Why am I still alive? Well I think it's because I'm a fighter, because I am determined every day to struggle with all my might against the will to self-destruction. I think it's my courage that has kept me alive.
Haha, just kidding. Actually the reason I'm still alive is that every time I reach the point where it seems like maybe it'd be better if I wasn't, I find myself struck by one or all of a number of points:
Firstly, I am still alive because of spite. There are enough people in the world who I know would be happier if I was dead, that it seems worthwhile staying alive just to make their lives a bit more miserable.
Secondly, I know that on the occasion of my death, everyone who ever knew me, or pretended to know me, or heard of me, or didn't hear of me but got told about me after I had in fact died, is going to weigh in with some damn opinion or other.
Some of them are people who have treated me like shit in life, but are going to act like we were the best of friends once I'm dead.
Some of them are people who are going to pretend that they understand why I died, and try to explain it to other people, and argue endlessly over whose theory of my death is the more accurate, and the more compassionate.
Some of them are people who are going to be secure in the knowledge that my death is all about them, and tell the world how pained and soulful they are so everyone understands that my dying has many victims, but none so tragic as this particular casual acquaintance.
Some of them are going to say how sad it is that I have died, and follow that statement with "but..." so they can explain how actually it's not really all that sad.
Some of them are going to write blogs and thinkpieces explaining how really it was all my own fault. And some of them are going to write blogs and thinkpieces explaining how really it was all the fault of someone or something that by coincidence they were already writing blogs and thinkpieces about before I died.
Some of them are going to use the circumstances of my death to trigger a petition.
Some of them are going to get incredibly angry that anyone is sad about my death, when there are much SADDER things to be sad about, and isn't it just incredibly narrow-minded of us to be sad about my death?
And the point is, when I'm dead, I can't tell everyone having a public reaction to my death to go fuck themselves in their fat ugly faces. So I really have no choice but to stay alive when you think about it.
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Sunday, July 21, 2013
It's On You Now
All right. The government has decided that if you try to claim asylum via a boat journey, you're not getting in. You'll end up living in Papua New Guinea, at best. The government has decided that this will stop the boats, and the government is telling us that this is necessary to save lives, because the most pressing need is to stop people drowning at sea. The government is clear that this has nothing to do with pandering to xenophobia, nothing to do with a lowest common denominator grab for votes, nothing to do with embracing the politics of fear. It is about saving lives. The government has a responsibility to stop people taking risky sea voyages, and so they've put in place a plan to stop them.
Very well. They can own that then.
Personally I never thought drownings at sea were the fault of the government. I never thought that any government in Australia had ever "lured" people onto leaky boats. I thought it was ridiculous to suppose that simply by maintaining the possibility that people with a legitimate claim to asylum could find assistance and refuge and a better life in Australia, our leaders were somehow tricking those silly foreigners into believing their journey across the sea would be safe. I thought that I was in no position to judge whether refugees from war-torn lands were right to risk their lives to improve their circumstances. I thought that asylum seekers were neither halfwitted morons unable to figure out the dangers of a sea journey in a rickety boat, nor mindless puppets reacting only to the string-pulling of Australia's government - pull this string, they come, pull that string, they stay. I thought that in a world of refugees, we cannot prevent people taking terrible risks to escape terrible situations: all we can do is our little bit to assist those who come to us seeking assistance. I thought it is not our place to lecture those who've seen terrors we can't fathom on whether the chance of death at sea is worth taking if it means getting away from those terrors, or if it means avoiding decades eking out a fearful, hopeless existence in a refugee camp, or if it means giving their children the chance of a future containing possibilities. I thought the government does not bear responsibilities for the tragedies caused by the sick and sorry state of the world - only the tragedies resulting from the treatment it metes out to those who beg it for help. I thought that accepting desperate people into our country and allowing them to become Australians was the noblest thing that our government does, and that the ones who came by boat were no more or less deserving than those arriving by other means.
I thought all these things.
The government thinks differently.
Well, fine.
But they should know, they can own that now.
I never believed the government bore responsibility for deaths at sea, but that's a responsibility they've taken on. Both major parties have stood up to willingly declare that the blood of asylum seekers who drown is on the hands of the Australian government.
Let them own it.
The PNG plan is said to be the way to prevent these drownings. The Opposition has their own tow-back, TPV plan, that they say will prevent these drownings. If this is the way they wish it to be, if this is the priority they wish to adopt, if this is the function they see as proper for the Australian government, then this is the standard by which they will be judged.
Because if Labor puts the PNG plan in place, or if the Coalition implements their own Howard redux policy, they'll have achieved their goal. They'll have done what they claim is necessary to stop deaths at sea.
And that means every death at sea from that point on is on them.
And we've got to hold them to this. If asylum seekers drown on their way to Australia, after the government declares that drownings are its responsibility and its policy the proper reaction to them, then with each death our politicians will stand judged as murderers - not by our judgment, but by their own. And it'll be up to us to remind them of that.
It's on you now, noble leaders. You want responsibility for their deaths, you got it. We'll hold you responsible, and see if you are so eager to hang yourselves when you've got no excuses.
Very well. They can own that then.
Personally I never thought drownings at sea were the fault of the government. I never thought that any government in Australia had ever "lured" people onto leaky boats. I thought it was ridiculous to suppose that simply by maintaining the possibility that people with a legitimate claim to asylum could find assistance and refuge and a better life in Australia, our leaders were somehow tricking those silly foreigners into believing their journey across the sea would be safe. I thought that I was in no position to judge whether refugees from war-torn lands were right to risk their lives to improve their circumstances. I thought that asylum seekers were neither halfwitted morons unable to figure out the dangers of a sea journey in a rickety boat, nor mindless puppets reacting only to the string-pulling of Australia's government - pull this string, they come, pull that string, they stay. I thought that in a world of refugees, we cannot prevent people taking terrible risks to escape terrible situations: all we can do is our little bit to assist those who come to us seeking assistance. I thought it is not our place to lecture those who've seen terrors we can't fathom on whether the chance of death at sea is worth taking if it means getting away from those terrors, or if it means avoiding decades eking out a fearful, hopeless existence in a refugee camp, or if it means giving their children the chance of a future containing possibilities. I thought the government does not bear responsibilities for the tragedies caused by the sick and sorry state of the world - only the tragedies resulting from the treatment it metes out to those who beg it for help. I thought that accepting desperate people into our country and allowing them to become Australians was the noblest thing that our government does, and that the ones who came by boat were no more or less deserving than those arriving by other means.
I thought all these things.
The government thinks differently.
Well, fine.
But they should know, they can own that now.
I never believed the government bore responsibility for deaths at sea, but that's a responsibility they've taken on. Both major parties have stood up to willingly declare that the blood of asylum seekers who drown is on the hands of the Australian government.
Let them own it.
The PNG plan is said to be the way to prevent these drownings. The Opposition has their own tow-back, TPV plan, that they say will prevent these drownings. If this is the way they wish it to be, if this is the priority they wish to adopt, if this is the function they see as proper for the Australian government, then this is the standard by which they will be judged.
Because if Labor puts the PNG plan in place, or if the Coalition implements their own Howard redux policy, they'll have achieved their goal. They'll have done what they claim is necessary to stop deaths at sea.
And that means every death at sea from that point on is on them.
And we've got to hold them to this. If asylum seekers drown on their way to Australia, after the government declares that drownings are its responsibility and its policy the proper reaction to them, then with each death our politicians will stand judged as murderers - not by our judgment, but by their own. And it'll be up to us to remind them of that.
It's on you now, noble leaders. You want responsibility for their deaths, you got it. We'll hold you responsible, and see if you are so eager to hang yourselves when you've got no excuses.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
My Captain
One of the first cricket books I ever owned was by Peter Roebuck. It's called Great Innings - I still have it now, more than 20 years after I was given it. It's simply a series of 50 short essays on some of the greatest innings played over the history of cricket, from the 19th century through to the late 1980s. It wasn't the first great innings anthology written - the sort of mind that tends to commit itself to cricket is always the same kind of mind that will incline towards list-making. And Roebuck would not have been alone in including in his own list Bradman's flawless 254 at Lord's in 1930, or Stan McCabe's 187 in the face of Bodyline. Most people would probably include Botham's Headingley hurricane of 1981 and it's not a great stretch to put in Viv Richards's 56-ball hundred, or Victor Trumper's 104 before lunch on a wet track.
But I don't know anyone except Roebuck who would select from Javed Miandad none of his myriad test match masterpieces, but a virtuoso 200 for Glamorgan. Who but Roebuck would nominate a whirlwind 88 by Kiwi legend Bert Sutcliffe, hit against a fearsome South African pace attack, with a bandaged head, and a broken heart the day after a train crash claimed the lives of 151 of his countrymen, including his teammate's fiancee? Who but Roebuck would bypass Garfield Sobers's dazzling 132 in the Tied Test in Brisbane in favour his captain Frank Worrell's unspectacular 65 in the same innings, seeing the greatest heroism in the inspiration a skipper gave to a young, insecure team?
That was Roebuck's peculair genius: he was not ignorant of the cold hard realities of the game; he didn't disregard facts and figures - often he would remind his readers that in the end that most important thing for a player was to make runs or take wickets - all else was incidental. But while keeping these realities in mind, Roebuck would still see the romance of cricket, its adventure and emotion, as much as its results and statistics.
He was a storyteller, and his greatest proclivity as a sports writer was to discern the narratives in cricket. Every innings, every day, every wicket, every moment was a story to Roebuck. Great feats of bowling or batsmanship were cinematic in their scope: he would relate them in epic terms, setting the scene with passages that could seem gloriously out of place on the sports pages, with their poetic imagery and whimsical metaphors. He would construct his story as if creating fiction rather than relating mundane real events - the obstacles to overcome, the inner turmoil of the individual, the magnificence of mighty champions coming together, and the triumph of a man over his opponents, his environment, and himself, were related as if Roebuck were handing down a legend, a tale of giants in a more momentous universe. Cricket was in his bones, and it ran in his veins, and his life was devoted to helping others to see it as he did. A team game in which personal ambition is supposed to be sacrificed to the collective good, yet which is comprised entirely of confrontations between individuals, he understood its beauty and its strangeness and its otherworldly quaintness, and he told its story in the way he saw it.
Players' careers were novels, tales of struggle and redemption and success and failure that stretched back long before the public became aware of them, and continued long after they faded from view. Roebuck was a very good player himself, a successful long-standing first-class player and county captain who played with Botham, Richards, Garner, Waugh and Crowe, and understood as well as anyone the battle a man can find himself waging against his own limitations; the frustrations to be found in the inability to realise your highest aspirations. When writing of a player, even to judge him as inadequate or to call for his dismissal, his pieces never contained malice, never lacked compassion. He never allowed his objective judgment of cricketing skill to blind him to the humans he was writing about.
And he delighted in those humans' successes. When weaving a story from the threads of a cricketer, he favoured the rags to riches variety. He loved nothing more than to tell the story of a subcontinental street kid, a country urchin raised on dirt pitches, or an island villager who grew up using a palm frond for a bat, rising to the highest echelons of international sport. He rejoiced in men like Ranji, or D'Oliviera, who defied their own bigoted societies to succeed. He took an especial pleasure in unconventional operators who found success despite their disregard for orthodoxy or tradition - the bizarre stance of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the crabbed, awkward technique of Simon Katich, the cheerful agriculturalism of Colin Milburn, were all admired by Roebuck, lover of the rebel and the innovator.
His sense of justice, his loathing of bigotry and nationalism, were palpable. He hated barracking, railed against those who would place their desire for their own team to win above justice or the good of the game. His opinions were always fiercely independent and scrupulously sincere. I didn't agree with him all the time - I thought he got it wrong on Darrell Hair, and that he completely lost his head when he savaged Ricky Ponting in the aftermath of the 2008 SCG test against India. But whether agreeing with him or not, there could never be any doubt that what he wrote was motivated by nothing more than pure, genuine conviction. If he could be intemperate, if his emotions could overrule his judgment so that he seemed less than dispassionate in assessing the facts, it only ever came from his love of the game, and his hatred of anything that could sully it. He saw such beauty in the game, and what it could do to elevate people, and bring them together, that it distressed him beyond measure to see ugliness intrude, to see his beloved cricket be less than it could be. That was why he wrote with such anger whenever corruption or greed threatened the game, when he saw it twisted to base political ends, used to assist political thugs in Zimbabwe or organised crime in India. He was no starry-eyed idealist thinking cricket could be divorced from the world around it, but that was just the point - he believed in cricket improving the world around it, and was inflamed by it doing the opposite, or allowing the worst of the world to infect the game.
But perhaps most important of all was how he wrote all this. That beautiful, lyrical, elaborate, passionate, impish, sharp, idiosyncratic style that somehow seemed of another time, evoking Cardus and Wodehouse as it painted intricately detailed landscapes and portraits of a day's play, while simultaneously devising new angles, new windows to see the game through that could distort it in new and lovely ways while also clarifying events in a way that other writers never even conceived of. There was simply nothing else on sports pages to compare with Roebuck's words. The art he brought to what can so often be a flat, blunt craft was something to behold. He could make you fall in love with cricket simply by describing the snap of a bowler's wrist, or the flourish of a batsman as he let the ball pass harmless to the keeper. He made me fall in love with cricket.
I was reading Roebuck before I read a word by Douglas Adams. Before I'd even heard of Terry Pratchett. Before I'd watched a second of Monty Python. Before I'd encountered Wodehouse, before I'd thought of becoming a writer myself. Of all the influences on me as a writer, Peter Roebuck is probably the longest-standing outside my own parents. I never net him, and now, to my lasting regret, I never will. I didn't know him - though, from what I understand few really ever did. But if it's true that a writer can show themselves through their writing, that you can get to know someone by the words they put down, I knew him. I knew him by his words, for most of my life, and the devastation I feel at his death is a testament to his ability to touch lives of people he was never even aware of. It's a mad, delusional conceit for me to wish I'd really known him, to think maybe I could have done something for him, as an act of reciprocity. But if I wish I could have been a friend to him, it's because he so often made me feel he was a friend to me. Maybe that was the greatest part of his genius after all.
I don't know all the details of his life, or of his death. I don't want to speculate, I don't want to intensify my own sadness, or anyone else's, by sifting through that which I really know nothing about, or by pontificating on sadness, or loneliness, or the flaws of a man only just gone.
But what I can say is that in recent years, Peter Roebuck seemed to be one of the last bastions of cricket the way it was supposed to be. As the game became more driven by money, by greed, by coldly professional calculations and cynical self-interest, to the point where the lines between corruption and administration were becoming blurred...Roebuck stood as a voice for cricket as pure, as joyous, as the most beautiful of games. As Michael Parkinson said, sport only matters if it doesn't matter - only if sport can remain a game, played for love and by principles of fairness and honesty lacking in the important, life-and-death world outside, can it be a beacon to that outside world, a force for good. Once cricket becomes just like everything else in life, it might as well not exist.
Peter Roebuck felt that. And now that he's gone, I wonder if anyone else really feels it the same way. With Roebuck gone, cricket feels a little more prosaic, a litle more dull, a little more sordid. I don't know if this game that I love still has the magic, the beauty that can make me believe there's something better in the world. Maybe there's nothing better in the world. Maybe everything really is, at heart, dirty and ugly and selfish. Maybe cricket is destined to go the way of everything else, and even the most brilliant of artists among us can't hold back the tide of voracious, remorseless reality. I hope it's not so, but maybe it is. And this summer, this Roebuckless season that is now upon us, can't help but feel grim and hopeless and dark. This game I love...can it be beautiful anymore? His words, today more precious than ever before, will hopefully help it remain so.
Peter Roebuck I will miss you. If I wrote a thousand times as many words as I have here today, I'm not sure I could ever really say how much.
But I don't know anyone except Roebuck who would select from Javed Miandad none of his myriad test match masterpieces, but a virtuoso 200 for Glamorgan. Who but Roebuck would nominate a whirlwind 88 by Kiwi legend Bert Sutcliffe, hit against a fearsome South African pace attack, with a bandaged head, and a broken heart the day after a train crash claimed the lives of 151 of his countrymen, including his teammate's fiancee? Who but Roebuck would bypass Garfield Sobers's dazzling 132 in the Tied Test in Brisbane in favour his captain Frank Worrell's unspectacular 65 in the same innings, seeing the greatest heroism in the inspiration a skipper gave to a young, insecure team?
That was Roebuck's peculair genius: he was not ignorant of the cold hard realities of the game; he didn't disregard facts and figures - often he would remind his readers that in the end that most important thing for a player was to make runs or take wickets - all else was incidental. But while keeping these realities in mind, Roebuck would still see the romance of cricket, its adventure and emotion, as much as its results and statistics.
He was a storyteller, and his greatest proclivity as a sports writer was to discern the narratives in cricket. Every innings, every day, every wicket, every moment was a story to Roebuck. Great feats of bowling or batsmanship were cinematic in their scope: he would relate them in epic terms, setting the scene with passages that could seem gloriously out of place on the sports pages, with their poetic imagery and whimsical metaphors. He would construct his story as if creating fiction rather than relating mundane real events - the obstacles to overcome, the inner turmoil of the individual, the magnificence of mighty champions coming together, and the triumph of a man over his opponents, his environment, and himself, were related as if Roebuck were handing down a legend, a tale of giants in a more momentous universe. Cricket was in his bones, and it ran in his veins, and his life was devoted to helping others to see it as he did. A team game in which personal ambition is supposed to be sacrificed to the collective good, yet which is comprised entirely of confrontations between individuals, he understood its beauty and its strangeness and its otherworldly quaintness, and he told its story in the way he saw it.
Players' careers were novels, tales of struggle and redemption and success and failure that stretched back long before the public became aware of them, and continued long after they faded from view. Roebuck was a very good player himself, a successful long-standing first-class player and county captain who played with Botham, Richards, Garner, Waugh and Crowe, and understood as well as anyone the battle a man can find himself waging against his own limitations; the frustrations to be found in the inability to realise your highest aspirations. When writing of a player, even to judge him as inadequate or to call for his dismissal, his pieces never contained malice, never lacked compassion. He never allowed his objective judgment of cricketing skill to blind him to the humans he was writing about.
And he delighted in those humans' successes. When weaving a story from the threads of a cricketer, he favoured the rags to riches variety. He loved nothing more than to tell the story of a subcontinental street kid, a country urchin raised on dirt pitches, or an island villager who grew up using a palm frond for a bat, rising to the highest echelons of international sport. He rejoiced in men like Ranji, or D'Oliviera, who defied their own bigoted societies to succeed. He took an especial pleasure in unconventional operators who found success despite their disregard for orthodoxy or tradition - the bizarre stance of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the crabbed, awkward technique of Simon Katich, the cheerful agriculturalism of Colin Milburn, were all admired by Roebuck, lover of the rebel and the innovator.
His sense of justice, his loathing of bigotry and nationalism, were palpable. He hated barracking, railed against those who would place their desire for their own team to win above justice or the good of the game. His opinions were always fiercely independent and scrupulously sincere. I didn't agree with him all the time - I thought he got it wrong on Darrell Hair, and that he completely lost his head when he savaged Ricky Ponting in the aftermath of the 2008 SCG test against India. But whether agreeing with him or not, there could never be any doubt that what he wrote was motivated by nothing more than pure, genuine conviction. If he could be intemperate, if his emotions could overrule his judgment so that he seemed less than dispassionate in assessing the facts, it only ever came from his love of the game, and his hatred of anything that could sully it. He saw such beauty in the game, and what it could do to elevate people, and bring them together, that it distressed him beyond measure to see ugliness intrude, to see his beloved cricket be less than it could be. That was why he wrote with such anger whenever corruption or greed threatened the game, when he saw it twisted to base political ends, used to assist political thugs in Zimbabwe or organised crime in India. He was no starry-eyed idealist thinking cricket could be divorced from the world around it, but that was just the point - he believed in cricket improving the world around it, and was inflamed by it doing the opposite, or allowing the worst of the world to infect the game.
But perhaps most important of all was how he wrote all this. That beautiful, lyrical, elaborate, passionate, impish, sharp, idiosyncratic style that somehow seemed of another time, evoking Cardus and Wodehouse as it painted intricately detailed landscapes and portraits of a day's play, while simultaneously devising new angles, new windows to see the game through that could distort it in new and lovely ways while also clarifying events in a way that other writers never even conceived of. There was simply nothing else on sports pages to compare with Roebuck's words. The art he brought to what can so often be a flat, blunt craft was something to behold. He could make you fall in love with cricket simply by describing the snap of a bowler's wrist, or the flourish of a batsman as he let the ball pass harmless to the keeper. He made me fall in love with cricket.
I was reading Roebuck before I read a word by Douglas Adams. Before I'd even heard of Terry Pratchett. Before I'd watched a second of Monty Python. Before I'd encountered Wodehouse, before I'd thought of becoming a writer myself. Of all the influences on me as a writer, Peter Roebuck is probably the longest-standing outside my own parents. I never net him, and now, to my lasting regret, I never will. I didn't know him - though, from what I understand few really ever did. But if it's true that a writer can show themselves through their writing, that you can get to know someone by the words they put down, I knew him. I knew him by his words, for most of my life, and the devastation I feel at his death is a testament to his ability to touch lives of people he was never even aware of. It's a mad, delusional conceit for me to wish I'd really known him, to think maybe I could have done something for him, as an act of reciprocity. But if I wish I could have been a friend to him, it's because he so often made me feel he was a friend to me. Maybe that was the greatest part of his genius after all.
I don't know all the details of his life, or of his death. I don't want to speculate, I don't want to intensify my own sadness, or anyone else's, by sifting through that which I really know nothing about, or by pontificating on sadness, or loneliness, or the flaws of a man only just gone.
But what I can say is that in recent years, Peter Roebuck seemed to be one of the last bastions of cricket the way it was supposed to be. As the game became more driven by money, by greed, by coldly professional calculations and cynical self-interest, to the point where the lines between corruption and administration were becoming blurred...Roebuck stood as a voice for cricket as pure, as joyous, as the most beautiful of games. As Michael Parkinson said, sport only matters if it doesn't matter - only if sport can remain a game, played for love and by principles of fairness and honesty lacking in the important, life-and-death world outside, can it be a beacon to that outside world, a force for good. Once cricket becomes just like everything else in life, it might as well not exist.
Peter Roebuck felt that. And now that he's gone, I wonder if anyone else really feels it the same way. With Roebuck gone, cricket feels a little more prosaic, a litle more dull, a little more sordid. I don't know if this game that I love still has the magic, the beauty that can make me believe there's something better in the world. Maybe there's nothing better in the world. Maybe everything really is, at heart, dirty and ugly and selfish. Maybe cricket is destined to go the way of everything else, and even the most brilliant of artists among us can't hold back the tide of voracious, remorseless reality. I hope it's not so, but maybe it is. And this summer, this Roebuckless season that is now upon us, can't help but feel grim and hopeless and dark. This game I love...can it be beautiful anymore? His words, today more precious than ever before, will hopefully help it remain so.
Peter Roebuck I will miss you. If I wrote a thousand times as many words as I have here today, I'm not sure I could ever really say how much.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Plugs
A quick plug for an article I wrote for Crikey on the whales who threaten our way of life.
And a BIGGER plug for my brand spanking new show in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival!
Yes! After years of saying "I will do it", I am ACTUALLY doing it!
Ben Pobjie's Funeral will run from 6 April-17 April, except for Monday and Tuesday, at 8.30pm, and will take place in the lush surrounds of Blue Velvet Bar and Nightclub, at 60 Smith St, Collingwood, a lovely spot indeed.
Tickets are $20, $15 concession, but for the the first two nights, a SPECIAL PREVIEW PRICE of $10 applies!
What is Ben Pobjie's Funeral all about? It's about one man's quest to make sense of life and death, and get people to say nice things about him while he's still around to appreciate it. It will deal with such urgent issues as:
- The meaning of life
- The meaning of death
- Zombies
- Cyclists
- The life cycle of the Port Jackson shark
- Wacky posters
- Jesus
- And many more
THERE WILL BE POETRY
Get tickets HERE!
And a BIGGER plug for my brand spanking new show in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival!
Yes! After years of saying "I will do it", I am ACTUALLY doing it!
Ben Pobjie's Funeral will run from 6 April-17 April, except for Monday and Tuesday, at 8.30pm, and will take place in the lush surrounds of Blue Velvet Bar and Nightclub, at 60 Smith St, Collingwood, a lovely spot indeed.
Tickets are $20, $15 concession, but for the the first two nights, a SPECIAL PREVIEW PRICE of $10 applies!
What is Ben Pobjie's Funeral all about? It's about one man's quest to make sense of life and death, and get people to say nice things about him while he's still around to appreciate it. It will deal with such urgent issues as:
- The meaning of life
- The meaning of death
- Zombies
- Cyclists
- The life cycle of the Port Jackson shark
- Wacky posters
- Jesus
- And many more
THERE WILL BE POETRY
Get tickets HERE!
Friday, June 4, 2010
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun
Blanche is gone.
She came out of the deep south to bring us a message.
A message of hope, and of love, and of the joys of middle-aged promiscuity.
Without her, the 80s would have been nothing but biting sarcasm and rustic idiots.
With her, it also had a bunch of sex jokes.
She knew the fine line between having a good time and being a wanton slut, and how entertaining that line could be.
But in the hands of Rue, the character of Blanche Devereaux was more than just a brazen sex-crazed hussy. She was a mother, and a friend, and an art gallery employee apparently, although evidence for this was scant.
A piece of the 80s just slipped away, and we are poorer, wearier, and sadder for it.
Farewell, Rue. I will think of you whenever I think about the irresistible sexuality of 50-year-old women.
Which is, let's be honest, a hell of a lot.
She came out of the deep south to bring us a message.
A message of hope, and of love, and of the joys of middle-aged promiscuity.
Without her, the 80s would have been nothing but biting sarcasm and rustic idiots.
With her, it also had a bunch of sex jokes.
She knew the fine line between having a good time and being a wanton slut, and how entertaining that line could be.
But in the hands of Rue, the character of Blanche Devereaux was more than just a brazen sex-crazed hussy. She was a mother, and a friend, and an art gallery employee apparently, although evidence for this was scant.
A piece of the 80s just slipped away, and we are poorer, wearier, and sadder for it.
Farewell, Rue. I will think of you whenever I think about the irresistible sexuality of 50-year-old women.
Which is, let's be honest, a hell of a lot.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Can You Get Enough Of Me?
Of course you can't! And that's why you need to get your grasping mitts on The Death Mook, published by Vignette Press. It features a piece by me, as well as myriad other works of art and intellect by a dazzling array of other talented notables. It looks, I must say, freaking awesome, and that's only 70-80% because I'm in it.
I am proud to be part of the Mook movement, which I see as the irresistible wave of the future. Get into it now!
I am proud to be part of the Mook movement, which I see as the irresistible wave of the future. Get into it now!
Sunday, September 7, 2008
A Cause For Celebration
It's sometimes hard to process all of the different issues swirling about us in the world today. Trying to make sense of religion, and politics, and economics, entertainment, art, celebrity, the nature of good and evil. Such a bewildering array of information sources assail us today, giving contradictory views. It can induce intellectual and moral paralysis to make any attempt to discern the right way to think and to act.
With that in mind, it is a sweet and refreshing change when a development comes along that relieves us of the ambivalence and doubt plaguing our every step, and crystallises everything elegantly and beautifully.
So thank God, say I, for the news that on Wednesday some scientists are going to turn on a machine that will destroy the world.
The Large Hadron Collider is set to make all our worries and cares wonderfully irrelevant. So let's all sit back and relax.
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