I’m back! I’m back from holiday! ...You didn’t know I was on holiday? I’ve been gone for MONTHS.

*stares you down evilly*

Yeah, it’s been a long, long time, and there’s a few reasons for that. The first is that I’m not writing much at all anymore; too busy watching films, thinking about films, etc. This course has certainly invigorated me on that front. I’m still reading, but very little (currently breezing through Salman Rushdie’s Fury, which is wonderful). My writing is essentially limited to reviews/editorials/whatever for Projectorheads and nothing else.

I’ve been so bad with this blog (but then, I’m always inconsistent with it. If you’ve [incredibly] read this far, you’ll know that by now), and the main, main, reason, is simple; I’m not depressed or unhappy at all. In fact, I think this has been one of the best years of my life, or at least the best for a while. I’m stuck in a routine that is glorious to be stuck in. And man, how the hell did I ever live without being a film fan? It seems inexplicable to me now. I realise that Liam and I used to talk projects and whatever, but whenever I picture us pre-film, I just see the two of us sitting around twiddling our thumbs for hours on end before saying “Okay, seeya later!!!!!” and leaving.

(On the blog front, after months of writing an uber-long entry, Jack Bz posted his latest blog. It’s very interesting, and very wordy for him. As he will be the first to point out, it’s basically the length of a normal blog for me, but it’s still great. Still, the fact that he posted it means that I am forced, as a friend, to immediately write a longer one just to render months of Bz’s life worthless. It’s a friendly thing to do, trust me)

On the film thing; I just want to make a fairly extended addendum to a previous blog entry. Last year – in fact, October of last year – in fact, Saturday the 4th of October, 2008 – in fa-no, stop there. Point is, I made a post that “examined” Empire’s top 500 film list, and was fairly scathing throughout. I read through this again recently and shivered with horror at how presumptuous and altogether unknowledgeable it is. I was basically making all these points about films that were on the list, when there was, like, half of the list that was totally unknown to me. I wasn’t qualified to make any judgments. It’s a stupid post, and I removed it from my blog. I don’t usually do that, because I feel – as is the case with this Journal – that if I make a stupid remark in the past, I shouldn’t erase it because I can use it as a reminder of my own folly and growing up. But this one was just too painful to leave online.

It’s still in this blog, though.

I was woefully unknowledgeable about foreign film in particular; as evidenced by this list of films I’d never heard of at the time, most of which are foreign:

Amores perros
Sideways
Brick
The Fountain
Flesh
Santa Sagre
Glengarry Glen Ross
Snatch
Ikiru
Ten
Dog Day Afternoon
A Man Escaped
Do the Right Thing
Greed
The Shop Around the Corner
Cache
Jules et Jim
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Lives of Others
Suspiria
Midnight Cowboy
The Red Balloon
La Belle el la Bete
Rocco and his Brothers
Rashomon (Oh god, I made a Pokemon joke here. Oh god)
L‘Avventura
Secrets and Lies
Ran
The Maltese Falcon
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The Leopard
Black Narcissus
Festen
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
Songs from the Second Floor
Le Samourai
Viridiana
The French Connection
Z
Double Indemnity
Breathless
A Woman Under the Influence
Los Olvidados
The Battle of Algiers
Fitzcarraldo
Touch of Evil
Yojimbo (I actually made a horrible remark here about wondering if the rest of the list was going to have more European and Eastern films. This despite the fact that I hadn’t heard of Yojimbo. I mean, what the hell? I made a Pokemon joke on Rashomon, and then did this with Yojimbo?)
The Spirit of the Beehive
The Night of the Hunter
His Girl Friday
La Dolce Vita
8 ½
On the Waterfront
The 400 Blows
Andrei Rublev
The Apartment

Oh god, that list is horrible. I didn’t know Godard, or Truffaut, or Fellini, or Tarkovsky (apart from Solaris), or Herzog, or Cassavetes, or Wilder, or Bunuel (beyond Un Chien Andalou), or Vinterberg, or Tati, or Kurosawa (beyond Seven Samurai), or Haneke, or Kiarostami, or Spike Lee, or Mike Leigh, or Argento, or Visconti, or Roy Andersson, or anyone from the Czech New Wave, or that Touch of Evil was a Welles film.

And even then, I fucked up by:

Assuming The Third Man was an Orson Welles film
Stating that Napoleon was the first silent film on the list, when it manifestly wasn’t

Jesus Christ, if I saw someone do this now, I’d pounce all over them in rage. Still, I’ve learned by my lesson. Not only do I not post about films beyond Projectorheads, but I don’t make Top 5s of books, albums or games anymore. I simply don’t know enough to be able to do so, I think. Liking Rushdie and Dostoevsky is a nothing opinion.

Oh, and I also – and this was in fact the main, main reason I took it down (I should keep this “main, main” thing up, it’s catchy) – intimated that The Godfather didn’t deserve the top spot because it was too obvious a pick. What a stupid, stupid thing to say. I hate myself for saying it. I hadn’t even seen The Godfather then. Hell, I still haven’t seen it*, but I wouldn’t make a claim like that now. In fact, I’ve no idea why I said that in the first place. I honestly can’t even remember what I was thinking.

*Future note: I have seen The Godfather, now!

(...scrolling through this Journal sometimes reaps the most horrible results. Did I really say that Napoleon Dynamite had one of my favourite title sequences ever? Dear lord)

The funny thing about all this is that, as I already said, I’d basically online-bully someone now for making such stupid assumptions. I mean, okay, most people on the internet don’t bag The Godfather for no reason without having seen it (ulp), but certainly there’s a growing and prevalent mindless majority of sorts who hate anything non-obvious-classic and non-Tarantino. The kind of people that label you as a pretentious film snob purely for having seen and enjoyed a Godard film. The kind of people that assume that, if they and possibly their friends haven’t heard of a film, then said film is obscure, not liked by many people at all, and purely something passed around snobby art circles for a bout de semen. In other words, for chronic, groupie masturbation.

(“a bout de semen” actually doesn’t make any sense at all, I just really liked the phrasing of it)

It’s an astonishingly narrow-minded view, and one that assumes without having much evidence. Certainly there are film snobs out there, just as, by the same token, there are – for want of a better term – film slobs out there (the type of people who will rent something like The Fast and the Furious and think it’s cool cos, y’know, it has some cars and women in it. Goddammit, I like cars and women too, but would you really watch an hour-and-a-half [I presume] film just for that? I mean, really?). Most people who actually watch films – i.e. deliberately seek out films to watch – fall between these two extremes. Arguably film slobs shouldn’t even have the word “film” attached to their catchy-and-new-moniker (I bet someone else has already thought of it, but I’m going to pretend only I have because I will look minutely cooler), since film isn’t an issue for them in the slightest. It’s something they indulge in whenever they feel like it, often with friends, just for the fun of it. Ain’t nothing wrong with this; everyone has their just-for-fun activities that they share with other people*. In between watching film and generally attempting to educate/culture myself, I spend a lot of my free time committing random, senseless violence in Doom and Grand Theft Auto, just because, well, I can. Because it’s fun.

*Those with friends, that is. I’m thinking of ex-Ugmoer “Ice the Frosty Cat” (yes, he called himself this), who once argued with me by saying that multiplayer games are worthless based on the fact that he didn’t have anyone to play them with.

However, while a lot of people I know who don’t really care about film are happy to acknowledge that they probably don’t watch the greatest stuff ever (equally, I’m guilty of not watching the best television shows ever, particularly of the current day – my favourite show is the wildly inconsistent Doctor Who, for god’s sake – and I’m even more guilty of, despite my firmly held belief that videogames are art, playing nothing more challenging than Doom when bored), there are those that react angrily, so angrily that they seem almost violent, to being told this. Or in fact, not even told this, because it’s rare that film-lovers will seek out someone and say, “Hey you, you know that film you enjoy? Well, it’s shit.” Usually it’s in fact a perceived insult. Witness Roger Ebert’s recent bashing at the hands of crazed fanboys after he gave a bad review to Transformers 2. They accused him of not being able to enjoy films and being a pseudo-intellectual snob, they said that whilst it may not be Casablanca or Citizen Kane it’s an enjoyable film, they said that he was old and out of touch.

Let’s just look at this absolutely clearly;

1) Roger Ebert can’t enjoy films.
This is a statement you can only possibly make if the only review of Roger Ebert’s you’ve ever read is indeed his Transformers 2 review. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of the “classic” films are often incredibly enjoyable anyway (I’ll get back to this in a second), this is the guy who gave Knowing a good review, in fact four stars (which equates to “great movie”), when everyone else trashed it. This is the guy who did a DVD commentary for Dark City along with obvious candidates like Citizen Kane. Hell, this is the guy that not only gave thumbs-up to both Bill-Murray-voiced Garfield films, but actually really liked the first Transformers film.

But yes, the enjoyability of older/foreign films. There’s this definite assumption that foreign films and older films are always unable to be enjoyed, only able to be analysed and looked at intellectually. This is bullshit and based on no discernable evidence that I can see. Anything by Francois Truffaut is incredibly enjoyable – Jules et Jim is hilarious, heart-warming and very-quickly-cut, and his others are too – and critic-favourite Hitchcock specialised in thrillers, in deliberately thinking of his audience the whole time (without, it must be said, assuming his audience was dumb). Citizen Kane is indeed the critics’ darling, and ignoring whether it’s the greatest film or not, it genuinely is actually really enjoyable. I mean that sincerely; I was entertained throughout. The idea that “art films” (a misnomer that is generally applied to anything foreign or non-mainstream/old; an art film is literally a film made by an artist. It’s Andy Warhol filming the Empire State Building for 24 hours, not Fellini making a film about a comedic clown girl falling in love with her well-built mentor [La Strada]) are always about “the meaning of life” and are incomprehensible because of that is one that is totally, totally incorrect. Apart from “the meaning of life” being a very, very vague term – it could refer to so many things – and apart from the fact that every human being thinks about the meaning of life from time to time – who the hell doesn’t? It’s in our nature to question these things. Otherwise we’d be animals, or worse, Christian* – I honestly can’t think of that many directors I’ve watched that have sparked my brain intellectually rather than enjoyably or emotionally. I can think of three off the top of my head; Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, and Ingmar Bergman (and even Bergman’s much more fun than he’s often painted). That’s 3 directors out of the 230-ish films I’ve watched from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, so far. 3.

*Joke! It’s a joke! I swear!

2) It may not be Casablanca or Citizen Kane but it’s an enjoyable film.
This is one of those weird defences that come about whenever someone is arguing with someone knowledgeable about film. Casablanca and Citizen Kane are two of the most well-known “classic” movies, so they’re the most often mentioned. Leaving aside that both are very enjoyable – Casablanca possibly more so (in fact, a lot of its appeal purely comes from its enjoyability, rather than any dissection you could do of it [it’s not that complex a film at all, in all honesty]) – this is a comparison that makes no sense, akin to saying that The Da Vinci Code may not be War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, but it’s more enjoyable than those two. The Da Vinci Code is nothing like those two books; equally, Transformers 2 is nothing like those two films. No critic watches a film about giant robots fighting and thinks, “Man, you know what’s better than this? Casablanca!” There’s no similarity in performances, in context, in genre, in audience, in anything.

The best comparison one could make should be very obvious; Steven Spielberg’s the goddamned producer of the film, so we should be comparing Transformers 2 with his blockbusters, or George Lucas’. So let’s do that. Is Transformers 2 as good as Star Wars? Is it as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark? Has anything Michael Bay’s made been as good as even a lower-tier Spielberg?

I’m not going to answer those questions; I’m just pointing out that those are the questions that should be being asked. You make quality comparisons between products that are similar, not between products that are so wildly different that the comparisons are totally meaningless.

3) Roger Ebert is old and out of touch.
Hahahaha. Hahahahahahaha. This is inevitably the fate, in the internet age, of anyone over the age of, ooh, 35. I’ve seen posters on Something Awful being called “old” for being 38. 38! They’re being called old by the same people who would hate the youth-is-best attitude that the media is constantly shoving in our faces. The younger, the better. Since when has that ever, ever been true? Youth is not better or worse than old age.

And let’s be honest; out of touch? This is a man who watches at least one film a day, who has a back-knowledge of thousands of films, vs. some dudes who like Megan Fox and robots, for who Transformers 2 is basically the only thing they’ll watch all year. This is a man who, as I’ve already pointed out, gives favourable reviews all the time to enjoyable kiddy films. Does Ebert look down on Pixar? Not in the slightest. When Ebert prefers the catalogue of a self-proclaimed children’s animation studio to a supposedly-for-grown-ups film like Transformers 2, you know it’s not snobbery talking. It’s honesty. It suggests something very, very simple; that there’s something very, very wrong with Bay’s films.

Think about this for a second more. Why is Pixar so popular amongst audiences and critics? Why is Transformers 2 only popular amongst (relatively selective) audiences? The answer is simple. Michael Bay is a grown man making an M-rated film with humping jokes, and is supposedly appealing to the child inside him. Pixar are grown men and women making G and PG-rated films that, by contrast, most likely appeal to the adult within children. Certainly Up’s opening is a saddening, depressing opening for a child, and all the better for it. But that’s not really the dichotomy between the two; the truth is that Bay isn’t making films for the child within us, because no child would give a shit about Megan Fox or Shia LeBeouf. No child gives a shit about the plot in general; I cared about emotion and exciting, imaginative images as a child, not plot. I liked Jurassic Park because it had dinosaurs in it, and I was a dinosaur nerd. I didn’t care if Laura Dern was attractive or not. No, Bay isn’t a child in a man’s body; he’s resolutely stuck in his teenage years. He’s stuck in his nostalgic teenage years, for that matter; the kind of guy who reminisces over their favourite things as a child and seeks them out again just to relive the fun. The kind of guy who knows it’s probably very shitty, but hey, big screen dolls, tits and explosions*! The kind of guy who would watch Transformers 2; who would pay money to watch it ironically. I’d say half of its audience is probably those who genuinely really love the film, and half is those who watch it because it’s hilarious to watch bad films.

Seriously, if you’re going to watch a bad film that’s hilarious, for god’s sake, watch The Room. David Cross loves it, and he’s awesome.

*I’m way too much of a Bowie fan these days.

The weirdest thing, though, is that this backlash happened at all. Think about it; Roger Ebert was doing his job by saying that he thought it wasn’t a good film. He’s supposed to give his honest opinion on things. How on earth did so many people think he was insulting their intelligence by doing this? He didn’t even say anything about the obvious dumbness of the film, just that the editing made the action difficult to follow and that there was nothing interesting in it. This is hardly a nasty criticism. It doesn’t even imply anything about the audience, apart from perhaps that they enjoy not knowing what the hell’s going on with such rapid-fire editing.

So why do people react so badly to criticism of such films? It reminds me of an IMDB user who said that critics suck because they like bad movies and hate the movies he likes. He listed Gremlins 2 as an example of a film that they disliked. I mean, what does he expect? It’s ludicruous.

Imagine for a moment that, like me, your diet tends to consist of McDonalds for lunch (hey, the people reading this are probably my age. This probably does apply to them. Stereotyping ahoy!). Imagine that you enjoy McDonalds, but know that it’s not really very good.

Now imagine something different; imagine that you enjoyed McDonalds so much that you genuinely thought it was one of the best sources of food in the world. Now imagine meeting a food critic, or a chef – someone, at least, who genuinely gives a shit about food – and arguing with them when they make a statement about McDonalds being fast-food, near-nothing foodstuff. Would you argue back? Would you claim that they were pretentious food lovers who snobbishly denied McDonalds, and only pretended that they like all these “obscure” foods because they want to look cool to other critics?

Ridiculous. For a start, if all critics genuinely didn’t like these “obscure” foods, they wouldn’t bother trying to look cool in front of other critics. Because if none of them like it, then why would they collectively say they do?

More than that, though, it’s just a stupid attitude to have. Everyone’s so self-absorbed these days, so much so that they assume the things they enjoy are the epitome of whatever those things are in their selective fields. To assume that McDonalds makes the best food ever is ridiculous, akin to thinking only Hollywood makes good films*. If you don’t enjoy the more “complex”/“obscure” stuff, then fine, keep on don’t-ing. However, accusing others of effectively lying about their tastes because it doesn’t fit with yours is just utterly stupid.

*McDonalds really is the most apt analogy for Hollywood; greedy money-loving capitalist pieces of shit that have the decency to have a certain amount of quality control, but only because they don’t want to alienate their consumers in the slightest. This also means that “indie cinema” is the equivalent of McDonalds’ “health-food range”, but I’ll leave you to work out what I’m implying here. Anyway, enough about this; I’m not here to rage against capitalism.

In conclusion, Mr. Reader; if there’s one thing I genuinely don’t like in people, it’s narrow-mindedness. It’s the only thing I’m, ahem, narrow-minded about.

End-note: C#.

No but really; I wonder if simply the fact that I’ve written this will instantly result in a “PRETENTIOUS!!!” back-slapping from anyone who doesn’t agree with me (and from Sandford, who will be three-quarters-joking). No-one at TAFE seems to think Liam and I are film snobs, which is good. I think it’s because despite us watching all this stuff they may not know, we also watch lots of other, more mainstream stuff (like most film fans). I mean, goddamn, my project for TAFE was a zombie film. I’ve argued on this blog previously about the awesomeness of Dawn of the Dead and The Exorcist, and I still absolutely stand by those arguments, and probably forever will. But I wonder if those reading who don’t know me very well (that’ll be a grand total of zero, then, but I’m talking hypothetically here! Give me a break!!) will assume I am this pretentious, arty-farty type of person. The mere fact that I’ve written this on a blog probably leads to the assumption that I like voicing my opinions about these things, about “obscure” films.

Hardly. This blog exists as a friends-only thing (by admitting this I’ve ruined my own hypothetical. BLAST) on the internet, and as a Journal locked away on my computer that no-one reads and that I’m not even sure why I’m writing. In real life (that old thing), I rarely talk about films unless explicitly asked about them, or unless I’m with Liam. I certainly don’t enter a conversation with someone just to say, “You know what’s a really good experimental Czech New Wave feminist film from 1966? Daisies!”

(It actually is a really good experimental Czech New Wave feminist film from 1966, but there’s no way I’d say that in real life)

...so much for an end-note.

Ah, actually, here’s a topic; Quentin Tarantino.

I’ll be honest. When I first sat down to watch Pulp Fiction, I was wary of what I was going to see. In fact, even after seeing it, it took me a little while to realise that what I’d seen wasn’t what I had been expecting to see. Naturally this can be the fear of everyone who watches a highly-well-regarded film – look at me, flipping over to the opposition for a second after arguing against them earlier – but in my case, it was honestly the people who regarded it, erm, well (what a shittily constructed sentence). I was afraid that it would be “cool”. That it would be stylish, and with no substance whatsoever.

I was wrong, of course.

But where did this assumption come from? Well, unfortunately, it came from the majority of the film-watching public. From, if I can call them this, Tarantino fans. What I was surprised to note, later, was that a lot of Tarantino fans actively deny a lot of the things Tarantino supports.

Tarantino’s a great guy, he really is. Possibly a bit too talkative or argumentative, if you’re clutching at straws to insult him, but then, so am I. He’s too talkative only because he has so much to say, because he knows how much digressions can sometimes add to a single, clear argument; his films reflect this too. He’s argumentative because he comes against people with stupid opinions sometimes. Or not even opinions, which is the problem; just unfounded prejudices. One of my favourite Tarantino vids on Youtube is one where he’s interviewed by someone who is apparently a film critic on a news program (Warning bell! News programs don’t employ critics! They’re meant to be unbiased, for a start! Warning bell!), when Kill Bill was being released. Now, I haven’t seen Kill Bill, but the woman’s main argument against him was that it was incredibly violent. What the hell? It’s an R-rated film. If you can’t handle the violence, then don’t watch it. There’s stuff I certainly can’t handle watching (people being raped to death by horses, for instance). But she seemed to take it upon herself to be a moral crusader – one with a stupid gardening hat on her head, of all things, which more than anything else revealed her idiotic conservatism – and question the need for violence in Tarantino’s film. She questioned whether such a film empowered women because butt-kicking women equalling empowered women is a fallacy (certainly it’s a lazy cliche, but you couldn’t accuse Tarantino of that, for god’s sake; look at Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, or Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds). But the funniest part was when she said, “But why would you have such much violence in a movie?” and Tarantino replied, “BECAUSE IT’S SO MUCH FUN, JAN.”

Oh, and when Tarantino said that he thought 13 year olds should totally see Kill Bill, on the basis that any rational human being would hardly be inspired to commit violence after seeing it, she replied with, “So you did that? And look how you turned out.” Which is how, exactly? He became a filmmaker, not a Columbine-esque shooter.

Still, Tarantino is seen as a man of violence and nothing else by a lot of people. Just last night, Marco said that he hadn’t seen any of his films because “98% of it is violence, isn’t it?” to which myself, Liam and my mum all completely disagreed with (it was good to hear someone from an older generation defend and praise Tarantino, incidentally). But this myth of the man of violence comes not just from his unfounded critics, but bizarrely, sometimes from his fans. You’d think from the way that some of his fans talk about his work that it’s stylish fun and nothing more, and that’s exactly the trap I fell into before I saw Pulp Fiction. He’s far, far more than that. Tarantino loves butt-kicking, because, let’s face it, he’s a guy. I love butt-kicking sometimes too. But Tarantino also loves themes, and dialogue, and emotion and cinematics. I love those things too. It’s not like the guy makes Dead or Alive, for christ’s sake.

That’s not actually what I was going to talk about, though. What gets to me – and it’s this same subset of people who shit upon Ebert for daring to not like Transformers 2, who equate non-Hollywood cinema with “not fun” – is that these fans hold opinions that totally contradict what Tarantino believes and preaches. I often wonder what Tarantino thinks of these fans. He’s probably too busy having fun to care. God, I hope I get to do the same thing one day.

Notions these people have that disagree entirely with Tarantino;

1) Critically acclaimed films suck.
Ignoring the fact that Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds alone were praised to the high heavens – Pulp Fiction won the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, for god’s sake! – there’s just something bizarre about this. Tarantino loves fun as much as the next man, but he’ll be the first to tell you that the broad expanses of cinema reap numerous benefits. This mean lives and breathes films; I remember reading that he watches at least one a day, that he explores as many different areas of cinema as possible. His enthusiasm for films is endless. He was a video geek, remember; working in a video store for years, he indulged in as many things as possible.

And yet a lot of his fans aren’t willing to step outside their tiny circle of what they watch. It’s bizarre.

2) Foreign films suck.
Leading on from the last point is this one. It’s particularly weird, this one, because I know that a lot of these people enjoy lots of Asian horror, which somehow doesn’t qualify as “foreign” to them. Whatever the hell that means.

Why do these people not enjoy foreign films? Do they just not like reading subtitles? If so, how the hell did they get through Inglourious Basterds, which is in German for a lot of its length? Indeed, Tarantino openly criticised the Hollywoodian stereotype of having foreign characters speak English purely for the benefit of the audience. Certainly characters may have to revert to English to understand each other, but no German soldier is going to speak mostly in English just in case someone non-German doesn’t understand him.

I also don’t understand why many lament Pulp Fiction not winning the best picture Oscar in 1994. Look, I don’t think Tarantino cares that it didn’t win. Similarly, I don’t think the guy who played Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds will care if he doesn’t win best supporting actor at the Oscars this year. Both are more interested in Cannes, who, let’s remember, awarded Pulp Fiction the Palm d’Or (in other words, best picture of the year) in 1994, and this year gave the Best Supporting Actor award to said guy who played Landa. Indeed, Tarantino explicitly made Inglorious Basterds over a period of time that corresponded with Cannes; in other words, so that it would be ready for the 2009 festival. He never considered anything else. So when his fans care only about the Oscars, I totally fail to understand. The Oscars often miss out a lot of things. It’s rare that Cannes does. Off the top of my head I can only think of Amelie not being in the official selection in 2001. That’s one example. As compared to the numerous mistakes the Oscars have made over the years.

3) To mention films that aren’t totally mainstream is to be elitist.
This is the most bizarre one of all. Cubert from Projectorheads (okay, his name’s actually James Humphreys, but I’m used to calling him by his 3dmm forum name) said that Tarantino is obsessed with “elitist film references”, which I don’t understand in the slightest. So Tarantino talks about Eric Rohmer in an interview with a reporter – so? Why the hell shouldn’t he? He’s a film fan! Knowing so much about cinema is what made him such a great director. It’s even less understandable that the film trivia in Inglourious Basterds similarly rubbed Cubert up the wrong way. These film references at their most explicit are: 1) a five-second scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage, which is used as a joke explaining how film canisters are flammable; 2) a discussion between an English sergeant and an English scholar about German cinema. They talk about The Blue Angel, they talk about Leni Riefenstahl, they talk about Murnau and Lang. Now, considering this film is set in World War II, considering that the whole film is about propaganda films and how film can influence history (as evidenced by the fact that the last scene is in a cinema, as evidenced by Goebbels and the film he commissions, as evidenced by the fact that history is changed when Hitler is [hilariously] shot in the fact), I can’t see at all how that’s inappropriate. It’s like complaining that a couple of soldiers in a WWII film talk about their makes of weapons and which ones they like the most.

Every other reference in the film tends to be more subtle and only noticed by those that get the references (I mean, it’s more subtle than The Simpsons, so why does Tarantino get the slap on the hand for this?); the Battleship Potemkin moment, the Western feel, etc. They’re not obtrusive in the slightest.
Tarantino wears his influences on his sleeves, because he enjoys sharing his love of them with other people. Don’t you love talking to friends about things you both enjoy? Isn’t that what we all do?

More digressions from the writing thing, I’m afraid. This is probably a really good thing for some people, though. But rest assured/worried! I will definitely return to the topic of writing later. Indeed.

Recently I became part of something called Newcastle Voice. I’ve no idea why, and it came around purely by chance; apparently they just ring people at random, and they happened to call my house when no-one else was home. I wasn’t in the mood to chat, so I lied and said I was 16. Unfortunately, this was one of those rare “you’re not the home-owner? Never mind, we can talk anyway!” type calls. Ironically, when she later asked for my age, I hesitated and said 1988 – and she didn’t notice the discrepancy. Phew!

But basically, this is just a committee of people who are there to comment on and try and do something (occasionally) about Newcastle. Mostly for me this’ll happen through internet surveys and things like that. The thing is, I’ve no idea what on earth I’m really supposed to contribute to this. As someone whose opinion of Newcastle is more insanely trivial than sane on any level (and as someone who wants to eventually bugger off and live in Melbourne for the rest of my life anyway), I don’t think I’d be much of a reliable member. On the phone, I explained to the woman calling that the only things I really had any self-determined authority to talk about was music and art (the “cultural” side of things), because whilst I’m interested in politics, social concerns, etc., I’m usually only interested at arm’s length, as some sort of fascinating curiosity that I’m not at all involved in. This might change as I grow older (hopefully), but that’s the way it is. She however assured me that this wasn’t a problem.

Except that... as I already made clear, my opinions on Newcastle are more warped self-reflections and cultural identity crises than anything tangible. I feel like Newcastle should have more of a musical and artistic side to it, and yet this is frankly bollocks, because we have very interesting and diverse music and art scenes. I guess the only problem within Newcastle is the way that we cling on to past successes and nostalgic favourites more than pushing forward with newer talent, but not only is this just a symptom of the older generation in general (I will get back to this later on another topic), it’s also just a symptom of me being young and therefore feeling wronged based purely on the fact that I haven’t found a successful niche for myself yet. And, that I’m surrounded by friends who are in the exact same position: Liam, constantly fighting the idea that sampling is stealing, and instating the idea that it’s a form of contextual warping, of giving pre-existing sounds and songs new meaning; Dave, intrigued by the past, by the industrial era, by the oldy-worldy, and sick of being treated as if he’s a novelty with freakish interests rather than a developed human being and artist. The irony is of course that both have found some measure of success anyway, but this will never be good enough for most artists (in any medium), who will always feel that nagging need to win people over. Dostoevsky wrote articles in his Writer’s Diary which directly addressed what some critics had said of his work, critiques that he thought were misguided rather than unfair, and this was when he’d just written Crime and Punishment and was being revered along with Tolstoy (and by Tolstoy). It’s just a measure of one’s own self-worth based on others’ opinions of you that never really goes away.

And um, brief digression there, but back to Newcastle; I guess the only true problem is distribution. The internet is a wondrous thing, but really, whilst we could be said to have a thriving musical and artistic scene, I’d venture to suggest that said scenes rarely step outside our own boundaries and into the world at large – or even the nation at large. And I return, again, to the question of what I contribute to Newcastle Voice. What on earth can I say in a survey? “Yes – I think we should extend our cultural and creative output, by utilising the internet. I’m not even entirely sure how – no-one in the world is – but somehow it’ll work, I’m betting on it.” I’ll look stupid, which would be a problem considering that I already sound and smell stupid. Alternatively, I could write, “Yes – I think the solution is to make the older generation less snobby and tell them to stop putting their noses up on our business.” But this just sounds angsty and worthless. Apart from anything else, it’d look even sillier considering that it’s just been announced that Australia will shortly be upgrading to international-standard broadband. Alright, so I doubt it’s being done with our creative side in mind, but that’s still irrelevant.

The biggest problem is that my own experiences are being catapulted onto the entire nation in my opinions. Without wanting to talk about an album I’ve written for too long because it’d look horrifyingly pretentious, Gatecrash (Vaudewraith album) is in many ways a massive allegory and exaggerated look at Newcastle (and the surrounding Hunter area), and yet... and yet ultimately, the problems I address in it – that of our creative output being stunted by lack of funding/interest/expectation/experimentation/etc. – aren’t problems in Newcastle. They’re problems in the whole goddamned country. Australia’s often referred to as a backward country, and whilst I can’t with any authority state that this is even mostly true, it’s certainly something that reflects on our creative output, because... because we’re still revering AC/DC. I mean, come on, for christ’s sake. It’s not that AC/DC are bad, it’s that they represent a summary of what Australian music is supposed to be; i.e. simple. Fun, catchy, yeah, I get that; and yet, simple. Intrinsically blokey.

I think Australians can sometimes have an immediate desire to reject complexity as the basis for creativity. Simplicity is certainly a virtue, but sometimes it feels like the be-all end-all for us. It’s as if pushing the boundaries even slightly is forgetting our place. It’s because our nation is built on one firm ideal, and that ideal is of the bloke with thongs, holding a beer in his hand. Or more mythically, the man wandering the outback, society an irrelevance to him, talking solace only in his own experiences, and whose interactions with other human beings are friendly and helpful but ultimately short-lived and meaningless. I actually kind of like this ideal, but in the same way that (prepare for a flimsy comparison!) I like Jesus’ teachings but dislike the way they’re interpreted to tally with the laziest/worst possible intentions, the Australian ideal can just sometimes make us comfortable. I’m not against comfort per se, but when it comes at the expense of what’s more important, well. As an example: recently a total arsehole of a radio presenter spoke to the woman who had organised the Tamil Tigers supporters protest. This protest had gone on for an hour longer than it was supposed to (it was unauthorised in the first place), and was impeding on a major road, causing delays for, it was estimated, 20,000 people. Now let’s ignore the issue of whether protesting illegally should be dealt with in a certain manner, etc (especially since some of the callers to the show said that the police should break out the water cannon and employ it. On a non-violent protest), because certainly, that’s exactly what this presenter happened to do. The reason for his rage? So many people had been held up on that road. This is just a total lack of perspective. Apart from the fact that he was very obviously racially-intolerant (however subconsciously) anyway – he at one point said “You’re blocking up our roads!” before amending that with “well, they’re their roads too, but still...” – this kind of attitude just beggars belief. He, and the callers, are furious because they’re going to be slightly late for home? Just fuck. Off. The very idea that these people were inconvenienced in any way sent the presenter into a rage that had him basically verbally drill into the representative of the protest. How utterly fucked up. How utterly fucking Anglo-centric. How utterly Australian.

I should add that he also showed considerable incredulity at the idea that some major retail chains wanted to open up shop on Good Friday and Easter Monday. Again, let’s ignore whether this kind of thing is right or wrong (personally I think it’s excessively capitalist), and focus on why he was incredulous. It was because he couldn’t fathom the idea of stamping on tradition in such a way. It was because he held those days as something sacred. I don’t honestly for a second believe he’s fundamentally Christian, yet if we embraced the idea of similar annual holidays for important other events in other religions – if we embraced Hannukah, if we actively encouraged Muslim workers to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca – then he’d be complaining. The irony as well is that this is the sort of man I’ve met before; who not only holds Christian traditions as sacred despite being broadly atheist and never attending church, but who would use “it’ll just be an excuse to not work” as the excuse for not recognising other religions’ traditions. A shiver of disgust went down my spine every time a former employer of mine (who incidentally is on the Newcastle City Council, so heaven help me) declared that the Aboriginal custom of walkabout was just an excuse for taking days off work (ignoring, apart from anything else, that we forced the Aboriginal people into working in the first place, for fuck’s sake); I suspect these people would also suggest that a pilgrimage to Mecca would be out of a lazy attitude. Yeah, go on then. You trek along with them and see how it is, you piece of shit.*

This is the problem with Australia in a nutshell, as I see it; we’re a country that supposedly (and does, I should add, with a less-cynical tone) promotes and embodies multiculturalism, and diversity in broad terms. And yet for all that, most of the figures of authority in Australia, the people we listen to on the news, the media at large – most of them are Anglo-centric, of an older (baby boomer) generation, and are casually racist even when they purport to support multiculturalism. Casually close-minded in general, really. For instance, there’s no discernable reason whatsoever to oppose gay marriage: the idea of marriage being intrinsically a religious tradition is flawed historically and irrelevant considering our growing proportion of atheism (according to our censuses); there’s no way enabling gay marriage would lead to anything consequentially problematic (the whole no-father/mother-figure argument about same-sex parents being unable to raise children isn’t just unproved and baseless, it’s borderline offensive and suggests that these straight parents know better than the same-sex parents how to raise children). There is no reason whatsoever for Kevin Rudd to oppose gay marriage, especially since this is a man that flaunts his mastery of Mandarin whenever he can.

It’s because it’s a tradition. That’s the thing. I genuinely don’t think it’s fully-fledged intolerance – more your sort of horrible “I’m not homophobic, I just wouldn’t want to be in an alleyway alone with one” attitude (homosexuality, of course, has been proven to be intrinsically linked to rape. Of course. Of course it has) – just this shitty feeling of honouring our forefathers.

I’m a great fan of history, but this is where history and tradition differ; history is something to be studied and learned from, whilst tradition is something to be questioned and in most cases eventually dissipated. I’m not talking about getting rid of the 1 minute silence on ANZAC Day or anything similar, because I think we can all agree that honouring our soldiers who died pointlessly and wastefully (well... actually, let’s not use the word “honouring”, because it sometimes has nasty connotations. Let’s go with “respecting” and “remembering”) is a worthy event. A lot of our traditions, however, are irrelevant, in the way of progress and, as I keep saying, Anglo-centric. Possibly worst of all, it’s simplistic. It’s painting Australia in this horribly narrow way; it’s the multicultural country that only celebrates Christianity, dontchaknow.

(Actually, with this in mind, I’d be interested in seeing how this-aforementioned-presenter views the annual tradition of Christmas. If the idea of opening shops on Good Friday and Easter Sunday is an abomination, then what is his view on the ridiculously-evident capitalisation of Christmas, an event that barely celebrates Christ at all [and historically doesn’t correspond to his birth-date anyway, but that’s less relevant]?)

And so, we remain stunted. This painting of Australia is simplistic, of simplistic things. The bush is just the bush. If the bush means anything, it means something Anglo-centric anyway. Everything is simplified and one-dimensional. And I find this ridiculous, considering the diversity and complexity of Australians. I don’t even just mean racially either, and let’s get off that point for a second; most white people I know (or at least, bother to keep in contact with because I consider them genuinely wonderful human beings) are far more complicated than what our national, stereotypical identity assumes them to be. And yet somehow, this doesn’t correspond to what we actually produce. We listen to a wide variety of genres in music, we appreciate complexity in overseas films, but what do we actually produce ourselves? Hmm. We’re somehow afraid of opening ourselves up, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why. We have such a variety, such a clashing broth of culture, to choose from and show to the world. I personally am interested in Aboriginal storytelling and in my own works I’m interested in recontextualising/reinterpreting them to create a somewhat-fictional/oft-exaggerated, mostly mythological, view of Australia (basically I’m intending to do this through Vaudewraith, if you were wondering). But I don’t know. I live in a city where Aboriginal hip-hop is widely considered a fun gimmick. Nothing more, nothing less.

I want things to change. Of course I do; I am always interested and eager for change. Possibly it’s because I’m young, I’m not sure. But the problem with that is that I can’t offer an end result for these changes. How could I possibly? I don’t know what the eventual total dominance of the internet as a way of distributing music will truly mean. Predicting the future is nigh-on impossible, even if you’re a genius. But that’s how it is; if you want change in this society, you have to have outcomes planned out. Hmmmmf. Maybe if music and art were intrinsically business models, then yes, but they’re not. They’re creative outlets, goddammit.

So I come back to the original point; what on earth can I offer to Newcastle Voice? Should I just throw blog entries or something at them? Bah. I really, really don’t know. And yet, I joined. Maybe some good will come of this. Most likely, none will.

End-note: Halfway through writing this rant, I watched part 1 of the new Red Dwarf special, ‘Back to Earth’. It’s been pummelled by online fans – mostly those who hated series 7 and 8 – and, yet again, I find myself disagreeing with them, and annoyed at their inability to embrace change (their constant refrain of “but it wasn’t funny” is infuriating; not only is the funniness of something subjective, but comedy as a genre does not mean how many laughs something generates, just as horror as a genre does not immediately mean “right well, let’s make the audience shit their pants here, and here, and here...”). But funnily enough, at one point, Rimmer complained about Kryten getting a holiday on the basis that robots shouldn’t need holidays. Purely by coincidence, Rimmer, by way of satire, embodies exactly the sort of true-blue wankers I was talking of before.

*...oh, alrighty then. Want one more dig at this presenter that I can’t remember the name of? Well, okay. He was also incredulous at the fact that a politician recently accused of paying for escort services and brothels had only issued a statement declaring that he hadn’t, and that he was going to take the matter to court. His reasoning was that, were he the politician, he’d be on as many radio shows as possible, attempting to clear his name. Not only is this crass, but when the presenter said, “I don’t understand it, why wouldn’t he want to talk to radio presenters?”, I almost yelled at the radio, “BECAUSE THE MEDIA ARE VULTURES WHO WILL POUNCE ON HIS EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WORD, YOU COMFORTABLE BARSTARD.”

That’ll be all for now.

It seems the most obvious thing in the world when you think about it, but (hopefully?) one wouldn’t think about it much. Get ready to have your mind blown, if you hadn’t;

PORNOGRAPHY HAS SCRIPTS

Check this out, a quick-and-easy (no sex jokes, please. They’re not appropriate in this discussion) guide I found for writing porn:

Hmm, it’s been a while. I guess the whole news thing I started for my blog brought everything to a stand-still. Really shouldn’t have done that.

Blogs are a very commonplace thing now, and there’s so much readily-available opinion, that – okay, obviously this is a good thing, but – it’s difficult to know what to talk about sometimes. Everything’s been discussed, done before.

So what to do? Well, I won’t stop talking about things, but... I should probably start throwing more creative things into this Journal too. Bits and pieces of stuff I’ve worked on, I feel like writing, will eventually work on, stuff like that. My actual online blog is full of a bunch of retarded MSPaint comics, which help break up the monotony of endless words, but this Journal itself needs more of that too. Erm... yes. This Journal needs a bunch of words to break up the monotony of endless words.

What are the value of words, anyway? Well you see, Dom, that’s far too loaded a question and I’m not going to answer it. But. Recently Liam and I talked about reading books, and he was saying that he didn’t think he needed to read any until he’d properly exhausted the huge list of films he was going to watch. As it happens, he had misunderstood my suggestion of reading; he’d assumed I’d meant that he had to write something immediately and needed a book to help with that. That isn’t the case – but definitely, reading is pretty much essential. Isn’t it?

Hmm. Lawrence Miles, book-writer extraordinaire (albeit an unknown/unliked one), said he felt that books were no longer relevant (he may have changed his mind now, but it still makes a good kicking-off point). Bluntly, the generation I’m a part of has grown up with the ability to absorb multiple strands of information in a faster time, and this also extends to interpreting stories in various media. In which case, books seem like the outdated form amongst the collection we have today: graphic novels require interpreting images and text, films require interpretation on more levels than that (if they’re doing their job properly), and videogames even more than that. With that in mind, books feel simplistic, archaic. Why have the audience imagine when you can have them interpret instead?

To an older crowd – particularly a literate one – this would seem an abhorrence. “Dumbing down”, all of those shitty and crap phrases, are thrown around; there was a golden age of story-telling once, and apparently this isn’t it.

It’s possibly true that there could be a slump in the creativity of film and television, but... if that is the case, then it’s the case since our generation can interpret faster, not because they’re dumber. “Short attention span” is another bandied-about phrase, but again, it’s more about focusing on more things at once, about letting your mind accumulate many conflicting things all at once. And then there’s access and availability; why watch a new TV show when you can watch an entire season, online, that you’ve heard is really great?

(Apart from, of course, generational cringe; the ability to deride an entire decade based on its choice of clothes and hair)

The difference is videogames, which are ironically as immersive as books used to be; I see no great difference between playing a game for hours on end, and spending hours at a beach reading, for instance. But in videogaming, you are the player, you’re the one doing things, and you can think whatever you like. Half of book-writing is about telling the audience what to think, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense; it’s about forcing the audience to think of characters in certain terms, to see the world the way that the author sees the world. Creating a world is an intense and wonderful thing, but if the reader can’t see anything but that world, you run the risk of denying interpretation.

On the other hand... a film will give you a fully-fledged world and hand it to you on a platter (as I often do, I’m talking in the loosest ideals here; I’m pretending that all films are great enough to be able to do this). A book, not so much; it can describe a world, even visually, but that doesn’t 100% tally with some peoples’ images of what’s what. I’d wager that some people don’t like to have to imagine, only interpret. This isn’t necessarily a bad attitude, but it runs the risk of losing a valuable part of creativity.

But, to the point (maybe). Is it worth writing a book anymore? Certainly for me, I’ve had a desire to write numerous books since childhood, but a lot of them have jumped media as I’ve seen the advantages of this happening. Even Mungo, which I doubt will work as anything but a book, would work even better as an online book (in my opinion; Liam doesn’t totally agree!). And most definitely, I’d be more interested in utilising the medium as an art-form in its own right, to deconstruct and then reconstruct it. For example; I’m determined to test something in These Storeys Never End* where the narrative voice will be... well, like I’m talking now... but the characters will all talk as real people. Mumbles, having to start sentences again, not actually talking much, and even pronunciation.

*Yeah, yeah, I’m talking about things only a couple of you will know. I apologise.

The above example is one of the things I feel books can do perhaps better than other media. In film and television, you can’t go out on a limb, abandon the characters for a bit, and explain in detail some factor of the society and/or place the characters inhabit. Or if you can, you have to do so by inventing new characters to show us this; you can’t do it through image and sound alone (unless you happen to be a total, total genius). This is actually the biggest limitation with videogaming as storytelling, too; abandoning the main character is unthinkable unless the player’s been given some warning in advance. As a quick example, notice how everyone whinged when Raiden was the main character in Metal Gear Solid 2. But the problem really is that you are that character, whoever that character may be, and to suddenly jump half across the world to, say, talk about how fascinating the bugs crawling through the fruit in this back-end shop are, is alienating and jarring. The best world-building games (apart from the literal ones like Spore, o’course) do so by feeding you information whilst never interfering with the player; Bioshock (and System Shock 2, naturally) spring to mind.

And then there’s the internal factor, specifically of characters. The best (and most well-known, that I can talk about anyway) example is 1984 (or Nineteen Eighty-Four, I suppose). For me, this is one of the few books I’ve read that wouldn’t work very well when adapted into a visual medium (with the possible exception of graphic novels, which allow ongoing internal narrative amongst images**), and that’s because, particularly at the start, most of what goes on, goes on in the main character’s head. The extreme totalitarianism of the setting is such that he can’t even twitch without being caught; and it’s impossible for a film to convey just how amazing it is that he writes even a couple of rebellious words on paper, especially if the opening isn’t set inside his head as well as outside. The only reason Brazil works so well is that it trades internal rebellion for ridiculous slapstick and hilarious absurdity.

**To that end, I’ve seen loads of graphic novels based on Christie works, for instance, and this is a development that makes perfect sense (I’d love to see them try Dostoevsky or Umberto Eco, but we’ll see). It makes much more sense than that really weird DS collection of classic literature, or that videogame based on a Christie book. Seriously, is it that fun to pick up your Wiimote and play what is essentially a more literate game of Cluedo?

Dostoevsky – who’s easily become my favourite writer, even if I haven’t read all of his works yet – is perfect in this regard as well. Crime and Punishment contains huge paragraphs of the lead character ranting at himself. Notes from Underground goes even further; its first half has no plot or characters at all, and is just an alienated man ranting at himself about life and himself. Once you’ve read the first half, the seemingly-average events in the second half take on an all-new meaning. Without wanting to spoil it... the extent of what he achieves is to meet a few people, insult a few more, and spend months doing absolutely nothing. Without the first half, it’d be a piece of shit. With the first half, it’s charged with meaning.

Seriously, if I hadn’t read Crime and Punishment, I probably wouldn’t have read another book for many more years, and would’ve just stuck to film. But now, I’m determined to find 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and I feel another obsession is coming on. And I’m glad. Really, really glad.

The chief thing will be, though, expressing what the point of books are. With so many media to choose from, and with books having the inevitable feeling of outdatedness, it’s more crucial than ever (to me as a writer, anyway) to concentrate on the medium’s strengths, to open it up, to creatively and artistically tell stories through prose and words alone. Through tone, and implied imagery rather than actual pictures. I’m not being snobbish here, seriously; I understand why reading Bridget Jones, or a goddamned Matthew Reilly book (“Action! Action! Action!”, for those of you who don’t know) might be fun. But it’s totally detrimental to the experience of growing as a reader, and to be brutally honest; I get my actual entertainment elsewhere. With so much to choose from, why the hell would I read an enjoyable-but-unimaginative novel when I can just play TimeSplitters 2?

Possibly more than ever, book-writing must become a purist thing. Darned good thing, too.

#01: These Storeys Never End (original passage)
(So here we go, the first of these exclusive-to-blog writings; the short that led to ‘These Storeys Never End’. I actually posted this a long time ago on my blog, but I feel I can do it again and deconstruct it a bit [something I feel comfortable doing because an earlier incarnation of me wrote it ;P])

The building is alive.
It doesn’t matter who constructed it. It could well have been a baby with Duplo for all that it matters. What matters is what it represents and stores. It’s a giant grey grave, jutting from the ground and hopelessly reaching for the heavens.
Many people die, and many people live.
15 floors, 14 of them in residence, yet so many. Countless lives, countless memories, countless. The building’s countless; there’s no vampiric being perched atop the building who watches those on the ground at night. There’s no vampire feeding off the life force of humanity.
Or at least, not a living vampire.
There are statues, though. Statues etched in front of the foyer like guard dogs, like Cerberus guarding hell itself, yet in this case, lost souls are being ushered inside. It’s accommodating. And once a soul has entered, they become statuesque, locked indoors forever, frozen in time yet aging, never changing yet decaying. These statues are not the oldest creatures in residence; ancient beings reside in the walls and on the floors and occasionally on the ceiling, centuries past. Yet the building will not let them go.
The building’s seen society change around it as it stays immutable, although even that’s not true. Its organs inside are constantly pumping with new bacterium and new newness. Everything’s new. Like George Gershwin films, notes from melodies float in the air, constantly circulating around a sound-proof yet sound-absorbing room. The staves waver but never end, the notes falter but never stop. Like John Cage pieces, it’s a glaringly loud explosion of silence. The difference is it’s endless.
The building has fed upon the continued evolution of music. Jazz, rock, post-rock. The building has fed upon the continued evolution of art. Traditional, modern, post-modern. Post-ancient, post-old, post, post...
The post’s arrived!
Sucked in from the streets surrounding, from the soil that the building has rooted itself in. Its people arise each morning and wade their way through the cascade of letters. Endless conversations, endless talks, endless how’d-you-dos. The letters change, but they never stop coming, and once they enter they never leave.
The people are letters too. 103a died a year ago, and so 103b now resides there. 103b on the dole, constantly thrown out of jobs. Constantly thrown out of concerts. Constantly thrown out of parties. Constantly thrown out of a prison cell after a night’s hard drinking. But the one thing 103b is never thrown out of is the building, because the building never regurgitates its food.
The letters are for communication, or at least they were. They’re dying out. E-mail usurps it. Yet nothing has changed. Technology is assimilated into the building, which continually adapts itself. Technological evolution. E-mail, e-bay, e-this, e-that...
E-taker in 906 laid dying on the floor. Rentboy in 609 laid on the floor, dying. Everyone dies as soon as they enter, yet their corpses are kicked until they’re bled dry of ideas and memories and emotion.
307, the walls. The paint is splattered with blood from a suicidal woman.
307, the walls. The blood is splattered with paint from an artistic woman.
What’s the difference? None that the building can see. Memories don’t need context to survive.
Floor 5, the floor. There’s a chalk outline next to the elevator. A chalk outline depicting police brutality.
Floor 5, the floor. There’s a chalk outline next to the elevator. A chalk outline where the children play hopscotch.
What’s the difference?
There’s a chalk outline in 704. 704c drew it across the bedroom. Marital problems? Preparations for renovations?
The families are all the same. There’s the mother, the mater. The martyr, the one who sacrifices her own life for her family, denying herself the oxygen of life to save others. Then there’s the father, the fater. The farter, the one who sits around in his own filth, denying others the oxygen of life as he suffocates it with his excretory airwaves.
The air’s captured in the ventilation, the windpipes of the creature. It hears everything, it smells everything, it feeds on everything through the ventilation. Unlike the movies, the ventilation isn’t an escape, it’s a winding, never-ending steel leech.
Travel down the ventilation. There’s distracting sounds coming from 209. Echoes of a failed guitarist. 209s isn’t the first to fail dismally in this room. There was r before him, and p before him. Six-stringed guitars join other six-stringed guitars, all hexagonal sides morphing and sticking together to resemble a soccer ball. It’s all a game, a multinational game that crowds cheer at, and 209s is never going to experience that. He reached for the heavens, for the stars, and he plummeted onto the cockroach infested floor.
His only audience is the building, and it’s never satisfied.
There’s graffiti and tags strewn across the walls, floors, ceilings. There’s dog tags; whiffs of faint urine where dogs have marked their territory. The dogs and their owners fade over time but never leave. The only thing they leave is faint traces. Traces that future dogs will bark at as their owners stare on in confusion. At night, the owners will understand, or feel the same, but they won’t know why. They won’t understand the never-ending cycle, the constant feed of numbers and letters into the building.
ABC, it’s easy as 123.
It’s too easy to lose yourself.
Travel up the elevator. The ground, floor 1, floor 2, floor 3, floor 4, floor 5... as the numbers rise, the numbers fall in the probability of escape. As lost souls enter the foyer below, they’re dripped into the throat of the creature, ascending towards its stomach. Floor 6, floor 7, floor 8, floor 9. Hundreds of thousands of living calories a day, and exempt of vegetation so the walls are decrepit, undernourished, dank and dirty. Floor 10, floor 11, floor 12, floor 14... it’s coming, you’re nearly there...
But wait. What happened to floor 13?
And then you realise; you’ve passed it. You’ve passed the point of no return.
Floor 13. The invisible floor. The black hole. The black hole that sucks meaning and time and memories and records into its huge, gaping, hungry mouth. A whirlpool of information turning and turning, consumed and consumed, until nothing is left behind. There’s no selectiveness, no spitting out things it doesn’t like, because it likes everything. Floor 13 doesn’t exist, and it’s hungry.
Welcome to the building.
You’ll live happily ever after.

(Try doing THAT in any other medium. It’s barely even got any characters, and no honest-to-God descriptions either)

#02: Body of Work (actually “Untitled”, originally)
(And here’s another one I posted earlier, but y’know...)

She stood in front of the mirror, knife poised, her face reflected back upon her in the bathroom mirror. It was expressionless, but no less determined. She reached down, drew back her left sleeve in a slow, rapturous motion, and gazed down at the network of scars and criss-crosses branded across her flesh, almost as if it was an incredibly detailed artwork. Performance art, perhaps. She smiled to herself, then steadied herself. Time to add another line to her masterpiece, her never completed magnum opus.
She sliced down, brutally. A thick jet of blood sprayed from the point in which the knife had perverted, but died down in an instant, leaving a faint bubbling effect as the blood was pumped out of her veins. She fiddled a bit with the knife, increasing the flow. There was no point in simply keeping it a minor wound, after all.
Her fingers reached down tentatively and started dipping themselves into the blood, swirling delicately so that she should get as much blood on her fingers as possible. And then, swinging her eyes up to look back at the mirror, she continued her art; the sketching. Art was about emotion, it was about how you felt. When she opened up her body, she scribbled down the feeling she was experiencing in her own blood.
The words tended to be powerful and evocative. Pain. Fury. Sadness.
Control.
Trusting to the instincts of her fingers, she allowed her mind to gaze away, to stare blindly into the wall as her hand took control of itself. She’d referred to it as “talking to the hand”, but no-one else had found this funny. They didn’t understand, though. They didn’t understand her art, the capabilities, the potential.
She was dimly aware of the long strokes her fingers were making as if dabbling in calligraphy... a delicate circle. Two arches. And the last letter reminded her of a helipad. Paying her preconceptions no heed, she stared at what she had scrawled onto her mirror.
Ouch.
A feeling of anxiety and revulsion crept into her stomach and throat, almost in complete contrast to what her body was trying to tell her. Why was her body mocking her? Why was it so indifferent? Why was she so... desensitised?
She knew the answer; her artwork was no longer glorious, no longer original. It was stagnant, dull, and boring. Whilst everyone else had progressed, ever pushing the boundaries of art, she was repetitious – the scars on her arm proved this. She grabbed her arm, as if ashamed of it – not something she’d ever felt before.
Raising the knife up to touch her hair, she looked at it through the mirror. It was the first time she had seen it in the reflection. It was crossing a taboo, it was unheard of. It wasn’t how her art worked. But she knew she had to progress; otherwise she would never feel properly ever again, never create.
She held the knife sideways and thrust it into her neck.

(Again, no dialogue. Everything here is internal. Incidentally, short stories are particularly good at being blunt and getting ideas across; this means that I think it’s only worth writing a book if you have adequate ideas – or adequate investigation of those ideas – to support it. Otherwise, why pay more, Bibilo? Er... I mean, why write a full-length novel? You’ll just put non-readers even MORE off reading)

(Oh, also; I know it’s probably a bit self-indulgent to talk about how to write books “properly”, and then basically post my own material as examples. But hell, I don’t care if it looks like that, to be totally honest. Anyway, HERE is something that is yet again an old writing, but is another good [in my opinion, naturally] example...)

#03: (?)
Wallop. Thump.
“Oi, kick it here!”
Wallop. Thump.
If Jesus Christ had known we were kicking a ball against his house, I’m certain he would have been a bit miffed. Yet the church conjoined with the park where we were playing, so inevitably the soccer ball would arch from time to time, threatening to reduce the stained windows to multicoloured fragments.
From the corner of the park, unseen to our eyes, an aging priest watched, observed, his hand tearing at his white tufts of hair to relieve his tension. He was powerless to stop us; but one thought consoled him.
Wallop. Smash.
The priest’s gaping mouth split into a toothless grin. He looked at the sky, and said triumphantly, “You know what to do with them.”
He knew the horrors that would carve through us later. He knew the abject pain we’d be subjected to. He knew what we’d get.
Wallop. Thump.

SCRIBBLINGS END HERE.

And there, again; implied imagery, all through wordplay.

So. I originally planned Tds4a Today in 2009 to be “The Year Of The Ninemsn Mocking”, for want of a better term; and this Journal would be something separate. Since that took up way more time than I’d imagined, and since I’m scrapping it, this Journal could potentially become what it’s been threatening to be for a long time; a total absence of personal biography, in exchange for, well... Morrissey would say I’ve become the writer and the author of nothing in particular (if he, y’know, knew me. Or cared about me at all. Which he wouldn’t. SELFISH BARSTARD :@ !!).

And there you have it, gentlemen (no ladies read this blog, I’m sure of it). A NEW BEGINNING. Or something.

Due to unspecified circumstances, the TDS4A TODAY NEWS team are unable to bring you the news as of this time. Expect a return shortly.

Virginia Tech, AGAIN

A female Chinese graduate student has been decapitated by a fellow student at Virginia Tech, the scene of the worst school shooting in US history in 2007, reports Ninemsn.

“It’s a perfect opportunity to make a sequel to Elephant,” said director Gus Van Sant. “Forget this pepper grinder thing – it’s Tech all the way. I’m thinking of making it an ongoing series, like how there was I Know What You Did Last Summer and then I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Hmm, what should I call the new one? Elephants Never Forget sounds pretty sweet to me.”

Casting and productions news will come later, and we wish the famed director the best of luck.

Oh yeah, and condolences to that family or whatever.

(Before: student with head. After: an artist depiction)

I Still Call Australia a Cockroach-Infested Home

They’ve survived nuclear disasters and World War III, but will cockroaches survive cultural cringe, is the question Ninemsn doesn’t ask because they’re not as forward-thinking as us. Travel writer Mark Dapin’s new book, Strange Country, talks of a practice in Queensland on Australia Day: cockroach racing.

The cockroach races take place at the Story Bridge Hotel, a nineteenth-century pub that gains lots of tourists in these events (and no customers at any other time, naturally). The founding myth of this noble sport is that “Daz from Hawthorne and Gor (short for Igor) from Kangaroo Point were arguing at the bar about which of their suburbs was home to the biggest cockroaches. To settle the dispute, each caught a cockroach at home and brought it to the pub. For reasons not entirely clear, they then decided to race them.” Well, they were drunk.

The cockroach racing is a fascinating development for Queensland, and after their discoveries of electricity and the bicycle (see: The Quickies, yesterday), they seem well on their way to global domination.

A domination which, naturally, only the cockroaches would survive.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

A pair of British schoolgirls claim they were threatened with expulsion for being too blonde, reports Ninemsn. Raegan Booth, 16, and Aby Wester, 15, claim that Rednock School principal David Alexander will ban them from sitting their exams unless they dye their hair brown.

Raegan stated, “We’re teenagers with awful names. What else are we going to do?”

But Mr Alexander claims that he’s been misconstrued. “It’s not that the girls being blonde offends me and will make me stop them doing the exams,” he said. “It’s that the girls being blonde will mean they just mentally can’t do the exams.”

The Hunchcat of Notre Dame

An American woman who marketed “gothic kittens” with ear, neck and tail piercings over the internet has been charged with animal cruelty and conspiracy, Ninemsn reports. Holly Crawford, 34, lives in Pennsylvania, and has registered shock over being charged by the authorities for animal abuse.

“We’re in Pennsylvania, for christ’s sake,” she said.

She went on to say that her fashioning of the cats is not abuse at all. “They were definitely loved, well-fed, no fleas, clipped nails. And they were happy.” But Daphna Nachminovitch, vice president for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, disagrees strongly on this point. “Since when are goths happy?” she argued. “Cats are supposed to be dressed in snappy suits, constantly check themselves in the mirror, and in terms of hot cat lovin’, the template is James Brown, not Robert Smith.”

Crawford, who sports her own body piercings, said she decided on a whim to pierce the ears and neck of a stray kitten she took in last year and named Snarley Monster. The fact that she named it “Snarley Monster” is being considered another charge of animal abuse.

THE QUICKIES:

Yes, he can: Obama to keep his beloved BlackBerry

“It’ll help remind everyone that I’m black,” he said candidly. “Remember? That I’m black? Yeah, cos I am.”

Brad Pitt comes unzipped

“Luckily I’m currently a baby,” Pitt goo-gooed, “so this isn’t a concern. Milk?”

Whales rescuers hoping for high tide

“We want the whales to be movin’ on,” said a spokeswoman.

‘Broken hearts’: Ledger family marks dark anniversary

“I just wanted to show how much I love that goddamn movie,” said Mr Ledger, Heath’s father. “In the end, my son died of a broken heart – he’d been expecting his wife to love his new facial scars, but she rejected him! God, that was a great scene. Hang on, what?”

In pictures: Miss World finalist’s infection nightmare

It seems likely that, due to this, Ms China will have to step out of the competition.

David Hicks keen to clear name: father

“But I like my name,” whinged Mr Hicks.

Vic firefighters mop up major blazes

“It’s not working very well,” they added. We could have guessed.

Mother let her three-year-old son smoke

To help him recuperate, authorities are currently working on creating a Nicorette nappy patch.

Piece of indigenous history recognised

The rest of it is still being ignored, of course.

ON THIS DAY:

1556 - An earthquake in Shanxi Province, China, was thought to have killed about 830,000 people.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: On second thought, authorities decided it was probably 2.

1977 - The TV mini-series "Roots," began airing on ABC. The show was based on the Alex Haley novel.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: Sex is still prominent today.

1974 - Mike Oldfield’s "Tubular Bells" opened the credits of the movie, "The Exorcist".

THE EFFECT IT HAD: Crucifix masturbation is still prominent today.

1941 - The play, "Lady in the Dark" premiered.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: Rape is still prominent today.

1983 - "The A-Team" debuted on TV.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: The death of Doctor Who, and millions around the globe becoming familiar with the phrase “I pity the fool.” Now considered a national disaster by historians, who pity the fool who created the show in the first place.

DAILY FORTUNES:

ARIES: Today’s Cure lyric: “I tried to laugh about it/Hiding the tears in my eyes/Cause boys don’t cry.” So stop crying, you little turd.

TAURUS: Today’s Cure lyric: “I’m gonna watch you drown in the shower/Push my life through your open eyes.” Advice: don’t take a shower.

GEMINI: Today’s Cure lyric: “Doo doo doo doo/doo doo doo/Let’s go to bed/doo doo doo doo.” Advice: don’t go to bed.

CANCER: Today’s Cure lyric: “ ‘I think it’s dark and it looks like rain’ you said/ ‘And the wind is blowing like it’s the end of the world’ you said.” In future, please don’t try and predict the weather, you’re useless and overblown. You’re as bad as a fortune teller.

LEO: Today’s Cure lyric: “Somethin’ small falls out of your mouth and we laugh/A prayer for somethin’ better.” You’re an atheist? Oh, you disgusting arsehole. Atheism doesn’t make sense. Think about it, why is the Earth round if the Big Bang happened? And why do you call your parents retarded?

VIRGO: Today’s Cure lyric: “Thursday I don’t care about you/It’s Friday I’m in love.” And it is Friday today, so you’d better get out there and start some lovin’. Oh wait, you’re a Virgo – you can’t. Never mind then.

LIBRA: Today’s Cure lyric: “But chilly Mr. Dilly/too much rush to talk to Billy/All the tizzy fizzy idiot things must get done.” Get off the drugs. Now.

SCORPIO: Today’s Cure lyric: “Everything you do is simply dreamy/Everything you do is quite delicious/So why can’t I be you?” Well, thanks! But you can’t, because I’m me, and I’m too awesome to let anyone else be me.

SAGITTARIUS: Today’s Cure lyric: “And I know that in the morning/I will wake up in the shivering cold/And the Spiderman is always hungry.” He’s fictional, mate. Get your head straight.

CAPRICORN: Today’s Cure lyric: “I’m the stranger/killing an Arab.” You WHAT? Fucking hell, you sicken me. Go kill yourself immediately, you racist son of a bitch.

AQUARIUS: Today’s Cure lyric: “Whatever I do is never enough/It’s never enough.” So stop trying then, jesus. Just lie in your room and stare at the walls and candy-striped-legged spiders.

PISCES: You will realise that star signs are ridiculous, and will stop reading them. Oh yeah, and your Cure lyric is: “I don’t want you anywhere near me/I don’t want you anywhere near me/Get your fucking world out of my head.” So yeah, fuck you.

TODAY’S COMIC:

IN RECENT NEWS:

INTERFERENCE ON THE CORPSE

A Sydney man who allegedly entered a woman’s unit to steal property but instead found her body has been accused of interfering with the corpse and covering up the scene to avoid any link to him, reports Ninemsn. Chady Wazir covered the body of Joyce Germain with pillows, blankets, clothing and other items, presumably to stop her from noticing that he was burgling her.

Wazir maintains that he was respectful to Germain’s body. “I only covered her in the best pillows I could find. I mean, I could’ve stolen those, couldn’t I? But I didn’t, did I? Eh? Please let me out.”

1000BEATSPERMINUTE

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Islamic leaders have condemned a Melbourne Muslim cleric who told followers it was permissible to hit their wives and force them to have sex, Ninemsn informs us. The cleric, Samir Abu Hamza, claims that he had meant it in the metaphorical sense.

This follows a spate of misunderstandings surrounding Hamza; he has also told his followers that they can masturbate over dogs, lick mannequin vaginas in public, and urinate in buskers’ hats, but all in a metaphorical sense.

WIND-OW!

An alleged burglar broke his arm after falling through the ceiling of a Newcastle house, shocking a family of seven, Ninemsn claims. When questioned as to why he was in their house, he replied, “Ohhhh for god’s sake, get an ambulance, jesus chriiiist.” After a further five minutes of interrogation was similarly fruitless, the police and paramedics were called onto the scene.

Attempted burglary is very much an offence, but it seems that an eye-for-an-eye approach may be taken here. “It’s simple,” said a chief officer. “I let the ******** family into his house, and then I break their arms. It’s only fair.”

PEPS AND ROBBERS

First it was frying pans, then capsicum spray – now, Melbourne woman Davina Adamson has proved that it is possible to ward off burglars by using nothing more than a pepper grinder. “It’s so effective,” Adamson stated. “All I had to do was stand with it pointed at his chest, grinding away furiously, and the pepper crumbled onto his shirt. He was mortified.”

In the wake of this discovery, police are now issuing their squads with pepper grinders. “We wish to investigate every possibility,” said an official. “Sugar might not be good, it might make them hyperactive. But salt? Yeah! And uh... maybe we could stick chilis down their crevices.”

Reportedly, director Gus Van Sant has expressed interest in making a film based on this story, about Adamson’s efforts to be noticed at work, and her eventual pepper shootings. The film will be called Pepperphant and will be released when hell freezes over.

THE QUICKIES:

Where’s the cocaine? It’s in the beef

The government’s funded project to increase the taste of beef comes to a satisfying conclusion.

Brazilian model loses feet, hands to infection

The two events are, as far as Ninemsn can make out, completely unrelated.

Baby’s accidental call lands dad in jail

The father later lamented, “They arrested me on wasting police time. I shouldn’t have taught him ‘000’ as his first word.”

Women can spot cute babies best: experts

Erm, good for them.

Puppy love: Labrador ‘most popular dog’

The Chihuahua nearly won the category, but its revealed affair with Paris Hilton disgusted too many of its previous lovers.

Extend help to those in need: Rudd

Kevin Rudd has realised that he doesn’t know how to run a country, has had a panic attack, and has started a mail-order fund-raiser.

Brisbane adopting pedal power

Having now discovered the “bicycle”, Brisbane’s next discovery will surely change the way we travel all over again.

Men get death penalty over tainted milk

The Chinese government is cracking down hard on tainted products and objects. “It’s lucky we finished our holiday there when we did,” said Marc Almond, vocalist of Softcell.

Electricity being restored to north Qld

Bicycles, and now electricity? Queensland is streets ahead of the rest of Australia right now.

Obama gown-maker ‘designs transvestite dolls’

...

Half Aussie women drink while pregnant

“We’re thinking of banning the dwarf community from pubs in general,” said a leading GP. “I mean, I don’t like looking at them, do you?”

Authorities destroy ‘risky’ cookie dough

This nearly came as a severe blow to Arnott’s new marketing campaign, but luckily they’ve still got other new products lined up, such as Hardcore Tim Tams and Xtreme Sao.

Rescuing bats a deadly game: authorities

“We should really start shooting ‘em instead,” said some resident of Kotara.

Look before leaping to avoid injury

As well as establishing this health benefit, doctors are advising “slow and steady wins the race”, “quality over quantity”, “mind over matter”, “the world is not enough” and “an apple a day keeps the doctor away, my arse. You’re doomed, all of you.”

Register ‘threatens’ fertility programs

This is the worst example of a recent register revolution that nearly caused businesses to lose their floats and not make a single dollar.

Qld dengue outbreak ‘worst since WWII’

...ah. Well, two steps forward, one step back.

ON THIS DAY:

1900 - Off of South Africa, the British released the German steamer Herzog, which had been seized on January 6.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: The Herzog immediately returned to its family and washed them with a hose, grumbling “Stop shivering. Stop shivering!”

1951 - Fidel Castro was ejected from a Winter League baseball game after hitting a batter. He later gave up baseball for politics.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: This convinced other ill-equipped stars to become political figures, such as Arnold Schwazzaneger and Greenday.

1984 - Apple introduced the Macintosh. It was the first computer to use point-and-click technology.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: None, as far as we can tell.

2003 - It was reported that scientists in China had found fossilized remains of a dinosaur with four feathered wings.

THE EFFECT IT HAD: None, since the discovery was eventually amended to; “China has found the bones of a man, who had been stricken with bird flu.”

DAILY FORTUNES:

ARIES: Fortune awaits you in the stars. But since you’re on Earth, you’ll be a nothing for the rest of your life.

TAURUS: I once went to a plaza where all the shops were named each consecutive letter of the Greek alphabet. No.19 was called – wait for it – TAU R US. HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH!@L!>~!>!

GEMINI: Many things in life are underrated gems. Apart from gems, they’re pretty well rated. I like them a lot, actually, they’re shiny and lovely, I – what? Oh, erm, you’re going to be hit by a car or something. *shrugs*

CANCER: You will feel hungry at lunchtime. I advise you to eat.

LEO: The Simpsons is on tonight, have you ever seen that? It’s pretty good, yeah. How did I know it was on tonight? Well, it’s on every fucking night, isn’t it?

VIRGO: You will read tomorrow’s fortunes, and be as similarly disappointed with what you read as you are right now. Ungrateful swine.

LIBRA: I like to lie with bras myself! HAHAHAHALA>A>A!L!L!L!!!!!!!! Also you’re going to die. Sorry.

SCORPIO: Despite sounding like a Bond villain, there’s nothing cool, suave, ingenious, mad, or the remotest bit interesting about you. Mind you, at least your gal won’t run off with some guy just cos he’s a Scot who punched her in the face.

SAGITTARIUS: Whereas your wife will. See her running off? See that guy with her, smiling at you? I’ve got such lovely teeth, don’t I?

CAPRICORN: You will feel the strange desire to move to England today, unless you are in England, in which case you will feel the strange desire to move there again. This will be difficult.

AQUARIUS: The only good star-sign! ...hmm? No, no, I’m, er, a Scorpio. Honest.

PISCES: You will eat fish on Good Friday. Yeah, I know that’s a while away, but it’s inevitable really. If you try to change this, I will personally come to your house and force the fish down your throat.

TODAY’S COMIC:

[As before, if you desperately want to discover what I wrote in the *CENSORED* sections, just ask and I will reveal. But if I censor it, it en't appropriate for this blog, you understand!)

Monday 22 December 2008
10:18pm

Jesus, it’s so nearly Christmas. And so nearly time to leave Singleton.

Hey Bz, you like “does want to someone through the penpal system”? Well, here’s one that’s nearly as bad:

“That’s the way to get into a girl’s heart; win a marathon. Actually, in the context of a sports film, that wouldn’t doesn’t seem so absurd.”

That wouldn’t doesn’t seem so absurd!

What’s really silly about it is that I actually made that typo whilst making fun of my 2006-self for being such an illiterate little shithead. Ah, how fate bites me in the arse.

Tuesday 30 December 2008
12:36am

Bugger – New Year’s tomorrow, and I still haven’t even thought properly about the New Year’s Resolutions yet. Y’know, the life-long goal ones [RETRO-NOTE: You won’t know about this, I only wrote about them in my Journal. They should be self-evident, though]

Currently back in Newcastle for Christmas, and then I’ll be back in Singleton for some of January, I guess, to… erm, drive. Damn. Anyway. It’s unlikely I’ll be working again – if only because, if I didn’t break away at the end of this year, I’d probably never break away – so technically I’ve said goodbye to people from work, which is the strangest feeling in the world. They’re not people I’d hang out with outside of work – barring the odd farewell or whatever – but I feel genuinely sad to say goodbye. And I haven’t even done that yet! God.

Have I done that in the past? I don’t remember feeling as dejected in previous years at saying goodbye to people as I did on my second-last and last shifts. Maybe it’s because every other goodbye – at least, since school ended – has always half-guaranteed inevitably stumbling into people again. That’s what Newcastle’s like. But leaving Singleton… apart from the odd visit, I probably won’t see anyone again.

And even if I do go up for the odd visit, I mean, will I really see, say, *CENSORED*.

And I can’t believe I just wrote *CENSORED*. Dear God, this is what nostalgia does. It makes you morph into a cliché-machine.

(Oh yeah; asked *CENSORED* Cowardly, aren’t I? But then, I’ve got so much more to lose with anyone knowing about how I *CENSORED*)

(Anyway, does this mean *CENSORED* Do I take this at face value, or… god, I don’t know. *CENSORED* I was one of only 30 friends to choose from)

This is why I rarely add people on Facebook and Myspace, really; once I’ve said goodbye, I find it infinitely awkward talking to people I really only liked in the context of classrooms. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great and lovely, but I wouldn’t talk to them outside of school because, well, what the hell do we talk about? Just the inevitable “What have you been up to”, I guess, which you can either answer with “not much”, thus killing all conversation, or going into detail, thus killing all interest.

So, looking back on this year. 2007 was my most productive year in terms of this Journal, but as some of the entries clearly attest, I spent most of that year… well… hating that year. Things have improved this year, and I don’t even mean for me personally. All those things I rabbited on about last year, they’ve been addressed and have (mostly) changed for the better. Rudd said “sorry”, for chrissakes!

And even though I spent a lot of (mostly early) 2008 entries talking about depression… I have this bizarre feeling that I wasn’t really depressed for long anyway, I just caught myself in moods. Oh yeah, and this was *CENSORED*. It wasn’t until my last week or so that I finally started to feel uncomfortable again. I felt old, which I hadn’t felt since the start of this year.

Yup. I’m definitely going to have to move on.

So has 2008 been the best year yet? With no real obligation other than work? Hmm. Well, let’s look at the benefits:

1) Internet. INTERNET, dammit. This can’t be stressed enough.

2) No course. NO COURSE, dammit.

3) Erm… okay, I’m running dry now. But 1 and 2 are bloody important.

4) Oh, money! I had money!

5) So many films, so much knowledge acquired. Mmm.

6) So many plans, so many ideas that completely changed our productions. Mungo is going to be an online book! Etc.


Cons:

1) Erm… I guess *CENSORED* counts as a con.

2) The real world invaded! I’d never had anything like *CENSORED*. Which probably says that I’m a sheltered individual, doesn’t it?

3) Living mostly on toast and Coke for so long. I don’t know if I’ve lost weight (and I’m really bloody skinny), but uh, yeah.

4) Living away from Liam wasn’t just lonely at times, it also meant a really stunted productivity. Effectively, I got nothing done. Hmmm.


Ultimate benefit, though: I was mostly happy! And “mostly happy” counts for a lot, it honestly does. It’s the maximum happiness you can ever have, and it’s lovely.

I might bother to do my New Year’s resolutions in a second, actually. But first, a note about a few films I’ve watched:

1) Finally watched Gummo. Twas good, deserves a rewatch to get all the comedy in it. There was definitely something I thought of that related to something Liam and I are planning, but now I’ve forgotten it completely. Argh.

2) Watched Serenity, so that’s finally all of Firefly wrapped up. That also means I’ve seen Doctor-candidate Chiwetel Ejiofor in action, and… and I think I need to see him in something else, because I was inevitably disappointed by him in such a fairly simple role.

3) Saw Twilight in the cinema. Competent acting, actually-nice direction. The story’s still rather lame, but y’know. It didn’t help that evil-vampire cocked his head and moved like Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 3. Or that Radiohead’s ‘15 Step’ was played as the end credits, which felt really odd.

4) Watched Quantum of Solace. Ah, what is it with me liking stuff I thought I’d hate, now? Hmm? I enjoyed this a great deal, and the best bit of the movie was undoubtedly Bond’s line, “Oh look! Someone’s trying to kill you!”. Definitely problematic, though: the opening titles are actually really dull; the movie ends really abruptly, which is possibly a bit brave but ultimately dissatisfying; and dammit, Quantum really are a useless concept. At least MI6 had heard of SPECTRE back in the 60s; here we’re supposed to believe that there’s an organisation working that no intelligence has ever heard of, yet not only does Bond very easily locate their meeting and listen in on their plans, but he basically sets up their downfall in just a couple of days. I mean, really.

5) Watched Land of the Dead… and it really is better than Day of the Dead, much better. Ebert agrees with me, amazingly (well actually, other way around, naturally). I’ve read the IMDB boards trying to work out why people think Day is better, but so far the only reason I can find is that it’s a classic. Which is meaningless. And the only actual criticism I’ve seen thrown at Land – as in, real criticism, rather than “what was Romero thinking? This was trash!” and such – was that the zombies learned how to use guns. But c’mon, this happened in Day, for fuck’s sake! And since when has reinvention been a bad thing, anyway?

Right, though. It’s time.

*ominous music*

Dalek: “What-is-that-ooooo-mi-nous-noise?”

It’s…

THE PROPER and UTTERLY-RIDICULOUS but ALL HONEST NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS THAT ACTUALLY APPLY TO DOM’S ENTIRE LIFE LIST!

I’m betting none of them will be as ridiculous as that title.

Anyway, I’ll divide them into “Proper” and “Utterly-Ridiculous” where appropriate. Some I’ll leave blank, for the fun of it (and because I probably can’t decide… whether you should live or die, I should kill you in your sleep but you said sleep is for tortoises and so you never do although Captain Jack said he didn’t sleep in ‘Ghost Machine’ and then we saw him dreaming two episodes later so who knows maybe I could and oh whoops I’m talking too long sorry I’ll shutup n-)

Okay, completely off the top of my head:

1) *CENSORED* (Why did that crop up first? *sigh*) [Proper]
2) Erm… *CENSORED* [Utterly-Ridiculous]
3) Do Free Quay st, exactly as I’d planned it. With the three TV series, with all of the book series, no creative decision compromised. Obviously I’d like no creative decision compromised with anything I do, but still, y’know. [Proper]
4) Have Free Quay st be not just critically acclaimed, but a boot in the back of the Australian TV industry that will not only allow Liam and I to continue on with other things (e.g. These Storeys Never End, the TV series thereof), but will allow new creative talent to emerge in this country. [Utterly-Ridiculous]
5) Record Sensiship, release it. [Proper]
6) Record every other Vaudewraith album as planned – changing details along the way as I see fit, no doubt. [Proper]
7) Have Vaudewraith be recognised as a great band/musical duo/whatever. Have the albums really, really work, and be hailed as brilliantly constructed, intellectually stimulating, boundary-pushing, utterly-Australian and lyrically-beautiful pieces of art. [Utterly-Ridiculous]
8) Realise how most of this Resolutions List will make me look like I’ve got horrible neuroses, and stop myself before I get big-headed. [Utterly-Ridiculous]
9) Film and release my many planned films, including: the one I talked about with Liam about kids having only days to live; Mothership; R+R; Adrift, all three of them. [Proper]
10) Write Vampire Counsel, release it, and have it not dismissed as a crappy attempt to steal Twilight’s thunder. [Proper]
11) Finally do The Bromine Rapier properly – renaming it, no doubt – as I envisioned it would look earlier this year. [Utterly-Ridiculous]
12) Erm… Doctor Who the Thirteenth? [Utterly-Ridiculous] Yes I know it is, shutup already.
13) Watch every Hitchcock movie, every other director I respect’s movies, every… oh hell. Every single good movie I want to watch.
14) The Celebrities I’d Like to Make Love to Include: Catherine Zeta-Jones; Mary Tamm; Carey Mulligan; Sophia Myles (I’m such a nerd, aren’t I); Eve Myles; Morena Baccarin; Myanna Buring; Kate Winslet; Cheryl Cole; Paula Abdul; Sarah Smart; Julie Graham; oh hell, there’s many more that I’d kick myself when I think of them, but haven’t included so far. Oh, t.A.T.u.! Bjork! Er… let’s leave it there.
15) The Girls I’ve Met who I’d Love to Make Love to Include: Y’know, let’s just say “most of them”; most of my teachers, classmates, girls I talk to. And uh, yes.
16) Experience every Doctor Who story ever made. Even the ones yet to be made. [Utterly-Ridiculous]
17) Do Peicey properly. The books, I mean. [Proper]
18) Do Peicey properly. The TV series, I mean.
19) Play Peicey in the TV series.
20) Have loads of people read my blog, talk about my film reviews, whatever.
21) Oh god, I really can’t think of anymore, and yet I’ll think of more over the next few days and cringe that I forgot. Oh well, er… I’ll put more in, this can be an ongoing thing. Unless I forget to continue it, and… no, wait! I can plan against that…
22) Finish things that I promise I will in this Journal. Mwahah, get past that one, Dom!
23) And… more to the point, explain. Explain this fucking Journal. Write a guide to it or something so that newcomers (i.e. Bz) can read it from the start and understand it. Do the Cast of Characters! Make this readable and understandable, even if it is your Journal! You can do it, Dom, I know you can! Yeah! I BELIEVE IN YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [Utterly-Ridiculous]

Friday 02 January 2009
9:04pm

Despite acquiring a number of films, recently, I –

What’s that? “New Year’s Resolutions”, you say non-verbally? Hey, I wasn’t joking when I wrote “Utterly Ridiculous”, you know. Well actually, I was, but only because humour is truth, or something.

– haven’t watched any of them.

I watched Gummo, mind, but I won’t talk about that because a) it’ll need a rewatch for me to appreciate (i.e. like) it better* and b) not talking about it will kill Liam.

Instead, I’m here to talk about Lynch.

(No, not really)

*What I mean is, I liked it, but it was so odd that it was impossible to like straightaway, if you see what I mean.

(As I often say when referring to something I wrote previously…) A little while ago, I said that I had argued for the validity of comics as a serious medium. Technically my argument was silly, because graphic novels are obviously considered far better and more mature than they were in “the past” (y’know, the past), but there’s still some merit to it when you consider I was mostly annoyed at the generation who consider what constitutes classic literature. Y’know, like how depraved-sexuality-based Lolita is a classic, but similarly depraved From Hell isn’t. Or how Metal Gear Solid isn’t seen to be an artistic achievement, or Okami.

And yes, I’m fully aware that they’re far more recent than Lolita is, except… I’m not sure that’s really relevant. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is talked of as one of those “don’t panic, just read it” books, and that’s the 70s. Alan Moore’s ground-breaking graphic novels came out in the 80s. So that’s hardly an issue. Hell, I was amazed that Agatha Christie was still around in the 70s, because she seemed so oldy-worldy from the way literate-types talked about her.

Anyway, we live in the nostalgia decade. We can access information at our fingertips, click of a mouse, all those things I could say that just mean “the internet’s here, folks. It wants to say hi, stay for a bit, rummage around your house, drink some tea”. If we can have programmes devoted to the 90s, and even to the early 00’s, there’s no way in/from hell that this needs to be an issue.

(Although I’d agree that the word “classic” possibly needs to be thrown out. By its very nature, it implies “old”. “Canon of literature”? Nah, “canon” is a word that eats me from the inside [yes, I am a Doctor Who fan, born and inbred]. So just “literature” will do)

ANYWAY, this is all irrelevant, so irrelevant that I had to put that in capitals as well as italics.

Point is: I said I’d branch out, and David Hampton has helped me, because he has nothing better to do. Which is lovely.

So; V for Vendetta. Definitely better as a graphic novel, if only because the story is told more interestingly (e.g. the chapter that opens with a piano recital). The story’s pretty much the same – and V still strikes me as villainous (“V”illanious! LOL!) rather than heroic, in a way – but there’s a line in there where he says “this isn’t anarchy, this is chaos”. From memory that isn’t in the movie, which is unfortunate because that line is essential.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen… actually I haven’t read the black dossier one yet, so I don’t have a valid opinion yet. It’s probably my least favourite, though.

From Hell, though, is spectacular. Genuinely amazing, and somehow it feels more epic and huge than V for Vendetta ever does.

And for anime… well, I haven’t been branching out a huge amount, admittedly, but I have been avidly watching Death Note. I’m fucking addicted, and every time I finish a DVD volume, I hunger for the next one. It’s insanely good.

I wanted to say a lot more about From Hell and Death Note, actually, but I sort of can’t think of what to say. Jesus, I’m becoming like Liam: “It’s great!” *NO JUSTIFICATION FOR THIS STATEMENT*

Oh well.

Postscript:

Guess what? As I just said to MICHAEL SANDFORD!!!!*, I just realised; now that it’s 2009, everything from 2008 will have to be moved to Tds4a Yesterday. *sigh* Why do I do this to myself? Anyway, I’ll probably do a "Greatest Hits of 2008" thing like I did for 2007 - yes! I’m that much of a self-obsessed prick! - but it’d be cool if like you guys could tell me your favourite bits, so I didn’t have to choose my own. That way it’d be slightly less conceited.

*There you go, Sandy. You were mentioned!