| Keeping the Aspidistra Flying |
[Apr. 14th, 2009|11:35 pm] |
"For some, including Push historian Anne Coombs, 'the co-operation between the [Builders Labourers Federation] and a section of the Push over Victoria Street was the sign of a long-awaited rapprochement between libertarianism and communism'. For others, such a rapprochement was neither long-awaited nor welcome. Frank Moorhouse, derisive of the whole struggle, dismissed it as 'a romantic alliance engineered by the women who were seeking fresh sexual fields to explore'. Bacon's reply was simple and angry: 'There wasn't much fucking going on; there wasn't much time!' Nevertheless, relationships between the BLF and the women of the Push soon emerged around the squats - Bacon and Mundey, Fell and Owens, and others. I mean, I hate to gossip, but all this is kind of awesome to me. There people who in a lot of ways seem so legendary were so much like us - the same half-annoying, half-awesome meetings, the same feelings of collective achievement, the same blurring of the social and the political, the same complexly incestuous sex lives. It's just how things are meant to be."
Sandy, Victoria St Forever
Crowbar my Heart #3, Feb 2009 |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 24th, 2009|11:04 pm] |
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Oh God, we're all doomed. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|10:09 pm] |
"but it did not function, as he seems to imagine, like a magic beam of light that emanated from a single brain. It was the product of institutions, of bureaucracies, and above all individual choices and decisions of millions of people. This is supposed to be a book about evil, in other words, but it doesn't even attempt to describe the base, nasty, and small-minded forms of evil of which even the most ordinary human beings are easily capable, given a base and nasty form of government...
"Yet while plenty of fellow-travelers were quite stupid, far more found the slogans and the language of totalitarianism genuinely appealing... The lesson here is not that he was stupid, but that even people of average intelligence usually ask the wrong questions, usually find it hard to recognize horror when it doesn't look like a horror movie and are therefore quite easily fooled." |
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| Association Meme, sight! |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|05:25 pm] |
Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
Associations courtesy of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) missmalice.
Call Centres.
Lauren and I have worked in two call centres together. One was the Metlink Melbourne public transport call centre in Richmond, soon after I'd moved to Melbourne. It was basically a bunch of douchebags wondering why a tram was running two minutes late, by their watch, in peak hour. Suffice it to say, it sucked. But on the upside, I got to know Lauren. We drank absinthe together, and our lifelong friendship began.
The second one was the Foxtel call centre on Franklin St. Lauren actually got me this job, and by this time we were housemates. I had fifteen unexplained absences before I was fired, whereas she just decided to stop rocking up sometime before Christmas. I still had enough money to go overseas, and I didn't join Salesforce's crazy Scanner Darkly brainwashing cult.
Politics.
What can I say, I do talk about it a lot. Lauren has always been quite abiding in my politics rants, mainly because the only times I subjected her to them was when we were blind drunk on box wine in our dank backyard. I think I hugged her profusely the day after the 2007 election, then bitched about Kevin Rudd while we were drinking that even.
Pop tarts.
Another staple of our friendship. Lauren has always known that food is the key to my heart (which is why I always tell her that her cupcakes are going to revolutionise human cuisine). That aforementioned absinthe was drunk on a two person 'pop tarts and absinthe' soiree.
Shaun Micallef.
I even made Lauren watch Newstopia when it was on. We would have to wait half an hour because we didn't want to watch it with one of our housemates, and it wasn't uploaded to the SBS website until after the episode had screened on TV.
Pho'.
Lauren once bought me XO sauce for my birthday. She made me tofu pho as well. Yet no matter how hard I tried to convince her, she never came with me to Chu The, the Vietnamese restaurant down the street from our house, most famous for being the single reason why I decided to travel to Vietnam in the first place.
Yes, Lauren's rad. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 19th, 2008|08:34 pm] |
From Bernard Keane in Crikey today:
"...In fact politics is more or less based around people of high principles and good will discovering that the obtaining and exercising of power involves doing bad things, distasteful things, amoral things, involves unpleasant trade-offs and not just the famous half-loaves of compromise but stale, mouldy crusts. And it’s all the more that way because its symbiotic partner, its Siamese twin the media, dislikes complexity and nuance, in favour of the same simple narratives, repeated with an ever-changing cast of characters but the same plots and moral lessons over and over again. That’s what sells. And what gets votes.
It’s the media’s job, or one of them, to make much of little and it has done that expertly for much of the year, as it does always. History suggests that, barring incompetence on an inordinate scale, Labor will be in power for several terms, but that’s not going to attract many eyeballs. Instead, the most minor political events are forensically analysed, with each tiny feature placed under the microscope so that it looms large to the viewer despite its irrelevance..."
In other news, an article appeared on page three of The Age's Saturday Insight, based on a bunch of lies I made up while speaking to the Education Editor. Boy, is my face red. Good press for Monash though. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2008|01:24 am] |
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All these stars, all these stars, all these stars! |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 28th, 2008|12:08 am] |
I am on Wikipedia, yo. Now I just have to contrive something really awesome to move me into the section before. Or I can do what Kelly Griffin did and edit the article myself. Why would someone do that? It's gauche. I know you're meant to prostitute yourself in this industry-of-sorts, but surely one would feel dirtier than receiving payment from a 150kg Samoan man after getting brownboxed up the bum in Laundry's unisex toilets if they edited themselves into a Wikipedia article. Jesus, unless you can afford to pay someone to insert you into Wikipedia, you probably shouldn't have an article on Wikipedia.
Then again, It didn't stop Drazic.
I've been feeling bleak and dreary all week. Nothing done, too much drinking, immune system failing on account of changes in the weather, global financial crisis, etc. Lame. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 8th, 2008|12:52 pm] |
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Turns out, you actually can't fight city hall. FUCK. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 26th, 2008|05:01 pm] |
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New blog. Did try this about a year ago and failed, but I think I've got a nice bit of momentum going this time. I got my colour scheme down and shit. |
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| 201 part two: the progressening |
[Apr. 19th, 2008|05:06 pm] |
(i)
On Wednesday night, a woman came in to buy a bourbon and coke and promptly shot up in the back toilet. I spent the next little while giving her the benefit of the doubt, and though it slowly dawned on me what was going on out there, I had already poured her drink and taken her money and I was worried about a scene in front of new patrons who weren't really accustomed to sharing space with drug users. I maintained my benefit of the doubt while she asked who was on the stereo and followed with a gushing appraisal of Neil Young's harvest, though her pupils were pin pricks and she spoke as if the world was all white light and rapture and her voice was unmoderated in her complete obliviousness as to how far it was carrying across the room. It was putting everyone off, but I'd already chosen my course of action: let her finish her drink and wait for her to toddle off. And I still couldn't believe it, and she was wearing short sleeves, and surreptitious glances at her forearms revealed nothing incriminating. So I had the chef supervise her while I checked the back toilet. She was conscientious enough to put her used fit and alcohol swab packets in the waste bin. I muttered something to the effect "fuckin hell" and went back inside.
She was only there five or ten minutes. It felt like forever. By this time most of the people sitting around the bar that weren't completely sheltered had sussed it out. I felt embarrassed, but more than that, I was overcome with this weird sensation of simultaneous pity and contempt, some emotive that's probably a single word in Deutsch that wouldn't transliterate properly in English. I hated her in the way I would've hated someone I'd formerly loved who'd done something unspeakable to me. I pitied her more than anyone else I'd ever served in the bar, or indeed ever met, particularly after she insinuated she was on her way to sell herself. When I first started working there, smackies who'd just scored in the commission flats across the road were coming in every other day to shoot up, but we scared them all off. They were all men, and they were all physically ruined, and their voices were like toddlers with no teeth, and they were easy to write off as such. But I've spent the last six months behind this bar getting emotionally involved with anyone who cares to divulge their stories - and even after doing ten hours of fuck all but listening to my regulars I feel emotionally drained on a nightly basis like very few times in the rest of my life - and this was a Neil Young loving, beautiful, friendly woman who had so fucking obviously a hard luck story worth listening to; something valid and something traumatic and something horrible and something to inspire boundless sympathy which I should've been receptive to. But I hated her.
(ii)
Last night, I fucked up in front of a girl I've been quite enamoured with and quite eager to impress. It's possible I didn't actually fuck up at all, perhaps it was a sin of omission, in any case. We went to Grey Daturas to witness some aural self-indulgence at the East Brunswick Club. The journey was stressful. Belligerent people on the tram, police chasing some East African dudes down the street out the front of the venue, what have you. People I just couldn't be fucked to see at the show, etc. She has excellent taste in music, I thought she'd appreciate the band from an artistic standpoint, you know? And it was funny to stand and watch them, and think to myself "I am such an absolute wanker for loving this band", and then looking across the room and seeing numerous other people having the same identity crisis. The projectionist during the set showed a human cadaver being dissected, and they looped a segment showing the coroner playing with the corpse's penis. They did the Y-cut down the chest; they scooped out organs. Suffice it to say, she was not impressed. After the last three Sundays together, I don't think she's coming around tomorrow or ever.
(iii)
Jerry is a Czech man who has been drinking at my bar every night for longer than I've been alive. Charlie is the same, an old bloke who's lived in Richmond his entire life and has cavorted with numerous criminals, painters and dockers, clergymen, Richmond royalty, etc. Charlie gave me a pair of bright red braces this week. Jerry said I shouldn't walk by DTs (rainbow flagged bar down the corner of Church and Highett) while wearing them.
"Ten years ago, brewery strike jou know? My friend and I go in search of beer, we go to DTs. Big fucken Maori, tall like jou but fucken HUGE! he have big rings [in his nipples] he say 'your friend is cute,' I say 'jou fucken have him, give me farken slab!'" (toothless cackling ensues).
Jerry. Drunk by 10am. Spends the day tiling and painting, comes to me to provide two hours of comic relief before toddling off to the Prince of Wales to throw whatever money he has left into a random number generator. Also the only one of my over sixty y.o. regulars completely at ease with his life, joyously debasing himself and loving every minute of it, making friends everywhere and becoming some kind of North Richmond celebrity. He's also the only one of my regulars I don't fid emotionally draining
(iv)
Another thing on the subject of freedom from fear, one day, one way. I have a horrible habit - accentuated when I'm intoxicated - of comparing people older than me to myself, and assuming that my life is going to follow their miserable trajectory. When I was living in North Fitzroy, I was over at Mon and Robin's Elgin Street abode, and offered these three guys a lift to Ivanhoe in exchange for some ganja. One of them was thirty years old and looked very much like me: about the same height, but a bit more heavy set and missing some teeth that he'd knocked out when he'd fallen over the month before. He was the worst kind of stoner, living in utter filth and telling self-aggrandizing stories that were impossible to follow with the amount of tangential information and brain fart pauses. He had the same facial features as me, almost exactly the same. And this is me in ten years, I kept thinking.
(v)
It was condescending pity, after all. The Fall. I should've tipped my hat. I realized this on Friday night, when we were waiting on Swanston Street for our next tram. That's the sort of doctor/patient relationship that being in charge of the flow of alcohol teaches you, a la Jerry and Charlie. Would I have asked her her story under other circumstances? Someone was saying "get your Big Issue, support the homeless and the long-term unemployed". That's me in ten years, doncha know. For now there's plenty of distractions in noise bands and abortive courtships. I didn't buy it because my book review's not in till the next issue.
I told all this to Ben, sitting at his bar while he leaned over sympathetically and listened to my sob story. He's better at it than I am. He even lit my drink on fire with a piece of lime; we don't even have a cocktail kit. The man's got skills; I've got boring stories and red braces. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 19th, 2008|03:10 am] |
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everything's fucked. |
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| 201 |
[Apr. 15th, 2008|01:38 pm] |
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....whoever examines the conscience of the present-day European, will always elicit the same imperative from its thousand moral folds and hidden recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd: "we wish that some time or other there may be nothing more to fear!" One day, the will and the way thereto is nowadays called "progress"... |
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| my fucking underground track two, infinite wisdom tooth |
[Apr. 10th, 2008|01:01 pm] |
Since Pip's election party, Bojan has taken to calling me Indiana because apparently I look intrepid. I don't recall Indiana Jones ever climbing onto the roof of a Mobil and yelling at passing motorists in his pursuit of archaeological treasures.
Such a panic-attack inducing amount of shit to do and neither the inclination nor the time management skills to do it. I blame the relaxed morals and easy virtues of the present age, moreso for my popper lobotomy over the weekend.
At CSS, I insisted on doing the I like your booty, but I'm not gay dance with Lauren, despite not remembering how it went. Lauren is the best person to break into spontaneous dance with, especially with Atari Teenage Riot in the background and scotch in the liver. Now that Youtube has reminded me, I'm going to go show her. Note to self: consult Youtube for Windsor knot lessons; my sloppy knots are making me the laughing stock of Spring Street. |
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| a brief history of the 21st century |
[Apr. 2nd, 2008|01:14 pm] |
Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima! Jerico and I sat out the front of her Addison Street abode and had our conversations cut off mid-sentence by low-flying Boeings. Conveniently, it was usually when I was making quite a rambling and elementary point that my voice was drowned out by jet turbines, and by the time the plane had landed in Mascot, I could pretend I'd forgotten what I was talking about and start afresh.
It's so pleasant to have contemporaries who can call your bullshit. I'd get too cocky otherwise. Being excessively verbose often lends arguments an authority that they don't otherwise deserve. Example - the other night Myles and I were having heated Pro Evo Soccer 5 battles; extra time and penalty kicks abounding as much as the shit talking about each other's ball control. He's kind enough to defer use of the big X-Box controller to people with hands suited to it; it didn't save me this time, though. Joints were smoked. The virtues of our 3121 postcode and our Baker Street pride were espoused (He's now living across the road). Red wine, maybe? Bob Marley was insisted upon. I said that liking reggae was the domain of boat shoe-wearing, jeep-driving Young Republican American kids in gated communities. Xavier Rudd? Xavier Fucking Rudd, it was my adamant contention, was the regular soundtrack of the sort of people wearing Australian flags as capes and yellow zinc-ing "WE GREW HERE..." into their chests for pleasant outings at Sutherland Shire beaches. Bullshit was duly called. Now every time I open my mouth to impugn his music tastes, he shrieks "Cronulla!" until I stop talking over the speakers.
Newtown royalty are much more interesting than Fitzroyalty. You forget how even the boho crowd down here are staid and self-conscious. Wearing grey and gale force winds aren't conducive to some spirited sense of abandon. People are too reserved; I want to be able to raise my voice in public without worrying about a front page headline in MX. The average person is more colourful in Sydney, and even the 428 bus driver said I was full of shit when I tried to pass off my Monash card as an accredited concession.
With the family, I went to the landscape exhibition at the NGA while I was in Canberra. Turner, Monet, Cezanne, Constable, etc. I went and saw the last Turner exhibition with my father about a decade ago, and it was good to go with an open mind this time instead of getting bored after five minutes and generally being a little twelve year old shit. Unfortunately, exposure to high culture at a young age doesn't pre-empt shitty taste in later adolescence, but it was the late nineties after all and mistakes were made by all and sundry.
This time round we were all better positioned to appreciate it, but everyone I spoke to about it pre-empted me by saying they hated impressionism. Fuckers. Personally, I find something endearing in taking an easel out to a field, getting frustrated and putting a revolver to your chest - but I tend to be one of those mopey sorts that enjoys suicide-inspiring artforms. Wikipedia tells me I may be confusing impressionism with post-impressionism in this instance, which pretty much explains why I had to let fuckers be fuckers instead of making a fool of myself by arguing my opinion.
I need at least a referent of big words if I'm going to get away with talking rubbish. My history tute on Monday: I put a very persuasive sounding argument about how the author's dismissal of the dichotomies of 19th C romance was undermined by her reliance on them to explain the life story of AJ Mumby, or something equally airy. A complete crock of shit, but the tutor is too polite to call bullshit. I'm really relishing in that, and I think I'm going to spend the next eight weeks getting progressively more outlandish. So Sean, what did you learn in university? I learnt how to find the right person to schmooze, how to lie and get away with it, and that emotional abuse accomplishes more than the physical.
The other thing on at the NGA was an exhibition on Australian surrealism. There was only one artist whose work I liked. Everyone else's stuff was derivative of the better things going on in Europe at the time. Jerico and her lovely housemates and I had a sprawling conversation about culture cringe when I was talking about how much it sucked. Being Australian means you have to hold Sidney Nolan in high esteem. At a pokies place, I tested the water in the beer garden by asking J's opinion of the cultured ones that fucked off overseas (Greer, Clive James, etc.) instead of overcoming it from within. I still reserve the right to leave Australia forever and bitch about it for the next 30 years. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 20th, 2008|04:00 am] |
Here is a list of nice things people living on Baker Street have done for me in the last week:
- Lauren dedicated the JAMC's You Trip Me Up on her radio show the other night. It was awfully sweet of her, especially as she sold me her V Fest ticket.
- Belinda cooked me pumpkin and pistachio pie today, and served it with salad and tomato chutney while we watched Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
- Kim and Ricky came to have a goodbye drink at my pub before they disappear into suburban obscurity in Oakleigh.
- Gabriel told me interesting stories about getting into fights with riot police in Stuttgart.
- Tony said I pour a good beer.
- Myles let our cats escape, but that's okay because he made me tea and played against me in Pro Evolution Soccer 5.
- Billy didn't scare me all week by forgetting to take his medication and pacing up and down the sidewalk, having imaginary conversations with an old cordless telephone.
- Emmy had coffee with me at Cafe Laity and listened politely while I talked utter shit for half an hour
- Rosa and Milton (while not technically people) have taken to keeping me warm at night, and have stopped shitting on random bits of clothing lying around my room.
- The neighbours didn't play Bloc Party remixes at their pill come down party last weekend. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 20th, 2008|03:03 am] |
I love this article. It was written by Guy Rundle for Crikey in May of 2007, when Tony Blair had just announced his resignation as British Prime Minister.
Special. So f-cking special: The Blair decade
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"Maureen wants to use the backroom later, so the press will have to clear out and move into the hall," the flat-vowelled voice said. Noon, and the radio feed was coming from Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s northern constituency, and the man himself was being introduced by his agent, a man he said had shown total loyalty to "me, the party, and Sunderland football club, not necessarily in that order".
Cue the sound of laughter in a regional hall. Pure political theatre, a man with his own nuclear arsenal announcing his resignation amid lace curtains and a steaming urn on a trestle table.
"Sometimes the only way you conquer the pull of power is to set it down" he said, mixing metaphors, as he passed through the formalities. "On 27 June I will tender my resignation to the Queen," he said.
What? June? Another month ? Bob Carr was out of the building while the TV journos were still doing their reaction shots after his tender of notice. We’ve already had the longest lame-duck premiership in history, one which has drained support from his successor, and Blair's still hanging around?
Well, at least we have a date. And, until the doorstopper memoirs arrive, the most direct apologia pro vita gubernator that we’re likely to get.
"I’ve never put it this way before" he said, explaining that as he came to political maturity in the '80s and '90s ('90s – a bit tardy?) the country presented as something where you had to be in favour of EITHER aspiration OR compassion, EITHER tolerance OR conservatism, etc etc, and that the country was now a place where aspiration AND social justice, tolerance AND traditional values, etc etc ...
There followed a defence of the domestic record, oddly couched in a rhetorical and defensive "ask when you last heard of people waiting a year for an operation, ask when you last heard of pensioners freezing to death in their homes ..." and so on.
But it’s a measure of the disastrous path the Blair Government has taken that all this felt like a warm-up to the main act, which was, of course, a defence of Iraq. We got everything we thought we would -- the deaths of hundreds of thousands defended on the grounds of sincerity: "Believe this -- I truly believed in what I was doing" etc, etc.
What was extraordinary was the political justification:
"In Sierra Leone and Kosovo I took the decision to make our country one that intervened ... and then came 9/11 and I thought we should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our ally..."
And so Afghanistan and Iraq.
Read that again. Iraq. As a consequence of 9/11? Or as unquestioning support of US war-making? Or as both? In other words, a country destroyed for reasons that had nothing to do with either clear and present danger to the UK, or the sufferings of its own population.
Let’s remember again the lead-up to the war. The weapons-inspection process was terminated early, the "proof" (copied from Phd theses online) was an obvious farrago, and Saddam’s regime was a tinpot, nasty dictatorship with about 1000 deaths and disappearances a year -- less than US/UK allies such as Uzbekistan. The decision had already been made.
For defenders of Blair, the focus on Iraq is simply a way of baiting a PM more centrist than they would have preferred by way of focusing on one among many policies.
And the record on domestic and social reconstruction policy is not insubstantial, but the point is that where you stand on such a question is an absolute test of your politics, and whether you focus on the narrow terrain of national politics or, in the last instance, have some sense of responsibility to human beings per se.
For the fact is that, under Tony Blair, Labour cut all ties not only with anything resembling democratic socialism, but also with social democracy, and even the most centrist notion of a left. It became a war party, buttressed at home by piecemeal social market programs and authoritarian control. Foreign and domestic policy were interconnected since the will to do what Labour governments should do -- introduce irreversible progressive change -- was never there. Instead, what was wanted was a disciplined population, increasingly subject to market forces, capable of serving Britain’s role of ongoing greatness.
Thus -- and this is the other side of Blair’s failure -- social mobility in the UK has decreased over the last 10 years. Under John Major, a kid from below the poverty line had more chance of getting out of it, of getting into university, to Oxbridge, to the professions.
Without increased opportunity, social welfare programs actually become regressive -- they’re a sop to the poor, a consolation prize for their permanently shrunken chances. Because people start to get a bit angry about that -- expressed these days in crime, booze 'n' drugs, violence etc rather than political activism -- a huge surveillance apparatus has to be put in place.
So, Blair’s Government has become the one which has seen not merely millions of CCTV cameras, but now cameras with microphones attached to pick up conversations in a 20-metre radius, and, most recently, loudspeakers which bark at you if you commit "anti-social behaviour". It’s the Government of the "foetal ASBO" in which children of criminal families are marked from before birth as potential criminals, to be tracked throughout life by social workers, probation officers, psychologists etc. The cumulative effect of these measures is simply to rot a free society from within. Public space becomes a place not of citizens, but of suspects. Trust and solidarity are undermined; fear and separation are enthroned.
It’s the Government which has turned primary education into a bizarrely over-regulated regime of testing so that by the age of seven, every kid is poked, prodded, metricated by 129 different benchmarks, and the actual process of education is lost. It has handed over control of education to "city academies" run by private companies -- who are building schools without playgrounds because they see children as part of a "business enterprise" who should not have unstructured time.
Yet, it didn’t have the guts to legislate changes to the Oxbridge entrance procedure, to break the hold of the public (ie. private) schools on elite learning. In civil liberties, it has banned political protest within a mile of Parliament, and mooted a multibillion-pound ID card that will do little against serious crime, much less terrorism, but which may be denied to those without addresses -- in other words creating a class of non-persons. The visible corruption around cash-for-peerages, dodgy dossiers, BAE arms deals with the Saudis has been as bad and more frequent than under the Tories. And overarching it all is gravity’s rainbow: the replacement of the nuclear Trident system has been authorised, contrary to prior non-proliferation agreements, committing the UK to an imperial future, rather than one as a citizen-nation of Europe.
In all, it has deployed the ideas and language of social democracy -- using the coercive powers of the state against wealth, to improve lives through lessening inequality -- to the practice of coercion directed against the poor, to maintain order in a market-dominated society. The surveillance state treats the population as guilty until proven innocent -- whether in Iraq or Bermondsey. And I have no doubt that a Rudd government would not be substantially different in many aspects.
For what? For what? When I first came to Britain in 1997, I lived in Hackney, one of the poorest boroughs in Western Europe. When I go back there these days, the unbelievably shabby, dilapidated high street has had a new music centre built, a couple of rundown housing blocks have been rebuilt with better fabric, and the hospital has a bigger casualty department. The kids are going to Sure Start early learning centres, and while the schools aren’t "failing" as they were hitherto, the students still aren’t going through to GCSE (the year 12/year 13 equivalent), or even levels below. Why? Because they feel there’s no point. The fix is in. Blair never really inspired them to believe that a fairer society was on its way, one that would repay their efforts to find a place in it.
Social democracy means nothing if it is not about freedom -- real freedom, the material freedom to make a meaningful life, rather than an existence in the surplus labour pool -- as well as equality and security. Blair’s supporters continue to point to the myriad of piecemeal programs and accuse critics of being unrealistic. This is simply limbo-politics, always making you bend over backwards further, to go lower. There are other stories to tell about the Blair era -- about economic stewardship, managerial competence, etc etc. But I’m of the left and Blair claimed to be of the left, and I can only judge him on those standards by which he himself asks to be judged.
In 1945, the Attlee government had a country that was broke, exhausted, faced the worst winter of the century, and was feeding a country -- Germany -- that had recently tried to annihilate it. And still they established the NHS, free education, a welfare state, nationalisation, decolonisation and much more.
The Blair Government came to power in 1997, on the wave of a Western global economic boom, with a majority of more than 160 seats. It entrenched privilege, reduced the poverty rate from 14% to 12% -- before it started to climb back again – and helped cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in a former colony. That is the Blair decade.
So, if Blair didn’t really believe in "irreversible progressive change", what did he believe in? His parting words in the draughty room in Sedgefield say it all: "The British are special. The world knows it. In our hearts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth."
What a thing for a social democrat to say. What a thing. Not an expression of left patriotism, of love of country and community, of a hope that its virtues had been strengthened, that it had contributed to the greater human good. Instead, a braying chauvinistic triumphalism, a mixture of Kipling and cod-Americanism.
So vale, Caesar. Some have suggested an EU post is in the offing. God speed your passage to the new Rome, Brussels. May you sojourn there in a glass box listening via headphones while the Iraqi maimed testify against you.
I re-read it again this evening. It has everything I love. The Eichmann reference at the end; the Orwell hangup; the whole idea of political vision and its role; and the sullen disappointment, as opposed to the pedestrian outrage you usually see in opinion pieces like this. But I'm a bit bolshy, and my love probably has more to do with this piece pandering to my prejudices.
Guy Rundle was totally right to call bullshit on Rudd, even at this early stage nearly a year ago. There's a void where there should be a vision. All we ever fucking hear about is working families, as if having to cut roquefort cheese out of the grocery budget or a foreclosure on some shitty red-brick out in Slappersville are the worst problems that people are facing in this country. There's the same tinge of state paternalism with mooted ISP-based internet filters - not to mention binge-drinking taskforces spurred by talkback radio - as there was with Blair's domestic agenda. We're still sucking up to the big boys, but now they speak Mandarin. There's no substantive commitment to improving the lot of the disadvantaged, just maintaining the facade of commitment. Brendan Nelson might be a twat with no public speaking skills, but he was right at the Press Club yesterday (even though he had absolutely no moral authority whatsoever to say what he said): there's something fundamentally fucking awry in this country if women are miscarriaging in toilets of Sydney public hospitals and the most we can do is talk about the property market.
Anyway, who gives a shit about politics. Went overseas, it was fun. Got dysentery, lost some weight and put it back on. Met amazing people. Got invited to a guys place for dinner with his family in Hue. Saw some depressing stuff, saw some serene stuff, saw some beautiful stuff, saw some sublime stuff. Had lots of fun with Sasha and Adrian. Met lots of amazing people, met lots of cockhead French tourists. Comported myself in a respectful manner at all times. Came back with some perspective on things, lost most of it as I slowly eased myself back into regular life. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 17th, 2008|06:17 pm] |
I've been working in a bar since about September. Several years ago, my pub was the sort of place where I would've been accused of looking someone's girlfriend the wrong way, and then taken out the back to get the shit kicked out of me by five people with fists bigger than my head. Now there's new management, and the angry looking tradies and union thugs have been relegated to the seedier joints further down the street. There's still the occasional junky using the toilet for things other than taking a piss, and the occasional prison-tattooed career alcoholic that wants to question my sexuality when I refuse them service, but these days it's mostly benign people doing benign things.
A substantial part of our small clientele are the Richmond twenty-somethings, cashed up from cushy jobs but still the nice and affable sort that would've been on the wrong end of five fists under the previous owner. They say they come here because they want a place to call their local - a place that doesn't have bright lights and machines hooked up to random number generators robbing people of their livelihood. Then someone strolls in with a handlebar moustache and skin that looks like it's spent the last ten years soaked in methylated spirits and they shift uncomfortably in their seats.
As the whole local vibe would suggest, ninety percent of my workload is playing Agony Aunt to the regulars. My God, they've got problems. A messy second divorce. Philandering spouses. Octagenarians looking after their invalid brothers. Loneliness, fuck - me and my coworkers are the only meaningful social contact to so many people..
And they tell me how Richmond has changed, talk about times when milk and bread was delivered to the door and no-one locked their houses; but then, the badness (invariably meaning Vietnamese people - the older ones aren't as veiled about it). And they switch mid-sentence to how rough my pub used to be.
These people, constantly telling me how good I've got it - youth is not to be squandered, etc. - and I'd love to agree, but instead I hear them tell me all the horrible things visited upon them, and I think "how awful", and I go home and go to bed. And I think about the reasons why I'm going to Vietnam and surrounds with my brother and Adrian at the end of next week. Whenever my patrons ask me I give them some bullshit reason, because saying "I want to rouse myself from my petty first world sense of entitlement and see how bad some people really have it" would be inappropriate and offensive to the lonely men who have it much worse than me.
My problems vary from deciding which is the least stained shirt to wear on days I haven't done any washing for a fortnight, to whether I can be bothered to wake up in time to meet Mon for Pho at the end of my street. I was hoping a trip overseas would put that into perspective. Now I realize that I'm going to visit eighty exhumed mass graves, think "how awful", and that'll be that.
Anyway, I'm gone from next Thursday to the 20th of Feb. I won't have my phone, you can email me. I won't write travel emails because I'll be too busy drinking fifty cent beer and sleeping, and I don't think I'll have anything interesting to say. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 20th, 2007|10:13 pm] |
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I moved here, in case you didn't know already. Yes, yes, I'm a self-indulgent, hypocritical twat, but that's nothing new. Replete with glamour shots and important information on why my cultivated tastes make me an awesome person. Same boring, arrogant wanks about nothing of any consequence, but a much nicer format to boot. |
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| private school junction, what's your sexual dysfunction? |
[Feb. 15th, 2007|09:03 pm] |
I remember this girl I knew a couple of years ago. We met at the Phoenix back when I was going there regularly on a Wednesday evening with a few people, when there was still the occasional clutch of old men at the bar and we were guaranteed a table and free rein with the chess set at any hour of the night. She was several years older than me and was finishing off her Ph.D in genetics, which involved a lot of field work going out into bumfuck areas of the country and examining the speciation of certain groups of toads. By the time I got acquainted with her she was using the science labs at the ANU to do some DNA profiling on the blood samples she'd picked up over the previous few months. After coming up to sit next to me, the conversation quickly devolved into her insulting my manhood for ten minutes or so, then she demanded that I go home with her. I said I'd take a raincheck for some other day and then went outside to get punched in the face repeatedly by the Sultan's bouncer for tearing their flyers off East Row and throw up in the public toilet in the middle of the bus interchange.
She lived in a place in Ainslie; some grand old bungalow just off Officer Crescent with a spiderweb sculpture thing that could be used to climb on the roof for a good view of the northern side of the city. More specifically, she lived in one of the cabins out the back of this place for fifty bucks a week and came in the house for food, television and bathroom. There were always dinner parties that turned into impromptu piss-ups, and a saddle was permanently suspended from the ceiling by rope for drunken people to break their necks on. It was a quintessential postgraduate place, and I kept my mouth shut most of the time lest I look like a fool in front of people much more intelligent than myself. Luckily I was always bringing around gigantic spliffs as icebreakers, so by late evening my opinion on news and current affairs could be exempted on compassionate grounds. Two of her housemates were the only people I saw regularly, one a stripper with a love for coke and another a librarian who always seemed to have a smirk on her face whenever I was in the room.
I remember lying awake in her cabin in the middle of the night, this piece of shit illegal structure with a roof comprised of balsawood held together with duct tape, on this block of land that seemed to be the focal point for all the rival factions of possums in the city, biting the shit out of each other at three in the morning and at any moment likely to drop through the ceiling and gnaw through my neck. She always said that I was just a means of relaxing after long days at the lab tearing her hair out when her log tables didn't correlate well enough or some such, and I wasn't like I cared at the state of things those few weeks. I just remember breaking it off because I was scared of the possums.
Last time I saw her was at the Corner Hotel while I was there for Bojan for Ringworm last year. We had awkward conversation about how she contracted Ross River fever in Queensland while doing her postdoctorate stuff on the field. We simultaneously made excuses to leave and went and brooded on opposite sides of the bar.
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I remember sex education at Marist. Adrian, Sasha and I were sitting around rehashing high school stories, and Adrian mentioned his hatred for Mr. Morrissey. On the closing weeks of year ten, Adrian got busted for marijuana possession. He was already planning on leaving for Narrabundah, but expulsion without a Year Ten Certificate certainly would've hurt his chances. Mr. Morrissey interrogated him and all of his friends (including my brother) about the "drug problem" in the school, and tried to blackmail a couple of people by saying Adrian had already given up their names, and they might as well come clean or get in more trouble.
Adrian and I both had Mr. Morrissey for sex education in year ten, a couple of years apart. Now, obviously, running the sex education curriculum through the religious education department of a Catholic school probably won't give the most up-to-date ideas about pubescent male sexuality, but talking about it with them both last night reminded me of a few things. I remember Mr. Morrissey taking no small pains to stress that abstinence was the only surefire way of avoiding pregnancy, STDs, and "immoral behaviour". I remember he made each member of the class write down a sexual secret on a piece of paper, which were then subsequently read aloud to the class; I also remember being absolutely fucking terrified that everyone in the room would be able to guess which one was mine. It was an immoral thing to be sure, with an assertion of his power as teacher and deputy headmaster no small ulterior motive to be equally sure, and I feel really angry thinking about it.
Adrian and I also remember people's stance on abortion being taken as a class vote. It's funny how the people who inappropriately term themselves "pro-life" always seem to make the issue into a dichotomous one. Then we were made to watch graphic footage of three different types of abortions - one of them late-term - that was shot during the seventies. Then we had another class vote to see who was against abortion; I put my hand up this time because otherwise I would've been the only person who didn't. Adrian was the only person in his class who didn't have his hand up. When Adrian was forced to elaborate that he thought abortion was a woman's choice, Mr. Morrissey humiliated him by bringing up the drugs incident from a week or two earlier. In my class, a couple of weeks before the classes on abortion we also watched graphic footage of childbirth (also taken during the seventies, judging by the woman's hair); I remember I was equally repulsed by both sets of footage.
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I'm a failure at romance. I took Ylleyna to the park for a picnic, but she already knew about my plans after overhearing my brother speak about it the day before. The wine I bought was shit, but I thought I'd better lash out on something that didn't have the word Cleanskin on the front so I took a gamble and failed. We walked back to the village and the conversation was stunted because I was too busy staring contemptuously at all the couples seated outside the restaurants and remembering all those Valentine's Days I was single, awkward, and perpetually pissed off about absolutely nothing, and now here I was celebrating a day I always did my best to refuse to acknowledge.
I remember one such year I was working in the bottle shop. I was called in because some twat destined for the dole queues for the next forty years. I think I'd been at Myles's during the afternoon after uni for a little gathering where we all outwardly expressed how great it was to be twenty and single, then sat around on our arses, played X-Box and ate Mi Goreng for hours. I was called in and I probably needed the cash to spend on more things to intoxicate myself, because I was persuaded to go in and do a close shift and a delivery. What's the best day of the year for florists is the worst day of the year for single, sex-starved bottle shop boys. Half of the business was couples more physically attached to each other than those twin security guards in Hellraiser Four who have their heads fused together by the Cenobites (so in other words, quite attached), and the other half were people who decided to deal with the pains of being alone by getting ratshit on Jim Beam.
Ylleyna and I walked to the Sun Theatre and saw Babel, me thinking that the smooth sights of Gael Garcia Bernal would probably redeem myself in her eyes. In retrospect, I probably should have taken her to see some generic Hugh Grant crap that always comes out at this time of year, or at least read the synopsis in the foyer. She was really upset for the last forty minutes of the film, and on the way home she was still in a bad way. We had an argument because I was being so flippant about all the senseless and needless death and despair portrayed in the film. I said I found it more productive to be angry about senseless and needless death and despair. I don't know who I was kidding, I'm an armchair revolutionary to the core. Certainly not her, and she said as much quite loudly. We reconciled later on, but from now on all future girlfriends will be required to sign a Valentine's Day waiver. |
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