Pah

Anniversaries

Approximately six years ago I moved to Melbourne. Three years ago I started going out with Ainsley. So half the time I’ve lived in Melbourne I’ve been going out with Ainsley. Tempus fugit.

Ashby’s Law

The survival of a system depends on its ability to generate at least as much variety within its boundaries as exists in the form of threatening disturbances from its environment.

Response to Andrew’s Haiku

What you speak is not a haiku, but a senryu. The two share the same form, but the content of senryu is greatly different. Senryu are often satirical in nature and usually lack the kigo, or seasonal word, required in a haiku.

An old pond!
A frog jumps in-
The sound of water.

The above from Basho, “the Japanese Shakespeare.” I cannot pick the kigo: the frog or the old pond?

In the over 18 months I have been working at my current employer I have moved from the Microsoft 3-tier Internet world to the Oracle Database world to a world of Java. My job has been “constantly changing while remaining annoyingly familiar.”

But the problem isn’t your job. Nor do you need to hear why the problem isn’t your job.

Novel

[My] goals are neither concrete, nor achievable, nor strongly desired, said Ainsley. [I]’ve written in [my] weblog for six months but that hasn’t translated into a novel. [She] challenge[s] [me] to write a novel. 5000 words a chapter. A chapter every fortnight.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC): “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”

Potential Insurgency Point

Glaxo Wellcome, which charges $10,000pa for an AIDS-fighting regime, is using patents to prevent “competition” ($365pa — a dollar a day) in Ghana. I put The Word in quotes, because obviously there’s no competition, a) quarter of the price wins hands down, b) this isn’t a game.

Tasmanians

She asked what was the matter and he felt compelled to answer honestly and say that he had run out of all the jokes and stories he had ever heard and no longer knew what to say to her.

The above from Richard Flanagan’s book Death of a River Guide. A little story from me:

I came upon Flanagan’s name in the humble Visitor’s Centre at Strahan. He’d been one of the participants in its creation.

Strahan is the only successful European settlement on the west coast of Tasmania. Only ever. When Tassie was known as Van Dieman’s Land (and part of the Diocese of Calcutta), the west was known as Transylvania. The Aboriginals thrived there for many thousands of years before their extermination at the hands of the Europeans.

The Visitor’s Centre is a mind-blowing experience, truly setting Australian history in a context that will change your perception of it forever. At the shop I asked if there was a book associated with the Centre, but I was told that there wasn’t. Now I think words alone can not express the power of the place.

200 years

I’ve been told that the average expected life of a public building is 200 years.

A History of the Nation
A different view of Federation.

Geoff Clark writes for the present day. I’m particularly taken with his turn of phrase “practical racism”, in opposition to John Howard’s “practical reconciliation”.

On mandatory sentencing: I’ve been told that the level of response to crime doesn’t vary the Aboriginal incarceration rate around Australia.

Disclaimed
This weblog is not to be read aloud.

Evolution

The cheetah is a victim of evolution. The cheetah is a must see case study, an exemplar of the fallacy of the evolutionary ladder. Evolution, as it happens, is over for the cheetah: all extant cheetahs have a condition similar to Downs Syndrome, which saved their ancestors from a killer disease, but which will lead to their extinction.

Evolution isn’t the movment towards a perfect form, it’s fits and starts, randomly trying things out. And choices must eliminate future choices.

Melbourne
The central suburb was once a town called Bearbrass, a version of the supposed Aboriginal name. Sometimes the streets ran with rivers. Today the water is tamed, e.g. a creek runs beneath Elizabeth St.

The settlement of Williamstown was supposed to become the Centre. Named for a King, while Melbourne was only named (~1835) for a Lord.

A squeeze around the Melbourne centre is on. The value of houses in Greater Melbourne has dropped in the last ten years: the outer suburbs die while the price of inner suburban housing skyrockets. Old houses are knocked down to build smaller living units.

I come from the country and the outer suburbs. Already the inner city seems to be constructed of small houses, the Victorian Terrace I rent is so slim. This might be explained by a similar huddling in the past: yet the inner city is resplendant in large parks. Perhaps there were other limitations on size, such as plumbing technology.

The outer suburbs, though generous in space, are poor in green space. And even poorer in life and beauty.

I’m going to look at the past to help my understanding.

• Bearbrass - Imagining Early Melbourne by Robyn Annear
• The Streets of Melbourne, From Early Photographs by Peter McIntosh

Gothic

Something a bit Aus Gothic: over 200 of these spiders living under the backyard of a suburban house. The media are claiming the Mouse Spider to be more deadly than the [Sydney] Funnel Web, but I’ve never seen that claim made elsewhere. Australian spiders are relatively benign, with only the SFW ever causing fatalities; and not one since an antivenine was created in the early 80s. As for our snakes and sea creatures…

Marshall Mathers (3)
I have a pleasant aesthetic reaction to Eminem. I find the lyrical content disturbing: ‘gynistic this, ‘phobic that, etc. The unfolding text on these matters is extremely rich; my focus wanders just thinking about it. And I’m easily distracted by sideshows like the bleeping of “fuck” from his Grammy performance.

Perversely, in the objectification of Elton John by critics of Eminem, I see a sad parallel to the story of ‘Stan’. Absolute standards and identification with a star, or whoever, is a commonplace in the lax and relaxed rhetoric of fandom. With both the fans and critics of Eminem I hear words that are turning people into characters, I hear them louder and clearer than normal.

Like the Pauline phenomenon here, I prefer seeing this issue raised than left like a wounded dog to grow mean.

Rock and roll
I love Patti Smith and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and the Beatles and all those bands where you can just hear there’s no rules. They’ve no idea what they’re up against.

genre death

Linkrot

Michael ‘Min’ Cooper.

Mirror, Mirror

Cinderella. Again.

The world changes, but regular as clockwork she appears. Hands held by her Prince Charming, feet held in the finest glass. It’s one past midnight and the day is beginning.

Primly they descend from the Rialto observation deck to the streets of Melbourne. Time accelerates with the elevator, a brilliant dawn washes over the city.

At the corner of Collins and Elizabeth a street seller is opening his stall. There are men’s, women’s, teenage, music, house & garden magazines bearing their faces there.

There is no time for getting the details right: she busks in the Bourke Street mall; he sits at the steps of Parliament. Five weddings are photographed while he waits. It begins to rain. Finally she has enough gold to ride the tram.

The ugly sisters are there to greet her, surrounded by flowers. Her Prince Charming has already hacked their feet off and the blood obscures chalk politics on the footpath. He has two pairs of glass feet in his handbag, but will not give them, not this time.

They take hands once more and walk to Fitzroy Gardens. He can see the towers of the MCG lit up. She is blind now and stumbles on the path. He leaves her for a moment while he takes a leak.

They dance and the moon comes down to carry them away. There’s amateur footage on the late news, except on SBS and Channel 31. There’ll be talk of it on the radio tomorrow morning, but that is another story.

Walken (the band)

The city is pretty in the sun. The city is pretty by night.

I spent the afternoon and evening in the beer garden on top of the Corner Hotel talking to Andrew Bowie, the guitarist of Melbourne rock band Walken. We talked of many things, including Walken’s debut gig at the Duke of Windsor yesterday arvo.

This is by way of review.

I’ve known Bowie for years, we share many happy associations. We’ve travelled the gay capitals of the world together. He’s going out with my second sister. I have in my possession many of his demos, on tape, CD, mp3, firstly from his ongoing solo project Approximate, and more recently from Walken.

It’s hard to review something I have such knowledge about.

I’m not sure how to evaluate my strategies for reading Microserfs (chop the last chapter) or watching Babylon 5 (swap ‘The Deconstruction of Falling Stars’ and ‘Sleeping in the Light’ and drop Season 5) when I’ve done otherwise previously. I suppose just by having these ideas, I end up thinking of neither the thing I’ve seen first nor the thing I’ve seen later, but a larger product.

So, review.

I find a useful strategy in writing is often to subvert an existing form. Or sometimes to invoke a spirit strongly. I thought I could use Melbourne free music magazine Beat (or Inpress, whatever) as an inspiration. But the good writing they save for interviews-slash-profiles.

This isn’t going to be an interview. I’m neither impartial nor fan; I’m a friend.

So, I’m not getting far here.

Walken opened with ‘Lego Woman’, a track that I’ve never much been a fan of, but which really worked on this outing.

Bowie on guitar: Walken is a guitar-led band. I never heard that much in the mp3s. Now the Approximate heritage comes through strong and clear. But this isn’t a guitar dominated band.

I’ve never heard them with Daniel on bass and Bruce on drums before. The expanded sound really enhanced the music, with little loss from the omission of electronic fiddlings.

Bruce was excellent on drums, able to really blend with what the song was doing, rather than overpowering it or merely providing rhythm.

One of the two major problems the band had on their first outing was different parts of the band pulling different ways (playing “loose”, I guess). There was one song that I thought must have sounded just like noise to a newcomer.

Oldest songs ‘Right Again’, ‘Ego’, and ‘Lucy’ were played tightest, though with new twists. ‘Lover’s Lane’, which I hadn’t heard before, also worked really well.

Daniel, a classic bassist, suffered from being on the giving end (kinda) of the band’s second problem: volume control. Sometimes parts were just drowned out by other parts due to poor mixing. Heath, the vocalist, was the part most often lost.

Heath’s vocals were great, but he also unveiled a hitherto unknown facet of his hyperactivity, by strutting his stuff to theatrical effect on the stage.

All was recorded by our friend Andrew Lee, so there’ll be time to review. My initial impression was that this was a very good first performance from a talented band.

Thanks to the ASA for helping get them up there.

The more points of view I see this band from, the more impressed I am. This page, as much as it exists as a review, exists as external positive pressure for the band to play again. I can’t wait to be able to talk to fan strangers.

Websites: Andrew Bowie, Walken, ASA.

Survivor II

I need to practice better watching television. I’ve been watching Today before work and some News after work. I’ve been watching the cruddy bits: talking head speccing mundane holiday destination, sporting celebrity endorsing product.

My ability to follow the news, somewhat anaemic since high school, has been on its deathbed since I moved to Carlton. For the last two years I’ve been catching the scent off newspapers held aloft in the morning and night transits. Damn them, I hear the two competing rail lines carry their own free magazines now.

I mention this, because I want to follow the news. Something exciting is happening. I think. Or maybe I’m just imagining it. But that’s how I do things, so eh. I’ll try to get some objective reality into my perception. I’ll talk to an Australian Democrat tomorrow, a Socialist Alternative comrade next week. In a Malaysian restaurant and a pub, respectively.

For now, here’s the go:

Pauline Hanson
She’s back. Totally 2.0, etc.

I’m not sure how she was received outside Australia last time. I know she was known around the world. A British backpacker related this story: Little beggar boy in Turkey ran up and said, “You Aussie, g’day mate. Pauline Hanson, smell like fish and chips.” Or something like that. I didn’t have a pen and paper. I had a beer and joint.

This isn’t exactly like that. Pauline’s new feature is being Without Policy. This is 2.0. This time she’s symbolic. As I see it.

Pauline’s killer app is directing her preferences in an election against the incumbant candidate (here’s how Austalia’s voting system, preferential voting, works). Pauline is the Wrath of the People. Incarnate. With red hair and freckles and a country accent. It’s all so uncut.

The parties
This is a beauty. Neither Labour nor the Democrats could break the homeostasis of Australian politics. Now here’s Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the tool of the Australian people, invigorating our democracy. Now good enough is not enough. Now better than the other guy is not enough. And nothing can be a better news story, so no hiding.

And Pauline Without Policy is a tar baby too. Those who cling to her will lose their souls. I don’t think discontent can be appeased by clinging to the symbol of discontent. And Pauline Without Policy is a wooden duck. Can’t kill the discontent by hunting it’s symbol. She slices, she dices.

There’s no one that I’ll be supporting. I’ll be supporting the people of [Australia].

These are exciting times.

Australia, Australia
And we are lucky to have the democracies of America and Indonesia in the news.

manila bug

hm.

don’t (Valentine’s)

Given the internet, is there a way to say what I want to say?

The Internet
It’s poor rhetoric to ask questions.

OTOH, I don’t like giving answers. I don’t know much but I know I don’t know much. People that bother me most are those who treat the world like a mathematical problem — and worse, a problem that can or has been solved.

I recognise my account: sometimes I can’t see anything happening because the action isn’t direct; sometimes the action is too complex; sometimes I can’t see how the action is effectual. And sometimes I am lazy or callous.

On this website I try to transcend all this. So I search for good rhetoric.

A piece of rhetoric has no room for conversation, but a fabric of rhetoric created from pieces over time can be part of a conversation. Conversation can be strange on the net, because there are no rules clear in my mind about how it interacts with Real Life. (Not that wholly RL conversations are always clear to me, but I stumble by as I imagine we all do.)

I am trying to ask myself the many questions that should be asked and use them to give myself focus. Here on this page there is no you except a construct, a word, that I say; the you is me and I am my own punching bag.

I continue to walk around the issue of war. It is too big a thing to focus on, so I will stop trying to.

IBM
I think my culture is about to gain a new myth. I think I saw the water break two days ago. That was when I found out that IBM was instrumental in scale of the Holocaust.

don’t mention

Given other people, is there anything I can say to them?

frameworks
What I would like to do is take this website and make it into a book. I’d like to sit in the Carlton Gardens and read it. I’d like to take notes. Make notes on the pages and have them collate themselves at the end.

The book wouldn’t be a normal book. It wouldn’t just be the text from this site. The text by itself doesn’t make sense. It’d also have to be the content I linked to. There’d be animations and sounds. There’d be, of course, hyperlinks.

I’d reread what I said and learn from myself.

Maybe one day I’ll make such a book.

don’t mention the war

Given the time machine, is there anything I can say to help my progress?

the war
This year I watched Colour of War, a documentary of World War 2. It’s novelty is in wholly having colour footage. The topic is surreal in colour.

The first part mainly concerned the bombing of London. I expected part two to be the same: colour cameras must have been rare and expensive. But the second featured the D Day landings.

It featured the US submarine Pampanito fishing Australian POWs out of the Pacific, days after sinking their Japanese captors. The Pampanito is now a floating museum in San Francisco.

With the Battle Box and Changi Prison in Singapore it haunts me.

The war haunts Kurt Vonnegut. It forms the atomic atheist core of John Fowles’s The Magus. The war (not Victorian London) forms the basis of hacker history, laid out in Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.

But my ghosts are those of stillborn predecessors. I do not know the war, not even through relatives.

The war is surreal.

“Think of some of what Dali or Magritte were doing. It’s ‘heightened reality’ in a way, where fantastic elements are introduced to put ‘normal life’ in sharper focus. There’s also a link with postmodernism - the way that ‘art’ ot ‘literature’ or ‘myth’ intersect with reality.”

…oh,

These images will constitute half of the brand real estate of cigarette packs in Canada.

There is already a cottage industry in sleeves to cover the warnings, including the Canadian Council for Non-Smoking, who call the images “medical pornography”.

I discovered this info in the NY Times after following a likely link from a weblog that I’d randomly surfed to. I’d heard long ago that such warnings were in the offing, on the radio or possibly in the newspaper.

In Victoria, next financial year (starts July), smoking will be banned in restaurants. In San Francisco, smoking has been banned in restaurants, bars, the whole deal, for years, successfully, with even the promise of non-enforcement looming over it initially. It is uncertain whether the Victorian government will have the courage to back such a move.

In my world, smokers have been heavily stigmatised. They disappear for their smoko. They cover up afterwards. For this reason many of the smokers I know can go for many months without others realising they have the habit.

Nicotine patch companies circle for the kill.

In my world, the biggest health risk posed by marijuana is the mixing of same with tobacco.

We are social creatures. We hate the smell. / We suck it in.

dickheads red

Tori from Bellarine

(those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same story everywhere) –Roland Barthes

.
Introvert that I was, that I am, I used to introduce myself to my sister’s friends via music. I’d commandeer dad’s stereo and put in whatever it was that I was lately besotted with and pump it up to full volume. Insert list here, delete where applicable.

I say I did it for my sister’s friends, but I just did it for everyone, for the world. This is who I am, that was who I was.

Anyway, it didn’t work. They didn’t know me. I see all sorts of problems with my approach now. Just better to walk up and say hello. But then…

Anyway. My point today is that music is important, but it can also be confusing. Like everything else. It seems direct but it isn’t. It’s an empty vessel we fill with meaning.

Take for example: ‘Cloudbursting’ by Kate Bush. Absolutely inseperable, in my mind, from it’s video clip. Countdown was an institution in my household, the family would gather round and watch Molly and the hits every weekend. ‘Cloudbursting’ has Kate and her (fictional) Daddy, who’s some kind of mad genius, mucking about with this great big church organ-like gun apparatus which bursts the clouds.

I don’t know what it means, but it causes some kind of movement in my brain when I hear it.

Then take: ‘Something Good’ by Utah Saints. This samples and stretches the haunting refrain of ‘Cloudbursting’. For many years this became my only link back to the original, my memory and connection to that original being only tenuous. But, as I discovered one day once later, the video clip samples the original video too, which is what really kicked off my memory.

There is yearning in these songs. I put it there.

..
INTJ, whatever, that Meyers-Briggs stuff, is a classic way to introduce a website. I haven’t, in the past, gone for it myself. I see people discovering your type then saying of course. Like it’s a horoscope. We see in it stuff we know, stuff we want to see, stuff we are able to.

Which reminds me of an adage. (That’s a joke.)

But when I got to the closing chapter of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (being Death: The Time of Your Life) I discovered what wisdom there could be in sayings. I didn’t see it for years, but Neil had taken me on a journey and given the words a meaning for me.

A weblog or whatever might give Pisces a significance yet.

(Am I talking around my purpose, rather than to the point?)

Another commonplace in personal websites, or even in magazines or TV shows, is the Top Ten. A list run off at random. And we can all do it. And we have. So one of my commandments on this website was not to write lists. Write them yourself. Delete as applicable.

(It occurs to me as I write this that I now have a significant corpus of words behind me that might serve to focus such a list. But anyway–)

The construction of a Top Ten, piece by painful piece — seeing the stated purpose, the judgement of the pieces against the purpose, seeing the questioning of the purpose, the rejudgement of pieces, seeing something just sneak onto the list unannounced, seeing this all take place haphazardly over time — is something good. Conflict creates character.

Yeah, give me scarlett.

…
So I was really disappointed with Faith No More’s 1995 album, King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime. A lot of the songs just didn’t sound right. They just didn’t go for me. Many were too short. ‘Evidence’ was too long. The sound of the album was scattered.

In ’96 I discovered Nine Inch Nails and Trent’s production was an epiphany. Suddenly the Wallace bros’ production of FNM’s albums seemed tawdry. Even the best songs were diminished. KFADFFAL languished on my shelves.

Someone stole it. It bothered me, ’cause I was a completist. But only ’cause, I guess.

Later I dubbed a tape copy for myself. I relistened. I decided that the lack of keyboards on half the songs really bothered me. Simple keyboard progressions really hold together most of FNM’s songs. A different, overlapping, half had fadeouts rather than endings. I was going for a fascist period on fadeouts. They were a definite nono. But I really thought the album was much better than I had initially given it credit for.

Two of my sisters bought me a new copy.

Eventually, I relistened. I discovered these track listings:

King for a Day
‘Evidence’
‘Star A.D.’
‘Cuckoo for Caca’
‘Caralho Voador’
‘Take this Bottle’
‘King for a Day’
‘The Last to Know’
‘Just a Man’

Fool for a Lifetime
‘Get Out’
‘Ricochet’
‘The Gentle Art of Making Enemies’
‘Ugly in the Morning’
‘Digging the Grave’
‘What a Day’

The key is that the second listing should be a live set. They have always been great moshy songs that really worked played live. But the studio versions were rather limp and the production only brought that out more — I’m always about to warp space and time and vaporise the cymbals with my embarassment.

Now, properly seperated out, KFAD becames a darkly excellent followup to Angel Dust. ‘Evidence’ becomes a relaxed introduction rather than a tedious twiddle after two twitchers.

I haven’t listened to the new FFAL yet. A simulation suggests it’s going to be great, a beautiful raging counterpoint to the stylistic slickness of KFAD. When I get an mp3 playlist of the live versions together I’ll let you know.

….
And I’m rediscovering Angel Dust too. No longer are the meanings of songs obscured to me. The album becomes a rather fine collection of short stories. It is still my favourite.

Incidentally, I came to FNM with ‘Epic’: a Johnny Come Lately to some. But they would be confusing what they put in their bottle with the bottle itself.