Dead Rock Stars, Dark Teeth and White Mexicans


Wherein our narrator gets a taste.

Saturday morning, 12:45 AM, having just poured myself back in from my first Sydney house party, hosted by an electronic artist and fellow traveller, celebrating his 40th birthday - making him one year less one month and four days younger than me. Does terrific work with java-based art at http://www.johnt.org/index.html. Anyway, a subsection of the arts and electronic arts community was there, certainly a number of people whom I know, or who know me. Much drinking and mirth-making, a few rather-too-dangerous fireworks (all the more fun) and, finally, someone rolled a joint. God. It's been very close to two months since I've been stoned, and, baby, I am enjoying it.

But enough scandal. It's been an interesting day. I've been listening to Elliott Smith nearly non-stop over the last two days; Dan sent me a few files he found on Acquisition, and I'll try to add a few myself when I can. So far, I am liking "Figure 8" the most, but perhaps because that's the only complete album I have. Either way, he's under my skin. A nearly perfect pop sensibility, and something that I'm enjoying immensely. The fact that less than about 28 hours elapsed between the time that I downloaded the album from Dan and Smith stabbed himself (because of International Date Line weirdness, on the same calendar day) is a little freaky. Here's this enormous talent that I only discover on the day he dies. It's the ultimate ephemerality: so close and so far. Kurt Cobain I got for a couple of good years. Terence McKenna I got for about 6 months. (Longer on the calendar, perhaps, but that's the limit of any meaning to me.) And now I get Elliott Smith for about 28 hours.

Yeah ok, I discovered Bach and Beethoven and Wagner and Mozart after they'd been dead a couple of hundred years. But still. It is weird.

Things began way too early this morning, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, over in the Dominion, a lovely park on the Sydney waterfront. Digital Hollywood, which was a fair amount of schmoozing - done tiredly and quaffing lots of copy (Sydney is *not* an early-morning town, thankfully), then a rather-too-longish-for-the-fact-that-we-were-all-standing-on-a-granite-floor panel discussion between four folks working in film/CGI related areas. Mind you, doors opened on this at 7 AM (!) and it ran until 9 AM, presumably so everyone could slink off to their jobs after traffic had passed.

I went with a few folks from AFTRS, whom I found (after doing a meet & greet of my own) in a small huddle with another fellow, discussing white mexicans. Huh? White mexicans. What are they? The special effects firms in Sydney who get the American film work because we work cheap. We're the white mexicans. I tell you, I felt embarrassed for both the US and Australia at that moment. And given that the AUD is up vs. the USD about 40% in the past year, no longer so cheap. No, soon the effects work will be done in Bangalore or Shanghai or Vientiane. The world of Snow Crash is coming true, only "movies, music and microcode" won't remain in North America. Something might remain, but those three have pretty much left the barn. And they're not making microwave ovens in Pakistan: they're making atomic weapons instead.

Then to a meeting - a story for another time - then home to AV with Dan and then my father, making the most of the remaining 110 MB that remained in my monthly d/l allotment. I could go off about metered internet usage and its evils, but suffice it to say that I upped the November limit to 2 GB because I'm getting sick of caring how much data I d/lo in a given month. Anyway, everyone seemed well enough. Which is good, because California is a weird place to be right now.

Then I went off to the dentist to get my tooth repaired. The "surgery" (as such things are called here, in the English-speaking world) was a small office. The dentist was working on someone when I came in, and her assistant came away from her side long enough to set me up with some paperwork, then went in and joined the doctor again. I filled the paperwork out and waited a bit, and then was ushered in. The dentist was a woman perhaps about my age (she might have been younger, hard to say - which has got me thinking a bit about my advanced age and how there are many more young people in the world now than when I was young myself) and we had a nice chat. She was friendly, amiable, funny, and set about rebuilding my tooth.

That rebuilding process was as much art as craft; matching composite material colors to natural teeth must be done carefully, or the tooth will look visibly different from its neighbors. And since this is essentially a "cosmetic" surgery - I was in neither peril nor pain - that was certainly an important feature. They compared my teeth to one color of composite, then another. Then another. And another. "You're awfully hard to match," the dentist remarked. "Are all Americans like that?" I didn't know what to answer. Perhaps our milk is different or the minerals in our water - but my teeth are a very non-Australian color. Evidentially. But eventually a solution was reached: a mixture of two composites, which created a color the dentist pronounced "perfect." And in truth, seeing it there in my mouth, it is. It matches my other teeth perfectly.

Now dentists all have one well known streak of sadism: they'll talk to you when you can't talk back. So I want you to imagine me, splayed out in the Dentist's chair, the ultimate vulnerability (and the reason for most people's phobia of the dentist), mouth taped this way and that, cotton rolls stuffed underneath my lips to pull them away from my teeth, with water and suction running under my tongue. That's when she says it. And I know she's been saving it up.

"So....", she begins. "Governor Schwartzenegger?"

Posted: Sat - November 1, 2003 at 01:37 AM        

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