution of their contemporary, Salman Rushdie). I wasn't getting very far with writing the article, but I did have time to do this:

Advice Hitchens!

Eventually I got far too immersed in reading their self-aggrandising bullshit (both suffer from a constant need to demonstrate their mastery of the English language: for Amis it's because his father spurned his books, for Hitchens it's probably just to show up his brother). and what I'd started to cobble together was shite. So, many weeks after the deadline, I sent my apologies:

Hi Bel,
I'm writing to apologise for flaking out on the latest issue. I overburdened myself once again and reading lots of Christopher Hitchens/Martin Amis in a short period of time was traumatising and I became consumed with unmitigated hatred for both of them, as one does, which spilled over into my personal life and was the catalyst for all sorts of horrible things. There's nothing to make someone feel inferior than trawling through hours of YouTube videos watching two middle-aged, bloated rotters scorning everyone with a slightly inferior command of the English language while inventing shitty neologisms like 'horrorism'. It's difficult for me to articulate properly, but the attached Hitchens photograph should give some idea [below]. So, I did that thing that people sometimes do where they keep postponing it a day again and again, until all of a sudden four weeks have passed without me realising it and I'm being invited to the launch party on Facebook.

What Martin Amis meant by "horrorism".

LOLOCAUST #1 Launch - Bar Open, Jan 15th, 9pm

2009-01-09T00:45:00.006+11:00

I'm putting out a zine. It's a homage to the wonders of the internet. There's contributions from friends near and dear, the launch party is free entry and it should be a cracker of an evening.

Here's links to the Hotel Wrecking City Traders, Useless Children and Mirrormen MySpace pages. There will also be intermissions with the delightful DJ Slap Bass Odyssey. They said I was wrong to meld folk/country, hardcore punk, two piece instrumental metal and the New Wave party hits of 1979 on the same evening - fools, fools!

His interactions with the faceless state apparatus can only be aptly described as Kafkaesque.

2008-09-04T21:15:00.002+10:00

Well, what better time to update than after I've lost my gestating readership? I was looking at my analytics account just now, and I'm still getting some rad traffic (put your hands up, Bangalore), though it's mainly from Google searches of Corey Worthington. One day, Corey, one day I'll reach your heights of internet celebrity. I need a YouTube clip of me battling an invisible Darth Maul, clearly.

Saturday night was Brian Jonestown Massacre at the Hi Fi. Elaine bought me tickets three months ago, and I figured that I was either going to be treated to two hours of aural bliss, or one of those trademark Anton Newcombe hissy fits ("mothafucka broke my sitar!") - either way, it would be entertaining enough to justify having sixty bucks spent on me.

No such dice. The support band, The Lovetones, were more pedestrian than the walk to the venue from Carlton. It probably wasn't their fault; I got the feeling that Anton had ordered them to cut the light show and use shitty amps, so as not to upstage him. They looked annoyed, but that was probably from dealing with him for the last week. Worse than that were the assorted hipster douchebags in the crowd heckling them for the full hour of their set. "Don't keep yelling! If you carry on like this you'll make Anton have a hissy fit!", is what I would've said if I weren't too embarrassed to make my righteous indignance heard to a large contingent of people who had probably only bought tickets to try and provoke him, anyway.

They came on, eventually, and Anton was obnoxiously drunk (surprise). For every five minutes of music, there was ten minutes of him telling stupid stories about his bandmates correspondence with a member of the Cocteau Twins, or abusing one of his other bandmates for being in a side-project with Matt Hollywood (don't care, don't care, don't care). Rather than getting the lurid, shadenfreude pleasure of watching an episode in a universally-loathed person's ongoing self-destruction, it was tedious beyond words. I went out for a cigarette on two separate occasions, only to find the only thing I'd missed was five minutes of Newcombe focussing all of his energies on remaining upright. Balls.

I really loved the new album (because really, the only thing better than psychedilia pastiche is shoegaze/psychedilia pastiche), but there were only two songs played from My Bloody Underground. The rest was more greatest hits-laden than a John Farnham tour (Who?, When Jokers Attack, Sailor, and just about every other song on the first disc of their retrospective), and at about a quarter to one, in the middle of another slurred speech about how great he was/how much everyone else sucked, we left.

As we were leaving the Hi Fi, Elaine and I crossed Little Collins Street. The lights were green on Swanston, but the little pedestrian man was red. On the other side, a group of three police officers were standing in formation, chests out and doing their best to look fierce for people who don't respect authority unless it looks like authority can beat them up.

I didn't notice them until we'd crossed the road, when one of them stepped in front of me:

Constable: "OI! You blind?!"

Me: [five seconds pause, as I look around, bewildered, until I realise that I am the person being addressed, and the person addressing me is right in front of me, and it's the kind of person that wouldn't think twice about throwing me in a room with violent drunks and HIV-positive prostitutes if I used this particular social situation to demonstrate my acerbic wit in front of my girlfriend] "..... what?"

Constable: "Are. You. Blind."

Me: "What.... no?"

Constable: "Then why did you cross the street?"

Me: [five seconds pause as I look back at the intersection, where traffic is still moving straight down Swanston, with no cars queued up on Little Collins, and ponder the insanity of being glared at by three officers of the law for the indiscretion of crossing a two-metre-wide strip of road, in the jaywalk capital of Australia, on the most jaywalked intersection in the Southern Hemisphere. What the fuck? Melbourne is all about the pedestrian right of way. Am I about to get fined? I almost want to get fined now, just so I can write the Letter to the Editor.] "Oh...sorry...[five seconds pause, in which I think about nothing in particular]... I guess I wasn't looking."

Cuncetable: "Oh, you weren't LOOKING, were you? [breathes the sigh of a defeated parent who has decided that disciplining their adolescent child isn't worth the emotional anguish, and resolves to pursue an extra-marital affair instead] MOVE ALONG."

Now, far be it from me to suggest that having three police officers standing on a Swanston Street corner to harrass jaywalkers is a less efficient allocation of police resources than maybe, I don't know, sending them to stop the half-hourly gang rapes in the back alleys of King Street. It just seems to me, given all the hysteria about that binge-drinking violence epidemic that the Herald Sun has been telling me about, maybe they'd be better off looking for some crime? Why, only two hours later, there was a fifteen-person fight the next street over, one dude even got hospitalised. Perhaps if they'd been there to make sure that no-one was crossing Elizabeth Street without the express consent of the green pedestrian man, the altercation never would've happened in the first place?

It later transpired that Victorian Premier John Brumby was out and about at around the same time I was, touring the CBD in an unmarked police car to assess those pesky violence epidemics in the city, first-hand. He might've got a better inkling of the true state of the city if he didn't have three bobbies standing on every street corner of the route of his motorcade, but it's not like the State Government's legislative approach to the issue has ever been burdened by the need for petty quibbles like evidence or rationality (see also: "ooh, let's exclude the most violent venue in the city from the lockout trial, so as to keep those gambling revenues coming, nice and juicy like. Thankyou, Crown Casino! Thankyou, chronically addicted gamblers!"). My oh my, I'm out of practice with this whole internet ivory tower thing.

The dog ate my blog

2008-08-18T22:08:00.005+10:00

Whoops, sorry for not updating for three weeks. No-one told me that signing on for Honours was tantamount to giving up my life for a year. Oh, wait - yes they did, I just didn't believe them.

There's been a lot of sharing tables at the State Library with homeless people trying to keep out of the Sunday drizzle. A couple of weeks ago there was a man with a shitty Peavey amp, giving a speech out on the grass about UFOs and the Trilateral Commission and all that other stuff; his audience was five other eager space cadets and five youngish sorts on their study ciggie breaks. Good times, good times.

There's been our involvement in the murky, insular bubble of student politics. Keshia, Gabe and myself have been running for the highly coveted editorship of our university's august student newspaper - mainly because we sound more credible referring to ourselves as the fourth estate in the first person when we're using a non-blog medium.

I'm leaving the bar on Tuesday, and starting a credible job with business casual attire on Wednesday.

I'm also putting out a zine. Should be having a rad launch for it at the end of October - more to follow.

Anyway, I'll be in the mood again soon.

Working families ease the squeeze to climb the ladder of opportunity and bask in the glory of aspirational nationalism with the other true believers.

2008-07-26T15:01:00.005+10:00

It was a good week for glaring contradictions on the news this week, assonant surnames or otherwise. Ten Late News ran another inflation story - the CPI's up four percent, vox popped mortgagees were complaining about repayments (including someone who bought a house in January of this year - are you familiar with the concept of fixed rate loans, you deadshit? Did you think interest rates were going down anytime soon? This is why banks need a stupidity clause for foreclosure in their mortgage contracts), and Wayne Swan managed to fit in a soundbite without the phrase "Working Families" for the first time ever.

It was another puff piece, to be sure. First of all, as economic doyen and straight-edge bad boy Pete explained to me, the Consumer Price index is a really rubbish way of measuring inflation. It maps the rise and fall of a group of prices without taking into account consumer purchasing habits; for example, when bananas went up to sixteen dollars a kilo after last year's Innisfail cyclone, it skewed the CPI upwards, despite the fact that poor people like me did without our Vitamin B for a year. It doesn't take into account the increased use value of products with major technological advances over time; for example, when computers become exponentially more powerful and progressively cheaper, there's no way of reflecting this in the CPI. Finally, the consumer goods mapped onto the CPI are often aribtrary; mobile phones were readily available for a decade before they were added to the CPI, by which time they were ubiquitous.

Malcolm Turnbull had a hissy fit at the end of the segment, complaining that additional taxation on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks and luxury vehicles were fuelling inflation. If I may put on the Edward de Bono brown conical hat of internet outrage for a moment: FFS. If there's anyone stupid enough out there to own a Ferrari and still have trouble servicing their mortgage repayments, they've waived the right to complain (then again, Turnbull does represent Double Bay and Vaucluse, so it's probably a sizable portion of his Vile Bodies constituency). Congratulations on continuing your party's fine legacy of economic sense and responsibility.

Because certainly the Coalition halving the capital gains tax in 1999 had nothing to do with making property prices escalate to the point where anyone on an income of less than six figures has to either live around an artificial lake on the suburban fringes, or pop out a kid just to get some extra sympathy from rental agencies. Certainly a housing market appreciating at double digits in some of the biggest cities in the country wouldn't be raising the cost of living - no, no, no. But that's alright, throw $14 000 at whoever wants to enter the housing market, that'll do. Oh whoops, now the market's jumped to completely absorb the government's offset. Oh, that kooky inflation, when will it learn?

Fuckarses.

Turnbull's little grab at column space wouldn't have been so grating, if it wasn't for the fact that Ten News ran a twenty second spot on Zimbabwe immediately afterward. The Zimbabwean Treasury has just printed a $100 billion dollar note to cope with rising inflation in the country, something that makes Weimar Germany look like a worker's utopia. The new currency can buy the equivalent of a cup of coffee or a loaf of bread, and translates to about an average day's wages. No word on what effect this has had on luxury car imports, as yet.

The Lost Boys

2008-07-26T11:58:00.002+10:00

Because I've been sojourning in a place where there's not much to do beyond praying for a quick and merciful death (ie: Canberra), I've been watching much more television than usual. Okay, it's not really that bad. I'm just going a bit stir crazy, as always, from not having the usual creature comforts of a constant background din of traffic noises and exhaust fumes. There aren't legions of unhappy looking people roaming the streets while dressed entirely in black, my parents' house has central heating, and I'm being treated to lavish breakfasts with ingredients that cost more than what I earn in a week. I tend to lose my sense of self when I'm not immersed in miserable surroundings, which is why I'm only happy when I feel like shit.

So, anyway, television. Remember Corey Worthington, the indigent little cock-head who became kidsthesedays poster boy for current affairs and talk back across the country, after advertising his Narre Warren house party on Myspace and destroying half the neighbourhood? Well, you probably should, given that it was January and every media outlet milked the story for a month in lieu of anything more substantial to report on, as well as plenty of international exposure, with everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to John Brumby inveighing on the subject. Here's Worthington on A Current Affair, the day after the party:

There's not much I can say about this that won't already be included in some sociology professor's upcoming dissertation, except that my sympathies are with Corey in the interview. It's a commercial current affairs truism (as expounded by Frontline) that kids are evil and out of control; Tracey Grimshaw's complete inability to exert any authority over Worthington makes the whole thing farcical. He might be an inarticulate nonse, but he's being made to wear a cross for the transgressions of every seventeen-year-old suburban slapper for what they do every other weekend, anyway.

Earlier this week, a kid by the name of Corey Warburton jumped off a bridge in Grafton to save a 70 year old woman who was attempting suicide. This is what he looked like:

In other words, like a stock footage extra from a Today Tonight expose on Youth Gone Wild. But he got his p.5 spread in all the dailies, and probably a minute or two on all the networks. At the risk of labouring the point, I don't think Warburton's making an appearance on reality television anytime soon.

All Hail Skynet

2008-07-16T23:18:00.001+10:00

That's what I've been trying to tell you!

Edit: Now that I think about it, it should actually be:

That's what I've been trying to tell you!

This is the problem of always talking in a monotone.

Way to die, ETS

2008-07-16T21:27:00.003+10:00

So, the Climate Change Green Paper gave Garnaut's draft report a rather messy emasculation. But I'm not worried:

This one did the meme thing on American blogs a couple of years back. Without dealing too much in abstractions regarding the media environment at the time, from my perspective, it seems like a fortuitous overlap of Al Gore's Powerpoint thing, The Day After Tomorrow, and some of the broader commentary surrounding the 2005 US hurricane season. When you consider the forty-odd years where scientific evidence on global warming has been documented, and the relative recentness of any meaningful deliberation on emissions (at least, as far as mainstream US politics is concerned), 2005-6 seems to be the point where the proverbial worm spasmed in the right direction.

The advertisement was produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank (read: agitprop vehicle) for the bigger fossil fuel companies, and the ad originally ran for two weeks in 2006, in all major American cities. It's an interesting choice of name for the think-tank: the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank founded in the forties, toes a similar line on global warming. In the last decade, the AEI has come under the influence of neo-conservative political theory - as evidenced by the recruitment of the leading neo-conservative ideologue, Irving Kristol, as a Senior Fellow of the institute, and various fellowships extended to Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney's wife, and all the other kids who believe in the inalienable truths of American Exceptionalism (as proven by the Quarter Pounder, hedge funds, and retarded albinos with banjos). Thanks, Wikipedia and first year ANU international relations unit!

It'll be interesting to see what sort of opposition the coal lobby put up once the ETS comes in (John Birmingham has an insightful article on the subject in July's Monthly, particularly with regard to Energy Minister Martin Ferguson's relationship with the coal industry); unfortunately, I don't think it'll be as entertaining as this. Not that we're given to subtlety as a nation, but that whole YOUR WAY OF LIFE IS UNDER THREAT thing only seems to work when you're talking about Lebanese people and water restrictions.

Do the awkward shuffle, then shuffle off awkwardly

2008-07-13T19:21:00.000+10:00

Four rather gauche things I've done in the last month:

Lent out the three books listed in my profile to people that read this blog.
Unconsciously plagiarised the aesthetics of this lady/gentleman's blog. Sorry about that, guy.
Met a girl at a house party in Collingwood. Found mutual interest in talking about the technological schizophrenia of kidsthesedays and being fragile, insecure, human, all too humans (topics of conversation always exciting to discuss with people you've just met, even if it makes you seem a bit fruity to the more guarded sort). Promised to meet up (with honourable and platonic intentions on my part, thankyou very much), with messages from her every couple of days apologising for being busy. Eventually agreeing to an evening, only to have no contact from her, and no contact since (awww.). Seeing her last Friday at Collingwood's finest live music venue, and having no recourse but to ignore her. What was I to do? My Larry David course in social ettiquette would suggest that I am to return the earlier snub in order to feel good about myself. But, the emptiness! I suck at being deliberately horrible. I think it's because she was vomiting into an esky when I met her, while her friend berated me for just sitting there and not holding her hair back. I was reasonably composed, and that last sentence probably explains why I was actually able to keep her attention for six hours.
Asking one of my regulars why he was having trouble speaking, when he wasn't even drunk yet - he had a stroke on Monday night.

Speaking of awkward shuffling, I went to the last Blitz on Saturday night. Lauren and Gus are hoping to move it to a venue where the promoter is slightly less of a two-faced prick with a spectacular ability to renege on all the giveaway stuff he constantly promises. It was a shame I never trotted off to see them earlier, but I'm usually quite wrecked after night shifts at the bar. Or the manager's in a drink with me and we can talk about our personal problems sort of mood, in which case I'm only too happy to oblige her. I got to do my door spot/fraternise with the DJs thing (which always works wonders for my self-esteem), the horrid feeling of being in a club was mitigated by the general pleasantness of the people there, and the music was great. Lauren and Gus both have an excellent post-punk repertoire, from Gang of Four's Damaged Goods to plenty of songs I'm not cool enough to know the names of or have since forgotten. I did my self-conscious little strut to Digital, because looking epileptic on the dance floor is actually a benefit as far as Joy Division's concerned. It's funny 'cause he killed himself, ha!

Anyway, hopefully Lauren and Gus get a new place to do their night, because they're both King and Queen of bringing in the nice, happy sorts, putting the word out in all the right spots, and actually making clubs nice places to be for jaded kids like me. Before I met Lauren I never realised what a talent that was, but seeing the effort that went into Blitz made it doubly beautiful to behold when I finally went.

The only exception to last night's pleasantness was some dude in a blonde wig who tried to get me to follow him into a dark, unlit cubicle in the unisex toilets. I still have a muscle memory shiver regarding unisex toilets because of an incident at Laundry three years ago; I'd elaborate, but it's basically the universal bad experience of all people in the unisex toilets at Laundry. You know what I mean, unless what you were thinking was the word "rohypnol" - in which case I'm either sorry for your traumatic experience (and will chalk up a fifth rather gauche thing I've done in the last month) or I'm surprised your mind went there, you sick bastard. No, no sex, actually. Christ, I'm not that exciting, I have a blog, after all. I can't even embellish my way out of being a dullard.

The West Gate Bridge!

2008-07-11T10:55:00.000+10:00

Here's a little trick I like to bust out when the urban ennui gets a bit too much. Wait till three in the morning, then get onto the Westgate Freeway on Williamstown Road, heading towards the city. As soon as you turn onto the onramp, play the song Girls by Death in Vegas. If you travel at about fifty, the crescendo of the song should hit right when you get to the apex of the bridge, then will slowly wind down and finish once you get to the bottom of the bridge and have the city and Docklands in full frontal view. Timed perfectly, it's a sublime experience. If you get the timing wrong, it's not as cool - but on the bright side, you've just listened to Girls, and that song is the bomb dot com (even if Sofia Coppola had to appropriate it for a rather shitty homage to racism.

If that doesn't cure your existential woes, you could always jump off the Westgate Bridge, but I can't vouch for that one as I've not tried it. Though my car did break down on the bridge one day and the passing motorists gave me that "are you going to kill yourself?" look.

Shaun Micallef's take:

The best Melbourne band to feature the Westgate Bridge (and the beautiful Yarraville oil depot) in their video clip (even if one of the lines from the second verse is "NO RIGHT TURNS IN OVERTAKING LANES!" They're angry. Angry about hook turns.):

...and the worst (though I can't hate on this clip too much, because 'Cinta was still drumming for them at this stage. She's a profile in steeze unto herself.):

Ironbar!

2008-07-11T10:20:00.000+10:00

Wilson Tuckey's exploits are well documented. I could rehash how he got his nickname, the time he called Kim Beazley fat, how he lost the 1990 election for the Coalition, how he unlawfully tried to get his son off a speeding ticket, how he walked out during the Parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations - but really, Wikipedia, as always, is much more concise than I am.

Way back in the seventies, my Dad was based out of Carnarvon, doing some mechanical odd-jobs and trying to save up enough scratch to get back to the UK (whereupon he met my mother in a Contiki tour in Greece, leading to a long process of international courtship and marriage which ultimately culminated in the watershed moment of August/September 1984: my conception. Nice work, Dad.). At that point, Tuckey was mayor of the shire, having stacked the council with money bankrolled from his control of all of the city's licensed establishments.

My Dad talks about his time in Carnarvon like Vietnam vets talk about Long Tan. He says that Wilson Tuckey owned that town. People used to shudder when he stepped into a room. Carnarvon was twisted into his own image; a cult of personality affected on such a small scale that to outsiders, it would appear pathetic. Some rural WA outpost, the closest thing Australia has to Deliverance territory (besides Gippsland), and this man barking at people to do his bidding. For the residents of Carnarvon - whose success depended on the good graces that twat - it must've been hell.

But he is pathetic. His pronouncements on the middle-class warriors in the union movement are laughable when you consider the amount of times he's abused the privileges of public office. Back in the eighties, this man was considered a Liberal Party kingmaker, which speaks volumes about why they were out of federal office for the longest period of the party's history. Ray Martin's sarcasm at the end of the clip is priceless.

Insanity Tuesday II: State Parliament

2008-07-07T15:34:00.001+10:00

First, a disclaimer, in addition to all the preliminary explain-ey crap I put in the last one. I probably drink an unhealthy amount of alcohol, for three reasons:

I work in a bar, and most of my clientele are lifelong drunks who like to buy me shots.
I'm in my early twenties and I live in Australia. There's a rational foundation for the current government's pogrom on binge-drinking (even if the misguided policy and ad hoc rubbish like Melbourne's 2am lockout belie better intentions). If we want to be extra deterministic, my Dad's side is Irish and my Mum's side is Russian - I was doomed to alcoholism from birth.
I caucus with the wasters in my social life; they're the only ones who know how to have a good time, and hedonistic self-debasement is eminently more entertaining than sitting around a dinner table with a glass of Pinot Grigio and discussing the relative virtues of Catherine Deveney's weekend television column. If you're going to waste your time with that dull crap, at least drink it from the bottle.

Sure, I'm not at the point where I'll come home one evening to find loved ones in the living room with Dr. Khan from Epworth rehab; much less breaking down in tears and promising to change before scampering out the bathroom window. For one thing, I don't have private health insurance, and St. Vincents is closer in any case. I've spent plenty of quality time with the sort to keep a bong on the nightstand to mitigate their gruelling three pm starts to the day, and plenty more with kids who spent more time in the shower drinking Melbourne Bitter longnecks than scrubbing behind their foreskins (for reals: he always had a distinctive aroma of smegma and alcohol-sweat). I'm not a bad drunk, and I certainly like to think I maintain a measure of decorum. But I do get a bit Withnail and I sometimes.

...So, like I said, last Tuesday was my internship graduation. I was expecting a three hour ordeal of congratulatory speeches and sitting still, so I thought I'd insulate myself from almost certain boredom by drinking (Hello, Dr. Khan? It's about my son.). Met my intern buddy Tony at the Elephant and Wheelbarrow; he opted for a Coopers stubbie, I opted for my second pint of Bulmers. I spilt half of it on the trouser legs of my aforementioned brown suit and put off wiping it up with cocktail napkins until I realised we were already running late.

We went up to the Legislative Council Committee room, where everyone was already seated, and Brian Costar was giving the opening remarks in the endearingly lofty tone of voice unique to Australian political science academics of long standing. The only seats were in the same row as former Premier John Cain, one of the patrons of the program. I had a shoulder bag hanging loosely off my right side, and as we were filing past this seventy-six year old doyen of the ALP true believers and elder statesman of Victoria, my bag clipped him on the side of the face. It wasn't an incapacitating blow or anything - to be fair, I don't think he even noticed - but still: the shame, the shame.

Turns out it was only a half an hour affair: a few short speeches, a few handshakes, and then an hour of designated refreshment time. I'm not the sort to pass up on complimentary red wine, and the State Parliament 2006 vintage is much more palatable than the cardboard boxes I usually drink from. There were a few representatives from various public sector departments mingling in the crowd, looking for bright young things to spent the next couple of decades developing policy and watching their little project babies disappear with a change in government, before resigning themselves to the twilight years of Solitaire and Facebook status updates.

After about ten minutes I managed to inadvertently offend the two or three other interns that I hadn't manage to offend over the previous thirteen weeks, get rebuffed by the girl serving drinks (though in my defense, I had honourable intentions; I was just trying to see if she'd allow me to surreptitiously pocket a bottle of the Victorian Parliament Cab Merlot), and tell the head of Parliamentary Services that his job sounded boring.

I thought I'd better say thanks to the head of the Parliamentary Library, seeing as he didn't tattle on me when he found me frantically looking through the catalogue two weeks before the report was due. He asked me where I planned to go from here: "I'll keep the aspidistra flying", says I. Being deliberately obscure with a librarian is difficult, and he gave me an almost imperceptible "what are you doing with your squandered life, you fool?" shake of the head.

Ooh! Ooh! I mentioned Withnail and I before. Did you know that Richard E. Grant was in a film adaptation of Keep the Aspidistra Flying with Helena Bonham Carter?! They had to rename it A Merry War for the American audiences, but still: Richard E. Grant as Gordon Comstock, the ever-dreamy Bonham Carter as his love interest - must be awesome, right? Wrong. So very, very, wrong.

I was already having trouble remembering to stand straight and to not bare my red wine stained teeth at the same time, but I thought extra thanks were warranted for the Monash academic supervisor, who's agreed to supervise my honours thesis despite having spent the semester keenly aware of the lack of effort I put into an internship I should've been grateful to receive in the first place. That failed conversation went something like this:

Paul: [to two other interns] Wow, so you're going into DFAT, and you're doing a graduate program with Goldman Sachs. Sean here is starting honours next semester.

[The two others look, and I feel, underwhelmed at my relative lack of achievement. I try for a disarming smile, but my attempt is stymied by the aforementioned red wine stains on teeth.]

Sean: Yep, yep. That's right.

Paul: I'm looking forward to your topic, Sean [the relationship between traditional media and internet coverage of the Australian 2007 Federal Election]. Should be very interesting.

Sean: Yes! Because, you know... [I try and say something to the effect of: "because the concentration of traditional news sources in this country is increasingly alarming and, in my opinion, internet journalism presents an exciting countenance to the lack of insight offered by Australia's mainstream media, much like organisations such as The Huffington Post in the United States" - but my attempt is stymied by aforementioned drunkenness]

Paul: Yes, [basically says what I wanted to say]. God, you read The Australian these days, and they all seem to think the sky's falling in around Rudd, when you look at the man's personal popularity, and he seems bloody hostage to the media's perception of him! I just wish he'd take his majority and not be afraid to do what's right for the country!

Sean: [excitedly grabbing Paul's shoulder and shaking it a bit]: Yes! YES! I knew you were a True Believer! I just needed to hear those words out of your mouth!!

Reflecting for a moment, I finally realised I was behaving a little embarrassingly, so I cut short Tony's designated refreshment time and we left. I needed some more alcohol to help me deal with the fact that I would now never attain a job with a political party, the Victorian public service, or academia (not that these were upsetting revelations; I just wanted more booze), so we drove up to Percy's for food + pints.

Next: Why I am a racist, sexist paedophile.

Royce Millar suffers blinding flash of the obvious, has a stroke, dies, and voids his bowels.

2008-07-06T18:23:00.000+10:00

You don't say..

Alexander Downer, the boy who never grew up

2008-07-06T17:41:00.000+10:00

So, I was up late last night. Charltons, say no more. Read this on Andrew Elder's blog, which referred to a great Peter Hartcher column giving Alexander Downer the most scathing political obituary possible without using the word "twat". He should've slipped it in there somewhere, I'm sure he could have justified it to the subs. Mitigating circumstances, if there ever were any.

Not knowing much of Peter Hartcher's glorious life story, I consulted my favourite reference tool to find that someone had vandalised his entry after the Downer piece had been published, to say things that would be becoming of a private school boy launching an ad hominem attack on an opponent during a Year Ten debating competition. Staunch left-wing this and farce that. All rather pedestrian, really. The sort of message a jilted lover would leave on your messagebank at three am after drinking too much gin and watching Ali McGraw in Love Story, except you put out an Apprehended Violence Order on her two months ago and moved house with no forwarding address.

Anyway, I did some snooping with my mad internet skillz, because, what else would I be up to at 3am on a Sunday, really? The anonymous edit was performed by an IP address whose only other modifications had been for the Alexander Downer wikipage. Hm. Not only that, but the edits had been done over a six month period, from a building in southern Canberra, adding personal details not readily achieved from the public record (like the dalliances of his wife and children), and removing some of the more trenchant criticism (because what's a little thing like launching a war under false pretences as far as the historical record's concerned?).

There's a Keating quote omitted because, according to the editor, there's not a compliment from Howard in the interests of "balance". I'm sure one of Mr. Howard's "Thanks for not fucking up that last trade deal by getting pissed and touching up Ms. Rice" quotes can be dug up from the next batch of Coalition memoirs, but for now the Keating criticism has been removed outright. According to the editor: "purile (sic) criticism".

So because my grand total of two site visitors (three if you include me - "so ladies, doing anything tonight? I'll have you know my blog readership is now up to double-digits. My place, or yours?") probably shields me potential libel litigation, I'm just going to come right out, add the two twos and say Alexander Downer edited Peter Hartcher's Wikipedia article because he wrote some rather unpleasant truths about the man. Or he made a staffer do it. Either way:

What a twat.

Anyways, Peter Hartcher said via the SMH letters editor that he was "touched by my effort". I've yet to decide whether spending the hours between 3 and 4 this morning was a sad thing or a really pathetic thing. Damnit Hartcher, why didn't you compliment me in less equivocal terms?! Don't you know I'm neurotic? Why else would I be up at that hour, defending your internet honour? Still, I take solace in the fact that I have (belatedly) reclaimed my title as King of the Internet. Clearly, I should've quit my day job ages ago and spent the last few years cracking into the US Department of Defense website for shady Chinese operatives. Too bad Counterstrike came along, and all my time got taken up by AWPing the shit out of n00bs on CS_Assault.

But hats off to Andrew Elder for once again being the Australian media iconoclast that he is, teaching me how to sort the good op-eds from the shit. His appraisal of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government is the most succinct and insightful thing I've ever read on the matter, and there's wisdom in his posts that could only come from what must've been a pretty freaking tortured existence as a moderate/centrist/whatever in the NSW State Liberal Party. What's more, he hates Jason Koutsokis, The Age's former Sunday Political Editor, for the same reasons I do (stupid, Gillard-hair obsessed, fat-cheeked prat - how this man made foreign correspondent I'll never know. Probably rim-jobbed Jaspan). The man knows his shit, all said.

Update: My letter got published in the SMH, I think. I guess if it's on the site, then it will go in the paper? Being on newsprints much cooler than being on the internet; must nag someone to keep that for me if it's the case. Unfortunately, they took all the libel bits out. They know though: I've got the oratory skills and I deployed them with zeal, yo, when the letters editor called me up to figure out what I was on about. Let's just operate on my educated assumptions, because the internet means I'm the voice of authority now. Didn't you see me on the cover of Time in 2006? Kneel down, bitches. If there's one thing Counterstrike taught the masses, reasoned argument always gets trumped by the dude with the most nasally voice.

Insanity Tuesday I: Preliminary

2008-07-04T15:03:00.000+10:00

Tuesday was a graduation for my parliamentary internship. I was seconded to a State Labor MP for the semester - mainly to do some policy work on my stated field of interest, but also to lay the groundwork for schmoozing my way into a big boy's job.

There was selective admittance to the program, with academics from Monash, Melbourne and Victoria Universities co-ordinating the internship for students from the respective institutions. Selection criteria depended on academic merit and a written application, but I fluffed both so badly that I'm convinced I got a pity place, after schmoozing the relevant departmental figures when I was working at a cafe on the ground floor of the humanities building. Never let it be said that rad barista skillz are a trifle: all those foam love hearts on my lattes paid off for something besides learning how to take polite rebuffs from attractive law students.

I failed to make the appropriate good impression. Being the only person in State Parliament dressed in a brown suit probably drew too much attention to me for my fraught sense of self-consciousness to deal with – with the sideburns, I looked like a cross between 1972 era George McGovern and Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon. I wasn't used to being up in the mornings, and I was in the middle of another chronic lapse into that debilitating syndrome that makes people behave like standoffish arseholes until two in the afternoon. Suffice it to say, first impressions with the MP weren’t so great, but I can take solace in the fact they were better than the second and third impressions. God. The second time, I caught him in parliament after Government Business, and I was going to do this whole Tony Jones thing on him in the Members Gallery: “so I read John Button’s Quarterly Essay. I noticed that you’re a vocal critic of the pervasive influence of union-driven factionalism on what was then an extremely beleaguered Federal Parliamentary Labor Party. After spending more than a decade in one of the nation’s largest unions immediately after your graduation from university before being preselected for a safe seat, do you stand by your comments in the 2002 Hawke-Wran review?” Thank Christ I still had some small taciturn impulse in my body.

Of course, I didn’t need one great big tactical fuck-up when numerous small ones would do. The problem with anyone taking an avuncular tone with me is that I take it as a cue to be as casual as I usually am. I am a horrible person in an informal social setting. The average time between someone important-looking saying, “call me [given name],” and me uttering a four-letter word politically incorrect in every circumstance except a rendition of The Vagina Monologues probably warrants a Guinness mention. Unfortunately, I have no friends to witness it for me anymore, because I called all my loved ones cunts one time too many.

My MP was pretty rad, to be fair. When your interest in politics is dying a slow death by the constant effort of sorting through the bullshit of the same banal talking points repeated upwards from student politicians to Michelle Grattan’s page three, it’s quite refreshing to hear an honest and forthright opinion about things that matter expressed by an important person - in confidence, on trust, and despite your horrid table manners.

But I was a bit of a prat about the whole thing. I had no interest in hanging about his office, I left all the fieldwork until the last two weeks, and spent the semester – as always – drinking too much and shirking all the extracurricular avenues through which I may one day be raised up from menial hospitality/call centre jobs to become an Important Member Of Society. I was churlish, irresponsible, unmotivated, and completely taking for granted an opportunity unattainable to most people without months of listening to old bints at branch meetings and weekends spent stuffing government propaganda in mailboxes.

To top it all off, with three weeks before the submission, I bumped into one of his factional allies while handing out issues of the student paper in the Menzies building. I had a glass of bourbon in my hand. I think I was having trouble balancing. I was politely asked how my report was going; I banged the side of my head with two dozen copies of Lot's Wife in the most emphatic gesture I was physically capable of under the circumstances, and shrieked, “I’ve done nothing! NOTHHHHINGGGG!” It was two pm on a Monday, and I probably void all right to be angry, if I was indeed white-anted (not that I have anything substantive to base these allegations on, but it makes the story more intriguing and makes my life sound more exciting by extension (at least, as exciting as the life of someone who regularly enjoys watching Question Time is ever going to sound)).

There’s probably a big black list in a filing cabinet, in a certain office, in a certain building on London Circuit, with my name in 24-point bold impact font and underlined twice. At least sparing the John Button thing probably spared me the voodoo doll. Luckily, my peripheral involvement with Young Labor types (ie: being brought along as the +1 to shit-boring junkets where there’s free booze) lets me see the bright side of this. I’ll find me a nice ivory tower somewhere and do my best to pretend to keep it real.

Next: Why drunkenly explaining your life's ambition to "keep it real" to potential employers is not a good idea, and how to best disrespect a former Premier of Victoria.

But who will hate the haters?

2008-06-28T14:02:00.000+10:00

Had a nice long shift last night, and I was conscious enough of my own precarious financial situation in the current bear market to not go out and buy a kebab on Brunswick Street at four in the morning on my ride home. It was the sort of shift I love working: a bunch of mid to late twenty-somethings smashing the bourbon and cokes and scotch and drys, with the usual cadre of old men sitting in one corner and demonstating that even lifelong alkies can be hilarious when they're drunk. I got to be flirtatious, which is always a lovely fringe benefit in a job where the standard rewards for good work usually bring hangovers.

My work's right around the corner from my old abode. A. came in last night with two of his friends. From all I said about him earlier, the casual reader could be forgiven for assuming that I'm devoting the rest of my life to plotting his downfall, Count of Monte Cristo styles. Unfortunately, I really suck at holding grudges. I usually work myself up into such feelings of blind and spiteful hatred that the original reasons for doing so are forgotten, and when I try and explain myself, I sound like a malicious dick. But them's the breaks. It's weird how congenially we're behaving to each other, when three months ago I hid in my room when I heard him coming home. Were I not awed by how awkwardly hilarious the situation was, I'd probably apologise, but then I don't want to lose whatever argument we were having.

Shaun Micallef, I want your man-babies.

2008-06-26T10:24:00.000+10:00

I've loved this man since I was a prepubescent kid, back in the halcyon days of 1995, when Channel Seven was still screening domestic content that didn't involve deadshit British backpackers getting caught in Bondi rips or the use of the Coalition's 2001 campaign slogan to identify a niche market. Marieke Hardy would call him a thinking-woman's crumpet, but that's not fair to the legions of men whose sexuality he's single-handedly thrown into doubt. Anyone who missed the first two seasons of Newstopia is poorer for it.

Simon and Leah were kind enough to put all of his Channel Nine tonight show onto DVD for me. During the audience participation section:

Shaun
And what sort of coffee do you like ingesting with your friends?

Louise, audience member awed by Shaun's wit and debonair charm
Um, Soy Lattes.

Shaun
Soy lattes! Not... Soylent Green? Because you know: [Charlton Heston voice] Soylent Green is people. Peeeeoplllle! [minimal audience laughter] Damn, should've quit while I was ahead.

The week before that he did the same, and had to explain the reference to his audience. *Swoon*.

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve; it was Lilith he longed for. Humbert was a dick.

2008-06-23T09:16:00.000+10:00

Well, Sydney was quite the unmitigated fucking disaster. I behaved atrociously, albeit about thirty percent of that was justifiable. Hah. Spare me, your honour; I’m only seventy percent guilty. Sometimes you don’t have the option of sparing a loved one’s feelings, but sometimes it’s quite intoxicating to behave cruelly to someone when you’re the type of person who usually does everything within your abilities to please everybody.

I usually really enjoy getting away to Sydney. Leaving Melbourne periodically is important for my sanity. I could go back to my ancestral hometown, Canberra, but it’s hard to settle into a place with no sense of history beyond your own personal life narrative and a few government buildings. I like my anonymity too much, I get away with more that way. I’ve got no communion with nature, so I can’t go to the country. I can’t start my day without five ciggies and a coffee and an hour’s arsing about on the internet in a dark room, so no rural and regional soul rejuvenation for me.

Sydney’s rad. After spending months in a city where everyone’s staid and restrained, where conspicuously avoiding eye contact and tutting into your latte at the sight of anyone behaving flamboyantly are social prerequisites, it’s nice to spend a few days in a place where people aren’t afraid of putting their personalities in the public domain. John Brack had it quite right about Melbourne:

Still, that’s why we love it. Donning black and fading into the background over the winter months is pretty cool, and it’s nice to play up our reputation for pompous wankery in other places round the country. I was staying in Marrickville while there were two ice-fiends on a serial bashing bender in the neighbourhood. It was on all the front pages, and the print and TV media up there uses the phrase ‘olive-skinned’ quite diplomatically, but I’m willing to bet Alan Jones took more than a few calls from people not given to politically correct finery. Unfortunately, Sydney people who haven’t grown up on the blue blood side of the harbour aren’t fond of the self-aggrandising Judith Lucy-esque vocal tones masquerading as humour. So when I got on my high horse at Newtown's Town Hall Hotel and (rather drunkenly) told my host’s friends that crime in Melbourne was much more genteel (because we all know Carl Williams could pass for a wealthy British industrialist and titleholder out for a night at the opera), I managed to roundly offend everyone. Damn you, irony, why can’t I be better at you?

What I did on my vacation, by Sean (age 6)

2008-06-18T15:34:00.000+10:00

I’m feeling under-stimulated and decidedly uninspired after spending most of the last three days in my bedroom. I’ve been exhausted after racing to get all my uni work done at the last minute, and if the caffeine all-nighters didn’t take their toll, then all the heavy drinking afterward surely did the trick. I haven’t worked in two weeks; my boss is putting a new door in, and his business plan tends to involve cutting down on overheads rather than maxing out his credit cards. Another Howard battler headed on his merry way to imminent doom. Hospitality isn’t the sort of industry where you can make your stinginess glaringly apparent. Shitty furniture, filthy beer lines and sparing use of the central heating aren’t adequately countenanced by how delightfully charming my co-workers and I are behind the bar. On top of that, my boss’s reluctance to use the dimmer switches on the overhead lighting give the place all the ambience of a pokies joint – though, to be fair, at least pokies joints have background noise.

But whatever, I’m bitter because I’m broke and housebound. I’ve another week to wait before my next helping to the government tit, and I’m as begrudging of having to delve into my chickpea and kidney bean stockpiles as your average middle-class white boy would be. I’d appeal for sympathy, but I spent all my money on getting pissed. Certainly, I’d normally be more sensible, but I was doing my best to forget everything I’d learnt all semester. I need all those surplus dendrites for memorising music trivia so I can successfully court members of the opposite sex, damnit.

My brother took pity in the way only a younger brother can express sympathy for their train wreck of an eldest sibling. Good thing I asserted my dominance early on by regularly beating him up in our formative years. We rode up to The Retreat for beers in the mid-afternoon. I talked about the girl my friends have a crush on. Everyone’s lucky to have met this sort of girl three or four times in their lives. They have the kind of beauty that transcends objectification by boys and their wayward naughty bits. A loveliness that expresses itself in posture and deportment, necessarily one part physical and mental beauty and ten parts je ne sais quoi for all the boys in the room to inarticulately fumble over for the rest of their lives. Men would sooner fantasise about walking down the beach with her than constructing lurid mental fuck fantasies about her. Rick James wrote Cold Blooded about her before his descent into cocaine depravity. Elliott Smith wrote LA about her before getting all harakiri up in his intestines. Indeed, she is a gorgeous harbinger of destruction, responsible for ninety percent of the world’s terribly composed poetry, love songs and blog posts.

I tried to explain this to little brother, but there’s no way of expressing it in a measured tone. I’m probably a bit smitten, hence all the beach-walking fantasies. But I’m incapable of true love, so it’s a moot point anyway. At least I can aspire to be one of the over-protective male friends that ward her off other boys for selfish reasons. I’m better at being less thinly veiled than most kids are in that respect. Anyway, I’d been blustering over the description for long enough that we’d finished our pots and decided on a change of scenery. We strolled up Sydney Road to the glorious A1 bakery, for an assortment of Lebanese pastries and coffee. My brother has a lot more foresight than I do, and he bought an arseload of herb pizzas for later consumption (which we then proceeded to finish off in six hours (and by we, I mean I)). Thank God for A1: preserve of all young kids undergoing their period of self-imposed Down and Out in Carlton and Brunswick rite of passage. I want to live like common people! I want to do whatever common people do! Plus, the Lebanese clientele lets us pretend we’ve undergone a profound multicultural experience, which certainly rubs well with my prejudices.

I’m going to Sydney tomorrow. I have a habit of assuming that dramatic changes in my daily life will shake things up enough for me to find the necessary inspirational vigour. It’s why I move house so often. I’m addicted to an idea of serendipity that doesn’t exist: force a change in my life, then wait expectantly for something profound to happen. The perfect recipe for conditioning yourself to ignore life’s beauty. I’m being flown up by a friend, who is returning the favour for me doing the same last month. I have no money, but I’m hoping to reciprocate the hospitality that’s being extended to me by cooking her tasty meals (she suffices on Up & Gos and confectionery, something I’m forever chastising her for; unfortunately she pretends to be vegan, and all my best dishes require cheese).

I intend to be boringly personal until my grand narrative is established in all its resplendent glory.

Love in the time of Eleva

2008-06-15T12:30:00.000+10:00

When I moved in to my last house, it was the beginning of winter, and everyone was in a collective funk. I was already feeling rather rubbish, after leaving a very harmonious house in Yarraville and working at the Coles on Elizabeth Street to make ends meet around my Centrelink benefits. Working in a supermarket again seemed regressive, and on a given shift, the police were called to deal with drunks or smackies or urchin shoplifters more often than not. Everyone else’s lives seemed in a weird state of flux, and people were either stressed, or listless, or angry, or feeling helpless. Collectively, it was contagious.

It was apparent from his behaviour that A. was depressed, but he didn’t have the presence of mind to know or care that his actions were alienating himself from the rest of the house. I made an effort to be pleasant, and nice, and accommodating. He didn’t acknowledge me the first month I lived there. He was argumentative with L., and across the hall, I’d hear him laying into her in a kind of hurt outrage that stemmed from him defending a sense of self-pride that hadn’t been assaulted in the first place. Speaking to him really riled me. We’d chat about the impending election, or atheism, or something else that was innocuous enough, but his opinions were always expressed from an ivory tower (and I realise I’m being hypocritical here, but I like to think I’m bigoted in a delightfully endearing way). There was no respect of other people’s worldviews; if they differed from his, it was because they weren’t as informed as he was. He giggled at the end of his sentences, either because he was nervous about arguing his case, or because he was belittling the other person for disagreeing with him – either way, it was grating.

He isolated himself from everyone. I tried to build bridges, because I was still wedded to my naive idea of domestic harmony. I appealed to him: we all had our little sadface thing going on, there was no point in continually antagonising each other, let’s just all talk about it. Let’s all be miserable bastards together. No dice.

I gave up, and it was an easy thing to do, really. Effort. Pfft. He realised he was on the outer with everyone, and we all decided to be spiteful bastards. It was much easier to ostracise him than to try to reconcile with him. I didn’t feel horrible about it at the time. I despised him without any sense of guilty compassion. Everything he did, I treated as a personal affront. His lifestyle was disgusting to me: McCain frozen dinners, a full-time data entry job with a bong being the first order of business after every workday, pub every Friday, and entire weekends spent lying in bed recovering from whatever injury he wrought on his body the night before. His opinions provided an ad hoc justification for his existence; he regurgitated Bill Hicks’ drug diatribes while smoking himself into a paranoiac stupor, and he was a zealous atheist as a means of coming to grips with his own life’s lack of meaning and wonder. I practically threw up my bile duct every time I saw one of his passive-aggressive treatises on the messiness of the kitchen taped above the sink.

***

Anyway, after a party last night, four of us took a cab back from Brunswick at four in the morning. The taxi driver was in a taxi driver mood, and he was eagerly foisting his worldview upon us. Normally I’d relish in it, but it was four in the morning and I was drunk and obnoxious. He told us how young and glorious we were. Think positively, affirmations, we’re the future, etc. Perhaps this was his shtick; telling obviously wasted young ones about the beautiful mysteries of life, tutting to himself as they relished in their misspent youth but generously offering the helping hand of the driver-passenger relationship to help them get their shit in order. Maybe many other drunkards got their Chicken Soup and went off to do him proud.

None of us four were in the mood for critically re-evaluating our entire existences, having actually had quite a pleasant evening and (presumably) all being in stable states of mind. But we were worldly, cosmopolitan, city-dwelling, pretty young folk and, no doubt, we’ve all had extended liaisons with the black dog at one point or another. We’ve watched enough people consciously acting against their own best interests to know that it takes more than some dude getting all Carpe Diem up in our hizzy to set us on the right trajectory.

How do you reach someone constantly befuddled by their own isolation? Hey guy, think happier: then people won’t think you’re such a douche-bag. Life’s beautiful, doncha know? Take your pick from any number of impending doomsday scenarios. Reside in a community which prides itself on values that you consider abhorrent and selfish. Find yourself socially slighted by vacuous arseholes with stupid haircuts because of the clothes you’re wearing. Listen to someone complaining about not being able to afford cosmetic surgery. Watch yourself lose the affections of people whose patience has been rendered ever scarcer by whichever technological advancement or option anxiety or disappeared social value is responsible for those horrid little kidsthesedays. Promptly forget all of that, because at least you’re not some stick figure on a World Vision commercial.

A. might’ve been a miserable cunt, but I couldn’t ever fault his judgement in being a miserable cunt. It was just easier to be a prick than to acknowledge all the ways we were similar.

he may have destroyed human freedom in Italy, but...

2008-06-14T14:35:00.000+10:00

Another blog, another didactic arsehole who wants to tell the world what’s wrong with it. Prefixing this thing with a disclaimer would be difficult, because I don’t think that I’m anywhere near a point where I can say what sort of a person I am. I don’t think I’m a particularly bad person, though I’ve done my share of shitty things. Likewise, I don’t think I’m a particularly good person, though I feel I’m entitled to be proud of other things. People are disingenuous when they say you shouldn’t have any regrets. I like who I am today, but I hurt other people to get the trains running on time. I like who I am today; tomorrow I might not.

But I’ve spent enough time reading the academic texts of our intellectual zeitgeist to be bored as shit whenever some prat works themselves into apoplexy from apologising profusely about being white and male and secretly much more Tory than their written words would suggest. Any other definitive thing I have to say about myself now would only be contradicted later – I reserve the right, in any case.