SPEWIN

ON the blog list right - I've got a link alled "simon".

Actually its to planet CAT where you can follow links to Simon Rumble, Stacy and other cool geeks.

I was just reading stacy's blog (I lurk quietly everwhere) and my blood started to boil. Check out:

http://catdev.cat.org.au/node/28

Fucking HELL WHY am I writing a fucking slow thesis -when some sketch clubs need bobms dropped on them and all those fucking slow old toxic fossils with their shit ugly paintings get blown to bits!!!!!!!!!!

The Australia government has just passed new terrorist laws so If I don't post here for a couple of weeks - then get worried and someone please tell my mum and anna.

Apparently we aren't even meant to know about them - but a few wild things are letting people know anyway. Check out.

http://www.chiefminister.act.gov.au/docs/B05PG201_v281.pdf

Download it, print it out, read memorise and eat it. This kind of info is illegal I kid you not.

The other thing is that people aren't meant to tell anyone when they get detained for interogation.

Some Chileans have been saying that this reminds them of 9-11. By that I mean 9-11-73 When there was a military coup d'etat and Pinochet took over. About 10,000 people got arrested and tortured or disappeared......... the lucky ones left the country and got shit jobs as toilet cleaners - but they managed to tell their stories at least.

this kind of shit is scary. CHileans also told me that the ONLY chance of NOT disappearing (ie being tortured to deaht and you body being dumped) when you got arrested was to SCREAM your name, your next of kin or whoever and I AM BEING ARRESTED at the top of your voice. Otherwise you'd vanish.

SOMeone I know had a scarily simliar experience in Paris about 20 years ago at the Nanterre PRefecture. If you want to see hell on the outside check it out. They've thrown in a miasma of pig shit just to scare motorists from 50 paces. One day, arranging a visa, she was detained a bit too long, and some officios suggested that she follow them down a looooooooong corridor. She mentioned she had a radio interview in half an hour with someone who'd be very supcious if she hadn't returned form the prefecture....... and they let her go.

You think I'm exaggerating? Did you know that 300 algerians got thrown in the SEINE in the middle of Paris in 1961? They were peaceful protestors who got rounded up and shot. A tiny memorial got put up 40 years later on the very spot. It got ripped off the wall eventually, coz lots of people don't like remembering how terrible history can be........

Australians are pretty dumb and passive. I count myself amongst this as on friday night I sat in a restaurant and ate the worst kebab I have ever seen smelt or tasted in my entire life. Not a peep did I say. I imagine that I and others would be like the sheep in Solzehnitzens Gulag Archipelago - just going quietly into hell.

Fuck a duck
how depressing.
I don't want to grow up or be an adult any more
I want to run away and read lots of books and paint rocks.

But, I won't (much)
and continue with my slow stupid minute processes of writing and living.

Stacy's story of fucked up artists abusing a model, (and exposing someone's naked flesh to a miasma of toxic mineral turps - whihc will penetrate the pores of her skin and CAN cause lymphoma - just because these prune mouthed rich old north shore fucks are too stingy to spend an extra $5 on a less toxic alternative - is ABUSE - and these people deserve a punch in the face - or act least osmeone to put 10 grams of paracetamol in their fucking cups of lanchoo tea.........) or other stories of teachers showing fucking cut up cadaver sketches of womens bodies in order to teach life drawing, remind me that even the most benign and anachronistic enterprise has its fair share of bloodshed.

SOmehow - I'll turn my rage into 80,000 words of coherent cutting analysis, and writing in a way that can create a critical discourse that will enable stupid necrophilliacal shits to go fuck themselves instead of fucking over other people

I will, I must, I will.

GRRRRRRRR!!!!! I'm too angry - better stop writing and go for a walk and bark amongst the dogs in sydney park

very bright orange

I LOOOOVE dayglo!!!!

I've had another fit of extreme writers block. Trying to make my nice critico fictive paper into something earnest about ethnography.
Failed
got distracted by a phone call. Spent an hour doing boring admin crap for the Coop where I live
shit
decided to wast time further by updating my blog
heaven!

does anyone ever read this?

I live by the sword of the artlife, and tend to flip onto jebnis, sandys and shortleftlegs quite often. Then if texta can type, or I wanna read about a phd with a social life i read emmas, or want to get lost in something QUITE ODD - then look at whimsy...... or check out jebni's nice storehouse of good writing...... My friend Simon bumble - really interesting and funny guy - posts really short comments on beer and photos! Mind you he's not very bookish - so maybe the 1000 word rant ain't quite his style.

oh god I'm name dropping

I was SOOOO sick for 10 days and had to drag myself over to the north shore TWICE to teach fucking rich old middle class brats how to paint. Acutally one of the classes was kinda cool and happy - and just happy to paint. the other class was terminal. Extremely grumpy and precious and no energy and tedious as hell. WHY DO IT IF IT DON't MAKE YOU HAPPY????? Ask the english I guess. fucking hell, and entire culture of grumps.

fuck
I hope I never see wynyard station ever again. I hope I don't cross the bridge for at least 6months. Its weird over there.

And very very beige.

while I was REALLY sick - I had an old school friend come to visit sydney for the first time in 7 years. I hadn't seen her for 2 years - or even spoken to her.

I had to clean my room.
In the process I started a fire - which I just managed to jump on - 20cms from my computer
fucking hell
it was one of those weeks.
I also was trying to polish a paper into a piece of brilliance
I had one friend come and visit from bathurst. he had an opening, whihc was a bit of a fizzler.
He wanted to chat.
he's insomnious like me.
nice chat though

then my friend from home.
I guess really good friends are OK to have around when you feel ratshit - coz they've seen you at your worst. We both lived through the evil sadistic nun in year two who PASHED US BOTH ON OUR MOUTHS. I kid you not. Our first ever conversation aged 8, was discussing this very perplexing event. And look how I've turned out.

I barely had the energy for any sort of conversation, let alone to tidy my room and make nice dinners. I should have been in bed. Instead, I robed up as mary, took a hipflask of scotch and downed some sudafeds and dragged her out to manjam.
she thought some of the acts were 'cheap'.
my brain is still trying to process this information.

oh god
i can't write at all
I'm going to have a shower and stroll in the sunshine and go look at some ART.
then I'm going off to a coupla openings - at artspace and then the free cognac fest that is 4A.

woohoo!

Tomorrow I've got a funeral to go to for the second woman last week I know to die of BREAST cancer. Then I'll meet my supervisor and errr..... try to learn something.

Snot Much at All

Personally I have been hit by a hurricane of Leucocytes. Blood and green pus oozing form a number of orifices. Delirious when I leave the house. Its amazing how illness sorts out ones priorities.

This week:
First ambition: try not to end up in hosptial with bronchitis.
My lung capacity is around 75% or maximum so I reckon I'm OK. Still - that extra 25% seemes to come in jhandy for stuff like ...errr.. maintining a continuous strema of thought.
Still coughing up green goo. Still slurping fenungreek. If it don't clear by friday i'll go see a doctor and try the bacteroclear option.

Second Ambition: Try to get my voice back by friday
I'm meant to give a paper! Hah! on what? ohhhh fucking hell.

this is all boring, but a great excuse to avoid, art openings concerts and social life. Pity I'm too sick to return all those books I borrowed which suddenly got recalled - I'd rather pay $6.00 than sit on another bus.

On a dismal note: I read the follwin story about New Orleans. I still can't beleive what has happened there........... check it out. Writing like this also reminds me why I don't miss newspapers or TV.
cheers

mayhem

Notes From Inside New Orleans
by Jordan FlahertyFriday, September 2, 2005

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. Itraveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to ahelicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants toexamine the attitude of federal and state officialstowards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise youto visit one of the refugee camps.In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freewaynear Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90%black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trashbehind metal barricades, under an unforgivingsun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard overthem. When a bus would come through, itwould stop at a random spot, state police would open agap in one of the barricades, and peoplewould rush for the bus, with no information givenabout where the bus was going. Once inside (wewere told) evacuees would be told where the bus wastaking them - Baton Rouge, Houston,Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told thatif you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (forexample), even people with family and a place to stayin Baton Rouge would not be allowed to getout of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. Youhad no choice but to go to the shelter inArkansas. If you had people willing to come to NewOrleans to pick you up, they could not comewithin 17 miles of the camp.I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Crossworkers, Salvation Army workers, NationalGuard, and state police, and although they werefriendly, no one could give me any details on whenbuses would arrive, how many, where they would go to,or any other information. I spoke to theseveral teams of journalists nearby, and asked if anyof them had been able to get any informationfrom any federal or state officials on any of thesequestions, and all of them, from Australian tv to localFox affiliates complained of an unorganized,non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me “assomeone who’s been here in this camp for two days, theonly information I can give you is this: getout by nightfall. You don’t want to be here atnight.”There was also no visible attempt by any of thoserunning the camp to set up any sort of transparentand consistent system, for instance a line to get onbuses, a way to register contact information or findfamily members, special needs services for childrenand infirm, phone services, treatment forpossible disease exposure, nor even a single trashcan.To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, itsimportant to look at New Orleans itself.For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you havemissed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. Aplace with a culture and energy unlike anywhere elsein the world. A 70% African-American citywhere resistance to white supremacy has supported agenerous, subversive and unique culture ofvivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, tosecondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, JazzFunerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, NewOrleans is a place of art and music anddance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhereelse in the world.It is a city of kindness and hospitality, wherewalking down the block can take two hours because youstop and talk to someone on every porch, and where acommunity pulls together when someone is inneed. It is a city of extended families and socialnetworks filling the gaps left by city, state and federalgovernments that have abdicated their responsibilityfor the public welfare. It is a city where someoneyou walk past on the street not only asks how you are,they wait for an answer.It is also a city of exploitation and segregation andfear. The city of New Orleans has a population ofjust over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders thisyear, most of them centered on just a few,overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have beenquoted as saying that they don’t need tosearch out the perpetrators, because usually a fewdays after a shooting, the attacker is shot inrevenge.There is an atmosphere of intense hostility anddistrust between much of Black New Orleans and theN.O. Police Department. In recent months, officershave been accused of everything from drugrunning to corruption to theft. In separateincidents, two New Orleans police officers were recentlycharged with rape (while in uniform), and there havebeen several high profile police killings ofunarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas,which has inspired ongoing weekly protestsfor several months.The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% ofblack ninth graders will not graduate in four years.Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child’seducation and ranks 48th in the country for lowestteacher salaries. The equivalent of more than twoclassrooms of young people drop out of Louisianaschools every day and about 50,000 students are absentfrom school on any given day. Far toomany young black men from New Orleans end up enslavedin Angola Prison, a former slaveplantation where inmates still do manual farm labor,and over 90% of inmates eventually die in theprison. It is a city where industry has left, andmost remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient,insecure jobs in the service economy.Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisianapolitics. This disaster is one that wasconstructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable sparkigniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. Fromthe neighborhoods left most at risk, to thetreatment of the refugees to the the media portrayalof the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with thetragedies of this week our political leaders havedefined a new level of incompetence. As hurricaneKatrina approached, our Governor urged us to“Pray the hurricane down” to a level two. Trapped ina building two days after the hurricane, wetuned our battery-operated radio into local radio andtv stations, hoping for vital news, and were toldthat our governor had called for a day of prayer. Asrumors and panic began to rule, they was nosource of solid dependable information. Tuesdaynight, politicians and reporters said the water levelwould rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians andmedia only made it worse.While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhereto go and no way to get there were leftbehind. Adding salt to the wound, the local andnational media have spent the last week demonizingthose left behind. As someone that loves New Orleansand the people in it, this is the part of thistragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts medeeply.No sane person should classify someone who takes foodfrom indefinitely closed stores in adesperate, starving city as a “looter,” but that'sjust what the media did over and over again. Sheriffsand politicians talked of having troops protect storesinstead of perform rescue operations.Images of New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged populationwere transformed into black, out-of-control,criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store thatwill clearly be insured against loss is a greater crimethan the governmental neglect and incompetence thatdid billions of dollars of damage anddestroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, justas the eighties focus on “welfare queens” and“super-predators” obscured the simultaneous and muchlarger crimes of the Savings and Loanscams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people ofNew Orleans are being used as a scapegoatto cover up much larger crimes.City, state and national politicians are the realcriminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its beenwidely known the danger faced by flooding to NewOrleans. The flood of 1927, which, like thisweek’s events, was more about politics and racism thanany kind of natural disaster, illustratedexactly the danger faced. Yet government officialshave consistently refused to spend the money toprotect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city. WhileFEMA and others warned of the urgent impendingdanger to New Orleans and put forward proposals forfunding to reinforce and protect the city, theBush administration, in every year since 2001, has cutor refused to fund New Orleans flood control,and ignored scientists warnings of increasedhurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as thedangers rose with the floodlines, the lack ofcoordinated response dramatized vividly the callousdisregard of our elected leaders.The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape theelections of both a US President and aGovernor, and ushered in the southern populistpolitics of Huey Long.In the coming months, billions of dollars will likelyflood into New Orleans. This money can either bespent to usher in a “New Deal” for the city, withpublic investment, creation of stable union jobs, newschools, cultural programs and housing restoration, orthe city can be “rebuilt and revitalized” to ashell of its former self, with newer hotels, morecasinos, and with chain stores and theme parksreplacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centersand corner jazz clubs.Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by ahurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment,deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damagefrom this pre-Katrina hurricane will takebillions to repair.Now that the money is flowing in, and the world’s eyesare focused on Katrina, its vital thatprogressive-minded people take this opportunity tofight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans isa special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.

Dayglo and disarray

Thinking abut Taussig - I went and bought my first piece of serious danger wear from GOLO today. Its an orange/black polar. It is snug (quite unlike the snugness of a warm grey coat as Walter Benjamin would have put it). I'm going to embellish it for Paris in the winter. Its so grey there - I wanna look like a dayglo pink haired furry freak.
Anway - I reckon the orange & black fleecy will go down a treat for the Forbes bash tomorrow. I was thinking of goin as the virign mary - but didn't want to have bare feet - and was scared of freezing out on the harboar - or tripping over my robes. And then I decided to join in with the cheerleaders - and considered going as Elvis. Thing is - my neighbours bright yellow bedazzled jumpsuit whihc would go down a treat with my elvis sunnies - but then it'd leave my chest exposed (never a good thing for an athsmatic in August).
I reckon I wanna feel secure safe and happy - and that's just what danger wear can do. Plus I'll match the cheerleaders costume of orange and black.
"We're Sexy
We're Cute
We're Radical to Boot"
Shit I'd better learn my lines before tomorrow. I've got a blond wig - so maybe I'll go femme?

In the meantime - I'm avoiding my anger and avoiding my (lover's) bed. she's drunk again (and what would you do on a monday afternoon, huh?). I felt serene for about 15 minute after she bumbled into my room. Then felt enraged. Then thought I'd better leave. the wall came up. No emotions displayed. Cool calm collected right? One of the disadvantages of living in a commune is that there is always someone around who wants to drink or smoke the day away in company. It is NOT a good place for chemical recovery. We've got a quite a few alcoholics, but mercifully the junkies have faded away. Living with stoners has made me understand the time wasting, irrational, ridiculous & obscene policies of marijuana prohibition. Stoners are FUCKING ANNOYING and INSANELY BORING to be around. Imagine a drug that makes people become fascinated by television. No wonder people banned it - just to encourage some discretion amongst the breakfast billie brigade.......... AM I being irrationally intolerant? Yes. Actually the T&S is surprisingly ok with substances weedal, its just the bottle thats a killer. Thurday, tipsy, friday drunk alone (she calls it painting), saturday OK, sunday ok, Monday not OK. Tuesday she works, Wednesday I want to go to an opening & if i ask her i risk having to drag home someone acting like a hyperactive 3 year old with gross motor skill failure. fun.

While I'm having a whinge - I'll throw in the OTHER highlight of the week whihc is the "reality check" that the office of community housing are dong on my premises this friday afternoon. Yes I do have a uni seminar and wuold rather suck sperm but I'll be there speaking the double speak. A real reality check would invlve me punching the bureaucrat in the face, instread of WASTING EIGHT HOURS OF MY LIFE trying to find some fucking documents that can pretend that the artists coop where I live - is actually a management consultants wet dream.

These people want us to produce: a Strategic plan, Strategic Policies, Strategic Procedures and show minutes illustrating the development and implementation of all three, PLUS a Risk Management plan, risk Management Policies, risk Management Procedures and show minutes illustrating the development and implementation of all three, PLUS an Asset Management plan, Asset Management Policies, Asset Management Procedures and show minutes illustrating the development and implementation of all three, PLUS a financial management plan, financial management Policies, financial management Procedures and show minutes illustrating the development and implementation of all three. I have summarised this a bit and left out the bullshit for responsive maintenance versus long term maintenance, and our accountability to key stakeholders. I'm trying to stick to the latter for which I'm officially responsible as treasurer, but each time I leave the house and venture into the courtyard - the few neighbours not swilling booze, smoking joints or having drug/alcohol induced fits of delusion - come an harrass me about all the other shit. "Have you read the document?" I ask. "err, no" they say.

Now the bitter pill of general yen in this case is that TEN YEARS AGO I had a very brief stint in the public service, I learnt the jargon and recited it in a classic fit of hysterical mimesis - upon each pissy memorandum I could devise. I HATED WORKING IN AN OFFICE. I hated the double speak - the anti service imperative of administration. I loathed it wiht all my soul - and tried to get the sack by turning up to work under the influence of a number of chemicals. Eventually when I realised I was harming myself more than anyone else, I left. I decided I would rather DUMPSTER DIVE, and BEG than work in such an envirnoment. It is all about LYING for a living. So I studied art & end of story until I moved into affordeable housing for artists - a rare and precious beast (see Squatting and the recovering catholic for my account at the time). GRadually the Dearetment of housing have been putting on the screws. We won't show tem the studio, and will promise sincerly to stop running any activities that aren't part of the core service delivery charter of the department of housing guidleine (like I'd READ THAt SHT! come ON!!!). And exress my delight to be made aware of the current benchmakrs for the Key performance indicators which they have used to assess our eligiblity for registration. LIKE AS IF i'D FUCKING GIVE A FUCKING TOSS!!!!!

For the past 2 years - I have-done 8 hours a week - every week - worth of volunteer work for the Housing Coop. I see it as a fair enough trade off for paying $50 per week for a big room and a studio in inner city sydney. I am willing to translate and engage with the stupid language - as I am freakishly (and contrary to 99.999% of public housing tenants) - fluent in it. right now - the coop has about 10 OK to good volunteers living here - which is better than at any time in the past 6 years I've lived here - and yet - this s no where near enough. The DOH model of cooperative management- requires that we wuld each spend 5-10 hours on ADMINISTRATION ALONE. So my economic rationalist brain - is starting to do the calculations.......... and I'd rather teach for a whole day (or model for 2 days) - and earn about $300 and pay rent in some commerical shitbox - than live with this shit. I guess that's their intention. Drive out the non white trash - who are able and interested to take a managment/advocacy/contesting role within coops - and leave the stupid, braindead, drugfucked cruisers - who'll just cling on - till they're cast out and forced to find another liferaft. You think I sound cynical? 6 years of living around "Newtown artists" kind of does that to a person. Actually the artists here aren't the problem - its more the friends of friends who've moved in for the cheap rent and access to the fun filled shopping delights of king street. groan. or the local cafes. groan again. takers. unspeakably boring.

anyway - this is a long winded way of saying that I am quite likely to lose my home next year. ho hum! welcome back to the real world I guess.

Cultural Congoscetti

Cultural Congoscetti

Its a jungle out there.

I cut and paste this photo coz i thought it would match the entry I'm about to write. the mispell is correct. I'm playing on cognoscetti, the congo, glamorous intellectuals and culture. It should be suitable opening for todays topic -which is about when I went and heard Michael Taussig giving a talk.


Regular Readers BE WARNED. this blog entry is going to have huge amounts of gratuitous name dropping. I'm trying to gain some currency in the bloghood as one of those cool people that do fun stuff. See pikky above. It's about as real as my tan.

OK so thursday night I rocked up to UTS to hear Taussig talk. He wrote a couple of amazing books on what I'd call 'radical anthopology'. One of my favourite lecturers at art school got me onto taussig after I raved about Alphonso Lingis. My friend Golden Boy bought "the devil and commodity fetishism in South America" I bought "Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man". Form followed content. It blew my mind. I got stuck for years on the chapter about "there is something in between the sweaty arse of him that rides and the labouring back of him that is ridden". This was fleshy wild writing. there was also a deep moral imperative in the book. He started of with the history of Roger Casement and his report on the British atrocities in darkest peru. Crikey. quick segue to Conrad. Think of Apocalypse now. double it. No triple it. Every society has its monsters. Every culture has its nightmares. One of Taussigs themes in Shamanism - was exploring the use of extremely powerful hallucinogens in healing by the descendants of the nightmare. the role of indians as bearers of colonisers evil, and bearers of magic is really interesting. tausig wrote about Yage - a form of DMT which is also derived from indigenous Australian plants (acacias). I wouldn't dream of touching it ever - but its one of those esoteric topics that used to go down well at certain parties about 10 years ago. While writing honours - I became entranced with Mimesis and Alterity - and it became on of those handy tomes (like Walter Benjamin's passagewerken) that I'd have next to me whenever I wrote - so I could dip in and out. Taussigs writing helped me really undertstand not only critical ethnography - but mimesis and performing of mimetic practices as a strategy of resitance and counter resistance. through taussig I could fnally read Irigaray.

So the chance the hear the man live - and see him in the flesh was pretty exciting. It was up there with Judith Butler and Liz Grosz (Liz is talking for free at usyd next thursday!!!!) . So thursday, Arrived early. Tried to persuade my old lecturer to come - but he had familial committments.

I walked in with Jebni and Sandy (this is the gratuitous reference that denotes my status in the blogocracy).
I wanted to sit up close and do some drawing so I moved down the front. there were no left hand sided lecture seats.Damn.

Michael Taussig was clearly one of those spunky young 70's groovy intellectuals. And he still holds his body like a man sure of his sex appeal. Like Jaques Derrida, he wears his white hair as if it was a bleached warhol wig. He also wore tight denim jeans. They could have been acid washed - but I think they were the deliberate noughties reference. Tight brown leather skin and a deep fuscia raw silk body shirt. Eyes barely opened as he placed and removed small red plastic rimmed reading specs during the perfomrance. Not many men in their 60's can ooze sex with such aplomb during a speaking engagement. Except some actors. And Taussig's delivery was much more of a performance than anything else. Sheer brilliance. This is why we go to hear someone speak. to see the oracle - or to see the performance of deep textual charisma. I had difficulty drawing him. I kind of got some of the gestures, and loking at my drawings I can SMELL him. Smell the room, smell my excitement.

Oh. enough gushing - I'll try to discuss the ideas like eany decent girl should.

I think the talk was called "the colour of the Sacred". And he was playing ficto critical performance, and I feel bad for forgetting my voice recorder. He sounded like my friend Ryan, with umms and aaahs and sighs - and the mind darting in different places, and he presented a series of impressions and made lots of 'in jokes'. Oh fuck - 'in jokes' in lectures are scary. They remind me of improvised jazz sets - when someone finishes their solo - and its a game between the players and the audience to know when they have finished their impro or not. who can clap at the right time? Oh the scary smugness of getting it right. In public. Its a bit like any ejaculation. Embarrassing and a bit smelly.

But I'll forgive taussig. coz of the shirt and the uhm and ahs and the vagueness which convey a certain level of humility. And because he used PHOTOCOPIES ON ACETATE!!! You know - like overheads! no powerpoint! how vintage! Abel told me that she and her classmates use powerpoint for their first year undergraduate talks. Oh dear. Its time has come and gone so fast.

The content of his talk was hard to pin down - because he gave fledgling forays into bioethics and the possibilities of new bodies, new experiences in changing climates. Using the phrase 'an anthropology of atmosphere'. He threw in a few other Deleuzian plays for good measure and then went back to everyone's favourite grandads of modernism. Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin, and their relationship to and invocations of colour and how it is experienced. He was talking my language.

The main focus of the talk was on Malinowski - and photographs of him among the Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski is known as 'the father of modern anthropology". I read some of his stuff and liked it - coz his observations on gift economies were used by Mauss and others as a form of reflexive ethnography - to explore the irrational and anachronistic at the heart of industrial societes. Malinowski is also famous for 'inventing' participant observation' - or a form of close living with the subjects (or objects?) of study .........

Taussig had a couple of images of Malinowski in his impeccable white and pith helmets - among these dark bodies, and he spoke at lenght of the (irrational) preoccupation of malinowski and 'the west' with creating a source of authority that was colourless and ascribing colour to primitives, children and women. He also picked some great photo with the caption "Ethnographer with a man wearing a wig" and used it to epxlore the irrationallity of ethnogrpahy and secondary texts associated with it. Taussigs descriptions of the "tantalising tumescent posture of malinowski" (in his whites and bald head) against the "fading dark skin of the man of sorcery" was delightful.

In exploring the facets of face painting, as opposed to painting of faces Taussig tore more at the tensions at the heart of the Eruopcentric project of representations. He also discussed Malinowskiss diaries and their separations form (and appparent mimicking of) his field records.

OVerall it was a nice meditation onto ethnography and critical ethnography as well as colour and the tyrrany of beige. Afterwards - I saw one of my old supervisors and was persuaded to have a beer and go to a pizza party at the home of 'one of my classmates' (if you can call fellow phD students classmates). Suddenly I found myself in one of those cool academic parties I'd dreamt of ever since reading "whos afraid of virginia woolf" . Ohh the joy of great minds numbing their brains with alchohol and blithering wildly! Taussig was there, but mercifully not at the centre of any coteries of adoring fans (the sure sign that this was a selective engagement). I tried not to gush and joined in the babble, but I felt like I reckon my friends son did when he was 5 and first saw that chad morgan performing the dog cry from "the sheik of scrubby creek". do I need any more words than this?

I'd asked a question at the end of the talk. usually in any talk I make a point of asking the most dumb question possible. this time I was beaten to the post by a clinical anthoropologist exploring physiotherapists experiences of auras in their patients, and an audience member who nearly got out the words "collective unconsioussness" before Taussig supplied a quick segue off somewhere. Even extremely cool anthropologists who've done lots of drugs and been around a lot of very weird people have their zones of evident discomfort.

smarty mayhem wanted to pop in something about Louis Kahn and the the St. Petersberg theosophists and their belief that all beings were made from light - stating that the precise moment of modernisms chomophobia taking hold was accompanied by an avant garde tradition of chromophilia - and in the 20th c - a weirdly scientised form of it too........

but I didn't - coz I hate posy questions that sound more like statements (Oh1 look how careful I am!). SO I bored him with it at the party and he smiled and said "yeah, I want some duck".

this was less cool than his response to my question in the lecture, which was about dayglo. Coz I was so blown away by his descriptions of the crazy coloured soldiers in Paris that I thought he must have noticed all the dayglo that has proliferated in (blue collar) workwear.

"Yeah.....wow...well.... I hadn't thought about that at all, really, ahhh nooo..... but err.."and then he went off into a nice discussion of anoline dyes and indigo and lots of stuff that I knew already (but he didn't know that) aobut the homogeneity of contemporary pigments - especially in clothes - and how it was the heterogeneity of pre industrial pigemnts that made a lot of older paintings far more interesting than curent ones. this I already knew - but it was nice to hear him say it.
He didn't really answer my question - he explained the social reaons for the Dayglo on workmen as being probably for safety reasons. bugger. I ahd hoped for somehting more trippy - along the line sof some sort of Maussian take - on the need to mark certain types of bodies.

Anyway - at the party - Pru the host was able to engage a little more. She is the workwear fashion queen (her thesis is on airline uniforms) - and she was happy to launch into an explanation of the different fabrics and dyes used and the cuts and designs...... My real query is about this not being fashion - and how it became demarcated as non fashion - and then how it then circulates in a curiously porous relationship to clothing retail - like Two dollar shops ad even lowes - so its a sort of sub fashion - that is operating as far more than as 'functionalist' dangerwear - but denotative of a whole heap of other socialised feelings aobut colour, conformity and power. This proved a opular party topic alll round so I reckon it was a winner as far as questions go. top marks for requisite Aussie quirkiness.

I've decided to start writing up some of my 'field notes' for the research on artist models and the life class. I've been reading lots of critical ethnogrpahy and apparently that is the done thing. this may also motivate me to starrt writing that paper I need to have done on er... 3 weeks. shit.

look at http://www.lifemodels.blogspot.com/ for more of my rants in a different area. My life is trifurcating and I can see a future when I spend MY WHOLE LIFE updating blogs. Its a GREAT way to avoid my relationship dramas. Right now I'm getting torched on my art reviews. this is compelling and demoralising at once.

Confessions of a Recovering Catholic

Lick a Virgin

What a Drag!

I just stuck up another pikkie from my latest round of dressups (jennicam here we come). Maybe I should start uisng these in my personals ads....

I did something very very very naughty on saturday night. PLEASE DON"T TELL THE NUNS! I just saw the video - and I kind of realise why none of the bledisloe cup watchers in the pub would meet my eye. I was dressed as the virgin mary (and I meand the full caboodle) - with mayonnaise smeared around my mouth.

It was all in aid of a film project with wife and neighbours. One of the neighbours was filmed waking up in a pool of blood and having a horrible vision - of me, the virgin mary, giving a blow job to some guy on the street - who was actually another neighbour cross dressing. We shot the whole thing in one take on King Street. And you can hear a car accident happening in the background......

This is what happens when I'm politically confused. I dragged Anna to the relationship equality rally on saturday arvo. I was dressed in gingham, meringue and corset. (I really shuld have worn more makeup) Anna Looked like "Animal" from the muppets. We are married
(if you can call our freaky cult wedding a marriage) and we have definitely undertaken a considerable amount of legal paperwork in both our contries of origin to gain legal recognition of our relationship, but we didnt' want to be aligned with the straight queers.

And looking at the CSAHHH or CAAHH, or whatever stupidly long acronym they have (I just followed the link from someones email) website - I kind of cringed.........
check out:

Objectives: The objectives of the Sydney event are to contribute to the national day of action for marriage equality by conducting an event which will assertively and confidently affirm the value of comitted, loving LGBTIQ relationships and communicate that value to the wider community in order to advance the campaign for relationship equality.
What is it? :

• A celebration (of what???? institutionalised homophobia? that's why I'm on the streets - if I wanted to celebrate I'd stay in bed)
  
• Fun (we did our best but most of the marchers were about as interesting as the festival of light at a mardis gras parade)
  
• Inclusive - open to all who support our objectives (dodgy working there)
  
• Looking forward, but not ignorant of the history of August 13 (people in management positions actually should be have their fingers wired up outside of the office)
  
• Apolitical, but not ignorant or unappreciative of those who support our objectives politically
• (HELLO!!!!!!! wot tha fuck?????? what exactly does it mean when the two major POLITICAL parties LEGISLATE against couples gaining STATE recognition for their relationships?
  

What it is not :

• A protest rally (could have fooled me)
  
• A partisan political event (unlike the ALP closet event one in the morning)
  
• An event purely for the gay community, or seen to be only for that community (Great so Lesbians were allowed to attend - thanks guys)
  
• An event to promote causes other than relationship equality (What's that old saying from the Nazi holocaust - "first they came for the pinkos but I wasn't a pinko, then they came for the queers, but I wasn't queer, then they came for the jews, but I wasn't jewish but then they came for me and there was no one left to defend me")

I am SO glad I didn't look at this dross unitl after the rally - because If I had read it I would have stayed at home like so many other fair minded queers (and friends).

And I would have missed out on Kerryn Phelp's great speech, and Kerry Nettle's, and Clover Moores, and that other scary girl who said that her friend just killed himself that week coz of homophobia (and I was wondering if she was exaggerating just a bit - and maybe she could have encouraged him to think less of the struggle and more of psychiatric intervention?????)

ahem I digress. those speeches were good.

Abel Seaman and the other guy with the bow tie didn't wow me. (I had my head bowed - I mean I'm not sure If I'm into giving anyone the right or obligation to kill others - and the question of human rights is very very abstract in such cases.............. I'd rather hear from a prison inmate) I liked Tanya Pliberseks speech - but why is she in a the same party as a bunch of right wing catholic arseholes? (and that is what half of the ALP consists of). If changing things from the inside works - then why don't queers all go to the nunnery???? Why don't we talk more about old queers, poor queers, refugee queers, prison queers - rather than the weirdly aspirational mirroring Kel&Kath queers of AME. How fucked would you be if you were an Afghan lesbian on Nauru???? Well not very. why don't these rally talk more about Fucking????

But it was good to see the queeruptors. and REALLY good - to walk down Okker street on a satterday arvo yelling "we're Here, we're queer, we're not going shopping!!!" But - I felt very very awkward for promoting the rally to queercores Glen and Liz - when it was so obviously a pink picket fence affair. As Liz said "I CAN marry my partner but I'm against it, so why am I here?" (or words to that effect - sorry if I've misquoted you). L&G are very actively involved in constructing communities that are about resisting and challenging the nuclear family model of emotional control and ownership - and so asking for their solidarity on the right for some queers to have access to some benefits of state recognition is a big ask..........

I'm still confused by the changes in australian society. I realise that 2 'straight' relationships I had in the past (first boyfriend was a vietnamese boat person - sponsored into a country town) and last major affair was with a permanent refugee for 5 years ( not the 3 of a TPV). I was able to gain some benefits of state recognition of my homosexual relationship - but only on condition that it conform or heavily dissemble a conformity to an extremely rigid and financially controlled version of emotional custodianship.

Its one that we are still suffering from today. tonight actually, right now as I write its 1am. I've been awake since 7am, and I'm tired, but If I don't write I'll cry, and eat more biscuits. Actually my stomach is hollow. I exhausted myself riding my bicycle yesterday - after spending most of the night before sobbing and reading until 4am. You'd htink my life would be challening enough wihtout this extra shit. things ain't good on the saphhic side right now.

There's a very nasty epidemic in the dyke community that begins with A and ends with M. There are a few others related to eating disorders (why are lesbians either rake thin or fucking fat?) but the piss thing is a worry. I was attracted to Abel initially because she was the first woman I'd seen in a dyke bar who had a healthy looking (muscular, yet curvaceous) body. Ohhoo hum, pity about my own chemical anaesthetisa at the time so I missed the other glaring problem. and then I found she had pretty much intrjected her mothers own anorexic standards of parisian sveltine. Shit.

After we received the first Temporary permanent residency - one of our closest friends said "I hope this means you guys can start to have a normal relationship". you know - independant, not dependant, co-dependant - or without the ridiculous power imbalance that the initial sponsorhip process thrust apon us. But old habits die hard - and bad habits that prop up old habits die much harder. Abel's passivity was reinforced by alcohol. Mayhem cultivates a mask of immovable passivity to hide her growing panic. I sit in my room at night gnawing, and my eyes flood with tears. If I sleep my stomach jolts me awake with searing pain. time to see that stomach surgeon again. Maybe. I know what this feels like. 11 years ago, when I looked 10 years older than I was. The same bodily symptoms. No libido (so she blames me and drinks more). Hair turning grey (It turned black again after the last time). Knife weilding stomach churns. the So I drift off more remote and more controlling and things just get more fucked. Drunk she is from hell. Angry at me, and I can't respond. this feels old, so fucking old. Something deeply atavistic from centuries of Irish peasantry takes over within me. I cower and hunch my back against her insults "Ta Geule! tu me Fais Chiant! Tu m'emmerde! Ta Geule!" I press my lips into a thin saintly silence, and feel my pink bits turn white with rage. Old fucking fierce rage. Hot tears burn my eyes, and I swallow and cower and my stomach hollows out to hold more of it in. No wonder I have gall stones. No wonder the Irish diaspora have been such fierce and feral colonisers. Centuries of drunks and martyrish frigid females let loose in english colonies. I blame the ancestors - because I did not grow up in an alcoholic household and wonder where the hell I learnt to act like this? to put up wth this shit? to cower and cringe and take all this in? Meanwhile she uses the studio as an excuse, and produces muddy excesses of her own sodden kingdom of the self. you think I'm being savage? Its myself I hate. Because every relationship I've had has been like this. Except for the nymph and I hated her for it. I am my own worst enemy. Is it because of my childhood? Yes. Mine was fucked, but how long can I keep blaming my parents? I've had 15 years of my own life, and I'd like to think that 4 years of therapy sorted some of the old shit out.

so its time to take stock and declare myself a fuckup and a failure and that its time to seek change. big change. Probably not thought field therapy or liposuction - or even permanent hair removal (eeeuuuuw! - imagine a life with NO BUMFLUFF?)

I'm going to become one of those Lesbians that advertise for a NS, ND, NA, BSOH in personals ads. This will take some time. and in the meantime?

I have given up a lot of hope. I don't think I or our relationship in its current state can challenge Abel to become less of an alcoholic. It's not only her stubborn french mind. She let herself go from one safe situation of permanent adolescence to another. she says I project my maternal desires onto her as a child/object - but she doesn't see how infantile and adolescent she is towards me (and most people around) - which isn't helped by being a migrant. I don't think our relationship could ever really work in australia. she'd have to go home and grow out of adolescence there. And all the good influence she has had on me, no giving me physical and emotional security is being eroded with every fucking drink she has (that I notice at least). So I don't know. we have a great house, and ostensibly a pretty good lifestyle here in Australia - and we do fun stuff like crazy films and art exhibitions, but at what fucking cost?

What I've written here is airing my dirty laundry and I'm sorry for the blush that crosses any readers who know and love us well - but I'm sick of being silent and stoic for the sake of people sidealised version of what our relatinship looks like from the outside. I am bigger, louder, more confident, more domineering from the outside - but inside she's the one holding the cards. she is the one who can and probably will leave - whenever she gets sick of art school, sick of australia or sick of me not being what she wants. I won't leave her - because I am loyal and loving and probably incredibly lazy ...... (says she with her 3 careers). I woulnd't wnat to inflict this relatniohsip onto children and I don't want to continue to inflict it on myself.

Its such a pity - becasue the work f our relationship the life work - has been incredible. Yesterday I interviewed a 90 years old aquaintance - who knows anna and I as models. He's a WW2 veteran, a bit sexist, conservative in s many ways - and yet he quite clearly made statements giving tacit understanding and support of our relationship. the muslims at our local Epicerie have also done the same. Despite john howard and co. there are many many spaces outside the gay ghetto where we are acknolwedged and welcomed as queers in the community. And its very very hard to do this sort of work outside of a seemingly stable, visible (and reasuringly hermetic) relatioship. single queers are a threat - because of the weird public/private roles of sexuality and seduction - and the threat of our desire to others within heteronormativity........... Most people are like my mum and school firends when I was 19. "How do you know if you're bisexual if you havne't slept with a woman?" "You just want to be trendy". The single lesbian is not a secual being. We are eunuchs - sad single spinsters waiting for something to happen to us.......... Oh god, Its enough to drive one to drink.

Can't Face the office

Can't Face The Office

I had this idea to do this as a massive billboard - just to show how much bureacrats suck

but then i realised how much of my Phd is presently unwritten

shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My brain at the moment is made from prridge.

I've had a completely useless day.
so useless I even painted my nails.
fuck o fuck

I'm stuck in pink trakkies and pink uggies with mint frost nail polish.

Still using pencil on the brows - post schapelle shaving.

I don't think I know who I am anymore..........

I've been interviewing models and teachers for the tome that will be.
PArt of me thinks it must be exciting. I keep telling people "God! this is so exciting!" and they say "Wow! that's so exciting - are you going to publish a book on this?"

"Yes" I say. "thats why I've enrolled at uni - so I can be paid to write the book I want to write".

Oh fuck. What book?

I've set myself a target of 2 papers by the end of the year. I have to have one as a work in progress in 4 weeks.

what was it on?

as an undergrad - a 5000 word essay felt like a piece of piss. No. thats a lie. It never did.
Well it hasn't changed.
bugger.

And I don't want to read anything, or think hard about stuff.
or put words together.
And interviewing people is really hard.

Most people watch television and trat interview situations like some sort of talk show. So it ends up as a cat and mouse and I'm meant to be Jana Wendt.
fuck.
I'm like andrew denton at best (bespectacled with a flat head)

Certainly not cut out for interview stuff - If people don't want to talk about things, why should I make them do it?

and am I somehow being 'wrong' if I dont' ask the same poeple the same questions?

and whats the point?

why don't i just write my memoirs? (coz its so boring I haven't even written it yet).

I'm thinking maybe focus groups could work.

I hate using the phone, but not many models use the internet.

anyway I thought I'd write some paper on the "paradoxical' role of textiles in the practice sof nude modelling. so far I haven't found anything even slightly interesting on this score at all.

some models use a robe - and are quite attached to their robes while others couldn't give a shit. Models are also pretty blase about the hair thing........... some shave, some don't, mostl people trat it as a non issue.

I need to read "journal of mundane behaviours" for inspiration. The every day is important. small things can reveal big issues.....

I try to think of Bourdieu - but he has become way too suspicially trendy of late. If read 3 aspirational academic blogs whihch quote the big Pierre.
Jesus christ.

Big Pierre - knew of the link between academia and activism - because he was an activist AND an academic. Like he hung around lecture theatres AND rallies - and so waas entitled to discuss both.

ONe thing that makes me turn silent as I swallow my spew is listening to my esteemed colleagues ernestly discuss their own critical conscioussness as acticist academics.
what?
Hah!
I ain't NEVER seen any of them at any sort of political protest (rally, meeting, online petition, offline petition or anything that don't look good on a CV), and I dont think any of them are members of the NTEU - and I'm not sure if any of them have even spent extended tim on the dole!
Critiques of 'the left' from the safety of the sandstone tower are pretty abstract - and pretty irrelevant to actual activists........ or the right wing fuckers that fuck things up.

I'm blithering. I'll stop talking about others.

Academia is not activism. Its a nice little career path for clever wordsmiths.
Its beats the fuck out of life modelling - at least for social prestige.
It certainly beats the fuck out of the Public Service (for sustainable delusions of intellectual autonomy - tho some people don't even have that as students.......so wots the point?)

I think there is a way that a person can be a socially conscious academic, and even an activist academic. but it does not involve writing eloquent essays on social ills and how to think of them in more rhizomatic terms.

It involves forming networks with other marginalised interlopers (like women and the great WC)

It means - getting involved in campaigns for preserving the autonomy and working conditions of white collar workers insteadof sucking corporate cock.


It also involves teaching in a manner that is inclusive, transparent and equips people with the intellectual tools to CHALLENGE academia.
This may involve teaching outside of the academy - and or doing unpaid work for community or activist groups.

It aslo involves doing research - that is just not about translating (and exploiting) the experiences and knowledges of reasearch subjects - in whihc to build our own expertise in an innovative research area, but err.........

.....yeah - well this is the bit I'm having trouble with.

I try not to forget where I come from, and how I was treated as a subservient, mute, casual employee, and to realise that what seperates from from my former fragile economic existance is a very thin veil of fate. (It's called an APA award).

I earned my stripes as a model by working HARD (30 hour weeks) for 3 years, and by being involved in a models union - where we all tried to negotiate better conditions. So I am i a privileged position to write as a model and to present a dialogue with (rahter than an interrogation of) other models.

I think the informal knoweldges and experiences of models are fascinating and interesting - and should be included in academic discourses about observation, voyeurism, objectification, obscenity - because they are related to actual experiences.........

I know from experience that many artists models do interrogate their own practice and experiences - I remember the conversations had on the phone, on the dias- in coffee breaks at institutions - and they (arguably) surpassed a lot of the blather about objectification and "the gaze" that I read in art journals and tomes on feminist theory.

But its hard - in a critical milieu -where what I'm tyring to write about - opens up as a big fat lacuna. The life class in the twentieth century barely exists. The lives of models exist - but not descriptions of what they do or did in the studio/classroom/podium.

Someone - was also describing life drawings - as essentially pointless. They aren't interesting to look at, work from or to frame and sell. (and where people do that -they invariable look kitsch). Most artists and almost all students throw out most if not all their life drawings.
So why bother?

For me - the pointlessness is an attraction. the ephemera of every day culturla activities - dancing, singing, (karaoke), coversation, drawing - or any activities that don't generate some sort of commodifiable product - are sites of resistance ....... so why then do I want to pick apart such a site - and leave it open for the vultures of information management????

Extreme Sports Gazing

I had visions at the start of the year of a nice ordered life.. the miracle of scoring a medical certificate to study part time would banish my weekly migraines and I'd be able to do 4 hours light academic reading a day - plus 2-3 days per week productive writing, and then 2-3 days doing nice oil paintings in my studio.

Well that was overly optimistic of course.

Up until about 3 weeks ago I was spending about 10-20 hours per week on the verge or in the grip of serotonin overload - and in foetal doona crawl.(I kid you not - You know all that time that most people spend watching TV, going to the cinema, going to pubs, hanging out on the phone, or hanging out? I spend it alone in bed, ears plugged, body drugged feeling like total hell......)

This is so tedious and unpleasant I don't even want to think about it and can't bear to write about it - and the main result of this is that when I don't feel like hacking my head off wiht an axe - I rush around madly trying to catch up on the life I've missed. this probably sets more migraines off ....... oh god .........................

Anyway In the rushing time I've realised that I do veer crazily between writing or painting. Alhtough I do 3 hours life drawing EVERY week, (plus the odd excusion ot the park to draw dogs) it takes DAYS for me to settle into painting mode - and then I'm in hell world - kinda. When I do tiny bits of painting I feel almost physically sick that I can't do more - so I'm grumpy. Then the first day - I'm happily mixing stuff up and splashing colour on about 5-10 different canvases (ADHD is a real plus for some occupations) and floating along........and feeling more alive than I ahve in weeks. From here I can either go into serious obsessive mode where i forget how to speak and eat like an oaf and abandon all bodily hygeine ......... (pretty much like most students when cranking out essays/papers/chapters - you eat/sleep/shit according to the routine of the writing......)......

or into the other state that I'm in now. Every brush mark sucks. Dribble a bit here. Decide to give up. then work on another bit. Then get really involved. Then realise its all crap. then dribble a bit somewhere else. keep plodding on. This is very similar to writing I guess. There are the fiery brilliant fierce flowing days and then the s ......l......o.......w....... stodgy hell of blank brainitis. Hell on wheels - and both are necessary.

I thought that I'm my slow studio days - I could escape the studio and go back to words, or on weeks/days of extreme intellectual block I could run away and splash about with paint.

I had a bad writing block late last year, and couldn't paitn either.
Now I frantically want to do both.
I pick up a brush and words flod my head.
I pick up a book and clours swim in front of me.

The sludge time can't really be escaped - I have to plough through it whatever medium I'm in, its like waiting for water to boil......... or I should think of something more poetic and alchemical.

Abel has just cooked a seafood feast of smoked mackeral and scampi. Neighbours have brought champaigne (OK Ozzie sparkling White). Laughter drifts up form downstairs. I want to join them. I also want to write. to find the words to trace the odd feelings I've had today.

Eyes open. PAinting. Not seeing what I'm painting. Then I see what I'm painting. I feel sick. think of Butler's words. Why do these images haunt me? why do I paint them? Aren't I aesthetisizing them? fetishizing them. The rubens transcription, gloriously glory as it is is a reminder - I am not the first. My metier is gounded in a horrible ambivalence - and Rubens, Goya, Rembrandt, Turner, Monet, Picasso - all knew it (I sound like such a wanker comparing myself to the canon of old masters - but I try to qualify this - I read the paintings of old dead men - like I read the words of philosophers and novelists - their works are a record of communication in a language that I am part of - so of course I see myself reflected in them.......). SO look at Rubens. Have ccourage. think of Picasso and Guernica. Mixup more beige, kmore grey. Laugh at Serge Gainsbourgh's version of "Mon Legionnaire" (that man has a the voice of the butter in LAst Tango in PAris). Keep ploughin on. Drag in some raw umber. No burnt umber. I want pink. No pink. I'm painting monsters.

After this. I crash into bed. Temples throbbing as I pore over some boring computer catalogue. swithc the brain off. Sleep. After leaving the stduio, my back aches, my hands ache, my head throbs. I'm exhausted. this is life.

Extreme Sports Abject

In "The Object Stares Back" James Elkins included reproductions of the images that horrified Bataille- showing a women in late 19th century china being flayed alive - and he wrote that only a masochist would stare at such images longer than a few moments.

Hands up.

My copy of Elkins book is paperback on cheap newsprint so the grainy photos look even grainier - which kind of makes them compelling - because what they depict is so gruesome - and unbelievable - a person turning into meat ............

I've just had breakfast (taro bun and coffee) - why am I writing this?

I experienced similar levels of fascinated horror in Hanoi. I was buying yellow plastic handled knives (highly recommended - they have a round broad blade but are sharp and great for uncoordinated left handers) at the markets and looked across and saw what looked like red glazed piglets (Like ducks in the windows of Chinese BBQ restaurants) but weren't. I keep staring, mouth agape into the red fried features of what I usually 'read' as the expressive face of a sentient being - until a moped nearly ran me over and I had to move on.

Here I'm exposing and admitting my own very narrow cultural specificity of affective responses. A dead duck laquered on a plate doesn't worry me, nor does seing the feathered head of a plucked chicken on sale at the french markets. I even think I'm going to a hungi on a weekend. I do find dead fish uncanny but it doesn't put me off judging them as meat (I want FIRM CLEAR EYES please!). the dog thing is recent too. Somehow when I hit 30 - I became a thirty something lesbian, with a thickening waist and a penchant for pooches. Weird eh?

Anyway - this is slightly off track - I was wanting to write about really full on images - largely inspired by Judith Butler's talk on Saturday. I was thinking of my own perversely ex-catholic moral outrage which delights in certain forms of pain. I remember 15 years ago seeing the images of Lucia Vergara - a chilean activist who had been tortured to death. These images circulated in that very catholic country and amongst its exiles - in slim gestetnered (now there's a word from the seventies) volumes filled with revolutionary tracts. Such things are a very very narrow departure from freaky religious paintings of martyrs - St. Sebastian with the arrows, that virgin with her tits on a plate, and that bloody guru of torture - Jesus . Such images are compelling and in drawing the fascinated stare - are meant to inspire a flurry of totally inarticulable feelings: fascination, curiosity, horror, terror, even desire. (Looking at transgressive/forbidden stuff is always a little bit sexy). This weird mixture of emotions - and I'm thinking of the blood rushing through me as a kid especially - are framed by and channeled through the instructive text which almost always accompanies such images. Catholic matyrs - got viewed in a church with the background of some ranting priest. "Hell and fire awaits you if you don't repent! Others have suffered so you can be free!" et cetera. My kneecaps still haven't recovered from splinters and chillblains from morning mass at subzero temperatures so I never really bought the whole freedom bit.......... but seriously politically aware and passionate - horrible images of torture and brutality incite my righteous rage - and fuel our continued weary battles against the behemoth of sanctioned state shit that is err....... the world? , well the news anyway.

I don't often receive the news. I threw out the telly a few years ago, and only sporadicaly listen to the radio. As much as I love the feel of newsprint on my fingers as my bleary eyes take in the daily fodder - I have tried to eschew the Herald - largely because it is filled with mindnumbing soul destroying toxic garbage. I read daily the headlines of a number of international papers when I check my email and supplement this by questions to my avidly news consuming mother once a week. Mum is a current affairs junkie (Mercifully only ABC, SBS and Fairfax) but still has trouble remembering the major news stories of the week. She cites early alzheimers - but I reckon its overload. Stupidity is contagious - so I try to limit my own contact........

Anyway this is a long winded way of saying that it was only recently that I copped a newspaper image of the scary human images from Abu Ghraib. (in January this year) Yes I knew of the torture (the net, word of mouth), yes I'd seen some of the images (largely in street and 'political' art/interventions), but this was the first time -I'd been confronted wiht the banality of a 4cm square photo on newsprint - surrounded by text and ads for flat screen TV's. Golly. Where was the instructive uplifting sermon? The picture was used to indicate an article on Private England and scary whatsiface- the posing torturers who'd been charged, trialled and convicted for their offences. The picture showed the two of them grinning luridly over the carrion mass of their victims, and I enjoyed gloating into the ..... damn - why dont' they have dots on newsprint images anymore?

Anyway I took my gloating onto the net and did a google search - so I could enjoy gloating into the pixels - trying to locate the minute crevices where pure evil could be located. In his sunglasses? In her haircut? In their green gloved thumbs giving the "Going Great!" salute? In their desert grey camouflage pants? In their boots? In the crevices of their teeth? their nostrils? I spent half a day - downloading all the abu-ghraib images I could, zooming in close and peering intently at these ghouls of grinning torturers. Evil has a face! and it smiles for the camera! How convenient for me! I went further and did B&W prints of some of the images - and blew them up on the photocopier. Do I seem insane? I took the photocopied images into my studio and then gridded up canvases - to paint copies of the photocopies - all in my most hated colours of beige, teal, grey. Because I am a painter - I can admit to such freaky indulgence. a philosopher would have more difficulty. Visual artists by deinifition are mean to immerse ourselves in visual phenomena and if something we look at provokes a strong reaction then all the more reason to keep looking at it. The subdued colour range of the paintings give them a tasteful aspect - which when juxtaposed with some suitably ironic advertising slogans of deathtech inc. (General Electric: Imagination at Work) provided an attractive and compelling cultural product. I know this coz one got sold in a gallery early this year.

Feeling Queazy? Evil is Banal isn't it? Even my lucid rage can be subsumed into a cultural production industry, the products of my horror can be commodified and sold. Rest assured - I didn't spend the sales money on lollies - it all went to charity - something worthy - and the buyer could feel assured at their aquisition of an image which would display their own care, concern and cutlural connossiership. You gotta love capitalism - all affective paths smoothed by continuous ooze of lucre - we can all buy, sell, be bought. If it weren't for the big K - those images wouldn't have been taken with a handy digicam, or posted in an ad-bannered email message back home to the family PC, or taken out and blasted across Newsweek to boost its sales, or stuck on the edition of the herald which I then bought - and I wouldn't have seen them. Just to implicate myself further in the murky waters of beige - if a prominent commerical gallery ahdnn't been doing a charity show of political plaquards - thus giving me a chance to stick my fairly unknwon work on its walls - then my image wouldn't have been resolved so quickly - or even if it had - it would be sitting in my studio, gathering dust with the other paintings.

As for the other paintings - they are still in my studio, as unfinished acrylic sketches on canvas. I haven't brought myself to finish them - althought I've got some shows coming up and need more work. But they are ....... erky - and I wonder what type of freak would want to buy this sort of image? some one out to assuage their own feelings of guilt? someone who likes the beige and thinks it will match their couch? I had a plan of showing them with some trasnciptions of Rubens "Massacre of the Innocents" and Goya's etchings on war - but then the Rubens trasciription took over my life and my studio and is now this behemoth resembling a kind of Peter Booth scene in Flouro Pink. It kind of drowns out anything near it. Oh God.

disgust

I have just had a week with the flu.
Its a great moment to dwell on all things gross like the snot that pulled form my nose that made me feel like Arlene's Board Game "Gooey Loui". A veritbale snake of blu-tack right on George Street too. Yum Yum

Now that you're feeling queasy non francophones can brace yourselves for the translated version of that long poem in frenhc that I posted a few weeks ago. Its by Lautreamont aka Isador Ducasse aka the umbrella dude from the surrealists (they got the umbrella sewing machine line from him).
Really, I haven't read anything weider than that poem. - so check out this bit below.

I am filthy
Fleas gnaw at me.
When pigs see me, they vomit.
The scabs and scars of leprosy scale my skin, covered in a yellowing pus.
I know not the water of rivers or the dew of clouds
On my neck, an enormous fungal growth spreads its stalky clusters like mushrooms in compost,
Resting on a makeshift seat, I haven't moved in four centuries.
My feet have taken root in the ground and form a sort of living vegetaion running up to my stocmach.
Composed of ignoble parasites this growth is not quite vegetable, but is no longer flesh.
And yet my heart beats.
But how wold it beat if not for the bare nourishment of the pestilential fumes and exhalations of my cadaver? (I can no longer call it a body)
Under my left armpit a family of toads has taken up residence.
Each time one of them moves it tickles me.
Take care one of them doesn't escape.
They can use their mouth to scratch at the inside of your ear and enter your brain.
Under my right armpit a chameleon, in perpetual chase of the toads, awaits, so as not to die of hunger. Everyone needs to live.
When they tire of their games with each other these creatures can find nothing better than to annoy me and suck the delicate grease which covers my scabs. I'm getting used to it.
An evil snake has devoured my penis and occupies its place.
This infamous creature has made me a eunuch.
Oh! If only I could have defended myself with my paralysed arms!
But I rather fear they have turned into logs.
It is evident that blood no longer comes to show its redness in these parts.
Two little hedgehogs refusing to grow have taken the inside of my testicles
And thrown them to a dog, which didn't refuse.
They have lodged themselves within the carefully washed skin of my scrotum.
My anus has been intercepted by a crab.
Encouraged by my inertia it guards the entrance with its pincers and causes me quite a bit of pain!
Two man of war jelly fish, traversing the seas, were drawn by a hope that was not in vain.
They regarded attentively the two fleshy parts which form the human posterior and then firmly attached themselves to the convex orbs.
form is now being crushed by the constant pressure of suction and the two morsels of flesh have almost entirely dissappeared.
Meanwhile two monsters have emerged from the region of viscosity that is equalled in colour, fomr and ferocity.
Don't speak of my spine since it is a double edged sword.
You want to know how it found itself verticaly implanted in my kidneys?
Myself I don't recall clearly.............

bon nuit!

Queer Eyes

Its my brothers birthday today.

I'd hoped to write somehting deep and prfound to mark the occasion. But I've had the flue. I've pulled an astonishing amount of snot out of my head in the past week. I'd hoped not to move this weekend but yesterday dragged my sorry arse and snotty nose out of bed to go into the city. I'd booked a ticket ages ago to go hear Judith Butler at Angel Place. So in the middle of Sydney - around the corner from the grey corporate blandness of martin place - I walked into an oasis of dykedom. Wow! bookish lesbians everywhere! plus those nice slender bespectacled men one sees at Gleebooks, or in gender studies seminars. Eye candy, eye candy gaydar felt happy as I chatted with various people from now, from before, from later on.....

It is important to make such facile observations - coz Judith Butler is famous for describing sexual categories in terms of iterability (no not iritability - but what could be culturally 'read'), and perfomrativity. Butler's theories threw out the essentialist leanings of idenity politics and ascribed queerness to a function of Gaydars. (How to pass, how not to pass etc.). I'm being atrociously facile - because I'm trying to situate her theories in the context of a social history which I'm going to try to succinctly outline below.

About 15 years ago when I had just started uni, lesbians were a distinct subset on the fringes of the women's colective. There were a few glorious tall types like Catriona McKenzie who sailed above everyones as a supremely cool editor of Tharunka. She didn't need any coming out groups, women's collectives and refused any positions of token lesbian. Then there were the other official lesbians, clad in lavender headscarves, or lots of denim, or like one chick in "women and philosophy" clad in black jeans,white sandshoes, femininst t-shirts and thick glasses, and shyly peculating if or lecturer was gay or not. the women's collective had sepcial books for members who htought they might be coming out. Like Radclyffe Hall's "the well of loneliness". Lesbians were a subset of feminism, another minority, who needed dental dams. No wonder I was straight.

Then suddenly in the mid nineties something exciting happened. women's collectives were boosted by the famous third wave of feminism, and people started talking about "Queer". Queer involved Dykes, Poofs and Trannys. Queers used slang to neame themselves. Queers wore better clothes than most student activists (I *still* see girls with long hair, loose t-shirts and long indian skirts coming out of the SRC), listened to better music and had a lot more fun. It seemed that queer came out of or merged with the rave scene. this was different to big post rat parties which were largely a lycra gayboy phenomenon (everyone looked like a flouro condom full of wallnuts). People wore more vintage clothes, flares, ties, tie dyed underwear, tie died hair, crazy bodiy peircings and lots of fluff. Boys wore dresses, and dykes wore lipstick. Oh blush and twitter my twat was on fire! I was a straight settled science student and a serious long haired loose lavender t-shirted, indian skirted capital f feminist so I saw most of this from the sidelines. Damn waste I reckon but, like many of the 'straight' womens' collective members -I did eventually cut my hair and come out of the closet - confused and nervous as a debutant around so many fishnets and fake fur coats.

So Butler's seminal (love that word) writings on performativity, passing and postsubjective philosophy -published in the early 1990's, became idenitified with a zeitgeist where queerness, campness, performing, play, ambiguity and general raunchiness was hip as hell. Her own provocations, within the rubrics of (post) femininst philosophy and queer theory, have largely obscured some of the more subtle and politically imperative work she has done on subjectivity, race and imperialism. I knew of Butler, knew the key words, but only really read her closely when writing my honours these 2 years ago. There's a line, from the intro of Bodies that Matter, whihc I've added to my Walter Benjamin Aphorisms as a kind of daily meditation, often repeated to myself. "the task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual fialure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to re articulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intellgibility"

OK it probably comes across as a bit convoluted and maybe the cut and paste has made her sound like Vladimir Illyich - (wot is to be done? the task must be!). Sorry Judith, sorry everyone else. What I love in this quote is her sincerity, and the imperative tone to reclaiming what is excluded, derided, ridiculed as socially abject as a source of power. This is very derridean (there is power in the margins, power in the frame, power in the hands of the working man..... ershitt that didn't quite work did it?) And really it is about much more than claiming some sort of transgressive power to trashy queens and sad lesbian eunuchs, but of emphasising the potency of those who are excluded by dominant social discourses- and showing that dominant social disocurses are constructed in order to contain and exclude those beings it describes as abject. I like this because of an inherent democracy at its heart. It opens its arms to dags, fashion failures, social losers and other dregs of humanity amongst which i so often count myself (Many years in dole queues - kinda keeps a person humble and grumpy). I'll try to talk more about this later.

According to pop-academic folklore one of Butler's most provocative statements was her refusal to identify as a lesbian, lesbian theorist. Apparently she insisted on retaining a stated idenity as 'fluid' even into such times where such a term implied sleazy freaks on exstacy trying to pull owmen into threeseomes with their girlfriends......... So I was intrigued to finally see her in the flesh. Would she be ubercool? glamourous? seductive and smooth as sandra bernhardt?, or as ernestm compelling and contained (and poorly coiffured) as Liz Grosz?

On Saturday, Butler sprited up the stairs to the podium, a slight figure clad in black. She struck me looking like on of the petite but dignified grey haired dykes I've seen at the Paris Lesbian Film Festivals, or occasionally in Sydney. Pants, Boots, some sort of top. Appropriately neutered for a philosopher, not femme nor butch, and with the requisite floppy but neat short grey hair. Not fashionable, but not out of fashion. It's wrong of me to pay so much attention to describing the clothes and phsyical appearance of a woman, instead of her words, but I've had access to the words and I was there largely to see how they melded with the physical presence of the writer. Also to my sheer delight (tragic drooling dyke), everything in her body language is iterably , panty wettingly sapphic. Sheer bliss! the leaning on the table, quizzical hand gestures, coy smirks, wry humour, occasional strides forwards and backwards. this was more salient in the questions and answers with the audience, but sustained throughout her paper. A physical presence that is slightly masculine, almost mimicking the classic charismatic professor stereotype, but retaining something that is profoundly not masculine, and yet not the fluttering femininity of gushes and giggles. Professor Butler has expended far more eloquence on this subject than I could ever hope to, so I guess she is acutely aware of that jene sais quoi of female presence. Latinos call a woman who is too female (not too feminine) "embra" but even this is perjorative and doesn't come near to describing what it is what we are when we are.......it.

I have worked on my own lesbotic iterability in the past ten years since I abandoned any committment to heterosexuality. Cutting my hair and buying a leather jacket was not enough. Anyone will tell you that beady eyed baby dykes aren't much of a turn on. There is something in the desperation implied by an imploring stare that doesn't seem to work for women. It does work for men, curiously enough. (Low cut tops and imploring stares, battered by fluttering eyelashes - believe me it worked for me and can work for you too). Fortunately my eyes are mostly shielded by glasses, so any askance glances are reined in - but I remember when I met Anna - it was how her eyes looked inwards, rather than implored me that really seduced me. And weirdly enough - about the time that I started liking dogs and my waist thickened I finally started to get "the look" from other dykes.

What happened? I wet myself with joy!

Ahem. What happened? Staring is an interesting thing. Sapphic iterability is largely conveyed through a language of glances, which bespeak interest, appeal, respect, attitude, desire, fear. gosh oh gosh, these words ain't enough at all. Its about holding your body - not like there's a pole up your arse either, but the butch dyke swagger is definitely cute as hell - if overtly tragic. In any case about the time I was able to presence myself as genuine sapphic product - I was also working about thirty hours a week as a life model. And I had long hair. No I wasn't femme, as such - and usually stalked the streets in french army pants, boots, beany and a security jacket. Plus on modelling days I was usually wearing my contact lenses. But I don't think it was the butch garb that did it. I think that spending 4 days a week naked, being paid to do yoga or to meditate while people stared at me for hours and hours - gave me the habit of having an internal sense of my physical presence, and also a comfort with meeting the gaze of others. My gaze back -in a life class is usually calm, curious but also calculated to be non threatening. (Oh shit - I betta go work on that chapter on the taboos surrounding the models gaze.....). I reckon I just took this habit into my clad realm of the street. So women, confronted by a calm steady gaze respond in different ways. Dykes either smile or do the microsecond flirty look away thing (Oh god I love it). SOme straight women meet my eyes, then blush and look away, others look back and smile. There's a whole lot more going on than sexual attraction/repulsion but other codes of psychological dominance, social identification, and heaps of other stuff. right now, my back and shoulders have just reminded me that I should stand up and stop typing. So I'll continue this later.

While gazing at Butler, I took notes, did a few cartoons and also recorded her thick noyyoik accent. She sounds like Carl Sagan on my recording. Oh Well. I'd borught a book to sign! (Undoing Gender) but felt too shy to go an apporach her. So I retired to cozy pub au coin to have a Latin Quarter moment with other postgrads......It was shortlived. Scurrying thorugh windtunnels to board a bus - a car blared past. A guy with a US flag bandanna stuck out is head and yelled out "THERE'S A PARTY IN HERE AND IT SMELLS LIKE SEMEN!!!!!" The skaters on stone steps of martin place ignored him, and I tried to hide my nausea.

The Vale of the Shallow

In case you ahdn't noticed, I have a bit off a problem wiht ivoluntary spoonerisms.

My hysterical self is convinced this is a sign of major neurophysiological decline but It's probably standard slobby hypochondria. I'm a crap typist. sorry

I alos reckon (check this for gratuitous self aggrandising sophism) that typing shoud be gestural - and typos give a pienc eof dry CRT text a kind of inflextive wuality. Readers can tell how passionate, rushed underslept or manic I am by the quantities of typos. Hell there's gotta be more than *this is impoortant* and THIS IS IMPORTANT styles of inflexive asciii (vintage reference eh?)

I reckon Artaud would have had lots atypos in his emails

I reckon proust - oh fuck -
hmmmmm..........
silence while mind boggles........
..........
...........................
...........
still dunno.

I can READ my accent when I type in french. Je suis anglophone, je suis un plouc veritable, et parfois tres con. Je suis sale.

can't you? probably coz I don't use any of the french typologised accents.........

anwya back to the point. the vale of the shallow, the shade of the valley, the dale of the shalley of veth.
errr, trying to make lite of heavy shit.

today is the one year anniversary of Pred's death at 2am.

I've still got Stacy's text message from june 1st on my phone "Thx heaps! more stuff is fucking up but got ng tube in so he's feeling more positive" I hold onto it - coz it reminds me of the excruciating closeness of emotions around dying, mad desperate hope are mixed with despair. fuck, he died slowly painfully horribly and monstrously. Getting an ng tube in was about the highlight of his 34th year ........ should I write about this even?

Fuck I hate hospitals - and they are full of people dying or people visiting people dying - huge edifices of agony and hell. And they are either berrima greeen pastel or bloody beige.

Pred's blog described his death (and life) far better than I could.

http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/blog-index.html

And the indymedia site was a really lovely community space for so many eulogies and tributes. I fell in love wiht the net at that point.

http://photos.cat.org.au/album/Predator/

http://www.sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=42084

so it seems a bit silly for me to try to give any sort of definitive post mortem on what his death meant.

Lots of people were really upset by it and lots of people really miss him still - he seeme dlike someone who was so increadibly alive that it made no sense that he died.

I don't think death makes any sense to anyone - at least not here in skippy land (post industrial white skinned ex-eurotrash like me).

I'm trying to see if I am able to form words about my own families grief. Mum and I had a teary phone call last night.

for those of you who don't know my borther collapsed in one of those "accidental suicides" that offer athsmatics an easy way out of the mortal shackles..........

(I nearly followed him tonight -when I unwittingly scoffed some almond laced cake on the graduation lawn and then realised I'd lost my ventolin.........decided that hanging out in the postgrad centre under air conditioning for a few hours would be the best thing)

for me - My brother Rod's death changed my life forever and completely. I have a photo of me taken on the day before I found out he'd died and I really feel like (appalling cliche) it is of a different person - the old mayhem, who vanished when Rod died.

I wonder if other siblings feel this intensely when they lose a brother or a sister. I'm still amazed by the depth of pain I felt and still feel. It's a deep visceral pain now, that throbs occasionally. I get tears in my eyes and a hollow stomach and horrible prickly feelings along my arms. My mum says that after her sister died she cried herself to sleep every single night - until the night I was born (ahhhhhhh!) when she got extreme sports post natal depression!

People don't really talk about death. I'm really into talking cures; I've done coming out workshops, CR workshops, lots and lots of self help workshops and I also had weekly therapy for 4 years - but I'm yet to find a space where death and grieving can be talked about so freely as - sexuality, (OK fair enough), illness, addiction or even childhood sexual abuse. I could toss off at this point about Baudrillard's ideas of Death being the great and only unexchangeable thing under contemporary capitalism. It is taboo because it cannot be exchanged - and so cannot be rationalised or even conceived. The process of describing something is invariably the first point at which it can be appropriated and modified into a unit of cultural or social exchange....... (can you imagine the next identity politics based on the grievers!!! the last untapped market for fashion! the black dollar could be bigger than the pink dollar!!!!). Death and grieving have been commodified certainly (hohoh remember Waughs the loved one - and think of the catholic church - its an entire religious emire built on the explicit fetishizing of death)

bud sad ai't sexy - well not yet anyway.

Speaking of cahtolicism, I have a terrible confession.

I am responsible for Pred's death.

Firslty lets get this straight. Bertrand Russle and Jean Paul Sartre got it wrong, John Donne got it right. God is a humourless vengeful arsehole who has made George Pell, pope arsehole and Peter Jensen in his own image. We are all fucked. Heaven is full of Christians, and the best we can hope for is eternal damnation so we can avoid all the smug arseholes in heaven. dante is preparing me for the inevitable. Sor are sydney summers.

the second factor is that Fuji had his 33rd birthday party in late november 2002. It was the first 33rd birthday party of my cohort of friends and in filipino tradition, poeple dress themselves up as a crucified christ at easter.

fuji picked a Jesus theme for his birthday.

I was going through a big virgin mary obsession - coz I reckon she is the patron saint of lesbian pregnancies and I love that colour of her veil in most churches. so I begged pred to dress up as jesus on the cross and I dressed up as the virgin mary. I'd just finished my thesis and anna was overseas and I wanted to get really drunk.

so I persuaded Pred to walk donw king street and mos tof Camden street wearing a crucifix and aloin cloth a while carrying a long neck of guinness. he loked great. The party was really fun.

I'm afraid god was not amused. Pred found his tumour a week later. the rest is history.

do I really believe this? I dunno.

Preds funeral service made me hate the catholic church with a really fierce passion. the cats bum kitch small minded patronising smugness was out in full force at oatley. It was so different to Pauls service which was open, warm, tender honest and funny. At pred's funeral I saw the church treating hist deaht as a shallow excuse to prolsetyse and claim his death as a victory for their rahter abhorent view of jesus. I wanted to scream! the funeral didn't even allow space for tears!

this brought back another painful part of my own experience of tykedom - whihc is the ban on crying. Ym mum dind't want me to cry at my brother's funeral. Most country poeple don't cry at funerals - you're meant to hold yourself still and dignified. We are allowed to laugh, this is the purpose of the wake. It is the sanctioned space to get drunk and make jokes about the deceased and laugh out all the screaming sobs that are bottled up inside. Being me - i insiste don the right to silently let tears stream donw my cheeks dring the mass - but smy school friends still said later I was doing the perfect jane austen act and it was painful to watch.

what is the perfect jane austen act? this is the point where I reveal that I have a different persona when I go to chez familia. People know I'm gay, so I'm not in the closet but. I wear diffeerent clothes, like skirts and pants (because jeans are for sluts) and usually one of those broad brimmed chemist shop hats, and a nice blouse, and maybe even a scarf. the perfect Jane Austen act involves serving cups of tea and being really polite and pleasant and having a high voice and no opinions and spending most of the time in the kitchen, washing up. Most of my family are scarey national party voters so I don't know how to talk to them and would prefer them to think that I'm such shy retiring type........... now pick your jaws up from the floor and continue reading.


there's all types of codes adhered to in the country, the dress is one. the lack of PDA (public dipslays of affection) is another. It took ages for anna to understand that at "home" we were NEVER to hold hands or kiss in public (for fear of having bullets shot through mums house later on) not having a car is pretty sus, but I get away with it. so being gay - means that everyone knows who I am and that I ahve a french female partner, but that we never act as a couple in public - boht of us act as pathetic nameless sexless servants - ie standard women. anywya - the priest at my brother's funeral was known in parlance as a former/closet celibate homosexual. he was really really lovely in the service - and despite the copper art decor of the Nambucca brinck veneer church - made me glad that the catholic church existed for one reason at least. I was also really glad to be able to go "home" and walk donw the street and bump inot people like my fmailies GP, or former classmates - who would know what I was going through and stop and give me a hug. As supportive as my friends were in sydney - the pace of sydney summer is hedonistic and allows little space for someone who is just ..... sad. Sad is an insult even! Most poeple cathc up at parties or spaces of celebration and "uppity" activity, everyone is realy busy - and so as supuportive as people want to be - ultimately it sint' easy - with someone who can't bear to go to parties, and is just as likely to aancel any arrangement like dinner, movies or a walk.

anyway - the nice part about sydney is that I never feel the need to "behave" or make up a host of respectable lies. the country also has this nasty side to the community concern. In relation to Rod, the questions in the country usually went "yeah, sad about roddy, how's ya Mum?" "How are You?" then "what did he really die of? was it an athsma attack or was he on drugs?". the subtextof this is - invovles a numberof unsaid questions, from the most obious "does he deserve my syumpathy or was he a scumbag junkie". this is not only a statement of prejudice - but also a test of alliances (Is he a member of my community?). the other aspect is directed at me "Are you going to tell me what I want to hear or are you going to say what I should hear? Drugs, depressions and sex all belong in the category of the unseen and unspoken. If I wish to identify myself as part of that community then I am obliged to retain this taboo and not mention drugs either, bt find some nice generalised euphemism. so that's what I do.

here is not that space so I can speak my truth. My brother never injected. He only smoked. the results of the toxicology report which we recieved at christmas found enormous amounts of alcohol and smaller but significant amounts of opiate derivatives in his system. We had no idea he was using anything, and I'd never known him to be that plastered on alchohol. It was an enormous shock. I still can't actually comprehend what happened, how an ambulance was called and didn't see that he'd collapsed, why he was alone, what time of day it was, etc. etc. I still can't comprehend why people die. when I saw his corpse - I refused to believ it was him, I couldn't believe it. I found it the most revoltingly abjec thting I'd ever seen. I guess a corpse is pure abjection - somehting derived from related to and yet profoundly, hideously other than a person. when after screaming, I studied the scars on his face wher eI'd scratched him as a feral toddler - I kind of understood - that his body was lying in front of me - and that he wasn't in it. But death? disappearance? Still don't compute. And so where is a person and what is a person. I kept some of his clothes - whihc I wear sometimes. I kept a sheet unwashed coz it has his smell on it - still after 5 years when he doens't exist! and i see his features in my hands, head and face, legs - and have decided not to change my surname..........

But I still grieve, and will probably continue to grieve for the rest of my life. Intellectually, philosophically, spiritally even I can justify this - it makes snese that life is formed out of death, that the immanence of death is what impells us - me to act and be in the world, but affectively - it just feels like pain and confusion. the nice thing, is that Rod's death taught me that I did love him, and that this sort of terrible overwhelmed state is what love actually is. I was pretty irritated by my brother for most of his life, so it has been a relief to realise that I did and do love him. this probably sounds pretty banal and it is actually. there ain't any cutting social commentary or intellectual critique here - largely because there isn't much space where this ever gets discusssed. also the witty intellectual engagement depends on a certain amount of affective distancing (at least in anglo traditions) but I wonder how many people reading this, how many epople who I know as firends, colleagues, students, activists, artists or whatever have been through grief? I know the sexual orientation and political affiliations of most peope I know - but not this part...... it's kind of interesting.