http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/blog/B1091156306 All rights reserved. Wed, 04 Aug 2004 20:35:02 +1000 Wed, 04 Aug 2004 20:35:02 +1000 iBlog 1.3.9 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.

]]> Wed, 04 Aug 2004 20:34:39 +1000 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.

]]> Sun, 11 Jul 2004 10:50:00 +1000 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.

]]> Wed, 23 Jun 2004 16:37:47 +1000 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.

]]> Thu, 22 Apr 2004 17:05:03 +1000 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.

]]> Wed, 14 Apr 2004 17:36:25 +1000 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.

]]> Mon, 05 Apr 2004 16:53:29 +1200 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.

]]> Sun, 04 Apr 2004 03:37:50 +1200 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.

]]> Thu, 25 Mar 2004 09:00:55 +1100 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...

]]> Tue, 16 Mar 2004 16:58:24 +1100 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.

]]> Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:19:15 +1100 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.

]]> Tue, 09 Mar 2004 16:25:11 +1100 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.

]]> Mon, 08 Mar 2004 17:46:04 +1100 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!

]]> Sun, 07 Mar 2004 23:17:09 +1100 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.

]]> Sun, 07 Mar 2004 10:51:23 +1100 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.

]]> Sun, 07 Mar 2004 09:52:17 +1100