I wake at eleven thirty and know, at once, that it is food poisoning. This is followed by the realisation that, in less than six hours, I need to be on a plane. My fare is non-flexible, non-refundable, and on a public-holiday long-weekend, near impossible to rebook. I grit my teeth as the first waves of nausea ripple through me. I will make that plane.

I roll onto the floor and reach for the backpack I have yet to completely unpack, the zips still covered in the tape the disinterested Laotian border guards applied after a cursory search and a half-hearted push for bribes. I feel inside for the battered plastic shopping bag, the one with a grinning number one, muscled Popeye arms giving a dopey double thumbs-up; “Clever shoppen auf Plus.eu.” This is my travel drug collection, and it is both versatile and extensive. I begin to prepare myself three courses in tablet form: a smorgasbord of pills from crisp foil pockets, a chaser of stale water, and the sour metallic taste that comes with the realisation that I will not be sleeping, not tonight.

That night, I discovered that my roommates will be on the same flight, and we plan to pool our resources and share a cab in the morning. When they awake at 5, I am standing in the kitchen, staring at the floor, a fizzing rectangular canister of blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution in my hand. I am sweating and shivering simultaneously.

“Morning”
“Good mor… what happened?”
“Woolies potato salad happened”
“Oh. Oh, right.”
“Food poisoning”
“Oh, Dan.”

The last is phrased so as to communicate three things. These are:

1. You look like shit. Really, all kinds of fucked up. Are you twitching?
2. I asked you to book the taxi last night. Did you book the taxi?
3. Will they let you on the plane? If we travel with you will they let us on the plane?

These are answered are simply:

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes. In fact, I have been through Canberra airport so many times the past year that the security theatre has sunk into a lower level of consciousness, and is so finely ingrained I don’t have to think as I pull things from the pockets they belong and put them into the pouches they belong. So, while you wrestle with bags, check-in machines and the conga-line of people struggling with their shoe buckles, I will be upstairs, behind the mirrored glass doors of the Qantas Club, kneeling on the floor of one of their pristine toilet cubicles, throwing up blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution.

I spend the rest of the day alternating between bed and floor and enjoying Prochlorperazine tablets. These, although yet to be endorsed by Mike Myers, are nonetheless little, yellow, and very, very strong. When I wake, it is afternoon and I can eat bananas. I can drink tea. I am overjoyed. To celebrate, we head out to buy alcohol.

The rain thumps the windshield in wet slaps, a schoolyard bully with a history of rapid escalation. He’s working his shtick, and the routine fits like a glove, so practiced is he in its execution. He’s balanced in the ebb and flow, and the way he juggles the expectations of this newcomer is in lines set to perfect verse, drummed in iambic pentameter against the tempered glass. Lash. And pause. Then, as if taunted from across the quadrangle, the droplets yield for a second, and there is a suitably dramatic intermission. The wind darts into the wheel arches, then golf-ball-sized lumps of ice begin to slam into the windows.

The sound is of someone throwing rocks into a trash pail. Large rocks, small pail. Outside, my partner in crime scrambles to pull shut the door of the garage. The rain is so heavy all I can see is the odd limb jerking spasmodically, a shadow puppet silhouette behind a wall of water. On the news that night, there are pictures of cars with ragged holes in the windows, houses stippled with damage from clouds sheeting mortar-fire from above, shrapnel of ice from the sky.

Going out in this to buy bitters, mixers, and those little cherries that taste like everything your grandmother ever baked, is mental. I’m grinning as we aquaplane over roads that look like rivers and even though I don’t drink, the payoff is a night of new faces and new ideas, and tiny pieces of candy scattered across a suburban driveway from the belly of a shattered pinata.

The next day, an inch thick carpet of leaves covers Melbourne. The cartoon fat kid drawn in the condensation masking the inside of the train window defrosts from the inside out, revealing a tapestry of sheeting rain outside, outlined by a chubby double chin. Shops struggle to outdo each other’s flood signs, and while there are a few “CLOSED DUE TO FLOOD DAMAGE,” I also spot a “Water, MAAAATE” and a “Closed, slight water issues. (ie. TOO MUCH!)” Inside, a huge pedestal fan is balanced on its side on the floor, blowing against a stain on the carpet that is far too large for the fan to have any reasonable chance of influencing.

I step into North Face and emerge fifteen minutes later with a jacket that will sit in place of the one stolen that night in Berlin, when we sat in the gloom of a squat bar under a disused railway bridge, and downed shots of Jäger amidst the yellowing propaganda, all angled lines, shades of grey, and futura on everything. The Aussies we had met were there, and we played up our challenge, shambling around with arms akimbo, poor facsimiles of bears on hind legs. We ran home through the snow-lined streets, me in a t-shirt, pale skin turned peppermint blue with the cold.

The pockets are in familiar places, the right places, and muscle-memory is at play as I reach for the zip that fastens on the right. It is like meeting an old friend after an absence of years, time dripping away, and shared experiences of the then settling comfortably together with the now. I quite like this pocket metaphor, and I wonder if it will stand up to being applied to a person. Who is not a garment, does not have pockets, nor a zip that fastens on the right. The metaphor is retracted and we hug under the row of clocks, amidst the shirtless teenagers in enormous, see-through plastic bags, then climb three flights of stairs and sit sipping steaming cocktails from a teapot, on the roof, in the rain.

Melbourne, you are completely fucking bonkers, but I think I’m starting to love you.

Posted in Mwah on Wed Mar 10, 07:40 am. Shoutouts.

I’m in the hole
Three thousand days
A buried soul
They live the dream
In terminal
No war too mean

I know the drill
Got cells to burn
I’m dressed to kill
A mortal coil
And time is still
On secret soil

Yeah pay the bills
Cells to burn
Mouths to fill
On Boeing jets
In the sunset make glowing threats

- Robert Del Naja
(Closing track on the stunning Heligoland)

Posted in Flatbeat on Sun Feb 28, 09:34 am. Shoutouts.

This might the best use of the Techno Viking yet. See also Slap Chop.

Posted in Vidiot on Tue Feb 23, 06:26 pm. Shoutouts.

A thousand windows of a hundred hotels face me all at once, black, punctuated by a flickering pulse on identical ceilings, blue, in synchronised media fulfilment. All I can see are his legs, thin, with tight black jeans and simple white shoes. A bare wooden floor. The ornamental façade of the Jubilee hall obscures his top half and so I watch the legs with interest as they begin to dance, alone in an empty gallery, hot-stepping fifty metres from one end to the other, and a succession of bewilderingly fast twists and back steps in front of the mirror at the end. Fireworks explode above the marina, visible between the towering buildings on the waterfront, most half-finished and exposed at the top, baring girdered claws. And still he’s stepping out, out, and out again.

The menu is in arcs of colour, green & white, with a cartoon figure of a man crouched, running, menu held above him, and it advises that ‘in case of rain’ it can be used as a Makeshift Shelter™. I have always considered the phrase ‘in case of’ confusing, no matter how correct it is. I guess others thought the same, as the signs outside elevators now say, ‘If there is a fire, do not use this lift,’ and this is brutal in its clarity. The lifts here say neither, casually omitting warnings as easily as they shed the fourth floor, the fourteenth. Sometimes the 24th is there.

I duck as the bassist turns back toward the bar and almost clocks me with his guitar.

“And who are you, whitey?” says the girl that has elbowed her way past the sound guy and into the tiny area of clear space from where you can shout at the old man behind the bar. She is small, curly black hair, and a trio of tiny cuts curl, ragged, toward her left eye, bisecting freckles, and only a day or so old.
“Dan,” I say.
“Just Dan?”
“Just Dan.”
“Well that’s no good,” she says, “Much too ordinary. How about I’ll be Star, and you can be Dare, and we’ll be superheroes.”
“But I have no superpowers,” I point out.
“This is okay. We can work with this. All we need are the outfits.”
“I’m not such a fan of outside underwear.”
“Oh, that’s such old-school thinking. We’ve moved on. Moved up.”
“To?” but she has caught the old man’s eye and is engaged in vigorous explanation of how, exactly, she wants this cocktail to be served. Bamboo culms, inked so finely they look like a photograph, stretch across her shoulder-blade and out of sight, and they flex in time with her gestures of affirmation.

I turn back to face the man with the Mohawk and the microphone, all muscles, and black gloves, and neck stretches, and I look for superheroes in the crowd.

Posted in Mwah on Sun Feb 21, 09:14 pm. Shoutouts [2].

Leuconoë, stop examining your
Babylonian horoscopes
and wondering what kind of death
the gods have got in mind for us.

We’ll never know. Accept it.
This winter pummelling the ocean
on the pumice rocks of Tuscany
may be our last.

Or not. Be sensible and pour the wine.
This life’s too short for longing
and the clock spins as we speak.
Days come and go. Hold on to this one.

- Mark Haddon

(found on the back of a postcard of a child throwing a dozen white doves into the air, written in Glebe’s beautiful tiny print, that was tucked into the cover of a book. As I took the book from the bookshelf, to throw in my backpack to take overseas, it fell onto the floor. It is signed, “pour the wine.”)

Posted in Textism on Fri Jan 29, 06:39 pm. Shoutouts.

We must blend into the choir
Sing as static with the whole
We must memorise nine numbers and deny we have a soul
And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won
We must run, we must run, we must run

We must hang up in the belfry
Where the bats and moonlight laugh
We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past
And in the caverns of tomorrow
With just our flashlights and our love
We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

- Oberst

Posted in Shutterbug on Tue Jan 26, 01:41 pm. Shoutouts.

She remembers swimming here as a child, her brothers splashing and taunting her from the deeper water as she stood at the end of the jetty and held her nose. Remembers bombie competitions from that same jetty, before they put up the signs about amoebic meningitis. A cartoon man holding his nose, tornado above his head, and the warning in thick red letters stating simply, “Don’t risk it. You could die.” So holidays from the lakeside, then, half a blackened and rusted 44-gallon drum as a barbeque, Coles sausages spitting fat, and the ever present smell of burnt onions. Before the kiosk with postcards, keyrings and souvenir stubby holders. Before the kitschy tourist train. Before the gate.

Tonight, the gate across the pitted and dusty single-lane gravel road is pulled closed, secured with a looped chain and a brand new padlock that gleams dully in the moonlight. It’s close to full, the moon, and it shines through the huddled gums that line the lake, casting dancing shadows onto the water. The sound of the frogs chainsawing at each other carries clearly from the bulrushes at the other end of the lake to where she is standing.

Other than the frogs, it’s a quiet night. The train that runs along the shore finished its final run hours ago, the charter-bus-driven tourists have headed back to the big city, and the single-room cafeteria closed for the night. She inspects her shoes, the mud clumped across the toes and shoelaces dragging in the soft silt where the water dries up and the eucalypts’ roots twist and tangle as they reach down toward the lake. The lock is at her feet, and she thinks that the mud will probably jam the mechanism.

“Hah! You drag me all the way out here and expect me to grok this? What am I, a naturalist? Davey Attenborough’s secret love-child? Jen, I’m a fucking arts major, all I’m supposed to do is smoke pot and read Kerouac. You can’t expected me to get this. It’s outside my limits. Officially beyond the scope of my curricula.”

She knew they hired canoes out here, knew where they kept them, but didn’t think it would be so easy to gently force the lock and walk one down to the waterside. Thought that in this day and age there would be someone, anyone, to stop them. She realised, then, that she’d been in the city too long. Worrying about alarms and home-security. 24 hour call-out. She’d even been to the hardware store the week before, a whole aisle dedicated to tiny white signs explaining in meticulous detail why you shouldn’t jump the fence to burgle this house. Her house. It still thrilled her to say that.

But there were moments when she knew, felt in her bones, that this wasn’t it, that it wasn’t right. The city destroyed people. Ate them up and spat them out as latte sipping clones, fixating on whether Mulberry burst or Teal tension would suit the feature wall better. So she stood in that cavernous, fluoro-lit hall, looking at chrome fixtures and knew she’d need to get out again, and get out soon. No little white sign for her: “Beware: bored and irritable country girl. Exhibits symptoms of cabin fever when contained. Bites when threatened.”

Now. Now, the alcohol beat a fiery tattoo in her veins and Leigh pranced up and down the shore, skipping stones and dancing a strange little jig, hand on stomach and elbow outstretched. He seemed genuinely excited. City boy in the country. Styled hair and fashionable shoes so wildly out of place she wanted to laugh at him. Walk up and smack him one in the stomach and call him pissweak. Instead, she flicked the hair out of her eyes and yelled, “Oi, Leigh, quit fucking around and help me with this for a second, willya.”

They ease the boat into the water. A flat, stubby nose and no keel ensures that it rocks wildly with every tiny movement and she overcompensates at first, leaning it heavily to the right and eliciting a squawk from her passenger in the back. She knows he’ll make jokes when they’re out there, knows how uncomfortable he’ll feel but, bugger it, he’s inflicted enough trivia nights and weekend brunches on her. Still laughed at her enunciation. Her clothes. She grins as she thinks how he’d take it if she took him back up north. The old country. Home.

Her brothers would eat him alive. Mirrored shades and knowledge of Plath, Burrows, and The Unicorns hold no social currency in the Territory, red dust working its way into everything, dog in the back, rifle on the floor. Spotties for the roos and tinnies for later. No Mojitos. No Mid-strength. Metrosexual as foreign as Molvania. She’d do that later though. Force him out of the city, and out of his comfort zone. For now, this was good. Drunk and floating in a stolen canoe, in a lake they said should have dried up years ago.

She leans back on the paddle and they coast to a slow halt, blurry stars reflected in the ripples and the brown water silver in the moonlight. He laughs then, a short bark that echoes off the water, “Fuck, if they catch us now, we’re so fucking fucked.”
“Eloquent, Leigh. Eloquent. Sure it’s F.A. you’re taking and not Law?”
“If your honour would please, the plaintiff was forced, under duress…”
“Duress? That’s what it’s called, is it? Running back to the car to get the extra bottle.”
“Well, I was clearly not in command of my faculties.”
“Yelling at me as to whether ma’am would prefer the salt and vinegar, or the cheese and onion.”
“Faculties.”
“Going back again for the glasses.”
“I shall cry piracy on the high-seas. Taken at cork-screw point and forced aboard by a fearsome she-pirate.”
“I’d say more muddied, brown and rapidly lowering seas. And I think the word is corsair.”
“Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves”
“If that’s yours, I will spot you the rest of the salt and vinegar, pour you a glass, and row you home.”
“Bill. Always Bill S. He of the Globe and the funny pants”

She leans back then, against his chest, and looks up at the stars. Pollux and Castor draw parallel lines in the rippling surface of the lake, lines that trace the silver-grey trunks of the gums and point out over the scrub. This is a compass bearing away from white pickets, wheatgrass, and ‘skinny with one, cheers’ and it soars upwards and out, to where there is nothing but clear and open air between here and the desert. But not yet. Not while the frogs are singing opera and the moon sits above, fat and contented.

“Leigh, how do you feel about amoebic meningitis?”
“What, I, what?”
“Hold your nose.”

And she rocks to her right, hard.

Posted in Textism on Sun Jan 24, 07:50 pm. Shoutouts [2].

The Colour is a new group blog/tumblr style image log that catalogues beautiful Australian images. I’ve found some great art on it, including Robyn Sweaney’s paintings of houses that remind me a lot of Reg Mombassa’s acrylics of NZ farmhouses. I’m also digging Marcela Restrepo’s work, how good is this. Oh, and this super hot wallpaper that makes me wish I had a house I could cover it in.

Posted in Artrage on Sun Jan 10, 08:26 am. Shoutouts.

The Third & The Seventh is a mind-bogglingly awesome short film by a guy called Alex Roman. It’s entirely CG and if you’ve got any kind of interest in architecture or animation, do yourself a favour and watch it in HD at the first vimeo link. There’s also some fantastic stills over on the main site.

One person did all that. Just one, all by himself. I am Jack’s acute sense of insufficiency.

Posted in Vidiot on Sat Jan 9, 07:16 am. Shoutouts.

The band is Sour.

Posted in Vidiot on Sat Jan 2, 11:09 pm. Shoutouts.