Wed - August 4, 2004
The Long Grey Night of the Soul
Wherein our narrator 'fesses up.
Finally.
There have not, for several months, been many
entries in this blog. Really, only one, a humorous little ditty that I wrote
basically to keep myself focused and out of an all-too-real panic attack due to
an unforeseen caffeine overdose.
Why,
you may well ask.
And so you
might.
And this entry I've tossed over
time and time again, but I've never written it. Never knew if I wanted to write
it.
Only it started coming out of me.
In the oddest ways.
I dreamt of writing
a novel, "Half the World," thinly disguised autobiography, about a man who
travels across half the world to flee himself, his actions, his broken
heart.
And toyed with the idea. And
sent myself a little note the other day, a bit to close to the core of the
matter:
Subject:
Theorem
You can reinvent yourself only up
to the limit of what you’re willing to leave
behind.
***
And
so it goes. Because it's sitting right out there on the surface, right there,
right out in the open.
I am
unhappy.
And I am not unhappy because of
where I am in the world. Sydney is wonderful - though it is mid-Winter, and
that's less enjoyable than I might have it, it doesn't really suck at all - and
my work is interesting, if somewhat
draining.
But it isn't enough. And it
isn't going to ever be enough. Because now I've thought about it enough, and I
know it's not enough. It's not the moment of resignation. It's the moment of
revelation.
I'm heartbroken because
I'm still in
love. And I haven't stopped being in love, not
for a moment. Not ever.
On the 4th of
July last year, on a rooftop in Santa Monica, after an afternoon of drinking and
a little light pot smoking, one of my friends, perceptive in that
witchy-sort-of-hit-the-nail-on-the-head-by-accident sort of way, said, "I bet
you go crazy and break their hearts." Or words to that
effect.
And it's true. And I couldn't
answer her then, because i couldn't answer
myself.
How can you look back on the one
moment in your life which fucked everything up, and see it, and see yourself
doing it, over and over again, and only understand that it was stupidity and
rage and brokenness which brought you to
it?
I may be a romantic, but I'm not a
sentimental sort, nor am I terrifically nostalgic. Things happen, and I move
on.
But somehow, I'm not able to move
beyond this. The wound is still there. And it's still as fresh as the day it
happened. And it's time I owned up to
it.
Because whatever I was looking for
here - most likely, a replacement, something to staunch the bleeding from the
wound - is the one thing I'll never find.
Because I don't want to find
it.
I don't want to turn the clock back.
Well, not much. I don't want the past to be undone. Well, not
much.
What I want is the only man I've
ever really loved. I want him back. Desperately. Even if he is 13,000 km
away. Because distance doesn't
matter.
And I have felt this wound, from
time to time, when thinking about what I am doing here, and why I am here, and
how long I'll be here, and whatever made me come here. Certainty, mostly. I
needed space, and money, and time to
think.
Well, I've had plenty of each of
those. More than enough, really.
And
today the other shoe drops, as my mail client choked on a 4 MB
enclosure:
Hi
Mark-
I hope Australia is
treating you well. How is the new program, have you
got
things whipped into shape. I love
getting the Yeschaton emails, which
at
least paints the picture that you
are doing well.
Me? I've been
great. I love the time that school is allowing me,
and
evidently the time to make work is
paying off. I had my first piece in
a
museum over the summer (a sound piece
in the Musee d'art Modern de la
ville
de Paris) and I'll be putting
another up in LACMA in November. So that
is
all going really well. Now I'm
beginning to think about getting a real
job
and start experimenting with prefab
architecture so I can really afford
a
home in LA...but that's a different
story....
Right now I'm working
on an experimental radio station project.
The
schematic for the idea is attached,
as well as the preliminary press
release
from the space. Check it
out.
I've been trying to organize
a series of science features of scientists
and
artists presenting their work- and
I kept thinking of you- and
specifically
becoming transhuman.
Would you be interested in producing a radio show?
It
would be new or old, massive of
small. Let me know what you
think.
Xoxo
Jeff
***
And
god that pain is so fresh. It makes me double over inside. I want to call him
and ask him how he's doing, all the time subtly fishing around, wondering if
he's got a boyfriend. I want to know that he's free again, so I can get on my
knees and beg and plead and sweep him off his feet again. I want to know that
there is still a place, somewhere, in his heart, for me. His heart, which I
broke so perfectly, so precisely, so completely, only because I wanted to break
my own.
There is no getting around this.
This is
this. The point of it all, the reason for being. And I know that now because
I've removed all of the other factors, of place, of stress, of time, reduced
myself to the basics of who and what I am. And this
remains.
This remains.
Posted at 08:34 PM
Sun - July 11, 2004
Warning Signs
Wherein our narrator does a little
profiling...
The trails are all shut down today, work on the
downtown loop. So I'm taking the friendly 288 all the way to AFTRS, which,
given it is Sunday, makes for a nice quick
trip.
Jefferey Dahmer Story. Gothish
friend, probably his partner.
This is
how serial killers begin.
Posted at 10:50 AM
Wed - June 23, 2004
Overdose
In which our narrator really overdoes
it.
Oh man oh man oh man am i gonna have a panic
attack a heart attack a seizure are the lights getting all fuzzy what is this
fire in my chest it feels so overwhelming or maybe the tibetan tohnkas coming to
the fore knocking around in my head and giving me a drive to ESCAPE to burst the
protoplasmic sack and escape in gnostic freedom into something unconstrained
uncontained unbounded like Masha said in her email yesterday where she was
lusting to become containerless and i said hey baby it may be a container but
it's also the vehicle of evolution no container no capacity to accept the slings
and arrows of life's fortunes which smooth the stone and make more perfect the
square that's Duncan's ritual all out there in the open but she's missing serge
and wants to join him in his busted bus dead heaven and hey who am i to stop her
she who is pope and who has spoken to the aliens in her ayahuasca tourism who
knows that tomorrow won't be terribly different from today unless she is somehow
utterly changed and perhaps that final consummation is devoutly to be wished but
here it is safe in my safe island home they sound different but feel profoundly
the same just as alienated as alienating and when i find myself gabbing away
with a roomful of north americans as has happened once or twice in the past week
i begin to understand the lure of the voice, of the power of talking to someone
who has a fundamental understanding of home or so they announce with every word
they speak but well things are calming down now perhaps the train ride home or
the Wilco ghost is born or perhaps because the drugs are finally wearing off as
we cross the Paramatta and the sunset hides behind a huge cloud bank and i
think, hey, maybe rain and maybe the drought will stop and i'll imagine that it
will be alright to stay that i haven't arrived in a land just about to die but
how different really is it than california with its lowest rainfalls in a
hundred years and perhaps those last hundred were a blip an aberration amidst a
longer cycle of pure and uninterrupted drought which is a chilling thought
because then neither of my adopted homes has any future and there is no going
backward no way to crawl back into the womb as suggested by that piece at the
MCA a man crawling through a tight slit of carpet into the space between floor
below and carpet above all snug and kicking free and it's better yes i don't
feel as though death is necessarily imminent but i promise myself again yet
again that i will not do this to myself again that this is more than i ever
asked for even as i tempted fate and somehow called for the worst to happen but
didn't really remember for whatever reason that if i play with fire i get burned
and for god's sakes man you're already burning brighter than a thousand stars so
you really need to pour gasoline on
that?
Man - I've
gotta
stop drinking coffee.
Posted at 04:37 PM
Thu - April 22, 2004
All Apologies
Wherein our narrator says he's
sorry.
Today was designated as "Programming Day".
Meaning that I was to commune with Renderware - something I haven't done since
1993 - in search of some answers to technical questions which had been posed by
various folks in digital media. I'd gotten clearance from Peter to do the work,
and dealt with the normal process of getting the tools, getting them installed,
testing, then settling to work. Although I started at 9 AM, it was 3 PM before
I could actually begin to test anything. Such are the ways of
programming.
I had disclaimed - freely
- that I could not be disturbed during this process. Not because I was so
precious, but because the programming mindset meant that I wasn't liable to be
very sweet when disturbed. It's an enormously complex task involving fairly
prodigious use of the memory, and interruptions disrupt that gentle collection
of short-term memory needed to be an effective
programmer.
So of course today is the
day when everyone decided to call, or IM, or drop by the office. By 11 AM I was
snarling at anyone who happened to stick their neck in, and my office felt like
Grand Central Station. So of course I spent a fair amount of time running about
and apologizing afterward. But hey, some of them had been
warned.
Anyway, it's good to do a
little programming every once in a while. It keeps me
honest.
And now, I realize, I have to
master Flash. Which is so overdue.
Posted at 05:05 PM
Wed - April 14, 2004
Queer Jungle Supermind
Wherein our author has an epiphany of mixes and
beats.
Saturday evening - or, more precisely, very
shortly after Easter Sunday began - with friends Chris, John and Lionel (the
last two of whom seem to be turning into very fine friends indeed) - I got into
a taxi and rode over to Kensington, which isn't all that far away - just a few
Ks down the Anzac Parade - to a weird little restaurant known as the Grotto
Capri. The Grotto Capri, it appears, is famed throughout Sydney for having a
nautically-themed interior. And if you think that dining *inside* a coral reef
is nautically-themed, well, baby, I have got the place for you. Stalagmites on
the floor, and stalactites on the ceiling. (Or is that reversed?) All
encrusted with an odd array of seashells, and some inset lighting in the floor,
and supposedly, under glass, a stream. (We never saw it.) A few fishtanks.
And so forth. It's the kind of place that a down-on-his-luck old-school Mafia
don might pick for his headquarters, taking a corner booth, keeping himself
protected by walls on two sides. That sort of place. It reminds me, in some
ways, of the restaurants back in Massachusetts and Rhode Island - designed with
the presumption of taste, and missing the mark by so wide a margin that it is
immediately recognized and loved as
kitsch.
I haven't had an opportunity to
write about the Bad
Dog party (grrr) I went to a few weeks back,
which is a semi-monthly affair where the art-fag-queers-dykes-freaks of Sydney
go out and dance to some fine music. On that afternoon at the Waverly Bowling
Club I realized that I would have a place & time in Sydney - here, in my
newly-adopted home - when I could cut loose. (Shirt off, of course.) I had a
great time -- and wanted more. So when I saw John & Lionel on Friday
afternoon - and got in my first swim at Bondi Beach (waves really too big to
have fun, but that's something I'll get used to) - they mentioned that there was
another party - "Evildoers" - which wasn't exactly a Bad Dog affair, but would
be very much like one.
Sign me up, I
said.
So we were not at the Grotto
Capri to dine; we were there to dance. We got there shortly after midnight -
fortunately, as it turned out - and took our time looking around at the strange
decor, grabbed a drink or two, and waited for the mix. We didn't have long to
wait. The two DJs - who are relatively well-known in Sydney - began to create a
mix that I'd never heard before, taking jungle beats and the queerest of queer
disco and slamming them together, like two overweight atoms only to happy to
fuse into some super-heavy nucleus that gave off a shower good vibes. Queer
jungle, I thought. This is it: I'm hearing something
new.
It went on, and got better. There
were moments when I felt myself opening up inside, and all of the happiness of
yoga/alcohol/cannabis/ketamine/music/pretty-dancing-boys/smiles-on-the-faces/the-kitsch-surroundings
took me into a transcendent
space.
Flash back, now, to dinner with
Rachel & Jeremy, earlier in the week. Rachel her normal ray-of-sunshine
self, whinging about the slow death of civilization. Trouble is, she's smart
enough that I can't easily coddle her with smooth words; she wants solutions.
And even catastrophe, my final fallback solution to all problems, won't work for
her. "Trouble is, Mark," she proclaimed, "the catastrophes never make anything
better. They only make things
worse."
Put that into your DMT pipe and
smoke it.
And so, because she had
saddled me with such a philosophical imponderable, I had no choice but to chew
on it, ruminating about this and that, feeling the enclosing claustrophobic
zeitgeist, and knowing that somehow, somewhere, there must be an
exit.
Then, on the dance floor, in the
midst of the mix, it all clicked: the opening is above, it is translinguistic,
gnostic and experiential. It can't be bought or sold, it can't be recorded or
reproduced. It has the absolute authenticity of the utterly ephemeral. It can
not be touched, but it can touch you. In the humble surroundings of the Grotto
Capri, the supermind was coming down to Earth and entering me, on that dance
floor, filling me with the godshatter of ideas which I have only just begun to
sort through. I know this: even in its articulation into the world of forms, it
remains itself. Like the Tao, it can not be named, though its manifold forms
can be observed, and their constant, changing glories keep the channel of
communication open.
But I'll have to
spend some more time dancing to understand it fully. Somehow the knowledge
enters through the body - my body.
As
is inevitably the case when breakthroughs happen, when you know that you're in
the space where anything is possible - if only briefly - the police came and
shut us down as an "illegal club" around 4 AM. All of us could have gone on
till the 6 AM close - but this way we knew, beyond all doubt, that we had
touched the magick beating heart of Sydney on Easter Morning, and, like Christ
ejected from the tomb, walked the glittering pre-dawn streets back to our
homes.
Posted at 05:36 PM
Mon - April 5, 2004
Now there's a pity
Wherein our narrator whinges about the lack of
WiFi in Auckland International Airport.
They have these lovely desk stations, one of
which I'm sitting at now, typing away. They even have phone jacks. And just 4
meters to my right, there's a bank of 3 computers, each of which eat NZ $2
coins, and provide you with internet/web
access.
But there's no WiFi. My poor
little AirPort smells *nothing* in the air. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps
the business travellers passing through the airport here are too fagged, shagged
and ragged to actually care to go online. But my goodness, they do it in
Sydney, and whatever they do in Sydney, they do in Auckland - sooner or
later.
I had it figured out pretty
quickly: New Zealand is the little brother to Australia's big brother. Like all
brother-brother relationships, it's fraught will all sorts of testosterone-fuled
issues of competition and one-upsmanship. New Zealand has very nearly the same
flag as Australia - except the stars are red, not white. (There may be other
differences, but they're too subtle for my eyes to discern.) The currency looks
very similar - it's plastic, just like Australia's - except the two dollar coin
is *larger* than the one dollar coin, which makes perfect sense, actually, but
has been consistently confusing me, because I'm acclimated to the Australian
2-dollar "pound" coin (because it looks very much like a british pound, and has
about the same value) which is smaller than the Australian
dollar.
Oh the comforts of
home!
But back to it. The big brother
has a checkered past (that convict thing), but, like the prodigal son, has
fallen back into a very comfortable middle age. New Zealand never did anything
wrong - being the comfortable satellite colony of Britain (they were offered
independence in 1907, and didn't accept it until 1947) and an altogether
comfortable, sophisticated culture. The biggest thing New Zealand has working
against it - its low population - is precisely the thing it's working so hard to
preserve. It's a fiendishly difficult country to immigrate to, yet about 25% of
the population are first generation immigrants. There are close to 4 million
Kiwis in the country - although about 10% of them are in Australia at any point
in time (permanent residents of either country can move back and forth between
them at will), and at least another few hundred thousand are in Britain, the
USA, or just backpacking around the
world.
I can understand why they cut
out and see the world. Auckland, with a population of about 1.4 million, began
to feel awfully small after just a few days - not impossibly small, but
relatively small. Sydney, with its 4 million population began to feel
positively gigantic, and Sydneysiders are always griping about how small Sydney
is, relative to London or New York or (lately) Shanghai. But Australia allows
1% of its population to be supplemented by immigration each year. (Perhaps in a
few years, one of those immigrants will be me.) New Zealand used to do this,
but has cut back lately, so that maybe just .5% of its population, on a yearly
basis, is new immigrants.
So New
Zealand is far away from everything - except Australia - which is far away from
everything else. It really is far away here. It took a long time to check in
at the airport this afternoon, basically because everyone packs everything
including the kitchen sink when they leave the country. It's a long, long way
to anywhere, so folks had more luggage than I'm normally accustomed to seeing in
a check-in line. Acres of luggage, bikes, surfboards, and so
on.
I had a very successful day today,
lecturing at the Auckland University of Technology and dispensing some free
advice to the faculty of various parts of the college of Arts. First thing this
morning I gave a lecture to a classroom of design students - one of my favorite
jobs, because I really managed to blow their minds. Too much, perhaps, because,
at the end of the hour, there were no questions. "Too many," one girl muttered,
when the call went up for questions. Heheheh. That first was a more or less
off-the-cuff talk about design in the age of active materials, not so much a
retread of the lecture I gave at RMIT as an elaboration on the same themes. I
borrowed from a Scientific
American article I'd read on the plane to
Auckland, all about the origin of the linguistic assignments for colors.
Pre-modern cultures generally have the same three words for color: black, white
and red.
Which brings me to my walk
through the Auckland Museum on Sunday afternoon. It's world famous for its
incredible collection of Maori artifacts, and I spent an hour feasting on this
fully realized and thoroughly unique Polynesian culture. They had a
reconstruction of a ceremonial hut (I believe it had simply been reassembled
inside the museum). that you could doff your shoes and walk through. Inside,
beautiful wood carvings (tikis, more or less) adorned nearly every available
inch of wall surface. Everything was painted, was colored - and all of it in
red, white and black.
Look back to
Lasceaux, Catal Huyuk, Uxmal, it doesn't matter: the colors of the "primitives"
are black, white and red. Whether they noted blue and described it as
"black-like' is unknown. But it makes sense. Black is cool and dark. White is
light. And red is warm - in addition to its role as the color of
lifeblood.
Oh, and the men are better
looking in Australia. More redheads here in Auckland (because exposure to the
sun won't kill them) but, on the whole, Sydneysiders are just prettier to look
at. Lucky for me.
Posted at 04:53 PM
Sun - April 4, 2004
Always in Love With the Last One
Wherein our narrator has some revelations about
his person.
Today is Auckland. Got up at 5:30 Sydney time
(Auckland is 2 hours earlier, or later, depending on how you count it) did my
yoga, made brekkie, and caught a plane. Got to my hotel by 4 PM local time, and
walked around, had a look. Auckland is what would have happened if Ralph Lauren
had been allowed to design Seattle. And from what the very friendly and
forthcoming natives (truly) have told me, but for 5 degrees difference (Auckland
is warmer), the weather is about the same. New Zealand is green because it
rains a lot. All the time. But not today. Today was like one of those summer
days that last for months in Seattle, where the cloudless sky seems to
sparkle.
I had set myself a goal: to go
to a city I'd never been to before, and go out, as a gay man. Go to a bar. Go
to a club. Dance. And take my shirt off. You see, I can do that now. I'll
spare you the all-too-boring details about my improving figure (you've already
read about it, ad nauseum) but I no longer feel self-conscious about dancing
half naked in a room of sweaty men. Instead, I find myself looking forward to
it.
Auckland is a late night kind of
city - which is not what I'd heard - so I didn't even get to the bar (Urge, a
"men's bar," which meant a cross between the SF Eagle and the Hole in the Wall,
in terms of population and age) until about 11:30. I sat, got cruised, then
struck up a conversation with a pair of very sweet men who chatted me up for the
better part of two hours. We talked about New Zealand, Australia, America,
everything. I really do mean it when I say these are by far the sweetest, most
open English-speaking people I've encountered on my travels. Australians, much
as I love them (and I do so love them) seem to carry a bit of a chip on their
shoulder. Perhaps all that convict stuff, who can really say. The Kiwis don't
have it, not at all. So everyone's been sweet and open and just generally
interested in whatever's going on. Nice nice nice.
At about quarter past 2 I left Urge
and headed to Flesh, the one real gay nightclub in town. (Yes, Auckland is
*small*. It's got just over a million people and since most aspiring queers
here head to either Sydney or London, I gather the gay community suffers as a
result. But perhaps I'm making that up. I can't say.) After the drag show I
joined the crowd on the dance floor, got sweatier and sweater, and - finally -
took the shirt off. It did the trick: men were looking. All good. But I
realized something - when you can have something, you get to know that maybe you
don't want it.
I can have (and have
had) all the cheap sex the world can offer. The older I get, the less
interesting it is. Either there's that moment of utter sexual frission - when
you know you must have this man, now! - or it's the moment when you see another
person's eyes, see the energy within, and judge it as kind, and sweet, and
gentle, and then you know you must have it, but in its place and in its time.
The first is a quickie fling, the second is husband material. And tonight, with
some sort of discernment born of the yoga and vodka and attention I've paid to
my body, I could look at a man, and judge his soul. Not eternally, but in terms
of his fitness for me. There was one boy, when I met his eyes, there was the
flash, the mutual recognition - but again, that's a husband thing and I don't
live here, so no husband hunting. And I clearly was not drunk enough to lower
my standards, and no one (well almost no one) pressed my buttons hard enough to
make me want to chase them. Maybe because at 41 I know that it's all just the
rubbing of flesh together. Nothing wrong with that, but really it's a lot of
trouble (and slightly dangerous, let's be honest) and you have to weigh out
whether, when all is said and cum, it was really worth it at
all.
But more than this, I have to be
honest with myself. I know the look in the eyes that I'm sensitive to, because
it's defining what I'm looking for. It's Jeff's look and Jeff's eyes, because
I'm still in love with him. That's cool, I've known that for a while (a long
while) but it's interesting to see it popping out so obviously. You're always
in love with the last one, till the next one comes along.
Posted at 03:37 AM
Thu - March 25, 2004
Your Kids and My Ass
Wherein our narrator catches us up with what's
been going on.
So much, so very much transpired in the last
week. On Saturday I had my first party in Sydney, a lovely 2-stage affair:
after 4 PM for families with small children (Peter & Ann with Liam &
Raphie, Shilo and James with Connor), after 7 PM for everyone else. When I
threw Big & Viveka out at 3:15 AM, I pronounced the whole affair a complete
success - people came, had a very good time, drank a whole lot of wine (but true
to form, they left me with more alcohol than I started with, something that is a
bit of an Australian tradition).
(My
god. Mahler's 9th on the Train. It's like a
revelation.)
So the weekend was mch
consumed by preparing for and cleaning up after the party. But on Sunday brunch
- I should have been dreadfully hungover, but wasn't, thankfully - I joined
Rachel and Jeremy for lunch. If there is any person (besides Shilo) I have to
thank for being in Sydney, it'd be Rachel. She took care of me in 1997 when
Grant (a former boyfriend I was staying with) turned into a bitch-on-wheels when
his own boyfriend broke up with him (because Grant was pathetically unable to
keep it in his pants). Ah, she was so young then, single but shacked up with
Jeremy, and making her way in the world, a path that led to San Francisco, and
marriage, and their delightful year-old daughter, Claire Christmas, so named
because her birthdate is
25/12/2002.
And an interesting point:
this is the cross-over axis of two blogs - my own and Rachel's (www.yatima.org),
and I wonder how each of us will come across in the
other's.
But this is all so much
obfuscation. Burying the lead, as Tony would say. I've met a lovely man. And
this presents an enormous
annoyance.
First: he violates the rule:
never date someone with your own first name. So his name is Mark. He's tall
& thin and forty years old. (Which, right there, marks him as different,
because I do normally date much younger.) He's absolutely gorgeous, that is,
with the most amazing eyes, that I can't really stop looking into, except that I
really do stop looking into them pretty quickly because I feel myself falling,
falling, falling every time I do.
(Do I
sound like a goofy 16 yearl-old yet? I hope
so.)
But here's the pisser: he's a
resident of San Francisco, and although he's been in Australia very nearly the
same length of time I have, he returns to California on the 5th of April - we'll
actually cross paths in the airport in Auckland on that Monday afternoon. So
he's got nine-days-and-counting left on his clock, and here we are each of us
finding ourselves both irresistibly attracted to each other and really enjoying
each other's company.
What to do?
There are all sorts of issues to consider here. One of them is the three-date
rule, another is the long-distance rule, another is the
I-don't-want-it-to-get-weird rule. So many rules. But we talked about it,
somewhat elliptically, somewhat plainly, last night, after a lovely dinner on
Crown Street. We're both agreed that it's quite a shame that this is all coming
to an end, and neither of us particularly wants to ruin it (or rather, have it
get weird) by rushing the whole shagging thing. And as promiscuous as I may be
from time to time (something that's only alluded to in this blog, because
goodness knows who might be reading it) I don't like to handle my affairs of the
heart in the same way.
Third, he's a
Cancer. But I've decided not to hold that against
him.
So here the two of us are, ready
to throw ourselves at each other. But not doing it. Because we like each other
enough not to do it. This makes sense if in a very Jane Austen-y sort of way.
But when he goes home, he might never come back. We might never see each other
again. And while I'm not so deeply emotionally involved that it'll just break
my heart, it will hurt.
And then,
besides all this, there's one other thing: my ass has disappeared. Evidentially
the current phase of weight loss has been taking it most conspicuously off my
backside. I looked into the mirror last week and said, "Where's my ass gone?"
I now have a classic white-boy's ass, which is to say, it's hardly there at all
- just enough to sit on, and very little more. That's good, because it was just
all fat, but that's bad, too, because asses are sexy. I wonder if this is what
women with small breasts feel
like?
God, I'm being incredibly
shallow. Oh well. Sometimes shallow is good.
Posted at 09:00 AM
Tue - March 16, 2004
You Need and You Need and You Need
Wherein our narrator muses on his own affability
and being taken for a ride.
Yesterday morning I had a meeting with two lively
fellows from New South Wales' State Development agency. You can think of them
as business development executives, working on behalf of the state. All well
and good, because one of them I'd met in a meeting during my June visit for XML
1, and the other, though new to me, was very focused. They want to promote a
games industry in NSW - catching up to Victoria and Queensland, which have both
put significant resources into such efforts, with at least modest successes.
I was allowed to pontificate about the
state of things - this, I guess, was their price of admission - and after that
we got down to nitty gritty. They asked me if I could help with a few things,
to which I affably agreed. I want to help them - don't get me wrong - but this
week is my busiest thus far at AFTRS, and I'll be teaching practically non-stop
for the rest of the week. And some of these requests were for things that
should have been handled *long ago* but have been left until just a few days
before they need to be
realized.
Specifically, they've asked
me to find someone in California who would be willing to pimp NSW a bit at a
barbecue thrown by the Australian Game Developer's Assn next week at their
annual event in San Jose. What exactly do they want this person to do? I
can't possibly tell you, because although a few names came to mind immediately -
Coco and Kate, specifically -- I don't know what I can actually tell them about
what NSW is looking for them to do at this event. In fact, I don't believe that
the NSW folks know what they want to
do.
Right now they're just needy, but
they don't know what for. And, in my own opinion, they're as helpless as
babies. I can give them some help, but there are numerous other demands on my
time. And despite my desire to ingratiate myself with local officials -
something that doubtless will help when I make an application for permanent
residency - I can't help having the feeling that they're getting my help and
advice for free. Free advice is all well and good, but I can assure you that
free advice isn't valued very highly. If I were charging them $100 an hour for
my time - which they couldn't afford to pay - then they'd be hanging on my every
word.
But for now, I just have a list
of TO DO items from these folks, and I'll do the best I can to check them off,
one after another. I hope that I can be efficient,, helpful, clear and of
service. And if I can't, well, I hope that it's not my planning that put them
into this
situation.
***
Tomorrow
I'm teaching "DigiDoco" - that is, Digital Media for Documentary Filmmakers. I
thought it was going to be a class of 4, but now it's up to 13 (at its peak on
Thursday) and counting. In a room that really is only meant for ten folks at
the most. It's going to be crammed, both with bodies and with information. If
I do my work well, tomorrow they'll leave that room with their ears bleeding -
figuratively at least. But it's interesting, because all through this weekend
my mind was churning, churning, churning about this class, popping up in my
dreams and whatnot, as a bit of a background process, which shows how important
I must consider this. And it's true, I've been doing everything I can to prep
myself for it. Most of this I can toss off quite easily, though some of it will
involve some original thinking - on my own part - and some on the fly
philosophizing.
Here's hoping.
Meanwhile, I wait for a call from the aforesaid NSW State Development folks, so
they can tell me what's up...
Posted at 04:58 PM
Fri - March 12, 2004
Tastes Like Victory
Wherein our narrator muses on fads and
trends.
Somewhere in the period of time between 4
November and today the Atkins low-carbohydrate died reached some sort of tipping
point in the mind of the English-speaking world. There are now tons of
articles, discussion, diatribes, dissent about the diet. Restaurants are
altering their menus. People are clucking their tongues, telling all these
newly-thin people that they'll be dead of heart disease in just a few
years.
So here we are, about 4 months
after starting on the low-carbohydrate diet, and I'm as thin as I've been since
at least 1989. That's 15 years folks. Back then, when I was just 26, I weighed
- at my lowest - 178 pounds. My body seems optimized for that weight. Today
I'm probably somewhere under 190, but I can't tell you exactly where, because I
don't have ready access to a scale, nor would I care to weigh myself, even if I
did. I know that my waist is somewhere under 34", and approaching 32". Which
is really, honestly where I intend to stop.
But there's a problem: I've become
addicted to being thin, to losing weight. I really don't want to stop. Yes,
sometimes at 9 PM at night I'm practically going nuts, wanting some sweets. But
then I just have some berries & cream with a bit of Splenda on top, and the
craving goes away. Last night I ate a half pint of blueberries, which I did
without the littlest bit of regret, because there's only about 7 grams of carbs
in the whole lot of them. Not so bad. And certainly well within the tolerances
for my body - which can easily handle at least 50 to 60 grams of carbs a
day.
Furthermore, this diet seems to be
healthy for me. We already know that it's stabilized my moods. But it seems
that when I eat carb-rich meals, I get gassy. Now we all know that I have a
tendency to be gassy, but that tendency has faded with the imposition of the
low-carb diet. And if gas is a sign that my body isn't really digesting
something (or having trouble digesting it) then I can see no reason to start
eating carbs, and every reason to stay away from
them.
You can criticize my diet, if you
like, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And all this eating is
making me thin and healthy. So tell me it's a fad, if you like, but I'm
beginning to believe, at the dawn of the 21st century, we've figured out how to
feed ourselves.
Posted at 09:19 AM
Tue - March 9, 2004
The Regular Swing
Wherein our narrator enjoys a brief holiday on
the surface of the Sun.
Yes, I did get up at 4:15 AM this morning. Yes,
I did my yoga. And put in most of a full day of work. I'm such a good do-bee,
I'll probably get a gold star.
I
watched the mercury climb, climb, climb during the day. Nic and I ate lunch on
the veranda, and she said, "This weather - this is like Perth." I said, nah,
it's too humid. Not warm enough. Well I was hilariously wrong: the humidity's
only at 25%, but the mercury is getting up near to 40 degrees. (That's 102 for
the metrically-impaired. Or
thereabouts.)
Last week I was bitching
where had Summer gone? Well, it's back, and with a vengance. If it had been
like this on Mardi Gras, I really would have been pissed, because it would have
been perfect party weather, and I'd have been missing it. Now at least I get my
summer back. Yay! And I can go for a nice nighttime swim in the pool this
evening, just the thing to take the edge off.
Whee.
It's getting on towards evening
now (well, late arvo, at least) and I'm on the train back to Central Station
from Epping, typing away on my iBook, writing another blog entry. This feels
right, because this is the rhythm that I established when I first came to
Sydney, nearly five months ago. It just feels like I'm back into the regular
swing of things. Even though I woke up this morning in Adelaide, and took a
1200 km plane flight to get back here in time for work (arriving only an hour
late).
And perhaps that's the lesson
here: I do enjoy being a jet-setter, being invited hither and yon to dispense
advice, provide inspiration, But I really do need that home base to return to,
that place called home. I can't live out of a suitcase, at least, not
indefinitely. And maybe that means I truly am beginning to feel at
home.
Posted at 04:25 PM
Mon - March 8, 2004
The Information Field
Wherein something begins to dawn on our
narrator.
The big moment this morning was when the AirPort
in the Little Theatre went live, able to communicate with the wider internet.
The three of us with Macs (David Barda and Tom Kennedy with their G4s, me with
my cute little G3) immediately popped them open and began to check our email,
surf the web, etc. For the rest of the day, as the presenters talked, and
websites scrolled by, I popped open the iBook, went to the site on view,
bookmarked it in Safari, then closed the iBook again, until the next time. I
must have 20 or 30 new bookmarks, plus a whole host of business cards of folks
who will (I hope) be coming into AFTRS to lecture in the "Producing for
Interactive" course next month. Over all, a very successful
day.
Now, there's just few things going
on - an Announcement about South Australia and ABC having funding for mobile
gaming - but network went away promptly at 5 PM. Which really truly sucks
because I was just getting used to bathing in all the WiFi here and having the
constant high-speed connectivity. I got MySQL working on this puppy, tested the
PHP/Apache interfaces - also working - downloaded 2 episodes of "Red vs. Blue"
from my server in Sydney, and whipped together some web pages to show them off.
I didn't need them, after all, but it was nice to know they were there in case I
did.
I've fallen in love with
Rendevous, which is zero-configuration IP networking; the best of AppleTalk
lives again! And that means that my web sever on the iBook is available to
everyone else in the room, on the AirPort, just by typing "luna.local" into the
URL field of their browser. Very, very, *very*
nifty.
I am continually frustrated by
having these tantalizing glimpses of the information field - which I soak up
greedily when I have it - and which disappears again, just as I've begun to
regard it as perfectly normal. I incorporate it so quickly into my operational
ontology that it seems as though I'm already *there*. Only the rest of the
world hasn't quite caught up.
I want a
Google implant, so I can know everything. Potentially, at least. And we're
going to need a lot more *unmetered* broadband, and pervasive WiFi before I get
my wish.
Posted at 05:46 PM
Sun - March 7, 2004
Shaking Da Tree
Wherein our narrator experiences a moment of
musical synchronicity.
Tonight is the full moon, and it's rising high
above the crystal clear skies of Adelaide. Last night I thought the better of
trying to do my Lunar rituals in the grey, rainy weather of a Mardi Gras Sydney,
and took a chance that I'd actually perform it once I got down here. And this
evening, after having shopped for some bare-minimum preparations (no candles,
just some water and fruit for offerings) I set to work. My cell, on the 11th
floor of the Residence Building at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, looks out onto
the Botnanical Garden. And this evening, in the Botanical Garden, the
WOMADelaide concert series is drawing to a close. This is the famous concert
series started by Peter Gabriel and WOMAD records back in the mid-1990s. I
arguably went to the first WOMAD concert, in Golden Gate Park, back in...1993?
1994? (It all runs together now.) So the sounds of the concert are drifting up
into my window, and were doing so, even as I cast the circle and drew back the
veil between the worlds. It wasn't as though I needed to ignore the music;
indeed, WOMAD music is pagan in its spirit, and harmonizes quite well with the
Rites of the Moon. But what was special - very special - was that Youssun
N'Dour came onstage during the middle of my working (he's still playing now)
and, as I finished up, and drew the circle back into myself, I did so to the
strains of "Shaking the Tree".
You
really can't ask for more than that.
Blessed be!
Posted at 11:17 PM
The Cell
Wherein our narrator finds consistency
maintained.
I'm in the residence wing of the Royal Adelaide
Hospital. Which is really a series of monastic cinder-block cells, each
containing a cot-like bed with only one (!!!) pillow, and a common bathroom /
shower for the 15-or-so units on this wing of the floor. I could be in hospital
- except if I were, I'd at least have my own bathroom! Gah, I haven't shared a
bathroom in a public facility since I toured Japan with my sister, 16 years ago.
Well, I knew it was going to be like
this. I just don't know if I'm happy seeing my expectations so utterly
fulfilled.
Posted at 10:51 AM
There's No You in Qantas
Wherein our narrator enjoys some in-flight
entertainment.
There has never been an in-flight fatality on a
Qantas flight. This makes Qantas by far the safest major airline in the world.
In ranking, I think Qantas comes in 11th or 12th largest - right behind
Singapore, and maybe China Airlines. It is the monopoly carrier in Australia,
although it is now facing some competition from Virgin Blue (Richard Branson,
cherry picking once again) and has been forced to start up a low-cost carrier,
branded as JetStar, to carry passengers to inexpensive holiday destinations.
They may offer cheap flights, but no way that'll cut into their lucrative
profits in the intercity trade. At least, not
now.
I've flown Qantas before, on my
trip to Melbourne in November for SPAA. It was comfortable and efficient. Same
today. Although I struck out early, I didn't get to the airport till about 7:30
- for a flight that left at 8:15 AM. In the US, that would have meant I'd miss
my flight, what with security and all. And although the line at the check-in
counter was quite long, it moved quickly, so by 7:45 I was on my way to the
gate, and onto the plane.
So not only
is this a cheap flight, courtesy FUTUREPROOF, I'm in the cheap seats. There are
29 rows on this 737-800, and I'm sitting in row 28. This is only marginally
alleviated by the fact across the isle from me is David Barda, a man-about-town
in Sydney, publisher of IF Magazine (which is all about Australian cinema
production) and someone who is growing to be more-than-an-acquaintance,, if only
because we're seeing each other so
often.
One good thing: the in-flight
entertainment included an episode of the Australian sitcom "Kath & Kim,"
which everyone has been telling me is the best comedy on Australian TV. Having
now seen an episode, I believe it. Headphones on, I was probably making quite a
scene of myself, because I was laughing out loud (and quite loud) at a couple of
points. Cardonnay, anyone? (It's French. The "haich" is silent.) It's full
of Australianisms - and so I was informed - but I'm getting enough of a grasp of
the culture here (after all, I do work with filmmakers and creatives who are
supposed to be keen observers of Australian culture) that I could get at least
most of the jokes. It's actually a universal comedy, in the wicked strain of
"Absolutely Fabulous" - something that works well in the UK and Australia, but
would probably be perceived as too cruel in America. Except, of course, for
"The Simpsons," which somehow manages to break every rule of expectations, and
succeeds, perhaps because of that. Or did. "The Simpsons," after thirteen
seasons, is beginning to look more like a dissociative diatribe written by a
bunch of pre-psychotic media studies
academics.
Ah, the captain is on the
PA, announcing that it's 16 degrees in Adelaide - brrr, I brought light clothes,
because it *was* 34 in Adelaide last week - and telling us we've gone below
10,000 feet, on our way into land. Soon they'll ask me to turn the iBook off.
Ah. There is is. And so to sleep.
Posted at 09:52 AM
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Published On: Aug 04, 2004 08:35 PM
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