Tuesday, June 26, 2007

(Filthy) hippie holiday.

At the moment I'm curled up on the couch, eating mandarins and organic chocolate biscuits, editing the theory chapter of my cousin's thesis. Yesterday the rain was so heavy that you couldn't see five centimetres past the window pane. Today the sun is streaming in and the hills are so crisp you could cut them out with scissors. It's bliss.

I've been promising my cousin Jude I'd come up here for about four years. I'm here now and already I'm the most relaxed I've been in months. Partly it's falling asleep (asleep!) to the sound of rain. Partly it's endless cups of tea. Anyway, Jude picked me up at Coolangatta and drove down some twisty backroads for a while and then we were ten minutes out of Bangalow, eating homemade baba ganouj on a multiple occupancy in the hinterland. Jude calls it the yuppie commune, but it's not so bad as that. Isn't the word 'hinterland' delightful?

We're planning to attend an incredibly wanky post-grad symposium on Friday, something about "interrogating whiteness". Jude's partner John will cook us a nautical feast to celebrate building a mast for his boat. There are outings. In the meantime, though, there's tea, and wine, and BBC costume dramas and reading chapters of salutogenic theory with a red pen, and organic chocolate biscuits, and mandarins, and rain, and making fun of hippie drum circles on the beach. So yeah, I haven't dropped off the face of the planet, I'm just in a different state. And a very nice state it is, too.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Three o'clock again, again.

It's three o'clock in the morning again. Again, again, again. I'm beginning to wonder whether my life isn't destined to be a series of three o'clocks. Right now I'm eating dark chocolate and listening to Nina Simone. At two o'clock I was crying. At two-thirty I poured myself another gin.

I'd like to blame this aimless melancholy on the cold, or the drugs, but it seems to be a function of being awake - endlessly awake - and alone, huddled in the cold of a single bedroom. Still restless, still antsy, still sick, still tired, but hey, at least I'm repeating myself. Staring at the ceiling at the peak of night. Seeing in another tepid dawn. Nina is telling me to break down and let it all out, and it seems like good advice.

Outside the window the air is frigid and I guess things could be worse. But Christ, if I have to see in another fucking dawn...

Not in an existential sense, of course. I can put up with day in, day out, but it's the prospect of watching the sky choke up with colour that makes me want to run and scream and groan. No rest for the wicked, I suppose. No rest for the rest of us. Tomorrow is an early start, and that start is inching nearer. And every time I blink, it's only to open my eyes.

It's three o'clock in the morning, and I think I'm losing my mind.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Argh.

Still sick. Still tired. But at least I've started drinking again.

In other news, I went into the office today, only to find that we had been mailed a preview version of this cd. Can't say he isn't stalking me now, Mel!

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Cold.

That is to say, it is cold, and I have a cold.

Somewhere between 3.30am last drinks on Monday and 8am wake-up on Tuesday, my immune system went on strike. Consequently I've spent the last three days huddled under blankets, sipping tea and clutching a hot water bottle and dosing up on pseudoephedrine. Oh, except for when I sat under a marquee in the bitter cold with Seb outside the Exhibiton Building, that is. I think one of my kidneys may still be frozen solid. And when I had that meeting, and today when I spent three hours with Helen in the concrete-floored, unheated gallery she is babysitting...

Anyway, cold and flu drugs always give me certain Pollyanna-ish tendencies, and so I've been trying to enjoy the physiological effects of being sick in an attempt to make the best of the situation. Cold sweats? Why, it's just like I've met a boy that I like! Dizziness and hot flushes? Hello, imaginary seventh glass of wine! Waking up three or four times a night gasping like a fish out of water, unable to breathe? Eh... not so much.

On some feverish level, I do appreciate the visceral qualities of being sick, the way that a change of two or three degrees of body temperature can skew so dramatically the delicate balance of all of our composite elements. It makes me better appreciate health (although, of course, with a multiplicity of possible modes of physical being, some would argue that 'health' is simply a spurious and commercially-driven First World construct [and I would say to them "pah! I anticipate you in parenthesis."]). In any case, there's something quite lovely and Victorian about the delicate shivers that flutter down your spine, and the swoony passing from consciousness when you finally rest your woozy head on a pillow.

Still. Three days of the dizzy blahs are quite enough for me. I would like to get better, please, body, so that I can get back to contemplating other, less mucus-related embodiment issues, such as whether Property dualism is congruous with a belief in basic neuropsychology, or whether you can be too fat for a haircut.

Otherwise, I might need some better drugs.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Tuesday night.

Coming home tonight the tram was strangely silent. No-one talked on their mobiles, or chatted to friends. A few people listened to music, but all that provided was a lilting hum, a staticky background to the muffling quiet. Everyone seemed lost in contemplation as the tram lurched through the night.

It made me think about the New Years Eve a friend took acid and wandered around the city. I walked her home, and she kept stopping to hear the music, insisting that the rhythm of the trams rattling by formed some strange symphony. She made short films and wanted an all-tram soundtrack, and heard it wafting through the balmy city air.

On the tram tonight no-one was taking acid, but the gentle undulation seemed to rock everyone into a fugue state. Inside the carriage, the thrum of the tracks seemed to coincide with a collective breathing in and out. A few people pressed their noses to the cold glass, and left condensation marks on the window. And still no-one spoke.

At Brunswick rd, an old Italian man got on and started up a monologue, talking to everyone and no-one, and no-one and everyone breathed in and out. Two stops before the depot, I pulled the cord. The driver leaned over to her grimy window as I passed and said, "I feel sorry for him". I realised then that we were the only people left on the tram. The Italian man wasn't getting off. But he'd gone quiet and the silence was enveloping.

I got off the tram and dug my hands into my pockets. The sky was black with clouds. I sang all the way home.

Friday, June 8, 2007

Hipster update!

Remember the perfect hipster*? After writing about him, I kept seeing him on various trams, walking along Smith St, and loitering on street corners. And then I was dithering around the internet recently, one vague and aimless day, and I came upon this photo... and this one... and this one... and either he's infiltrated every street pics blog in Melbourne, or I am stalking him now without even realising it.

Can you stalk someone by accident? I wonder, sometimes. Perhaps it is he who is stalking me, so carefully and subtly that I begin to doubt myself when I see him everywhere and assume that I am somehow persuing him. What he has to gain from this, I have no idea, but the perfect hipster is a sneaky beast. And I still find him faintly ridiculous.



*This entry has a very inglorious starting sentence. I suggest that you skip it.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Renovations.

You might have noticed the schmalzy new colour scheme. Don't worry, it won't be around for long - just until I teach myself enough HTML to really, as the kids say, 'pimp' this site. Or until I bribe the magazine's tech guy to do it for me, either way.

Also, because I have done an absolutely crap job of protecting my anonymity (by making references to where I live and who I know, and by linking to an article with my full name and place of employment written at the bottom), I figured I might as well go the whole hog and put a photo up as well*. Where I look oddly pink (to match the new paint, dahlink). Internet stalkers, do your worst.

*This was taken at Is Not Magazine's spectacularly awesome two-year birthday bash on Saturday night. (Is Not Magazine is a wonderful institution, and you should go visit its site and donate some money. Also, the editors are all pretty and they smell nice, and are all upstanding citizens, and I am not just saying that because I may or may not have an article published in the upcoming edition. Hi, Is Not! Love your work!) The theme was Golden Years, and yes, I am dressed as an old lady in that photo. The tram ride on the way over from Brunswick was awesome, with people giving me the discreet eye and trying to figure out whether I was in costume, insane, or just another hipster. And so the line between coolness and insanity draws ever thinner...

Monday, June 4, 2007

Media I have consumed in the past 48 hours.

Books: Fresh Apples, Rachel Trezise.
Hung over on Sunday morning, with the taste of tsatsziki lingering in my mouth and my hair smelling of other people's cigarettes, there was nothing for it but to go back to bed with a cup of tea and read a book from start to finish. I'd nicked Fresh Apples from the office where it was sent to us as promo. Andrew Davies, of no particular publication, is quoted in the frontispiece as saying that FA "can easily be compared to Jame's Joyce's Dubliners", which... lets not go nuts here. Some of the stories, 'Chickens' and 'Jigsaws' in particular, are cute, but mainly it's unrequited love, drug use, Welsh vernacular and plot 'twists' you can see a mile away. Trifling and decorously gritty = perfect for my sleazy tsatsziki Sunday morning hangover brain.

Hama beads.
Perhaps technically not media in and of themselves, but I used them to make some media-related bits and pieces, so maybe by some sketchy and tenuous graphic design association? What the hell - craft as media, kids. Anyway, the most fun I've had in yonks. I also made some lurid technicolour fruit to string on a necklace, and Helen made me a little penguin to turn into a brooch, so that we can be just like the hipster coolsie kids who buy their Hama masterpieces for far too much and miss out on the tea-drinking, chocolate-eating, Hama-ironing fun in the process. Suckas.

TV: The Mighty Boosh, Season One.
There are no words.

Film: The Science of Sleep, dir. Michel Gondry.
Hallucinatory and sweet. I kept trying not to compare this to Eternal Sunshine, since without Charlia Kaufman Gondry is a very different beast. In any case, since the comparison is inevitable anyway, it lacked the emotional coherance of Sunshine and amped up the visual innovation. Had a few cute bits about relationships that rang true; had a few that were creepy and unsettling, and a little too close to comfort to the Hollywood 'stalking = quirky and cute' schema for my taste, but probably any analysis of this film in terms of narrative or character development is futile. Watch it instead as an innovative and visceral take on the videoclip as cinema - a two-hour punch to the cerebellum. And maybe don't take any actual hallucinogens before you go in.

Music: Back to Black, Amy Winehouse.
This was impulse-bought at (shudder) Borders after the film, when my cinema companion rushed off to do countless important things and I wandered in looking for a specific CD and came out an hour and a half later in a sort of media coma. I saw this CD and had one of those moments when I couldn't remember whether I heard one of the songs and really liked it, or heard one and hated it. You know when you sometimes remember the extremity of the response but the accompanying emotion?... To be totally superficial, I was almost put of this CD because AMy Winehouse herself is so terrifyingly bony. Seriously, I thought that her clavicles would cut there way through the CD case and free her, whereupon she would devour me whole because she hasn't eaten anything in a year. Girl is thin. But it turns out three-quarters of her body mass is pipes, and the CD is really growing on me... especially the more uptempo ones like 'Rehab' and Tears Dry On Their Own'. Music to pump up and play while lying in the sun drinking gin and eating cupcakes. And offer Amy a cupcake while you're at it.

Magazines: Yen and Acclaim.
Bought for research purposes. No, really. Acclaim isn't normally my scene, but the layout is interesting and they had a good interview about tattoos. Yen I am saving for after dinner, as a nice sweet media dessert. Stay tuned!... or not! Either way.


Friday, June 1, 2007

Still life with eggplant.

Someone at the supermarket - whoever's in charge of visual merchandizing (or its grocery-store equivalent), I guess - has decided it would be a good idea to wedge a compartment full of individual containers of chocolate 'dipping sauce' between the strawberries and the pears. It took me a second to process this, as I'm used to a fairly immutable supermarket taxonomy. "That's not fruit!" I thought, before promptly realising that the idea was for the customer to suddenly realise that her delicious fresh produce would taste even more delicious if coated in sugar and fat.

I wrote this off as fairly standard marketing practice, but then I noticed that someone - presumably not the supermarket's middle management - had buried a couple of chocolate bars in with the loose potatoes. And I assumed that someone was taking the piss, and this filled me with glee. And then, as I was doing my single girl/sharehouse route of milk bread eggplant toiletpaper chocolate, I kept seeing Things That Didn't Belong. Some of them didn't belong in fairly subtle ways, such as those that questioned the supermarket's meaningless ghettoisation of vaguely ethnic food, like the Italian chocolates in a store display of Freddo Frogs. And some things didn't belong in strikingly explicit ways - magazines stashed in the bread aisle, toothbrushes next to the biscuits - and these things made note of the cognitive dissonance that arises from the deviation from what is ultimately an arbritrary and/or cynical product organisation system anyway.

And look, I do realise that people just pick things up, decide they don't want them, and stash them away randomly because they're too tired or lazy to go back and find where they belong. But I prefer to think that my local supermarket has been infiltrated by a performance artist whose pointed rearrangement of consumer goods illustrates the inherent futility of a search for meaning in a codified site driven both by capitalist imperatives and the arbitrariness of a single prioritised taxonomical logic. By showing us these things of our supermarkets, they are showing us these things of ourselves. Or something. Who knows? This is Brunswick. Fucker probably even has a grant.