buggery.org

(Recycled from the House of Love)

(There’d been a news item the night before about a T-Rex skeleton for sale on ebay)

I’m in a forest clearing with Annie McW., who is telling me that she has discovered that the rich volcanic soil in this area makes a delicious and nourishing drink when mixed with water. I’m not sure what to make of this idea but she mixes some dirt and water together in a glass and gives it to me to try.

It’s a bit gritty and murky but it does taste good. Annie explains that she’s planning to market the stuff and she wants me to come up with a marketing campaign. I’m not sure how to go about marketing dirt-mixed-with-water to a sophisticated global beverage market, so I decide to study Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies to find the answer.

Meanwhile, Annie’s son Johti, who I learn has been appointed head of excavations for this new venture, arrives with disturbing news: while digging up the raw material for our assault on the beverage industry, he has unearthed a complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton right in the middle of the part of the forest where the best drinking dirt is located. We head off to investigate.

Sure enough, it’s a T-Rex, the giant, majestic creature perfectly preserved in the loose soil. We hold an emergency meeting of the Dirt Marketing Corporation (Annie, Jo and I) on T-Rex’s tail to discuss the implications of the find.

It’s clear we have to keep this quiet: if word gets out we’ll be inundated with archaeologists and palaeontologists and every other kind of do-gooder-ologists and our plans to dominate the black gritty beverage market will be ruined.

Jo, who in spite of his young age is an explosives expert, suggests blowing the skeleton up. It’s not a bad idea and we consider it for a while, but decide against it just as the first jeepload of palaeontologists arrives.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Picture it: Australia, 2000. Two queer boys, in love, in a tiny, two-man tent, pitched under a Banksia tree by a long stretch of white sandy beach. So far, so good. Now picture howling winds and driving rain. For a week.

Quite surprisingly, we didn’t even come close to strangling one another. I’ve seen plenty of relationships go down the gurgler under far less pressure than this, so I reckon we’ve done alright.

Those of you reading this overseas probably have a pretty utopian view of an Australian summer: you sit huddled around your single bar radiator with your slippers on and imagine broad white beaches, tall bronzed lifeguards, ice cold beer in the fridge and sizzling shrimp on the barbie. Well, summer this year hasn’t quite lived up to your expectations: we’re not quite huddled over the radiator, but the lifeguards are inside drinking cocoa and waiting for the rain to let up.

I suppose it’s global climate change at work, thanks very much to American capitalism, which has given us aerosol cheese-in-a-can, air-conditioned dog kennels, vaginal deodorants and the Exxon Valdez. I hope you’re all enjoying your 21st-Century lifestyles up there in Boise Hollywood, cos down here we’re wallowing in all the delightful consequences of decades of chloroflourocarbon pollution.

But of course every hole in the ozone layer has a silver lining: despite the fact that it’s been bucketing down rain since about November I’ve managed to get sunburned twice. Welcome to the 21st century, where we can burn tan in half the time it took in the old days. And when it rains, we read.

Back in our little tent at Sandon, despite the cramped conditions, the suboptimal weather and a narrowly-averted crisis involving almost running out of swizzle sticks right in the middle of cocktail hour, we managed to make the most of it. Brent, being Canadian, is accustomed to foul weather, hiking, roughing it and all that butch stuff. I, being me, am accustomed to eating good food and sipping on a cocktail while leafing through whatever reading matter is at hand. Brent comes fully equipped with a range of camping equipment – made entirely of lightweight Kevlar™ – which folds down to approximately the size of a handkerchief; I come equipped with a hat and 23 hardcover books.

While our 0.27 micron microfibre snow-resistant, UV-resistant, moose-resistant, double-gusseted, flame-retardant Kevlarâ„¢ home was buffeted by hurricane Betty, Brent flew about, madly hammering stakes back into the sand and lashing the tarp to anything that looked like it might resist the storm, while I sipped on a Pimms and read. As is my democratic right. We live in a free country, after all.

Well, sort of. Today I hear that the forces of right and might have been hard at work in Melbourne, where they have swooped on Polyester Books (one of my favourite bookstores) and seized just about every book in the store except the Women’s WeeklyTM Cookbook. How can this happen in a liberal democracy like Australia? Surely, along with those long languid summers and crystal clear seas, Australia is a fabulously mature and progressive country. I wish it were true. The sad truth is that we have one of the most oppressive regimes of censorship this side of Afghanistan, and lately it’s been getting worse, not better.

Take, for example, the recent news that the censors have banned the acclaimed French film Romance. Although it has been shown uncut in the US, the UK, Turkey and even Ireland, it cannot now be shown here. It can be seen by 16-year-olds in some Scandinavian countries, but it cannot be seen by 40-year-olds here. The Executive Director of the Melbourne International Film Festival says it’s “one of the most fascinating and articulate films to have dealt with female sexuality in recent times” but that cuts no dice with our censors. Why? According to Herald film critic Paul Byrnes, the film deals with female sexuality with gravity and intelligence. There’s a scene where a woman is (consensually) tied up with rope. There’s a scene of sexual assault.

As Byrnes points out, in this country it’s a simple matter to buy all the porno trash films you like, which “don’t take sex seriously,” but the censors won’t let adults watch a film which treats the matter of sex in an adult way.

It’d be laughable if it wasn’t such an insult to every adult Australian.

Coming back to this news after reading David Marr’s book (see over the fold for a mini-review) I can’t say I was surprised. While the xtians in this country aren’t nearly so rabid and outspoken as their north American cousins, they do wield an unreasonable amount of power. As he explains in the introduction:

I was writing about censorship, wondering why people still bothered, when it came to me that what’s at stake here is heaven. The enemies of books and magazines, of sex and music and drugs and television, of drink and dancing are Christians. And what they’re campaigning about is not this life but the next. … Ours is a very secular country but the churches remain the most resilient, most respected and best-connected lobby in the nation. Sin is their business. Heaven is their aim. Government is their partner. There’s a certain instinctive generosity in wanting to keep all us sinners on the train, but there’s also a bullying indifference here to those who count on living only one life – this one.

Free speech doesn’t exist in this country. Whether it’s subcultural books like those stocked by Polyester or films dealing maturely with sex, honesty loses out in favour of a culture of prohibition on knowledge. Whether its books, magazines, movies or the Internet, the government will do anything to restict what you can see and appease the Cardinals. The philistines win again. But like our little tent against the wind and rain, censorship can only resist the truth for so long. Eventually you have to pack up your little tent and feel the rain on your face.

It’s surprisingly refreshing.
(more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

I’m in a prison. My friend John D. is in there with me, I don’t know why but it seems to be a rather well-appointed and comfortable prison. John’s doing an interpretive dance on the theme of imprisonment. He dances divinely, sublimely, defying gravity and employing various props — the cell is well stocked with objets d’art — in a truly breathtaking performance.

A member of the audience [Audience? In prison? It's a dream, remember] takes one of the props and won’t give it back, spoiling the dance. I have to wrestle this object away from the spoiler and return it to John.

The dance is over and I’m having sex with another prisoner (not John, worse luck) — I’ll spare you the details. Afterwards, he walks through the automatic glass doors [!] of the prison, out into the snow. I can’t follow him, and he can’t return. I assume he’ll freeze to death out there.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

I’m not sure whether or not to be disappointed. I’m certainly not surprised.

The Y2K disaster turned out to be something of an anti-climax. The fireworks in Sydney were spectacular (I hear— I was on the dance floor at midnight) but the much-anticipated fireworks that were supposed to come with the end of civilisation-as-we-loathed-it never materialised. Apparently the are having a little trouble in Gambia, which the news bulletins promise is in West Africa, but apart from that it’s a fizzer. Whatever. I was on the dance floor at the time, and that’s the main thing.

But at least one Y2K promise has come true, and the House of Love now has a convenient slot for me to insert unfocused, poorly-thought-out, self-obsessed ramblings about whatever happens to take my fancy: yes, it’s a journal. Sorry if you were expecting more.

Now, any idiot can write a journal; the art is in getting someone to read it.  Before the invention of the web, all but a very very few journals were kept utterly for the author’s eyes only, and now that more people are putting their late-night thoughts into HTML, we are realising what a blessing that was. The web is groaning under the strain of crappy journals and my only prayer today is that I’m not starting another one.  What I hope to avoid here is what I think is the failing of many – pointless, self-obsessed rambling about what I had for dinner or how the guy on the bus pissed me off or how I have nothing to write that day.  I am no Samuel Pepys but I’ll try to do what good journals do – weave together my personal experiences with the big events that are taking place around me. I figured January 2000 was as propitious a time as any to start on such a foolhardy venture, so here we are.

I will not write every day – indeed, I will probably not write every week. Some of the content will be shamelessly personal, some less so. All of it will be my opinion and if you find you tend to agree with what I’ve said on other pages on this site, I invite you to check in from time to time. Some entries will be very short; others will be lengthy. There will be an index by subject, which seems to me to be a key thing lacking from every other online journal I’ve seen (although in some cases every entry would be indexed under ‘pointless self-obsessed rambling’). There will be running narratives, and in-jokes, to reward close readers, too.

I think I might have mentioned that I was on a dance floor at midnight on New Year’s Eve. I had an excellent time in the company of dear friends – human, chemical and botanical. And as it’s now close to midnight on January 2, I must be trashed. I deserve a round of applause for getting this far.