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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Leonardo's car brought to life

"A programmable steering mechanism allows it go straight, or turn at pre-set angles. But only to the right. Good in towns like today's Florence, with a one-way system. As ever, Leonardo was centuries ahead of his time."

BBC NEWS | Technology | Fingertips 'read' text messages

"Pieces of art could be developed solely to be touched, by 'tactile composers' akin to music for the ear and paintings for the eye."

This blog is dead. Come to my new home. It tastes better.

Iranian Spread I missed the last two MIFF sessions I was supposed to attend (Durval Records and Osama) due to study commitments (I'm such a nerd). But I did make it to Iranian Spread), the last film I'll see at this year's festival. Kianoush Ayyari's film follows the travels of a counterfeit 1000 toman banknote, as it changes hands in markets, taxis, weddings, shopping malls, and other transactions. Not only does this provide a clever transition point for linking a series of short stories, it also provides a moral and ethical testing point for the characters. Each story takes as it's beginning and end, this transferal of the banknote, the passing of the problem as though it's a baton in a relay. Each recipient of the money deals with its problematic nature in a different way. A wealthy man offloads it by giving a beggar 50 tomans, receiving 950 legitimate tomans in change. The husband of an abortionist attempts to return it to the woman who handed it over for an illegal and seemingly brutal abortion, only to find the weak and pained woman struggling to afford a much needed banana drink to recover from her experience - instead of returning the forged note he pays for her drink. These two exchanges at each end of the ethical spectrum within this film, and in between we find the processes of trust and charity, greed and self-centeredness, as each character deals with the situation. As the note passes hands, we encounter not only the story of the note itself, but also the peripheral story of the character and those around them; the woman who defiantly beats all the men in her group by standing in a freezing cold creek for longer than them, thereby winning the money to undergo an illegal abortion; the familial drama surrounding a rural wedding; the university student whose father pays for her education by begging, much to her chagrin. I'd have to say that this is the best of the ten films I saw at MIFF this year.

Jakarta attack John Howard's twists of logic continue today. After a terrorist attack on Jakarta's Marriott Hotel, an establishment heavily frequented by Western business-people, Howard has pointed out that only Indonesians were killed. This proves, in Howard's view, that the targets were Muslims. Muslims attacking Muslims, this concept not only implies a certain lunacy, but also validates a call for Muslims to make a stand against fanatics. "They're attacking and killing fellow Muslims and that means that this is a war that must be waged by Muslims and Christians and Jews and all people of good will around the world against fanatics." I think it's a long bow to draw, to assume that Muslims were a target here. Howard's schematic flows of logic have sparked my interest in the last few days. In this case there's a positive angle; by including Muslims in the victim-barrel, it lessens the backlash against them (hopefully). Also interesting in the aftermath of the Jakarta attack, is the faux-implication of Jemaah Islamiah. There has been no solid proof as to who is behind the attack, and as I write nobody has claimed responsibility. The Australian media has been pointing a veiled finger at JI, implying but never concretely stating who's responsible. We love super-villains. We love having a focus for out collective hatred. It lessens the confusion of the world.

New CNWB blog at Typepad I've been inspired by Angus' move from Blogspot to Typepad, and have consequently started up a new version of CNWB there. I've got a free one month trial, so I'll post the same entries to both Blogspot and Typepad during that time, and then decide if the benefits of Typepad are worth paying for. The new blog is here. The layout is still under construction, and visitors are requested to collect their helmets from the site office.

Adam and Steve John Howard has joined both the Vatican and George W. Bush (is that surprising?), in denouncing the notion of homosexual marriage. This is to be expected from a man who places much emphasis on (nuclear) 'family values', but what I found interesting was his reasoning behind his stance. Gone are the days where conservatives could claim moralistic reasons for their exclusionary opinions on homosexuality (well, they still can, but not if they want to win an election). Howard has claimed that marriage is the bedrock of society because it ensures "the survival of the species". The inability of homosexual couples to produce offspring places them at odds with the social responsibility to procreate. What I find curious is the reduction of a cultural phenomenon to a scientific one. While procreation is a natural urge which ensures the survival of the species, marriage is merely a cultural construction, and has nothing to do with the survival of the human species. Seagulls don't get married, and they're bloody everywhere. I think that to reduce marriage to a purely utilitarian function ignores the whole notion of people choosing to share their lives together. Using the Howard model, every marriage is under some obligation to bear children. It ignores the fact that people get married because they love each other, and choose to express their commitment to each other through a cultural outlet. Conversely, there's the issue of teenage pregnancy. Here's a situation where natural urges are ensuring the "survival of the species", yet we're not as keen to defend this phenomenon. Our society and culture is set up in such a way that makes teenage pregnancy problematic. By the same logic of defending the institution of marriage as a kind of natural evolutionary tactic, and ignoring its cultural relevancy, one could also argue that teenage pregnancy should be encouraged. Of course, teenage sexuality is terrifying within the construct of 'the family'. I'm getting a bit off track now, but the primary point I'm trying to make is this; it's quite offensive to imply that homosexuals being able to express their love and commitment in the same way heterosexuals do, is somehow endangering the survival of the human species, especially in the shadow of war, famine and disease. Finally, how must Janet Howard feel, knowing that her husbands primary reason for marrying her is the survival of the human species. The Null Device has also had a stab at this issue.

More MIFFism Crimson Gold I Was disappointed with Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold. The film opens with the story's conclusion, and so the rest of the film consists of the backstory to the events we've already seen. Unfortunately, the conclusion is that the film's protagonist kills himself in a bungled jewelry shop robbery, and so we're left following a character who we know is essentially a timebomb. The intention of the film therefore, seems to be to show us what drove the character to such ends, why did he rob a jewelry shop and why would he kill himself when it all goes wrong? These questions aren't really answered effectively, which leaves the conclusion-first narrative somewhat pointless. Furthermore, many of the scenes seem to be left inconclusive. Two scenes in particular left me feeling that the situation was left unresolved. I'm not usually one to fuss over unconventional narratives, in fact I quite enjoy them, which lead me to wonder why this film didn't work for me. What I concluded was that, as often happens with foreign-language films, words alone cannot convey all the subtle and intangible elements of language. Subtitles allow us to follow the basics of the plot, but much of the message is lost; physical gestures made while we're furiously reading lines of text at the bottom of the screen, cultural references, irony, sarcasm. I get the impression that much of Crimson Gold's story was lost in the translation, not only of language but also of cultural subtleties. I'm therefore more inclined to say "I didn't enjoy this film as much as I'd hoped" rather than "this is an bad film". Ballroom Parallel universes make for some interesting films. One of my favourites is Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds, another is the Back to the Future trilogy. Ballroom is set in a small coastal French town, where two men live in a renovated old ballroom. One of the men, Rene, is a visual artist whose work somehow involves toy bears and webcams. Rene becomes obsessed with an old photo he finds in a magazine, a pair of men dressed as little girls, some kind of vaudevillian act called The Bernard Brothers, which is also Rene's surname. Rene starts to notice unusual things occurring around the ballroom, doors left open and food disappearing from plates. He soon starts to catch glimpses of the culprit, it's one of the Bernard Brothers, though it's actually him, Rene. On a trip to Copenhagen with his partner, Rene meets an associate who explains his theory of parallel realities. He uses the example of the parallel world that would exist in which Nazi Germany won the second world war, and then goes on to point out that Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen cars are everywhere in Europe, and that IG Farben, the company that made Zyklon B, is still listed on the stock exchange. Other realities aren't parallel to ours, he says, but rather we are constantly at intersections between multiple realities. Clearly the recurring appearance of the Bernard Sister is Rene himself, from a different reality. Somehow Rene is able to peer through the curtain which separates these worlds. As a counterpoint to the Nazi Germany theory, television news reports are audible throughout the film, clearly defining Rene's world as the world we are part of; the fall of Kabul, the truckload of dead refugees found in Britain, the calls to close the Sangatte refugee camp. Towards the end, Rene incorporates the Bernard Sister character into his performance art, effectively merging the two worlds. Doing Time The reflections of Anime writer Hanawa Kazuichi's time spent in prison. One of Hanawa's pastimes was battle re-enactments, similar to those that take place in the USA or the UK. In Hanawa's case it's not the American War of Independence or Medieval scenarios, but rather Vietnam that he and his friends recreate. A subpart of this community is the crafting of replica guns, and Hanawa's pistol is regarded as a fine piece of workmanship. In fact, so lifelike is his gun that it's capable of firing real bullets, which makes it illegal to own in Japan. Consequently Hanawa spends time in prison, and this film follows his observations on other inmates, and of the strictly regimented daily routines they're forced to live by. There is no specific narrative to the film, it's purely a nicely paced observational wander though the lives of the prisoners, coupled with some genuinely humourous moments whereby the warmth and humility of the characters shines through the barrage of pointless protocol and institutionalisation. Feisty Noodle Feisty Noodle is a Melbourne blog which has hitherto escaped my radar. They too, are blogging their journey through MIFFistan.

The Allegorical Power Series The August volume of The Allegorical Power Series is up; a selection of free MP3 files, curated this month by Dion Workman. Featuring Okkyung Lee, Raz Mesinai, Rosy Parlane, Toshio Kajiwara, Julien Ottazi, Tim Barnes and David Daniell.

Plastic Balls A very addictive Pong / Breakout-style game. Great interactive animation in The Man Project (reminds me of the stomach worm things in Donnie Darko). Both via Blogdex.

CNWB Top Five for 27 July - 2 August 1. Sean Paul : Like Glue 2. Dizzee Rascal : I Luv U (remix) 3. Dusty Springfield : Just A Little Lovin' 4. The Postal Service : From Great Heights 5. The Gossip : Fire Sign

Old blogs Abbas Aly's fight against the bigots of Annangrove has surfaced in the news again. This time the Land & Environment Court has overturned the Baulkham Hills Shire Council's decision to disallow Aly to build a Muslim prayer centre on his own property. I wrote about this in an old blog of mine, which sent me looking for it. I must've erased it for some reason, but it was interesting to look over those old blogs; Logic Probe was my attempt at a copy-n-paste scrapbook, while Silent Type dates back to January 2001 and trails off just before September 11, 2001 (which is a pity, because I would love to have a record of my thoughts at that time).

More MIFFin' Love Liza Directed by Todd Louiso (who played Dick in High Fidelity), starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman (one of my favourite actors), and written by Hoffman's brother. This film about a successful web-designer whose wife has committed suicide, left me pretty cold. A character on a descent into destitution and madness, with little left open for our engagement with him. Hoffman's journey takes some interesting and unconventional turns, but ultimately I'm left not caring about the outcome. Warp : Film for Music A selection of video clips from the Warp Records back catalogue. Lacking from the selection was any indication as to what each track was. Some were obvious (Aphex Twin, Autechre, Plaid, Squarepusher), but other required some post-film investigation. Three videos which really stood out for me, were Antipop Consortium's Ghostlawns, Vincent Gallo's Honeybunny, and Autechre's Gantz Graf. Antipop Consortium come through with such a successful take on futuristic Hip Hop, so 'funky' yet perfectly mutated. Vincent Gallo's 60s perve-fest was just so overtly and unashamedly sexual it's impossible not to give it props. Autechre's Gantz Graf is a perfect symbiosis of sound and image, a faultless realisation of the links between electronic music and graphic design, between shape, movement and sound. Interestingly, the two Aphex Twin videos (Come To Daddy and Windowlicker) raised a certain amount of cheer from the audience. This reminded me of the 'golden oldies' syndrome, whereby familiarity draws appreciation. Or something. I must admit that I cringed when the opening images of Come To Daddy appeared. Not that I dislike Chris Cunningham's brilliant work, it's just that the effect of this particular video has worn rather thin on me. It's impact is its shock and fear, which becomes tiring with repeated viewings. Windowlicker is another matter, a hilarious piece of mutant-sexuality and self-parody. It's a pity however that the video's comedy distracts from the music, which is one of the finest Aphex moments. Leaving the cinema, I heard one woman say to her friends "It was just beats and sounds, but really fucked up". So dismissive yet so articulate.

Jamaican Riddim Directory Massive selection of Java-based Jamaican riddims (via MeFi).

RIP John Schlesinger

Mistress For Christmas The A-Z of S&M undertones in pop music, from AC/DC to ZZ Top (via NR&RF).

Glowing mice My new desktop wallpaper.

Australian Idol : it's like punk never happened Being a glutton for (or victim of) hype, I watched the first episode of Australian Idol last night. Having never immersed myself in Popstars or Search For A Supermodel, this is my initiation into the 'talent-search' genre of reality TV, and I'm therefore still brewing over my initial reactions to the show. This subgenre is often approached from the perspective that it's exposing the real workings of the pop music industry, and that this in itself is interesting, even subversive. From my initial musings on Australian Idol, I couldn't disagree more. I think this is a symptom of the public's increasing cynicism and the consequent marketing aimed as such cynicism. This explains the success of programmes like The Secret Life Of Us, which prances around proclaiming to be in touch with the cynicism of hip innercity late 20-somethings, yet offers nothing in the form of social critique. The characters imply that they're disillusioned with modern hyper-consumer culture, yet the same characters are used to sell toothpaste and burgers during the ad breaks (I've had my little rant of this before). Similarly, we get local Hip Hop outfit 1200 Techniques pushing Frankfurt School Franti-isms on us, yet their main mouthpiece part-times in TV ads for chocolate biscuits. In both situations, we're having our cynicism sold back to us. By buying into The Secret Life Of Us or 1200 Techniques, we feel like we're engaging in a critique of consumer culture, like we're expressing our disillusionment with the hyper-reality of television advertising. But really, it's simply a case of the No Logo generation becoming another niche market. Which brings me back to Australian Idol. It seems that this show, and it's predecessors, are tuned into the fact that its target audience is aware of the inorganic manufacturing of pop stars, and so they've flipped the machine on its back allowing you to view the inner-workings. It panders to our cynicism of manufactured pop music, making you think you're getting some kind of insight. It pretends to completely blow the lid on the manufacturing process, as though our simulacrum-savvy wits have earned us the rights to look inside. But in doing this, it doesn't so much expose the inner working, which is what you're supposed to think it does, so much as it re-mystifies it. The status of 'celebrity' is removed from any preconceptions that it's in any way accessible. In programmes such as these, we're shown the supposed prerequisites for celebrity status; a one in ten thousand chance, a grueling training regime which lasts months, humiliation, degradation, debasement. Winning this competition, and earning celebrity status, requires almost superhuman abilities. The curtain is parted, and one lucky person is invited to enter the mythical world. Guarding the door are the three judges, consisting of one bona fide celebrity, and two manufacturers. It was their job in the first episode to construct their own characters; Marcia Hines the motherly figure, Ian 'Dicko' Dickson the arsehole, and Mark Holden (whose character was indeterminate, having been drowned out by the other two). Ian Dickson's character is the most interesting, the personification of industry creep, he's obviously the villain of the series. It's his job to vilify and upset, to reduce people to tears, to shatter their confidence. He makes a lot of money from hurting people, which makes him a certified prick. His justification is that the entertainment industry throws so much hatred at celebrities, the contestants must be able to handle it. To get into the party you've got to get through this idiot's insults. Once again the myth is constructed. Being a celebrity is exceptionally difficult, and not something that most people could handle. The life of a celebrity is stressful and full of criticism (oh, how remarkably different from the real world!). In reality his character is a ratings earner, he's there to create drama. Dickson extends the rejection of unsuccessful applicants, creating entertainment out of disjection. Dickson's character mixes post-PC irony with retro-sexism. The blatant judgment of body image and sex appeal is overt and unapologetic. This shallowness is justified by the fact that the audience is shallow, that consumers of pop culture are shallow, that the whole entertainment industry is shallow. This is part of the notion of looking at the innards of the pop music machine, the fact that it's superficial and emotionless, that we expect our celebrities to fit into a certain physical mould. The blame is effectively passed on to us. A skinny young man is auditioning (and here's someone whose body shape I can relate to). "I don't wanna sign someone who looks like they'd lose a fight with Nikki Webster" says Dicko. A woman who may not be considered stereotypically good-looking auditions, only to be confronted with Dicko's "You haven't got a voice strong enough to overcome the way you look". A slightly overweight woman auditions (and when I say 'slightly', I mean that she looked totally 'normal' to me), which raises questions about whether she's comfortable with her body size. The lowest point came when a black man with an African accent auditions. Dicko asks him why he came to this country, to which the man answers that he was a refugee. Dicko says to him "you represent what I love about this country" referring to the fact that this guy had the initiative to enter the competition. It's odd that this wasn't applied to any other the other 7999 hopefuls, until it becomes clear that Dicko's making an effort to appear as though he has a humanistic edge, but it's such an obviously tokenistic gesture that it becomes exploitative and offensive.

YellowCat It's always great to find a Melbourne blog with good taste in music. YellowCat is the latest find.

Homework The second of the Abbas Kiarostami films I was to attend. When attending the cinema, I usually try to sit one third of the way in from the front, and slightly off centre. In this session, my preferences were confirmed when Mr Kiarostami chose my aisle to sit in himself. Before the film, he made similar statements (again via an interpreter) as he did at the screening of Ten. James Hewison, the executive director of MIFF, also announces that many of the older Kiarostami prints were very fragile and that any degredation in the quality should be accepted. Unfortunately it wasn't the quality of the print which the problem at this screening, it was the fact that MIFF had been sent the wrong print, one without subtitles. Five minutes into the film, the lights came up and Hewison approached the lectern to announce that the rest of the film would not be screened, and that refunds would be available at the box office. Someone asked if the film could be screened anyway, without subtitles, to which Hewison replied that Kiarostami himself had requested the screening be stopped. So I left, having stood in the queue for longer than I was in the cinema.

Simon Reynolds on Cabaret Voltaire I'm using the new Blog This tool to draw attention to this article on Cabaret Voltaire by Simon Reynolds (via K-Punk).

Melbourne International Film Festival First four MIFF sessions down, nine to go. Dom Durakov (House of Fools) The occupants of an asylum, oblivious to the outside world, find themselves at the center of the Chechen War. House of Fools reminded me of No Man's Land, not only in its similar geopolitical setting, but also in the way it approaches the war genre from a humanistic angle. While Chechen soldiers are holed up in the asylum, they're visited by Russian troops who have brought them a Chechen corpse, out of respect for the deceased. While the commanders of each side are negotiating, the Russian and Chechen troops arrange to trade some weed for ammunition. Meanwhile, the commanders realise they both fought in Afghanistan, where one's troop saved the other's, and so a mutual respect is formed. The humanity and civility of the soldiers are exposed, subverting the notion that they're simply programmed robots, obeying the commands of their leaders. This trans-faction humanism goes against the general Hollywood model, whereby any aspect of humanism is within the one faction (usually the American), while the enemy are simply a prop to signify the united cause of the home-team. All The Real Girls A love story soured by human mistakes, set in a small American milling town, similar in feel to the towns represented in Twin Peaks or Northern Exposure. Mechanic Paul meets and falls in love with his best friend's sister, Noel, who's just returned from boarding school, all grown up. Their courtship is sweetly romantic, and their eccentric conversations convey the strong links forming between them The turning point comes when one betrays the other, and for the remaining two thirds of the film we're following the tensions of the widening rift between them. Their relationship is set up with such saccharine romanticism, it's hard to shift gears and engage with the resultant melancholy, which throws the audience into the same state of confusion faced by the characters. We're left wondering if there's any way out of this mess, if the film will square-out and leave us rewarded, or if we'll be left in the same murk the Paul and Noel find themselves in. A defining moment occurs when Paul finds himself drunk and depressed, talking to an old ex-girlfriend at a bar. He tells her the story of how he once watched a flock of ducks flying through the sky in a perfect V formation (so precise yet so organic), only to smash into the side of a barn, fall to the ground and die. "Have you ever seen that? Have you ever seen animals make mistakes?" he asks her. For all our complexities, we're still encumbered with the tendency to make monumental errors; "it's only human", as the saying goes. Ultimately the film has no solid conclusion, which is a little disconcerting, and it's taken me a couple of days to overcome the disappointment and realise the film has played out perfectly. Ten MIFF's crown piece this year is the attendance of Abbas Kiarostami, the renown Iranian film-maker. He introduced his 2002 film Ten, through a translator to a sold-out screening at the Capitol Theatre. His introduction was very simple; it's a pleasure to be in Melbourne, the theatre is beautiful, please enjoy the film etc. A digital camera is mounted to the dashboard of a car owned by newly divorced woman. As she drives through the streets of an Iranian city, she converses with a succession of passengers, and through this, her story develops. Her pre-teen son is unhappy about her divorce from his womanising father, and her partnership with a new man. Meanwhile, her friend is struggling with her own disintegrating marriage, and advice is imparted. Apart from her son, all the passengers are female; an older woman on her way to pray at the mausoleum, a street prostitute defiantly proud of her profession, the driver's sister. Men appear only as traffic obstructions, who aggravate the driver on both a real and metaphoric level. At times another car draws up next to us, and we see the faces of it's occupants slip into and out of frame. As they stare directly into camera, breaking the diegesis, making no secret of the medium. The performances are so realistic, so genuine, it's extremely difficult to ascertain whether the story is in-fact real or scripted, and the staring faces add to the diffusion. Nice. The Studio One Story The story of Sir Coxsone Dodd's Studio One, one of the most important studios in Jamaica's rich musical history. There's certainly a huge story to tell, encompassing the birth of soundsystems, ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, dancehall and ragga. Unfortunately, Soul Jazz's usual attention to detail and love of music is ruined by awkward and clumsy film-making. For a start, a garish coloured frame surrounds the images for the whole duration, which never ceases from being distracting, as it changes colour with each scene. The interviews, particularly with Dodd, are too inarticulate, which is the result of ineffective editing moreso than the fault of the interviewees. For a music documentary, there was too little music. While various studio and musical techniques are discussed, we're not given any demonstration of these techniques, and when some music does eventually begin, it soon fades as another interview begins. With some ruthless editing, and the addition of more archival footage, possibly some narration to add more structure, and the reduction of an hour from it's duration, this could have retained the same quantity of information, and been a lot more watchable.

Modernist Hip Hop I composed a bleary-eyed post-gin e-mail to a friend this morning, and felt the sentiments worthy of repeating here... Have you heard/seen the new 1200 Techniques song? I hate that band. I hate that really smug, self-righteous Hip Hop. This dude's telling me the internet and TV are draining my brain! Fucking modernists. And then they directly quote that Disposable Heroes 'Television, Drug of a Nation' song, which blows their cover, and exposes them as the Franti wannabes they really are. Go back to Frankfurt and take the John Butler Trio with you.

Thirty, it's the new twenty-two, and I'll be there in 50 days. Graham's also looking down the barrel of this gun, as I suspect a lot of my fellow bloggers are. I mean, it's 11 o'clock on a Friday night and where am I? In front of my laptop. In my pyjamas. (waiting up to see the Dizzee Rascal video on Rage). Speaking of other local bloggers, Null Device is quick off the mark in getting down his thought on the beatbox doco which screened tonight as part of MIFF. It was only a few hours ago I was walking past the queue for this film (where I made yet another Alex Viviano spotting). I was passing by after seeing All The Real Girls at the Forum Theatre, and House Of Fools at Village. More on those later. Update : Angus had posted his thoughts on Le temps du loup. MIFF and blogging, I'm loving it.

RIP Tim Hemesley, rock n' roll outlaw.

RIP Jude Milhon (aka St Jude, feminist cypherpunk).

Mega CD & book sale Melbourne readers may be interested to note that the Mega CD & Book Sale is on again at the Melbourne Exhibition & Convention Centre (aka Jeff's Shed). It's open every night until midnight. It's been slim pickings over the last few years, and there are certain CDs which turn up every year (Ian Brown, Peshay) getting cheaper and cheaper. Nothing will beat the bonanza I struck in 2000 when I walked out with an armload of Top Deck and Blood & Fire comps. Update : Don't bother going down there, unless you're after overpriced Ministry Of Sound-esque comps, or Del Amitri, or Nine Inch Nails remixes. I only picked up Ms Dynamite's A Little Deeper (for $10), and contemplated picking up Foxy Brown's Ill Na Na, but opted out.

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More on BB3 : I'll get a life soon, I promise Max Markson, of publicity / events outfit Markson Sparks, suggests Tasmania should utilise Reggie in promoting tourism to the state, but stresses that it should be done fast ("she should be going on the road very quickly"..."I'd sign her up immediately"). He no doubt recognises her limited shelf-life as a media identity. It's our desire for instant gratification, instant celebrity, which drove Reggie's popularity. We'd rather laugh at someone than get to know them. Jo Chichester makes some ambiguous points about Reggie's success, claiming her unsophisticated demeanor reflects many people's distrust or disgust with the pretension of "the elites". Perhaps, admiring Reggie allows us to position ourselves within this ideology. We can make claims that it links us with the commoner, with the everyman, and sets us apart from pretension or snobbishness. But we're all pretentious in the eyes of someone else, even if we'd like to think we aren't.

Skeletor's top eleven minions So many memories; Tri-Klops, Merman, Beastman, Trap-jaw, Evil Lyn. They were all minions of Skeletor (via Fark). Of course, Skeletor is second only to Megatron as far as cartoon villains go.

QAF out of sync SBS slipped up last night and screened the wrong episode of Queer As Folk. It didn't bother me too much, as this is the third time I've seen this series, yet for someone who's just catching up, the plot would have gone in a kind of fragmented surreality. One minute Ted's poaching Brian's cast-offs, the next he's in a coma after taking drugs with Blake. Michael, who's just decided to make the commitment to move in with David, is now talking about a guy he picked up at Babylon. Emmett, who's recently renounced his homosexuality after joining a cult-like Christian movement, is now telling tales of the S&M Master he spent last night with. This minor error pales in comparison to the injustice of withholding the third series until next year! The good news though, is that series four is in pre-production, and is hoped to be screened straight after the third series.

Final BB comedown The final episode of Big Brother last night. I was disappointed, yet hardly surprised, that Reggie won. I'm setting myself up for a beating here, but Reggie's popularity has been grating on me for the last few weeks. Reggie represents our fascination with celebrity status, with the narrow confines of charisma, and essentially, with surface at the expense of depth. This prioritising of superficiality over substance is typical of our immersion in pop culture. Reggie's also emblematic of the archetypal 'Aussie battler', those troubled souls paraded around the current affairs circuit like stage ponies; the sick child who gets a visit from High-5, the selfless charity worker who gets given a new Hyundai, the bored fish n' chip shop owner who wins $250,000. Her desire to escape the confines of her life no doubt played heavily into the public's empathy with her. Her charm has been her naivety, and whilst that isn't a particularly demeanable trait in itself, it's been rewarded at the expense of two of Big Brother's most engaging and complex contestants ever. Dan's sensitivity and earnestness, his unashamed weirdness and eccentricity in the face of overwhelming machismo and militant 'normality', his overt expression of his femininity ("now it's just us girls left" he says after Patrick's eviction), his raw honesty. Chrissie's sharp-as-a-knife perceptions, her clarity of vision, her strong sense of self, and also her warmth and compassion. They both had a knack of saying the right things to people, of making outsiders feel welcome, of comforting those who were feeling down, and identifying the good qualities they saw in others. I have no doubt Reggie's a kind and friendly person. My quandary is not with the woman herself, but with her popularity. There were some charming moments on last night's program, such as when Reggie was told she'd just won $250,000, to which she replied "I thought it was gonna be a Playstation", or when seeing her husband for the first time in 3 months, only to be fascinated by his new watch; "it's a nice one" she says. And now Big Brother is over for another year or so. We'll be seeing Reggie's face and hearing her voice for months to come, but she'll soon be as forgotten as Sarah-Marie or Marty & Jess, an instant celebrity chewed up and spat out by the endless cycle of showbiz. If there's any comfort in all this, it's that people like Dan and Chrissie exist, and their unflinching humanity is a reminder that there is goodness is be sought in everyone.

More BB musings After much searching of websites and message boards, I can't seem to find any mentions of Big Brother parties tonight, except for a mention of the Canada Hotel in Carlton here. I posted a query to the forums on the official BB website, but it was seemingly removed by the notoriously censorial moderators. Maybe it was seen to lead into discussions of commercial establishments not sanctioned by the official BB entertainment conglomerate. I was thinking about tonight's eviction whilst enjoying my Pho soup today. It's a shame that it's such a given that Reggie will win. In a way, it would have been more exciting if Chrissie was evicted last night, as the race between Dan and Reggie would be a lot closer. But there is an outside chance for Chrissie. Popularity polls indicate Reggie is the favourite, but Dan had a large fanbase, and those fans will have seen the strong connections formed between him and Chrissie. There's a possibility, remote as it is, that Dan-fans will join forces with Chrissie fans, and the voting power between them may evict Reggie. Of course, this didn't work last year when Jess fans didn't have the power to vote out Peter, leaving Marty as the winner.

BB3 : Penultimate eviction As last night's Big Brother penultimate eviction was starting, I made the prediction that Dan would go. I considered blogging this prediction, just to prove that it happened, but was a little too comfortable on the couch. The second favourite always gets voted out in the penultimate eviction, because the fans of the favourite, seeing the second favourite as the immediate threat, put their voting power into action. This leaves the least favourite of the three to slip through to the final day. So in this case, Reggie's huge fanbase voted out Dan, allowing Chrissie to stay. This was most evident in the first series, when Sarah Marie was evicted (although I still can't work out how Ben beat Blair). The result would be different if we were asked to vote for who's to stay as opposed to who's to leave, in which case we'd have Reggie and Dan sitting in the house today. All three housemates seemed quite shocked by the eviction of Dan. I think they were all expecting Chrissie to be evicted. This was evident during a conversation between Dan and Chrissie, where Dan said he regarded Reggie as his main competition, and furthermore outside, where Reggie tells Chrissie she's all amped up to beat Dan. Once back in the studio with Gretel, Dan was seemingly in a state of bewilderment, quite stunned by the sudden shift in realities. Quite bizarre was the special prize given to him, a prosumer-grade Sony video camera. I'm still trying to find a price on this model, but I'd guess it would be around $10k-$15k. Gretel made comments to the effect of it being a special prize, given to him because Big Brother (and whether that be Channel 10 or Southern Star or whoever, is unclear) was so taken by his talents that they wanted to encourage him to pursue a film-making career. Indeed, I'd be very surprised if Dan's not offered a role in a kids TV show or something. And so where's left with Chrissie and Reggie in the house. Until now, no women had made it through to the final two, let alone two women. My prediction is (unsurprisingly) that Reggie will win. Contrary to what may have been perceived in my recent BB post, I have nothing against Reggie; I think she's a charming and charismatic woman, but of the human traits I value the most, Chrissie is surely my personal favourite to win. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find out where the final eviction parties are on tonight.

Shane Lyons on Richard Wolstencroft Some interesting and incisive critiques of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival are presented by Shane Lyons. This may be slightly outdated now that MUFF has finished for another year, but I figured it was worth linking to in the afterglow of the David Irving controversy. Also interesting is Lyons' examination of Richard Wolstencroft's politics and interest in neo-Nazism and fascism. But this isn't a rambling diatribe, Lyons presents a clear-minded, articulate and well humoured assessment; I often found myself laughing out loud, particularly with lines like "The only real threat he poses to anyone in the Australian film community is embarrassment by association". One criticism made by Lyons regards the overabundance of low-budget exploitation films (it almost seems a MUFF prerequisite to include either hit-men or bondage in the plot), which are passed off as being "underground". Compare the films in MUFF with some of the films in the "mainstream", "conservative" Melbourne International Film Festival, such as Li Yang's Blind Shaft, which explores life in China's notoriously unsafe coal mines, made without the approval of Chinese officials, or Mohsen Makhmalbal's The Afghan Alphabet, which follows the life of Afghani refugee children, filmed during the US's bombardment of the area, or Manijeh Hekmat's Women's Prison, made under her husband's name after Iranian officials refused to grant her permission to make the film. In this light, it's embarrassing that MUFF's most controversial offering was a David Irving documentary.

Viviano spotted We went for a quiet drink at Bourgie on Friday night, a sparsely populated local bar with innercity hipster pretentions (still, they gain cnwb points for the great blown-up Bowie poster on the back wall). Phoebe spotted the elusive Alex Viviano, although I didn't realise who it was until I checked his Livejournal today.

Another Ken Park screening I'm still getting ton of hits from people searching for Ken Park downloads, which is sure to increase as news hits of another illegal screening in Melbourne. 200 people attended this screening at an undisclosed venue, with invitations being spread by e-mail and word-of-mouth. Still, myself and everyone I know seem to have been left out of the loop. When is someone going to invite me?

Punkdub to P!nk: a junk voyage I often make junk compilations; CD-R mixes of stuff which has recently fallen into my mitts. Often they're loosely constructed with another listener in mind, where I try to find an intersection where my taste may crossover with theirs. This is the latest, with my girlfriend's sister in mind... 1. Vivien Goldman : Private Armies 2. Finley Quaye : Even After All (Studio 2000 mix) 3. The RZA : Righteous Way 4. The Clash : Bankrobber (dub) 5. The Pop Group : Where There's A Will 6. Blondie : Once Had A Love (1975 demo version of Heart Of Glass) 7. Go Home Productions : Justin Likes Blondes (bootleg remix of Timberlake and Blondie) 8. DM & Jemini : Yoo Hoo 9. Sharkie Major : This Ain't A Game 10. Hindi Dub : Diwali Riddim 11. Sean Paul : Get Busy (Diwaldi instrumental) 12. Punjabi Hit Squad : Hai Hai 13. Sean Paul : Gimme The Light (2-step mix) 14. Oxide & Neutrino : No Good 4 Me (Foot to the Floor mix) 15. Sean Paul : Get Busy 16. Zapp : More Bounce To The Ounce 17. Pink : Feel Good Time

BB3 : Messages from the outside I've been adding lots of bits n' pieces to other people's blogs on the topic of Big Brother, so I figured in these final days of series 3, I should reflect on my personal perspectives. I haven't written on the subject since Belinda broke the news of her family's dark secrets, at which time I was avowing I would give up on the show. The lure has been too great, however, and I've found myself enjoying this series possibly more than any other. Big Brother is winding down now, which is both exciting and disappointing at the same time. I started off this week believing that any of the three remaining housemates deserve to win, but my impression of Reggie has since begun dropping, while that of Chrissie is rising. Reggie's popularity (and there's little doubt she's considered firm favourite to win, even by those within the house) seems based on her naive ocker-ism, the charm of being a little less cultured than the others. Maybe it's something we can all identify with, when we get the feeling we're somewhat out of our depth in a conversation. But the charm is wearing thin, and the more we get to know Reggie, the less her naivety appeals. In short, Reggie's over-rated. Dan, on the other hand, is someone I really can identify with. The self-confessed introvert, who spent the first few weeks building up a persona to mask his insecurities. This raised the ire of some other housemates, who used Dan's overt performances as a reason to nominate him, stating he wasn't down to Earth and that they couldn't get to know the real Dan. This kind of reasoning has always troubled me. As someone who often encounters insecurity and shyness, I frequently find myself employing some kind of persona to get me through social situations. What's more, I'd be surprised if there's anybody in Western society who doesn't regularly use this trick. Nobody acts exactly the same whether we're at work, at the pub, in the home, meeting people of importance, at a party (well, maybe John Elliot's an exception). Furthermore, down to Earthness is judged from a culturally static point, the mythical Australian-ness of being 'easy-going', friendly, good humoured. To be outside this point invokes criticisms of weirdness, snobbishness (often confused with shyness), or (God forbid!) effeminateness. Dan dealt with the hyper-socialisation of Big Brother by concealing his more natural self beneath a barrage of clown-like performances. He survived an string of nominations and, as the social circle has dwindled to a handful of people he's truly comfortable with, we've been blessed with seeing Dan for what he really is; a sensitive, affectionate, caring and honest man. His survival in the house has proven that beneath every 'odd' person who sits outside the static and (quite simply) boring normality of Australian cultural hegemony, is a real person who's no more messed up than everyone else. Chrissie has similarly shown herself to be a selfless, caring and thoughtful person. Her ability to see through the fog of hyper-reality with the clarity of a critical home-viewer, and her headstrong sense of self, make her my personal favourite.

Headed down to the Forum Theatre on my lunchbreak, home of the new MIFF box office. It's a broom-closet compared to the old box office at the Capitol Theatre, and even though it avoids the problem of confusing dual queues for tickets and films, I predict it'll lose that community-like feel the Capitol foyer had around MIFF time. Bought my minipass, and booked tickets to nine of the ten films I intend on seeing. It's a sad day in Cuba. RIP Compay Segundo and Celia Cruz.

Melbourne Blogs now has a discussion board. Pretty quiet so far, but it's only just gone up.

To open the gate for me there was the gravedigger I had already met at The Star Of Sweden. "I am looking for Mr. Kauderer", I said to him. He answered, "Mr. Kauderer is not here. But since the cemetery is the home of those who aren't here, come in". Ukko Ahti, Leaning From The Steep Slope, pg. 2

MUFF withdraws David Irving film Once the excitement of mass protests such as S11 and M1 had died down, it became clear to me that I would not attend such events any more. Direct action can all too easily become undemocratic, forcing one's political ideology onto others, attempting to shut down meetings and discussions purely because they go against the beliefs of others. Don't get me wrong, I sympathise with a lot of the concerns of the anti-globalisation movement, but I find such intimidation and bullish behaviour to be contradictory to the goals of the movement. Whether it was intended or not, the Australasian Union of Jewish Students has succeeded in such intimidation. An attempt was made to ban a film by ultra-Right historian David Irving, to be screened as part of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal rejected the appeal, allowing the screening to take place. The group then chose to demonstrate outside the screening. To their credit, the aim of the protest was to be a small gathering where pamphlets on the Holocaust would be handed to patrons. The group resorted to expressing their right to free-speech instead of suppressing someone else's. It seemed like a fair result all round. Cases like this create a difficult situation for free-speech advocates. It's easy to argue for Larry Clark's Ken Park to be accessible to the public, but Irving's historical revisionism (based on Holocaust denial) presents a different challenge, for it undoubtedly re-opens painful wounds for many members of the population. I personally supported the screening, purely on the grounds that everyone deserves to at least be heard, after which their arguments can be debated. But the screening didn't take place last night. The festival's organisers decided against screening the film, blaming fear of demonstrators. Melbourne Underground Film Festival director Richard Wolstencroft claimed that "It's far too scary ... we will never play another film by a historical revisionist ever again". I have little sympathy for MUFF; they pride themselves on being controversial and pushing boundaries, and by deliberately taking Irving as their modus operandi for pushing the point of free-speech they should have expected such tensions to be raised. This is the price for taking such an extreme example to make their point. Maybe MUFF realised that even though free-speech is worth fighting for, David Irving isn't. Gerard Henderson has sketched out some of the background to the Irving debate. Wolstencroft has impressively refused to hold a grudge, and offered to allow the Australasian Union of Jewish Students to curate a section of next year's festival.

Confusions over gender and sexuality in the Victorian Police Force Victorian Liberal Party leader Robert Doyle has spoken out against the Victorian Police Force's potential recruitment of a transsexual. Doyle claims that while people have a right to express their sexuality, it would be inappropraite for a transsexual to be in the Police Force. In this statement, Doyle confuses sexuality with gender, and proves himself to be an inappropriate spokesperson on this issue. It may seem like I'm splitting hairs, but I think it's an important distinction, and confusion between sexuality and gender is a common basis for misunderstanding and intolerance. In a Sociology tutorial on gender and sexuality last semester, I raised the question of the gender/sexuality vortex. If a man identifies as a woman, his sex is male but his gender is female. If that person is sexually attracted to men, is he homosexual or heterosexual? The same question can be raised if she is attracted to females. What of the men and women attracted to this person, are they homosexual or heterosexual? The subject here is biologically male, and gendered female. The tutor took the easy option and said "What do you think?" I replied that it shows sexuality is fluid, not binary, a point which wasn't raised in that week's reading or lecture. Doyle's statement implies that he's making presumptions on the transsexual's sexuality, assuming all transsexuals must be homosexual (ie. they're attracted to men). This brings my Sociology question into the issue. If the person is attracted to men but identifies as a female, is that person homosexual or heterosexual? Neither answer is right, of course, which just shows how shallow Doyle's understanding of the matter is. This misunderstanding is compounded by his claim that what people do in their bedrooms is their business; again we see his confusion over gender and sexuality (besides which, this kind of statement is annoying because it implies 'other' sexualities are to be hidden away from the public). Police Association secretary Paul Mullet claims that he would support the recruitment, but that it would have to achieve 'community support'. He's at least a little more understanding than Doyle, but still fails to deal with the issue sufficiently. How are transsexuals to become accepted by the community if they're seen to be on some kind of probation or 'approval-pending' situation. The very fact that this has become an issue is damaging in itself, and shows that our society is still yet to grapple with the brave people who have the 'balls' to express their gender identity. Upcoming Melbourne events Live Cinema : Loop, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne : 8pm on Friday 11 July "Now that pixels are easily sampled & mutated as sound, an emerging breed of audiovisualists are busy carving up the territories that lay between cinematic storytelling and the dancefloor bootylicious. Using loops, layers, live processing, FX and editing , tonight showcases some of the approaches possible for 'improvised cinema'" Feat. Spoole, Future Eater, Cicada et al. Part of Melbourne Underground Film Festival. Infrasound : RMIT underground carpark (meet at Kaleide Theatre, 360 Swanston Street, Melbourne) : 7pm on Friday 11 July Underground Spatial Acoustic Concert, feat. Infrasound (Scott Arford & Randy H. Y. Yau), Lawrence English & Phillip Samartzis, Machina aux Rock, Bruce Mowson. Part of Liquid Architecture. Codec Cinema : Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, cnr Swanston & Flinders Streets, Melbourne : 8pm on Saturday 12 July "Codec Cinema explores the live interaction of sound and vision. New Media artists from different streams of practice - Vjing, net.art, animation, installation, sound design, noise and music ranging from musique concréte to synth-pop - are invited to form new partnerships in the production of original works, which are then performed live. By creating a dedicated performance space in which the audience can be completely immersed in the audiovisual experience, Codec Cinema offers a unique opportunity for these artists to explore the subtle expressive potential of their chosen media. This encourages artists to take creative risks, and to push the boundaries of their practice, in order to adapt their individual practices to a live, collaborative format". Feat. performances by Casey Rice vs QUA, Cicada vs James Wilkinson, Geoff Robertson vs Andrew Barrie & James Cecil, Cassandra Tytler vs Phillip Pietruschka & Tim Catlin, Sally Golding & Pia Borg vs Joel Stern & Alison Blunt. Part of Liquid Architecture. GRM Films : Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, cnr Swanston & Flinders Streets, Melbourne : 3:30pm on Sunday 13 July "The finest, freakiest of French animation and video art and all with stunning electronic ("musique concréte") soundtracks by international guest Bernard Parmegiani. Grown in the wilderlands of unloosed imagination, these films are as unalike to Hollywood cinemanure as is the elusive octopus to a fecal-obsessive orangutan". Curated by Jim Knox. Part of Liquid Architecture. Shuriken et al. : Rob Roy Hotel, cnr Brunswick & Gertrude Streets, Fitzroy : Sunday 13 July Feat. Shuriken, Letraset, New Estate, Sister Cities. F-Hole : Bus Gallery, 117 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne : 9-29 July Three week festival curated by Robbie Avenaim, feat. Al Drummond, Anthony Pateras, Ernie Altoff, Robin Fox, Emile Zile, Erick Mitsak et al.

They have known her since she was a girl, they know everything there is to know about her, some of them may have been involved with her, now water under the bridge, over and done with; in other words, there is a veil of other images that settles on her image and blurs it, a weight of memories that keep me from seeing her as a person seen for the first time, other people's memories suspended like the smoke under the lamps. Italo Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, pg.19

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years. Italo Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, pg.8

Ken Park screening Fucking bravo to Margaret Pomeranz and the Free Cinema crew for their courageous and defiant action in attempting to screen Ken Park. This crew have put themselves and their reputations on the line for what they believe in, their actions are an inspiration. I'm receiving an inordinate amount of hits from Australians looking for a Ken Park download. I wish I could tell you where to find it, but unfortunately I don't know (although if any of you do find it, please come back and tell me). If anything should be banned, it's the Larry Clark website, one of the ugliest sites on the web.

Melbourne Events this week Liquid Architecture 4 launch : RMIT Kaleide Theatre, 360 Swanston Street, Melbourne : 7:30pm sharp, Tuesday 1 July (tonight). Feat. Ai Yamamoto, Sue Harding and Bec Charlesworth, each performing for 20 minutes. This follows the gallery opening at First Site Gallery (a few doors down), 5:30-7:30pm (part of Liquid Architecture 4). Mu Mesons - The Foundations of Control : Bug House Omniplex, top floor, 125 Flinders Lane, Melbourne : Friday 4 July. "Jay Katz and Miss Death of the Mu Mesons archive present a program of 16mm film and video that displays the manipulation of the media from the beginning of Television in the 20th century up to the recent Iraqi war" (part of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival). Stephen Mallinder : Revolver Upstairs, 229 Chapel Street, Prahran : Saturday 5 July. Founding member of Cabaret Voltaire. Not sure if this is a live set or a DJ set, but I'm predicting the latter.

borgesian book review conpetition The excellent literary website The Modern Word is hosting an Borgesian book review contest. In the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges' notion of imaginary books... "The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books." Reviews of imaginary books must be between 500 - 1000 words. Entries close 15 July.

Melbourne Events Ai Yamamoto curated evening @ Bourgie, 397 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne : Thursday 25 June (tonight). Simon from Triple-R's Symbiosis plays "fine minimal electronics". Chad Chatterton and Stephen Honegger present their "exciting visual works baseed on game environment". Dual Plover CD launch @ Barkly Street Warehouse, 153 Barkly Street, Brunswick : Friday 27 June. Feat. Suicidal Rap Orgy, The Purple Duck, Slesu & Mt Tape, Das Butcher Ockerchino Discoteque 1st birthday @ Rob Roy Hotel, cnw Gertrude & Brunswick Streets, Fitzroy. Feat. Cherry 2000, Raycie Pussycat, Dr Jeckyl & the Hydes, the Outfits, Letraset, Slesu, Mr Tape & Videotape, DJs Mack Daddy, Albino Dwarf, Saigon Sausage, VJ Bubonic Firetruck.

Collated Top Fives During the final weeks of semester I fell behind in my reportage of Annotated Top Fives. Here's what was happening... Annotated iTunes Top Five 2 - 8 June 2003 1. Punjabi Hit Squad : Hai Hai : Prime example of why London appears to be the ground zero for the post-colonial culture-mash. Garage, dancehall, bhangra, hip hop; this is where worlds are colliding, this is where cultural imperialism is usurped by cultural globalisation. London could be the new Alexadria, the point of cross-fertilisation on the riddim trade-routes. There's something essentialist about this, something totally unformulaic and spontaneous, it just works. One of the most refreshing things I've heard this year. 2. Slim Smith : Everybody Needs Love : A slice of soul-drenched rocksteady as sweet as fine apple crumble. Smith's voice is so achingly dulcet, with ample amounts of sincerity and earnestness, the tender organ lines so inextricably imbued to Smith's delivery (like a co-conspirator) you can't help but endorse his overwhelmingly simple yet wonderful truism; "everybody needs love". Amen. 3. Go Home Productions : Justin Likes Blondes : The bootleg remix phenomenon seemed to peak and dissolve quickly, fading from the spotlight, leaving a faint trace of a faddish post-Napster novelty genre. There were, however, some fantastically inventive tracks, this being one of the shining examples where the tracks are synergetically infused, drawing something unforeseen from disparate sources, in this case Justin Timberlake's 'Like I Love You' and Blondie's 'Heart Of Glass'. Might still be available for download here. 4. Out Hud : Dad There's A Little Phrase Called Too Much Information : Californian outfit with links to !!!, which explains the similar approach to the neo-no-wave electro-disco dub-house soundclash. This track sets itself aside from that school via the implementation of 80s-style big guitar lines, a la Big Country's 'In A Big Country'. Nice. 5. Red Shadow : Understanding Marx : A triptych of tales of Marxist discovery, delivered by a Mamas & The Papas / Walk on the Wild Side back-up singers hybrid form. West Coast Summer of Love meets post-McCarthyist proletariat enlightenment. One of the finest 365 Days discoveries. Annotated Top Five 9-15 June 2003 1. Big Star : Thirteen : One of my favourite lines in pop music; "Won't you tell your Dad 'Get off my back' / Tell him what we said 'bout 'Paint It Black'". Alex Chilton's lyrics convey such an endearing portrayal of the 13 year-old protagonist, it's impossible not to conjure up images of your own misunderstood youth, struggling to make your mark on the cusp of adulthood, and make an impression on a crush, your heart pounding as the rush of love and lust grips you for the very first time. 2. Velvet Underground : Sunday Morning : I'm so in love with the line "Watch out, the world's behind you". Apparently Nico was originally lined up for the vocals here, but once Reed had finished writing the song he insisted on singing it himself. It'd be interesting to hear Nico's take, but Reed delivers such a classic VU-style haunted pop ballad. Mo Tucker's drumming, Sterling Morrison's guitar, the first two notes from John Cale's bass, there's little about this track that doesn't articulate the finest of the Velvet Underground's pop gems. Great photo of John Cale here. 3. Arab Strap : Love Detective : There are few accents I love more that the Scottish accent. I think it's the prime reason I enjoy watching The Book Group. Aidan Moffat's miserablist vocals pack more Scottish angst than you're ever likely to need (which is surely a good thing). Lyrically, Love Detective takes the form of a phone call to you, the listener, from a protagonist who's just uncovered some secrets about his lover. The lyrics are here, and make for an engaging tale in themselves. 4. Alton Ellis : Too Late To Turn Back Now : The story goes that it was at an Alton Ellis recording session in 1966 that Jackie Mittoo invented the rocksteady sound. Ellis concurrently took the crown of "king of rocksteady". This Cornelius Brothers cover hits that slow-ska / American soul tip which resulted in so many sweet Jamaican delicacies during the late 1960s / early 1970s. 5. Sean Paul : Gimme The Light (2step Moabit Relick remix) : I have this sneaking feeling Sean Paul's about to explode all over my radar. 2-Step dancehall; what more could you ask for in a trans-Atlantic heaven. Annotated Top Five 16 - 23 June 2003 1. Desmond Dekker : Pickney Girl : A chorus of children is always an equation for some pure pop euphoria. Regardless of the dark lyrical matter of this track, the kids bring such sweetness and light to the proceedings it's easy to overlook Dekker's spiteful message, even when the kids are repeating that message. 2. Kit Clayton : Surba : Highlight of the Nek Sanalet disc, the almost conversational dialogue amongst the wavering tones creates an abstract desolation and sadness which surpasses most 'human' endeavours. 3. America : Don't Cross The River : It's good to see America attaining some respect via Simon Reynolds' recent Uberhipster Index. MOR mediocrity or classic Neil Young-esque Americana? It's a subjective position. I'll take the latter. 4. People Like Us : Downtown Once More : I've often found People Like Us to be better on paper than in ear, but then I hear moments of collage-beauty like this, and get goosebumps. Based around that wonderful Petula Clark hit Down Town, this has that cosy copy-n-paste warmth I hear from Kim Hiorthøy. Evidence that the skillful manipulation and layering of samples can result in some unexpected softness of the most pleasantly glowing kind. 5. Gamers In Exile : I Am a Decent Man : A vocoded plea for acceptance. All this Italian robot asks of you is that you accept his decency.

Jules et Jim Watched François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (video), coincidentally a few days before seeing Les Quatre Cents Coups. I'm beginning to really admire the way Traffault's films flow through time, instead of steadfastly marching from plot point to plot point. The relationship between Jules, Jim, and Catherine plays out like in exactly the kind of haphazard whirlwind fashion real relationships, friendships and courtships do, rarely touching down on concrete positions but wafting from situation to situation. The friendship between Jules and Jim is the highlight for me, Truffaut creates a strong sense of the intangible links between good friends, and by the end I'm left feeling sullenly congruous towards Jules and the situation he finds himself in. Secretary Public perceptions around Secretary amongst those who have not (or refuse to) see it, seem to dwell on the fact that it depicts a sadomasochistic relationship. I've long been interested in 'deviant' sexualities, not so much from a participatory perspective, but more from the point of view that for all our supposed sexual liberation, society is still blinkered into narrowly defined concepts of 'normality'. Fifty years ago, homosexuality was treated with the same disdain and ridicule we now place on sadomasochism or polyamory. I'm interested in the ways people express sexuality which lays outside society's cultural expectations. Admitting to having an interest in such activities, from a purely observational viewpoint, can be dangerous ground, as people will automatically assume you're 'kinky' or 'perverted', and fail to understand that there are complex and highly intellectual interactions occurring in most S&M relationships, which are interesting even from an outsider perspective. It's not surprising then, that a raised eyebrow is an immediate reaction from some people when you tell them you've just seen Secretary. But it's the cerebral side of sadomasochism, and not the 'kinky' side, which Secretary so masterfully depicts, and it's a shame that this distinction is blurred by an 'enlightened' public unable to discern the mental and physical sides of sexuality, where 'kink' and 'perversion' are signs of mental instability or cultural outcasts (witness any legal/cop TV drama to see examples of this kind of ostracisism). Subject matter aside, Secretary still stands as a great film. Maggie Gyllenhaal, my current cinéma babe-du-jour, puts in such a wonderful performance of a woman on the cusp of realising her sexuality, torn between societial expectations (her near marriage to family friend James) and her own personal 'deviant' desires. James Spader comes across as slightly less convincing, and there's a certain amount of ambiguity as to his own past, and where he sits in respect to his own acknowledgement of his sexuality. A scene towards the end, where (without giving too much away) Gyllenhaal is visited by a succession of friends and family, is somewhat farfetched, and the only lowpoint of the film. Zéro de Conduite Zéro de Conduite and Les Quatre Cents Coups were screening at ACMI as part of their Rememberence and the Moving Image programme. Jean Vigo's 1933 forty minute film follows the revolutionary plottings of a group of French schoolboys, who aspire to overthrow their principal and teachers. This is incredibly comedic; the teacher who's just a riotous as the kids when away from the eyes of his colleagues, the midget principal, the androgyne boy who becomes the most rebellious of the students, and some obvious digs at the English language "No. 'Father', 'father', say it like you've got a lisp". An appropriate preclusion to Les Quatre Cents Coups. Les Quatre Cents Coups For me, the key moment of Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) comes when Antoine is about to face the detention centre's psychologist, and another boy tells him not to look at the (female) doctor's legs, as it'll go down on his record. Antoine asks what is meant by 'his record', and the boy tells him that it's everything they know about him, 'they' being doctors, the police, teachers, employers etc. This is essentially what Antoine is fighting against, the constraints of social institutionalism, the limitations placed on us by bureaucracy, our identity composed of paperwork and files. Les Quatre Cents Coups is a gorgeous film, not only visually, but also in its characterisation of Antoine and his railing against the constraints of modern life, and his spontaneous and lucid portrayal by the young Jean-Pierre Léaud, and the playful and carefree temporality of the film. Incidentally, Les Quatre Cents Coups was produced by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, who recently stood in solidarity with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami when he was denied a visa to attend last year's New York Film Festival. Kiarostami is scheduled to appear as a guest of honour at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Let's hope similar controversy doesn't inhibit his journey here. There is a fantastic photo of Jean-Pierre Léaud here

The global influence of American culture According to BBC research 62% of Americans feel the global influence of their culture is not too little, not too much, but "just right". 44% of Americans feel they are the most cultured people in the world.

Melbourne events : LCD et al. Melbourne thing this weekend:

werd noiseluvvaz... lcdci announce a show this coming saturday at the lovely good morning captain... the venue not the song.... it'll be earlyish from 3pm... lcdc on around 6... guest lcders will/may include max rebo, sonny icewoman, and YOU!?! also on the bill ist jodi moor ... the band not the person... fast piss blues band... go genre everything.

The Ken Park controversy "The ill wind of conservatism is getting a lot chillier" said Sydney Film Festival director Gayle Lake, after Larry Clark's film Ken Park is once again refused classification by the Classification Review Board, deeming it essentially banned in Australia.With the Sydney Film Festival nearly over, the next line of attack is the Melbourne International Film Festival, which has expressed interest in trying to screen it. Even the crew at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, who usually (boringly) position themselves at odds with MIFF, have stated their "solidarity" in opposing the ban on Clark's film. The Classification Review Board consists of appointees of the Federal Attourney General. The choice of appointees is not subject to public scrutiny. Libertus.net have a great site on the CRB, with bios on these appointees. Another group who are heavily involved in this issue are Watch On Censorship, an organisation which includes Media Watch's David Marr and The Movie Show's Margaret Pomeranz. But perhaps the most biting and succinct words have come from The Australian Screen Directors Association's Richard Harris : "The fact that the Sydney Film Festival is not able to screen a film that has been shown in major festivals around the world is a national disgrace and will make Australia a cultural laughing stock"

Spontaneous mobs Large crowds of people have been 'spontaneously' forming in New York City, and then dispersing after 10 minutes. There is no logical reason behind the amassment, as curious bystanders display confusion and bewilderment (via Null Device). It was Woozy, a Melbourne fanzine from the early 1990s, which first alerted me to Hakim Bey's notion of Poetic Terrorism. Bey seems rather 'old hat' these days, and like other pre-dotcom-boom heros, such as Terrence McKenna and Erik Davis, he seems to have disappeared off the radar of internet culture (well, at least in the circles I seem to be moving in). Back in the day though, I was really connecting with the ideas of Hakim Bey, and Poetic Terrorism. It seemed to analogise a way of engaging with society which undercut the rigid cultural illusion we'd built for ourselves. Of course, it was somewhat a rehashing, or reconfiguring, of Debord's Society of the Spectacle and the Situationist International movement. But I didn't know this at the time, and the idea of using pranks and creating weird situations as a form of liberation seemed revolutionary to me. A slurry of guerilla-art ideas flooded into my young-adult head; stickers, stencils, projections, graffiti (street theatre was, and remains, too cringeworthy for me). I've grown older and more boring these days, but there are still cats out there doing great things along these lines. The spontaneous mobs in NYC slot nicely into the Poetic Terrorism concept, and it's a pleasure to hear that such projects are still happening amidst ever-tightening security, scrutiny, and suspicion.

No time to stop n' talk, I've got an exam tomorrow Two upcoming Melbourne events this week. Synaesthesia Records Launch @ Loop, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne : Wed 18 June at 8pm. Feat. Délire, Snawklor, Anthony Pateras & Robin Fox, and Smallcock. Phantom Image @ Public Office, 100 Adderley Street, West Melbourne : Thursday 19 June at 8pm. [snip] For those who couldn't make the last one, Phantom Image is an event showcasing live improvised soundtracks - short video pieces, (many created specifically for the night) are re-scored by local improvisers and electronic musicians. Theres a wide range of performers & approaches, from Rod Coopers weird sculptural instruments, Fox & Pateras' visceral improv. electronics to Clayton Thomas' double bass playing, Ai's laptop electronica and more.. [/snip]

exams and events I have an exam tomorrow and another on Tuesday. This is why posts have been so sporadic in the last week. Sometime next week, I'll have to write about the issue of camera-equipped mobile-phones being banned from Australian swimming pools and gymnasiums. There's a ton of issues to unpack here; appropriation of new technologies, cyborg-theory, 'the gaze', privacy... the list goes on. Some upcoming events which should provide a plentitude of blogging material: Melbourne International Animation Festival : 24 - 29 June Liquid Architecture 4 : Festival of Sound Art : 1-26 July Melbourne Underground Film Festival : 3-13 July Melbourne International Film Festival : 23 July - 10 August

Get Your War On New GYWO is up...

Subsonics A new 6-part series to screen on SBS-TV begins this Thursday at 11:25pm. From the SBS website...

MUSIC SERIES - SUBSONICS Six episodes in this series which explores the long neglected area of experimental music. Over 24 international and local artists are featured - everything from all elephant orchestras, the sounds of electrical activity in the upper atmosphere, to cutting edge turn-table artists and music for sticky tape. Subsonics uncovers a vibrant and thriving underground culture, with the first episode showcasing Mulatta Records in New York, whose challenging and bizarre label includes the sounds of the Thai Elephant Orchestra; the digital computer art of Japanese visual media designer Ukawa Naohiro; NSW composer Sue Harding and her creations from the tones of dot matrix printers; the harsh and barbaric "jumping noise" of Japanese physical performance artist Masonna; and the sounds of 70s African-American experimental jazz musician Sun Ra. Executive producer: Margaret Pomeranz; producers: Alison Wall and Brendan Walls. (An SBS-TV production, in English and Japanese, English subtitles). * New Series *

Pythagorus Babylonian Bathtub For Melbourne folk : Warren Burt three hour sound installation and live improvisational performance; for 3 laptops, 3 synthesizers, 4 loudspeakers, 48 oscillators, and 167 scales. 2-5pm, Sunday 14 June at Cecil Street Studio - 66 Cecil Street, Fitzroy.

More on ABC bias The ABC bias controversy continues, Robert Manne enters the fray...

The right in Australia are growing greedy. It is not enough for them that we have the most conservative government in Australia for over 40 years. Nor is it enough that views of which they approve are disseminated daily in the popular press, on talkback radio and on commercial television.

You may not always agree with Gerald Stone, the "godfather of chequebook journalism", yet in his take on the ABC bias issue, he offers some good tips on spotting media bias...

What are some of these techniques? Ironically, though biased reporting is notoriously hard to prove, many of its warning signs are easy for the listener or viewer to spot. Here are just a few. Beware of any report that begins with a value judgement before the fact: "The Government suffered a major setback today when the Prime Minister announced ..." Beware of inference-packed words like "admitted", "conceded", "claimed" when "said" is sufficient. Beware of the use of "but" to link a seemingly positive development with a less favourable one that invariably seems to put it in doubt. For example, an announcement of a drop in unemployment followed by the spoiler: "But unions warn of unrest, etc." Most of all, beware of coverage that continually takes a given fact and immediately overshadows it by raising grave doubts about where it might possibly lead in the future. That was the most frequent "offence" to feature in Alston's litany of complaints.

Furthermore, Michelle Grattan cleverly draws attention to the Howard Government's lack of credibility with regards to the 'children overboard' scandal, and the secret 'evidence' of WMD, which interestingly fall into place vis-a-vis Gerald Stone's comments on incompetency. Post-Suharto Indonesia is getting a taste of a freer journalistic environment, particularly in reportage of the war in Aceh. By being sceptical of the Indonesian Military's actions, especially the executions of unarmed villagers, I wonder if they're being biased. And speaking of media bias, I watched both National Nine News and SBS World News last night. Of the two news items which overlapped, protests in Geneva and Amrozi's trial, SBS came shining through with respect to a broader, more balanced picture (is this really surprising?). SBS noted the fact that the violence and looting in Geneva was instigated by a relatively small band of activists while the vast majority partook in a more stately protest, Nine on the other hand drew a picture of mass riots and mindless violence (once again, is this really surprising?). SBS mentioned the fact that Amrozi's theistic courtroom outbursts were directed at his own lawyers, while Nine simply portrayed him as the lunatic fundamentalist villain the whole of Australia loves to hate. These observations are hardly revolutionary, but their potency rises in times like this, where journalistic bias is in question.

Annotated Top Five 26 May - 1 June 2003 What's been heavily played on iTunes this week... 1. The Saints : Messin' With The Kid : From 1977's (I'm) Stranded, back in the days when Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey were still friends, this Stones-esque urban-blues-rock track is all perfectly placed lazy drumming and shimmering guitar and Bailey's snotty Brisbane drawl. Like many of the tracks from I'm Stranded, this is an 8-track demo rush-released to catch the '77 punk-wave, and there's an immediacy and candid earnestness apparent. 2. Hood : You're Worth The Whole World : I'm rather fond of Hood's efforts at blending melancholy slow-fi with elements of 'lectronica. This track, from 2001's Cold House, features guest Dose-One's chopped-up DSP-ed vocals chasing its tail around reversed instruments and pensive acoustic gtr-lines. It's the chopped-up nature of the vocals which make the track work, the masterful use of technology to bend the voice into shape, not just to achieve purely avant-ends, but to push the despondency beyond its usual limits. 3. Cavemen Speak : Episode 17: Acceptance Equals Death : Information on this Hip-Hop outfit is seemingly impossible to come by. I suspect they're either German or Belgian, although I detect traces of Mexican accents (?). This is a slow, melancholy track, reminding me somewhat of Tricky's 'Makes Me Wanna Die'; the beatz slowed down to stoned miserablism, draped over looping piano and inward-gazing lyrics. "I never wanted to be lonely / It's killing me slowly". 4. The Space Lady : Major Tom : Downloaded from the 365 Days Project, San Franciscan busker The Space Lady delivers a beautifully interstellar minimalist Casio-driven popsong. Surpasses any kitsch-factor with its pure textural splendor. Beats Space Oddity at its own game. Of particular beauty is the chorus, where The Space Lady really lets the phasing fly. 5. Music To Get C6th By : And I Love Her : Another 365 Days Project gem. A demonstration record for a pedal steel guitar company, covering a Beatles track, this approaches the cold-warmth bedroom isolationism of Durutti Column, fed through an occasional Hawaiian filter.

Get Carter A botched attempt to see Metropolis on Friday evening, due to the pathetically unreliable public transport system (excuse me while I briefly overreact), saw us heading to a friend's house to watch Mike Hodges' 1971 Get Carter (DVD). Michael Caine comes across as an arrogant tough-as-nails Londoner, up North in Newcastle to get answers for his brother's dubious death. Great contrast between the icy-cool, almost nonchalant big-city crim against the seedy, gritty industrial-town mob. The climactic scene, a chase through a black-sludge beach towards a coal mine, intercut with the rolling black waves making their grisly, forbidding descent upon the shore, the sky overcast and featureless, articulates the overall feel of the film; gritty and squalid, with a sense of desolation and desperation. Metropolis Saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the Astor Theatre on Saturday evening, the newly restored version with Gottfried Huppertz's original score re-recorded (ie. not the heavily-cut Giorgio Moroder version). A dystopian futuristic world where the workers slave away in an underground city, while the upper-classes live it up on the surface. You know the story. The proletariat revolt, and pay the consequences by having their city flooded. They learn their lesson, it's a Functionalist world, and slaves would do well to stay in their place. Dubious politics aside, Metropolis is such an iconic film it's hard not to feel humbled by Lang's grandiose SF vision. Essential dystopic reference point. St Kilda Film Festival : competition session 16 The only session of this festival I attended, and like (I would speculate) 95% of the people who attend these sessions, I knew someone involved in the making of one of these films. I've left that film out of this post, and will discuss the others. Sucker : Incredibly typical short-film fare, middle-class angst and capitalist dreams, metaphysical vacuum-cleaners and sex-in-toilets. Ho-hum. Cold Turkey : Superb story-telling from director Steve McGregor. Two brothers tread different roads, one eyes success in the opal-fields of Coober Pedy, while the other prefers the easy-life in Alice Springs. Most of the story takes place in a ramshackle outback prison-cell, as the brothers glimpse flash-backs of the previous night's activities which brought them here. Presiding over the affair is a mysterious older man, with a sage-like presence. The sound design and cinematography were superb, particularly time-lapse footage of the vast cloud-spotted sky, looming over the miniscule human inhabitance, or the streets of Alice Springs as night falls, burning up with headlights. Claudia's Shadow : Wonderful VCA production by Ruth Borgobello. Seemingly biopic, paying reverence to the tenacity and braveness of her immigrant parents, the potency of story-telling, and the connections between oral and filmic cultures. Watched Woody Allen's Manhattan last night (video). More on that later, maybe, but I must convey this line : "I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion". Quick links Australian actors and performers launch a campaign to exclude the culture industry from free-trade agreements. Guardian article on the benefits of blogging over Big Media. The Unh! Project : a glossary of "guttural moans" from comics. Gnoosic is a "self-adapting system" which recommends music for you. It asks for 3 artists you like, and then computes a suggestion for you. I entered Joy Division, the Velvet Underground, and Nico. It concluded that I should give Keiji Haino a try! Next, I tried to confuse it, and entered Black Flag, Artful Dodger, and Ennio Morricone. It suggested the Adolescents.

Excuse me The previous post, on intertextuality and marketing, was a left-over thought from the essay I recently wrote, and was hastily posted merely for the sake of 'posting something'. But isn't that what blogs are for, quick brain-dumps you'll later regret? Quick Links The Guardian hires Salam Pax, "the Baghdad Blogger", for a fortnightly column. Oh! Dr Philip Nitschke, what will you think of next? I support the notion of euthanasia (for similar reasons as to why I oppose capital punishment), but I sometimes get the feeling that the pro-euthanasia movement's most prominent advocate is a detriment to the cause. We need to be underlining the compassionate side of the argument, and trying to reduce the State's control over the most important decisions of our lives, not inventing cheap death-machines just to rile up the Pro-Life movement. Nitschke's sometimes like the clown who enters the room and spoils the mood, especially after such a sober victory as the BWV tube-feeding decision. Sydney buys faulty nuclear reactor, and continues to use it! In a display of complete naivety and insensitivity, Rene Rivkin believes it's possible to "learn to enjoy" rape. The interplay between Blissblog and K-Punk (with occasional adjudication from Pillbox) is making for some of the most interesting music theory and debate you'll read anywhere.

Intertextuality is a nasty postmodern marketing ploy Why isn't the concept of intertextuality used as a critique? Why is it always used to uphold the greatness of The Simpsons or Buffy, while never being used to highlight the deceptive tricks of marketing. I've spoken before on the The Secret Life Of Us (and if BlogSpot worked properly, I'd be able to link to it) and the way it's perceived as being a fresh, hip drama breaking barriers on Australian television, when in actual fact it's merely a way to peddle merchandise to a particular niche with high disposable incomes. Samuel Johnson's dual role of narrating Secret Life (ironically playing a disillusioned advertising industry employee) and narrating hamburger ads during the commercial breaks, is the most obvious example of this. But more recently, I've seen Doritos ads depicting a 'cruisy' gang of late 20s / early 30s friends, enjoying some laughs in their rooftop innercity garden, munching Doritos. The rooftop garden is definitely a reference to Secret Life, and now we've got something else to ad to our lifestyle, besides Barinas, MacLeans toothpaste, Hungry Jacks Burgers, and Crown Lager (oh, and marijuana). So I'm generally of the opinion, especially of late, that intertextuality is nothing more than a marketing tool, a way to cross-promote products to niche audiences, under the guide that it's a neat postmodern party trick.

Claims of ABC bias The ABC's role as independent, non-commercial media voice is under threat, because they dared to express an independent, non-commercial outlook on the war against Iraq. They dared to question the US Military propaganda and maintain a sceptical approach, and now they're under fire for doing so. Communications Minister Richard Alston weighs in. Director of News & Current Affairs, Max Uechtritz, responds, making some excellent points on the role of the media during war. Compare this with the way the Murdoch press (a much more powerful and influential outlet) covered the war (and the rewards they received for it), and we see not only the dangers of concentrated media ownership, but also the importance of an independent, critical view.

Annotated iTunes Top Five 19-25 May 2003 What's been heavily played on iTunes this week... 1. The Stooges : Dirt : Perhaps the only track from 1970's Funhouse that doesn't begin with Iggy Pop's distorted scream (a motif which seems to be firmly embedded into the sound of any contemporary 'incendiary' faux-protopunk band). Instead, 'Dirt' begins with Scott Asheton's metric yet somehow time-warping drumming, following closely by the loping bassline, Ron Asheton's pure-rock licks, and finally Iggy's sly yet bitter vocals rise surface. This is such a perfect slow-burning protopunk monster, all bitterness and spite, and as heavy as good gravy. Absolutely seething. 2. The Specials : Ghost Town : The erie dubbed-out ska conjures such vivid imagery of deserted city streets at night, like Kurosawa's Yojimbo, all dark and rainy, the people driven away by outlaws. The glistening streets carry a lonely romanticism, yet an undertone of unspoken threat and fear exists. There's even an almost Vaudeville-like drama to it, of spooky faces caked with make-up and implied horrors. The Specials aren't content with taking a simplistic stance on the issue at hand, the finger is pointed at the superstructure; "Why must the youth fight against themselves / Government leaving youths on the shelf". 3. Electrelane : This Deed : English quartet seemingly in defiance of finger-placing; every track of theirs I hear is strikingly different. This Deed builds on a slumbering rhythmic base, infused with warm yet crystalline vocals, before awakening with some great yelled-from-afar indecipherable rantings two thirds of the way through, reminiscent of Lilliput / Kleenex style shambles. 4. Mondo Rock : Cool World : A nasty piece of lyrical work, seemingly about a psychopathic obsession to destroy the life of someone who 'has it all'. Musically, this is a lot better than I remembered it, which is always a pleasant surprise, cold tingly synthlines emerging from the chug-lite 80s rock. 5. Kaada : Burden : Downloaded from The Rub last week, on a purely random basis, this is the most intriguing piece of music I've heard in ages. It's the moment in the un-realised David Lynch film where the lady with an eggplant-shaped head finally gets to dance with the intersexed giant, who's awkwardly crouching over to embrace her, and the lights have dimmed in the abandoned diner they've found themselves in, and this track is playing on the jukebox. That crackly collage-warmth that the Norwegians seem to excel at (well, my only reference point is Kim Hiorthøy ).

City Of God and The Matrix Reloaded Entries have been quite sporadic lately, due to an essay in progress, which is due on Tuesday. I'm quite happy with the progress of this essay so far; I've managed to quote Buggles and Baudrillard in the same paragraph. Music getting me through the essay: Kit Clayton, Pulseprogramming, Rhythm & Sound et al. I haven't had time to write-up Cronenberg's eXistenZ, which I enjoyed far more than the first time I saw it in 1999. I won't have time to write up City Of God, which is an absolutely amazing film, especially considering we were intending to see The Matrix Reloaded that particular night. I've built up such an aversion to the Matrix phenomenon that I've dismissed Reloaded without even seeing it, although I'm of the opinion that seeing as I've been bukkaked by the hype and marketing, I've experienced the film for what it actually is, hype and marketing, and have therefore no need to see it. Nor will I have time to write-up the Ninetynine / Royal Chord gig I attended on Saturday night.

Urban Diaspora : The Garage-Jungle-Hip Hop-R&B-Dancehall-Bhangra Matrix It's strange, but wonderful, how ideas sometimes intersect and collide, and fall into a well-congealed heap, glowing and pulsating in your hands. After discovering Simon Reynolds' blog recently, I stumbled upon his Back to the Roots article while leafing through old issues of The Wire. Upon re-reading, it struck me how relevant these ideas are today. In the article, Reynolds points to the hidden influence of Dancehall over the UK music scene, particularly with reference to Garage (the article is from September 2000). Similar lines can now be connected between Dancehall and American R&B and Hip-Hop. The first thing that struck me about Missy's Get UR Freak On was how Dancehall infected it was, albeit filtered through Hip-Hop and almost Bhangra-like rhythms. Around the same time I discovered Reynolds' blog, I discovered Mark Groves' Ujaku blog. In Groves' most recent entry, he nods to the writing of Tim Finney in Melbourne's Beat magazine. So Wednesday rolls around (the day Beat comes out), and I keep an eye peeled for Tim Finney's work. Lo and behold, he's written an article called Urban Diaspora, in which parallels are drawn between Dancehall and R&B / Hip-Hop. In fact, Finney outlines a synergetic matrix encompassing UK (Garage / Jungle), US (R&B / Hip-Hop), Jamaican (Dancehall) and Indian (Bhangra / Bollywood) elements, all cross-pollinating each other, in defiance of the increasing cultural imperialism and ethnic intolerance infecting our world. The article points a finger squarely at Australia's stagnation in this respect, especially in regards to airplay. And when The Vines' Craig Nicholls is nominated as best 'breakthrough' (whatever that means) songwriter at the ARIA Awards, this stagnation is pulled firmly into focus.

Google News now has an Australia-specific page.

iTunes Top Five 11-18 May 2003 I created an iTunes 'smart playlist' which displays the tracks which have received the highest amount of play in the past week. 1. The Clash : Lost in the Supermarket : Described by a friend of mine as being "too Gramsci", this is a stark pop gem in the mixed stylistic bag that is 1979's London Calling. I'd have to disagree with the Gramsci comparison though, as while it does seem to be a critique of consumer culture, it approaches the subject from street-level, in total solidarity with the song's protagonist; as though we're all caught in this modern condition, and we're all on the inside looking out. 2. Missy Elliot : Can You Hear Me : Missy and Timbaland's eulogy for Aaliyah, T-Boz and Chili's eulogy for Left Eye, a sincere and touching tribute to friends departed. Most affecting is the imagery of community which is brought into view, particularly the opening voicemail message from Aaliyah's mother to Missy, and Missy's conveyance of this to Aaliyah : "But for your mom its been so damn hard / I hate to even hear her cry / Aaliyah she asked me why / Would a baby girl go this way / Can you give me better words to say". 3. Lene Lovich : Lucky Number : In which Lovich moves from a bold proclamation of staunch singledom, towards the realisation that there is someone out there for her, and her lucky number changes from 'one' to 'two'. Great post-punk proto-New-Wave popclash, with early-80s London art-school vocal delivery. 4. Erase Errata : Marathon (Adult. remix) : SanFran neuvo-no-wave outfit get neuvo-Detroit-electro treatment from Adult. Is 'electroclash' a dirty word yet, cause I'm inclined to use it right now. 5. Curse ov Dialect : All Cultures : Australian hip-hop mentalists address the frictions in Australia's multicultural discursiveness, the contentions of ethnicity, and fluidity of racial identity. Further proof of hip-hop's malleability across cultures.

Belinda's bombshell : or, Why I've stopped watching Big Brother I've never made a secret of the fact that I avidly followed the first two series of Australian Big Brother, or even that I started this third series out by admitting to myself that there was no use resisting the lure. As it's turned out, I've only been able to see a couple of shows per week, due to other (some would say 'more important') commitments, such as work and study. It's caused the glitter to tarnish somewhat, and so last night I was more happy to be headphoning on the couch rather than watching Big Brother Uncut. Eventually I succumbed though, and watched the final 20 minutes, only to become disillusioned with the whole concept, and swearing that my Big Brother affections has undoubtedly come to an end. For those of you wise enough to have had no interest in the show from the outset, the latest controversy surrounds one of the housemates, Belinda. Rumours started spreading earlier this week that a 'bombshell' had been dropped, and it quickly became apparent that Channel Ten were saving something 'juicy' for their Big Brother Uncut program. What had happened was that Belinda, whilst seemingly very drunk, revealed a very dark family secret. The shocked housemates were caught unawares, and as Belinda broke down, they supported her, arch-rival Carlo even offering his lap for her to cry into. It was excruciating viewing, and I felt ashamed and embarrassed to be watching someone break down in such a voyeuristic manner. Whilst it's been fun to watch people candidly discuss masturbation and trade sex tips, show off their various party tricks and speculate about how they're being perceived by the audience, it's very different to exploit people's shame and sadness. For me, Belinda's bombshell was the moment Big Brother turned from being a bit of fun, into exploitation of people's emotions for commercial gain. It's inevitable that, by throwing a group of people into a house for weeks on end, skeletons will come out of the closet, but Channel 10 promoted this moment for commercial gain, where a bit of sensitivity would surely have been more appropriate. Channel Ten have tried to justify their screening of this by claiming that the story had been revealed via the web-stream, and that the rumours were out there anyway. I don't think this excuse is justified, as it seems that this only shows their competitiveness when it comes to peddling rumours. They couldn't let such 'hot' material spread via word-of-mouth without taking some credit (and ratings) for themselves. It's been no secret that ratings for Big Brother 3 have been below expectations, and it's a pity that they're resorting to such practices. This moment, for me, brings all the arguments of reality-TV naysayers into focus, the confusion between reality and drama (and there is a difference, and a very distinct one at that), the blurring of the lines in the chase for ratings. I feel I can't continue to defend Big Brother in the same way I used to, and I can't continue to watch it as a piece of harmless 'light entertainment'. And after all, I was having a better time listening to Joy Division.

Annie Hall We watched Woody Allen's Annie Hall on friday night (DVD). Surprise has been exclaimed at numerous occasions where friends have discovered that I hadn't seen this. I'm glad I paid heed to their advice and finally investigated it. So much wit and intelligence, such a sharp eye for the foibles of modern metropolitan life, but not without a hearty dose of self-parody. The playfulness with the medium is great fun to encounter; the constant addresses to the audience, Marshall McLuhan's cameo, the metafictional twist towards the end where a scene is immediately replayed as a piece of theatre (albeit with a different ending). So many great lines to learn and use. The Matrix We watched The Matrix on Saturday night (TV). I hadn't seen this since it was on at the cinema in 1999, and my memories of it were quite vague. I'd remembered the premise, that 'reality' is an hallucination manufactured by artificial intelligence in order to keep humans docile while their energy is harvested, but I could remember nothing about the rest of the plot. Upon re-viewing, I'm not surprised why so little stuck to my orb. Even in 1999, it's cyberpunk hacker aesthetic had been overdone and seemed superseded. This style can be done well (ie. Darren Aronofsky's Pi), but The Matrix fashioned an overly slick delivery of what is best kept as either a low-budget affair, or left to the original 1980s flava (ie. WarGames). Even the soundtrack feels old and worn-out, that industrial / big-beatz-techno crossover was old-hat even in 1999, and hasn't aged in the same way as, say, fine vintage punk-rock. Furthermore, besides the dated aesthetics, The Matrix is little more than a pile of special effects and fight scenes. Much of the hype surrounding it's original release revolved around it's state-of-the-art SFX. Four years on, and these effects look slightly dated, such is the furious pace of this technology. It's interesting to note how The Matrix: Reloaded is already being hyped along similar lines. These effects are largely deployed within the fight scenes, which seem to dominate the plot. These scenes get boring really quickly, particularly towards the end where deus ex machina follows certain doom follows deus ex machina, over and over, making me feel somewhat insulted by the blatant mollycoddling of the audience's intellect, dragging us along, leaving no room for our own navigation. Although the hallucinatory reality scenario is set up, The Matrix fails to take it any further, fails to explore how its existence might affect the human condition (where's Philip K. Dick when you need him), and reverts to a testosterone-driven CGI jerk-off. What really get up my nose in regards to The Matrix though, is the over-emphasis placed on it's 'headfuck' nature by an army of stoner-type 'dudes'. Give them a little Plato dressed in a cyberpunk robe, wrap it up with the latest special effects technology, and it's somehow heralded as a masterpiece of hyper-real science fiction. And so coming back to Annie Hall, with its lack of special effects or overly-choreographed fight scenes, highlights the way innovation in film-making succeeds purely on the depth of its ideas, without resorting to superficial surfaces without substance.

We saw Gustav Deutsch's Film Ist last Wednesday evening at ACMI. The Melbourne Cinematheque programme explains...

First in Austrian Gustav Deutsch's series of works. Divided into 6 parts the film consists of footage taken primarily from existing scientific & educational films about such subjects as the intelligence testing of apes, stereoscopic vision & hurricanes. The poetic & lyrical dimensions, of what are routinely presented as objective documents, are examined by recombining & sampling disparate images & sounds.

Two fine moments for me. The first being a short but almost narrative string of images and sound, a distant galaxy surrounded by other galaxies, begins to glow and pulse as it slowly draws nearer to the audience. As it pulses it emits a similarly pulsating tone. It continues to grow until it's filling the screen, until the point where the whole frame is blinking red and black. The camera pulls out again, and the blinking is revealed to be a flashing LED on a 1950s style computer panel. A man in uniform, seemingly in reaction to the flashing LED, presses a large button, and instantly we cut to lighting crashing to the ground, as though some signal from a distant galaxy has caused this man to activate some kind of lighting weapon. Another moment, in the section of the film entitled "Film Ist Ein Spiegel" (Film is a Mirror), we watch black & white footage of a (seemingly) human eye being removed from it's socket. Intercut with this is footage of small groups of people, watching something obviously similarly squirmish, positioned just near the camera, as they seem to be staring straight at us. As we grimace and writhe in our seats at the sight of the eye, the audience on screen mirror us.

An unusual dream last night. I was having coffee with a friend, resting on the table was a plastic bag containing items I'd just purchased from the supermarket. We were chatting when something in the corner of my eye caught my attention, a green flashing LED. From out of the bag I took the new razor handle thing (the shavers out there will know what I'm talking about; the handle to which you attach razor heads), on the head of which was the flashing LED. I turned it over and discovered that it had a colour LCD screen, displaying the message "you have 14 new messages". The first one was from Donna Haraway, but I didn't bother reading any of the messages just yet, as I had other places to be. I farewelled my friend and departed on foot. As I walked through the streets I discovered another feature of my new device, as I passed various street signs the handle seemed to import data from them. It was constructing a map of my journey, consisting solely of instructions such as "roundabout ahead" and "pedestrian crossing". Now I could undertake subsequent journeys along the same path, without having to look at where I'm walking. I could be reading a book or playing Bantumi on my phone. The only problem was that the settings in the handle seemed to be outdated, as it was looking for German street signs from 1942. somehow, I'd uncovered secret Nazi technology which had been lost for over 60 years.

I received a hit from a search for "women kicking men in the balls". I'm ranked number 5 in the Google search for this. This is the best one since the hits I got from people searching for Melbourne bukkake parties. I've decided that when this semester is over, I'm going to purchase Sim City 4. I was addicted to Sim City 3000 a few years back. Sim City 4 allows you to import your Sims, which would be good if I had been into The Sims, which I wasn't. Another new feature, and one that I always thought would look cool, is to view your city at night. Having somewhat of a cartography fetish, the appeal of Sim City for me has always been creating cities as maps. I'd love a feature on Sim City to create street directory style maps, and train network maps.

The last episode of The Office screened last night, disappearing over the horizon with a final, burning wave. There were moments where I sat there, awestruck, at the brilliance of the show. The defining part for me was Tim's dice analogy, explaining his low-risk, play-safe outlook on life, and his consequent rejection of the temporary management position. To follow this up with his spontaneous decision to finally confront Dawn with his feelings towards her, breaking the pattern that had built up throughout the series, reflected the kind of risks we all take when it comes to love, no matter how safe we play the rest of the game. As Tim suddenly leaves his chair to make his way towards Dawn, the camera stumbles, caught off guard, quickly responding to the action, we're plunged into visual chaos for a few seconds. The attention to detail is superb, the mock-umentary / faux-reality genre played out beautifully. We chase Tim down the hall, and as he takes Dawn into another room to confront her, he removes his radio-mic. Dead silence ensues, as we're left clueless as to what they're discussing, waiting with baited breath, reading their bodies instead of their words. The silence rings louder than anything, the removal of stimuli snapping our perceptions into overdrive. It's a brilliant piece of self-relfexiveness, because it goes beyond being a gimmicky postmodern party-trick, it uses the technique to over-amplify our senses, to express the situation in ways where words would over-complicate things. In the simplicity of the scene, we're left raw and exposed to Tim's final confrontation with Dawn, and we can read into that scene all the awkward yet heart-pounding situations we have found ourselves in, laying ourselves on the line, hoping to hell we're not gonna get crushed. Prior to this, Dawn's revealing her own outlook on love...

"A real relationship isn't like a fairy tale, if you think that for the next forty years, every time you see each other you're going to glow, or, every time you hold hands there's going to be electricity, then, you're kidding yourself really. What about reliability, or er, someone paying the mortgage, or someone who's never been out of work. Those are the more important, practical things, you know. In reality".

When Tim is able to break out of his utilitarian trance, Dawn's not there to catch him. She's fallen prey to the deadening condition we all find ourselves in so often, and when someone attempts to reach us, having broken free from the bounds of this, our deflector shields are activated. And what could be more poignant that the closing scenes, David Brent's nuevo-management rhetoric comes sharply into focus at last.

"Life is just a series of peaks and troughs. And you don't know whether you're in a trough until you're climbing out, or on a peak until you're coming down. And that's it, you know, you never know what's round the corner. But it's all good. 'If you want the rainbow, you've gotta put up with the rain'. Do you know which philosopher said that? Dolly Parton. And people say she's just a big pair of tits".

It might be a string of clichés, but it's accuracy as a summation of the series is perfect. Sometimes the mundanity of life is blinding, and it can crush us with its weight, and we laugh at The Office because "it's so true", and then we continue again on our endless treadmill.

My girlfriend Phoebe has a very cool method of wrapping gifts in Chinese newspaper, instead of boring old wrapping-paper. Today's Front Pages displays the front pages from 170 newspapers (24 countries), updated daily (via Six Different Ways).

I saw X-Men 2 (aka X2: X Men Kicking You In The Balls So Hard That You Puke On Your Balls And Also Your Ass) last night. Certainly not a stand-alone sequel, spending no time on character development, and very little on character refamiliarisation. What struck me was the same thing that struck me after seeing the first X-Men film, that comics provide an interesting lens with which to view the world. Science Fiction was the first genre that started me on this tip, quite a number of years ago I became interested in the way SF provides quite distinct and exciting analogies for looking at society, technology, politics, the human condition, gender, race et al. Horror soon followed, and then comics. Although I've not emersed myself in these worlds, I've always appreciated their meanings and metaphors from an outsider perspective. X-Men 2 continues this interest, and there's plenty here to ponder; the modified human as prototype military weapon, the fear and hysteria caused by people's differences, pre-emptive strikes again rogue (no pun intended) entities. Besides all this, there's are some amazing effects. The opening sequence in particular, with new character Kurt Wagner de- and re-solidifying around the futile attempts by Whitehouse security guards to stop him. It's fun to watch (although a tad too long), interesting to ponder and draw comparisons to, and it looks wikkid. Ultimately though, for me, it'll have disappeared off my radar after a few months, like Spiderman did, although not quite as fast as I predict Daredevil will.

Over a delicious meal of chicken & beef fajitas at the Phillip Island "tex mex" restaurant, my Dad told me about his great grandfather, a German sailor who 'jumped ship' in Perth, thereby planting the Bieg seed in Australia. Like most Germans who migrated here, the Biegs seemed to set up base in Adelaide and the surrounding areas. The German influence on South Australia was reflected in the many Germanic place names (many of which were changed during the first world war). My mother and father moved to Melbourne when I was 4 years old, but I suppose one could say my 'roots' are in Adelaide. We head back there every Christmas to consume too much food and alcohol with the extended family. In our whirlwind week-long tour, we stick to the suburbs around Parafield and Elizabeth, and never venture in the city of Adelaide itself. Consequently, I've never really experienced the city in a cultural capacity, but events like The Plastic Pulse make it all the more appealing (via Astronaut's Notepad).

Last year I made my Mum a CD for Mother's Day. This year I'm planning to do the same. The tracklisting for last year was (from memory): Marvin Gaye : Let's Get It On Scott Walker : The World's Strongest Man Velvet Underground : Oh, Sweet Nuthin' Rolling Stones : Wild Horses Rolling Stones : Sweet Black Angel Bruce Springsteen : Atlantic City Mississippi Barry : There's An Angel Watching Over Me Hungry Ghosts : Hannah Bob Marley & the Wailers : Chances Are Bob Dylan : I Want You Bob Dylan : Most Of The Time Bob Marley & the Wailers : No Woman No Cry I should point out two things; a) keep in mind this was for my parents, and the somewhat breazy 'vibe' is representative of that, therefore it's not what I, myself, would consider a particularly interesting comp., and b) the lyrical nature of these tracks was not taken into account (so don't go getting any Oedipal ideas).

Finally, the essay is finished. I'm not altogether sure what to make of it. It seems to me like a good essay, but I've kept it somewhat in the style I usually write my essays in; ambiguous and abstract, drawing on concrete examples when it gets too nebulous. It's an approach which has served me well so far, I received my short essay on blogs back, gaining a distinction. In fact I've received distinctions for every piece of assessment I've subitted, with the exception of the atrocious minor essay for Australian Politics, for which I received a Pass. I apologise if this seems somewhat self-aggrandising, but I'm in the mood for a little pat on the back. Anyway, back to the case in point, I fear that this current essay may not fit the apparent strict guidelines set for sociological essays. I've been rambling on about layers of meanings embedded in technology, and how cultural aspects connect with organisational and technical aspects, and the way these meanings and aspects intersect. You get the idea, essentially drawing on abstract notions in an attempt to place someone's empirical research within the context my cloudy head. Still, it's a relief to have it finished.

I'd like to write about television, in particular the programmes I watched last night, but I don't want to scare anyone off when I mention Big Brother, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, or (perhaps the worst offender as far as I'm concerned) The Secret Life Of Us. First of all, Big Brother, which began its third series here in Australia on Sunday evening. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been hooked by the previous two series, and have no plans to resist the lure of another round. At the moment the housemates seem alien and unfamiliar, but I have little doubt that in a few weeks I'll be as concerned for one of them as I was for Alex. It strikes me as odd that Big Brother has, throughout it's 3 series as well as Celebrity Big Brother, managed to have a respectful (in as far as would be expected from a commercial television programme) spectrum of sexualities and genders. There has always been a (somewhat tokenistic) gay or bisexual housemate, and even a transgendered one. But somehow ethnicity and age seem to be a sticking point. This series, both Carlo and Vincent (who appears to be attempting a Brian Kinney style approach to interpersonal attitude) are from Italian backgrounds, and Irena comes from a Georgian background (witness her Mother's gorgeous accent on her intro footage), but there's a lack of anyone of Asian, African, or Middle-Eastern descent. What I have found interesting over the last two series has been the types of people who have either won, or who seem to have remained spokespeople for the show. The winners, Ben and Pete were the archetypal Australian males in one respect; the "strong silent types", hard working, honest, responsible. Blair and Marty, the runners up for each series, have possibly been the antithesis of this, yet somehow still archetypal Australian males; loud, popular, easy-going. The popularity of these men has been representative of the cultural hegemony within Australia. We've seen the loud, outrageous women like Sara Marie and Jessica curiously become the objects of debate, with a mixed response of adoration and scorn, as though we're somehow still coming to terms with women being personalities in their own right (like, didn't we get over this decades ago? Obviously not). Also of curiosity has been the (non) acceptance of homosexuals or bisexuals (or even sexually deviant characters, such as that semi-Dominatrix whose name I can't remember). I think that Big Brother brings out sentiments within the community that maybe popular culture does not always reflect. We're told that homosexuality and assertive women are accepted within society these days, but perhaps they're not. I've run out of time now, but have a lot more to say about the TV shows I listed earlier (as well as the current re-screening on Queer As Folk), but it'll all have to wait for another day. By the way, I uncovered an article on Australia's Big Brother from one of my favourite websites, Pop Matters. And an ex-housemate of mine (of the real kind, not the Big Brother kind) is doing a talk on reality TV at the ACMI.

My first Photo Friday entry, the subject this week being Shadows. This is an old photo, taken on the beach at Cape Woolamai. Apologies to anyone who's come in from Photo Friday and had to scroll down to get to this entry; the permalinks on Blogspot don't seem to work (well, not from my computer anyway).

The Sociology essay is slowly coming together. At least now I have what resembles a clear picture of how I'll piece together the five references (in 400 words!). Having little spare time leading up to the due date (Wednesday evening), I e-mailed my tutor requesting an extension until Friday. I received a very rapid response telling me that this will not be granted.

Returning from Phillip Island last night, we were subjected to one of the most amazing sunsets I've seen. The photo (taken by Phoebe, I was driving) doesn't really do it justice - there are elements outside the parameters of the lens, which only the naked eye can experience; the sky was clear bright blue, the clouds burning orange (as we all know, these are complementary colours), the hazy glaze of fresh suburban rain lingering in the air.

I'm housebound and alone again tonight. I'll be getting my keys back tomorrow, when we head down to see my folks at their Phillip Island holiday house. The cat is sleeping in some secret corner of the apartment, whilst my only companion in this tiny bottle of Campari. I took a sip and shuddered. I think I need to mix it with something. The latest issue of The Wire arrived yesterday. I read the article on the history of Mego, and I was most impressed to hear about the latest Farmers Manual endeavour, that being a DVD of MP3 files, clocking in at over 3 days worth of audio. There's more information on the DVD here, including around 10 hours of MP3 files. In related areas, there are only a few days left to download Fällt's Invalid Object MP3s.

Two photos taken on the return journey from Taggerty last Monday night. The general slowness of my digital camera's shutter speed, and the ability to freely snap away at everything, without processing cost considerations, is a true joy. I took about 20 similar photos that night, something I wouldn't have done in the analogue days. And if anyone can explain to me why the second image is slightly lower than the first, I'd be most appreciative.

This Sociology essay is driving me nuts. I just can't seem to pull it all together. I've been working on it for three days now, but the problem is that I should have had far more done by now. I'm planning to be half way by tonight. The fact that this essay feels like pulling teeth, and that I'll be finishing it off at Phillip Island, remind me of the Australian Politics essay I did last year. That essay brought me my lowest marks yet, and I'm slightly fearful that history may repeat itself. Still, I'm much more confident of what I've got to say in the Sociology essay, it's just a matter of getting it out within the strict parameters of the outline; 800 words to summarise the piece of research, 800 words to critically analise it, with a minimum of 5 sociological references to back up the case. 800 words isn't a lot of room for 5 references to back up whatever argument I can squeeze in.

I have a slightly below average Empathy Quotient, however my Systemizing Quotient is above average. I wonder if this is at all reflected in this blog. I wonder if wondering this is in itself a reflection of these results. I wonder if the fact that I just changed the wording of the previous sentence in the hope that it makes more sense is a reflection of this. I wonder if the fact that I?m still slightly concerned about that sentence is a reflection of this. I?m beginning now to worry about the grammatical structure of this whole entry. The results from my Systemizing Quotient test indicate that I may have Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism!

I'm back from my holiday and have been spending today working on my Sociology essay. I left my apartment keys at Jamieson, and they've consequently ended up at my parents' house in Olinda. I've therefore not been able to leave the apartment today, due to the fact that I won't be able to get back in. Being housebound isn't so bad when there're essays to be written. If I was on regular holidays I'd have bugged out by now. I've been biding my time trying to articulate what I feel is wrong, or maybe naïve, about this Noble & Lupton article I'm critiquing for this essay. It has something to do with the way that, in analysing appropriation of personal computers in the workplace, they ignore the inbuilt nature of malleability that GUIs offer. It reminds me somewhat of claiming that the fact that people program radio stations into their car stereos, using the inbuilt functionality of programmable settings, somehow implies that they are reclaiming control over hostile, alien technology. There's some hazy line between utilitarian and aesthetic flexibility that I have to put my finger on. I have set aside two more days for working on this, and if it comes together the way I envisage, I think I'll have a good essay on my hands.

I'll be offline until Tuesday. I'm going away to Jamieson, and then Taggerty.

I couldn't help but notice Jenny Sinclair's blog column in The Age's Green Guide was not present today. Maybe she's on holidays, or maybe it's been pulled. Maybe The Age didn't want Jenny reporting from the blogging frontline, ala Kevin Sites. Maybe there's a hidden conspiracy of old-media attempting to suppress the multi-discursive world of blogging. In any case, it's great to have this spot for blogs in such a mjaor media / entertainment newspaper lift-out. I hope it returns next week.

The Punch-Drunk Love website opens up with an excerpt from Jon Brion's distinctive score (this piece seemingly titled Barry States His Case). I am reminded of how music from films, heard outside the film, can evoke the feeling and mood so effectively. This excerpt from Punch-Drunk Love, looping over and over on my tinny laptop speakers, somehow conveys a sense of the film without stating anything. I'm sure it's more than a case of association, some scores just work, using the intangible nature of music they latch into the intangible qualities of certain films. I've been trying to articulate my thought on this film since I saw it last weekend, and I still can't quite put my finger on it. It just seems to work, in a way that's maybe unquantifiable. Maybe good films work like music, where there's little point trying to put into words the essence of it; music exists to state what words can't, and some of my favourite films work in the same manner. They evoke something intangible, a feeling, which can't be summed up in a plot synopsis on the back of the video case.

Charles Saatchi launches his new gallery of modern art in London, with a retrospective of the works of Damien Hirst (who has already dismissed the gallery as old hat). The BBC have a slide show of 15 pieces of work. Spencer Tunick photographed between 60 and 160 (depending on which report you read) naked people nearby, although I'm still unclear as to whether this was part of the Saatchi opening or pure coincidence (the Saatchi collection is supposed to celebrate "Young British Art").

If a war is launched on Syria next, it'll be interesting to see where public opinion falls, particularly the 'swingers' who have never been staunchly on either side, but whose opinion changes with the situation. On one hand they may see a strike on Syria as emerging evidence that the US has interests beyond WMD and liberation, and that they're just trying to get a foothold in the Middle East. On the other, they may see the 'success' in Iraq as justification for the US to liberate whoever they goddamn please ("I thought going to war was bad, but boy was I proven wrong" that's the last time I doubt the Pentagon").

I've had a really busy day today, and certain tasks will have to be carried over into tomorrow. I haven't had a chance to mention two films I saw recently; P. T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (cinema) and Almodóvar's Live Flesh (video). I haven't had a chance to express my disappointment at the fact that the last episode of Queer As Folk (US series two) screened last night, and it appears SBS aren't going to screen series three just yet (the good news on that front is that they will be screening series one again). Here is another photo from my collection. This one taken in Barcelona. The exposure is terrible, which is the price one pays for taking the snapshot option when travelling. Regardless, I'm quite fond of the composition on this one.

This morning I have been laughing hysterically at Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf’s, Iraqi Minister for Information, new column in The Guardian. It is, of course, a pisstake, and a very well executed one at that…

If you see just one film before the end of the world, ensure that it is Johnny English, a new and extremely hilarious examination of the stupidity of western imperialist intelligence-gathering, starring Mr Bean.

Excellent Melbourne band Ninetynine have a website (via Null Device). There looks to be a large selection of MP3 files about to go up, but the links are dead at the moment. Their 180∞ and 767 albums are currently in the to be converted from vinyl to CD-R pile here at the CNWB Media Lab, so maybe I’ll just download a few tracks instead. As a token of sympathy to the fish, following the death of a neon tetra, I removed all the web-like mossy algae that had grown amongst the plants, changed the water (and even pH tested it and modified the hardness), and shifted the Easter Island statue to a more central position. They seem to be enjoying their new crib layout.

I’d always thought “euthanise” was a word, but it seems that it’s not, according to various dictionairies. In any case, I had to euthanise one of my neon tetras this morning. He’d had a chunk bitten out of his tailfin, and has subsequently been unable to swim properly, just drifting around with the tank’s currents. Obviously in pain, and dying a slow death, I googled for various euthanasia methods, which ranged from freezing to electrocution to more professional methods such as injections of chemicals. In the end, I opted for the platicbag method, whereby he was placed in a plasticbag, quickly taken outside, and stepped on. This was the quickest and most humane method I had at my means. The second aquatic death this year, but still not a bad run for a beginner.

Following dinner with friends at Swan Palace in Richmond, we headed next door to the lacklustre Bar 9T4 for a drink. This is a fairly typical nondescript inner-city bar; boring Café Del Mar style music emitting from a badly configured sound system, cool people crowded around the bar blocking everybody else from making purchases, overpriced drinks, you know the kind of place. Siting at a window table, I spotted Phoebe’s cousin Ben walk past. He works at a bar a few doors down, The Richmond Club (which used to be a reasonably good band venue; I remember seeing The Cannanes there many years ago), and invited us over there to have a drink. So we head across, and bravely enter an environment we’re clearly unfamiliar with. The Richmond Club is full of drunk men in suits, dancing with women (who have seemingly taken time out to change after work). The music is commercial house, and I ponder the way a style of music with its roots in the gay and black communities has evolved into the spectacle I’m now witnessing, as inebriated dancing businessfolk flail their hands in the way they’ve seen hip-hop characters do it in movies (seemingly unaware that there’s a difference between hip-hop and house music), and as the football is telecast on the TV screens surrounding the dancefloor. When the DJ moves tactlessly from that “Bass in your face, London” song into Blister in the Sun, the icing is placed almost perfectly on the proverbial cake. “There’s only one song that would have better summed up this whole experience” I say to Phoebe. “Is it Khe Sanh” she asks. She was dead right. As a man slouches over his beer, his tie almost falling into it, one hand holding his mobile phone to his ear, the other attached to the finger up his nose, I realise I’ve never been part of the drunken after-work ritual, the catharsis of beer and mixed spirits.

Sam Vaknin’s The Demise of the West concludes with an interesting perspective on blogs as representative of the multiplicity of perspectives in out globalised world:

Finally, in an age of globalization and the increasingly free flow of people, ideas, goods, services and information — old fashioned arm twisting is counter-productive and ineffective. No single nation can rule the world coercively. No single system of values and preferences can prevail. No official version of the events can survive the onslaught of blogs and multiple news reporting. Ours is a heterogeneous, dialectic, pluralistic, multipolar and percolating world. Some like it this way. America clearly doesn't.

It’s hard to choose just one, so I chose two. Get Your War On are still providing some of the most articulate, acerbic commentary on this war.

Some more reading for this bloggin’ essay. In Speech and Weblogs, Dave Winer tells his version of the history of blogging, tying it in with the story of Napster, to invoke a kind of revolutionary mindset with regards to blogs and the free-trade of ideas and creativity. In Jon Udell’s Blogs, scopes, and human routers, blogs are explained as being useful tools for information distribution, operating in different ways to e-mail. This is something that I’ve noticed myself doing. My blog has become a clearing house for thoughts and notes which I don’t necessarily feel are appropriate to e-mail to people. I wouldn’t e-mail my friends to tell them about the dream I had last night, but I can post it here and know that it’s somehow appropriate. E-mails seem to be a coercive form of communication, like a telephone call. If I send someone an e-mail, I expect that they read it. Blogs seem to be more passive; “if you post it, they will come”. I don’t force the blog onto people, I just keep posting, and people seem to drop by.

Last night I dreamt that I was in a newsagency, thumbing through magazines. An employee approached to ask if I’d be interested in making a little money. Apparently a winning lottery ticket had been discovered in their stocks, but hadn’t been sold yet. Regulations forbade the employees from making claims on this lottery. If I was willing to put my name to the claim, I would receive a percentage of the winnings. I agreed, and soon found myself in receipt of $10,000. There was one last hitch, the employee told me, which was to sign a transfer form. This form allowed for the transfer of funds from the dream world into the real world. Signing the form is the last thing I remember.

In the last few days, two images from Iraq have really resonated with me. The first is the footage captured by the BBC’s John Simpson and his crew, as “friendly fire” rains down on the convoy they’re “embedded” into. There’s a moment, just as the strike hits, where a drop of blood hits the camera lens. It stays there for a few seconds before it’s wiped off. For the armchair audience of this war, around the world in front of their televisions, their opinions and consent being fought for by an immense PR operation, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. I include myself in this category, and especially people of my generation who were born after the Vietnam War, and have never been so closely immersed in such a grand scale media / military matrix. The situation whereby real war shares the same medium as fictional war, where devastation and tragedy become soundbites and news updates, creates an environment where we’re so displaced from reality it becomes hard to really understand and feel what’s happening. The splattering of blood onto the BBC camera lens seemed to break the diegesis, like the characters in a film suddenly talking directly to the audience. The blood broke through the bounds of the subjective, drawing attention to the means of the medium. As the camera panned around, the blood now dripping vertically down the image, the thick black smoke wafting off to the right, I wondered if there could be a more pertinent image of this hazy line between the fact and fiction of this war. The second image, was of US Marines entering Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad. As the Marines wandered through the rooms, their faces alight in child-like wonder, something of their naïve innocence came through. These men and women, trained to kill and obey orders unquestioningly, essentially mercenary robots, showed their youthful awe, like children at Disneyland. I can’t quite articulate what this image said to me, other than pointing vaguely in the direction of the surreal and hyperreal world inside the heads of children.

I want to mention this page at The Age website, which encourages people to send in digital photos which they think captures the essence of Melbourne. When I was recently at Federation Square, I noticed that there were photographs being displayed on their large Barco screen. The photos were seemingly professional ones, possibly journalistic in nature. I decided that it would be a good idea for Federation Square to set up a website where people could upload their own photos, which could then be displayed. This would engage the public in the community space, and certainly in the creative realm, both of which Federation Square seems to aim to do. The photos at the Age website listed above, show that Melbourne is a city full of people with an eye for colour, composition, and the beauty of the everyday. The advent of cheap(ish) digital cameras and internet technology has allowed such creativity to flourish, to escape the little glossy envelopes and private photo albums, and be shared with strangers. Furthermore, I think my digital camera has allowed me to be more adventurous in my photography. I no longer have to worry about the cost of developing and printing. I can practice the Don't Think, Just Shoot manifesto of the Lomo crowd, and the results of such experiments have sometimes been surprising. There are also the photos I've taken digitally, which I would once have erred on the side of not taking, due to said economic reasons. These photos have turned out to be amongst my favourites.

I've just finished writing a short piece (750 words) for my Popular Culture class. This seems to be aimed at getting us to think about how our personal interests fit into the thoeretical schools we've discussed. With a larger essay looming, the obvious option seemed to be to write about the same subject for both essays. I don't consider this as being lazy, I consider it to be economically wise. Time has been incredibly tight for me lately, and so sometimes the cards have to be shuffled in such a way as to obtain the best hand. One thing I've got to learn to do, is to think about Uni less while I'm at work, and think about work less when I'm at home. And so this short essay is on blogging. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it seems to meet the assessment criteria, and I consider it reasonably well written considering the hastily assembled nature of it. We'll see how I go.

Another specimen from my dusty box of photographs. This was taken in Barcelona, either 1999 or 2000 (we were there for New Years Eve). It was one of those moments where the sunlight hit a surface and injected it with sentience. The sky was the brightest blue, the building glowing with life. The camera doesn't always do such moments justice, but I've refrained from making any adjustments in Photoshop.

News has arrived that LCD didn't achieve their goal of a 12 hour noise performance (though not for the lack of trying)...

Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2003 18:10:51 +1000 From: emile zile Subject: LCD 12 hr show shutdown by FORUM THEATRE when the comedy feztival holds their matinees next door - be sure not to organise a noise festa nearby - they came charging out of their AUDI stationvagons - started unplugging our gear and gave us ten minutes to get out - russell gilbert's one man show must not be interfered with - ... funny money comedy fest closed our noise party ! emile.

I'm too old for this, but it's surely worth passing on...

MELBOURNE WORKSHOPS * SOUND POST 2003 Are you age 12 to 25? Yes, then you get to dabble in some risky experimental sound making with some of Australia's most innovative and leading sound artists. There'll be workshops on turntable scratching, impromptu sound and theatre, rhyming skillz, break dancing, sound and music making with found objects, walk through installations, forums plus live performance. Featuring performances in the Amphitheatre by Megabias, Curse of Dialect, Peso Bionic (DJ), Spare Change Society, Minimum Chips, Private Benjamin, The Emergency, The Lucksmiths and special guests. @ Melbourne Museum WHEN: Saturday 12 April to Monday 14 April BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL: 03 8341 7222. Limited workshop places available FREE

This morning I’ve been reading my Sociology textbook in the State Library. I started using this location for my reading due to its lack of distractions. This also serves as a disadvantage, as I tend to set an overly ambitious target, and then fry my brain from not taking a break. I stagger out of there in a daze, and it takes me a little while to get things together again. I might tie my essay on blogging into George Ritzer’s theory of McDonaldsisation, which I was briefly introduced to in my Sociology readings this morning. It seems to fit neatly into the dichotomy of a public versus a privatised internet. Might also talk about alienation. Megnut’s The Weblog Revolution : How technology and amateurs are changing the way we communicate slideshow may come in handy. Some further reading to include The Register's criticism of The Second Superpower, and The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head article by James F. Moore.

Some links I've been reading thus far, for the blog essay; Rebecca Blood's Weblogs: a history and perspective, Immediast International's Seizing the Media and Hakim Bey's Immediatism. Accompanying soundtrack - Rechenzentrum.

As I write, LCD will be approaching the 6-hour mark of their 12-hour performance. A friend and I dropped in around the 3-hour mark. I'll go and check them out later tonight, maybe take some photos and post them here.

Last night I attended a benefit for the Irene warehouse. Pretty amusing assortment of theatrical lefty performance-art, erm, something. “This is just fodder for Andrew Bolt” said a friend of mine, making the observation that what we were witnessing was surely the epitome of everything that gets parodied and ridiculed about such events and people. Crazy dancing, flute-driven music, acrobatics, people dressed as animals. The night was saved by Jihad Against America. Songs lasting around 15 seconds each, with titles like (to paraphrase) Mum Drove Me to Googlengook in her Landrover and Eat Meat You Wimps and Vegans Must Taste Funny (I think). Every song ended with singer Liz loudly proclaiming "You guys suck". Oh, it was funny. I did laugh.

This weekend I’ll be taking preliminary actions towards my two essays for the semester. The first one is for the Popular Culture subject…

Stuart Hall argues that the meanings of popular culture forever transform from stages on incorporation – distortion – resistance – negotiation – and recuperation. Discuss these processes of ideological and cultural struggles in the realm of popular culture. Use one example of popular culture to make your case.

…My example of popular culture was going to be bukkake, until I realised what it actually was, and then changed it to blogging. Research should be fairly enjoyable, plowing through many blogs. Finding printed resources on blogs could prove more difficult. I’ve borrowed a stack of books from the library, but they mostly seem to centre on MUDs and MOOs as the epitome of online community. It’ll no doubt be a few more years before research on blogs hits critical mass, and my library gets some books on it. The most I can find on blogs in printed form are articles from IT publications, which so far seem to focus on the software more than any cultural analysis. So I may end up treading into a minefield of trying to properly reference actual blogs. I guess that’s where permalinks come in handy. The other essay is for Sociology. This is to be a critique of a piece of sociological research. We were given eight pieces to choose from. I chose Mine/not mine : appropriating personal computers in the academic workplace by Deborah Lupton and Greg Noble. It seemed the most interesting of the selection. More on these projects as they happen.

Last week I mentioned that I didn't get along to see a friend's band. They're playing again this weekend, for 12 hours! Details are as follows...

LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR presents ->12 HOUR NOISE MARATHON PARTY<- ** THIS SATURDAY - THIS WEEKEND ** 11am - 11pm April005, Year003. HUSH HUSH - Hosier Lane, (opp. MISTY) - Melbourne - off Flinders Lane - first lane in from Russell St., facing Swanston St.

Also, on Friday evening, I'll most likely check out the band of a friend of a friend, whom I've been told to see...

BLOOD POTATOES + IRENE SUSPENDED CIRCUS + LOWBOY + GO GENRE EVERYTHING + FOGWATCH + JIHAD AGAINST AMERICA + GROUND COMPONENTS The Railway Hotel, Brunswick. 9pm. $10/6.

Another photo from the archives. The snow started falling during out stay in Czesky Krumlov, Czech Republic. We were drunk on fine Czech beer, and wandering the streets late at night. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before, almost magical. This was taken the next day.

My Sociology lecture last night consisted on a 1 hour talk from a librarian about accessing resources through the library’s website, about 40 minutes on an upcoming essay, and then the remainder on the subject of ‘culture’, this week’s topic. The sections on library use and essay writing were largely irrelevant to me, as I already knew about such things (such is the nature of undertaking a first-year subject), and having read the appropriate textbook chapter for this week, the remainder of the lecture was basically a rehash of said material. The tutorial consisted of more talk on essay writing. I have to keep in mind that for many of the kids here, this will be their first university essay. Some stupid questions therefore arose from some students. For instance, after being told that essays are to be double-spaced, one student asks if we’ll lose marks for not double spacing. I can’t fathom why you wouldn’t double space after being told that you must. Another student asks if more bibliographic references would equate to higher marks. It seems pretty obvious that the only factor that equates to higher marks is a good essay. Still, I don’t blame them. Such questions may have been on my mind if I was in their situation. Naïve questions don’t bother me, but there are many other things that get me riled up whilst in lectures… Firstly, people who talk during lectures. I’m the kind of person who hates people talking during films also. I can’t understand why people pay a lot of money to attend university, and spend the time talking about rugby or boobs or how much beer they drank on the weekend. I have finally found a position within the lecture theatre where I am out of earshot of every chatty clique. Secondly, people who ridicule those who do want to learn. When questions are raised by students which may appear ‘nerdish’, there are sly gestures exchanged between the other students. When a student recently raised a question on the French Revolution’s relationship to the Industrial Revolution, smirks were traded around the room; “my god, this guy’s such a dork”. Having said that, I also get annoyed when people raise question which are not aimed at furthering their learning or understanding, but are purely raised to jerk-off. The above example actually fell into this category. Said student often raises question that are obviously not intended to advance understanding, but simply to show everyone that he knows something. Last night, after an explanation of a particular style of referencing, this student raises the question “That the Harvard method, right?” Lecture time is too valuable to be wasted by people raising such self-aggrandising points. Worse than this though, are questions which relate to nobody other than the person asking it. A question like, “When I try to log into the library catalogue, it asks for my ID number, but I don’t have one because when I enrolled I didn’t have a phone number because I was moving house and my Mum’s phone was disconnected…” This just wastes everybody’s time. Such questions should be raised after the lecture. Phew, I feel better having got all that off my chest.

As I was saying below, the world is seeming more and more like a comic. Two examples I forgot to mention; Chemical Ali (surely one of the best comic villain names ever), and Saddam Hussein's use of doubles.

With all my university reading done for the week, I relaxed on Monday evening with the latest issue of The Wire, and became absorbed in an article on Autechre. What I found of particular interest were the claims that Autechre exist outside the influence of anyone else, that their music is separate from all that has gone before, existing in a vacuum. Whilst I don’t believe that this is possible (they themselves have sighted hip-hop as an influence), I admire this brave aspiration. To claim to be beyond influence is to exist in a world unimaginable to our current mass-mediated sphere.

…they believe their music is about evading all forms of “meaning”, signification or representation…

I also liked this quote, about the current staples of popular music :

Autechre’s approach is strictly antithetical to most popular music, which is essentially either nostalgic (be it retro-derivative, mischievously postmodern or sentimentally redolent of bygone summers) or it’s written with one eye on ‘classic radio’ posterity, over-eager to familiarise itself with you, become the stuff of future revivals, flecked with associations and connotations.

Autechre’s Lentic Catachresis is downloadable from The Wire.

When I find a blog I like, I often spend a bit of time exploring their links, which leads to further good blogs, and so on. Today, I’ve been delving into the links of Invisible Shoebox, and uncovered some treasures. Here goes…

One Word is a great stream-of-conscious inducing site. A word appears, and you have 60 seconds to write about it. You can then view what others have written. Milon's memory is an inventive and quite moving "living obituary" for a friend who passed away in 1981. As information on Milon comes to light, Bernard posts it here. The latest post, some correspondence from Milon’s former principal, is especially touching. In Paperback Writer, MissJenJen writes up a great 20 point summation of the procrastination accompanying essay writing. I’ve acquired some Photoshop actions which attempt to replicate the look of a lumo camera, but it comes nowhere near the beauty of the real thing. Gusset has a great gallery. I like reading research blogs. I don't know why. But some new ones discovered include Interactive Cinema, Purse Lip Square Jaw, and Ten Seconds to Midnight.

Since the attacks of September 11, it’s struck me how much we seem to be living in a cartoon world. I’m not referring to the ‘fictitious’ world conjured up by Michael Moore at the Oscars, but to the seemingly comic-book type nature of geopolitics these days. Every day this war on Iraq further comicises the world. We’ve got Morocco offering the Allies bomb-defusing monkeys, the use of mine-clearing dolphins, the reclusive super-villain with bases buried deep inside mountains, the hereditary nature of the Bush leadership, the planes flying into the towers… I could go on and on.

There are movements which aim to reclaim the swastika as a legitimate religious symbol. The problem they face is that the symbol caries so much weight now, it’s virtually impossible for it not to conjure up images of Nazism and the associations of evil and hatred which accompany it. It reminds me of those who call for a reinterpretation of the word ‘queer’, trying to reclaim it from it’s homosexual connotations (no doubt back to a derogatory term for homosexuals). It’s especially amusing when they become quite adamant about this, basically claiming that homosexuals had no right to claim the word ‘queer’ in the first place, and that somehow its current meaning should be ignored. Both of these cases involve an arrogance towards the fact that meanings change, their feet firmly planted in the belief that the initial meaning implanted into something should be its only meaning. This was the central concern in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which I saw last night (DVD). Through a vodka-haze, I saw a wrangling over the meanings of signs and symbols, attempts to reinterpret them and attempts to redefine them. Like swastikas and the (once derogatory) word ‘queer’, the imagery of minstrels and golliwogs carry a lot of political weight. It’s surely not an easy subject to invoke, and even more difficult to satirise. Bamboozled treads carefully through the minefield of these changing definitions, looking at the meanings people derive from such imagery. It reminded me of the artwork of Michael Ray Charles, which in turn reminded me of the scene in Ghost World when Enid's reappropriated artwork (dealing with the same subject matter) is censored at an exhibition.

I had my first fatality in the fishtank yesterday. Vaj, one of the giant yellow snails, passed away. Vaj has gone to a better place.

I left the power supply to my Powerbook at work, so I’m currently sitting on 43% battery power. Not much time to do everything I wanted to do this weekend. Amongst the books in the ‘to-read’ pile next to my bed is T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I open all these books periodically, and browse some of the passages, which does nothing but make me realise that there are too many good books in this world to read in one lifetime. Anyway, the passage of Seven Pillars of Wisdom which I opened to last night, contained this…

By brute force it marched then into Basra. The enemy troops in Irak were nearly all Arabs in the uneviable predicament of having to fight on behalf of their secular oppressors against a people long envisaged as liberators, but who obstinately refused to play the part.

Another photograph from the cnwb archives. This was taken near the town of Taranna, on the Tasman Peninsula. We were driving to Port Arthur, when I spotted this eeire scene; a small lonely inlet, the tide stretched right out, the sun long since dissappeared behind the encroaching fog.

Working with students brings me into contact with all kinds of personalities. I’ve just been helping one particular student with Final Cut Pro, who exudes an undercurrent of hostility in everything he says. There’s nothing overt against which I could respond “Hey, what’s with the hostility?”, just this subtle but very detectable attitude. One of those characters whom the world is against, whom the odds are stacked up against, who perceives every technological problem as an intentional obstruction caused by me. Watched Midnight Cowboy last night (DVD), and was left cold. I’m sure I’ve seen it before, and somehow remember it being a lot more ‘accessible’. I don’t remember it being so overtly miserablist (oh, hangon, I’m thinking of The Three Amigos). I felt nothing for the characters of Ratso and Joe Buck, except that they were respectively opportunistic and naïve. Towards the end, my ‘lids were heavy and slowly closing over. I faced that sleepy decision, do I force myself to stay awake and see the end, or do I just give up. I gave up.

I’m still enraptured by Love’s Forever Changes LP. With each listen it’s growing on me more. One of those perfectly conceived and executed albums, with lush orchestration, conceptual-art murmurings, rock freak-outs, British beat-group inspired percussion, something more pop songs should have onboard; trumpets. This is all done with enough subtlety and mastery and uniqueness to quantify it as a ‘classic’ in my books. It seems odd to hear critics bangin’ on about Silverchair’s latest forays into this minefield of 60s orchestration and studio extravagance, when their take on it seems so muddied and tokenistic. So anyway, I’m still trying to work out of I have enough money to see Love when they tour in April. Sly & Robbie are also touring, with tickets costing $60. This is a pity, because their Drum and Bass : Strip to the Bone by Howie B is one of my favourite modern dub excursions (fitted with an electrometafunk exoskeleton [sorry to go all Kodwo Eshun on you]). Also touring soon is Terry Callier, who I’d been primed to investigate thanks to an interview in The Wire, which portrayed him as a metaphysical soul/jazz angel, speaking in tongues from another musical universe. The 2 discs I’ve bought of his have turned sour on me, although I’m yet to track down any of his early material. Speaking of gigs, a friend invited me to see his band at the Rob Roy tonight, and seeing as I probably won’t make it, I’ll post the details here:

LCD, Mr Jeckel & the Hydes, Hospital Brothers (Chris Smith, Justin Fuller et al), and Jihad Against America. Tonight at the Rob Roy Hotel (cnr Brunswick and Gurtrude streets, Fitzroy).

Last Tuesday evening I had a lecture on pornography. A few rudimentary definitions to get started, followed by an outline of the Dworkin / MacKinnon perspective, and contrasted with the postmodern perspective (Beatrice Faust, Lynne Segal, Catherine Lumby et al.). What I found disappointing was the focus on the morality of pr0n, with no examination of how it’s embedded into our culture, how it’s used, how it’s made, how it’s distributed and consumed. Some important elements I would have liked to have seen mentioned :

Annie Sprinkle : a ‘post-porn modernist’; writer, lecturer, workshop holder, and general sexuality advocate. Cicciolina : Italian porn-star who successfully ran for parliament in 1987. Cicciolina was an advocate for anti-nuclear and human rights movements, anti-censorship, pro-sexual liberation, as well as many other causes. Cam girls : Women running their own businesses, often from their bedrooms without the knowledge of their unsuspecting parents. Annabel Chong : Subject of the documentary Sex : The Annabel Chong Story, in which she philosophises on the pro-porn perspective, asserting herself as a woman firmly in control of her medium. She ends up being chewed up and spat out by a ruthless industry intent on upgrading the novelty value of each production (Chong sets a world record by having intercourse with 251 men in one session, a record which is quickly broken again by the next pron-star du jour).

I’ve been a long time fan of the intersection between queer culture and comic culture. Since I first tapped into Tom Coates’ bag of comic fandom mixed with queer theory (and other points of cultural analysis, especially gelling in the wonderful Barbelith Underground), though to Rage, the fictional gay superhero in Queer As Folk. It was with interest then that I read about Rawhide Kid, purported to be the first gay title character in mainstream comics, and the interesting debate on CNN’s Crossfire.

Salam Pax gets a write-up in The Age. Meanwhile, Blogger and Google have mirrored the site for those of us who were having trouble with the underscore in the URL.

The whole city looked as if it were on fire. The only thing I could think of was “why does this have to happen to Baghdad”. As one of the buildings I really love went up in a huge explosion I was close to tears.

Debate over the authenticity of Salam Pax plays directly into some of the questions of fiction and non-fiction I’ve been thinking about in regards to this war.

The media wars have also started, Al-jazeera accusing the pentagon of not showing how horrific this war is turning out to be and Rumsfeld saying that it is regrettable that some TV stations have shown the images.

What struck me the most about the images of the American POWs was the absolute fear in their faces, and also the very fact that I hadn’t seen fear like this before. Why should I have? I’ve seen fear expressed in films and on television, but never an undiluted, non-fictional fear like this. All wars are unique, but what marks this one is the media saturation, not only from American media, but also the Arab media, and ofcourse the internet. We’ve been so oversaturated with films and TV, that it’s hard to find the line between the muddy waters of reality and fiction. The horrors of war have become a computer game, a reality-TV show, an action blockbuster. I also saw footage of Allied troops blowing up an Iraqi base. There were whoops and cheers and high-fives as the building exploded. I wondered if this is how troops have always reacted in this situation, or if these troops, like me, have only seen war in movies, and their reactions are guided by the fictional representations of war.

A sporadic occurrence in my strip-mining style of CD purchasing (which has slowed remarkably since I moved to a more expensive abode) is that a disc comes along which initially gets buried in the quagmire of cheap CDs, before slowly creeping its way through my subconscious, until I finally can’t get through the day without certain tracks being stuck in my head for hours. When music falls into this category, it usually stays there for good. I think Unknown Pleasures may have been the first disc to do this to me, back when I was 16. The latest one though, is Love’s Forever Changes; a near-perfect black-humoured proto-psychedelic monster. It’s an astounding coincident then, that Love are touring Australia next month (having never toured here before and in fact, having hardly toured at all in the last 35 years).

I've just signed up with Camblog, whereby i can now e-mail photos to a given address, and they get posted straight to my blog. It's a good alternative for dupes like me who have neither server space nor Blogspot Plus. Here's the initial test post, taken at the Melbourne anti-war rallies a few weeks ago. No Photoshop filters or any such trickery, just a flash and slow shutter speed.

Went to see 24 Hour Party People again on Saturday night. I’d seen it previously at the sold-out Melbourne International Film Festival screenings last year. Being somewhat of a Joy Division fan, I found the first half of the film to be the most interesting, although the whole film stands up for itself. I was speaking to someone at a wedding yesterday, who has read a lot about the Factory scene (on which the film is based). He was disappointed in the film due to its glossing-over of much of the overall Factory story. I didn’t take the film so much as a documentary or factual account, but more as a superbly sprawling postmodern mess, breaking in and out of diagesis constantly. Sean Harris does a wonderful job at portraying Ian Curtis, and the short tribute to him after he’s killed himself, a grainy excerpt from Atmosphere’s video-clip, is particularly moving. Some trivia from IMDB :

Ralf Little plays Peter Hook in the film. Caroline Aherne, the writer of "The Royle Family"(1998), which he also stars in, was once married to Peter Hook.

Kevin Sites has been "asked to suspend" his warblogging! He doesn't mention who exactly asked him. Interesting. His blog seemed to be getting a lot of coverage.

Get Your War On are getting really savage. The most articulate opinionating around.

I thought I'd log-on to check the news and read some blogs, before getting on with the days more pressing matters (ie. laundry, cleaning kitty-litter, replacing fishtank water, study). Somehow I got caught up in the messy world of my Blogspot template code. The reason I have no links here, is because I have to keep resetting my template. It seems that whenever I try to add the code for my Extreme Tracking, it deletes whole chunks of the template code. I've wasted an hour on this so far, looking for unclosed tags and other abnormalities. My knowledge of HTML is fairly rudimentary, I'm certainly no wiz, and so it's been driving me bonkers. If I can't even get the Extreme Tracking GIF up there, how am I going to cope with visitor comments or those little chatroom style services? Fuck this, I'm gonna go listen to Nico for a while.

I finally managed to access Where is Raed, via my dialup access at home, although I’m still too pre-coffee to read it yet. Tom has neatly summed up something that’s been on my mind lately…

In fact, my only piece of advice to people on both sides of this issue is an analogue to Bohr's comments - anyone who is 100% sure of the morality of their position with regard to the war in Iraq probably hasn't understood the issues involved.

When the first official strikes were made against Iraq on Thursday afternoon (Australian time), protests quickly assembled. Somehow, it didn’t feel right it attend. I was too confused, too numb, too disillusioned. Then, as is now, and as has been for months, these feelings have outweighed any sense of rage or anger. In fact, the quote from Badlands below pretty much sums up my feeling on the issue right now. …hmm, I need to pour some more coffee…

Everybody's talking about Dear Raed, but due to an underscore in the URL, I can't access it. Underscores in URLs apparently go against RFC953:

1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus sign (-), and period (.)

In a Sociology lecture last Wednesday evening, the lecturer brings up Laud Humphreys, the American sociologist who studied gay ‘tearooms’ (anonymous sex in public toilets), by covertly acting as the ‘watch-queen’ (on the lookout for police or potential gay-bashers). There’s a chorus of ‘rugby-dudes’ who always seem to sit behind me, and chatter the whole way through lectures. When queer theory was recently mentioned, they sniggered amongst themselves. When Humphreys’ research was explained, there was a lot of “He must’ve been a fuckin’ poofta” and “What a sicko”. I find it hard to fathom how somebody could hope to achieve anything from a sociology subject with attitudes like this. Maybe NARTH is more their line of research.

Earlier this week, I decided to use my ample downtime more effectively. I’ve started hiring DVDs and watching them on my Powerbook. I can just sit in my office and watch films. The afternoons have been passing a lot more quickly since establishing this routine. This week I watched Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the bomb. Obviously Strangelove is a great film to see in out current context (and a dose of ironic sanity amidst the general war celebrations going on here at work). Badlands provided one of the greatest lines I’ve heard in a film recently…

At this moment, I didn't feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub.

How can vagueness be expressed so articulately. Wonderful. Still have Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards to watch before the discs are due back. Joining Video Dogs in Carlton is in some ways more difficult that obtaining a crop-duster license in the US, and I’m not particularly happy about them having my credit card details (whereby they can automatically fine me for damaged DVDs, without room for my appeal). Apart from coming across as somewhat anally-retentive in their business practices (certainly not as relaxed as my old neighbourhood video library, Movie Reel), there’s also the film snobbery. There’s a blurb on the back of their DVD covers (I hate it when libraries don’t give you the original covers) which at first I thought was excellent, but the taste is now starting to sour in my mouth…

HEALTH WARNING At Video Dogs, we stock a complete range of new release titles. We apologise for the very poor quality of most of them, but there is nothing we can do about this. The distribution of cinematic material is controlled in large part by the Hollywood machine which favours the mediochre, the predictable, the unadventurious. Only occasionally, and quite by accident, does a good film slip through the net. (When they do, we put them on our recommended shelf and mark them ***). At Video Dogs, all we can do about this risible state of affairs is warn our customers that most new release videos may damage their minds with the influence of mediocre ideas, poor storylines and patronising stupidity. We cannot refund monies paid when customers come back and complain that the film they just watched was rubbish. That is why, as Video Dogs, we strongly recommend as an anitdote that out members mix their diet of new releases with some good healthy roughage. To this end, we have helpfully arranged on the back wall of the back room hundreds of the greatest films ever made. In fact, at video Dogs, you will find the largest collection of great films in Australia, and very possibly in the southern hemisphere. At video Dogs, we believe that the people of Australia deserve to have access to the finest films ever made. That they deserve more than the rubbish that is customarily served up by the profit-hungry distributors who make no distinction between mind-rotting nonsense and outstanding mind-nourishing cinema.

Saw two films over the weekend; Todd Solondz’s Storytelling (on DVD) and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (at the cinema). Some of the criticisms levelled at Storytelling revolve around the fact that Solondz addresses his critics without actually explaining himself or his work. The work of two fictional storytellers are criticised in the film, reflecting similar criticisms that have been aimed at Solondz; that his films are mean-spirited, invasive, deliberately shocking, exploitative, etc. By fictionalising these criticisms in a film, some critics saw this as an (failed) attempt to explain himself. I can’t see any reason why Solondz, or any artist, should feel the need to explain their work or their motivations. If Solondz did feel compelled to answer his critics, so be it. Can he then be blamed for not explaining himself clearly enough? He’s not Saddam Hussein. I prefer to think of Storytelling not as an attempt to answer his critics, but merely to fictionalise them, and allow the audience to make what they will of the process of criticism. Are criticisms of Solondz’s work fair? Are Solondz’s films ethical? Should taboo subjects be held up in a comical manner? Should an artist even take criticisms onboard? Meanings are subjective. I don’t think Storytelling, or any of Solondz’s work, is supposed to answer questions, so much as raise them.

Bush makes his speech in 15 minutes. I was intending to watch it, until I realised that I'd be sharing the television with pro-war work colleagues. They seem to be getting excited, calling their friends to tell them to tune in. It's like a sporting event. There's an atmosphere of excitement that sits uncomfortably in my stomach. I think I'll go get a baked potato instead.

Happy Pi Day, math-geeks.

In a recent episode of The Secret Life Of Us, copywriter Evan is asked to come up an advertising campaign for sanitary pads. The angle he comes up with, is to mock the traditional advertising campaigns of sanitary pads. He creates a campaign that cuts through the bullshit and tells it like it is. His campaign mentions periods and blood. Whilst it may seem odd that a television show is mocking the very advertisers who provide the revenue the show depends on, for me it signifies the very point I hate about it. Recent discussions I’ve had, have questioned whether ‘the masses’ are being duped. Are they victims of the capitalist hegemony, falling for every trap advertising lays for them? Or are they more aware of the tricks being played on them? It’s the modernist versus postmodernist debate. I tend to agree with both schools of thought. I think ‘the masses’ are wising up to advertising tricks, and are becoming more cynical about the way advertising works. But I also believe the advertisers are one step ahead. They realise that this cynicism is out there, particularly in the under 35 age group. It’s not hard to notice; look at how many books and articles were written about ‘generation-x’ 10 years ago. And so we see advertising that mocks advertising, that appeals to our cynical postmodern outlook. All of this is hardly revolutionary, and it’s not something I’ve just discovered in a flash of brilliance. You don’t have to read No Logo to work this out for yourself (but then the No Logo generation is another gripe altogether). What annoys me about The Secret Life Of Us is it’s just another marketing tool aimed at our cynicism. There’s a gay character, and an aboriginal character, and they smoke pot and sleep around. It’s meant to appeal to our desire for more realistic drama, more representative characters, people we can identify with, so that when they drink Crown Lager or drive a Barina or use Macleans toothpaste, we can too. What annoys me is that by thinking they’re getting something real, the audience are still being duped, the same as they always have. It's a lifestyle program, no more. It sells us a lifestyle, and all the peripheral consumables that go with it.

The apartment is quiet, and there’s a nice Autumn feeling of stillness outside. I live about 20 metres from Swanston Street, opposite the QV construction site, unfolding like reversed origami. The occasional tram passes, and it’s just started to rain; that light rain which falls like snow. These moments are rare in the city. The street-sweepers will be moving in any minute, and it’ll all be lost. Some friends came over last night. We drank two bottles of cabernet merlot and watched Dogs In Space and Evil Dead 3 : Army of Darkness. Evil Dead 3 would have to rate as one of the lamest films I’ve seen, and I haven’t yet worked out whether it was in a good way or a bad way. It’s a Lovecraftian medieval fantasy time-travel horror action spoof, and if that sounds clumsy, you should see the animation and bad chromakey effects. We apparently saw the US ending, where Ash battles a she-demon in a present-day department store. The UK ending appeals to me more, where he accidently awakes in a post apocalyptic world; reminds me of the ending to HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Dogs in Space is a film I saw a couple of years after it’s release, and already it had attained a timeless feel. As a boy on the brink of adulthood, yearning for independence, I wanted to live my life like the people of Berry Street, Richmond. Oh, how times have changed. One of said friends who was visiting, was a friend I met through discussing this film with, at a party 10 years ago. Thinking back to our relatively (for a coupla outer-suburban teenagers) extensive collective knowledge on the bands, personalities, and history behind the film, I was surprised that we knew so much without the aid of the internet. It reminded me of the pre/post-internet divide that my generation straddled. To future generations, I’ll be like one of those people who lived before television. Dogs in Space is a unique film, a labour of love by all involved, to document a little-documented time of great importance to the history of Australian music. In our baby-boomer controlled mediascape, where the Sunbury Music Festival is upheld as the golden moment in ‘Oz-rock’, where Billy Thorpe and Daddy Cool and Sherbert and Little River Band are the canon of Australian rock history, the immediate post-punk period is very neglected. Bands like The Saints and Radio Birdman get their dues, but there’s an entire hidden world buried in there. Guy Blackman’s Chapter Music label has done an unsurpassed job in further documenting this scene with the Can’t Stop It compilation. What’s more, I can’t imagine a film like this being made today. We live in an age where the marketing companies have long ago discovered the spending power of ‘gen-x’. All I need to mention is The fuckin’ Secret Life of Us to make my point. Dogs in Space, despite any faults that may be conceived in it, is remarkable in that it drew in a star of the magnitude of Michael Hutchence, and still managed to come across as a genuine effort to do something free from being contrived and marketed. An attempt to pencil in a moment for fear it would be forgotten, to let future generations know what existed(even if it's a dramatised version). I think it achieved it's aim.

Sitting here in our apartment, I hear the agitated rumble of jets passing overhead. It’s Labour Day weekend, where we honour the eight-hour day movement. In Melbourne, this is overshadowed by the Grand Prix, a celebration of the automobile, a spectacle of Debordian proportions. Like the early Christians who appropriated Pagan festivals, claiming them as their own, I’m wondering how long until Labour Day is known as Grand Prix Day. The jets are part of the festivities, a glittering mirage of the power of technology, along with the Formula One cars. Although the jets fly every year for the Grand Prix, this year they carry an added meaning. It’s hard not to think of the flexing of military muscle, or a showing of our technological might. The screaming sound, half-submerged in the overcast sky, reminds us that we’re on the brink of war.

Thus far, it's been a frustrating day at work. Things were mounting up, e-mails passed around behind the backs of others, stupid little games and power-plays. Somehow, I ended up in the vortex of it all. It even caused me to break my usual easy-going demeanour I maintain for the students, as I grumpily informed them that they were eating into my lunchbreak. Finally, at lunch, I wonder why I've become so riled up. My job isn't exactly the most stressful, and I certainly don't encounter a high amount of aggression. Then it comes to me, slipping into my mind through some unseen entrance; I don't like being fucked around, used as a pawn, or taken advantage of, all of which have happened to me this morning, however subtly. It's amazing the kind of clarity one can obtain from a toasted chicken sandwich and a raspberry smoothie.

Two refreshing sights on the way into work today. Firstly, a homeless person asleep on our doorstep (almost). It’s one thing to be aware of the fact that every city, including my own, has homeless people, but thinking about the fact that this guy was sleeping in a smelly concrete alcove, just metres from my own warm bed, kinda put things into a bit more perspective (to use a horribly middle-class cliché). Secondly, walking up La Trobe Street, I pass a group of early-rising tourists. They’re staring and pointing in amazement at RMIT’s Francis Ormond building, speaking a foreign language, no doubt admiring the nineteenth century architecture. I too, looked up at the building I so often pass but rarely marvel at. It is a beautiful building, and it often pays a handsome reward to look around with the eyes of a tourist.

We were supposed to see Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris tonight, but a message on the Astor Theatre website announces that the screening has been cancelled due to unavailability of the print. What a pity; probably my only chance to see it in a cinema before I see the new Steven Soderbergh version. I purchased the book yesterday, and plan to read it before seeing the new film, giving myself a cross-platform experience.

Some nice Flash-work; making snowflakes and The Economists. Speaking of snowflakes, there's an amazing gallery of microscopic images here, plus Betsy Devine has some really nice musings on the matter.

My parents sailed off on the Oriana last weekend, technology has allowed me the see what they're seeing.

"There are three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. And no one is lying." : Robert Evans.

Saw The Kid Stays in the Picture last night; the 'life and times' of Robert Evans, who rose from a businessman (his company apparently instigated the ladies slacks trend), to bad actor, to film producer. Riding the Hollywood rollercoaster, rising and falling, hanging on by the seat of his pants, but always in control. Cleverly, this documentary uses no new footage, only old photos, film footage, television appearances, newspaper clippings, yet manages to unfold a totally engaging story in a way that makes you feel like you never step back for the big picture, you're emersed in the story as it unfolds, and are never given the unfair advantage of hindsight. Robert's story is an intriguing one, a focused man of deep principles, a businessman's head and a mouthful of great lines.

"Any man who thinks that he can read the mind of a woman is a man who knows nothing." : Robert Evans.

Drank a whole bottle of cabernet sauvignon last night, and watched Ghost World on DVD. Found it quite enjoyable, despite the bad reviews some of my friends had given it. The mutual disaffection Enid and Rebecca display towards their synthetic suburban world, and the polar ways in which they aspire to break away from it, really struck a note with me. Reminded me of my own teenage musings on the hegemony of mass-consumption culture (ofcourse I didn't know what 'hegemony' meant back then). While the pragmatic Rebecca adopts a stoic work ethic, saving money to move into an apartment downtown, Enid searches for authenticity in the world of Seymour, a dorkish blues collector. Seymour's world is simultaneously more authentic than, and equally as false, as Enid's world. Is anything authentic anymore?

Very little happens, which I like in films (I'm currently feeling a sense of liberation at having decided not to see Gangs of New York tonight). The girls encounter various characters, often cynical caricatures (in the best of ways); the 80s video-artist cum community art teacher, the nun chukka weilding patriot, the party of blues 78s collectors (where was John Fahey?).

At times it felt like the filmic adaptation didn't quite do the comic version justice; the meta-physical/phoric bus ride a little out of place in the more realist celuloid world, perhaps better suited to the more meta-physical/phorical world of ink and paper.