I have five minutes left on this airport internet terminal
» Sunday, August 29, 2004

Would it be more appropriate to refer to the two Kill Bill movies collectively as Kill Bills or Kills Bill?

Because I've got twelve Australian dollars, two thousand Philippine pesos, and ten Singapore dollars riding on it.

Labels: travel

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yarra valley blues
» Saturday, August 28, 2004

I've spent a week in some of the most scenic parts that the world comes with, and if I have to see anything else scenic for the next three weeks, I'm going to burn it down. We drive along a winding highway, pick a road, see where it goes, follow the path we've guessed at, keeping one eye on the mileage and another on the view. We look for ferntrees and eucalyptus, heights of land, strange wildlife and bright colours. Eventually, when we've driven too far and seen so much that nothing is left to impress us, we stop at the first spot and point the camera at the best thing available. Then we wait for the clouds to break and the sun to light the place up, which in mid-winter southeastern Australia is like hoping for dry water (mmmm, a nice wafer of freeze-dried water with a bit of salt, it's like taking a bite out of the ocean). And when that's done we head back to the hotel and watch Australians win gold medals. Then we watch the news, which is all about Australians winning gold medals. Then we go to any one of the thousand Italian/Greek restaurants that saturate the Melbourne suburbs. At supper the waitress asks us if we've seen the Australians winnning gold medals, and we ask her if she's seen Steve Irwin in the wild. Then we spend the whole night in the restaurant because the meals here take eight hours to digest properly, and it's imperative that you remain as still as possible while the cheese and beef pass through your intestines.

Today I witnessed a product called the Kiddie Kutter, a brutal 5" knife with a se blade and a bright plastic handle "designed for children's hands". The knife is intended to help instruct children in the art of preparing food. The package says: "Spend more time eating and less time cutting!" I can sympathise; sometimes I spend so much of a meal cutting and so little time eating that by the time it's through I haven't eaten anything at all.

I'm impatient to get home and post at my leisure. Chancing on terminals that set their meters on you is no way to enjoy blog-style writing. I'm not really a spewer; I need some time to stare at the screen and drink five cups of coffee and idly surf around in order to put together a satisfactory post. Forty-eight hours from now and I'll be back home, ready to blab away in the privacy of my own bathrobe. Five dollars will get you in the door. Ten for a ringside seat.

Labels: travel

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overseas still
» Friday, August 20, 2004

On the 500 Philippine peso note it says "The Filipino is worth dying for". Do they mean any Filipino? Because there's 87 million of them in the Philippines alone. I simply can't live with that much responsibility*. Which may be the idea. Or maybe, since there's so many of them, you'd die long before you could even choose which one you'd die for, which one would be your special Filipino. At the airport in Manila there's a footwear disinfecting station (a germicidal mat of some sort) and a SARS testing station (they take your temperature). Maybe they should have a Choose Your Special Filipino station. It would be heaped with corpses.

*Do you ever lose your way in the midst of typing out words like 'responsibility'? Do you ever stop and physically have to count the i's and l's and check where in the daisy chain you've stuck your 'ty'?

This morning I took a helicopter ride. Maybe my readers regularly arrange helicopter rides in the developing world, so you will all know what a surreal experience it is. Thirty minutes beforehand a woman knocks on your hotel door and collects the brick of 65 000 pesos that you've painstakingly banded up with elastics. Fifteen minutes later the hotel duty manager and a guy in a snappy barong knock on the door to escort you to the helipad on the hotel roof. Once at the roof, surrounded by security men, the duty manager, assistants, and a nurse with a first-aid kit at the ready, all your camera equipment is immediately permeated with moisture. Then the helicopter arrives, a cream-pale insect with a jade eye settling down with a blast of wind. Inside are the pilot and another guy who doesn't speak when you say "Magandang umaga!" or smile back when you nod and grin. Instead he takes your bag and puts it under the seat. Suddenly you realize that everybody looks a bit grim, as if they're thinking Oh boy, another couple of North American journalists about to die in some power lines or get shot down by the MNLF, and you wonder what it is you're doing. The unsmiling man buckles you in and shuts the door, and after a moment of adjustment the helicopter is suddenly rocking unsteadily, just a few inches off the ground. A sudden tilt and you're over the city, heading south to circle an active volcano.

Anyway. We'd taken a boat to the volcano a few days before (where I'd thrown up in the middle of a Foreign-Legionesque guided tour) but it was entirely different from the air. The Taal Volcano crater is actually a lake of dilute sulphuric acid, surrounded by high cliffs on Volcano Island, which is on Lake Taal. So it's a lake on an island in a lake on a bigger island. In order to get some decent aerial footage we needed to remove the doors, so the pilot touched down right on the shore of the crater lake. We got off and shot some footage while the unsmiling man removed the doors. Then we were strapped back in and the pilot began to show off, banking and swooping over the cliffs, widening his circle to take in the dry volcano crater from a previous eruption. We saw a trail of people on horses riding up and down a ridge, which overlooks the crater lake by a couple hundred metres. Tin shacks and stables lined the ridge. During a smoke break (for the pilot) by the lake I found out that the pilot was emigrating to Calgary in a year or two.

Everybody here thinks we're from National Geographic and they call us Joe.

Labels: travel

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hey, is that filipino food?
» Wednesday, August 18, 2004

How long have I been here? A week? A month? Three and a half hours? I honestly don't know. If I were to approach someone and ask Where is this place? they would fix me with a pedagogical look and say More important than where is when. Then they'd tell me that I'd been living in a dreamworld, a fantasy of wealth and luxury, and this crowded, stinking place packed to the rafters with human beings all jostling, calling, selling, buying and begging, is the real world. Which of course it is, if you're going by the weight of numbers. The strangest thing about being in Manila or in the nearby provinces is that I'm witnessing what the bulk of the world looks like. Industry and poverty sandwiched next to other, mansions and embassy abutting shanty towns of corrugated steel and yards of mud and shit. Young boys giving haircuts by the side of the road, people gliding between lanes of traffic with cut-rate plastic goods for sale. And everywhere you go, another McDonald's, a Jollibee's, an Ulo Ulo barbecue shack. Exhaust fumes both slate-blue and soot-black, smoke from a wok in a satay kiosk, an old man brushing branches and dust from his storefront. Then a sudden rain hits and the whole place smells of mud and rot and hog shit. There is no end to the movement here, no break in the lines of traffic on Roxas Boulevard or the lines of ants crawling up the wall. You go for a walk and listen to the cries of "Hey Joe!" from children and vendors and think Christ, isn't that from the second world war? And everywhere in Manila men with guns slung over the shoulder stand around on corners, lounge by the casino entrance and hold open the restaurant door as you enter. You lose your bearings quickly if you're not used to it.

I'm running out of time on the computer here. Remind me to tell you about my hike on the Taal Volcano Island, where my cameraman got sunstroke and four Filipino guys looked on in sympathy as I threw up in some bushes on a field of smoking lava vents. The torrential downpour afterwards really made it fun.

Labels: travel

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a fine-tuned PSA
» Friday, August 13, 2004

I have no time to tell anyone about my adventures in the Philippines right now, but I'd like to inform The Lotus that her tunicky garment was on the futon in the living room when I left the house for the airport.

That is all.

Labels: travel

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up with Perseids
» Tuesday, August 10, 2004

According to National Geographic, Thursday night witnesses a bright show from the Perseid meteor shower. A cloud of dust from the Swift-Tuttle comet will be flashing through the atmosphere and visible mostly over Europe and Asia. Around that time I will 40,000 feet above the Pacific speeding westward. I'll be spending the whole evening with my face stuck to a window to see what a meteor shower looks like at that altitude.

I'm a little worried about all the triffids booked on the flight, but I figure that as long as I keep one eye on them I'll be okay.

Labels: useless

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a good day for neologism (a bad day for neologists)
»

Without disclosing full details of its genesis, I will inform you that I've created a new word from handy preexisting ones, the better for semantic range and flexibility: sockbison, s. from OE socc "light slipper" & L. bison "wild ox": 1. rar. much as you would imagine, a species of pygmy American bison (tax. bison bisonum) accustomed to living in people's socks, where it is said to favour a warm moist environment - 1932 "It is imperative in the tropics to check one's shoes every morning for nesting sockbisons, as their hooves can deliver a crippling blow to the toes and ankles, to say nothing of their vigorous headbutt"; 2. obs. a sort of crude ordnance, reputedly derived from a Frankish sling-style weapon, employed in the War of the Roses - c1450 "A traitor shotte a Gonne, and this soccebison smot the good Earl of Salisbury"; 3. coll. male genitals - 2004 "My sockbison hurts from when you kicked it after I made up the word 'sockbison'".

I'm off to go hang around an active volcano in the Philippines for a week. The next thing you hear from me will be a tired grumbling from a hotel somewhere near LAX.

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television criticism
» Monday, August 09, 2004

Last week I succumbed to foul temptation and downloaded every extant episode of The Grid, TV's latest valiant attempt to explain geopolitics and terrorism to the masses. It's got just about everything a guy could want out of an hour of television: nice moody lighting, guns, nerve gas, the anaphylactic face of Julianna Margulies. A scene featuring a group of dead university students in London, with Ugg Boots and matching scarf-toque sets everywhere. And a bunch of bearded guys in the desert appearing as the senior council of Al-Qaeda! Let's hear it for the actors who agreed to play the leaders of the single best-known terrorist group in the world today. After that, I imagine they can look forward to a bit of typecasting.

I was hoping, as the luminescent and twitchy credits popped up, that The Grid would not be a combination of tinny exposition on global politics and sentimental harping on how America felt on 9-11. If God heard my wishes, he clearly answered them in the negative. Not a single scene goes by without a brief lesson on Islam, oil politics, Chechnyan independence, general Saudi cravenness, what have you. Unless the lesson is just how bad Americans felt when the planes hit the towers. Dylan McDermott (whose jawline continues to weird me out) incarnates the emotional shock of 9-11 as FBI agent Max Canary (get it? huh?). He wanders around the show in a daze of permanent mourning for his buddy Tim or Tom, having gone so far as marrying his widow and adopting their emotionally damaged son. In what is positively the worst scene of post 9-11 entertainment he grunts out the story of his friend's death in an interagency board meeting:

Canary: My friend died when the planes hit the towers. (Pauses)

Me: Oh, that's why his jaw is clenched like that.

Canary: He was just a guy in his way to work. (Pauses)

Me: Never mind, his jaw always looks like that.

Canary: He went up in the elevator... (Pauses)

Me: Please don't say that he didn't come back down.

Canary: ... He never came back down.

Me: Fuck.

Canary: They found his leg.

Me: His... what?

Canary: That's all that was left of him.

Me: No more, please.

Canary: They buried his leg.

Me: I wonder if they dressed it in a pantleg?

I'm parahprasing, but that's roughly how it went.

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questions, answers, veracity
» Saturday, August 07, 2004

People who read my blog have been asking me questions lately, so it's only fair that people who write my blog (me) answer them. You're with me on that? Okay, let's proceed.

Palinode, did you really find a manuscript in the alley behind your building?

Why yes I did. I went out the next day to grab page 29, which has an excellent description of a gang of sunburnt bikers walking down a dusty street - surely to terrorize the inhabitants! - about to confront our hero. Does our hero, with ole' Broke Bike and Big Gun/Huge Revolver, know who these bikers are, with their dusty jeans and sunburnt noses? Will justice prevail, a twisted justice that makes a mockery of mercy? I dunno. I couldn't find page thirty. The entire alleyway had been cleaned up, the junk swept up, the stinking dumpsters emptied out, and the manuscript a dream.

Palinode, are there really women in your palace, as you claim, and do they truly bestow class?

Yes. You can see them here, diligently plotting out ways to make my palace even classier. Oh man, you should see my digs. So much class. Mahogany accents, indoor swimming pool, wet bar, you name it.

When's your next trip and where are you going?

On Tuesday I go to the Philippines for a week or so, then I'm going back to Australia for another week. I'll be back on the 31st of August, jet-lagged and freaked and exhausted, limp and translucent as a jellyfish. When I'm in the Philippines I'll mostly be in rural areas, so you won't be hearing much from me. Melbourne, though, is full of IBM-compatible personal computers, and no doubt some of them employ TCP/IP to transmit information all over the world.

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stupid dirty monkey
» Friday, August 06, 2004

Today was a complicated mixture of physical heights, scared children and the vague airy sense of leaking dignity. The truth is that I scare children between the ages of two and ten, and I have yet to figure out why. Infants and toddlers stare at me unceasingly and laugh when I wave or make faces back; I think it's because, with my shaved head, I look more like a gigantic infant than a proper adult. They see me and think: A-ha, he's one of us in disguise. He has access to all the cookies, he can reach all the doorknobs, he uses the regular drinking glass. Once they pass that stage, the amusement in their eyes turns to wariness. It occurs to them that maybe I've made a pact with unwholesome powers to walk among adults. Or perhaps the way I talk to children - that is, with the expectation that they're intelligent young minds who'll respond well to being addressed with respect - is fundamentally off, an aberrant expectation stemming from my lucky childhood. Whatever. Little kids get creeped out when I talk to them.

It's probably because these days I attach a microphone to their shirts first. Maybe that's got something to do with it. I want to go back to the States, where even the most slack-jawed homunculus knows what a camera is and how to respond to it. I swear, they imbibe so much television that apeing the language becomes a reflex for them. Cameras and mics function as eidetic triggers for streams of sentimental longings or paramilltary posturing. They like it when the sport's extreme and the paths of romance are lined with rose petals. Those kids live by a script and they have the decency to recite from it unashamed. When I talk to them I wonder where all the shame went. These kids, they really are free to be you and me.

Today's kids at the exhibition either didn't know the script or didn't want to play along. Instead they averted their eyes, responded in one-word bursts ("Monkey!" "Diving!"), nodded dumbly and pulled at the microphone. I felt defeated. So I harnessed myself to a high=dive tower sixty feet in the air and filmed a group of divers who dress up as five pirates and a monkey. They made the monkey walk the plank.

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found: Arrival
» Tuesday, August 03, 2004

This afternoon I found someone's manuscript scattered along the alley behind my apartment building. A few dozen pages lay on the ground, having peeled off from a ream of paper sticking out of a dumpster. The first one I noticed also happened to be the first page of the first chapter, engagingly titled "Arrival". After scanning the text I decided against collecting the rest of the manuscript, but I did pick up the first page and bring it home. Here it is.

Our hero came from over a hill in the east, just a small shadow rimmed in golden sunlight. The wind howled in his face and dust devils danced to and fro, blowing gritty, orange sand all about and whipping countless tumbleweeds across the vast desert floor. The old motorbike he pushed looked beaten and broken, the tires worn almost flat to the rims and the paint all but faded to a sickly rust-color. On the side of the tank the weathered imprint of an old insignia could be seen; beside it, a faded eagle-motif. The eagle was screaming, it's talons stretched out in front as if it were about to slice into the side of it's prey (sics on all the "it's").

Okay, that's our first paragraph. What have we gathered so far? The author certainly hasn't wasted time identifying the protagonist: some heroic biker with a (presumably) broken bike. Given the amount of space the author's devoting to the bike, I'm wondering if the damn thing isn't more important than the hero. Let's see: one sentence there with the hero as the subject, three sentences with multiple clauses fixated on the bike. We also know that the eagle depicted on the tank is highly unusual, in that it doesn't grab its prey with its talons so much as come in from the side and give the unsuspecting prey (gopher, rabbit, &c.) a good gash to the flank. Plus it screams on approach, which is counterproductive. When you consider that this hero is pushing a broken-looking bike through a windy desert with an endless supply of tumbleweeds and he doesn't even get more than one sentence, it's not surprising that he be represented by a screaming ill-angled eagle. Oh, we also find out that he's from the east, which always spells Christ-figure in big buzzing neon to me. Onward:

The machine matched his sandy brown leather jacket, it's left pocket bulging conspicuously where that huge revolver was holstered. How many long, lonely miles had the bike carried the man, and how many lives had the big gun ended so violently? He'd lost the answers to both questions many miles ago.

We know from the first paragraph that the bike figures prominently in the story, but it appears that the bike also has a left pocket with a "huge revolver/big gun" in it. I'd keep it in a holster on my body and not in a pocket on my motorcycle, but I'm not a hero with a jacket so cool it deserves three adjectives. The more I read this story, the more I'm thinking that it's a Western-biker Nutcracker Suite or Velveteen Rabbit, with bikes and jackets and huge revolvers/big guns as characters. Maybe the bike wants to be a real horse. Maybe the jacket wants some mink oil. Maybe the huge revolver/big gun wants to get holstered in a holster instead of a pocket. Let's see if the next paragraph tells us.

He doggedly rolled it across the desert clinging to a vague thread of hope that he would soon meet someone with the knowledge and parts to make it run again. But he hadn't seen a soul in almost three months.

What? Three months? No wonder the author's taken so long to focus on the main character. It's embarrassing, holding up some three-month's-lost loser as the hero of your piece. On the other hand, I have to hand it to the guy for his tenacity. And his jacket, which was probably stitched with threads that were not vague at all, but very specific.

He stopped on the hard shoulder and pegged up the bike. He untied the old drawstring satchel from the front. From that he pulled a silver thermos with a screw top. Inside were the few remaining drops of water he had so carefully rationed; they were minimal and unquenching, but they'd last him another day or so. The man tipped up his hat and let the few measly, unsatisfying beads land on his tongue. It would have to do.

If there were one lesson to be drawn from this paragraph, it's that water sucks. Minimal, unquenching, measly, unsatisying beads that will just have to do, that's what water is. We also learn that the hero has been pushing the bike along a road, and that he enjoys pegging his bike. Pegging is defined as the act of sodomy with a strap-on dildo. So even if the bike wanted to become a real horse it wouldn't make much difference. Also of interest: silver thermoses with screw tops may, under the correct circumstances, turn into hats.

His dark, upturned face baked in the ever-smiling sunlight. His ~~dry,~~ cracking leathery skin still ached from the wind storm the night before. ~~He just shuddered to think about it~~ Thinking about it made him shudder. The Great Desert was famous for it's horrendous tornados of dust and suffocating heat, and he'd narrowly escaped with his life,

Page two was not readily available. But how do you think that interrupted sentence ends? My best guesses:

futilely shooting his big gun at a furious tornado and wasting his precious deadly bullets.

desperately pegging his battered, weathered bike in a fond final farewell to the cruel world, only to find that the vicious killer storm had luckily passed him by.

doing everything possible except turning around and not bothering to cross the Great Desert in the first place, because with a name like that you pretty much know what to expect.

building himself a shelter out of adjectives and taking shelter inside from the whirling, screaming, suffocating, choking, inconsiderate tornado outside that almost seemed to wait for him personally for three harrowing scary days.

Tomorrow I'm going to see if the second page is hanging around somewhere. In the meantime I invite your best guesses on the ending of the last sentence.

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the complex world of T-shirts
»

One of the last times I went shopping for clothes I ended up at the Tip Top in the benighted Cornwall Centre. The salesman was a tall guy with dark greasy hair and a stiff suit. After I tried on a couple of shirts and decided that both were just fine, he leaned forward (which, given our difference in height, meant that he actually leaned over me) and said, "How's your T-shirt situation?"

I was floored. I didn't know T-shirts got involved in situations. I didn't know the lives of T-shirts could ever be so rich as to warrant situations. I wanted to say: Buddy, my T-shirt situation is a disaster. The Stanfield V-Neck won't talk to the Gap XS Crew Neck, the old Motorhead shirt snuck into the underwear drawer, and my Zig-Zag T-shirt got arrested for smoking up in the park. I am a broken man on account of my willful polycotton blenders.

Instead I said: "My T-shirt situation?"

"Of course," he nodded. "For layering".

Oh right. Layering. Otherwise I'm a laughingstock, a fashion victim who couldn't even get it right at Tip Top. I bought two, both size small - after all, even if they're tight, I'm layering here - in reliable black and daring aquamarine. I hope the aquamarine gets along with the Motorhead.

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