The Culture Spoon

Tibet and the Fantasies of Democracy

2008-09-28T02:37:00.012+10:00

WELCOME TO TIBET, a land synonymous with avid mountain climbers, California-born Bodhis, dreadlocked caucasians and the occasional Wall Street banker in search of salvation and somewhere to squander his oil bonds. For years, moonbeams of all flavours have been making the pilgrimage to the Tibetan highlands, dieting on banana lassies and free-range yak kebabs, breathing in the crisp mountain air (incensed with said yak) and meditating on the petit-bourgeois proclivities of inner-peace and transcendental self-discovery.

But on March 14, four days after the 49th anniversary of the Lama’s relocation to the Hollywood Hills, the capital Lhasa exploded in riots, as the predominantly ethnic Tibetans took a torch to the ruling Han Chinese. The government went into lockdown, banishing all foreign tourists, journalists, expatriates and Californian yoga instructors – save for a handful of aid workers and covert Christian missionaries – and thus closing the boarder indefinitely to all foreign neophytes and press badge wearing lackeys.

And so once again, the world’s eyes fell upon the mountain mystery of one of the most talked about yet least understood regions on Earth. For four months, the disgruntled accredited press salivated around the Beijing bar streets, rehearsing and reasoning – in between beers and blowjobs – their schlock Hollywood appeal for Tibetan independence and blind zeal against Chinese interventionism.

The blind fanaticism of the ‘Free Tibet’ camp has raged ever since journeymen such as James Hilton, who penned Lost Horizon in 1933, depicted the mythical Himalayan utopia of Shangri-la. Tibet since has been the object of a fantastical Western ideologue bathed in ancient mysticism and religious idealism. And so for the Western hemp wearing neophyte, the capture of Tibet by the Maoists in 1950, was the desolation of an idyll whose antithesis was the decadence and corruption of 20th century modernism, socialist or otherwise. However, the seemingly idyllic picture masked a medieval backwater steeped in serfdom, polygamy, child slavery, infanticide and religious violence, and ruled by an autocratic elite group of monks, a world away from today’s democratic catcalls of the Sharon Stone clique.

WHEN I ARRIVED in early July, Lhasa was a ghost town, vacant of any foreigner – four months scratched from the five million expected in 2008. With the boarders having recently opened, I expected a flood of curious tourists, covert journalists and newly indoctrinated vegans covering their ‘Free Tibet’ tees with Olympic ‘Nothing is Impossible’ tracksuits. Yet in a place usually festering with whiteness, Wally (or Waldo) simply wasn’t there.

The foreigners had been substituted for members of the People’s Liberation Army, a nubile mixture of seasoned soldiers and dumbfounded cadets. In double-file they paraded the junctions and alleys that run between the empty hotels and odious piles of yak cheese in the Barkhor marketplace. In the Muslim quarter, a square flanked by skinned yak carcasses and Halal butcheries, they guarded the Grand Mosque. And just about all over the eastern partition – the Tibetan partition – they stood post every 50 feet, eyeballing anyone with a camera or a paler complexion.

Tibet is split between east and west – east for the Tibetans, west for the Chinese. In the east, the Barkhor Circumambulation Route takes centre stage and is a circular bazaar selling everything from Tibetan prayer wheels to tourist shirts emblazoned with ‘Yak Yak Yak Yak Yak!’ At the core of the Barkhor’s circular track is the 7th Century Jokhang Temple, the holiest site for the majority Tibetan Buddhist population and the end goal of a once-in-a-lifetime three year prostration journey, whereby a pilgrim virtually bellyflops the whole way from his village – scraping up mountains and over highways – to Lhasa.

At any given time there is at least one veteran flopping his way in or out of the Jokhang, marking the end of an excruciatingly tedious three years of belly flopping. It’s common courtesy to give them donations as they prostrate along and by the end of it all they’re allowed to catch the bus home.

Since the 1959 expulsion of Tibet’s theocratic regime to India, Tibet’s economic development has boosted the ethnic Tibetan population of Lhasa from 37,000 to 520,000 and turned a once remote mountain village into a sprawling suburb, providing housing, work and education for a previously nomadic and uneducated people. Today, Tibet has four universities and over 110 secondary schools. Still the worst literacy rate in China (67.5% in 2000), before Chinese intervention, Tibet had virtually no formal education system, with monks having to learn scriptures from oral memory as opposed to written word.

However, today Tibet anxiously shares her developing status with roughly 100,000 newly migrated Han Chinese in the western partition. As Lhasa grew west, so did the hotels, shops and karaoke bars, contrasting the ancient Tibetan mud-brick architecture of the east with the modern outdoor toilet-tile of the west – the toilet-tile that befits so many Chinese cities. It is this massive influx that the majority of Tibetans complain about; that Mandarin is becoming the mainstay over Tibetan and that Tibetan shopkeepers are being pushed out by Chinese economies-of-scale.

Bridging this ethnic wake, and sitting majestically above the skyline, is the Pagoda Palace, the traditional seat of power for the Tibetan Government and the home in life and death to every Dalai Lama, bah number 14. Today, the lights are on, but nobody’s home.

I HAPHAZARDLY MET Roberto, a young Basque gentleman, one night at one of the few remaining bars in Lhasa, a small hole-in-the-wall chipped off the old Tibetan mud block, which proudly owns an oddball collection of donated CDs from a dozen years of music piracy (ungodly amounts of Leonard Cohen) and tech-savvy spiritualists.

Roberto sat in the corner with his Italian fiancé Katrina, drinking Scottish whiskey on a work night. The two are Yin and Yin: both garrulous, both alcoholics and both despised by one another’s company. (Their love affair began when they were sent to some remote outpost of Tibet for three months with nothing better to do but sleep, drink and fuck.)

Together they form the main contingency of aid workers in Tibet, and since the riots, had been forbidden access to the outer-regions, where their particular work is needed most. According to Katrina the government officials are good intentioned, investing heavily in the region, building schools and infrastructure, treating water supplies and aiding village doctors. However they are paranoid to hell of their public image, which often leads to heavy handed and irrational protocols.

Once, when the Olympic torch came through Lhasa on June 21st, the cadre phoned Roberto to tell him not to go to work that day (Saturday). When he said that he was already there, they bafflingly suggested, then don’t look out the window.
Another time when his mother had heard a faint cough emanating over the wires from her baby boy halfway across the globe, he explained, “No mum, I’m not sick. It’s just the 20 Chinese listening in.” On top of that, a simple email can take two to four days to arrive, as the Communist Party raises an army of People’s Linguists to translate a single Italian Christmas card.

As for the riots, Roberto’s positive it was the Dalai Clique’s organisation, that they had planned it long in advance, in order to gain international attention before the Olympics. All the while the Dalai Lama, grinning and posing, had said that he supported, on the one hand, the Beijing Olympics, and on the other, the protests in Lhasa. This was an odd manoeuvre, seeing that the protests were a massive violent abreaction and not a candlelight vigil.

Roberto’s not muddled as to who was doing what. He was there and saw Tibetans, including Buddhist monks (yes monks have as much propensity as being assholes as anyone else), hunting Han Chinese, burning shops and smashing windows. Even his favourite French restaurant was ransacked. The Chinese “crackdown” (a hasty word) was like any other crackdown in the West. He compares it to the 2005 Paris Race Riots. Yes there are issues, but how else do you diffuse a violent mob?

OUTSIDE LHASA, on a five-hour journey to Namtso (Sky Lake) – the highest body of saltwater in the world – the road is desolate. Along the way, piles upon piles of Tibetan prayer flags whip in the castrating wind. Nomads collect under the flags; their lives spent begging and bartering the shards of rock around their necks. Their faces have been hardened by the ferocious winds. Life out here is short and brutish. It takes little wonder to understand the attraction of religion and the compulsion that pushes someone to the desperation of a three-year-long prostration.

The lucky (or unlucky) nomads are given permanent housing and stipends from the government, so that the mother and children can at least remain under one roof whilst the father toils the valleys. However the pro-separatists complain that this is destroying the traditional nomadic culture, breaking apart communities and forcing Tibetans into unwanted work. It’s difficult to argue with this, but at the same time worrying to suggest that a lifestyle that condones education and social progress is worse than one that doesn’t.

WITH HIS LANKY STATURE, flattened face and monotone voice, Dogda, my personal guide, has the air of a garrulous sun-tanned Lurch (Addams). His views are surprisingly well informed from the Internet as well as books his clients would leave for him. Dogda is pragmatic, saying, “If China didn’t rule Tibet, somebody else would: India, Britain, America.” Independence to him is merely an ideal as immaterial as the mystical kingdom of Shambhala, Tibetan Buddhist nirvana.

It’s difficult to get a sense of the bigger picture. The Tibetan mysticism and Chinese bureaucracy cloud too much. Centuries of backwardness, feudalism, serfdom and polygamy were brought to a halt in 1959 when the Chinese Communist Party expelled the Dalai from the Pagoda Palace to live out the rest of his natural life giving speeches, attending cocktail parties and having star-studded birthday bashes along the Californian coast. To cynics, he’s known as “the monk in Gucci shoes,” and when the likes of Sharon Stone lament, “my good friend,” whilst mouthing-off karmic retribution for the Sichuan earthquake victims, you can’t help but imagine the two on Rodeo Drive shopping for Bally leather sandals together.

Thanks to his Hollywood status and 49 years of the type of PR money can’t buy, the Lama languishes in the same regard that slightly dishevelled dark-haired Parisian girls have for Jim Morrison. For many he is the only voice that one need be concerned with when it comes to all things Tibet, never mind he hasn’t been there in five decades or even that the real powerbrokers refuse to have a conversation with him until of recent.

Even Dogda, a Tibetan Buddhist himself, says schools, hospitals and infrastructure has all been built thanks to the Chinese. Tourism (most of the time) is flourishing. Life expectancy has increased and infant mortality has dropped from 430 per 1000 in 1951 to 91.8 per 1000 in 1990. The Chinese built the roads, ironed-out the Qinghai-Tibet railway, and increased trade between Tibet and the other regions. The Chinese President, Hu Jintao, as the only member in the politburo to have served in Tibet, is by far the most sympathetic yet to energising the poverty stricken region.

This is not to suggest, however, that Dogda and most other Tibetans don’t have grievances with the Chinese government: the rumours of police brutality, the monks routinely being forced to publically condemn the Dalai, the red-washing of Tibetan culture, the massive Han Chinese immigration, the urbanisation of pastoral lands, the insurrection of villages, as well as the proposed mining of Tibet’s natural resources. These are all issues at hand.

But with the blind and perpetual affection the West throws upon the leader of an essentially autocratic, theocratic and power-starved group of monks, Beijing is nothing but frustrated when some French moonbeam with a beansprout-a-day diet tries to blowout the Olympic torch with a fire extinguisher whilst screaming “Libérez Tibet!” Not the best methodology for political progress when you’re up against tomorrow’s most powerful economy.

The whole process takes delicate and careful consideration, not to mention allowances on both sides. The whole mess isn’t going to be solved by a screaming Björk, or an unfurled banner by some prissy Briton looking to gain college credit along with the affection of the hemp-mafia. Until there is serious debate, all one hears is, “Yak Yak Yak Yak Yak Yak!”

[Published in Arena UK November Issue]

Tattoos: Do they know they're permanent?

2008-09-12T02:39:00.001+10:00

From Ancient Maori and Aztec rites to a way for Angelina to keep track of exactly where she picked up each of her kids, tattoos have played a long and important role in human history, but the other day I saw something that made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea to introduce ‘the perpetual art’ to this fickle, modish generation hooked on instant gratification and the next, best look.
We’ve all heard the stories about the girl who wanted a sexy, pouncing lynx tattoo and wound up with a malignant-looking blob, or the guy who asked for funky Chinese characters which marked him forever as “a very unattractive boy”. There’ve always been risks in getting ‘inked’ (part of the reason for many countries’ prohibition on tattoo parlours servicing anyone who’s consumed alcohol in the 24 hours prior to visiting), but the greatest risk is the one that will befall them all: with age, it’ll just look crap!
The ink will fade, the edges will blur, the skin will stretch and sag. In short: if you go under the needle, what you get today, even if it looks good now, will not be what you have in twenty years time. Now, in saying that, I’m clearly demonstrating the sort of forethought and appreciation for consequences which make it unlikely that I’ll ever belong to the sort of crowd where tattoos are mandatory, but it also means that in 20 years time I’m not looking for the best way – short of amputation – to con my health insurer into paying for laser removal.
What got me thinking all this was a young guy, twenty-three or so, who’d clearly had an illustrious career as a front-rower: he had calves the size of my torso, and down one entire flank was a huge, black rectangle. A great slab of ink, with perfectly straight sides and exact, right-angled corners on what was otherwise an impressively chunky, slightly spotty canvas. It was awesomely stupid! And yet, so intriguing: maybe it was a critique on the meaninglessness of modern tattoo culture. Maybe it was an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s monolith. Maybe it was covering up an embarrassing, earlier foray, or perhaps he was going to rent it out as a billboard in rugby season. Maybe he just really liked rectangles.
Of course, by now he’d noticed me ogling his calf. “You like it?” he asked, and I said “yes”, because no matter how silly it looked, one flex could cause me a lot of pain. “Yeah,” he grinned with real pride, “I like it. Big!”
One of those ‘there but for a pair of frontal lobes go I’-type moments. But he’s happy, and that counts, but will it count for enough when he starts trading his incredible muscle bulk for something a little less taught? Or when he learns to distinguish his left leg from his right without visual aids?
Perhaps the 24 hour/no drink policy is insufficient. Maybe tattooists should also be required to show a computer simulation of what that tat is going to look like later in life; or maybe a regulatory body where you have to submit your desired design and a member of the Queer Eye team is legally empowered to bitch slap you if your idea is offensive, stupid or…well, mostly stupid. And maybe that same body could be extended to every part of your “look”, from where you shop to how you dress each day, because maybe the fascists were right and there are just some decisions too important, and some people too stupid to go deciding things for themselves.

China Becoming pt.1.1: Time and Sexuality

2008-07-05T20:32:00.008+10:00

8.8.2008
Waves of time permeate across Beijing’s darkened sky-scraped horizon. A warm wind blows upon our bodies, tracing our skin with an invisible effigy. A light flickers upon our naked figures, folding and unfolding with time. I trace the length of Marguerite Donnadieu with the efficacy of a surgeon, so that I may open her body to mine, so that I might pry open the perfect creation of an imperfect creator.

We are but outer shells intensely lost within one another, our minds, given, gone to the catacombs of history. There is no context, no ghost, no learned experience; merely the surface of two caressing bodies, as if we were an image of all lovers, mummified carcasses, anxiously looking, kissing, touching and feeling our ways in the darkness and up the banks of the primordial ooze, eventually surrendering ourselves to an impossible immortality or an inevitable finality.

A television broadcasts a light upon our flesh, a distorted montage of the Opening Ceremony, the blueprints for some intoxicated dream of patriotism and globalization: Manchu bannermen, Shaolin monks, a veiled salute to the godless idol Mao, a giant panda two hundred children wide grazing in a sea of red, the smiling Hu Jintao coddled by a whitening Bill Clinton.

All this history laid out, naked, on the flesh of my lover, like a bountiful feast. I want to eat time, to be nourished like a god, on the ambrosia of the universe.

The world’s politicians, celebrities and athletes, one-by-one are imagined on the curve of my lover’s breast, a nipple to nurse the ninety-one thousand representatives of the world, to teach them, as a mother would, about pain and pleasure. Humanity’s mythologies, its psychologies are retold through the shadows of her sinews and echoed through the cage of her ribs. I imagine four billion eyes, gathered in between the crevices of her skin where her ribcage protrudes, gazing at the grand narrative of humankind projected upon her breast. To kiss her breasts would be to suckle the world.

And so on the curve of my lover’s breast, in the midst of the Middle Kingdom, on the 116th parallel, that imperial axis from the heart of which two successive dynasties ruled the world, finally the Chinese promise, two-thousand-two hundred and twenty-nine years in the making, of all-under-Heaven, at last.

To kiss her breasts would be to nestle all-under-Heaven in the arc of my lips.

Across the horizon, a flash of light. A silent thunder splits the Beijing skyline, followed by the echoing roar of a dragon. A dragon along the north-south axis, that same axis upon which ascended and descended the last Ming emperor, Zhu Youjian, hanging from the rope that his eunuch had tied from a tree just outside the Forbidden City. Two hundred and eighty years later, it was Puyi’s turn, the last of the Qing, expelled from his throne whilst his palace was ransacked by Feng Yuxiang’s warlord army. Did he notice the tree, whilst being escorted out from the Gates of Supreme Harmony for what was his first and final time, and think to himself of the impermanence of all things? Was it the possibility of immortality or the inevitability of the end?

The Maoists uprooted the tree, to replace it later with another – a gesture to man’s struggle against the impermanence of all things, particularly dynasties.

Something must be said for time and space, for time and place are essential to the aberrations of Chinese pseudo-psychology – a limp cocktail of Taoist methodology, folk-cosmology and Marxist paternity. On the eight-hour after the sun’s zenith, of the eight day, of the eighth lunar cycle, of the two thousand and eighth year of the anniversary of the birth of someone else’s lord and saviour, we are present, struggling against the impermanence of all things.

On the same celestial axis that the Chou, some 3000 years before, had outlined the canonical layout for all dynastic cities, the Olympic Green stands cosmologically in line with Zhu Youjian’s noose, Puyi’s ransacked palace and a grandiose mausoleum dedicated to another prince of fate, Mao Zedong, tyrannically sitting on the south side of Heaven’s gate, Tiananmen Square.

That is the beauty of the universe – the patterned quilt in which the German poet Schiller weaved his philosophy – that a thread can be traced from the innocent musings of the two year-old Emperor Puyi to the earth shattering terror of Mao’s guilt-ridden Cultural Revolution. It is thus the vocation of the philosopher, the theologian or the rain man to weave-in the patches of the quilt and sew up the holes of the universe. Beijing is but a microcosm of man’s imperative, to align time and space in accordance to the infinity of the stars. With so many stars, so many places to navigate, one can never be at a loss. And just as the heavens unite us cosmologically, they do chemically, for we were all once just dust and matter, awaiting time and space to emerge, to merge, like the treads of Zhu Youjian’s knot.

It was the memory of Mao, the godless idol that they wanted to resurrect in the spring of 1989, to pull his trace from out of the netherworld and into Heaven’s Gate. They wanted to channel the great leader, the people’s Chairman, the rightful inheritor to the Marxist Tao, in order to resist, as he would, the Chinese Communist Party’s capitalistic reforms. Instead, they were given his successor’s tanks; ears and mouths crunched to the ground, they were still not heard.

Now the tanks have gone, to be replaced by rollerblading children and Kazak tourists. But still their ghosts remain, unremembered, but not forgotten, like Marx; like the Party’s official policy on Mao, unremembered, but not forgotten. As the French poet filmmaker Chris Marker had once said – who would have spent an entire lifetime in search for the machinations of memory – ‘History throws it’s empty bottles out the window.’

On this hour of history, on this day of China’s grand opening, like those tanks in 1989, we are consuming flesh.
Today more historic than the eight hundred and fourteen thousand days since the first Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the first imperial son of China, for whose indefatigable determination to unite ‘all within four seas’, China is named. The Chinese promise, all-under-Heaven, in the arc of my lips.

In the arc of her hips, the television projects its phantasmagorical tattoo, cemented in the embrace of our bodies. On Marguerite’s skin, the amassed history of China, a red moon, its celestial paradox of waning and waxing, of wanting to be both opened and closed. The dream of red mansions, the Middle Kingdom and her lovers, all together for a cataclysmic orgy on this day of days in the wake of natural and manmade calamities. This French woman and a half-caste man, two sets of bodies: China and the world, simultaneously inhabiting one another, all-under-Heaven. Our limbs, for better or worse, an impossible tangle.

If scars will not heal, then one must learn to love them, to fetish over them. And so my lover pulls her hand back upon my shoulders, cupping the tendon from which, for some, in all men angel wings had once grown. Pulling me tighter, closer, she cuts her nails deep into my back, glaring into my eyes to watch me resist, to witness pain silenced, so that she may comprehend that which we all practice our whole lives to withstand. That is, the pain that forms the existential scar for some that holds the same value as God does for others. It is the same pain Zhu Youjian amassed his courage against as his eunuch tied that final knot, connecting together the threads of the universe.

On a fateful day in 1924, did Puyi see the scar on the tree left by that grave knot? Surely the story had been lamented to him on dozens of occasions as an omen to his own dynastic decline, an era the imperial tutors were surely aware of. Did he learn to love his own particular brand of the anxiety that fills the being of all men? Did he learn to love the inevitability of the end?
At the threshold of pain and pleasure, when the heart beats at an irregular pace and the anxiety, which from my pours emanates every day, blankets my entire being, Marguerite pulls my sex close to hers.

Heavy drops of rain pound the window.

[to be continued]

Making a Fantasy out of Thinness

2008-04-18T17:55:00.008+10:00

The French government is closer than ever to passing a law banning the idealization of thinness. Pending the bill's approval in the French senate, one may be imprisoned for up to three years and fined $70,000 for having "incited excessive thinness." The authors of the bill, which directly targets pro-Ana and pro-Mia websites, also hope for it to have a spillover effect on the fashion industry, who have often taken the brunt of criticism for idealizing improbable and unrealistic images.

The problem however, is how does one define "incited excessive thinness?" Pro-Mia/Ana networks come under obvious condemnation, as their prescriptions for a healthy body and contented life drift into medical malpractice, however to charr the industry of beauty as a whole - from advertising to fashion to cosmetics - for pushing an improbable and at times impossible aesthetic-world-order seems somewhat absurd.

To what extent can the public legally condemn the individual's will to aspire to an ideal such as beauty? Granted, this ideal - beauty - is tempered by shifting cultural and societal norms and is therefore relative, however, its relativity is by virtue what makes beauty relevant.

In the recent past, the ideal Western woman was more robust, voluptuous, with a lot of time on her hands in between debutante balls and tea parties. Now she's been liberated from her heavy garments and thrown into the chaotic frenzy of bourgeois economics, where she must be more capable - mentally and physically - to take on the challenges of the world. At the same time as delimiting the bounds of the pleasure principle (more sex, more fun), society has rerouted the asceticism of monotheistic religion (no sex, no fun) and sublimated it into our five day work week. We forbid ourselves to eat carbs and instead consume our partners' bodies.

And so today, everywhere we look, a slim bodice - two-dimensional - eyes us from all perspectives of the urban landscape; threatening you with their body, their face. It is a body and a face that does not consume, perhaps nourishment, nor is consumed by you, but however, which consumes you in its very ideological nature. That is, the image of the body totalizes you - the audience (the socio-economic consumer) - it envelops your whole being and casts you back out into the world, somewhat more existentially fulfilled - if not actually physically - than before the rendezvous.

At some point or another we decided that God was the "idea" of "impossibility". That to put faith in God was to aspire to the unattainable impossibility. And at some point Kant equated the ideal of beauty with God; unattainable beauty, the presence of which aspires towards great things impossible or not.

Images of the impossible have always haunted human nature. They are the logical images springing forth from our ids and superegos, as we fantasize ourselves and each other. Why not be caught up in that wave of a dream which sweeps you out to the heavenly bodies and places you inside your the depths of fantasy?

However, the media is consistently called upon to return to Earth; to ground their messages in reality and portray believable images. One affirming response came from Nivea who, for one campaign, sought everyday-women to market their brand. It was heralded as a brave and pioneering move by a veteran beauty corporation. However, noticeably, since their gallant effort, everyday-women models have seemingly dried up.

But who wants to aspire to everydayness, to blandness. To mediocrity. What kind of bland escapist offers up reality as an ideal? This is why consumerism has done so well to learn from religion. One must put hope in the unattainable, so that the ever grinding process of perfectionism can continue. The slow grind of which deters us from death; if not, then at least for a moment.

Purging Bloggers: The Great Firewall of Chinois

2008-04-07T18:26:00.008+10:00

Maintaining a blog is difficult in Chinois. For one, Google’s Blogspot – the Internet’s most popular blogging domain – was nationally blocked until only yesterday by the Great Firewall of Sina. This has made my first few weeks here excruciatingly difficult; that is, not being able to consult my compulsory style blog, the Sartorialist, especially when temperatures range between 1-23˚C within 12 hours.

But of course, Mother knows best, and the Great Firewall – an array of the world’s most advanced firewalls and server routers, piloted by a virtual Red Army of an estimated 30,000 techno-police – was set up “to keep the world clean for God.” But when you have Mother, who needs God!?

The majority of these techno resources are put to use assuring a high level of morality against perversions such as pornography, paedophilia, the BBC’s journalism standards and of course, Miranda Devine’s SMH column. However, a great number is also devoted towards liquidating the fourth estate. Mother’s hackers spin their way across the Web, searching keywords, tracing IP addresses and with algorithms, instantaneously and automatically block domains in order to restrict access to particular topics, such as, hmmmmm… well I can definitely think of three that begin with “T”.

At the end of the day, there is an ever-growing string of mainstream websites that are often privy to the government’s omniscient censorship. Such include Wikipedia (after not removing a dubious article on one of the “Ts”), YouTube (clearly to protect brain cells), the British Broadcasting Corporation, Amnesty International, Reporters Sans Frontiers, Blogspot and from time to time the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. One can test which sites are blocked in Chinois by visiting http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/, which, conveniently, is also blocked. And of course, there are many others blacklisted, from the purely irrelevant to the particularly noxious – again, Miranda Devine.

Interestingly though, Blogger – Blogspot’s co-dependent sister domain – was not, and to my knowledge, has never been, blocked. This is significant because with Google’s blogging program, blogs are uploaded through Blogger’s domain, but then viewed through Blogspot. For example, I can login to Blogger to format and edit the Culture Spoon, however its domain remains culturespoon.blogspot.com and hence, blacklisted.

So, until very recently, we in the Chinois region – when using Google’s Blogger – could author blogs, but not view them. So why this selective discrimination? Does Mother’s army of technocratic-spies lack the acumen to suppress Blogspot’s two domains – one for input, one for output?

One theory – opined to me under the breath of a slightly disgruntled British journalist, recently removed from one of those places whose name begins with “T” – is that Mother doesn’t mind her children blogging. After all, it increases their literacy and hence, economic functionalism. At the same time, blogging is the favourite past time of Western journalists and bored Occidentals, and of course, Mother doesn’t want to suppress ALL that they have to say, especially when it’s something favourable or touristy.

So at the end of the day, people will write; it’s a question of who and what is read, and Mother – with the most sophisticated communications surveillance in the world – can at least successfully police this within her own home.

Now, allow me to offer a slightly more cynical and sinister speculation. That allowing blogging – one of the nation’s recently acquired favourite pass times – is an opportunity for Mother to easily detect those questionable elements that attempt to stir the otherwise peaceful surface of la disposition Chinois. Just as witches float, dissenters speak up, and in doing so will rise from the midst of the unconscious masses.

This most recent unblocking of Blogspot comes right on the heels of Mother’s most recent triumphant purge, in which she sent to jail, for three and a half years, a certain dissident – a human rights advocate and prolific blogger – for inciting subversion towards his homeland. Armed with no more than a blog, said dissident lambasted Mother for not keeping her promise to improve human rights conditions leading up to the coming 0lympia.

So then why open the blog gates now? Because with this latest incident, those subversive communities (pro-democratis elements) will be fired-up after five long months of trial and a blanket ban on blog reading. Opening up the floodgate, for one, serves as a warning to those who are fearful to tread water, but also as an incendiary to those who are not. By creating a public discourse, Mother can see which of her children are behaving badly and punish them accordingly.

Now that's smart technocracy.

The Fictional Death of Heath Ledger

2008-03-24T19:56:00.012+11:00

It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like. | For me, it was just like any other weekend in my life. I didn’t eat a last meal, I didn’t jerk off any more or any less, I didn’t climb a mountain or end up swinging from a noose with Mozart’s Requiem in the background. But suddenly it’s important exactly what I did, because they are the last few days, and what you do in the last few days, down to your last lunch, becomes a fairy tale.

So begins “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” easily, the most intriguing piece of “journalism” I’ve read in some time. Penned by Lisa Taddeo, “The Last Days…” is subtly slipped-in towards the end of the April edition of Esquire magazine; though, not so subtly previewed in just about every major newspaper’s culture section.

Taddeo’s pseudo-fiction re-romanticizes Ledger, not in the image of the tragic artist, or the drug-fuelled starlet, but, in that of the self-deprecating narcissist, the apathetic - nothing so special, except that I’m fucking famous - agnostic, dressed in a ski mask - “That’s right, a ski mask… the kind of shit you can get away with when you’re a celebrity… and [] still get laid.”

No doubt the piece channels elements of Gonzo journalism - a consciously self-obsessed celebrity on a bender from London to New York - however, it was the déjà vu, I received, of having read Brett Easton-Ellis' American Psycho (clearly where the self-deprecating narcissism comes from), which drew me into its sinkhole.

I felt as if, that at any point Heath was about to plunge an axe into the Malaysian bodice that he had brought home from the Bar Beatrice to his Manhattan high-ceilinged apartment on his second-last night; just to prove to himself, well, that he could, and then, recollect afterwards, "Yes. Heath Ledger can."

But more potent to my point was the protagonist’s weariness, his disconcern and existential nonchalance, as if he himself was stepping through this so-called dream named Heath Ledger. Today I'm Bob Dylan, tomorrow I'm the Joker, but right now, I'm a guy in the Lower East wearing a ski mask and pretending to be Heath Ledger, whoever the fuck that is.

There is an idea of a Heath Ledger… somewhere between Monday 7:04 and 7:27AM:

[I] get out of bed in this naked body, and I am aware of the very physicalness of myself. I look in the mirror, and this is one of those lucky times when I don’t see the movie-screen face or the love-scene body, just the grease on my face, my not-great hair, a body that is in good form, a body for sex and for running, but just as much for one as for the other.

Or as Easton-Ellis once put it:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.

Taddeo researched the short piece to quite an extent, tracing his movements down to the very last muffin. And so, what philosophical import am I to receive, safe in the knowledge that Heath Ledger's last meal on Earth was a dry banana-nut muffin from some café on Broadway, you ask; and, that if he were to do it all over again, he'd go out with “an endangered animal’s heart on toast with foie-gras crumbles and black-truffle shavings.”?

Taddeo certainly sees the nonsense in such superfluous observations, and the piece is partly a statement on the media’s psycho-journalistic habits when it comes to grieving over dead stars: “For those of you who will try to define part of my life by my death: Don’t.” This is, I think, where the first-person narration succeeds; that is, as a voice for the recently departed, saying, Hey, you, stop pissing on my grave and fuck off!

*Out now in the back of American Esquire with that other gay cowboy, George Clooney, on the front. I recommend it.

Dirty Dirty Auden

2008-03-18T22:06:00.005+11:00

The recent anthology The Best American Erotic Poems – selected and annotated by David Lehman – begs the question of Americans and eroticism. As poet and literary critic Dan Chiasson puts it in his entertaining essay in the New York Times Book Review, such an anthology comes down to "best metaphorical labia! best profane blazon," which more or less pins down the existent of America's brazen erotic. And so in this contest, Chiasson gives it to the good old Anglo-American W. H. Auden's "Platonic Blow," which, as Chiasson proclaims, "is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester - I can't even talk about it here."

So for the sake of metaphorical labia and profane blazon everywhere, we shall talk about it... here:

The Platonic Blow
W. H. Auden

It was a spring day, a day for a lay, when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown;
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stoop I saw him standing alone.

I glanced as I advanced. The clean white T-shirt outlined
A forceful torso, the light-blue denims divulged
Much. I observed the snug curves where they hugged the behind,
I watched the crotch where the cloth intriguingly bulged.

Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn't move. I didn't know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
"Will you come to my room?" Then a husky voice, "O.K."

I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
He told me his story. Present address: next door.
Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong.
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck.

And here he was sitting beside me, legs apart.
I could bear it no longer. I touched the inside of his thigh.
His reply was to move closer. I trembled, my heart
Thumped and jumped as my fingers went to his fly.

I opened a gap in the flap. I went in there.
I sought for a slit in the gripper shorts that had charge
Of the basket I asked for. I came to warm flesh then to hair.
I went on. I found what I hoped. I groped. It was large.

He responded to my fondling in a charming, disarming way:
Without a word he unbuckled his belt while I felt.
And lolled back, stretching his legs. His pants fell away.
Carefully drawing it out, I beheld what I held.

The circumcised head was a work of mastercraft
With perfectly beveled rim of unusual weight
And the friendliest red. Even relaxed, the shaft
Was of noble dimensions with the wrinkles that indicate

Singular powers of extension. For a second or two,
It lay there inert, then suddenly stirred in my hand,
Then paused as if frightened or doubtful of what to do.
And then with a violent jerk began to expand.

By soundless bounds it extended and distended, by quick
Great leaps it rose, it flushed, it rushed to its full size.
Nearly nine inches long and three inches thick,
A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.

I tested its length and strength with a manual squeeze.
I bunched my fingers and twirled them about the knob.
I stroked it from top to bottom. I got on my knees.
I lowered my head. I opened my mouth for the job.

But he pushed me gently away. He bent down. He unlaced
His shoes. He removed his socks. Stood up. Shed
His pants altogether. Muscles in arms and waist
Rippled as he whipped his T-shirt over his head.

I scanned his tan, enjoyed the contrast of brown
Trunk against white shorts taut around small
Hips. With a dig and a wriggle he peeled them down.
I tore off my clothes. He faced me, smiling. I saw all.

The gorgeous organ stood stiffly and straightly out
With a slight flare upwards. At each beat of his heart it threw
An odd little nod my way. From the slot of the spout
Exuded a drop of transparent viscous goo.

The lair of hair was fair, the grove of a young man,
A tangle of curls and whorls, luxuriant but couth.
Except for a spur of golden hairs that fan
To the neat navel, the rest of the belly was smooth.

Well hung, slung from the fork of the muscular legs,
The firm vase of his sperm, like a bulging pear,
Cradling its handsome glands, two herculean eggs,
Swung as he came towards me, shameless, bare.

We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact contact, the attack and the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.

Straddling my legs a little I inserted his divine
Person between and closed on it tight as I could.
The upright warmth of his belly lay all along mine.
Nude, glued together for a minute, we stood.

I stroked the lobes of his ears, the back of his head
And the broad shoulders. I took bold hold of the compact
Globes of his bottom. We tottered. He fell on the bed.
Lips parted, eyes closed, he lay there, ripe for the act.

Mad to be had, to be felt and smelled. My lips
Explored the adorable masculine tits. My eyes
Assessed the chest. I caressed the athletic hips
And the slim limbs. I approved the grooves of the thighs.

I hugged, I snuggled into an armpit. I sniffed
The subtle whiff of its tuft. I lapped up the taste
Of its hot hollow. My fingers began to drift
On a trek of inspection, a leisurely tour of the waist.

Downward in narrowing circles they playfully strayed.
Encroached on his privates like poachers, approached the prick,
But teasingly swerved, retreated from meeting. It betrayed
Its pleading need by a pretty imploring kick.

"Shall I rim you?" I whispered. He shifted his limbs in assent.
Turned on his side and opened his legs, let me pass
To the dark parts behind. I kissed as I went
The great thick cord that ran back from his balls to his arse.

Prying the buttocks aside, I nosed my way in
Down the shaggy slopes. I came to the puckered goal.
It was quick to my licking. He pressed his crotch to my chin.
His thighs squirmed as my tongue wormed in his hole.

His sensations yearned for consummation. He untucked
His legs and lay panting, hot as a teen-age boy.
Naked, enlarged, charged, aching to get sucked,
Clawing the sheet, all his pores open to joy.

I inspected his erection. I surveyed his parts with a stare
From scrotum level. Sighting along the underside
Of his cock, I looked through the forest of pubic hair
To the range of the chest beyond rising lofty and wide.

I admired the texture, the delicate wrinkles and the neat
Sutures of the capacious bag. I adored the grace
Of the male genitalia. I raised the delicious meat
Up to my mouth, brought the face of its hard-on to my face.

Slipping my lips round the Byzantine dome of the head,
With the tip of my tongue I caressed the sensitive groove.
He thrilled to the trill. "That's lovely!" he hoarsely said.
"Go on! Go on!" Very slowly I started to move.

Gently, intently, I slid to the massive base
Of his tower of power, paused there a moment down
In the warm moist thicket, then began to retrace
Inch by inch the smooth way to the throbbing crown.

Indwelling excitements swelled at delights to come
As I descended and ascended those thick distended walls.
I grasped his root between left forefinger and thumb
And with my right hand tickled his heavy voluminous balls.

I plunged with a rhythmical lunge steady and slow,
And at every stroke made a corkscrew roll with my tongue.
His soul reeled in the feeling. He whimpered "Oh!"
As I tongued and squeezed and rolled and tickled and swung.

Then I pressed on the spot where the groin is joined to the cock,
Slipped a finger into his arse and massaged him from inside.
The secret sluices of his juices began to unlock.
He melted into what he felt. "O Jesus!" he cried.

Waves of immeasurable pleasures mounted his member in quick
Spasms. I lay still in the notch of his crotch inhaling his sweat.
His ring convulsed round my finger. Into me, rich and thick,
His hot spunk spouted in gouts, spurted in jet after jet.

Gastro-Religion and Why Salmonella is Not My Friend

2008-03-18T17:32:00.008+11:00

Apologies for my recent lapse in Spooning. I have been in the midst of one rather phantasmagoric salmonella plunge, as well as a bliss binge (though I expect only a handful to comprehend that reference).

Some thoughts. Why are food poisoning dreams so certifiably deranged? Do neurotoxins trigger some primordial partition of the brain, causing my otherwise insignificant memories to spill over into my sheets? Several times I woke up in a sweat last night, thinking, "God, what ever happened to that guy?" Individuals I hadn't thought of in well over a decade suddenly ascended to the surface of my cavernous mind pool attempting to feign some greater meaning. Yet there is none. Believe me, I tried to psychoanalyze this one out. But even in my withered, debilitated and ripe-for-bullshit state, I could not find any associative significance.

So it got me thinking more about food poisoning, as well as religion, which of course, I am consistently trying to debunk.

Long before civilization's understanding of hygienic food preparation practices, food-borne illnesses must have been as common as "divine inspirations". As an analytical species, we have, I think, attributed too much signification to the delusional fucked-up states that we've at times found ourselves in after gulping down a half-a-dozen Sydney Rock oysters?

"Ah... Guys. God said that if we want to stop defecating from every orifice, we Jews gotta stop eating shellfish!" Mix that in with a couple of fancy hallucinations, add some historical Hebrew references et voila, you have yourself a sermon. When the mechanics of the body don't work the way they're supposed to, we question the material world and answer with transcendental explanations.

So, perhaps we can compound monotheistic religion to a series of gastro-medico-fantastical trial and errors. After all, if something's bad for you, then God purported it to be so. He made the sky blue, the Earth round and the cows look like our grandmothers. "Mooo, don't eat me. I'm your cousin."

We could go further to suggest even, that a culture which has refined its culinary practices to the point of being able to cook and consume anything and everything, is far superior than a culture that, say, has a nonsensical taboo on specific ingredients, such as pork or beef.

And so, enter the Chinese! Bird's nest, turtle blood, whale sperm, yam... an all-encompassing diet for an all encompassing economy. As China rises, the rest of the world will go hungry.

Carry Grant is Rolling in his Grave

2008-03-04T17:00:00.006+11:00

If the great Alfred Hitchcock were not so rotund he would probably be rolling in his grave. Vanity Fair, in their annual Hollywood Issue decided to recreate the auteur’s most iconic images, replacing his rolodex of Hollywood’s Golden Age with the current flings of the month (this month being the Oscars).

Whilst the ambitious project has some flavourful touches, for instance a chiselled Javier Bardem that makes one wish Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window was Latino, as well as La Vie en Rose’s Marion Cotillard being Psycho stabbed in the shower (which is also happens to be a current flavour of the month), the recreation also destroys some classics: that's right, Seth Rogen’s beer-belly tripping over itself whilst being chased by a swooping bi-plane in North By Northwest.

Correction. Carry Grant is rolling in the grave.

See the whole Hitchcock recreation here.

Cotillard's French-American Conspiracies

2008-03-03T15:34:00.013+11:00

If you have not seen Marion Cotillard’s galvanizing, Oscar-winning, back-wrenching performance (literally) as the French chanteuse Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, stop reading now and come back later.

For she has said some p-r-e-t-t-y ridiculous things of late after having swindled the Yanks by raping and pillaging Los Angeles (deservedly so) by co-authoring and co-conspiring the acquisition of the Academy Awards’ top four gongs for Europe. This recently indoctrinated darling of the Hollywood elite puts Matt Damon’s idiotic composure to shame.

She is quoted as saying – God knows why – on the topic of the 2001 September 11 attacks:

"I think we're lied to about a number of things… We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? They was [sic] a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed."

Questioned as to why the government may have wanted to destroy the towers and manifest an elaborate cover-up:

"It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them."

O...K.… Where to start? First of all, congratulations for making Matt Damon not look like the biggest retard in Hollywood for the first time since Good Will Hunting. And points for originality on the real-estate angle. Look. Conspiracies are fine. I mean, I have my own.

For instance, I don’t believe that Keira Knightley is remotely English. She has San Fernando written all over her. The Valley Girl got her accent from re-runs of Thomas the Tank Engine and that black English butler from The Fresh Prince... But the thing is, I don’t tell the Poms that. They would have my head and put it on display at the London School of Economics with that Jeremy Bentham fellow. By the way, how does one go about acquiring a black English butler?

Ms. Cotillard could have stopped after that kick in America’s metaphorical nuts, however she went further, adding:

"Did a man really walk on the Moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don't believe all they tell me, that's for sure."

Shhhhh. I’m doing this for you. I like you as an actor. You’re tops! I love French women. Truly. However, this morning three of your North American representatives, who are probably Jewish, just fired themselves after reading your insipid bullshit.

And all this, especially considering that Cotillard comes from a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by restrictions on your yearly intake of wine and truffles. Mais non! But I must feed my children.

Seriously, it’s like Michael Moore winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and then telling Le Monde: “you’re all fat, ugly and stubbly, just like me - just like America. Muahahahaha. Now give me some money and truffles bitches méchantes!”

Admittedly, the comments were made last year before she received the award she probably didn’t think she’d get for being French anyway. The interview was recorded in French for the program Paris Premiere - Paris Derniere and so her words were not intended for American ears or eyes. Besides, who makes money translating French into American?

We can only hope that this doesn’t taint her acting career, particularly in her upcoming role as the lover to Johnny Depp’s gangster in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. Wait. She’s crossing the Atlantic and playing an American! My recommendation is consult Keira Knightley on this. She’s much experience in the transatlantic category.

NOT English!

Jack of All Trades Gives Clinton An Elderly Nod

2008-03-03T12:39:00.004+11:00

Jack Nicholson is probably that much more qualified than his fellow thespians to endorse a Presidential nominee. After all, he did play one in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! and... almost save us from impending doom.

And so in this latest endorsement-cum parody of the faux-politik of Hollywoodland, Jackie goes against the fur and bats for Hillary.

In fact, during his five decade tenure amongst the ranks of Hollywood royalty, Jack has charmed and spoiled us with an iron-fist full of politically charged undertakings. Certainly no one can say that inexperience is his downfall.

For example:

He proffered US-Chinese economic relations in The Departed by selling military hardware to Guangdong merchants. As the Joker he provided welfare benefits to the good people of Gotham City, as well as put on a parade worthy of an Academy Achievement in Art Direction.

In the touching About Schmidt he tackled the issue of America's aging and depressing population and courageously represented a nation's innermost fear of fat people in swimsuits. His exemplary work in A Few Good Men outlined procedures to be followed in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Jack bravely tackled the corruption that lay behind the LA County's debilitating water mismanagement in Chinatown, as well as cop one in the nose.

And as every "honest" politician, Jack has even openly discussed his '60s experimentation with marijuana and stint in jail in Easy Rider.

Add to this that he tore down a haunted house in the Colorado Rockies (The Shining), reformed the authoritarian treatment of mental patients (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and made the world safe once more for old quirky arrogant men - who really outta get checked out - everywhere (As Good As It Gets).

Jack you have my nod!

Encyclopedia Baracktannica

2008-02-27T16:46:00.003+11:00

The phenomenon known as Barack Obama frequently causes journalists to have near-fatal joy seizures, affecting their literacy, hence the onslaught of Obama-inspired neologisms. Thanks to Slate, we now have a working dictionary to navigate all of the blasted hope-mongering.

The Effeminate Tyranny

2008-02-26T21:41:00.009+11:00

During the fall of the tyrannical Taliban regime in 2002, photographer Thomas Dworak discovered a cache of portraits depicting Taliban men in curiously effeminate pictorials. Magnum Photo has produced a 7-minute audio slideshow on these fantastic images.

What I find fascinating about this phenomenon - besides an anecdote involving a particularly paedophilic warlord - is the relationship between the Taliban’s prohibition of female effeminacy and the apparent externalisation of male effeminacy.

Prior to the American intervention in Afghanistan, strict shariah laws based on a patriarchal religious dogma, virtually forbid any public display of effeminacy: women must cover up all flesh (including their faces), mothers are subjugated by their sons as wells as their husbands and public displays of affection are completely outlawed.

Logically, with such a strict doctrine enforcing the day-to-day practices of public life, femininity would then manifest itself in the private domain, away from the judging eyes of other men. Though, with the all-seeing eye of Allah ever-present and the most meagre of infractions punishable by death, what little privacy there is, is hijacked by dogmatic fear.

Thus Ironically, women are removed from the libidinal economy, burkha and all. Ironically, because in this context, the sexual suppression of women equates to their annihilation as an object of sexual desire, whereas, here in the West, we subjugate women for the very purpose of making them objects of desire. We objectify, the burkha annihilates.

Veiling the woman and making her a sexual non-entity transfers femininity to the man. Hence, men, who are superficially the only players in the Islamo-fascist libidinal economy, become the logical targets for any effeminate manifestations and objectifications.

The portraits act as playful marker of this transference, of a welcome affection amongst men. Their cheeks blushing, hand-in-hand, they flaunt guns and present flowers in front of radiant pastel pastoral backgrounds. They are reminiscent of the early age of technicolour: saturated hues and picturesque flowerbeds.

“It’s a very feminine culture,” Dworak says. “They’re very effeminate with their black eyeliner and their little guns and flowers and holding hands and everything.”

Though not all the photographs display incidents of pederasty, the slideshow outlines a particular tradition whereby an older man will adopt a young boy and become not just his lover, but also his guardian and teacher; a custom practiced by many a culture, from the ancient Greeks to the Persians to the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts of America.

Of course, the Taliban outlawed homosexuality, as have various Christian dioceses. However, there is a particular sexual-idealization of the flesh of male youth in cults that demonise the female body. Think of the carvings of naked cherubs that adorn so many Renaissance alcoves. Could all the cherubs in the world account for the significantly large proportion of paedophilic male clergy?

I think, perhaps. After all, it is the Father who shows care, who will listen to your inner most feelings, navigate your sins and offer you forgiveness and salvation – all effeminate traits. I believe that some Christian-feminists even ordain the God of the New Testament as made in the image of woman, given her predisposition towards things like forgiveness and such. Or is that the plot to The Da Vinci Code?

However, this is not to suggest that effeminacy directly leads to homosexuality, which then leads to pederasty. But, that there is an integral place in the human condition for what Occidental thought refers to as femininity, and that femininity is not necessarily exclusive to the female sex.

The traits of femininity, such as care and love, are not so much the effects of a distorted cultural system, but are in fact ontologically prior to culture. They will manifest in all cultures and all gender structures.

On the other hand, paedophilia and pederasty are bastardisations of these traits, blurring and blending care and love into domination and control. It is culture that screws up, not human beings.

To paraphrase the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, when you get down to it, human beings are essentially all about care.

Christina Ricci's Seven Year Cycles

2008-02-26T12:14:00.005+11:00

The girl who epitomized the attraction to apathy in the '90s is no longer "going to hide behind her notorious sarcasm," according to New York Magazine, who profiles Ms. Ricci as she gets down into some unexpected fatalism:

Christina Ricci is a fervent believer in seven-year cycles. “My mom told me, ‘Every seven years, everything changes: your physical being, your emotional being, the way other people look at you. Everything’ … Oh, God,” she moans, mocking herself. “This is the kind of shit—if I go into the bookstore and ask for the astrology section, they’re always like, ‘Oh, a.k.a. the crazy-lady section?’ That’s where you’ll find me. Yep, the crazy-lady section.”

Ooh yeah. All sarcasm gone it seems.

Electric Prayers

2008-02-22T13:45:00.007+11:00

A current and constant theme of tension between the Abrahamic religions has been the apparent Disneyfication and modernization of Christianity compared to the raw and unapologetically antediluvian nature of contemporary Islam.

Now with electroluminescent phosphor printing technology, Islam can participate in the aesthetics of the 21st century without giving into the religious watering-down associated with sects such as Hillsong.

This piece of holy technology comes all the way from BrIslam. English-based Turkish designer Soner Özenç has merged the evanescence of divinity with the effervescence of modernity with an illuminating sajjadah (prayer rug) – the Sajjadah 1426.

Those in performance of the Muslim prayer – the namaz – are in for an atmospheric treat that makes practicing the prayer all the more electrifying. What’s more is that the luminosity of the Sajjadah 1426 strengthens as the rug points closer towards the holy land Mecca, sending charges of electrifying God current up your spine and in the general direction of paradise.

Godliness has never been so savvy. This is almost better than virtual praying in Second Life.

Marilyn Monroe & the Lindsay Lohan Omen

2008-02-20T11:49:00.006+11:00

Lindsay Lohan, in a provocative yet slightly underwhelming photo shoot for New York Magazine, has resurrected the spectral corpus of Marilyn Monroe. A troubled starlet plays… a troubled starlet six weeks before she topped herself in the Hotel Bel-Air in 1962; and six weeks after Lohan's latest stint in rehab.

The infamous last photo session for American Vogue was recreated by the original photographer Bert Stern, who found it easy to talk Lohan into doing the slightly fatalistic, omen-istic, augur-istic shoot; I mean it’s not like we’re making some sort of cultural statement about celebrity. Are we?

On the tough decision to play the dead minx, Lohan muses, "I didn't have to put much thought into it. I mean, Bert Stern? Doing a Marilyn shoot? When is that ever going to come up?" On Monroe’s and Heath Ledger’s dénouement: "I sure as hell wouldn't let it happen to me." Remember Lindsay! Beer before barbiturate, you’re in the shit. Barbiturate before beer, you’re in the clear.

My favourite response to the shoot comes from Monica Corcoran in the LA Times who opined that Bert Stern "should be ashamed of himself for aping such a memorable photo shoot for a 21-year-old actress whose most notable credit is Herbie Fully Loaded"?

Really Monica! Between Herbie Fully Loaded and The Seven Year Itch, Herbie takes props!

Mac Fetish

2008-02-19T19:51:00.003+11:00

Since its inception in 1984, the Macintosh has garnered a cult status to the point of fetish. The doco MacHEAD seeks why.

Macheads - the movie (trailer)
by brunogarattoni

America's Fear of the Vag

2008-02-18T18:00:00.011+11:00

An Ohio high school is in uproar after the student newspaper, Le Sabre, under the bright pink headline of ‘Have a Happy Vagina Day!’ published a diagram of a vagina to accompany its Valentine’s Day special on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.

God forbid these children know exactly what they’re getting their fingers into. Haven’t these kids seen the movie Teeth (“chomp”): vagina dentata, anyone? Seriously! There be monsters.

After the school attempted to confiscate all copies of the paper, in protest, the 15 years-old, editor-in-chief, Richard Edmond, along with other students arrived the next day brandishing T-shirts saying, “My vagina is obscene.” Again, Teeth, anyone, anyone?

That visual V-bomb occurred just a couple of days after Jane Fonda dropped a C-bomb on live national television (that’s “cunt” for you Protestants). America went nuts! Jane Fonda, however, was in fact citing, a specific chapter of The Vagina Monologues, entitled, ironically, ‘Reclaiming Cunt.’

The remark immediately prompted an on-air apology from Meredith Vieira, in which she plugged the next segment: “The secrets to making your love last.” I can only guess that dirty talk is not going to be part of that infotainment masterpiece.

A few classic gems I can think of are: “lick my [C-bomb],” or “I want you to [F-bomb] me in the [C-bomb].”

Sounds tactical.

Or we could go with, “My vagina is obscene.” That always gets ‘em.

The entire ruckus over the “obscenities” begs the question: is there a uniquely American fear of the vag? Does the word “cunt” cause American men to shiver? David Letterman, when recounting the above anecdote, couldn’t even bring himself to say “vagina.”

We might propose that popular culture sees the female sexual organ akin to a void; a place absent of all signs, which makes it chaotic, irrational unreal, unnatural and unconscious. By failing such a simple task as uttering its name, we put it into the realm of mythology.

And in Greek mythology, there are few better stories about the abject of woman, than ‘Pandora’s Box’. Basically, Pandora comes to Earth with a box (which is kind of labelled “don’t open”). Man – with his infantile sensibilities – is curious of Pandora’s box. Some dude opens the box and unleashes hell on Earth (which in some versions is women).

Thus men both fear and are obsessed by the vag. They fear the box controlling them, so they must attempt to control the box back (which is usually done by forcibly opening and penetrating it). Or as Tom Cruise puts it in Magnolia: "Respect the cock! Tame the cunt!"

However, in the world of nomenclature, this is done by refusing to utter its name. By not giving something a sign, or by forbidding utterance of that sign, we label the object the sign denotes as subordinate, or abject. Basically we think: “cunt” = vulgar word, thus “vagina” = bad thing.

But of course some conservative linguists might think that by removing “cunt” from the popular vernacular altogether, we remove all badness associated with vaginas. The problem is then that “cunt” is simply and only reserved for negative and abusive use towards women. And this is the idea behind “reclaiming” the word.

Think of the negativity associated with things we don’t utter: “those we don’t speak of,” “whose name we do not say,” etc. Unless we want vaginas associated with Lord Voldemort, I suggest we get used to the C-bomb.

Try it with some common phrases: “her cunt was lovely,” “by the way, great cunt!”

And boys. Be nice to the cunts.

* My reading of the myth of 'Pandora's Box' is based on British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's interpretation in 'Topographies of Curiosity'
** Vagina diagram from the Virginia Academy of Science

Madonna's Filth & Wisdom

2008-02-16T23:57:00.002+11:00

Filth and Wisdom, which just premiered at the Berlinale, is Madonna’s directorial debut. Finally taking it from behind… the camera, the Queen of Pop tackles a subject close to her heart and most easily supplied by her own boudoir: stripping. Let’s hope that hubby filmmaker Guy Ritchie (Snatch and the unfortunately unforgettable Swept Away) stayed away for the sake of the film’s watchability.

Here’s a three-minute short thanks to IndieWire.

indieWIRE: Madonna's "Filth and Wisdom"
by indiewire

Watashi wa Jezutsu desu

2008-02-15T16:42:00.005+11:00

Japanese Manga artist and Anglican priest wannabe Ajinbayo Akinsiku has transformed the bible, from Genesis to Revelations, into a Japanese Manga comic; interpreting the Son of God as a hard-edged Samurai with a big sword and a demeanor to use it.

Christ as the existential misanthropic hero? Sounds like Kurosawa meets Clint Eastwood on a bad day. After all, he does die for all our sins. That could make one slightly irritable.

In this attempt to make the bible more accessible to nerds, in true Manga style, they’ve got to make the Virgin Mary - aka Sailor Moon – a hot MILF, circa 1980 Catholic school girl: rolled up Harajuku socks, pink cotton undies and poses that, well… hey if you’re hanging it out like that, how could you not get preggas?

Mary's baby shower?

Moses and the burning bush?

Islamic Police Crackdown on St. Valentine

2008-02-13T14:12:00.005+11:00

According to the Guardian Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (what a great business card) has banned the sale of red roses and red gifts on the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, accusing the day of love as being un-Islamic and claiming that it unlawfully promotes relationships out of wedlock.

This is old news however, as six years ago there had been reports of mass confiscations of teddy bears and flowers on the actual day. According to Arab News the holiday had officially been deemed a “pagan ritual” and is forbidden from being celebrated by Muslims.

Ahhh, what a great idea CPVPV! I think all governments should take a lesson from the Saudi’s religious police. It could be the 21st Century’s version of book burning. We could parade wannabe Casanovas in the streets, make them walk on rose thorns and hang them up by their oversized red ribbons, or even go the Sarah Kane route and simply force feed them low-carb chocolates until they burst.

We should promote singledom and prevent said singles from madness caused by hyper-romantic excess and bumping into ex-lovers carrying sachets of Ferrera Roché. This would probably reduce the number of shootings and bring down the aggregate mass-murder index.

On another note, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Amnesty International’s recent use of the red rose to deter a certain Islamic ritual from another part of the world; namely, female circumcision, or female genital mutilation.

Is there a deeper, more sinister post-colonial intention for the rose? Heal the world. Love each other! That sort of horseradish? Well... for now:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Don’t fornicate out of wedlock,
And Allah loves you!

The Calculatingly Unobjectionable: Oprah, Urkel & Obama

2008-02-12T21:32:00.000+11:00

The LA Times is usually one of the most insipid English-written newspapers in the world, partly due to its proximity to the vapidity of the Hollywood Hills, and not to mention the burgeoning English literacy crisis of Schwarzenegger’s “Kalifornya.”

However, columnist Joel Steins, in a piece called “He’s got Obamaphilia,” trips over a political fact that only years of probing the profound pools of Hollywood’s monotony could prepare one to discover. And that is, that Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is sooo much hot air.

He is the black Anthony Robbins hyping up the crowd, making one feel inspired with hope. As Stein opines, “I want the man to hope all over me” and I must say, I want him to hope all over me too.

For “What a man, what a man, what a man, what a mighty good man” to persuade the youth of America to even show-up and vote in their respective caucuses. Obama is the guy on the Tonight Show who warms up the crowd: “Where are you from Sir? Carolina? Well hey. Lots of blacks in South Carolina. Anyone know a feminist lesbian midget? I know one. She’s in Seattle. You people rock!”

As Steins suggests, “The dude is Urkel with a better tailor” – charismatic, good-natured and slightly goofy. He is the material recipient of all our quixotic aspirations. Quixotic because, at the end of the day, you don’t think Obama, like Urkel, will be able to pin down the job. But we so want him to. We want him to succeed. We want to live in a perfect world where idealism works and the goofy black kid becomes President of the United States.

But what such a comparison of personalities reveals to us is his calculatingly unobjectionable persona. And at the end of the day, it is a campaign run on persona, as well documented by the image-starved celebrities in the [excuse me while I vomit] “Yes We Can” music video. His one and only personality quibble is a self-confessed short-lived cocaine experience that makes him seem all the more “real,” and when touched on by a Clinton aide, backfired into Hillary’s face. His is a persona so well crafted that the LA witch doctors must have been brought in from the get-go.

Like a great actor – a master of empathy – he is whatever we want to project onto him: mainstream, alternative, activist, socialist, Christian, secularist, black, white, immigrant, native, African, American, African-American… He speaks to and for all of us: from the Heartland of America to the Middle East. He is a man of masks, of tricks, veils and surfaces, which is perhaps what is exactly needed to move mountains in a land that thrives on such impossible illusions.

For who else has such a virtual impact on the lives of so many? Who else turns the nullity of vapid hot air into the airwaves of success and power? The answer is she who has already anointed this one to serve as her demigod. Who else but Oprah, that vacuum of personality, so calculatingly unobjectionable? After all, she is the master of dealing with America’s hopes and inspirations.

“The medium is the message,” said Marshall McLuhan. It’s not what Obama says, but how he says it. It’s not who Obama is, but how we perceive him. Messages don’t matter as long as they’re delivered with, hmmm, inspiration and hope.

And so, in the 54th year of our Lord and Savior Oprah Gail Winfrey, will Barack Obama, on a platform of change – “what change?”… “who cares, just change!” – be anointed President of the United States of America?

As Leonard Cohen sang in his forgotten epitaph “Democracy”:

It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.

Super Football Caucus MAS*H

2008-02-08T11:14:00.001+11:00

According to AC Nielson, a record 97.5 million viewers watched last Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI – the most ever to watch a Super Bowl, and apparently, the second largest for any TV Show, second only to the finale of M*A*S*H in 1983, which apparently averaged 106 million viewers.

I want to know what-the-fuck happened in the last episode of M*A*S*H in 1983? Did Radar finally come out of the closet?

According to the US Elections Project only 122 million of 202 million eligible voters turned out for the 2004 US Presidential elections.

To reduce that margin, let’s run old episodes of M*A*S*H concurrently with the Super Bowl in order to maximise voter eyeballs. And then just before an offensive play, touchdown or the punch line to one of Alan Alda’s intoxicating repartee, we flash, “Press the Red Button to Vote and Continue”. Call it “Vote-per-View”. “This caucus is sponsored by Budweiser and the Church of Scientology: hmmm, thetans taste gooood…”

The Mythology of Beckham’s Bulge

2008-02-06T23:29:00.000+11:00

Flipping through my February edition of Vanity Fair I couldn’t help but visually trip over David Beckham’s package on the inside-front-cover.

I thought it ironic to see the once shy and humble boy, who from modest means in a North East London borough rose to become the greatest sporting star of all time, spread-eagled with the insignia of one of fashion’s most successful designers emblazoned on his crotch.

So in the spirit of Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, semiotician and Voted Favourite Person to Have at a Party, I think I’ll entertain a little of my own mythologies on this advertisement.

First of all, what sticks out the second most (hehe) is the complete absence of leg and chest hair. Clearly, David Beckham thinks a good manscaper is imperative!

As we well know, the obsession with expurgating body hair is more commonly associated with the vanity of women than of men (inversely proportional for homosexual circles). According to popular rhetoric, obliging ladies to shave their legs, typifies man’s paedophilic inclination towards the pre-pubescent body; basically, men want women to be infantile. So is this to say that we want David Beckham infantile? He does, after all, play with balls.

Allow me to venture a similar, yet distinct theory. What is it that is said to continue growing once the body is entombed after death? That is, the hair and nails. According to Georges Bataille, in his ground breaking monograph Death and Sensuality, this would have had the gravest of impacts on the first ancient cultures to indoctrinate burial practices. Along with the decomposition of your fellow man’s body is the preponderance of hair.

Hence, shearing this excess growth acts as a symbolic gesture towards deterring death. It is not so much eternal youth that David Beckham’s hairless legs signify, but the universal anxiety over death and the subconscious dream of eternal life. To exist hairless is to exist outside of nature’s logical path of maturation and death and hence, to exist outside of time. Not pre-pubescent, but embryonic.

Consider this photograph of Billy Corgan by the New York based artist David LaChapelle.

Old ladies visit the hairdressers more than anyone else because they want to purge the signs of decay, of grey and thinning hair. With this perspective, this image of the Chicago rocker instils a sense of atemporality. Living, not in the moment, but outside of all moments, before time even has a chance to do its mortal and unholy work. (Monotheistic religions proclaiming an afterlife are obsessed with cleanliness, wanting one to expurgate everything from blood to hair to foreskin in order to reach beatitude.)

Traditionally, grooming was an aristocratic activity. It was reserved for those who had an inexhaustible amount of time and money - individuals who did not actively participate in the laissez-faire economic system, a system controlled by the clock.

It was not until the 18th century Dandies of Western Europe, that the middleclass began to practice the effeminate art of greater upkeep of their physical appearance. They would essentially imitate aristocratic sensitivities, grooming, powdering and occasionally buggering.

It is not so much the appearance in itself, which is significant - as it is with the plume of a peacock – but the perceived time invested in the appearance. And so as class revolution gave rise to the bourgeoisie over the 19th century, time became an accessible luxury and these values were instilled into the bourgeois logic.

So back to the legs. Georges Bataille might have referred to this fetishized act of biomaterial destruction as “negative expenditure”. We negate a part of our body in order to elevate our social and divine standing.

Beckham’s standing is no less than godly. He is a Greek statue, a masculine paragon cast outside of time, to wither eons of birth and death. David Beckham was born lower-middles class. He is now a God. He can afford all the time in the world to veet his legs. (He does, after all, play for L.A. Galaxy.)

And so, it doesn’t seem altogether out of place, to see this man of humble beginnings, laying hairlessly, as a God, bulging, adrift on a satin cloud, awaiting your fiancé’s phantasmagorical orgasm. This will be his myth. Zeus!

(Now I haven’t even talked about the bulge. Well, clearly it indicates a fondness for tennis.)

The Political Unconscious of the Fashionably Conscious

2008-02-05T18:47:00.000+11:00

Salon’s Videodog took to Mercedes Benz New York Fashion Week to get the fashion world’s low-down on Super Tuesday. They found a Hillary look-a-like (unfashionable), an oblivious male model (“Is that like Super Bowl Tuesday?”) and a slightly confused fashionista (“I took like an online test and it said to go with Mitt Romney,” very unfashionable).

Psychosexual Vegetarians

2008-02-04T17:03:00.000+11:00

PETA Asia Pacific’s recent marketing campaign, which attempts to persuade meat-eaters towards vegetarianism by flaunting fully-undressed supermodels, reminds me of something Jacques Derrida talked about in his seminars on cannibalism: that carnivorous desire is exchangeable with carnal drive.

He says, “vegetarians, like everyone else, can also incorporate, symbolically, something living, something of flesh and blood... if they love, for it is the very temptation of love.” And so to follow the psychoanalytical logic of the undersexed older white male, vegetarians are hence, amazing in bed, because they sublimate their desire for meat into a desire for, well, meat. More fieldwork can only validate this old wife’s tale.

Truly, between Sophie Monk and a medium-rare porterhouse steak, I know what I’d rather sink my teeth into. And so the mantra “sex sells” is really finding a psychosexually suitable place in the anti-flesh industry. PETA is even having a Sexiest Vegetarian Next Door contest! So forget all the feminist objections to the objectification of the female body: we’re doing it for fluffy.

But as The Writer in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker says: “My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?”

Can't I have my steak and eat it?

Hollywood: Too Much Handheld, Not Enough Grip

2008-02-04T13:25:00.000+11:00

Kyle Smith, film critic to the New York Post recently wrote an article, “Handheld Cameras Are Officially Over,” partly in response to the lukewarm reception of Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams’ latest soon-to-be forgotten marketing masterpiece, shot entirely with the effect of a shaky handheld camera.

A lot of people cite The Blair Witch Project - equally forgettable - as the beginning of cinema’s obsession with the shaky-cam, but I remember the first big-budget foray one year earlier with Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, particularly in the infamous Omaha Beach landing scene.

Spielberg commercialized the fly-on-the-wall style of cinema vérité, replacing the fly with Tom Hanks and the wall with a legion of German mortars, giving to the war genre the effect of gritty realism and first-person presence.

Private Ryan’s shooting style foreshadowed the onslaught of Fox News’ own gritty and realistic war coverage as journalists reported from their “embedded” infantries in between gun-battles and car-bombings. Through overexposure, the shaky-cam has entered our visual lexicon and has come to be equated with veracity, courage and truthfulness uncontrived.

The Mancurian author Anthony Burgess labeled America’s demand to “face up to reality” as Nixonian; that is, a nation led by the lying smile of a president thug and fed on the monochromatic bloody images of the Vietnam War is a nation with a predilection for suffering.

On a hesitantly zooming lens, we watched the reality of a Boeing-767 marrying metal-to-metal as it collided into Tower Two of the World Trade Center. Camera phones provided the first glimpses of the 2005 London bombings. All over South East Asia reporters-for-the-day emailed and SMSed anxious holiday footage of a 30-metre wave.

Indeed, the world has become Nixonian. Through images, we deal with the harsh and visceral truth of all things. We have a propensity towards the real, so much so, that all images become a function of the real, particularly those steeped in fiction. We say the computer-generated images of the latest action blockbuster are “so real”. J.J. Abrams goes so far as to produce those effects in the lens of a handy-cam, as if we might be able to recall the images of 9/11 as mere phantasmagorias, conjured up by some studio lot in Burbank.

Perhaps a detriment to Cloverfield, is that for all the reality it professes - heightened by the promotional image of a battered Statue of Liberty (no doubt exploiting the visual unconscious of all New York’s observers) – it treads too close to what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the “hyperreal”, a reality exploited to the point of nonsense. Hollywood dreams of a reality so real, it ceases to be real, or as another post-modern theorist put it, we exist in the “desert of the real.”

Compare the action sequences in Private Ryan and Cloverfield with the impossibly smooth and flowing images of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.

In Children of Men D.O.P. Emmanuel Lubezki also utilizes a handheld approach, giving the appearance of documentary. Almost every scene is contained in a single tracking shot, but a single cut where the camera moves seamlessly and unshaken within a chaotic environment. There is an ethereal dream-like quality as the camera pans and follows the protagonist, seeing what he sees and observing what he observes.

Now watch this seminal scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 masterpiece Paths of Glory.

A reverent irreverence or solemn nonchalance characterizes this style. The camera reflects the humorless demeanor of our protagonists as he walks pensively down the trench. Unlike in Saving Private Ryan, it reflects contemplation, not action.

Reality (and I mean hyperreality) stupefies the viewer into shock, causing him or her to reject the experience, alienating one from any deeper understanding. The difference between gritty realism and the ethereal dream is the difference between suffering and contemplation. We contemplate the dream. We attempt dream interpretation.

With hyperreality, we are lost in the moment, lost to the emotive purge: fear, love, dread… we risk seeing reality taken to such a horrifying extreme, that we lapse into apathy: “this is just the way things are.” Or, we go into shellshock and deny the world’s malevolence altogether and simply await Tom Hanks to come pick us up and bring us into the third act.

Perhaps audiences are becoming jaded with hyperreality. In our current wartime, we are constantly bombarded by images on our TVs and in the cinemas dictating to us the veracity of reality. What filmmakers such as Cuarón and Lubezki are doing - and others including Joe Wright, Todd Haynes and Julian Schnabel - is recalling the contemplative and inspirational styles of Fellini, Kubrick and Hitchcock, where dreams have as much validity as reality does.

Canned Laughter Fails To Bring The Funny

2008-02-03T01:36:00.000+11:00

In news that is sure to send waves of explosive defecation through production houses across the globe, a primetime comedy has failed to garner a single laugh. Details remain sketchy, however, early reports suggest that Channel 10’s “hit comedy series” skitHouse was met with silence last Thursday night despite the producer’s liberal use of Track 15 from Pet Sounds (of Audience Approval).

“We don’t know what went wrong,” series’ executive producer Craig Campbell moaned, obviously uncomfortable in his rubberized underwear. “Track 15 is a classic! It’s never failed! What else can we do? We turned up the volume; even tried Track 16! It’s as if you people are trying not to laugh!”

Beverley McGarvey, Channel 10’s Head of Programming, knows what’s going wrong: “The problem has always been the viewer,” she said in a statement released this morning from cubicle three of the executive toilets. “You can’t rely on them liking the same thing from one day to the next. I’ve been in the industry for thirty years, so obviously I know good television… there aren’t many viewers that can say that.”

10’s solution, she explains, comes in HD. “It’s simple: we sit the viewer down in front of a TV tuned to 10 and then put the remote out of their reach. It’s the digital revolution.” Of course, some people might still be able to find the controls on the set, and even be willing to get up to use them. “Which is why we’re focusing initially on geriatrics. They can’t even get up to relieve themselves, you think they wont just sit there and take it? This is the genius behind Ten Half Dead!”

Channel 9 is going one step further. For the premiere of their landmark “new comedy” Monster House, they’ve turned to the emergent Blu-Ray technology. “The flaw to Ten HD,” incoming Nine exec Michael Healy explains, “is the restriction to age. Now sure, we all prize the over-80s demographic. It’s pretty clear that most of our programming is targeted to their outmoded ideas of what’s acceptable or even funny, but it’s crazy to ignore the more able-bodied viewers. With this technology, as soon as anyone tries to change channel, a high-powered blue laser simply takes off their finger!” His personal assistant assured us later that Mr Healy’s propensity for miming laser-fire while screaming ‘zap!’ for much longer than can possibly be needed to illustrate his point is the result of a birth defect which rendered him anatomically brainless. “We’re confident that people will soon recognize the quality of our programming.” He eventually concluded.

Whichever technology proves successful, it seems Australian comedy will survive this current crisis thanks to our indomitable spirit of innovation, ensuring that the same quality product is unmissable for generations of obese, fingerless geriatrics to come.

Blanchett’s Yiddish Bone: “what does that even meeean, maan?”

2008-01-30T16:01:00.000+11:00

Personal note: Never have I remotely been attracted to the waifish and slightly Jewish appearance of Bob Dylan, yet embodied by the scrawny and slightly taller figure of Cate Blanchett, oh boy I want to jump his Yiddish bones!

Todd Haynes’s allegorical film I’m Not There is a parade of Dylan. Five Dylans in fact, personified by five distinct actors; none of who, in the flesh, remotely resemble the iconoclastic singer-songwriter. However, it is Blanchett’s eponymous performance as the post-folk, post-acoustic, post-political, post-Christian Bale and dare I say, post-Dylan Bob Dylan that eats Queen Lizzie’s cake, as evidenced by her recent Golden Globe win and Oscar nods.

Floating through a whimsical landscape patched together from interviews, live performances and well-known anecdotes, Blanchett channels the ghost of a man who simply is not. From press conference to performance to garden party, he, she, they… stammer dyslexically through their meaningful meaninglessness with lyrical acumen: “Two words on Shakespeare…Raving queen. Cosmic amphetamine brain. I dig Shakespeare.”

He is a performer, a “trapeeeze R-tist”, a caricature of existential bad faith and a poster-child for the post-modern identity: neither present nor absent, active nor passive, man nor woman. And who better to portray such a conundrum of personality than one who has shared sheets with the likes of Queen Lizzie (Elizabeth) and Cat Hepburn (The Aviator)?

Throughout his career, Dylan’s consistence in defying and defiling the media’s claim on him is a testament to his self-reflexive infidelity. He is a liar, a sinner, an asexual deviant, who for years, has been sleeping with the other halves of himself (“God, I’m glad I’m not mee”); and so the time has come for Blanchett to loan her body to an ephemeral orgy with the ghosts of Bob Dylan.

Ephemeral, for whatever photographs, sound bites and archived film reels are splayed out for the sake of defining the man behind the music (Blanchett’s act is partially based on D. A. Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary Don’t Look Back), he vanishes, to be replaced, somewhere between the fifth and third acts by Richard Gere. Simply, he is not there. Bob Dylan is not present. He is yonder, at the vanishing point of the horizon, outside the screen’s frame, watching from the projection room with a doped-out grinning Allen Ginsburg wondering, “what does that even meeean, maan?”

And so where Dylan is not, Blanchett will be. Where Dylan disintegrates into the tomes of music journalism and cinema vérité, Blanchett is present with harmonica and cigarette; that is, to nail down, for a fleeting second, the smoke-filled spectre of a man not there.

The enigmatic Blanchett outperforms Dylan’s phantom. He is annihilated leaving a post-Dylanism, leaving in his wake a corpus, a body of work, a body that matters; that is, Blanchett’s body. And logically, this body must reinterpret the cinematic oeuvre and embody all of histories curly-haired paragons: Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Queen Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Catherine Hepburn, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Captain Jack Sparrow. But why stop at the world of celluloid? Imagine a political revolution of Blanchett: Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Barack Obama as President of the United States. For in the performance of all things, if gender is an illusion, surely then, race is too.

For who can deny the power of the Blanchett? She is a performer to outperform all others, to outperform the very idea of performance. She unveils the very lie that is identity and that indeed we are all sleeping with our other halves. “Sleep? Sleep is for dreeamers, maan,” and what a dream it is, because in the post-Dylan, Blanchett discloses to us all, that really, at the end of the day, we are Bob Dylan.

And so the logical question transpires? In the coming post-Blanchett era, who will play Blanchett who plays Bob Dylan who plays no one but himself who isn’t there in the bio-pic about Blanchett who plays Bob Dylan in I’m Not There?

The answer, of course, is you, because “you’re liiaars, all of you.”