Jutchy YA YA

2002-05-05T03:13:00.000+10:00

And now what you do, what you do is you go here and you go there because that's where the blogging is now. And the CD reviews. And the comics. With monkeys in them.

Why is it "monkeys" and not "monkies"? The second one I always want to pronounce "MON-keeeze". Don't ask me why.

And also, ignore the entry below this one. it's fucked up. and i don't know why, but don't click on that link there. Really. There's some fucked up implosion shit going on here because I mis-typed a link before. Blogger is freaking out because I'm abandoning it. That must be it.

Told you not to.

2002-05-05T03:10:00.000+10:00

And now what you do, what you do is you go

2002-04-09T21:13:00.000+10:00

Two sparrows fucking outside my window. They live somewhere up there in the eaves of either my house or the neighbours' house. My bedroom window looks out onto the small alley that's created by the gap between the far wall of the loungeroom and the corrugated iron boundary fence, and since both houses are two-storey terraces, there's a bit of a valley-esque feeling created by this area. In the mornings the sparrows come down from wherever they stay, which is outside the field of vision of my window, and sit on the fence for a while before flying off to do whatever it is sparrows do after they fly off. But this morning, they were fucking. I'd never seen sparrows fucking before. I'd seen pigeons and chickens fucking, but not sparrows. I guess I assumed that they did it on the ground like all other birds, but these two were doing something a hell of a lot more acrobatic. Lady sparrow, or maybe we'll just refer to it as the bottom sparrow, was sitting nonchalantly, toes gripping the top of the fence, while top sparrow was doing a cute little flip-flap-hover-hover number right above bottom sparrow, holding itself so that its breast was just above the back of the neck of the bottom sparrow, and curling its body around and under the cloaca (look it up, I'm pretty sure it's the right terminology) of the bottom sparrow. the effect was similar to that of a honey-eater dipping its beak into the bell of a flower, except, well, it's the opposite part of the body that's doing the dipping. The top sparrow would take off, hover over the bottom sparrow, dip two or three times, then drop down next tot he bottom sparrow, then go through the same actions again. Sometimes the bottom sparrow would do one of those little sparrow jumps and be facing the opposite way it had just been facing, but both of them maintained that nonchalant unexpressive manner that sparrows do - a little bit of curiosity, a little cocking of the head from side to side, but that was about it, really. After five "sessions", for lack of a better word, the bottom sparrow finally flew off, with the top sparrow following shortly after.

And now I have to ask. Do birds have orgasms? Or is that a higher animal kind of thing? Like, is it exclusive to primates, or maybe even humans, to have orgasms in the sense of there being something other than simple ejaculation involved in sex? I know DH Lawrence wrote about a turtle having an orgasm, but was that poetic license, or was there actual biological knowledge at work there too?

"We can't eat poetry"
"How will we live?"
"We'll get jobs."
"Yes, we'll get jobs and be happy."
"No, we'll get jobs and pay the rent. We'll get credit cards and be happy."

2002-04-06T13:19:00.000+10:00

Listening to the latest Missy Misdemeanor Elliot CD and there's a continual thread about ecstasy running through the album. I think Missy's a bit of a party-drug girl. That album, ...So Addictive, is absolutely rife and riddled (yes, I did say "rife and riddled") with ecstasy references: "It's like drinkin liquor or weed or X whatever does you the best"; "Here's a glass of orange juice, let's go X it out"; "Mhm, ecstacy/It enhances your most inner desire/to become more free with your guts and feelings"... and so on. Thing is, in one song she talks about a feeling so good that she feels like she's on ecstasy. It's interesting, though, because that's a complete inversion of association. Feelings of actual emotional ecstasy have been around a lot longer than the drug ecstasy, and you've got to think that when Es first came around, everyone was like, "You've got to try this man, it's like the best feeling ever." And now having the best feeling ever is like being on E. Makes me wonder how many other inversions of idiom exist in the English language. What was the size of Ben Hur compared to when it was first released? How did people evoke the speed of lightning in the beginning? What was it that a locomotive was more powerful than that allowed it to earn the right to the idiom? Who was Jesus bigger than?

- No matter what I achieve, I always have this irritating sensation of emptiness and futility.
- Oh yeah, i hate that.
- I want to be awed by my own accomplishments. I want to be compared to great men. I want to change people's minds. I want to set trends, destroy preconceptions, be loved by beautiful women. I want the image i have of myself and myself to become one.
- Cool.

2002-04-05T11:11:00.000+10:00

Ég Er Kominn Aftur
Inn I fiig
fia› Er Svo Gott A› Vera Hér
En Stoppa Stutt Vi›
Eg Fl‡t Um I Ne›arsjávar H‡›i
A Hóteli Beintengdur Vi› Rafmagnstöfluna Og Nærist
Tjú Tjú
En Bi›in Gerir Mig Lei›an - Brot Hættan Sparka Frá Mér
Og Kall A - Ver› A› Fara - Hjálp
Tjú Tjú
Eg Spring Ut Og Fri›urinn I Loft Upp
Ba›a›ur N‡ju Ljósi
Eg Græt Og Eg Græt - Aftengdur
On‡ttur Heili Settur A Brjóst
Og Mata›ur Af Svefn-G-Englum

These are the words of Icelandic band Sigur Ros, from 'Agaelis Byrjunan', an incredible album that has come into my life recently. It's one of those albums that is so beautiful and so moving that it inspires you to say things like "it came into my life", because that's how grateful you are to discover something so mind-wrenchingly beautiful. They sing in Icelandic, and this particular song, track 2 on the album, is the one that makes my breath come easier as I fall asleep, the wailing chorus of "Tju..... Tju....", which sounds like "It's you.... It's you...." to my non-Icelandic-speaking brain, folding over me as I lie quiet, trying to breathe the music in, to drink it, to absorb it through my skin. It's the kind of music that is made to be turned up LOUD so that you can swim inside it, vibrating in sympathy with it all. The fact that I don't understand the words serves to enhance my pleasure, because all I have to work with, all that I can use to understand what they're trying to say is the tone of the singer's voice, the emotion that is projected through these alien words, and it's their alien-ness that is part of their beauty. Sigur Ros play and sing with a strength and a beauty that transcends language. I don't ever want to be given a translation of these lyrics, because to know what they are "supposed" to mean would ruin forever what they give me at this moment in time. I don't even want to try to sing along, or try to use the written form of these lyrics to try to pronounce the words. I'd rather the mystery and the resultant beauty remained untouched, and that the above simply be regarded as a set of instructions, incomprehensible to me, for constructing nine minutes and three seconds of total, unutterable visceral, emotional and sensual pleasure.

I had a bad day. I had to subvert my principles and kowtow to an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible.

2002-04-03T13:06:00.000+10:00

Computer crashes. The ephemerality of the whole word-processing experience is highlighted by the whim of whatever little gremlin lives inside your CPU and decides fuck it the little shit hasn't hit control-S for fifteen minutes. let's show them who's REALLY running the show. Right? That sort of thing would never happen if you stuck to pen and paper like the REAL writers, jotting stuff down in their notebooks and so on. Except you do tend to lose stuff just as dramatically, though maybe not as frequently, when you use ink and paper. Ever spilled a coffee? Or had a kitten take a dump on your notebook? Ever left the fucker at a tram stop/bus stop/ex-girlfriend's house that subsequently burned down/JAL flight from New York to Tokyo? Well, then you'll understand why way back they were all advocating against pen and paper. I mean it, son, if you keep writing things down like that you'll forget how to use your memory and THEN where will you be? You won't know, will you, because you won't be able to remember! Except those old buggers aren't so smug when they get brain damage or have their heads partially eaten by sabre-toothed tigers, are they? A lot of good your brain's doing you now, all leaking out over that rock like that. Not so clever now, are you? Shoulda stuck with long-chain protein endomytreosis like that amoeba over there, shouldn't you? Well? Answer me, brain man. If you can, I mean.

2002-03-26T11:49:00.000+10:00

The house is empty except for me. The inflatable world globe (for kicking around like a soccerball and bouncing off of walls) is over in a nook beside my bed, which is right now folded into a couch. The only other inflatable thing in this room is a transparent dog-shaped thing. The Space Puppy. More a humanoid with a dog's head and a little waggy tail than anything else. Used to be in the bathroom of my old house. I found out on the day I moved out that Karen had apparently always hated having it hanging there off the shower railing. She could have told me, I wouldn't have minded. I like having the space puppy close. With his eyes on either side of his nose like that he has a nice tranquil idiocy about his expression. Love that Space Puppy. Time to put Happyland on the stereo.

Where has my chicken gone, they ask, invoking one of the two automatically cool and funny animals in the modern western pantheon. The other being the monkey of course. Chickens and monkeys. Automatically funny. Automatically cool. The only thing cooler than chickens or monkeys are robots. Thus, a giant robot chicken-monkey would be the coolest thing of all. Sounds about right. Now that I think of it, Gigan, one of the monsters from the Godzilla movies (that's funny - "one of the monsters from the Godzilla movies", as though Godzilla isn't a monster himself), was a kind of giant robot chicken. It had a beak, at least. No monkey attributes as such, but there's nothing that says we can't change that.

It might also just be the fact that the words "chicken" and "monkey" are funny-sounding in themselves. I have to admit there's a satisfaction to be had from saying "giant robot chicken-monkey" over and over. Try it for yourself.

"You want confidence! A pledge. Safety. Guarantee. Promises. Expectation. Consideration. Sincerity. Selflessness. Intimacy. Attraction. Gentleness. Understanding. An understanding without words. Dependence without resentment. Affection...To belong...Possession...Loss."
"Hey, Sheriff, everything OK at home?"
"Why do women exist?"

2002-03-22T08:37:00.000+10:00

Anyway, I spent the whole day checking email and playing computer games, feeling useless and hot, but at one point I replied to this little writing challenge that was put up by someone on one of the bulletin boards I frequent: write a parody of the current trend in American comics where you take an obscure character from an old comic and 're-vamp' them, make them all 'cutting edge', bring them into the 21st Century, so to speak. So I had a hack at it and dredged up the MAN-THING from the depressingly encyclopaedic resource of superhero trivia that nests in my brain (no, really, name a superhero and I'll tell you what their powers are and what their secret identity is, no sweat), and came up with this. It's not REALLY creative, and it's not particularly accessible to anyone apart from computer geeks, but I do like the line about Darren Morse.

MAN THING: Burn Baby Burn

A gripping twelve-part maxiseries featuring the return of one of the weirdest characters ever to slowly shuffle from the swamps that surround the House of Ideas.

Everything that knows fear BURNS at the Man-Thing's touch. That's standard folklore around these parts. With a couple of Jack Daniels inside him, Ol' Jem will go on for hours about the time he cliams to have met the shambling green mound on a 'gator-shooting trip, and how he only managed to escape because his hound Seth threw himself at the monster. "Never fergit the smell o' burnin' hound long as ah live," is how the conversation inevitably ends, as Jem's head hits the bar and he begins to sob quietly to himself.

But what of Ted Sallis' bastard daughter Janey, born of his one extra-marital indiscretion with Hendrix-groupie Winter Rainbow Jackson at Woodstock, all those years ago? She's heard ol' Jem's story and she knows that there's more substance to it than the golden liquid Jem chooses as his slow method of suicide. She knows the music that the dimensional portals make when they open on this side. She knows that the urban legends about a duck running for President have more truth than fiction to them. She has seen the photographs of women dressed in viking helmets and bellydancer costumes as they walk unharmed through the treacherous swamps of the Florida Everglades. When Darren Morse put his hand inside her pants at the office party last month he got third degree burns. And Janey thinks she knows why.

Janey thinks that the answers can be found by finding the mysterious crature known as the MAN-THING, but little does she know that her fears concerning the truth that she wants to revel may be her undoing, because...

whosoever knows fear... BURNS AT THE MAN-THING'S TOUCH!!!

With guest appearances from Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu, Howard the Duck, Conan the Barbarian, Devil Dinosaur and Moon-Boy, plus a special cameo from Moon Knight. Issue one is a guaranteed collector's item, coming poly-bagged with a hunk of grassy dirt and instructions on how to make napalm from household materials.

"I believe you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road. Try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness, look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems bad to you within yourself will grow pure by the very fact of you observing it. Avoid fear, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartendess in attaining love, and don't be frightened overmuch at your own evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you. For love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed, so everyone can see. Men will even give there lives if only the ordeal does not last too long, but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding, as if on a stage. But active love, active love, is labour and fortitude."

2002-03-21T17:58:00.000+10:00

If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut.

I’m all lyrical at the moment with my long-long-long sentences as a direct result of reading a magnificent book by the name of Ka. It’s a novel with its primary source as the various semi-incomprehensible Indian mythologies that make up the Vedas, the Suryas, the Brahma-ramas and all the other odd and hypnotic books of Hindu stories. The author, some Italian gentleman who prior to this did something similar with Greek Mythology, attempts to tie all of the various stories into one continual narrative of (dare I say it?) magic realist proportions. It’s nice. Dreamy. You as much swim through it as read it, and I’m really loving it. I gained knowledge and appreciation of Hindu mythology during my time working as an editor at Lonely Planet, editing their travel guides about India. [no link 'cos they're a pack of bastards who treat their employees like shit] From knowing almost nothing bar what I saw on the walls of the Hare Krsna restaurants on Swanston street when I went there for their $3.00 smorgasbord lunches back in my poor student days, I have become something of an amateur flawed afficionado of the stories and characters presented. They’ve always reminded me of superhero comics written by children who feel little need to explain the motivations of their characters.

Vishnu, Brahma, Kali, Shiva, Ganesh, Garuda, Sarasvati, Rama, Durga, Hanuman, Matsya... these crazy kooky Hindu kids running amok in their colourful pantaloons and bright blue skin, sitting astride tigers, holding ten weapons at once, emerging from the heart of lotuses, it’s a crazy crazy beautiful world out there in Hindu mythology and I’m partially addicted to it.

I guess if I had to play favourites I’d probably pick Matsya and Hanuman from the Hindu pantheon. Matysa because he’s the fish incarnation of Vishnu, one of the “big three” in Hindu circles. You’ve got Brahma the creator, Siva the destroyer, and then Vishnu, who kind of sits in the middle and sustains things. Like most Hindu gods, ol’ Vish has a few varying incarnations of his own, each of which can be worshipped in a God in their own right if you so desire. The main ten incarnations of V. are (let me see if I can get this right...) Matsya the fish, the turtle whose name I forget right now, the boar-man whose name I also forget, Narasimha the man-lion, Para-su-rama the mountain-dwarf, Rama the heroic Prince, Krsna the cowherd/charioteer, Buddha and Kalki (who either rides on a white horse or is a white horse whose presence signifies the end of creation) and there’s one other one that goes between Narasimha and Para-su-rama, but I can’t quite remember who. I’ve got some idea that it’s a little bald-headed child carrying a yellow parasol, but I’m not sure. Anyway, I pick Matsya for his fishness, being that there’s been this stupid injoke that I’ve carried with me since year nine in high school that boils down to the phrase “I have seen the fish” and because of that joke, which isn’t worth explaining, I like to sometimes associate myself with fish and stuff, so that’s why Matsya gets the nod.

Hanuman is a monkey-god whose adventures figure significantly in one of the major books of Hindu myth, the Ramayana. He helps the hero, Rama, rescue his girlfriend from a demon and fight a war against the demon’s armies. He does this using various magical tricks and he’s a monkey so he rocks. I see a tentative kinship between the magical tricks of Hanuman and the exploits of Monkey in the book that most of you would remember as the Japanese TV show “Monkey Magic”, and they both rock. One day I’ll write a comic where the two of them live together in a cramped New York apartment. They’ll be the original Odd Couple! Except for Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau (who are the original Odd Couple - Jack Klugman and Tony Randall are spinoffs and pretenders to the throne, so shut up, okay?), of course.

"One time I hired a monkey to take notes for me in class. I would just sit there with my mind a complete blank while the monkey scribbled on little pieces of paper. At the end of the week the teacher said, 'Class, I want you to write a paper using your notes.' So I wrote a paper that said, 'HEllO My NAmE IS BiNGO I Like tO CLIMb ON THINGs can I HAve A BanaNA?' I got an F. When I told my mom about it, she said 'I told you never trust a monkey!' The end."