The Standard Line Delivery System Two Thousand And Nine

Former US President George W Bush recites a eulogy to my dead grandfather on my behalf.

2009-03-14T18:21:00.005+11:00

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090314032025805#

2008-12-22T23:36:00.004+11:00

John Barrymore Stokes: 4 July 1926 - 22 December 2008

Dear Pop,
It's a warm night here in Canberra. Just the other night it was too cold to even walk into town without a coat, but tonight there is a threnody of cicadas, an absolute stillness, a blanket of pin-stars. The perfect night for remembering.

I actually only have a handful of memories of you and I alone together, without anyone else around. One of these was a time at the beach, around the time that I hated everything about the beach, which was the same time of life that Mum and Dad tried unsuccessfully to get me to start doing surf life saving on Saturday mornings. This day we were a little north of North Cottesloe and our towels were a little further away from the water than we usually sat. I was laying on a towel on my front, my chin resting on a little mound, and you were sitting there, bare ankled and making patterns in the sand. You were explaining something to me in a lot of detail - it was either something historical (about the Roman Empire or World War II perhaps) or something scientific (some particular laws of physics) but I can't remember what. I remember distinctly that I wasn't listening to a thing you said. You were taking great pains to explain this thing to me; in fact, it stood out because it was probably the most animated and conversive I'd ever seen you. You were really into it; there you were, just riffin' on this one subject, diving deep into the nitty gritty; and there I was, chin on sand. I realised suddenly, after a while, that you'd been talking for ages, and I hadn't heard anything at all, that my mind had gone to sleep in the sun, and I'd missed all the wisdom you had for me. This realisation was a shock, and I remember that I felt bad.

I didn't know you all that well, Pop. But you always seemed to me a gentle and intelligent guy, a man who loved learning, who found beauty in complexity and reason. Often, though, it seemed to me that you didn't know quite how to relate to other people, how to share in the joy and spirit of others, that, at times, you felt a little uncomfortable. Looking back, you always seemed to associate best through rational discussion and analysis. I don't mean to say you were cold - I never felt that Pop - but I always wondered what you really thought about people, about all the people gathered at Christmas, about me. I always wondered.

Pop, we have always seemed such different men, but I realise more and more these days how, in certain characteristics, we are all too similar. At times, I too find myself unsure in relating to others. I realise that I sometimes shy away from even those I love clearly and vividly, that I can come across distracted and aloof, that my emotions are grey and hidden, even at times when I am most safe and secure. Fearful of something (I know not what), I find solace in the mind. I find myself telling long, enthusiastic, detailed explanations of politics, of genealogies, of geography, of literature, of war. I notice, much more often than I'd like, the eyes of my companions glazing over as I go on too long on subjects which are not always universal in their appeal. They turn their glances, and I am left with half a tale. It's a lonely feeling, Pop, and I wonder if you felt that too.

I think I had a lot more I could have learned from you, old man. I wish I had. I wish I'd asked you more, dug deeper, been more inquisitive. I wish I'd known more about the ancestors whose inscriptions mark the goblets and wooden compasses you gave me. I wish we'd spent more time together in those lucid years of splendid rationality. I wish I knew you more, so I could know myself, more.

Rest easy.

x

State of My Life Address, 8 December 2008

2008-12-08T16:08:00.003+11:00

A. Today I have lived for exactly 28 years, or 10226 days. 28 is the second perfect number; it is also a Størmer, a happy, and a Keith number. Twenty-eight is the number of convex uniform honeycombs, it corresponds to the word koakh meaning 'power' or 'energy' in Hebrew Numerology, and it is the common name of the Western Australian parrot Barnardius zonarius semitorquatus. Neo-Nazis use '28' to refer to 'blood and honour' (with B=2 and H=8), and there are 28 letters in both the Swedish and Arabic alphabets. In the drug trade, 28 refers to the number of grams in an ounce. Chinese astrology has twenty-eight mansions (xiù), each representing a latitude the Moon crosses monthly as it circles the earth. These twenty eight mansions are split into four regions, as follows:
1. Azure Dragon (青龍): Horn, Neck, Root, Room, Heart, Tail, Winnowing Basket;
2. Vermilion Bird (朱雀): Well, Ghost, Willow, Star, Extended Net, Wings, Chariot;
3. White Tiger (白虎): Legs, Bond, Stomach, Hairy Head, Net, Turtle Beak, Three Stars;
4. Black Tortoise (玄武): Dipper, Ox, Girl, Emptiness, Rooftop, Encampment, Wall.

B. Purple walled cheaply built brick townhouse with concrete slab, numbered thirty four of seventeen. Cream-beige carpets and cream-grey curtains. Above the street a baldachin of oak trees which drop leaves into the courtyard, where I sweep them on weekends with assistance from the next door neighbour, a six-year-old Chinese girl called Abby who is also teaching me how to speak Mandarin at the rate of one word per month, and who made cut-out monkeys for me which are now on our fridge. My room with the Rapunzel balcony, and the yellow lamp light that reminds passers-by at night of glow-worms. Night sounds: cicadas, neighbouring televisions, the engines of hoons, an occasional possum. We live close by to a Turkish owned fast food shop called Charcoal Chicken, which has very oily pides. The laundry fan makes a terrifying noise, so the switch is sticky taped to avoid accidental use. There are plans for collaborative artworks and furniture purchase trips, even a house-hold dance. Chimeras of community. I live with A.O. who makes salads with tinned mango, pan-fried chicken and macadamia nuts. She counts indigenous people for a living, on an abacus, in Belconnen. I also live with K.B. who must be a spook because I am not allowed to know what she does, and she has a small paper shredder on her waste paper bin in her room. She likes Marilyn movies, and that is all I will ever say about her on this website. On Wednesdays it is family dinner (another chimera), which we alternate in cooking, and follow up with desert in front of Twin Peaks. We have a tiny television. We live in Canberra (population 340,800), the capital of Australia, and sporadically I like it, often I don't mind it, but sometimes I just resent it so much.

C. Today, though, I am seated at the small square table in the tiny studio flat of my sister and her boyfriend, in Carlton, Victoria, Australia. It is a corner apartment and there are windows running the full span of two walls, and the light is pouring in, and there are many green plants in pots along the window sill. I am listening to the New Pornographers' Challengers record. I am wearing a checked cowboy shirt (brand: 'RANCH - BAR') that I bought in a Walpole op-shop in 2002, an organic white cotton t-shirt, grey jeans, white socks and brown, green & red Nike sneakers. I am also wearing the same old spectacles, and my hair is messy. I am a little sunburned from a long and lazy day yesterday riding bikes and wandering at the Collingwood Children's Farm. So far on my birthday I have eaten one plate of breakfast foods, cooked by Kate and Haslett, which consisted of 2 x poached eggs, 2 x slices of bread, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, big tomatoes, avocado, orange juice, and peppermint tea with lots of sugar. I still have seriously weird issues with my digestive system, particularly recently, which one day I might think about getting checked out. I also have a seborrheic keratosis behind my right ear, as well as the last remains of a healing cold sore. I weigh 77.9 kilograms.

D. I have taken the day off work today. I work in the Humanitarian Policy Unit of the Humanitarian & Emergencies Section at the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID). Very few people outside of Canberra seem to understand exactly what it is I actually do, so let me tell you. I am part of a team of four people who manage Australia's strategic policy when it comes to humanitarian affairs. This means that I advise the government on humanitarian issues, help negotiate appropriate text for UN resolutions on humanitarian issues, and spend taxpayers money on things like humanitarian research; provision of basic services and protection to populations displaced by natural disasters and conflicts; and core funding for multilateral and non-governmental bodies like UNHCR, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and the NRC Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and stuff. Basically, I push paper and tease my workmate about dressing and acting like a real estate agent. I sit at a desk with my back to the window, the view from which takes in Parliament House, the Lake, the National Carillon, and the purple hills which flank the south of the city. Often there is Toblerone that someone has bought back from an overseas trip, sitting behind me, taunting me like a villain in a children's puppet show. I like my job, actually quite a bit.

E. I also volunteer for CISV International and am one of the Training Coordinators for the International Mosaic Committee, along with A.N. from Canada and B.E. from Austria. I am a member of Board Game Club, with four others, and we frequently play El Grande, Ticket to Ride (Europe version), Tichu and 1960: The Making of the President. I frequently lose. I study Arabic language two days a week, private lunch time lessons in one of the little rooms off the foyer at work, with an Egyptian man who also teaches ballroom dancing. I can feel much improvement in my reading and speaking, which is exciting. My ballroom dancing still requires practice. I believe one day I would like to live in Damascus, Syria, where I will have tame finches in my apartment, cook kofte, and go on Saturday afternoons strolls to watch the dervishes.

F. I have a car, for the first time in my life, a small sea-blue thing with speed-stripes. I have a bread machine and a bicycle and a navy blue bedspread, with pinstripes. I do not have a girlfriend or any pets. I have $161.74 in my savings account.

G. For my birthday I got phone calls, SMSs and facebook messages from friends in Colombia, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Uganda, Israel, Portugal, the United States, Guatemala, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Italy, Egypt, Jordan, Mexico, Norway, India, Lebanon, Thailand, Argentina, Iceland, Austria, Lithuania, Sweden, Fiji, and Australia. I got some homemade blackboards from my sister, a book of Flannery O'Connor stories from Lauren, a Hannah Montana chocolate advent calendar from Claire, a bottle of elderberry syrup from Anneke, a video of a Puebla mariachi group from Abigail, and a video of Flo and Alena eating pizza for breakfast with a birthday candle on the table, from Flo and Alena. Thankyou to everybody! You are golden horse fruit!

H. I've made pilgrimage to this city a number of times this year, and each time its left me sort of shaken. Often times at home people assume I come from Melbourne instead of Perth (most people in Canberra are from interstate; we're a society of wash-ins) - "you just seem so Melbourne" they say. Which I'm not sure if they mean in a positive, negative or neutral way, but whatever it is, it seems to feel that way to me too. The city has long been a sort of Zion, both to me and to those I've grown up with, and to which a lot of those I love have migrated. And yet here I live, in Canberra, a desperately quiet and completely inorganic town of mindnumbing straightness, where culture is something imported from the Dutch Golden Age in bigass packing containers for a limited season at the National Gallery, not something that people, individuals and posses of likemindeds, live and breathe in studios and parks and attics and cold water flats and alleyways and town squares and community gardens and bedrooms and basements and collectives. Where any attention to aesthetic is marginalised in place of the quest to pay off the mortgage, and to slap together more beige suburban townhouses with tile floors to accommodate the inflow of young, engaged public servant couples and Chinese students. There's been some acculturation, but I still feel like a bewildered migrant, displaced and confusing to those I come in contact with everyday - oftentimes kind, intelligent, interesting and humorous people, but still not of my tribe. In Melbourne I am made jealous of the art and architecture, the community and spirit, the stories and images; but I am also reminded of the anxiety and discontent of my kinsfolk, the degree to which we be constantly questioning, forever exploring, fucking up in the same ways again and again. And then, as I get back to Canberra everything seems so lacking in complication, so local, so completely modest and unassertive, that I find myself breathing a long sigh of relief, and greatly enjoying the morning ride to work, and marveling in the simplicity of it all, and getting very confused indeed by what I want and what it means to be grown up, and whether or not I actually like living in this city a little bit, after all, and whether that means I'm becoming more and more boring (actually, I know that I am), and whether this bothers me, or whether all of this anxiety, all of it, is learned, and that all I need is to unlearn it, to be more calm and content in a chair with a book, to ignore the brazenly bland, to distinguish better between that which is good and that which is pretentious, to ultimately become more Canberran.

I. Currently I am reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright, and The Responsibility to Protect by Gareth Evans. The last movie I saw was Quantum of Solace (2008). The last gig I went to was Rye Rye at the Bakery in Perth - that was in October. The last non-food item I bought was soap from the organic market at CERES community farm in Brunswick. The last thing I cooked was baklava, for the combined-graduate birthday celebration picnic on Friday. The last girl I kissed was L.S, who apparently no longer exists. The last country I have visited outside of Australia was Singapore. The last alcoholic drink I consumed was a vodka with orange juice.

J. Since my last birthday I have visited Java and Queensland for the first time; started cooking a lot more, and a lot more confidently, than I have in the past; and become well and truly confused by modern youth, with their hair and their shrieking and their enthusiasm for stupidity. I have started drinking some alcoholic beverages, including fruity cocktails, cream-based liquors, and Stones alcoholic ginger beer. For a period of time I started attending Meetings for Worship at the Canberra Branch of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which I very much enjoyed, but then stopped for some reason, which is unfortunate. I am certainly more spiritual than I was last year, and believe strongly that the human condition is, as Simone Weil describes it, a balance between gravity and grace - a balance which I am still struggling to find. Other than that, I follow Thoreau in believing that "religion is that which is never spoken". I certainly need more time in silence.

K. I ride my bike to and from work every week day, which takes me approximately 9 minutes each way. I play squash occasionally with a group of males. Sometimes I walk up Mount Ainslie with A.O., which makes pain on my lower back, and when we get to the top we sit with our legs looped through the balustrade of the lookout and gaze across the satellite towns to the Brindabellas, which are capped in snow for a short time in the winter. I am contemplating joining an Ultimate team. I went skiing a few times through the winter. This summer I plan to take anyone who comes to visit me kayaking on the lake.

L. My favourite poem is still "Self-Portrait at 28" by David Berman, which, as one of the original vague inspirations for these annual addresses, warrants special celebration this particular year, my twenty eighth. It will be celebrated by my now quoting my favourite passage to end this year's address:

It is a certain hill.
The one I imagine when I hear the word "hill,"
and if the apocalypse turns out
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown,
if our five billion minds collapse at once,
well I'd call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful,
a place I wouldn't mind dying
alone or with you.

2008-12-03T01:15:00.002+11:00

Anneke told me a story, as we were walking through the eucalypts up Mount Ainslie, about one of her friends who is working in a school on an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. She had to break up a fistfight that had broken out between two of the boys in her classroom. Pulling them apart, she asked "Now, explain to me: why are you fighting?"

"We're fighting about which is better;" one of the boys replied, "black Michael Jackson or white Michael Jackson".

Magic inky cuttlefish friends

2008-11-19T21:14:00.004+11:00

Tonight (and this is kinda symbolic of my life, nowadays, in general) I cooked cuttlefish paella with ink and white wine (a typical Spanish ración meant for sharing round a big outdoor table with jugs of sangria) and ate it alone, in my bedroom, while listening to the rain and reading the New York Times website. I had invited a number of people to join me - starting with the housemate who eats seafood (busy), then moving on to my two single friends (busy / didn't answer), before realising that the only other person I could really ask at short notice was a vegetarian. But I'd defrosted the cuttlefish, so I cooked it anyway, and it was fantastic - black and gluggy and warming. I helped myself to seconds, then tupperwared the rest for work lunches.

Today: I wrote a long sentence about Humanitarian Access which may be partially (or even wholly) used as part of a UN resolution. And I missed her more than I told myself I would.

In June a friend asked me to write a poem featuring the word 'shawl' as one of five challenges, and I wrote this.

2008-11-13T19:16:00.001+11:00

Talion

Let me explain the man
who appeared a month into the witchhunts,
while the fog was gathered on the barrows,
and you were in the hospice, engulfed in spasms.

I remember how he got everybody to reach for their shortwave radios
and the night became filled
with Morse clicks
and patriotic cantos

while the grasslands were swept of objects.

Jaw locked, you managed:
“how beautiful were its teeth before”
then merged again into turbulence.
I used your shawl
to swab the skerry of spittle from your chin
and admired from the window sill
the villagers assembling
a militia
on the paddocks below.

Then: a month of fires.

They prepared him a home
on the tallest mound,
rooms cut from blast rock and cedar,
where he sat with a flute of sherry
well fucked and plump
and commanding the hills and snow plains
all the way to the borderland shanties.

Posters of your delicate face
with the words
We Shall Avenge
fading on the roadsides
shuttereyed and pale.

The purple arc of dusk on the sierra
where they emptied the murdered
into canyons
and strung the raped by their throats, in trees
bald and bloated and eyeless.

O Girl, it’s darkness, and
I have run out of accustomed prayers.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

2008-11-12T22:39:00.006+11:00

I've said too many times that it's been too long and that it would be a fresh start. I've promised change, I've painted frescos of radical rebirth. I've been boughed with good intentions, imbued with Sagittarian optimism. And no silence has been as extensive as this one. I almost let a year slip by! A year of my life! Discarded to mere memory! By design I should stand here prone and exposed, begging for absolution, constructing before you all a monumental stratagem of transformation.

But no.
I have almost killed this somnolent blog a couple of times through this year - quickly and painlessly, of course. This town I live in now hasn't exactly been forthcoming in inspiration, and my life (far more... adult? than I ever saw myself becoming) hasn't provided all that many quips and tales that I thought any of you would be all that interested in. I work for a government (I am not allowed to say which one, so guess)- I like my job, and think there is much to be interested in about it - but I don't think I've yet had a conversation about it with anyone outside the industry whose initial interest hasn't wavered within a few minutes. Thats cool, I understand it. I'm usually not interested in others' jobs either. But y'know, the reason I'm here in this town is the job, there aint no other reason. In this way its my life. And what a life. Just not so transferable into a blog. You can imagine.

But here I am, trying anew. No promises, but there is a new layout to distract you from the words. Pretty bears! So we'll see how this pans out. If nothing else, I will ensure there's a S.O.M.L.A on December eight. Maybe I'll start telling you about what I cook. Tonight it was Persian stew - lamb 'n' rhubarb, with rice. Recipe: Put the lamb in a pot with fried onion, pomegranate molasses, saffron and stock and slow cook that motherfucker. Some mint, parsley. Sit back with a Stones Alcoholic Ginger Beer (ch ch ch changes!) and watch some old episodes of the Wire, let the juices seep. Add rhubarb, watch it dissolve. Eat it. Shiiitchyeah. Bone fide Standard Line food blog, holmes.

So anyway, suddenly its summer nights here in the hill country and the cicadas are singing and I find myself adding iceblocks to everything and wearing wifebeaters. Most nights are spent up late, listening to J Tillman, engaging in hair removal, and combing Flickr for talent. Sometimes I bake bread in a machine, in my bathroom so that it doesn't annoy my housemate's boyfriend who sits up very straight as he writes essays at my dining table. Sometimes I fall asleep on a beanbag on my skinny balcony. Sometimes I engage my board game club friends in a German-designed board game with colourful playing pieces. I am the single one in the board game club but that's okay because most of the games are for maximum five players, so a lover'd just make board game club infeasible.

As for writing, lets just say I've been reading Borges, and when I sit down with fingers on keys I get lost immediately in the "feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity". It's a fucker, that infinity.

Recrudesce

2008-01-29T09:15:00.001+11:00

I have been back in Australia for just over three weeks, and back in Canberra for the last three days. I am living, temporarily, in a large hotel room which has two flat screen televisions, two floors, a stove and a balcony overlooking a verdant garden, all paid for on my behalf by the Australian tax-paying public. I arrive in the capital by Greyhound from Sydney, on Australia Day, and drag my suitcase along the pavement from the bus terminal, through the city centre, past the black, red and yellow flags of the ‘Invasion Day’ demonstration in Garema Place, and down the wide, silent, suburban streets which flank the tiny centre of Canberra towards the hotel. At the check out desk the three girls are in the office, blowing up green and gold balloons and inhaling the helium to make their voices squeak. One of them has a flag tattoo on her cheek. A peroxide blonde with dimples and small eyes comes out to serve me, and continues to giggle and snort as she searches for my booking, and the other two staff keep opening the shuttered window into the office, poking their head through, and squeaking at her, which makes her burst with laughter again and again. ‘Your room (giggle) isn’t (snort, giggle) ready yet (guffaw) – it’s still being (giggle) made up… (laugh induced tear)… it should be an hour – you can go wander around the shops and I’ll call you (snort, laughter) when it’s ready.’ I head to the weekly community market and sit in the sun and read Miranda July and eat Salvadorian papusas with beans, cheese and chilli. A shirtless man with scraggly hair selling poetry on crumpled foolscap mutters curses at cricketer Adam Gilchrist and the nation of Australia. I go buy a mapbook for my upcoming househunt challenge. The Jesters pie shop has either shut down or moved, one of the two. Two brown wild rabbits are eating grass in front of the ANU Law building. I go back to the hotel after three hours, and the girl looks embarrassed at having forgotten to call me. One of the wall mounted flat screens is a metre wide. There are some excited Brazilians in the rooms surrounding mine; they spend a lot of time in the hallway, commuting between each other’s rooms and shrieking. That night I meet Stephen and Kate for a monster movie involving the destruction of Manhattan.

The next morning I am navigating myself in the park, using my new map book, when a heavily cleavaged elderly woman approaches on her bicycle. Her aim is to help me, but when she realises that I pretty much know where I’m going she flips the conversation to a virtual game of word association – she asks me a question, then reacts to the answer with whatever comes into her mind, eg: (1) I say “Oslo”, and she responds with stories about: (a) a Norwegian she met on a cruise ship from London to Guyana and subsequently dated, (b) her days in Guyana in the 1960s and an incident with overheard gunshots when she returned in the 90s, (c) the only other time she’s heard gunshots, during a drive-by while she was drifting off to sleep in Johannesburg. My mentioning Perth, on the other hand, triggers discussion of Heath Ledger. She has a theory that he was gay, but hadn’t come to terms with it yet. ‘I was married to my husband for 20 years’ she tells me, ‘and it took another ten years after we divorced for me to realise that he was gay. Wasn’t till I saw him rubbing suncream on the back of our son, who he always said wasn’t his anyway. That triggered it, the suncream. Very Death In Venice.”’ She rides her bike around me in a clockwise direction, mumbling something about ancient pagan rituals (“Probably come in handy with your peace studies!” she says) and goes back the way she came, following the stormwater drains northwards.

In the car, Stephen, Kate and I head to Kambah pool, a swimming hole in a river past the satellite towns of Canberra, where we eat sandwiches and watermelon on towels in the shade of the banks and swim in the sand coloured waters. The gum trees are white and run up the valley edge. It’s gorgeous. Downriver a little there is a section of rapids and rock pools, and we leap across on boulders to the other side. A nearby car park is full to the brim, but there’s almost no one around at all, and we are confused, until we see a path with a stencilled sign on the cement: “NUDE BATHING AREA – 200M”. We follow it down, and on the way pass an ape-faced teenager who points his thumb down the path. ‘Those people are fuckin’ sickos’, he offers. Moments later, a rotund gentleman emerges from the bush with no pants and an open shirt. His cock wiggles. He stops just passed us to dress himself. On a bit further, we reach a clearing – sure enough, the rocks are scattered with nudists, men and women, their skin bright through the fronds and trunks. We do not go further, cautious of appearing like sightseers in our shorts and shirts. We turn around and head back to the car. On the drive home, we pass a BMX park named after Vikings, and one of the world’s three NASA Deep Space Communication Complexes.

Today, after an hour reading and sleeping under the statue of Mohandas Gandhi in Glebe Park, I am walking back to the hotel, when I hear words behind me, children’s words, the words of a four year old. It is a young boy, talking to his mother, who is pushing a pram and walking a few metres in front of the rest of the family. It is just us on the eucalyptus flanked avenue, I am just a little in front of them, and the air smells good and the sky is warm. I hear words from the boy and at first I just register them as the babble of a child, a child fielding probing but directionless queries at his parents, but then I hear them crisp and clear, and right there at my back. The words of the child go: ‘We don’t like them, do we mum, because they aren’t Ausssie?’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re not welcome’.
‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re not welcome’, he repeats after her.
‘Not welcome here at all’
‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re. Not. Welcome.’ His four year old squeak is tasting the words. His four year old mind is absorbing the very idea.
It’s that easy for my recent attempts to embrace the idea of living in suburban Australia to be undermined. That easy for the positive thoughts I’ve concentrated on since returning to Canberra to be sapped instantly. I am paralysed by disgust at this woman, at the whole idea of nationalism, at this country. I feel compelled to turn and hurl abuse. But I keep walking.
They go into a block of units, and push the pram through the gate. ‘I know where you live, you bigoted hatemonger’ I think. As I walk on, I place myself in scenarios involving violent campaigns of re-education, then downsize them to ones involving letters of careful, simple and passionate language, dropped through the mailbox. I dream of kidnapping children of racist parents and Pied Pipering them away to some kind of dynamic and multi-cultural Neverland. But none of these fantasy responses, nor anything else that afternoon, do anything, at all, to unjumble my head and lift, again, the heart.

State Of My Life Address

2007-12-09T09:36:00.000+11:00

A. Today I have lived for exactly 27 years, or 9861 days. Twenty-seven is both a perfect cube and a decagonal number. It is the atomic number of cobalt, the number of books in the New Testament, and the number of moons of Uranus. Twenty-seven is also the age in which musicians Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, and D. Boon (Minutemen) all died.

B. I am not a musician.

C. I live in Oslo, Kingdom of Norway, and have done since the beginning of August of this year. My time in Norway will finish in three days, at which point I will be leaving with most of my possessions on a bus to the south of Sweden. My home is a 25m2 one room (plus bathroom) apartment in a large complex of interlinked buildings with echoing corridors which smell of cooking, both good and bad. The buildings are positioned on the bank of the narrow Aker river, and wraps around a central courtyard with a playground and puddles made by a leak which recently have been mostly frozen. The complex incorporates student accommodation, a hostel, housing for immigrants and a Best Western Hotel. In the entrance to my building (#3) there is very often some rubbish or discarded furniture or household items, and there is some graffiti which reads "fuck da police". Right now there are some mandarin peels on the floor in the elevator; these were left by a French guy who I rode the elevator with and who was eating mandarin when I entered on the first floor. He said hello to me when I got on the elevator which is an incredibly rare event here - the Norwegians in the building rarely, if ever, say hello or even smile at people in the lift or hallways. Getting out of the elevator you must unlock the crimson coloured door to my hallway, and mine is the first apartment on the left, number 622. My door is also crimson. Inside, the walls are cream and the window and door frames a light wood. I have three windows which look out on a hospital and a tram line. Often you can watch tram inspectors stopping trams below my window and checking for tickets, dragging ticketless souls into a waiting bus where there are desks for the processing and awarding of fines. Inside the room there are two single beds, a desk, two chairs, a wooden stool, a coffee table, three lamps, a set of shelves, a small fridge, a cupboard, a set of coat hooks, a sink and two hot plates. My bed is infected with bedbugs, but as they have been there all semester without my noticing them, because my body not react to their bites, and because I am leaving in a few days, I am doing nothing about it. On the walls there are a series of old and new maps, including a Nazi German map of Europe (1940), a colonial era map of Africa (1922) and a map showing the location of Colombia's promising oil deposits (1939). There are also a number of illustrations by Marcel Dzama in two rows along one wall, a number of posteards, a badge reading "The Rock: Jesus", and an Efterklang poster. The room is pretty messy right now because the process of packing up stuff has begun (though not proceeded very far) plus I have in four large containers the orphaned household items formerly belonging to Sonja Litz, who left yesterday to Hong Kong. There is a heater in the room, but it doesn't really work, so a lot of the heat comes from the electrified bathroom tiles, which work perfectly. Norway right now is mostly covered by snow (so I understand) but Oslo is not. The roads are salted and there's neon Christmas decorations throughout the downtown and a little ice rink near the National Theatre crammed full of young kids and teetering Latino and Indian tourists. Today, the sun rose at 9.04am, and set at 3.14pm.

D. It has just turned 4.30pm, and I am currently sitting at my desk under the glow of a 60W globe, listening to Grizzly Bear's "Friend" record. I am pretty tired. I am wearing black rimmed glasses, a white shirt with red pinstripes, a maroon tie, a black cardigan, blue jeans, a silver ring, two Colombian bracelets of vegetable ivory, black socks and white & green K-Swiss sneakers which I bought in Sydney in June and already have already ripped at a number of places down each side, making them a particularly bad investment. The shirt and tie is on account of the semi-formal class dinner party I will be attending tonight to celebrate the end of exams. Beside my computer is a jar of 150 Norwegian kroner (A$30) in 1 kr and 50 øre coins which I have been collecting throughout the semester and intend to use tonight to pay my portion of the dinner, which is apparently going to be a selection of tapas.

E. Today I have eaten: 1 x raspberry tartlet, 1 x pesto, parma and mozzarella sandwich, and 1 x bowl of ICA "Crunchy" Muesli (with dehydrated strawberries and yoghurt clusters) and milk. Since arriving in Norway I have eaten this type of cereal almost every single morning, and I have kept every box (flattened) in order to know how many boxes I have bought and consumed. The grand total is 26. The tartlet and sandwich was from the United Bakery in Karl Johan's Gate, where they have a hot liquid chocolate fountain (with which to fill up brioches upon request) and a conveyor belt on the roof that pulls around little hanging carts, trays and boxes of scrolls and danishes, delivering them to the shop floor from the bake house in the floor below. I went there for lunch with AO and EK, and we sat and ate at a table on the street, where we weirded out Norwegians by smiling and saying hello to them as they walked past. I cannot report this year on my weight, as I have no access to scales, but I imagine its about the same as last year (70kgs) - perhaps a kilo or two less. I have some particular problems with my digestive system.

F. Yesterday was the last exam for my Master program - meaning that come January my full letters should read "BA(Hons), MIA". I do not have a job in which I am currently employed, though I am due to start working in February for the Australian Federal Government as a public servant at AusAID - the Australian Agency for International Development. This means that I will be moving back to Canberra, which is where I lived for most of the first half of my 27th year. Canberra is not a city I have grown fond of in any way, but I am thinking much more positively about the prospect of settling there than I was a few months ago. I think that for a few years I have been trying to create necessary change in my life by changing the place that I was in, rather than changing myself and my own outlook. I will try to do this in Canberra. For example - rather than sitting around thinking, procrastinating, using the internet, roaming aimlessly and such, I hope to read, write, cook, garden, build and create more. I will seek to be less distracted, more focused and unmixed in my attention. Rather than focusing my thoughts as much on human deficiencies I am going to explore the intricacies of the natural environment. I am going to seek, in both theory (through a forthcoming website) and practice (in my everyday actions and interactions), a more cohesive and symbiotic balance between community and solitude. If I can, I will not live in a suburb of Canberra, but in a cottage or small house slightly outside of the city, with a rural outlook. This may be tricky, particularly with the commute. I will probably buy a car and spend weekends bushwalking, camping, going for concerts in Sydney, skiing and exploring the eastern coastline. Absolutely essential to my vision is a bread machine and many, many books.

G. Recently, a number of people have said that I don't smile enough, or that I never laugh. That I am morose. This is probably increasingly true, and although I don't feel sad or grumpy most of the time, I am mindful of the impression I give people, and of the fact that I do take things too seriously and often find it hard to engage with people in a tender, relaxed, and loving way. I used to be a lot more filled with love and excitement for the world and its people, but these days, on the whole, I feel unable to connect with many things. There are individual people who I know that I love, and I know that were something terrible to happen to these certain people, I would be ripped apart. But I think that years, now, of moving and resettling and saying goodbye over and over to places and people; friends, family, lovers - all of this has led to my disconnecting my interior from the exterior, my self from community, my head from my heart. This is something I really want to undo. It is the thing I most feel I must try to change.

H. I am not a member of any organised religion, but I have felt more recently as though religion, or at least a part of it, is beginning to mean more to me and be more a part of me than it was in the past. By religion I follow Tolstoy in referring not to obedience to church dogma, not to submission to established authority, but simply to "the principle by which one lives". Part of the above process of personal change involves some fine-tuning, some recommitment and some reimagining of the principles by which I hope to live. I hope to engage more in and understand what may be called true human work - home and community building, agriculture, cooking. I hope to attend Quaker meetings in the new year and see if they hold anything of value for me. I hope to read and reread and become actively inspired by Henry David Thoreau and ideas of transcendentalism. I would usually refrain from providing hyperlinks in a State-of-my-life Address, however I must say that these two Curtis White articles in Orion magazine (along with two others of his in Harpers magazine) have been, very recently, massively influential in helping consolidate my thinking and outlook on belief and faith and care. I believe I am more of a pacifist than I was this time last year. I have a long way to go, however, before I can claim to act in any manner that may be thought of or described as religious.

I. I have a girlfriend; she is tall, Swedish, and perhaps the most caring, rational, hopeful and loving people I know. My love for her is both important and warming, and continues to grow, all the time. I wish I understood the way I experience love more than I do, and I wish that I could express and show it better. I look forward to learning more and more from her, about her, and about this love for what I hope will be a very, very long time. She was also the person I most recently kissed. I will see her in three days time.

J. I am very broke - particularly so because of the expense of life in Oslo. I have, over my time here, become more used to the idea of paying up to A$6.00 for a bottle of water. I owe a lot of money to my parents and a lot of money to the government of Australia. I hope, after February, never to have to borrow money ever again. I do not have a car, a boat, a horse, a dog or cat, and I have not read The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice - I apologise to MMM and EK, respectively. I do not drink coffee or alcohol. I have a Facebook account, a Flickr account and a Gmail/Blogger account. I use the internet more than I should. I need a haircut.

K. Currently I am reading The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen, The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, and Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. The last movie I saw was The Dead Poet's Society (1989). The last gig I went to was The National and Hayden, here in Oslo, and it was absolutely incredible. Seeing me at that show would have surprised those people who think I don't smile. The last thing I bought was a black cardigan, from H&M. The last meal I cooked was burritos with red kidney beans.

L. I have been to 36 countries and one occupied territory: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Laos, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States of America, Vietnam, the West Bank (Occupied Palestinian Territories). I have lived in Australia, Canada, Egypt and Norway. I speak English, a little Spanish, a little French, a dwindling amount of Arabic and a tiny collection of disconnected Scandinavian words.

M. I am a member of CISV (Building Global Friendships), an international peace education organisation which I've belonged to since I was 11 years old. CISV likes acronyms. I am currently a co-opted member of the IMC, in which I am part of the training and communication sub-committees. As of today I will responsible for doing the Mosaic website. I am also a director on the board of the Australian NA. In the last year I have participated in two international programs -APRW/JASPARC in NZ, where I did a training session for the JB; and an IPP in DK. Etc. Basically, its a cult.

N. This year I have attended lectures by three Nobel Peace Prize Laureates - Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams and His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and in two days time I will be seeing a fourth (and fifth) when I attend CNN's interview with Al Gore and a representative from the IPCC in the Oslo City Hall, as part of this year's Nobel ceremony celebrations. I have studied often in the Nobel Institute library, visited the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and held a season pass to the Nobel Peace Center here in Oslo. These experiences have been: varied.

O. It's been a strange year, a bittersweet year. I've learnt a lot, I've felt lonely and even forgotten, I've hurt people I love and been hurt by people I love, I've made only a handful of new friends, and missed my old ones more than I usually do. I've found new clarity and focus in where I want to go and who I want to be, but I've simultaneously become more lost at sea than ever before. I feel scarred and bitter, and yet naive and hopeful. I have realised that the idea of 'place' has come to mean a lot less to me now than it once did, when it used to factor heavily in my writing and thoughts and dreams, and I think this has come from living in two separate cities with which I am not in love, nor have historical connection to. It's been a year without spring - autumn then winter segueing into a windy and wet intermission when it was often light but seldom warm, before returning again to autumn and dark, dark winter. Even love, which I have tried to allow myself to feel again, has, at once, soothed and confused me. I have spent a lot of time watching seabirds pass my windows, suspended in the grey skies. Here I am, I'm twenty seven, and I'm hovering in the thermals, feeling the updraft, hanging here, one of the luckiest people alive, and yet still: black eyed, selfish, and unable to decide where to perch next.

State of My Life Address 2006 (26 years).
State of My Life Address 2005 (25 years).

Simulated Roomscape

2007-10-29T09:57:00.000+11:00

Today, it was grey and wet and dark by 4.30pm. In a desperate attempt to do anything but an essay on Proportionality, Just War and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah Scuffle, I downloaded the newish Google SketchUp program, which is: Awesome.

Instead of 1000 words on jus ad bellum, then, we have a 3D model of my one-room (plus bathroom) apartment. In colour. Lets just say it took me some time.

So, if, dear reader, you find yourself wondering what hijinks I'm up to o'er here, rest assured that what with wretched weather, lack of disposable income and impending academic assessments I am more than likely sitting in my private 25m2 penitentiary, which, while in actuality a lot more dirty, messy and filled with kitchen utensils, pieces of paper, books, clothes, chairs, and, on the walls, posters and postcards, is otherwise roughly as these diagrams suggest:

(view from above)

(view from the doorway)

(view of the main area)

(just imagine that outside the wind is blowing water at the window at a 65 degree angle)

Are Falling Leaves

2007-10-27T10:50:00.000+10:00

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Today I sat, reading, in the window seat of a French-style delicatessen near my house, where I had a shrimp & salad sandwich drizzled in olive oil and a cold bottle of hylleblomst saft, which in English you would call elder flower drink. Elder is common here in Scandinavia, both as a cordial made straight from petals, at home, by crafty men and women, and as a pre-made beverage in a green bottle. In times when we as humans paid more heed to folklore than we do today, it was thought unlucky to grow elder in one's garden. If an elder tree was cut down, a spirit called the Elder Mother would be released and take her revenge. Reads the poem "Wiccan Rede": 'Elder be the Lady's tree, burn it not or cursed you'll be". In order to cut the tree you had to chant a rhyme to the Elder Mother. Now elder is sold in Israel as Fanta Shokata, which is this bright red fizzy type of Fanta that kind of tastes like heavily sugared battery acid. Danish/Norwegian hylleblomst is much much better.

Oslo's getting really cold. The vanloads of begging and busking gypsies with layered skirts and accordions who were scattered all over the city area have dispersed, returned with their earnings to Budapest and Bucharest. Every first step outside immediately makes me think of Montreal, the way the skin reacts instantly and your breath suddenly adumbrates. I have a Syrian scarf, big and black and grey and red and green, but I don't have any gloves yet. Everything is quiet in the streets, the cafes and bars look sleepy until the doors open and the clatter and din and warmth inside escapes. The trees have turned from rufous to gold to sallow, to thin and tenebrous. The leaves are becoming mulch and loam, a pepper tinted carpet. The skies; greyer, often, and darker, sooner. We play basketball to keep warm, hustle to-and-fro, and it's that strange combination of sweat and chillbitten cheeks.

I hide away at nights and make processed foods with stick blenders.

Tonight I saw Kurt Wagner play under a pegged and pulleyed clothes line for his tunesheets. The audience were perhaps the most silent I've ever heard one. His voice's warm timbre was perfect for autumn. He even started, from amongst the audience, in darkness, with a hymn about autumn, a capella. Snaggletoothed. We were definitely snug there, under those songs. He made the season feel less in transition. We are meant to be here, after all.

an irrelevant anecdote and an angry outcry

2007-09-19T09:16:00.000+10:00

My friend "Giacomo" works for ICBL, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, one of the two co-winners of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. He doesn't get paid for this job, he does it pro-bono, but its amazing work experience and he's extremely likely to get streamlined into some other, equally great organisation, as soon as he's done with this one. About a month before I left Canberra, he asked me to do a tiny little comic/character that he could use on a bunch of business cards he was having made up. He wanted either a picture of himself with "some luggages", or perhaps a little looking land mine with an evil face, or something. I agreed, but never really got very proactive on the producin'. And then it sort of became a joke, sort of, in which I just kept alluding my promise, much to his chagrin.

Anyway, about a month ago we were sitting in a bar here in Oslo and I was drawing on this stack of napkins and we were talking about the West Wing, which "Giacomo" discovered earlier this year and became appropriately obsessed with. So, while we were talking I just started scribbling this sketchy picture of Toby Zeigler, all furrow browed and shoulder-slung jacket, a drawing that was finished in about 25 seconds. "Giacomo" took the napkin and put it in his pocket.

I was against his using it for the business cards. I thought it represented him as a short, bearded, grumpy, balding Jewish man, rather than what he really is, which is a tall, grinning, beardless, goofy-but-loveable northern Italian, with a full head of hair. But he loves Toby and he loves the West Wing and he insisted. He sent off for the business cards to be made, and they were.

---

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the signing, in Ottawa, of the International Treaty banning landmines. Here is Oslo, there are celebrations going on. One of the main squares, beside the Hard Rock Cafe and the National Theatre, have been taken over by a simulation mine field, demonstration sniffer dogs and an absolute Leviathan of a truck called a "Minewolf" which looks like cross between a tank, a bulldozer and a combine harvester, and swings thick metal chains out front to detonate mines in large flat areas like fields. Throughout the week a series of conferences and events are being held, which in part commemorate the project, but also draw attention to, and prepare further for the signing, hopefully by the end of 2008, of a similar treaty against cluster munitions.

Yesterday during lunch, I put on a collared shirt and my better shoes and snuck into the afternoon session of the Civil Society Conference. "Giacomo" had been there all day, in suit and tie, schmoozing with the NGO celebrities and meeting his co-workers, previously known to him only by email and skype calls. And there he was handing out the business card, with my little Toby Zeigler scribble. To the ex-head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. To Charmaine Gooch, founder of Global Witness, who initiated, ran and pulled off the campaign to ban blood diamonds. To ICBL members Paul Hannon, director of Mines Action Canada, and Steve Goose, Director of Human Rights Watch - Arms Division. And to his wife, Jody Williams, campaign spokesperson for ICBL, recent head of mission for the UN Human Rights Council in Dafur, and joint winner in 1997 of the the Nobel Peace Prize.

I was there to see Jody speak, along with Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Judge who also won the Nobel Prize, in 2003. "Giacomo" and I had told a bunch of people in our class about the talks and said how we should be able to just walk in and listen, even though we weren't officially invited, but nobody else came, citing "too much study" or "it'll probably be boring".

It wasn't boring. It was incredible. Jody Williams gave the most inspiring speech I've seen given for a long time. Probably ever. In massive contrast to the other Nobel Peace prize winner I saw this year, the Dalai Lama, there was not one platitude, not one feel-good fuzzy, not one moment of kumbai-ya. There was no apologies, and no set speech, and no big statements, and no soft forgiveness. Jody Williams is angry, she is outraged, she said so many times. She is outraged at governments, she is outraged at the UN, she is outraged at civil society for giving in, or for not pushing harder. She is outraged, and she should be, we all should be, at what has happened to humans, what has happened to the concept of the individual, to the need for human security, to the absolute common fucking sense that says that inventing, testing, producing, selling, stockpiling, threatening to use and actually using all types of purely destructive machinery, from small weapons to land mines to clusters to thermobaric bombs (like Russia's darling newbie) to nuclear monstrosities, is WRONG; that it is not just wrong but disgusting, criminal, evil. Jody Williams sat there, tired eyed and tight jawed, and she ponders these simple questions out loud, and when she asks why, it's not the sort of why you can just make up excuses to. It's the sort of why you just have to listen to, and think about. And get angry about, too.

How, she ponders, can a country like Sweden, with all its platitudes to peace and freedom, how can it still be the leading producer of small arms and clusters per capita in the world? How can the Russians and the Americans produce bombs of massive destruction and then release statements to the world's media about their "pride" and "excitement" at the success? How can government's like Frances - smart men like Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières - how can they seriously even consider the possibility of war with Iran? How can Western governments continuously backflip and pander and smooth over the truth in Dafur when every day people are being slashed to death and women are raped and there's just not enough food and shade and water and medicines, and they say they want reports that everybody is happy with? How does one act in such a way, when we know the full extent of the destruction our act is causing, but we do it anyway?

And the beauty is that she wonders all this without leftist cliche, without flimsy grand statements about the brotherhood of humans, without inane gestures towards the strength of the human spirit, without always blaming someone else, without using just words. In order to wonder all of this aloud, to cry out about all this she uses truth, she uses outrage, she uses logic, she uses the painful fact that we are all to blame, but that we also all have the capacity to make noise, to learn more, to care.

It's an odd feeling, being filled up with a sad flame of fury, and a hot flame of excitement and energy at the same time. To walk out of a room with a new hero.

---

After the speeches "Giacomo" was approached by Paul Hannon, asking whether the balding bearded guy on the business card was meant to be him or Steve Goose. "Oh no, it's meant to be me when I'm older and balder" he said. "But it doesn't look like you at all" replied Paul, "although, it does sort of look like a... fictonal character". Hahaha.

---

STOP CLUSTER MUNITIONS, NOW.

http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/
http://www.icbl.org/
Jody Williams' Nobel Lecture, 1997

Oslo

2007-09-11T06:54:00.000+10:00

Oslo. I walk your quiet streets flanked by quiet houses capped with handsome mansard roofs, these quiet, neat streets, with autumn trees holding green, the quiet skies darkening earlier and earlier. The soft moaning sigh of a passing tram, the harmony of a raw wind from off the fjord, a wind danced by seabirds. A trio of Swedish girls, teenagers, all matching in Helly Hansen puffy parkas and dusty foundation and jingling charms, their hair fashioned wet and swept sideways (as though licked by a large horse), their mouths stuck in scowling singsong and dipthongs. Street corners colonised by 7-Elevens, by Narvesens, by Delis-de-Luca. A sound, a silence, a sound.

Home is the border line between Grünerløkka and Grønland, between hipsterdom and the migrant quarter. Along the Aker river African men stand in position making hissing noises and whispering hash? hash?, their hands clenched around tiny parcels, while the water gushes and trickles towards the fjord. Blond men pushing strollers. Bass guitar from the warehouses. The two sides of the Anker bridge, guarded by statues of human-animal teams from Norwegian fairy tales - Per Gynt and the reindeer, Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon with requisite bear, Veslefrikk med fela and Kari Trestakk - and in the middle, a Roma couple playing accordion and tambourine. My apartment is part of a massive complex, eleven connected buildings round a central square, where Somali women talk to friends through ground level curtained windows, where bored looking Kurdish teens hang out by the little playground, where white students pass by, heads down, where Arab men stand against the wall listening to Arab pop songs on the fuzzy speaker of their mobile phones. From Anker: down Torggata, the Turkish and Vietnamese grocers, the Kurdish kebab and pizza shops, the cobbled squares, the worn out, greybearded gypsy beggar, always in the same doorway with his paper cup. Up Markveien, the second hand stores, the keffiyahed indie kids, the bars with antique furniture, the smell of coffee, the ghosts of industry.

I spend a lot of afternoons in the Nasjonalbiblioteket, the National Library, in its big reading room, rimmed by bookshelves, under disc shaped ceiling lights that look like UFOs, listening to the symphony of paper shuffling, zips, computer keys, the tap and squeak of stepping shoes and the occasional punctuation of sniffs or coughs. I spend a lot of nights in bed, under the doona with my back against the window sill, reading Sigrid Undset or my Ethics textbook and listening to Efterklang or Pärt. I spend the mornings sitting naked, mindlessly trawling the internet for items updated while I was sleeping. I spend the other mornings in class, in which I am one of 16 students from seven countries. I spend the darkness dreaming about people I have never met, and of hideous circumstances. I spend most breakfasts eating ICA muesli clusters with dehydrated strawberries and dried yogurt clumps. I spend a lot of my time thinking about one person, one girl, one smile, one set of eyes, one city, south of here, a city that feels as much like home as any other at this point.

But, Oslo, you hold me safe for now, you appease me for now, you with your rolling skies and cold sea air and colourful streets and lanterns and fountains and construction sites and drug addicts and freckled girls and accordion players and sighing trams and oil-proud Hummers and sad looking trees and street-corner berry sellers and graffiti and nervousness and wooden houses and hills; you with your song.

You smug city, Oslo; you'll do for now.

Looking into the Eyes of Others

2007-09-06T07:17:00.000+10:00

In his book Totality and Infinity Emanuell Levinas makes a distinction between rhetoric and conversation (or dialogue). Rhetoric resists dialogue and corrupts the freedom of the Other not to become the Same. For that reason it is violence par excellence and thus injustice. Levinas talks about violence as interrupting humans' continuity. It is tempting to see our lives as lived narrative in that connection. For Levinas the face of the other speaks to us and its manifestation is already conversation or dialogue. The face opens for the original conversation. We do not fuse with the other or become like her, but interact. The ethical is for Levinas then taking consideration for the irreducibility of the Other. The way the face of the Other presents itself to me is, he writes, non-violence par excellence because it does not violate my freedom but instead calls my freedom to responsibility. As nonviolence it maintains the plurality of the Same and the Other.

Ref: Erik Cleven, "Between Stories and Faces: Facilitating Dialogue Through Narratives and Relationship Building"

just a song

2007-07-28T22:23:00.000+10:00

Ukelele: The camp ended. There wasn't many tears, except when Joanna left. There were, of course, hugs and notes: hugs that spoke louder than words had been able to do in three weeks, as well as uncomfortable hugs, hugs by expectation, hugs of severance. Notes containing compliments and platitudes, silent notes speaking carefully, notes with outpourings of almost desperate love. A note declaring the recipient as grossly self-centered, honest. His back was a voice bubble saying "Rock On" which is about as much a sidestep as you can get and still have pen on paper. It appears the people of France and I might need to spend a bit of time on patching our relationship.

Voice: I do feel bad that I didn't really try very hard. I tried but I couldn't find it. This will be my last international CISV program for a while - I think I get it now, I think it's time for me to do something else. Mosaic, for one thing, and other things, other things entirely. Which is certainly not to say I have regrets: No. Wheat fields, capoed guitar on hilltop, Amella (as a symbol), Magdalena, Jo, the looking beyond, the smell of rain and fire; no.

Accordion: She is only seven, and she is waiting and she will keep on waiting and she has been waiting all of her life, and she is unknowing, she is defined by unknowing. Here I am in Sweden, so easily in Sweden. That's something.

Percussion: The Dane, Kierkegaard, asks if despair is a merit or a defect. He proposes that it is both. "It is infinite merit to be able to despair. And yet not only is it the greatest misfortune and misery actually to be in despair; no it is ruin...Despair is the imbalance in a relation of synthesis, in a relation which relates to itself. But the synthesis is not the imbalance, the synthesis is ust the possibility; or, the possibility of the imbalance lies in the synthesis. If the synthesis were itself the imbalance, there would be no despair; it would be something that lay in human nature itself, that is, it would not be despair; it would be something that happened to a person, something he suffered, like a sickness he succumbs to, or like death, which is the fate of everyone. No, despair lies in the person himself. But if he were not a synthesis there would be no question of his despairing; nor could he despair unless the synthesis were originally in the right relationship from the hand of God."

Trumpets: You are so beautiful when you are shy.

Stories from Svogerslev

2007-07-17T09:15:00.000+10:00

Tonight we were in the fields, waist deep in grain, and suddenly, thirty metres away there was a young deer, bucking and leaping through the wheat. I yelped "ET RÅDYR" which is how you say it in Danish, and stooped and sprinted along the tractor path, thinking I could catch it up and surprise it. Unfortunately a leaping deer is faster than I am and it got away. Still, it was a beautiful moment, the sky of milk being pierced by a disappearing cardinal sun and the wind mills whipping and our movement making tracks of crushed cereal stalks. It was always gonna be beautiful, but the addition of a solitary leaping deer? I mean, come on.

Also there are hundreds of very very large slugs, often in clumps.

The school we are staying in is peculiar in that it has a Lord of the Rings theme, and has meeting rooms with runes on the wall, and hallways with murals on the walls which depict different bits of the story, kind of like a Catholic church might have depictions of the twelve stations of the cross. At night local kids play on the sloping tin roof and spy on us through the skylight as have our discussions. While exploring the adjacent forest today I found a series of paths which lead to a mini climbing wall in a little clearing in the trees, on which I plan to hang a white sheet, and to which I will run a very very long electrical cord to power a projector and computer and I will take mattresses and couches and citronella lanterns and tea lights in brown paper bags and set up a little outdoor cinema. This I will do in secret and then I will lead the other participants to it in the dark, and we will come to the clearing and they will be shocked and enchanted. There we will sit and we will watch the film Voces Innocentes which is about a very good film about child soldiers in El Salvador and then we will be discuss child soldiers and everybody will be very engaged and interested and even emotionally affected. But shhh, I said it´s a secret.

I leave you with a humorous company logo from the side of a plastic food delivery tray.

On Escaping

2007-07-15T10:47:00.000+10:00

Behind the school where we are living, over the little hill and across the road, there is a vast wheat field, the stalks waist high and shimmering yellow. In the middle of it all, three vast turbines, whooshing mechanically, and a tractor path running under their shadows. It’s half past eight, the sun is getting lower on the flat horizon, and we are enjoying the magic hour, the four of us, which is to say me and the three people I like most in this project – Maggie (Sweden), Jo (Canada) and Ghassan (Lebanon). We are lying here, hidden by the sea of crops, feeling good because we have escaped for a little while; we are vagrants, camped out and cautious of farmers with shotguns, we are five minutes from the camp but it feels like we are in a John Steinbeck novel, somewhere in California, or Nebraska, or Saskatchewan. We are giddy with laughter and there are ravens in the sky, and flat white clouds. The stentorian whomping of the turbine blades, the gentle rustle of wheat husks, the glow of the sunset on the faces of these people that I have recently met and recently come to love.

We started phase ‘two’ of the project today, which means that working with the kids in the refugee centre is on hold while we devote time to discussion, research, activities and exploration of the project theme (human, and specifically children’s rights). This does not suit some in the group, those who came here to act, to plunge themselves into the lives of some confused kids with confused futures, to do something for a couple of weeks so as to return to ‘normal’ life feeling as though they have achieved something – who look shocked and somewhat horrified at the suggestion that this could in fact be a learning experience for themselves first and foremost. I guess I understand this almost desperate desire to be of use, to stop talking and start acting, but for me this is in no way the venue for that, and we are not the right people – and I disagree greatly with these people. On the other hand most of us are excited and engaged by the switch into discussions. Having seen first hand the impossible awfulness of the situations of these children I feel like I owe it to them – Burhan from Kosovo, Omar from Iraq, beautiful doe-eyed Shamsa from Somalia – to know as much as possible about everything (every declaration, every policy, every arrogant or ignorant decision) which has led them here. Then I owe it to them to work, with every one of my actions, with every one of my thoughts, with my life, towards change. That this is not a reaction shared by some of the other equally well meaning people I am currently sharing a bedroom with is…interesting to learn.

The last day with all the kids at the centre was the easiest so far in terms of running activities and dealing with the kids – but it was by far the hardest emotionally. I think this is the first time I’ve cried sad tears from watching children laugh and smile – brought to surface by the overhanging realisation that their score has been well and truly set, that we are only masks, smokescreens, three minute long funfair rides, that we are powerless, and that next time I hear of death in Iraq, I will have no idea which of these kids are there now, and which are still trapped in the green, leafy purgatory of Avnstrup.

The other day, in the sunshine, a moment worth sharing: Muna from Somalia was playing djembe (she plays really well), while the other girls (Kurds, Persians, Albanians, Roma girls) clapped and trilled their tongues and sang together the song "Ah Wa Noss" by the Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram. I sang along too and attempted to dance, which inspired the Kosovar boys, who busted out some break moves in the long grass. There was a butterfly, and I remembered the name in Danish. The world seemed so small in that moment, and incredibly beautiful, and in that moment, just like in the wheat today, and in the fields of daisies with M and S yesterday, it felt as though escape (from reality, from everything) was really still possible.

Scandinavia: An Introduction

2007-07-12T07:24:00.000+10:00

Hello?

For a while now, there's been something wrong. Somehow, somewhere along the line, this blog became something in my mind which it was never meant to be when it started, it outgrew itself and went through some sort of mid-life crisis - it lost shape and energy, its very reason came under question, it grew inert. The need to write began filling me with apprehension, with emptiness, with fear. Once upon a time it was a way to say hello to friends and loved ones around the world, and just express whatever was in my head, or in the streets and skies and hearts and minds around me - but at some point it became something else, it hung above me threateningly, it taunted me, as if saying "you're not good enough anymore. Your writing is not as intelligent, not as beautiful, not as thoughtful as Bec's or Marty's or Patricks. Your photographs are nothing like the brothers Eaton. Your thoughts are repeats, your emotions thin and familiar. They don't want to read about that, not now".

I know this is a stupid way to think. I know that even if it was true, it shouldn't matter, because this is for me, its for my parents, its for my most forgiving and loving friends, its for my children, its for my memory. It's the only way I've ever found by which I actually maintain some sort of commitment to writing - and I must start again now, before I lose this one last medium, before the doubt and paralysis overtakes completely. I must write regularly from here on out - If I can't do it in this six months, when I'm all the way over here, experiencing these things, learning all that I am learning, then something is massively wrong.

I've been meaning to kick off this "new phase" of the blog for a while. I meant to use it to mark the end of my period in Canberra, and to process my quick return to Perth, and to herald my arrival in Scandinavia two weeks ago. But this has been a hard post to write. I've stalled on it again and again, distracted myself just as I've sat down to write. And for whatever reason I needed it first, as a page break, a border, a full stop, a new paragraph. Hopefully with this posted, we can forget about the lapses over the past few months, and I can just start using this more as I always intended it, with entries frequent, imperfect, and likely rambling. This is ok. At least it is better than silence.

Right now I am living in a school in a small village with an unpronounceable name (Svogerslev) which is a few kilometers from the city of Roskilde on the island of Zealand in the nation state of Denmark. I am living here with 24 others from 9 countries, and we are working together with CISV and with the Youth Association of the Danish Red Cross in a refugee asylum center nearby. The families that live here are mostly on their way out - the system has pulled and shunted them around for up to seven years, but their temporary residence visas are about to run out, and they have been denied permanent residence, so they are due to be returned to their countries soon enough. There is despair, and there is pain, and there is depression in this place, especially with the adults and the teenage kids, who remember life before Scandinavia, and understand completely what uncertainty may come next. The younger kids, meanwhile, the ones we are working with, mostly, are left confused, bored and scared. Boys and girls from Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Kosovo float above the grass in the Danish countryside. We spoke earlier in the week to an Iraqi Kurdish guy who had grown up in the Danish asylum seeking system, and had been lucky enough to be able to stay on in the country. We heard about his family being sent a bill to pay for the bullets that the Iraqi government had used to execute his uncle. We heard about the psychological pain his father went through during seven years of imprisonment, and the damage caused to his mother as she tried to get her children out of Iraq and to keep them in Denmark, and to keep them alive. And these were horrible stories to hear, incredible and hard stories, but they have become so real, working with these kids, watching them move and talk and think and play, and doing all these things with them. It is an honor, and it is devastating.

I am blessed too to be working here with some incredible people, with warmth and intelligence and creativity and real, thick, creamy compassion. I invite (actually I implore) you now to read a blog entry written by one of the girls I am doing all this with, Joanna from Canada, who is 20 years old, and very inspiring - and you should read it because she says everything I have been thinking, everything I want to be able to express, and she says it amazingly well. Her blog can be found here: http://ideas-thegrandtour.blogspot.com/

I will try to write every two days or so for the next six months at least. Maybe more. I really hope it will be no less. Right now its the middle of the night and there are still birds chortling and squeaking outside, like this: "chauuuuchooootwitttercheeeechoootweet". There are always birds making these noises, which makes me think that Danes don't need windchimes. Today I sat in the grass and planned pirate activities and made daisy chains and we fit three grown people on the tyre flying fox. This is the beginning of the Scandinavianised version of the Standard Line Delivery System. Velkomme til.

An Echo.

2007-04-21T14:29:00.000+10:00

It’s a slow and measured ride. A little after sunset, the smell of wood fires, the scratch and shuffle of possums. The chilled air bites your cheeks, your knuckles, your nose. Scattered milk crates, a barking dog, patches of gravel on the path left from flooding during the hail storm months ago. Bus stop graffiti reveals Casey to be a Big Fat Slut. You cross the dew licked grass. The moon is full, and glows like a future behind the dark lump of Mount Ainslie. A carefully placed bunny-hop up the curb and you’re out the front of the house, cresting at the apex of the shallow U shaped crescent, hidden by the line of conical hedge trees which are exactly the sort you can buy in hobby shops to line the country roads of your model train diorama. Around the dark buses, through the chain link gate and past the old bath tub and little piles of car parts. Through the bead curtain hanging in the backdoor frame. This is what we call home.

And it’s definitely a lonely town.

But here I am and here I am. Canberra, our nation’s brave and bright political beacon, our majestic capital. A city kinda like Pauly Shore or Vanilla Ice – a joke that never fades. Already half way through my first (and possibly only – inshallah!) stint here. Steel-trapped behind the computer desk, reading, typing, thinking, procrastinating – procrastination never feels so bad when you’ve got nothing better to rush off to anyway. Stretch it out, make it last right up to the hour it’s due. See what I care. I’ve got Allen’s snakes, I’ve got the new Modest Mouse, I’ve got Facebook messages from ex-lovers. Out there there’s nothing but a couple hundred up-collared jocks stumbling liquored outta Mooseheads, humming Khe Sahn, on their way to the $2.50 pizza slice counters. Beyond that? Silence and cold and darkness, and somewhere among it all, my bedroom.

I exaggerate of course. There are warm, sunny days with windsurfers on Lake Burley Griffin, and birds flicking from orange and yellow trees. And there are people I have here as my friends, and they are good people, despite not exactly making my desert island shortlist. The key people in my life right now, for your information, are as follows:

"Giacomo"
He is Italian, from near the French border. He likes wearing his sweaters over his shoulders, smart-casual style. He has a particular way of speaking that often includes the use of the phrases “It’s a good/crappy thing, actually, at the end of the day” and “oh PERfect, well done, well done”. I will be studying with him in Oslo for the second half of the year, also. He once stole a 7 disc set of Dawson’s Creek Series 5, but felt guilty and returned it to the store, offered to pay for it, and was arrested. He represented himself in court and walked away without a criminal record. He has trouble with getting the ladies because they all think he is “such a good friend” and “such a nice guy”, and we all know how sexy that is. Little do they know that he’s actually a sexist, Eurocentic (bridging on racist), porn-collecting, smack-shootin' motherfucker. You’re missing out, girls.

Yui
She is from Thailand. She is here on an Ausaid scholarship, meaning the Australian government pay her the same amount to study here as they give about seven local undergraduates – ie: she actually gets enough to live on. She’s pretty much the cutest thing since Sanrio and I’ll admit here that our friendship kicked off when she was chosen in the early days as the closest thing to a crush I was ever likely to develop in the course (and indeed in Canberra) and thus approached her with invites to social occasions. Since then its all gotten pretty severely platonic (thus rendering the whole crush-scene distinctly wastelandic) although Micky and I joke often with her about both of us being somewhat head-over-heels, hence our new (hilarious!) project – http://yayforyui.blogspot.com . She likes cake and German boys.

Hugh
He is from Perth. He is friends with Jim Mitchell! He has a pretty girlfriend called Claire, and surfs, and wrote a honours thesis about Aceh. When he doesn’t want to discuss something he gets very obvious in his vagueness. He doesn’t like discussing the affairs of others, or about his honours thesis, or about skinny waitresses with lisps who have mad crushes on him. He’s a really lovely guy, but he lives out in Upper Downer, which is a very inconvenient place to get to by bike, so he’s consequently notoriously antisocial.

(photo to come)

Jason
He is from Taiwan. He is the most fashionable male in the course, as voted by me and Yui. He works at the Taiwanese embassy, or whatever they call it given that they are not allowed to have an embassy. He is actually a special operative spy intent on the immediate destruction of China. He cooks a powerful Korean dumpling, too.

*
I’m gonna post more, I promise. This is the start of a new era for the Standard Line Delivery Corporation. Enough stalling with illusions of literary birds nests – this is supposed to be a diary goddamn, something to belt out when I’m alone and cold, and to read back on someday when I’m alone and cold and, also, old. For now, to the two or three of you who still bother checking this thing for updates, goodnight, and may your dreams hold rickshaws filled with soft fruit and slender Vietnamese women in milk white ao dai.

Sturm Und Drang

2007-02-28T17:13:00.000+11:00

(all photos are not by me, but are, rather, taken from these four flickr sites - (1) (2) (3) (4) -
you can see many more such photos at these sites)

“Oh, and by the way,” Sarah had told me, “Jane said you can only stay with them in Canberra if you can bring some rains with you. They’re desperate after such a long drought.”

Last night, I was sitting on my bed, slowly absorbing a dry and drawn-out essay on self-education and evaluation in humanitarian aid organisations during situations of crisis, when, all around, the rumbling started. Not at all like the usual punctuated claps of thunder, the approaching storm sounded like a great stampede of wildebeests, like the catastrophic build-up of angry electricity, like the centre of a oval-sized swarm of bees. There were bursts of lightning, slashing across the city centre, and there was the growl of wind coming from all directions. But for a while there was no rain. For a while there was only the terrible noises, an approaching war.

But then it came, the rain. And with it came the hailstones, pounding the trees and the soil and the windows; rocks the size of icecubes. I opened the door a little - ice flecked in through the crack and scattered onto the carpet. It was ferocious - I closed the door again and a burst of excitement shuddered through my body as I jumped onto the bed and snuck under the covers.

It continued. The drains were blocked by hail, and the yard flooded. I went to the door again, turned on the light outside, trying to assess the carnage from the safety of my flat. Where my feet had touched the carpet, wet patches appeared. From under my door, rain had been pouring in, the rubber-bottomed carpet was floating. My room was flooded.

I lifted up the VCR, books and clothes which were on the floor and put them on my bed. I slammed towels and the bath mat up against the door to stop more seeping in. I rang Ed, who ran down and got in through the shed, into the flat. The main house was leaking everywhere, he said, rain was pouring through the roof. We ran outside. Ted was up on the roof, clearing hailstones out of gutters - Jane grabbed a mop to help make the water flow efficiently into the storm drains, Ed and I threw rags and tarps at the base of the door to try and clog up the openning. We ripped drainpipes off the walls to make it flow faster, we clambered up to try and divert the flow of water to other areas of the roof, we dashed through troughs of water in the garden up to our ankles. All the while, hail stones pounded us from every direction.

Then it stopped. The wind slowly died down. Everywhere there was the sound of sirens - police sirens, ambulance sirens, house and car alarms, wailing like this was some other type of air raid. Everywhere the ground was a pot pouri of white and green - huge drifts of ice banked right up to the house, flecked throughout with torn leaves and broken branches. A thin mist snuck across the suburbs.

I pulled up the carpet, and in my soaked socks I started mopping the concrete floor underneath.

Today, the university is closed, due to water damage. Classes are cancelled, shops are shut. People in the streets are shovelling the huge carpets of ice that coat the paths and gardens, creating mini mountains of hailstones. The city centre's streets are covered with ripped leaves and drifts of ice. I have never experienced anything remotely like this.

And they say it might happen again this evening.

(Special note to those in the northern hemisphere - I would like to remind you that: (1) this is summer, and (2) this is Australia. Yeah, holy shit.)

Goodbye Qawawis

2007-02-19T23:15:00.000+11:00

( all photos by my friend David Parsons. Thankyou David. )

During Ramadan 2005, I stayed for a short time, just three days and nights, along with two friends, David from Canada and Maraya from the USA, in the rolling south Hebron hills in the occupied West Bank, in a tiny Palestinian settlement called Qawawis. Settlement is a loaded word to use in the context of this land, like so many other words ('wall', 'terrorist', 'refugee camp') it is drenched in subjective meaning - but there is not another good word for this place that I stayed. It is smaller than a village, and not really a farm. Qawawis was a collection of about seven stone huts built low to the ground, it had some pens for goats and sheep, it had some olive trees, a couple of stone bake ovens, a well, and a population of about 40 people, from four or five families. These people are shepherds and olive farmers, they rise early, graze their gaunt stock in the surrounding hills, bake bread, make olive oil, pray, talk, laugh, play soccer. They had electricity for only one hour each evening, from a generator.

David, Maraya and I were in Qawawis for these three nights because we were acting as international activists aiming to lessen the threat of harassment of the Palestinians who lived there. Qawawis was situated near to a smooth bitumen Israeli road, like the many which slice through the West Bank, connecting army posts and illegal Israeli settlements with Israel itself. On the horizon on three sides such Israeli settlements were perched high on hilltops, overlooking the huts of Qawawis - these settlements were all built since 1982, and are home to Jewish communities of the more fundamentalist persuation. Frequently the Israeli settlers or soldiers would make visits to Qawawis, or stop on the roadside, often with weapons, in order to harass, abuse, threaten and sometimes attack them. Shortly before I was in Qawawis a makeshift bomb was found, planted by settlers in a stone wall - if a rock above the device was removed the bomb would be detonated. The log book in our hut documented countless cases of the villagers being hit with rocks and sticks, of cars driving loudly towards the village honking horns to scare the animals, of settlers suddenly walking around, and into the huts, unannounced, and occasionally accompanied by soldiers. Caves attached to the houses and often containing ovens or storage areas have been cemented over, animal feed and olive trees poisoned. Soldiers at one stage declared the area a "closed military zone" and began to arrest any Palestinians found in the area.

In March 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the military had to respect the rights of the people of Qawawis and similar villages in the surrounding area to live in their ancestral land. The people of Qawawis returned and rebuilt their homes, requesting permanent assistance from International Human Rights observers to help them retain their homes. Harassment, on an almost daily basis, continued.

This photo is of Hadj Khalil, one of the patriarchs of Qawawis. In this photo he is sitting on a platform on which he prayed each day, and looking towards the watchtowers of a nearby Israel settlement.

Hadj Khalil, along with all the other people of Qawawis, were welcoming and warm with us during our stay. Despite the fact that they were fasting for Ramadan, they frequently bought us mint tea and olive oil and za'atar and warm fresh loaves straight from the ovens in the caves. They sat with us and spoke in patient Arabic, as we asked countless questions they had been asked again and again by other internationals. The three of us had an incredible time here with these people, we were made to feel at home in our little stone hut, and together we learnt so much, in so short a time. I will never ever forget the people of Qawawis, or the short time I was there.

A few days ago, Qawawis, along with a number of similar Palestinian villages and settlements in the Hebron hills area, was destroyed by Israeli military. My heart is sunk. Please read the below press-release, sent to me by my friend Sarah, and today, keep in your mind these few innocent, peaceful, beautiful and now homeless families, and the countless others like them, throughout Palestine and the Middle East.

---

Seven Palestinian Homes Demolished
Independent Catholic News
Saturday, February 17, 2007

Israeli soldiers demolished homes in three Palestinian villages near bypass road 317 on 14 February, the Christian Peacemaker Team reports. Starting in Imneizil at around 9am about forty Israeli soldiers with two bulldozers demolished one home, an animal pen and a stone bake-oven. At noon the soldiers moved to Qawawis where they demolished the homes of five families and one bake-oven, then on to Um Al-Kher where they demolished one home and damaged a wall of another home.

At Imneizil several young children were in their home eating when the Israeli military arrived; the soldiers gave the family time to get out, but did not give them time to remove their personal belongings. The animal pen was demolished with a few animals inside; two lambs were injured. The Palestinian family began immediately to build a makeshift pen for the animals as the majority of the sheep were just returning from grazing in the fields.

In the village of Qawawis one of the demolished homes was over sixty-five years old, and sheltered two families.

The Israeli military, in concert with Israeli settlers, has been trying to force the Palestinian residents of the south Hebron hills to leave their homes for years. Due to harassment from the nearby Israeli outposts several of the young families of Qawawis moved to a nearby town; when the Israeli army then forcibly evacuated the remaining families, a court ordered that the families could return to their homes. According to a lawyer representing the families, the Israeli army now claims that this court ruling allows only the last inhabitants of Qawawis to return, not their children who earlier fled the assaults of the Israeli settlers.

"Our children need homes," said one villager. "What do they want us to do?"

The Israeli army said: "Twenty illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity." The Israeli military made no provisions for shelter for the families whose homes they demolished. The families asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide them with tents.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said: "A building permit is unavailable there [in the south Hebron hills]." The preceding day three Israeli peace activists and two internationals, including CPTer Sally Hunsberger, joined approximately fifty Palestinians in working on their land near Imneizil. The Palestinian men, women and children planted 600 olive trees in fields that they had been afraid to walk on for the past four years due to threats of settler violence. During the action, soldiers and settlers watched from a distance, but did not interfere with the tree planting.

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, please visit: the CPT website

© Independent Catholic News 2007

A house, a family, a home.

2007-02-19T19:55:00.000+11:00

SINCE arriving in Canberra I have been staying at the house of the Radclyffe family, in Ainslie, just a short ride from the city centre and from the university. The deal was hooked up for me by my friend Sarah, because she is wonderful. The house's residents currently number six. There is a dog named Lucy. There is a cat named P.C. There is a guy named Ed and his girlfriend named Kat. And there is Jane, the mother, a warm faced woman of about 60, who teaches English to refugees and migrants, mostly kids and women from Sudan and Sierra Leone. She also sometimes teaches French and Japanese. And there is Ted, her husband, a small man with a tight face and white hair and a blurred tattoo on his inner arm. Ted used to be a public servant, now works as a contractor, something to do with passports. All this info I was given by Sarah on a special piece of paper before I left Perth, a short introduction to the family. They, and their house, are some of the very best things about my short time in Canberra thus far.

ON the front verge there is a vintage car, a light pink Dodge with two surfboards strapped to the roof, and there is a beautifully restored silver and blue full-length antique bus. In the driveway; two more buses, one massive green and cream double-decker which looks like it belongs in some 1930s Superhero comic, the other smaller, blue and red and decorated with Trailer Park Trash stickers and an exhaust-burnt dolls head on the tow-ball. This bus has been converted into a living space and is therefore the mobile residence of Kat, she who is the girlfriend of Ed (the son), has piercings in both nostrils and is from Tasmania. Ed is a musician and this week Kat and he have been in Melbourne while he was being filmed on some new show called "Australia's Got Talent!" so I haven't really spent much time with them yet. Also in the yard is a motorbike that Ted rides to work, another restored Dodge with bench seats and some tiki figurines on the dash, a noseless mini minor which has been converted into a trailer, an old engine or two, and a fair amount of junk. Also: there is a vegetable garden, there is a murky pond rimmed with stones, there is a hills hoist, there is a plastic hose transporting run-off from the washing machine into the garden, there are two wooden hives, flecked with swirling bees.

I am currently bedded in the granny flat, which is out back of the house as well. The flat is joined to the garage and a shed, which until late last year was the space in which Ted was constructing a small aeroplane from a kit he got from the United States. It took him seven years to build it, but its finished now, and hes been travelling two hours each way once a week to fly it around a bit ("It looks pretty unique up there on the tarmac" he tells me, "all those other planes are nothing but caravans with wings, all painted perfect white with stripes. Mine might not be like theirs, its all hand-painted, red and silver, but thats the effect I was going for, and it's the way I like it".) This weekend he is flying it to the coastal town where he and Jane have a holiday house so that in the future he can stay longer on the coast, and just fly back to Canberra for work. "At least once" he says. "I just want to do that at least once, y'know, to say I've done it".

Inside the granny flat there is a small fridge, a tv, a microwave, two burners and a bathroom which has a floorspace measuring about 1m x 2.5m, including the shower. There is also a Telstra rented telephone, as well as an old black telephone without any dial on it, just a silver crank you would use to contact the operator in order to place a call. I thought this was a showpiece only, until it rang with two short bursts the other night. I didn't answer, thinking it must have been hooked up to the main line inside the house, but a few minutes later Ted came knocking on the door. "Dincha hear the phone?" he asked "I was tryin ta ask you if you wanted to come in for some dinner, or a beer". Apparently inside the house there is another vintage phone, hooked up as a direct line through to the one sitting plump on my bedside table. An old-world intercom.

Inside, Ted tells me how he brews his own beer, in order to save money on Reeche's, which is otherwise the only beer he'll drink. He tells me his plans to go to the following night to the club. ("They raffle a meat tray on Fridays. Not many people go down for it, so I think I'm in with a chance"). He discusses his hatred of pumpkin ("Ah, I just don't think we should eat orange vegetables. I mean I don't really mind pumpkin in a soup. Or a pie. Or a garbage dump".) At 6.30pm he turns on SBS World News. Asking my age he puts my data into the Nielsen TV ratings tracking device they have hooked up. I become a statistic. Every morning at 2.15am on the dot the stats of who-was-watching-what,-when for the day gone are sent by modem, causing a single trill of the telephone throughout the house. "We try to stick in who's watching as accurately as we can," Ted says. "You can cheat it if you like, trick 'em about how many people are watching. But what's the point?"

Jane brings out some dinner and the three of us watch the news. The two of them moan and grumble whenever Bush or Howard are mentioned, but its whenever David Hicks is discussed that they start exclaiming at the screen. "Bring the poor fella home!" cries Jane. "Oh, they will, you wait and see," predicts Ted. "Right before the election, they'll whisk him outta there. You wait and see." After dinner and the news are over Ted flips through the channels. "Ah, what is this?! SHIT-HALF-HOUR?! That's what we call this Chris, when they don't have anything to show of value. So all we get is shit."

I excuse myself (something tells me Ted is going to sit and flick through the shit anyway) and head back to the little flat out the back, where I find three Daddy Longleg spiders in the kitchenette. I clamber onto the bed with a massive round of Afghan bread and three tubs of dip - red pepper, smoky eggplant and Persian chickpea; I tear the bread in chunks and dab . I dance around the flat a while to the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, I watch the West Wing on ABC, I do some readings for International Relations Theory. Outside I can hear a possum growling and wheezing like some terrible monster, and then a sudden fight, and a clatter, and then silence. The night hangs close and heavy around my little shack. I am asleep before midnight.

THIS arrangement was meant to be temporary, while I scouted the city for a room to suit my needs and budget. But, this is Canberra, and therefore this is almost impossible. The city is flooded with students, the (liveable) cheap rooms near the uni have been claimed. I looked at a room in a house the other day whose two other tenants are currently taking each other to court - she's a miniature Russian woman called Dino (who I thought was a feminine Asian man until I was corrected by two others who had also been to see the room before me - apparently we've all been covering the same ground, all us new arrivals) who likes meditating but never cooks, only microwaves, and requests that tenants scrub the shower (in their private en-suite) down after every time they use it - while he is a one-eyed drug user who lives out the back and doesn't trust anyone to touch his stuff, so while thats where my room would have been had I taken the house (haha!) I couldn't actually see that particular room today, because he was apparently in a bad mood. What's confusing is that despite their feud when I arrived Dino was delivering him a salad.

Anyway, after explaining this particular househunt experience to Ted and Jane they warmly offered for me to move more permanently into their house, outta the granny flat and into the spare room inside the house, once they've cleared some clutter out of the way. So this place, this house with its TV watching monitoring system and its stacks of banjos and guitars and cobwebbed books and antique telephones and cars and buses and its mannequins with sailors caps, and its tiki masks and Buddha heads and its cat and its dog and its possums and its smell of possum shit in the rafters, this place is, for the next four months, going to be my home.

The Pull of the Bush

2006-12-30T00:15:00.000+11:00

Rising up out of Sawyer's Valley the highway careens at almost the level of the treetops. The forest sprawls out, a shawl over the dry land. It is an honour to see it from this level. The air tunneling through the two front windows makes the car shake. I am driving at 100 km/h and I am listening to "The Dreaming" by Kate Bush, and I am singing loudly and the sky is large and baby blue above me.

See the light bounce off the rocks to the sand.

I break, and the trailer (heavy with the luggage of twenty-six newly arrived CISV teens who themselves are carving crushes and hopes and impressions on each other in the bus just behind me) jolts the car forward as if being toyed with by a hidden magnet. An old wooden train carriage in a small paddock. The rust tin roofs. On the road's edge I pass a car crash memorial; plastic flowers scattered in murky jars on the gravel and a Metallica flag hugging the death tree, refusing to let it forget its charges.

At the turnoff I get out to open the sheep gate; unclipping the chain, throwing the two gates swinging, barefeet on the red stones, Kate Bush spilling out across the yellow grass. I have been listening to this album on repeat the whole way from the city and its beautiful, its perfect. In the bus windows Scandinavian and North American faces are pushed to the glass, anxiously staring at their new temporary life. There is a rattle in the bonnet of the car. The patriotic SHOOSH of wind in the eucalypts. Its nice to drive in one certain direction. It feels like home.

See the light ram through the gaps in the land.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Går å Norge

2006-12-22T23:31:00.000+11:00

In 2007, I'm going to live in Norway.

All these photos of Norway are from Fecal Face dot com, and are by Corey Arnold

State of My Life Address, 8th December 2006

2006-12-08T07:42:00.000+11:00

A. Today I have lived for exactly 26 years, which means I am no longer classified, formally, as "youth". I have been alive for 9496 days.

B. I am currently living in an old terrace house, which I share with two girls, Jess and Laura. The house has the word MENAI printed on its front facade, above the roof of the front porch. The Menai were the Greek goddesses of the lunar months, the fifty daughters of Selene (the Moon) and Endymion, the king of Elis and Olympia. They each represented one of the fifty lunar months of the four year Olympiad. I have the third room as you progress from the front door, down the hallway. My bedroom is fairly full of items, clothes, books, boxes, cds and other items. On the walls there are 42 postcards, a chart with the letters of the Arabic alphabet, a large diagram of the skeletal system, a reprint of an old map of Australia (missing Tasmania), 24 prints of drawings by Marcel Dzama which are attached to metal rods with bulldog clips, a framed poster advertising a 2003 Mount Eerie/Mountain Goats/Baptist Generals concert in Anacortes, Washington, six small black frames containing Chinese paper-cut characters, and a reproduction print of a 1936 promotional poster for the Palestinian Tourist Association. My bedspread is navy blue with a very fine pin stripe and my bed linen is black. My house is in Lake Street, which is geographically in Northbridge, but technically counted as Perth (because of strange jig-jagged urban zoning) which is the state capital of Western Australia, Australia.

C. I am currently in bed, with my computer on my lap, a wonderful breeze coming through my window and the occasional light spindrift from the thin mist of summer rain hitting my bare shoulders. I am listening to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. There is soft light from a paper lantern. It is after 1.00am on December 8th and I am tired, having worked ten hours today over a 13 hour period.

D. I am also hungry. In the last 24 hours I have eaten: 1 x bowl of Wild Berry Fruity Bix with milk; many chocolates while in a three hour meeting at work; a Bean Burger with chili cream from Retro Betty's Burgers in Oxford Street, Leederville and two fairly old mini chocolate muffins which were home-made by my boss, Sharon. I was planning to go to the Moon cafe for dinner after work but then I had emails to write and this thing to write, so hungry I remain. This is a common pattern for me - I am terrible at keeping myself in supply of three balanced meals a day. Despite this I currently weigh 70 kilograms and I am 182 cms tall, making my body mass index 21.1, which is healthy enough, apparently.

E. I currently have two paid jobs (bookstore, out-of-school care centre), one smooth alabaster 1.83GHz Macbook, one dental filling, no pets. I am borrowing a car from Gene Eaton, who is in Europe, for a couple of weeks, but usually I ride my bike almost everywhere. My favourite ride is from Leederville to home when its a beautiful still night and the road is empty of traffic and the Morton Bay Fig trees smell rich and pungent. My least favourite ride is around the river towards the university when the sea-breeze is blowin' right towards me and my backpack is very heavy.

F. I have earlier tonight been notified that I am one of seven Australians who have been accepted to the Peace and Conflict Studies Specialisation, as part of a Master of Arts (International Relations) at the Australian National University in Canberra and the International Peace Research Institute / Bjørknes College in Oslo, Norway in 2007. This means that (if I choose to accept) I will spend six months in Canberra from February next year, followed by a semester in Oslo and then another in Canberra. This is exciting news, but there is still a little bit of thinking to be done, as I have also been accepted for a Master of Social Science (International Development) at RMIT in Melbourne, and this also looks like a great course. That said, I think the Canberra/Oslo option is the way I am likely to go, despite the fact that pretty much the best thing our capital had going for it - the legality of fireworks - is no longer applicable.

G. I am not affiliated with any organised religions, though I believe humans should remain humble and inquisitive always, and that we have, on the whole invented a reality to frame ourselves in which is inherently corrupt, self-serving and largely arrogant, and that needs to be changed, in significant ways. I believe strongly in non-violence, but am not strictly a pacifist. I identify in particular ways with all three monotheistic religions and find myself regularly concerned with trying to help rescue Islam in particular from misunderstandings, distortions or misrepresentations. Which is kinda like trying to use a farm plough to flatten the oceans, I fully realise.

H. I currently have about 402 Australian dollars in my savings account, along with $A28.50 in my wallet. I will be paid a further $A298 later today. There's another $US10 in my desk drawer, along with coins from Colombia, Israel, Thailand and Costa Rica. I owe $A100 to my parents for a speeding fine I apparently (according to the multinova photographs) attracted a few months ago, which I have only just found out about.

I. I have been to 34 countries (Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nepal, Philippines, Hong Kong (pre-unification), Israel, Egypt, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Spain, France, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Czech Republic, Austria, Canada, USA, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina) - 35 if you count the Palestinian Territories (actually, I do).

J. I am currently the co-President of the Perth chapter of CISV - Building Global Friendships. I am a director on the National Board of CISV Australia and a trainee on the CISV International Mosaic Committee. CISV is a worldwide non profit organisation working with young people to promote peace education and cross cultural friendship. In the last 365 days I have attended three international events for this organisation - an International People's Project in Phang Nga, Thailand; the Asia Pacific Regional Workshop in Manila, Philippines and a Seminar Camp in Medellin, Colombia.

K. My appearance has changed very little since last year. Until a week ago I had a month-old moustache for reasons of charity, but it has been replaced by the regular facial hair. On my wrists are two Brazilian wish band ribbons, one green and the other red, as well as two bracelets (1x black, 1x brown) from the Colombian Amazon, made from vegetable ivory. At the moment I am otherwise naked, unless you count the doona.

L. On my birthday today (after I sleep for four hours or so) I will be rising early, going to Claremont Pool, completing a refresher training for my Aquatic Rescue certificate, coming home, sleeping a little more, going to work at the bookstore and fielding enquiries regarding the location (in our store) of this Christmas's sleeper hit(!) book title, Where's Bin Laden, which is kinda like Where's Waldo/Wally but, like, with Osama instead of big Wal, which, wow, how clever, don't you think Carrie will think this is hilarious, what a perfect Xmas pressie, maybe I'll get one for Rebecca too, but is it her sense of humour, oh yeah sure, why not, get three etc. Also: I will eat cake.

M. I am currently reading The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. The last DVD I hired and watched was The L Word Season 2 Disc 1. The last gig I went to was Jason Molina at the Rosemount Hotel. The last girl I kissed will have to remain nameless this year, as I am fairly confident she would prefer it that way.

N. I do not currently have a girlfriend, I am not dating anybody, I am not engaging in repeated casual sexual relations with anybody and I do not have any crushes of significance. I am aiming to seperate the intimate and the sexual into two different spheres, and feel mostly like they would best be coming from mutually exclusive sources at this point rather than combined into the package of a single romantic relationship. And, in fact, the sexual I am putting aside as much as possible for as long as possible, so to concentrate almost exclusively (or at least increasingly) on the intimate (ie: close friendships, without lies or fictions). I need this.

O. I have a goal to speak English, French, Spanish and Arabic fluently by 2014 - there has been little progress on this plan in the last year, and while I have refreshed my Spanish brain while in Colombia and maybe added a bit of knowledge in this area I have carelessly lost a lot of the Arabic I gained in 2005. I plan to concentrate on the Spanish in 2007 and also add to this a devoted one year goal to getting some Norwegian under my wing, should I actually come to live there. Sommerfugl = butterfly or, literally, "summerbird". I hope!

P. I have never taken mind-altering or hallucinogenic drugs, I have never smoked cigarettes, I have never been drunk and I have never drunk coffee. I do eat meat though, and I eat a lot of sugar.

Q. Often, recently, I have felt so distanced from people and from the world and from all the values and opinions and lifestyles and reactions and emotions that humans seem to have, that at times I have ended up feeling almost invisible. Sometimes this makes me feel angry, sometimes very sad. Sometimes it makes me feel resolute and strong and gives me direction - sometimes it thrashes me down and renders me completely directionless. Sometimes I don't understand people so much I want to scream and melt. That said, there are a selection of people I am fortunate enough to know and love who just seem so ready to change everything, just teetering there, just on the ridge of great things, or, actually, possibly already achieving them right now, right under my nose, and I'm just not noticing properly while I'm focusing too much on all the people who aren't. These people, these people who swirl around me and perform brilliantly, and who we are all blessed to live alongside, I also sometimes feel invisible in their world, ghost-like and shadowed, but at the same time, they are and they will always be a constant inspiration and source of wonder to me.

State of My Life Address 2005 (25 years)

Disputes / fruits

2006-12-07T04:18:00.000+11:00

I was born just under twenty six years ago in a hospital in Subiaco, Western Australia. Most of the first seven years of my childhood, however, were spent in a small town called Donnybrook. The word donnybrook means “a brawl or fracas”, “a scene of chaos” or “a heated quarrel or dispute”, a usage which comes from the Donnybrook Fair, held from the time of King John onwards in a Dublin suburb of the same name (Irish: Domhnach Broc, meaning Church of [Saint] Broc). The fair was notorious for drunkenness and violent disorder and was eventually banned in 1855.

Indeed, it is from these Donnybrook days that I remember my first experience with conflict. When I was six or seven some of our sheep escaped from our paddocks and into the neighbouring fields, the result of some poor fencing. Our neighbour, whose name was Mrs Strong, came over to our house and proceeded to confront my mum and dad and lambaste them hysterically and aggressively for their negligence. At some stage my mother reached out her hand in an effort to make peace, and gently placed her hand on Mrs Strong’s arm while pleading for calm. Her reaction was to shout wildly and to go straight to the police to report that mum had physically abused her. The police laughed (they knew the Strongs well) and refused to press charges. Throughout the incident I hid in my bedroom with my sister, Kate, and I distinctly remember that first ever taste of fear and horror as my utopian world (of goslings, of willow trees, of old barns and orange school buses) was invaded by this sudden barrage of hatred and hostility, right out there on my own porch, forcing itself upon my own parents.

I invite you now to enjoy the following, from the current Wikipedia entry on the Donnybrook of Western Australia, the place of my childhood:

DONNYBROOK (WESTERN AUSTRALIA)

Donnybrook is situated between Boyanup and Kirup on the South Western Highway, 210km south of Perth, Western Australia. The region is known for its apple production.

Apples
Donnybrook is long proud of its apple production and has many town icons bearing the fruit. Such can be seen on the main street, where apple shaped lights line the entrance of the Old Railway Station. These lights (six in total, on three posts) have in recent years been restored to their former luscious green glory. Atop the east Donnybrook hill lies an even larger tribute to the apple, a giant tower with an apple at the top. From the top of the apple visitors can view Donnybrook and its surrounding areas.

A yearly tradition in Donnybrook occurring in Easter is the Donnybrook Apple Festival. In recent years the festival has not occurred, but community interest assures it will continue again in the future. During the apple festival, the citizens of Donnybrook gather on Egan Park to celebrate the apple. The festival includes agricultural displays, sideshow alley and of course, the crowning of the Apple Queen.

The Apple Queen has long been a citizen of the Donnybrook/Balingup area, aged between 17 and 25 years. In recent years this has been changed to the title of "Ambassador" and males are now allowed to enter. During the contest, local girls compete for the title by attending dinners, doing community service and riding on giant apple shaped floats. From these floats they give apples, fruit and lollies to the children lining the closed-off section of the South Western Highway.

During the street parade the Catholic Church of Donnybrook blesses the holy apple, assuring a good harvest in the years to come.

The Shire of Donnybrook also had a mascot, Donny Applebrook. Donny was a giant green apple who promoted the festival. Donny has since disappeared from public life.

Tourism
Aside from apples, Donnybrook economy also relies on tourism. Many tourists pass through the town, admire the apples and sometimes enjoy apple treats at local cafes. Other visitors include backpackers from all over the world. Many of these backpackers earn money by picking fruit in the area.

First Daylight Saved

2006-12-04T05:20:00.000+11:00

7.30pm - Hyde Park, Perth - Christina, Chris, Lauren
Mutual Love Club

Remastered, Repackaged, Rereleased.

2006-12-01T05:25:00.000+11:00

As even the most casual of readers would have noticed, we at the Standard Line Delivery Corporation have sought to rejuvenate our image and souls with a fresh new layout. This is a strategic move which we felt would, in a utopian reality, persuade us to once again fall in love with the "blog" medium, and this "blog" in particular, and maybe lead to our scribbling more on its walls and skin, with more frequency and less despair about any monotony a Perth life may or may not lead. The artist whose trees and humans line the background is Marcel Dzama, who is Manitoban and uses root beer to paint with and is a member of the Royal Art Lodge.

So, now that this post has served its primary purpose, which is to inform you of something which is plainly visually obvious, no one should have cause for complaint if it now degenerates into a late-night attempt on my behalf to piece together a quick abstract of life, recently, for me and those around me.

Tonight is the final night of Movember, and the potentially unhealthy men of Australia are $330 richer thanks to the rich generosity of a small handful of kind benefactors. Thank you to you all. As there was next to no visible change in the quantity of hair since the below photo (taken almost a month ago) I have opted not to post an end-of-month update, and you'll have to believe me when I tell you it wasn't that good. Surprisingly.
I have decided that the closest thing I have to a chapel (or alternative place-of-worship) right now is the underpass below the Narrows Bridge, right on the side of the Swan, where the sea-breeze whips and gusts where the concrete pylons and the road above perfectly frame the old brewery and the lightly rippling river and the magic-hour sun leers just above the cliffs running up to Kings Park as I am riding home from work, and there are silhouettes of anglers on the banks, and the rays of light fall sharply between the grey slats of the bridge's underbelly and even when I am in the foulest of moods and every motorist and most pedestrians I have passed since leaving work has attracted my swelling hosility, even then it still feels (just for a moment) as though if a manifestation of Yahweh might exist anywhere at all in Perth, this is where it must surely (surely!) be, at this exact time.
Which will be an hour later next week because: daylight saving trial!
Life right now = approximately 25% sleep, 10.7% bookstore, 12.5% afterschool care, 7 - 15% CISV, 5% reading, 2% socialising with housemates, 10% socialising with other friends, 2% chores, 8% wasting time on computer, 5% transport time... the rest=other.
In the last month I have been threatened and chased on my bike by five guys in a car with no lights on, at three in the morning; I have seen a motorcycle-car accident; I have requested a police welfare check on a drug-fucked guy passed out on the verge outside my house (a job they only half saw through, leaving the woken guy angry and violent outside my front door); I have witnessed a major car collison; I have seen three police cars busting kids who had been harrassing neighbourhood homes; I have seen a thuggish looking guy holding another guys hands on his head and making him kneel next to a sports car on the pavement.... all of this within three blocks of my house.
Oh, it's late, there's work tomorrow; I will continue my directionless scatter soon enough.
x Out.

Mo' Money

2006-11-02T17:27:00.000+11:00

Hi there,
I've never been all that much a fan of the moustache... It's not been something I've considered strongly as a worthwhile addition to my face, not without accompanying stubble anyway. But, this month is Movember (the month formally known as November) and along with beer swiggin' males all over Australia I have decided to (attempt to) grow a mo for one month only. All the money goes to organisations working on men's health - focusing on prostate cancer and male depression mostly - and you too can send me a couple of bucks if you choose, by visiting http://www.movember.com.au/au/sponsor and then entering my rego number, which is 22309. Meanwhile, you can expect to see occasional photos here on this blog of the progress of the growth, although I'd warn you not to expect all that much, as I am not all that adept at facial hair growth, depsite long term asperations to a Sam Beam style beard, or at least Colin Farrell type stubble. But I will do my best.

Anyway, at the moment I look like this:

24 Hour Comic

2006-10-21T23:21:00.000+10:00

The comic I did a few weekends ago for the 24 Hour Comic project is now printed and ready for reading. If you would like a copy, please smile in my general direction, or even better, give me some sugar in any way you deem appropriate.

The comic is about the conflict situation in Colombia and is based partly on my time there, but also on recent reports by Medecins Sans Frontieres and Human Rights Watch.

A Location, A Menu, An Adventure, An Image

2006-10-21T18:37:00.000+10:00

You can tell summer is here, because there’s moths whapping across the iridescent bulbs in the bookstore, and posters stuck with Blue-Tac are curling from the walls and by 10am its already too hot to be still in bed on a lazy Saturday morning like today’s. But here at Hyde Park, where I have come to type the afternoon away, the sun is bright but the wind is still strong and the air is filled with dragonflies and with falling leaves and with whole swarms of dancing blossom, buds of which are dropping onto my laptop and getting stuck between the keys. I am seated on my rainbow rug, alone, with a makeshift picnic consisting of White Rabbit milk and rice paper lollies (from China), SOTO cuttlefish flavoured snacks (from Malaysia) and a Berri 2.4L Family Pack container of Apple Juice (from Australia). The crows caw in crescendos, ducks preen, Italian men gather in brimmed hats, glittering ribbon hangs from the twigs of trees, remnants of a long faded park-based celebration. A lone, dumpy woman sits still, slumped slightly forward, on a bench nearby, staring off blankly across the park, white, knobbly legs poking out from a pale blue skirt like broken pegs. Groups of rosellas, swirling oaks, a wedding limousine, a girl’s laughter. The White Rabbits are not anywhere as good as I remember them to be.

Last weekend I cooked a dinner party for some people and although I had some valuable assistance from a few key individuals it was, I think, the first time I could honestly say that I had done that, of my own accord, in my lifetime. It was all Middle Eastern food, as will be the successive dinner parties or picnics which are planned to occur on a fortnightly schedule from this day forward, and to which you might be invited if you are both within proximity and particularly strategic in your dealings with me (Let us assume, for the purposes of this blog, that the food will be at least, somewhat, good). The previous menu, which all but eight of you missed out on, read as follows:

Mezze
Warm Lebanese pita bread
Olive Oil
Za’atar
Fresh Hummus (made from hand-peeled chickpeas, kids)
Muhammara (Red pepper and walnut paste)
Baba Ghanoush
Eggah (Parsley omelette)

Mains
Moghrabieh (Lebanese giant couscous) with chicken and lemon zest
Stuffed red peppers & stuffed tomatoes

To Drink
Chilled Egyptian Karkadai (hibiscus infusion drink)

In summary, I have decided that cooking can be rather fun and isn’t all that stressful after all.

In other recent news:
I have, in the course of three weeks, twice had to foil attempts to steal from the bookstore. The first time we were tipped off by a nearby store owner who suspected that the woman had just stolen some cards and maybe a tshirt from him and that she was now in our store, which she was. I watched as she tucked a number of books into her bag and then made sure than she realised that I was watching until she sheepishly, and not altogether stealthfully, removed the stack from her bag (3 x Jodie Picoult novels and 1 x WA lesbian magazine) and tried to balance them on a nearby display shelf as if nothing had ever happened. She then bought two other books and mumbled something non-sensical which I presume was aimed to throw me off making any comment about her poor attempt at crime. The other time was last weekend, when I was again tipped off, this time by the kebab store guys from next door, that a girl had just stuffed a calendar in her bag and walked a little way down the street. My reponse this time was somewhat more direct as I approached from behind and took the calendar from her bag before threatening, rather hollowly, to contact the cops. Her excuse went something like “Oh some girl just GAVE it to me to put in my bag. I dunno WHO she was! She just said ‘Here, put this in your bag and walk away’. Yeah, I don’t know what that was about”. And really there’s not all that much you can say to an alibi as strong as that.

I leave you now with a Clip-Out-And-Keep souvenir photo of me which I will take right now, with my computer, of me sitting in the park in my traditional Colombian hat. Good day.

Time capsule letter

2006-10-20T18:33:00.000+10:00

Below is a letter I wrote to myself while I was on the Seminar Camp in Israel in August last year. The idea was for our letters to be sent to us one year or so later, which they were, and I received mine this week. Thankyou Eva, for remembering to send it out.

------------------

3 August 2005, Bet Govrin, Israel, 5.00pm

Dear Chris,
Last night there were jackals. Of course there has often, or always, been jackals before last night, every night, for a number of millennia anyway. But last night there began to be jackals for me. Jackals entered my mind, my sphere, with a distant hoot, heard above the growling cello coming through my headphones. Suddenly there I was, contemplating jackals. Contemplating my proximity to jackals. There were jackals last night.

About a week ago it had been the same thing with warplanes. Their roar filled the sky, an echoing boom over the kibbutz. Before that it had been Helene, one of the most gorgeous people who ever did live. Before that there was Eva, whose presence filled everywhere with light.

This camp has also bought new things from within. I know, now, some of my most significant and most dangerous flaws. Before, I might have guessed at them or seen them in miniature, but I may not have held them in my palms like plump, round plums. There they sit now, wet and dark, firm and promising, one in each palm, ready for me to decide what to do with them now. I cannot leave them behind: in many ways they are attached to my skin, they are attached deeper. I must carry them, learn to carry them, to hold them well. I must cherish and admire them, like terrible monsters in a nearby cage. I must learn and understand the howl of a jackal.

I wonder what the next six months will bring, what the next year will bring, what new things will grow from within me or approach from outside? What will a month of focused attention in Cairo do or bring? A month or two of desert solitude? A few weeks in Palestine? Will my heart and head jumble further, get dry, soak and expand, explode completely? Already (it’s been less than a month) I feel better, stronger, more focused, less bored – will this trend continue or will I sink back into post camp ennui? Hopeless sadness? Self doubt?

This night is advancing, we approach the close of camp. We will be spread, soon, smeared again in the CISV Diaspora. The group, unbreakable; broken. And the warplanes will roar and the jackals will howl.

And those I love and those I can no longer live without, they will be in every song, they will be in every wish. They will be the birds and the drums and the gorgeous masts of old ships. Our love can, and our love always will, from this point forward, float on.

I hope you are well & happy & safe.

Chris.

News Feed

2006-09-20T01:31:00.000+10:00

After over a month with no contact I return, loyal subscribers, to your bedsides and Electric Viewing Consoles™, humble with apology and laden with tawdry gossip. Since returning home from the cloud-crested mountainsides of Colombia I have been gradually resettling, a process which took significantly longer than I think anyone could have anticipated, but which seems to have advanced to a stage with which I can feel comfortable and ready to call life "on track," once again.

I have recently added a StatCounter to this blog which lets me to see quite a lot of information about every single one of you who comes to read about me and I am happy to report recent visitors from places such as Lithuania, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Guatemala. I can see that due to the second last sentence of my last post I have attracted hits from charming North American pedophiles Googling "adorable pre-teens," and that, mysteriously, I have developed a fanbase in Canberra, a city in which I know no one but produces more hits than any other city in the world including Perth. I do now realise, however, just how much people actually look at this thing, which is more than I ever expected, and so in order to satisfy the clearly insatiable appetite of my legions of world-wide fans I present, just quickly, a digest version of news from the last few weeks of my life:

I am now the owner of a new laptop which means that, in theory, blog entries should be much more frequent as I am able to compose updates from basically anywhere - the beach, buses, strip clubs, hospital beds and so on. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the small Chinese child who was employed to assemble my machine out of its composite parts, in poor conditions, for very little pay. You are whole, you are much-loved.
A lot of my days are spent fiddling around on this new computer in the snug and lovely environs of a small alleyway cafe in the city called Tiger Tiger which was apparently not named after the Mandarin phrase "Horse horse tiger tiger" (ma ma hu hu) which means "so so" or "comme ci comme ça"; nor was it named after the line in the William Blake poem "Tiger" (Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night); although it was, however, named from an artpiece in the WA State Art Gallery which was in turn named for the Blake poem, according to reasoned speculation. The cafe has lovely wooden tables and communal couches and a candy jar and staff who grin & joke and wireless internet & "special" hot chocolates with all sorts of surprises mixed in including, but not limited to, shredded coconut, cinnamon and sesame seeds. Anyway, I am here at this place a lot of the time, drinking such hot chocolates while the speakers play Dylan or Tim Buckley or Ryan Adams or Bon Jovi and the grey clouds spatter rain on the city streets.
Next week I am moving into a new house, away from the oversized parental home by the coast and into Northbridge, in a street scattered with the houses of friends and which runs into Hyde Park, which remains one of the most beautiful urban parks I have ever seen. I am moving in with two girls - Jess (who was formally known by me and select others as "Lil Cutie" until I swore I would stop calling her that if I moved in) and Laura (about whom I know not enough to give even a brief anecdote). The house is a terrace which is exactly opposite in layout to the next door house, and the girls have a cat who used to live next door until the owner killed its siblings and said it would have to die too unless someone could take it. Which Jess and Laura did, and for a while the cat was so confused when it came into the house because all the rooms were in reverse.
I am no longer "seeing anyone" and can guarantee that I won't be for some time.
Today I went for a ride by the river. Let me paint the picture. It's overcast, ok; theres a chilled wind and maybe a bit of drizzle, and my knuckles are bitten with cold. My bike sweeps around the river's edge, the water glinting a metallic brown blue, flat, calm. The trees are tipping down the cliffs on the edge of King's Park, dark and drooped and speckled with clusters of yellow acacia. The sky is rich with clouds, and its making the earth glow. There's black cormorants, proud and still, with wings cocked; there's pelicans; there's shelducks followed by furry ducklings the size of children's teacups. Theres a row of Australian flags pointing northwest and flicking in the winds, which makes the flagpoles squeak like hospital-bed wheels. I am riding through puddles. Two guys in beanies are playfighting on the grassy banks. A girl in tight ponytail stares at the water. There are streaks on sunlight emerging from behind cloud on the banks over Freeway South. The low cluster of city skyscrapers. Engine Oil. Cold sweat under my backpack. The smell, everywhere the smell, of wet leaves.
Last week I was in hospital for a double-ended visual inspection of my digestive system. If you get my meaning. I got to starve myself for 4o hours or so, then drink litres of a solution that tasted like sea-water. Then I got to see a televisual broadcast of the inside of my empty gut, which was mostly healthy except for a little mini polyp in there somewhere which got lanced by a little mini laser before it could grow into something sinister and nasty.
There are two courses I am applying for next year. One is a Masters in International Relations, specialising in Peace and Conflict Studies, at ANU in Canberra for one year and at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo for six months. The other is a Masters in International Development at RMIT in Melbourne. There are certainly positives and negatives in both courses, so my policy right now is just to wait and hope that the universities help me by deciding for me...
I will soon be participating in a local project in conjunction with International 24 Hour Comics Day which will lead to my being locked in the WA Film and Television Institute for a full day, in which time I must personally complete a 24 page comic, which at first didn't seem too hard until I considered the idea of a page an hour, which assuming there's about 10 frames a page is a frame every six minutes without counting time for eating or thinking or planning or going to the toilet or whatever. Which: Ha!

That's the news, folks.
Now that that's out of the way, expect future posts to stick to descriptions of sunsets and trees with occasional ill-informed diatribes about social justice and complaints about the absolute static stillness of Perth and the aggression exhibited by its bored, mindless citizens when fueled on alcohol and even occasionally, actually, not.

It is about time to get out of this town, more or less for good.

Important Notice

2006-08-12T01:16:00.000+10:00

Dear Passenger C. J. Stokes:

Due to "communication problems" currently being suffered by Bogota El Dorado International Airport your aeroplane to Buenos Aries, Argentina, which you'll no doubt recall was due for departure at the exciting hour of 6.55am has unfortunately been delayed. We also regret to inform you that the original delay of three hours has now been extended to five hours. We at Aerolineas Argentinas reserve the right (of course!) to extend this delay further, and request that in the ensuing waiting period you sit tight, smile, and ignore the headaches, oncoming diarrhoea, gut-squeltching and need to vomit that you have been experiencing for the past 14 hours, as caused (one assumes) by a combination of sunburn, inhaled peach-flavoured shisha smoke and the consumption of a bad patacon. Please feel free to make full use of our small box-like room with a paper sign reading Sala 10 sticky-taped to the window, in which there are not enough seats nor access to entertainment and which is currently filled to overflowing with frustrated Latin Americans. Please do not find a place to lie down on three empty seats in another section of the airport, because if you do we will be forced to wait until you have just fallen asleep then send a member of the airport police squad to wake you up, mutter something to you in Spanish, then proceed to write down on a sheet of paper your name, passport number, address, educational level, current occupation, birthdate and marital status. He will not give a full explanation of this process but will instead just smile and push on to the next possible-vagrant/terrorist who likes to lie down on seats. You may proceed, instead, to the fast food resturaunt named Presto, where we will be happy to serve you a complementary breakfast of dry eggs, dry arepas, coffee and a small thimble of orange juice which tastes similar to a mezcla of bodily fluids. Take the time to watch, on our wall-mounted televisions, back episodes of Colombia's hit television show "The X Factor... for kids!" where you can see adorable pre-teens croonin', krumpin' and caterwallin' while tiny niñas lay down the freshest booty-shakin' reggaeton dance styles.

We thankyou for your patience and look forward to having you on board Aerolineas Argentinas sometime in the next day or so.

Best,
The Smiley Crew at A.A.

Nights alone, nights in company

2006-08-10T09:13:00.000+10:00

Cartegena de Indias. Wooden balconies, coloured stone walls with green flowering creepers, horses pulling carts with massive wheels. A carved cross above a window in the Palace of the Inquisition, the window from which heretics were denounced. The crashing surf just beyond the thick city walls. The smell of arepas with cheese, of fried chicken, of sweat and salt. Slow moving tourists, looking up, looking everywhere. The hollers of frizzy haired teens in school uniform. Limestone churches with huge wooden doors and tall ceilings and pews dotted with quiet people, sitting, crossing themselves. Carts of avocados and limes and eggplant. Heat.

In Plaza de Bolívar troops of dancers perform for thickets of tourists, twitching and shaking and jumping and wiggling to the rapid thump of large drums, their hips quaking and feet stomping, tall, beautiful, African Colombians, barefoot and dressed in bright primary colours, black muscles, big grins. They collect money in straw hats, and the spectators disperse around the square, past perfect fountains and the old men selling collared shirts and flavoured ice and cups of watermelon juice from square tubs on wooden wagons. It is late in the day, it is almost magic hour, but the humidity is still strong, and the outdoor cafes are filling up with groups of tourists from across Colombia, the Americas, the world.

Then it is night. In the Plaza de las Coches skinny whores wait in the yellow lights beneath the arches of the old city wall. "Hola, mi amor!" they whisper, holding slender white cigarettes between brown fingers and winding their waists subtlely to the reggaeton spilling from a tinny radio. There is not much work tonight - President Uribe is in town this monday and there has been a city wide ban on alcohol declared for the whole weekend, - so without nightclubs to comb through the girls are left to roam in the quiet squares. I stop and talk a while to a girl named Erica; a gentle mulatta with big eyes and a white skirt that flicks up in the breeze. She tells me about her life - she has been working this way for two months, she has a one year old daughter called Rosario whose father is gone, and they live with her parents in a distant bario. She is studying cosmetics by day and working by night. She is nineteen years old.

We sit astride wooden benches and watch the soldiers with their heavy black guns pacing the streets. We drink freshly squeezed lemonade through thin straws as blue clouds pass across the sad, bent moon. She says she wants to be alone with me in a hotel, that its a quiet night and so it will cost me just 30,000 pesos, which is just under $US13. I decline, but give her 40,000 pesos instead to walk with me a while through the old city. Her real name is not Erica, it is Marja. We walk, and we dodge the approaches of smug dealers offering 'crystal', and watch as the well dressed trickle in and out of a private wedding party as warm light and the rhythm of vallenato blasts over the wall and through the trees and into the shuttered streets. We converse in a combination of Spanish and charades and the night presses on and turns into morning and so we bid farewell beneath the illuminated face of the plaza clock. I give her another 5,000 for the moto-taxi home, to her parents, her daughter, her real life.

I make other friends too, while in Cartegena. While loitering under the huge street lantern in Plaza Santa Domingo I meet Camillo, my first bonafide Colombian hipster, who works in television and is due to act as third producer on the up-and-coming British film production of Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, which I have just finished reading, and which is due to start filming soon around both Mompox and Cartegena. While on a boat cruise out to some nearby islands I meet Jenniffer, a hard-rock loving teenager with huge biker sunglasses, and her working-class Bogota family who have saved hard for a four day trip to the coast, by a bus trip of 24 hours each way, to see the ocean for the first time. She approaches me on board the boat and gives me a gift, a small white and brown shell she has found while beachcombing, after she sees me grinning sheepishly at her after thinking that she sees me taking sneak pictures of her, along with many other awkward looking tourists, from across the deck of the boat. It is a warm gesture, and a brave one, and the next day when I bump into her family under the statue of Bolívar's horse they invite me to walk with them, and eat with them, and visit the grey sand beach with them, where they spend hours lolling in the shallows in unfashionable clothing while Jenniffer sings, in makeshift English, all her favourite songs to me ('Stairway to Heaven', 'Enter Sandman', and so on) on the jagged rocks where crabs scuttle and waves smash.

On the bus to Santa Marta I meet a woman from Cali, her face thick with make-up, who interupts my reading to quiz me in heavily accented Castilian. She is in private security, she works around Cali with the obscenely rich and/or famous as a private bodyguard, in a company called SNIPER. At the moment she is in the employment of the owner of a large hacienda, with cows and coffee and sugar cane but, she assures me, without cocaine. She is one of ten (10) men and women employed to protect this one guy and his family from the threat of murder, kidnapping and theft. She says she loves her job, which only occasionally actually involves violence. She touches my leg a lot and giggles and asks if I have a girlfriend. Soon after I say that I do she cuts the conversation short and drifts into sleep and I go back to Garcia Marquez's autobiography. Past Barranquilla we skirt the coast line on a thin road cutting across the Ciénaga Grande, an expansive area of swamp land which laps upto the Caribbean Sea, and then there, in front of us, across the plains of cartoon cacti and brown marsh sits the purple mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, rising sudden and triumphant out of the coast, steep and snowcapped.

Here I am, now, at the foot of this moutain range, my feet in the ocean and my skin burned, drinking juices made from fruits with names that sound like distant planets: Lulo, Cipote, Maracuyá, Guanabana. It is a small town, this Taganga, packed with backpackers from all over, but overwhelmingly from Israel, scores of them, hippified and with grins of mischief, their presence being so overwhelming that it leads juice stand proprietors and hotel owners to have a great number of their signs in Hebrew and Spanish, with English third if there at all. Small boats wedge in the dirty sand, five metre cacti pierce the sky along the hillsides, rainbow coloured fish live on in the smashed up former reef. It is from here that I depart: tomorrow to Bogotá, and then half a day later back home to Australia. I'm out of time. Oh Colombia, there's so much more, but I'm out of time.

This Macondo, Mompox.

2006-08-03T07:33:00.000+10:00

I have been in the town of Mompox for three days now, and for three days I have been teaching short English lessons in the early mornings at the local high school. "English lessons" is what I would like to call them, but really they consist of me drawing a mud-map of the world on the white board to try and explain where Australia is, followed by a field of Spanish questions about my life from giggling teenage girls. "How long will you be here in Mompox?" they ask. "Do you like to dance salsa?""Do you have a girlfriend?" "Do you think Colombian girls have beautiful eyes?" I try to answer in English, but they protest, loudly, in thick costeño accents: "Noooo! E-pañol!" The lesson then deteriorates into a mass photo session, while girls from the younger classes, who have been watching from the doorway, pass notes inviting me to teach in their class tomorrow.

Suffice to say that with enthusiasm like that there are not so many foreign tourists here, in this town. Nor anywhere, much, in Colombia. Presumably the legions of backpackers seeking new and remote locations round the globe are still detered by false conceptions about the threats of narco-terrorism, kidnapping and paramilitary warfare. Somehow both the international media and foreign governments , and with them the tourists, have missed the updates - its not 1991 anymore; Escobar is long-dead, the cartels of Medellin and Cali mostly dismantled, the guerrilla groups pushed deep into the jungles. Colombians are literally scratching their heads as they search for ways to bring the world up to speed on what the actual situation is like, to bring the people in to what is truely a spectacularly beautiful country.

Arriving in Mompox (or, alternatively, Mompós - take your pick) in particular, its impossible not to be completely enchanted. From Bucaramanga I took a combination of bus, car, boat, motorbike and wooden canoe, and dismounted in Plaza de Bolívar in awe. This is a town which is completely off the main roads of Colombia - virtually in the middle of nowhere - but which glows with a colonial charm unlike anywhere else I've been with the exception of Havana. Founded in 1537, Mompox was originally an important trading center and active port, through which all the merchandise from the Caribbean city of Cartegena passed, via the Rio Magdalena to the interior of the colony. In 1810 it was the first town to declare independence from Spain, and here Simón Bolívar conscripted many men for his liberation campaign. By the end of the 19th century, however, shipping was diverted to the other branch of the Magdalena and the town was left to its isolation.

Today, Mompox is a lazy town of long, hot streets lined with whitewashed houses. The windows, open behind elaborate wrought-iron grills, reveal ornate living rooms filled with antique furniture. Through the doors you can see central courtyards, filled with plants and fountains, and bathed in sunlight, while family members inside tip gently in thin rocking chairs made of wicker and dark wood. In the streets men sell lottery tickets for the daily draw, which happens in the middle of the square at four o'clock. Boys wield trays of queso de capa, long stringy tapes of salty cheese wrapped into small balls, while nearby ladies pump metal fruit presses to squeeze the sweetest, most gorgeous orange juice into tin cups. In the botanic garden a medley of the world's trees shelter parakeets, hummingbirds and butterflies. School kids in checked skirts are transported by motorised rickshaws, old toothy men in straw sombreros park their ancient bicycles on kerbsides, young women with podgy stomaches poking over the top of tight jeans cross themselves as they scoot past the churches by motorbike. On the riverfront large trees shelter the roadway from the overwhelming heat, multi-coloured mansions boast massive wooden doors, grey and green iguanas thud along the sloping banks. Clods of grass and tree branches take the fast flow of the brown Magdalena while fish flip and splash by the staircases which run down to the water. There is the sound of bells from balconied church towers. The amazed smile and inquisitive queries of little kids, scampering in little gangs along the malecón. And at night the iron street lanterns, the candlelit bars on the riverside playing old latin tunes on crackling vinyl, the chirping bats, the portable trolleys carting wood ovens from where you can buy guanábana pizza by the slice.

I was meant to be here two days but I extended and have stayed three. Still, it is with great reluctance that I head off tomorrow morning, particularly because tomorrow is the beginning of the town's five day fiesta in celebration of independence; unfortunately I just can't afford any more time if I want to get to everything I want to see on the coast. I have, however, explored real estate prices (anyone wanna share the cost of a $100,000 Spanish colonial mansion with me?) and I have found and bought myself my very own school t-shirt from the college where I have inadvertedly become a sort of local celebrity, so I live in hope that one day I too can be an old Momposino man, wiping sweat from my brow from my very own rocking chair in my very own courtyard, watching my very own granddaughters who flirt with their thick accents that ignore the "s" in "español" and who know how to sing all the words to all the latest reggaeton hits from Puerto Rico without taking even a breath.

Qana

2006-07-31T00:53:00.000+10:00

I'm in a bus station in Bucaramanga, waiting for the onwards journey to Mompós, where I plan to sit in rocking chairs and read Latin American literature while bats play in the sunset. But, as I have time to kill, and as my heart is pretty heavy after hearing of todays events, I have chosen to subject you all to a bit more about the Middle East. My apologies if this disappoints you in any way, dear reader, in case you were hungry for more gossip about my lonely existence in the plazas and courtyards of steamy central Colombia. Please understand though that right now, to me, this stuff is way more important than my attempts at tourism, and that I have literally no one to talk about this all to, except for the glass-faced CNN presenters on my hotel televisions and you all. Its a form of coping I guess.

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The Lebanese believe that Qana, a hill town in the south of their country, is the spot where Jesus turned water into wine.

On April 11, 1996, in response to cease fire violations by the Hizbollah, Israel used SLA radio stations to warn the civilians of forty four southern Lebanese villages and towns to evacuate within 24 hours. By April 14th 745 people were occupying the United Nations compound in Qana in an attempt to seek refuge - this number had reached 800 by April 18th. On this day the Hezbollah fired two Katyusha rockets and eight motar shells at Israel from areas about 200 metres southwest and 350 metres southeast of the UN compound. Fifteen minutes later an Israeli unit responded by shelling the area 32 times. Two-thirds of the of the shells were equipped with proximity fuses, an anti-personnel mechanism that causes the weapon to explode above the ground. Of these 32 shells 13 exploded within or above the compound and 4 exploded very close to it.

106 civilians were killed, mostly women and children. Four were UN troops. Their bodies were ripped apart, beheaded, disembowelled. Israel immediately expressed sorrow for their "mistake".

Today Israel made the same "mistake" again. This time 56 civilians are dead, including 34 children. Israel has once again expressed regret, but added that residents had been warned to leave the area. Because, as the residents of Qana know, that works so well.

Having spent time in Israel and having friends who are Israeli I feel as though I know in some small way the way Israelis think and feel about this conflict and about their neighbours. I know that the results of both of these attacks were unintentional. I know that Israelis (extremist settlers I met around the West Bank excluded) do not like killing Arab women and children. But this sort of thing has stopped becoming a surprise. It has stopped becoming something you can refer to as a "mistake". A mistake is something you learn from, an opportunity to grow. Israel is powerful and strong; it is using this power and this strength to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people. This is well understood, and completely ongoing. This is not a mistake.

An Open Letter to the Government of Israel and to All Their Apologisers and Supporters.

2006-07-29T16:16:00.000+10:00

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things,—
What they are yet I know not,—but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

- Shakespeare: King Lear, Act II Scene IV.

Dear Israel and friends,

The other day, on a television in my dingy hotel room in a Colombian small town, I saw Arye Mekel, Israel's Consol General, telling the BBC that Israel is "doing the Lebanese a favour" by bombing the Hizbollah. With a straight face he told the camera that "most Lebanese appreciate what we are doing".

Of course it is true that a majority of Lebanese ordinarily oppose the actions of the Hizbollah. It is true that the Hizbollah are a ruthless and destructive guerilla army whose killing of Israelis and contribution to the continual culture of violence in Lebanon are not only counter-productive to their "cause" but heartbreaking terrible and entirely unforgivable.

One would think from comments like Mekel's that Israel is well aware of the difference between the Hizbollah and Lebanon. But it is impossible to understand one's values, one's beliefs, one's mind without taking into account his actions. In the past two weeks Israel has decimated the infrastructure of Lebanon and targeted and killed both the civilian and humanitarian population. You have flattened schools and airports, bridges and hospitals, homes and petrol stations. You have sent missiles into the new aqueduct built by Rafik Hariri with aid from the Italian government - a symbol of cooperation between Lebanon and the European Union. You have bombed milk factories and pharmaceutical factories. You have once again displaced over half a million people from their homes, killed hundreds, maimed thousands. You have bombed Red Cross vehicles, you have killed UN volunteers and health workers, you have ordered the evacuation of southern villages then bombed and murdered the fleeing convey of civilian vehicles. You have broken the heart and soul of Lebanon right at the time the country was starting to blossom after decades of civil and regional war.

Your aim undoubtably is to defeat "terrorism" and to defend your citizens. But what you are destroying is not terrorism. You are destroying a country, a people, a sense of hope, a future. You are fertilising the Arab and Muslim world, and Lebanon in particular, with anger, with fear, with hatred. You are teaching a whole new, young, largely educated, multi-lingual generation of Lebanese - many of whom missed the pure horror of the country's previous years of conflict - why it is their parents and their grandparents had so much resentment for and fury at Israel. You are breeding terrorism. You are teaching that violence is the only solution. And you are dooming your own people, and with them the entire world, to decades, if not centuries, of continued bloodshed.

A young and concered Mexican asked me the other day why the Israeli army and their unfaltering supporters (the US, for example) does not attack Syria, if they are the political supporters of the Hizbollah. Why attack Lebanon? I would like to propose an answer to this question; tell me if I'm mistaken. If Israel was to attack Syria, the response would be obvious. Syria has the military capabilities to immediately respond; they could hurl rockets at Tel Aviv, at Ashkelon, at West Jerusalem. Lebanon has none of this military power. Its air force is made up of three ancient Hawker Hunters and an equally ancient fleet of Vietnam-era Huey helicopters. So it is Lebanon which you attack.

We know well that members and sympatisers of "terrorist" or guerilla organisations live throughout Lebanon, just as they live throughout the world. We know they live in Gaza, they live in Tehran, they live in Paris, they live in New Jersey. To bomb Beirut and to bomb South Lebanon in order to "break" the Hizbollah makes as much sense as bombing the United States once suspected terrorists are located. And such acts are as close to "terrorism" as any acts by Hizbollah. I laugh to think of what the international reaction would have been if in the last year, after one of the Israeli armys frequent incursions into southern Lebanon to "capture" Hizbollah fighters, the impotent Lebanese army had responded by bombing Israeli cities and bridges, by destroying Ben Guiron airport, by killing hundreds of Israeli citizens. Such an act would have universally been called terrorism. Yet Israel's attacks are, at worst, described by the EU, and even by the timid Lebanese prime minister as "disproportionate".

In your country's 1982 invasion of Lebanon 17,500 people were killed. Please, please stop this before we reach anywhere near this number again and set Lebanon, the region, and indeed the world back another 24 years.

Yours Sincerely,

Christopher John Stokes

Girón, Colombia, 2006

Timeline of Important Events, Part III

2006-07-29T15:58:00.000+10:00

NOTE: This is the third time I will write this entry. The first time I was over halfway through when a hit of the backspace key once again mysteriously erased the entire piece. This made me aggrevated but I decided the only thing to rid me of my heartbreak was just to write it again while it was fresh in my mind. The second time I was just about finished, just deciding if I needed another sentence to finish it all off, when my computer just suddenly restarted itself. None of the other computers in the internet place did this - just mine. For reasons which now escape me I had once again not saved the entry. The man behind the counter sort of shrugged and charged me the full amount. I had been in the internet cafe for almost five hours. I went out into the plaza, into the cool air, and just stared at the trees.

I have decided, though, that as this day has already been pretty much given over completely to the internet I will attempt to reproduce this for a third time. After all, Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas wrote a number of the novels in his Petagonia up to five times when his manuscripts they were stolen, seized, lost or destroyed. So, with Reinaldo on my mind I return, and, having eaten a very late meat-based lunch and watched the music video for Hips Don't Lie by Shakira and Wyclef Jean for what is, quite literally, the 70-somethingth time since being in Colombia, I feel refreshed and ready to start again. I must defeat this pincha entry. I will not sleep until this fucker is down.

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At night the town of Barichara is still and completely silent. The sloping streets are streaked in yellow light, the cobblestones small and dark, the houses sit shuttered and proud with their whitewashed walls and red roof tiles. There are almost no vehicles, not even parked on the roadsides. The sandstone cathedral glows orange under floodlight. In the canyon behind the town silent lightning flashes behind low clouds. The sparks of light reveal cats behind rubbish cans, tall crucifix gravestones in the tightly packed cemetary, a duo of young lovers on a park bench in the town plaza.

Ana, Jorge and I are eating Brazilian cashews near one of the smaller churches and we are arguing for and against the existence of elves. We are drinking tap water from a red bulletproof Canadian drink canister with a maple leaf design and a sticker saying "Made in USA". We are imagining ourselves as characters in Hollywood slasher flicks, but what with the darkness and the eerie silence and the lightning and the squeaking of wheeling bats, we have decided actually not to jump over the wall to the cemetary. Instead we approach the open metal gate of the Children's Park. Outside there is a parked motorcycle. We tiptoe into the blackness and we are clutching each other tight and glancing around. Under the rotunda there is a hulking, black silhouette, and Ana's eyes are wide as she breathes "It's a person! Lets GO!". We go, moving like shadows.

Back in the light of the streetlamps Jorge and I have lost our fear of a few moments ago and dismiss any notion that there is any thing dangerous ever in this tiny town. We are talking at full volume now, which makes everything seem less scary. Ana is not convinced, however, and chooses to stay sitting alone by the benches in the alameda. We turn to go, though and she squeaks "mmmMMMMWAAAIT!" and runs to join us. We stop to read the sign on the wall by the gate; "Parque Infantil," it reads, then below it a phrase with missing letters - "R ED R U IO", which gets us talking about The Shining and makes me start growling "redrumredrumredrum!" in a kinda gruff voice. It is at this moment that Ana freezes and goes white and I turn around and see, behind the metal grate in the wall, a man's moustached face, staring silently at us from the darkness. Now, my subsequent reaction is one that I can not justify or explain, even after extensive cross-examination from both Ana and Jorge, and it has become, since, a cause of much humour in our little trio. My reaction was: in shock, to raise both arms up, like an attacking bear or big cat, and to claw the air viciously while yelping, loudly, "REDRUMREDRUMREDRUM!!" at the face of the man, as if trying to exorcise him from the park. There was no thought process to this, and once I registered what I was doing and what he must think I backed away silently while the face disappeared and the man in full appeared at the entrance to the park, startling Jorge who hadn't yet seen the face and was just puzzled about my sudden outburst. "Is something the matter?" the man asked in Spanish, looking suspiciously at his motorbike. Jorge replied, "No Señor, we were just wanting to come into the park but we weren't sure if it was open". "It's always open" he answered, and shrunk back again. We went in, quickly and I avoided the mans gaze but noticed, as we passed ,his girlfriend hidden away in the darkness.

They left, and we played on the see-saw and danced and laughed and encountered a huge millipede. We owned that park, then. But still, we remained giddy with soft fear. Still there were the sounds of bats, still the silent lightning. Still the street lamps mysteriously switching off around us. Still the wind and the quiet emptiness of the stone town. Still, the shadows.

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By day, Barichara is a gentler, kinder place, its ghosts and elves long gone. In the mornings a thick mist hangs through the streets as stores open their wooden doors to sell handicrafts and creamy brown tubs of arequipe. The fresh sun glistens on the cobblestones after the morning rains. Old men in wide cowboy hats lean on slender canes and amble slowly up the hills. The sounds of church bells and the tooting of the minibus horn. School children gathering in the main plaza to flirt and gossip. Smells from the resturants of cooked trout and goat. The cathedral rises bold and splendid. Purple flowers, overhanging the white walls from the courtyards.

One of the mornings we head by bus into the nearby town of San Gil to do some white water rafting. On the walk along the riverside malecon I kick my foot and crack my big toenail into two pieces, which is painful. A lady from the rafting company fixes it up with some disinfectant and a bandaid while we are waiting for our guide. He is late because he ran into the river to avoid the approaching army. The army is currently making a sweep through the town in an attempt to recruit men, and indeed, as we wait here come soldiers on motorcycles, black guns poised and tall, heads turning as they look for any possible candidates. What they are looking for are young, male Colombians - if they ask you must be able to produce, on the spot, evidence that you either have already served in the military or are exempt from doing so, otherwise you will be taken immediately for an interview. Unless you are incredibly lucky you then must front up for intensive training before a lottery to find out where you will be serving for the next year and a half. If you are really unlucky your location will be on the front, in the jungle, fighting and possibly dying in the long battle against the country's everpresent guerilla groups like the FARC and ELN. For this reason we instantly forgive our guide's AWOL status and wait in the sun for him to return.

Which he does, grinning, and we begin our rafting. The rapids are fun and we get wet, but whats really special is everything happening around us. The sky is clear and glowing and the banks are lined with brown willow trees, drooping spectacular. The rocks are dark and jagged, the water murky and brown. There are groups of thin cattle, lazing by the water, there are black vultures hopping, there are swarms of butterflies whipping in mini hurricanes, storming in flashes of white and orange. We float downstream, in and out of the raft, and we listen to the water and the wind and the chirruping, giggling birds.

Timeline of Important Events, part II

2006-07-28T22:57:00.000+10:00

Theres been ten days since the end of camp, when we all assembled in our final circle on the bug infested grass and there were tears and there were proclaimations of love and thanks and sorrow and hope. Surrounding us was the colour green, swirling botantic, fresh and broken only by flecks and patches of colour; the white trunks of the eucalypts, the dirt road, the bright flowers of red and blue. Our chugging hearts, the desperate hugs, this familar scene. All of us, fast inventing futures in our tired minds. The arms were loosened, last wet kisses, and we were on the bus. Away, to Medellin.

Since then the group has been shrinking daily, people being shaved away by buses and aeroplanes, to school and families, from 27 of us to just me. Today, in the multilayered Bucaramanga station I watched as Jorge and Ana's bus backed out into the soft rain, their faces smooshed to the glass, fingers pulled into sideways vees like presenters on the Colombian music television show Cool Play. This is loneliness. It's been three days with just the three of us, three days in the small town of Barichara, but this time seems longer to me than the whole time the camp lasted. It only seemed right that they join me for the rest of it. But now it is only me.

But first, lets backtrack. In Medellin we celebrated the eve of Colombia's independence by dancing with whistles and flags in a large and famed nightclub crammed full of cowboy gear. On the bartops were teams of professional dancers, gorgeous women with elliptical plastic breasts and sparkles on their skin, thick jawed men built like tree trunks, and midgets chucking headstands. After an hours sleep we head southwards, thirteen of us now, to the Zona Cafetera, our minivans hugging the lush hills stacked with coffee plantations. We bathe in thermal springs, our bodies light and soft in the steam and sulfur and the jungled mountains hugging us tight as the afternoon light glows then fades. We hire a mariachi band to perform two tender songs to us under the looming statue of Simon Bolivar in the empty Pereira plaza. At the Parque Nacional del Café (like a coffee themed Disneyland for 6 year olds, without any actual attractions) we form a guerilla organisation, las FACEP (Fuerzas Armadas Contra el Patacon), committed to ridding Colombia of one of its more bland foods, the mashed plantain patty known as Patacon. Jorge accepts my 5000 peso dare to approach patacon stores and announce our groups intentions to overtake them and "take all the patacon hostage," much to the confusion and amusement of the store ladies. One reaches for the money she is counting out and tucks it away, worriedly.

The highlight of the coffee zone, though, is Valle de Cocora, where tropical looking wax palms rise tall out of the thick white cloud which blankets the forest. We take horses along the valley, over gushing streams and vibrant meadows, the hills on either side eerie and beautiful, the cloud spectral and the tall palms emerging slender, like roman candles. The farms end and we are engulfed by jungle, where we dismount and explore a waterfall before trotting back along the valley as the sun disappears and we pile 16 into an open backed jeep back to town. Darkness now, and the fields along the roadside are coated with, literally, millions of fireflies, glittering like static in the black grass.

We took the nightbus to Bogota. We had to choose between companies, and the one we didn't take rolled into the capital behind us with a shattered window. Woah, we said, and Jorge asked a little girl what had happened. It had been a direct bus to Bogota, but a man had wanted to get off along the way. When the bus driver refused the man took the little red hammer and just smashed the emergency window out, which as you might imagine left many passengers pretty cold for the remaining journey over the high passes of the Andes.

When it was just the three of us left we headed northwards again, to San Gil, and to Barichara.

Entry Two

2006-07-28T18:44:00.000+10:00

Entry Two in the "What Chris is Doing In Colombia Over the Next Month" creative writing competition.

by David Parsons of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Chris boards the bus wearing a new shirt: tree-frog green, greyshort-sleeves, and an italicized elephant screen-printed in flat blue above his washboard stomach.

The mall was cool, air-conditioned, made him uncomfortable. His new ranchero hat keeps the sun from his eyes as the sun shines in the window; it reminds him of the mall, and this he does not like. It comes to mind now: why, he wonders, doesn't he like the hat reminding him of the mall? He thinks on it, and begins to like the memory. The small, semi-private internet cubicle at Marión with a keyboard he could hardly navigate for the accents and a photograph of the swiss alps with the word SUISSE in red letters on top; buying Mexican candies in a small Colombian hardware store because the shopkeeper told him, "Son los mejores, mi amigo."

Memory is like that, he realizes, as he watches the others board the bus and lurches as the yellow bus -- "East Mississippi School Bo rd: Bus 14"emblazoned in black on one side, the "a" conspicuously missing -- begins the short ride back to camp. We remember things as we like to. His distaste for the cool consumerism of the mall will metamorph into an appreciation of the differences of pop-culture that come with language and geography changes: he will remember smiling as he heard a deep masculine voice ringing out, "doble-ve doble-ve doble-ve punto coca-cola punto com," as a radio commercial played over the speakers of a clothing store. He will realize that he can't be sure whether things happened as he remembers or whether they may as well have happened because he remembers.

The lush green foliage, the smells of corn and smoke from roadside vendors selling food to people inside noisy buses and trucks, the sound of horns honking and spanish pop-music -- they all seem to float by as his mind weaves them into his story.

Together, here.

2006-07-05T07:51:00.000+10:00

One week into the camp; its shopping day and I'm taking refuge from the big shopping mall in a stationary supply store called Marión which has, as a logo, an elephant that looks like its been italicised. It's the only place here with internet, and so I have dashed here first thing, like some kind of desperate smack addict while most of the rest of the camp eat chorizo or watch the Italy-Germany game or shop for bluejeans.

All goes well so far. Last night was the first serious simulation type game of the Seminar and was themed around prejudice. It involved teams of four or five running between stations manned by people who were not very nice to certain people, especially one guy who was highlighting the issue of women hating by making the girls peel oranges while shouting at them and then forcing me to shove three (minature, granted, but still) oranges into one girls mouth in order to give us the next clue. All agreed it was a good activity, albeit scary and confronting. Yes, I realise this CISV thing sounds weird to those from outside it. That? is because it is weird.

But fun, y'know, too. Our camp site is gorgeous, surrounded in green hills where horses graze and green fireflies speckle in the fruit trees in the black night. Geese slide across lillypadded lakes, which are surrounded by Australian eucalypts and strange pom pom trees which look like monster cheerleaders. By day we run barefoot through the soft grass, kick footballs, smack volleyballs, search for Colombian fruits that you can break open (the insides look like fish eggs) and eat with teaspoons. At night there is a log fire, bottles of beer, salsa music, the loaded massages of young couples on the verge of becoming young lovers. There are 27 of us altogether, and for the first time on one of these seminars (this is my third in 18 months) I really feel like we are one group. There is noone at all that I cannot stand. And, of course, there are individuals within that group who are wonderful, beautiful, inspiring. Jorge from Mexico, always excited and curious about art and politics; the soft and smiling Brazilian Ana, confusing the boys and possibily herself, a monument to all that is great about teenagehood; Sara from Sweden, a gum chewin', tobacco-lipped, headrollin' type of hiphop girl with whom I have developed a secret communication method using English words written in a hybrid Arabic/Persian script (her family is from Iran) with which we compose broken letters about the cute boys at the camp and urging each other to have fun cleaning the bathrooms.

Actually, now it's time I left, the bus is nearly departing and I haven't done my neccessary shopping (deoderant, candy, a ranchero hat if there's time) so I bid you all farewell for now. Greeting from Antioquia, Colombia, and I hope with everything I have that you can all safely say that you, like me, are pretty much at peace.

Entry One

2006-06-26T11:12:00.000+10:00

Entry One in the "What Chris is Doing In Colombia Over the Next Month" creative writing competition.

By Molly Greene, 15, of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Chris rises at dawn, drinks a glass of water and eats some Vegemite. On a rice cracker. He is prepared for a new day at a lovely seminar camp. Unfortunately, he discovers he can't discover or recall where he left his favorite shirt, dyed in the Himalayas by Wiccans in the most delicate shade of saffron. It is the only shirt that matches his parachute pants, the only clean pants he has. "Good grief," he thinks to himself. "Whatever shall I do?" At this moment a water spirit appears in the doorway. "Christopher, matchy-matchy is out, as everyone knows," the water spirit announced. She had long spidery hair carefully clothing her scale-y body and Christopher wondered how a naked water spirit could be advising him regarding style."What are you doing here?" he wondered aloud. "There isn't water for acres." "Ahh, foolish lad," she replied wisely. "The true water is found in the mind." At that moment, Chris knew what had befallen his favorite saffron shirt. "You!" he cried. "You have my shirt." "Nay, nay," she whispered. "The shirt too is found in the mind." Chris, usually a mild soul, began to lose his temper. "Beastly wench," he hissed. "Return my shirt to me immediately.""Only if you answer me one question: Why is the ocean blue?" She looked a thim smugly because surely no one knows why the ocean is blue. However, Christopher knew. "The ocean is blue because it reflects the sky, which is also blue." At that moment the water spirit disappeared, replaced by the saffron shirt, which Chris wore for the duration of the seminar camp and grew to love more and more every single day. The end.

Please send further entries to standardlinedelivery@gmail.com in order to fill the void in posts over the coming months.

One Week Report, Illustrated.

2006-06-25T16:30:00.000+10:00

(Figures 1 and 2: Antony Gormley artwork titled "Asian Field", exhibited at Pier 2/3 as part of the Biennale of Sydney, 2006. Gormley got a village in China to make these critters out of local clay and then assembles them in various galleries around the globe. There are over 180 000 figures in all. The art of setting them up and transporting them is the most impressive part and it was truely one of the most beautiful art pieces I have ever seen.)

(Figure 3: The main Cathedral in Bogotá, with cloudcrested Andean peaks behind it. Bogotá is a city with many pigeons, gracious old churches and girls with big asses in tight jeans. It has this crazy cool transport system which is called Transmilenio, which is like a metro system but with special buses, with their own traffic lanes and stations and it's very cheap and crowded and wonderful.)
(Figure 4. Downtown Bogotá street. Bogotá also has many lovely streets and small children who, very cleverly speak Spanish. Both are present in this illustration. What you can't see is that in Bogotá there are well dressed and altogther finely presented young people dancing well to Latin music in many many swanky nightclubs. It was at one of these such places that I danced next to the famous ex-child actor Carla Giraldo who, years ago, played the title character in the Colombian telenovela "Lolita" and recently posed naked and discussed her bi-sexuality in a mens magazine. She was indeed, kissing girls in said nightclub. I attempted the salsa and didn't do so well.)
(Figure 5: the tips of the mountains that overshadow Bogotá on the eastern side. At least three people told me to use the mountains to keep orientated in Bogotá. So I did. Bogotá is at about 2500 metres above sea level and it is possible to suffer some effects due to the altitude. I didn't, unless you can count the strange and vivid dreams I was having each night, which come to think of it I also had while trekking in Nepal. I've mentioned the Guus dream in a previous entry, but others involved me seeing four people from the upcoming Seminar camp being ripped apart by a bus and also me sucking, briefly, the tongue of a fifteen year old girl and worrying that my breath smelled. Both of these dreams resulted in my waking up and wondering if they were real or not for at least 30 seconds.)

(Figure 6: A cloud above the campsite, in el Retiro, near Medellin. The campsite, which we visited today, is incredibly beautiful, with ponds and geese and green trees everywhere and a cosy house with big windows and a wood fireplace. The nearby town is just as wonderful, with little dim cantinas gathered around a cute main square, packed with old men with moustaches drinking aguardiente and eating chorizo. I'm actually not sure I've ever been to a country so consistantly attractive before in my entire life. Anyway, I leave to the camp site on Monday, so this may be my last entry for some time. Enjoy the rest of the World Cup, readers, and remember me in your autobiographies. All the best. )

Street Art: Bogotá

2006-06-24T03:01:00.000+10:00

2006-06-23T21:13:00.000+10:00

Children at home and abroad.

I have just written the longest blog entry I have ever written. It was about trying to watch the Australia-Croatia game here in Bogota, about the transport system, about my insecurities, about my continuous jetlag and about the crazy dreams I have been having, including one in which Australian socceroos coach Guus Hiddink was attacked, on field, by a guide dog which ravaged his right ankle.

I had just finished it, and tried to use the backspace bar to erase one letter and for some reason it erased the whole thing. I had been writing for one hour and a half and it was a good entry, I think. My efforts to get it back were fruitless.

I must go now, but I'll end this heartbreaking entry by saying that I will not, after all, have internet access at the camp, which begins next week. As a result, don't expect too much from this motherfucking blog.

You are, however, warmly invited to send, by email (standardlinedelivery@gmail.com) your own fictional accounts of what you imagine I might be up to, at the camp, or just freely wandering the verdant forests of Colombia. All submissions will be published.

Excuse me while I go stand in front of a bus.

One Fork in the Path.

2006-06-19T15:17:00.000+10:00

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.
- Jorge Luis Borges

On the outskirts of Buenos Aires, beside the autopistas which run between the city centre and the Ministropistarmi airport, where the green commons are lined with leafless trees of early winter, where streams trickle in shy gullies, an old man has balanced his bike on the trunk of an elm while he stoops to collect firewood. Above him in the branches, as in a number of other trees in nearby fields, an abandoned kite hangs tangled, its long colourful tail lashing slowly in the wind. Its an overcast sky, thick and low. The man moves slowly on the grass, ties bundles of sticks to the frame of his bike. There are small birds above the telegraph wires. The sound of tyres of damp roads.

Downtown, the cobbled streets of el barrio San Telmo are peppered with porteños - amourous couples tightly held, students in scarves and sweaters, tired eyed beggars with infants wrapped close, Argentine women with carefully constructed hairstyles. It's Sunday, and Plaza Dorrego is crammed full with a labyrinth of stalls, selling antique candlesticks, timepieces, binoculars, hats and old photographs stuffed in metal tins. Groups gather and grin around the street performers. Here is a leotarded contortionist, here a puppeteer. Here, old men in brimmed hats are playing piano accordion, here couples dance the tango. And the old women, wild haired and with smudged lipstick, whose attraction is just that they are mad, and who bang out rhythms on deoderant lids or tango with stuffed toys. All attract crowds. Then the smell from the resturaunts, of thick, juicy beef steak, of fried potatoes, of chorizo. And, as darkness approaches the people slowly leak downwards, into the tiled subte stations, another labyrinth, musty and echoing, once grand.

A List Upon Departure (for Marty)

2006-06-16T01:11:00.000+10:00

Ladies, fellas, it's been a little while. I apologise.
Right now it's two and a half hours until my plane leaves Perth for Sydney, where I will, for two days, run around and look at art with an ex-girlfriend/ lounge in front of the World Cup with an ex-housemate before onwards travelling towards Buenos Aries, and Bogota and then to Medellin. I will be away for two months in all. There is a plan to write on this blog a number of times weekly. Thats a lot more than I have been writing on it recently.

Colombia. Col-om-bia. Mmmmm. chk chk. Colombia.

Partial list of items packed for the trip:

1 x silk inner sheet
2 x books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1 x book by Jorge Luis Borges
1 x power adaptor
1 x inflatable kangaroo
1 x Australian passport
1 x Yellow Fever Vacination Certificate
2 x mousepads with naked beach girls on them, with the words "AUSSIE BABES - AUSTRALIA"
1 x Triceritops iPod case, with iPod.
1 x box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, in the shape of koalas.
1 x Jordanian kefiyah
16 x Temazepam sleeping pills.
1 x brand new notebook
2 x protective combination padlocks
3 x packets of Timtams, part of a present I am delivering on behalf of a Colombian au pair who looks after a girl at my afterschool care centre, to her family and boyfriend in Medellin.
1 x book belonging to Nick Tapper called "Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish".
Probably too many jumpers.

For the record: this is probably my most hesitant departure ever. Because? I have reasons.

Lived in Parks, Lived in the Night Air.

2006-05-22T01:26:00.000+10:00

Tonight is Sunday night and if I could choose anything I would be sitting, legs tucked up, in a dark movie theatre watching some French film with Katie's head nustled perfectly into my neck, eating a tub of expensive vanilla icecream with a cold, clean spoon; instead I am at work, at the bookstore. Listening to Wolf Parade, rubbing my scalp, practising Mexican slang (chinga tu madre, cabron!), fielding blank questions from the wasteland minds of customers. I have a new hat - its about as good a replacement for my old favourite hat (lost in the shadows of Masada, by the Dead Sea, in Israel) as I will ever likely find, and in terms of this criteria scores an 8.5/10. There's the chilled air coming from the door. There's Oreo Wafersticks. There's dilapidated shelves, attacked by the hands of browsers (hands holding icecreams, hands holding hands), ready and waiting for me to come and tidy and straighten and replenish. My lips are chapped (the nights are long and warm and dark). I stand in the doorway, leaning onto the frame as I imagine old Turkish rug salesmen and old French Tabac owners and old African American barbers doing outside of their own stores, waiting for sales, gazing outwards at the passing by. Across the street from the bookstore is Oxford 130, a cafe which would have to be reconstructed as a set in a soundstage in the tv adaptation of my life, were there one. The chinking of glasses, the rev of engines. You know, this afternoon we were in the park and this whole group of Sudanese kids ran past flying a kite, a plastic yellow hawk on a string. It tugged and weaved between the branches of the trees. We lay there on the edge of the dappled sunlight, watching these kids, with their white teeth, and matching haircuts and fast legs skipping and tripping. I babbled about Middle Eastern history and Katie listened carefully and intently despite the serious pain in her muscles from six hours worth of dance audition. A nearby kookaburra ate the scraps of a bread roll. All around the lake there were people clustered in groups, walking dogs, cooking sausages, limbs akimbo on picnic rugs. We lay together and her eyes were wide and her hair was shimmering and her fingertips were soft and her heartbeat slow and steady and the sky was gentle and cloudless and my clothes all fit comfortably and everything was right, all right. All right?

For Jenny Fried

2006-05-05T10:59:00.000+10:00

Sunrise from my balcony, Friday 5 May 2006

just three more photos from Philippines

2006-05-05T08:30:00.000+10:00

So, it was pointed out to me how remiss it was of me to have missed, in my previous photo sprawl, two specific people from the Philippines, Tita Riya and Tita Tessa, both of whom are beautiful and wonderful and definitely worthy of inclusion on this website.

Tessa with Randii

Tita Riya

during this weird crying/laughing fit they were having while I was trying to check my email

I really hope this is to your satisfaction Titas.

The Dining Room at Dusk

2006-05-03T21:33:00.000+10:00

At the doorway the buffet tables stretch out like wings, weighty with dishes of meat bits.
The others are seated in pods under the yellow lights.
The sky outside is singing in pinks and oranges.
The trees hum along, light green, soft, glowing.
There is already no empty seat next to you.
The staff wear bowties and say sir and carry bright orange glasses of Fanta which here in the Philippines is called "Royal".
The birds ride the updrafts.
On the basketball court the Japanese are dancing in a staggered formation. They are below a streetlamp, their thin arms catch the light as they jump, windmill, flick. I watch them from the tinted glass of the window.
I was expecting, falsely it seems, to find young kids in love.
But there is something else, something better.
There are coloured paper flags on a plastic string.
There are the eyes, sparkling during kiitos.
There is you, over there, laughing as you slurp your soup.
There is tomorrow.
There is tomorrow.

What Good Looking People Look Like

2006-04-30T03:20:00.000+10:00

I realise this bunch of photos are likely not so interesting to most outside of CISV. This, however, is about as accurate a representation of my time in and around Manilla as you could get. Basically, you understand, the entire purpose and pleasure of my trip to the Philippines came down to the people I was with for the two weeks. There were slightly over a hundred of us at APRW and JASPARC, but when you count people at the Mosaic workshop too, and all the Philippines chapter people I met outside of the two workshops combined, I probably met and spent time with about 150 new, extremely quality people in the two weeks that I was there. Here is a tiny sample of the 800 or so photos I took of faces and crowds, mostly during some of the many (many) photo snapping sessions we in the Asia Pacific region are becoming more than famous for ...

Anna, JP and I. These two were on my 2002 village in Norway when they were 11. Such a massive delight to see them again.

with Anna.

with JP.

Kat with a bubble.

with Rica.

Hana (Egypt) and Ica (Philippines)

with Astrid (Denmark)

with Shinpei (Japan)

Marika (Japan)

with Mitzi.

Jollibee Number One Fanclub: Yasumi, me, Yumin.

with Bebbe (Sweden)

Pilar guesses How Many Choconuts.

Randii and J.A. sing karaoke.

Hana and Tiiram take the mic.

the handsome Juanca (Colombia), surrounded by admiring Filipina women

with Donna.

Jollibee

2006-04-26T19:36:00.000+10:00

There is a fast food joint in Philippines called Jollibee, which is more popular here than McDonalds. It is also everywhere; in small cities Jollibee exclaims from bus stops "Keep T_____ clean", massive signs loom over elevated highways, and resturaunts are crammed full of blank-eyed customers. I made it my mission, in the early days of my Philippines stay, to try and take a photo of every Jollibee we passed, and every reference to Jollibee I saw. Often this was from car windows and I now have a large collection of blurry signs photos and napkins that people have given me. I only ate Jollibee once, and it wasn't very good. But, anyway, here are some of the photos:

Just remember, kids: Jollibee is not a bee... he is your friend.

three photos of lakes and two taken from a car

2006-04-26T19:24:00.000+10:00

Scenery from my first few days in the Philippines.

Isang Puti Sa Pilipinas (On Holy Week, With Whippings).

2006-04-21T22:17:00.000+10:00

I am here in the Philippines for the CISV Asia Pacific Regional Workshop/Junior Asia Pacific Regional Conference. Together with a Swede named Bebbe I am training Japanese, Filipinas, Indonesians, Koreans and Thais to be staff in a Seminar Camp. In spare moments I am encouraging as much dancing, human-pyramid building and teenage hook-ups as possible. I am hanging with kids I haven't seen since they were eleven, in Norway four years ago. I am sharing a room with a moonfaced Chinese guy called Terry. There are about a hundred of us in all. We play basketball at dusk and sing songs about the deliberate arson of superhero residences. The mood is rosey and confident and bright. We are on the edge of a volcano inside whose crater is a lake, in the middle of which is another mini volcano, inside of which is another mini volcano - a volcanic Russian doll. Filipinos smile and laugh a lot, and speak all cute like Americans with a special interest in diphthongs. I would build beautiful gardens in honour of a great number of them. Yes, oh, yes: this is a lovely place to be.

Before the conference there were days on a lake, warm days with dragonflies and Japanese laughter. On the edge of lake we slept in a tent, albeit the type of tent with electric lights and as big as apartments I have lived in. The day before was Good Friday, when, in a nearby province which, much to my disappointment, I could not reach, a number of men followed the annual Filipino tradition of being nailed to crosses in tribute to big JC. Big news this year involved the Scottish guy who attempted to be the second ever non-Filipino to take part in the cruxifiction but, after having carried his cross two kilometres to the makeshift Golgotha, and having watched the pained faces of the other wannabe Christs, broke down and cried and said he could not do it. He was booed and pelted with fruit.

In other areas of the country, citizens were flagelating themselves with spiked whips.

In the old Spanish city of Intramuros the people sold cotton candy and long balloons and assembled to complete the twelve stations of the cross and to kiss the toes of the statues of Christ. The stone walls and cobble roads glowed in the lantern light. We ate halo halo, some weird Filipino muck involving ice and milk and toasted popped rice and jackfruit and coconut meat and sweet yam and flan and shreds of sweetened plantain and motherfucking mungbeans and sometimes, if you're lucky, icecream. It gets my weird food award, hands down.

Hey, it turns out that if I bemoan things on my blog then events seem to be changing for the good shortly afterwards. ie: I sobbed about kidnapped activists - shortly afterwards the survivors were rescued. I got sad about the schisming of young Katie Moore and myself - voila, she is back in Australia and will be beating me back to Perth. Having this sort of power can really go to a cracker's head. I'm thinking of just starting to bitch about everything thats messed up in this world and cross my fingers.

No, you're perfect.

Quick Administrative Notes

2006-04-13T12:09:00.000+10:00

1. Later today I will be going to the Philippines for a couple of weeks. I plan to update more frequently than I have been in recent times. You might even get photos.
2. I have a new blog, in addition to this one, but I haven't really updated it yet since the first night I made it, so we'll see if it ever actually comes to anything. Its called the Chimerical Clam-Bake (regretably) and its meant to just be a collection of linkage to things that capture my attention for short periods of time. Please email me suggestions.
3. If you borrow someones bike to go to the service station to buy Ginger Beer before a game of Scattegories don't forget to put it back inside the house before you sit down to play, because otherwise it will probably get stolen later on and you'll have to give your friend $400 for a new bike.
4. Recently enjoyed:
{film} Paradise Now (2005)
{book} The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil - George Saunders
{comic} Acme Novelty Library 15 - Chris Ware
{food} sushi from Taka in Shafto Lane
{concert} Sigur Ros at Perth Concert Hall
{person} Katie Moore
{phrase} "lemon squinty"
{article} "My Crowd" by Bill Wasik (from Harpers Magazine)
{juice} guava nectar
{customer} Hollie Raymond
{Perth band} Institute Polaire
{teen slang} "totally H.K." (abbrev.=Hard Kore)
{arabic word} "shebab" (def: youth)
{pen} Faber-Castell PITT artist pen, small, light brown

three weeks

2006-04-13T02:28:00.000+10:00

1.
20th March
Out there is a thick gash of dark glowing green, laid out under the black curve of the sky. On the pier, men stand with fishing rods and buckets and swap slow stories with sudden endings. Above our heads, the bugs spin and whiz, collecting gleam from the floodlights which spill across the fields of white sand - "sort of like it's a whole constellation shooting out of control" you say (or something like that; my memory only allows paraphrases).
We arrange ourselves to stop grains from getting in our hair, on our scalps.

The kissing is quiet, and beautiful, and broken with words.

2.
7th April
That was three weeks ago, almost.
So I let myself abandon my defences and my fear and reservations and I let myself descend, again, into the weeks of soft air and tensely packed hearts. Nights smell like vanilla and tomorrow is always looming, and so we lie there, tucked close, refusing to turn over to the dawn. The cats are leaping at the door. There is wind in the eucalypts. There is anxiety, yes, but there is also relief inside of us, and it leaks out of our eyes, owl eyes, squirrel eyes, and wraps itself around our bodies, glowly warmly, set firmly in stone. The windy mornings become bright afternoons which become nights trapped and cold and still. I hold your hair, soft and thin, grasp your tiny shoulders, feel your breath. The world is calm. Your voice is small and the leaves are blowing and the candle flicks and the cats are gone. There is a language of lost words seeking refuge from stunned hearts. Then it's dark and silent, and for now, at least, you and I are here.

3.
12th April
When you go there is a dull clash inside of me like the sound of a 40 gallon drum being dropped a kilometre or so away. This is everything familiar and I'm imagining as though its lines I've been delivering in scenes I've been playing for years, to different crowds. But then we're out on stage and the whole thing seems strange and I can't pick why but then I realise its a different set altogether, a different stage, and now you're uttering different lines and I start to panic; this wasn't meant to go like this. You look up, out of the top of your eyes, and you speak, and I realise, fully. This is completely something else.

And I wasn't expecting water.

When you go I really stand there a few moments waiting for you to come back. Its only moments, but in that time I really believe that it will happen. I have never stood there like that before.

When you go, I walk outside and the cold autumn air echoes around the airport carpark. The air is vibrating more and more and it pops into a vacuum, a silent emptiness. Inside the car I am finding it hard to breathe.

Come back one day soon, please Katie, to dance above this grass.

Why I Am Crying

2006-03-15T03:17:00.000+11:00

Tom Fox at an anti-wall demonstration in Palestine

I have just found out that less than a week ago the body of Tom Fox, a human rights activist from Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) was found in a garbage heap in west Baghdad. Tom was kidnapped in Iraq in November 2005 along with three other CPT activists; Harmeet Sooden, Jim Loney and Norman Kember. A previously unknown group calling themselves the Swords of Righteousness Brigade claimed responsibility for the kidnappings. I did not know Tom, or any of the three other men personally, but both Jim and Harmeet are friends of very close friends of mine, friends who have been hurting and hoping and working hard for their release over the last four months. The work that these four men were doing in Iraq was very similar to the work I myself was doing in Palestine last year, and most of them have also been very involved with both CPT and the International Solidarity Movement in the olive fields, villages, camps and cities of Palestine.

The peoples of Palestine and Iraq, trapped by violent and oppressive foreign occupations and by misguided and weak leadership continue to struggle daily for their lives, their freedoms and for their basic human rights. Theirs is a seemingly hopeless situation, as everything around them is torn apart again and again and as violence and death becomes synonymous with living. But it is men like Tom who do bring hope to individuals and to communities, who do work hard to foster and build and promote this hope, who do see a future without bloodshed. Tom and the other three activists acted through their opposition to occupation, through their commitment to non-violence and through their faith in love, and have helped pave the path, in whatever small way they could, towards a better future.

We anxiously wait in hope for the safe release of Jim, Norman and Harmeet, and send our prayers and thoughts to their friends and family, as well as, of course, to those who knew and loved Tom. Please, too, join the voices of activists and human rights workers worldwide on behalf of those who suffer, be it under occupation or by one's own government. It is only through hopefully one day bringing freedom and peace to others that we ourselves will find solace and relief.

Here is an excerpt from a piece, entitled "Why Are We Here?", written by Tom the day before he was kidnapped:

It seems as if the first step down the road to violence is taken when I dehumanize a person. That violence might stay within my thoughts or find its way into the outer world and become expressed verbally, psychologically, structurally or physically. As soon as I rob a fellow human being of his or her humanity by sticking a dehumanizing label on them, I begin the process that can have, as an end result, torture, injury and death.

"Why are we here?" We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God's children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.

Tom kept a blog which can be read here: http://waitinginthelight.blogspot.com/
Please, please consider reading it.

Christian Peacemaker Teams: http://www.cpt.org
Electronic Iraq: http://www.electroniciraq.net

Nay, Tis Not Death.

2006-03-14T02:11:00.000+11:00

Oh, boy: Life is so still.

Regardless, recently:

The closest thing I have had to a friendship group of late has effectively exploded in a blinding flash, and littered the surrounding countryside with splinters of flesh. Resultingly, I foresee many nights of housebound solo fun. From my little bright box in suburbia I plan to, over the coming weeks, watch the entire back catalogue of Spike Lee, drink much Passiona and read Vollmann until my brain buckles.
With the kids at work I am making an Afterschool Care version of Monopoly, which will involve buying such things as "the toilet", "the tree house", "the trampoline" and "the computer room", on which you may, if wily enough, build cubbys on to attract more money from other players. In Jail will be "Wash The Dishes" and the utilities will be the leaf blower and the toasted sandwich maker. Chance cards will involve different afternoon tea scenarios. My main co-creators are the brother and sister duo Radomir (Asturius Cobryn-Koletti) and Jadviga (Asturia Hepatia Cobryn-Koletti) who have this way of referring to their favourite play leaders which is to call them their "local". I am (hopefully still) Radomir's local playleader, but Jadviga only allows female playleaders into her circle of locals. Both of them have tubby red cheeks and awesome glints in their eyes.
I have been reading the Robert Fisk book and would like to declare Israel's policy of helping supply Iran with arms during the Iran-Iraq war to be one of the most unbelieveably strange concepts I've come across in a while, one which I am completely struggling to get my head around.
I visited Keith and Lottie and bought a shirt with the owl and the pussycat on it, along with some strange ghosty men playing horn instruments. It's my new favourite thing to wear except for my kefiyah, which is my really real favourite thing to wear.
There are about six people at the moment that I like spending time around specifically because I find them attractive and hope they feel the same, or similar, about me. I have no desire, on the other hand, to engage in serious relations with any of them. It's a strange feeling, making me feel filled with wonderful strength, but also sort of hopelessly pointless.
I'm still mostly listening to the Hold Steady every time I drive, except for when I listen to a Spanish phrase-learning cd which has great music between the lessons that sounds like the most awesome parts of Calexico. I'm up to "Lesson Three - Still at the Hotel".
Events at Rottnest island last weekend: (1) someone stole our crayfish, from right outta the pots, (2) The covers band at the pub played Khe Sahn and the night was so windless we could hear it right over the other side of Thompson's Bay while we played Carcassonne on the back table and out the front the green was swarmed with the black silhouettes of quokkas, collecting their like a ghostly militia, (3) we bumped into jazz guitarist Pat Methany on a secluded beach.
I am thinking I may need to change a couple of things about my life as soon as is possible.

Oh and for the information of all non-Australians, a pictoral glossary:

QUOKKA

PASSIONA

CUBBY

CARCASSONNE
(this has nothing to do with Australia)

CRAYFISH

KHE SAHN

Nights, Ghosts, Nigerians

2006-03-10T15:44:00.000+11:00

At night I sit naked in bed and listen to John Coltrane while eating toasted cheeseys and reading about the Iran-Iraq war. The night air squats warm and still and my posters, which are mostly old maps bought at Save-the-Children-Fund booksales, peel away from the wall and faint to the floor. The cheese doesn't taste like I remember it tasting on childhood cheeseys. I think I've lost some skill in cheesey-making over the years. My feet reach for the cold depths of the sheets. Cottesloe is completely silent, except for the dull rush of cars flashing alongside the trainline. The trains finished runnning an hour ago.

My friend Marty lives next to Hyde Park, and it turns out his house is haunted. I wish this was my story to tell you all, but really its not. It's just me recounting a story. Basically: over the last couple of months there have been the most crazy things happening to and in this house. It started with attacks of eggs and rocks at the front windows, followed by things placed on the window sill - a mushroom with "XXX" written on the top and "j" on the base of the stem for example. Then there were black X's written on window panes... some of them would even appear while they were home, in the rooms with the marked windows themselves. Then, on a back window the words "NO NEXT WEEK" appeared. And then months passed without incident.
A few weeks ago, more eggs, including one coming from over the top of the house and hitting the street, while they stood there. They ran through the house, but there was noone to be found. Then: a bullet shell on the window sill. And a few weeks later there was another. And then the voices.
Last week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights there was a voice, which repeated every half hour or so, in different volumes and from what seemed like different places in the house (but it was definitely coming from within the house). The voice is a woman's, sounds desperate, and says "I want to talk to you". All three housemates (and Courtney from Australian Idol who is a friend of Dan's) have all heard it a number of times, from different rooms. The voice sounds distorted or static, as though it is coming from a tv or a recording device. The housemates are, understandably, pretty scared.
Oh, and on Saturday morning? A ring of salt appeared on Dan's floor, within a three hour period in which no one was in the house. The ring was about the diameter of a lemon, according to Marty, and piled one inch high. There have been no more events of this nature since Saturday.
Obviously we are all are very unsure what to believe, or what to expect from here on.

I end this post with a hilarious and lovely message I got this morning on a popular "online community" that I am guilty of belonging to. According to her profile she is Nigerian. I don't quite know what I liked about this message so much, other than the obvious delight in her choice of words. It's nice because pretty much ever unsolicited message I have ever got on this site has been generated by a robot/computer named "Jenifer" telling me how lonely they are and how I should check out their sexy photos on site "x". And every email I have ever got from Nigeria has asked me to send my bank details to help transfer vast sums of money out of the country. So, assuming there is no junkiness involved in the communique below, it makes for a pleasant change, and is sweet, I think, in its simplicity. And because I imagine Rose to be a 40 year old christian Nigerian woman in a floral dress. I recommend you imagine the same:

Hello Chris
how u doin,...i hope u are havin lovely day out there?Well i got to check ur profile out ,..and i did love it,.ok.
Rose is d name,it will be my pleasure getting to have an wholesome chat with u anytime,..u seem priviledged.Here is my chat ids smilingrose10@hotmail.com,ulookhoney@yahoo.com.
And lets i forget to say that"u have a very lovely picture" on [online community].
i'll be waiting to read from u soon.
urs Rose

Gettin' nerdy about Seperation Sunday

2006-03-02T17:45:00.000+11:00

These days I live with my parents, in a big modern house in Cottesloe, which is near the beach, close-ish to Fremantle. Every day, pretty much without fail, I drive at least once to and from the 'inner-city' area where traditionally I live, where my friends live, where the bookstore is and where the venues I frequent are. In the middle of the night, when there are no cars on the road, this takes me about 20 minutes, this drive. In the afternoon, when mothers in shiny gas-guzzlers are picking up their darlings from school, it can take me close to 40 minutes. Basically, I am spending more time driving these days than I ever have before.

In my car for the last couple of weeks I have been listening to very little else but one album, which I borrowed from Jackson and which I have come to know intimately, and to love, greatly. The album is Seperation Sunday by The Hold Steady. There hasn't been a record which has featured so strongly in my life in recent history. It is crucial, you understand.

Nick says it sounds like bad 90s rock, like Everclear. He begs me to turn it off. I often do, because I am a fantastic guy, and I understand where he's coming from, in a way. But as soon as he's out of the car, it's on again.

One of the very great things about it, perhaps the very greatest thing, is the way the songs all weave together, stacked as they are with shared images and themes, with recurring characters and settings. The album itself cannot possibly be seen merely as a collection of songs, but as a whole document, a portrait of a scene. Its a literary work about religion and addiction and being down and out in Minneapolis. It's huge and sprawling and beautiful.

Today I sat and tried to map out all the songs and their contents. This is one of the most useless things I have ever done and was harder than I thought it would be, but for your interest (or despite your lack thereof) I have included, below, a list:

Number of songs on Seperation Sunday, out of 11, which obviously deal with drug use, dealing, addiction or rehab: 9
Number which mention bible stories or Christianity: 10
Number which mention skaters, hoodrats or punks: 5 +
Number which refer to being "born again" or to a resurrection: 5
Number which refer to saints (Saint Theresa, Saint Barbara etc), or to the US city Saint Paul: 4
Number in which a drug dealer named Charlemagne is a character: 2
Number in which Holly (short for Halleluilah) is named as a character: 5
Number of songs which I think are actually about Holly, if you consider that Holly is actually the often mentioned hoodrat friend: 9 to 11
Number which mention the Mississippi River, or camps which are on its banks: 3

et cetera.

I love this band, you see.
Ah, you know what? Just ignore me, and this post completely.

www.theholdsteady.com

black and white pictures of (and 10 observations about) the 6 authors who i am reading books by at the moment

2006-02-23T22:20:00.000+11:00

Observations:

Half of them are wearing glasses.
Three of them are British, two are American, one is Japanese
Two of them are dead, four of them are not.
All six of them are men.
Only one of them committed ritual suicide by cutting open his belly after a failed coup attempt.
Only one of them kidnapped a Thai child prostitute, bought her off her father and put her in a home and school.
Both of the Americans won the National Book Award.
Only one of them was badly beaten by an angry mob in Afghanistan, although another of them did go to Afghanistan when he finished college to try and volunteer with the Mujahideen in the war against the Russians.
Two of them are journalists, one of them writes children's books and four of them write novels.
I have met only one of them.

(robert fisk, yukio mishima, david mitchell, william gaddis, william t. vollmann, philip pullman)

piedras que el cardo seco morderia escupiendo

2006-02-17T23:15:00.000+11:00

I saw you standing in Fritz-Foerster Platz. Your skin pale, your coat with clusters of badges. I saw the effort you had made, and I saw you smile, broadly. There were sparrows and there were crisp snowbanks over your shoulder. I saw you there and you were laughing with some boy who wasn't German but he might have been French. Or he might have been German after all, I don't know. I saw you lick your lips to save them a little from the dry winds. I could see your breath. Your laugh carried out all the way across the shadows of the buildings, cast on rough angles by the 4 o'clock light.

But we both know life aint as peachy as that little scene.

And that too much thinking can make you leak fear.
And that you're always breathing too fast, gettin' pent and gettin' wounded.

But, then, also: that you can't own situations, or people, or moments or hearts.
And that you gotta dance to the music thats playing, and just forget about that other show in that other bar.
Especially when that show is the same old band, playing the same fucking songs to the same old drunks in black jeans.
And when you've got absolutely everything you'd ever need to kick it.

Bookshop stories

2006-02-15T19:11:00.000+11:00

1. A difference of opinion =

Australian Member of Parliament Danna Vale, Tuesday 14th February, 2006 - "[Australians] are almost aborting ourselves out of existence... Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years' time"

Customer at Oxford Street Books, Wednesday 15th February, 2006 - "Oh my God, SO many people are having babies these days, there's babies everywhere, don't you reckon?"

2. Way I was described by my friend Simon's mum when he asked her who was working at the bookshop today: "Turkish looking guy, about 30 years old"

3. Number of famous celebrities who came into the bookshop today: 0.

Six Maps

2006-02-03T23:07:00.000+11:00

From the book The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, the attached cd rom of which contains all the maps "for design purposes", and which I am totally excited about pirating.

Hooray!

Standard / Song

2006-02-01T23:02:00.001+11:00

Suddenly it is Feburary.
The city is still swept in wind. He is looking from the balcony outside his room, across the suburbs and the river, across the thick spread of box trees and jacarandas, to the city, the five visable skyscrapers bared like baby teeth.

The school holidays are over and so he is no longer working full-time. He has been unpacking boxes full of books, and filled the shelves with their glorious spines. He is reading again, in the bedroom which is usually his mother's study, the bedspread pooled with late afternoon sunlight. The house is big and tall and empty, his parents away down south. He remembers that he has been forgetting to feed the fish, and is glad that they are still alive. He puts off going to bed for so long, to make the day stretch out, to just keep on continuing, until he can't take it anymore and slides into the cold depths of the bed, and his back sighs in relief and he wonders why he didn't just do this earlier, it feels so good. He cooks with store-bought sauces. He rides. He drives, with too much engine-rev in each start up. There are platinum blonde girls with big sunglasses sitting like dark moons over their eyes, alone, in cars behind or beside him. They are everywhere, these girls. There are plans being made and unmade. The plans include putting off the masters degree (with it's unweildy seminar times) and making the most of wide roads and young minds. There will be free airflights to the Philippines, for a week-long workshop in April, and Colombia and the United States in July. There, there will be a roadtrip, involving at least four states, and he has already bought a map, each state a spill of pastel colour hatched and crammed with roads and small towns. His finger marks the route, and makes deviations and extentions, into Canada, into the regions of Ohio with nothing but plantations of buckwheat and soy. He knows he cannot afford these extra segments, that they are impossible, but his finger and his mind won't stop.

But there must be more than all this. There just must. He knows this: that to let a whole year be washed away with the need to "find ones feet" and to let it be engulfed by the approach and then the memory of a few months in the Americas, especially a year right now, a year of comparitive youth, a year he will never in the slightest way get back, that, he knows, would be an unforgivable crime. And so it is this gap, this flirtatious emptiness which finds itself draped before him, this annual canvas - this wonderful year - this, he realises, must become both his standard and his song.

Recrudescence

2006-01-18T21:13:00.000+11:00

I am back in my hometown of Perth, Western Australia. It's a January that is sometimes quite muggy, sometimes rather warm and occasionally rather wet. I am eating irregularly and although I have been back for ten days and am living about three minutes walk from the beach I have not yet, in fact, visited the beach. What I am doing, mostly, is working at the UWA out-of-school-care centre, where I am now entering my ninth year of employment. Today was skate boarding day and we were blessed to get through using only six ice compression packs. I am also working, again, at the wonderful little bookstore in Oxford Street, rendering me economically stable, warmly happy, and well stocked with reading matter.

I recently played three on three basketball in the park against three Aboriginal guys from near Karatha. I was not wearing any shoes, and developed black blisters on my big toes which made it hard to walk for a little bit. I recently found out that the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh are run by a Japanese company who increased entry fees by 500%, started charging Cambodians to pay respects to their own massacred family members and who pay a rather tiny annual amount of money to the Cambodian government in return. I recently danced, enthusiastically, at the Amplifier bar, which is often called "the Muff" by a certain constellation of people, but which Stephen delightfully renamed "the Mump". I recently discovered I would be going to the city of Medellin in Colombia in July to direct another Seminar Camp, an offer which originally caused me internal conflict but which I am now already getting excited about. I will hereby be aiming to touch up my Spanish for the occasion. I also recently decided I want to go hunting one day. In fact here is a little list of impromtu abstract goals for two thousand and six.

1. Don't return from Colombia broke and/or in debt.
2. Spanish.
3. Arabic.
4. Defeat ingrained Mageirocophobia (fear of cooking).
5. Dance frequently.
6. Write even more frequently.
7. Continue maintaining blog.
8. Go hunting.
9. Witness the complete withdrawal of all Israeli troops and settlements from the West Bank and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
10. Finish reading The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollmann and History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, the three bookmarked and unfinished copies of which combine to take up almost a full shelf of my shelving unit.
11. Warmth.

I am communicatable most of the time (when I am not in the shower, in the cinema, or engaged in some sort of child-care related activity which may put my phone at risk, eg: watersliding, skating, brawling, etc) on the following digit sequence: +61 415 491 084. If you're in Australia, of course, you can simply remove the +61 and stick a 0 on the front, and it'll work just the same.

I am actually working in the bookstore right now, and this is a quote I just heard:
"You can ask K____ all about it, she's a Muslim, yeah, well, she's from Bali so she's really a Hindu, but she married a Muslim so now she's a Muslim too. So she'll know. She can tell you all about... Muslimism? Is that a word? Muslimism?"
Oh, welcome back to Australia, Chris.

These final, hell-like days.

2006-01-05T22:44:00.000+11:00

So, The IPP is over, we're back in Phuket awaiting flights, and 20 days later the jury decision still stands:
Patong beach really is the most vile place on earth.

I'm home in three days y'all.
Alhamdulillah.

Threnody for a frustration

2006-01-01T20:13:00.000+11:00

Apologies are due for last post's melodramatic explosion of moaning and hypothetical self-injury. Things were really quite messed up there, for a while, for a whole variety of reasons ranging far beyond the purposelessness of teaching to a class which already had a teacher.

You caught me at a flashpoint of my distress, and I'm sorry if the resulting discharge happened to get any of your clothes dirty.
I am, however, extremely happy to announce a turn around in the camp feeling, the direction of our energy, the focus of our projects, and my general mood towards being here, in this place, with these people.

A few nights ago various frustrations were spilled in a relatively tense 'evaluation' time when we found out that the staff didn't see why the scheduled evaluation (the project's first) was necessary as "the programme is all worked out now anyway, and we're having one at the end, so why should we do it twice, etc". It was when we carefully explained that our evaluations may involve topics beyond the actual things we have been doing (like how people are considering cultural difference and the emotions of others, how we address the very concept of development, how we are working as a group, whether we are listening to or consulting each other etc), and that we might like to do an evaluation that could actually be useful to us as delegates here and now, rather than to the chapter, International Office, etc, the staff nodding along, before seemingly revealing that they hadn't heard a single word we'd said and were absolutely unable to take constructive criticism, so much so that one of them put on a 'funny' voice to read Kate's evaluation about the staffs lack of concensus among the participant group - that was when we kind of went crazy in a red faced, heavy-heart beat type way, and talked about a whole lot of things, and shook it all up a little, and probably didn't get through at all to the staffs, but at least vented a bit, and discussed how we really felt for the first time, and just lifted the kettle for a while, really, I guess.

And then, immediately afterwards I just felt so full of energy and excitement and so did others, and we ran down to the moonless beachfront and cartwheeled and yelled our tension away and discovered phospherescent flecks of plankton on the tide line, little granules glowing radiation-green in the black night, and scuffed our hands and feet through the sand to see it flash like tiny sparks of fire as it was uncovered, like the precious stones of faeries. At this moment, I, for one, felt more alive than I have in weeks and weeks. To overflow with tightly packed frustration is a superbly wonderful thing.

Other things which I have since experienced and greatly enjoyed:

Straight after the glow-in-the-dark plankton I went back and had a lovely and long translated conversation with Yuka, Soto and Yasu from Japan, who are my favourite delegation, until 2.30am. This was very special to me because Soto and Yasu are significantly less good at English than the rest of the participants, and are pretty much always just overlooked when it comes to our greatly discussion-based program, and left to sit in the corners with their pocket dictionary computers trying to pick out as many words as possible as we all shoot back and forth with statements pretty much drenched in rhetoric and repetition. I don't think anyone so far has really taken the time to ask what the Japanese guys are really thinking or feeling, and it was great to just chat a little, and gossip, and talk about our respective cultural differences in relation to conflict, etc, and to know that they were appreciating it as much as I was.
The following day was the 30th and we began a two day minicamp with about 25 children from the Morgan village of Tub Tawan, many of whom lost parents or relatives on Wave Day and now board at a local school funded by the King of Thailand. Ranging from about 9 to 16 years old, these were some of the most gorgeous, creative, energetic, loving and respectful kids I have ever met, and just being with them for the last two days has been a heart-warming honour. The camp was held in a National Park and sea turtle sanctuary on the beachfront, a beautiful location. The best moments include:
Flying kites on the vast white beach as the last sun of 2005 became a thick red ball on the western horizon, sprinting along the squeaky white sand, the kites tugging and snaking above the white foam of the ocean, the kids grinning and leaping and digging holes and just embodying happiness (an occasion made particularly wonderful by the kids teachers telling us that this is the first time in a year the kids have been so relaxed near the sea). I really like kites.
The talent show/country presentations - the Japanese guys silently folding a huge paper crane, from paper the size of a picnic blanket; the older Morgan boys cuttin' rug with some dance moves that were particularly street and entirely awesome; unaccompanied solo-singing from Pla, one of the smallest and most visably psychogically affected girls, who lost both her parents to the tsunami, and who sang about the rain, and the sun coming out afterwards to always bring a better day, and countless multi-lingual songs and dances that all the kids completely got into.
Then, the changing of the year, all of us on the beach again, day-glo bracelets on our wrists, launching 50 (or so) hot-air lanterns, great balls of fire, glowing as they breeze upwards and outwards across the ocean, bright and yellow gashes in the black fabric of the sky, spitting firey wax into the dark waters, our very own constellation illuminating our faces before becoming fading in the empty distance. Hugs and wais and kisses for the new year.
Seeing exactly how much the kids had been affected by the weekend as they pile into the vans to leave and the tears begin to flow on Art, the 'coolest' 16 year old boy, sort of the leader of the gang, the one with the flyest hip hop moves and the studded belt, as he burys his red eyes in his hands and urges us all to visit the village - to know that of all the kids these older guys have loved us this much is an entirely touching thing.

Also:

Catching a greasy pig in front of a huge, cheering Thai crowd at a Christmas street party, the pig more vicious than imagined and incredibly loud with the squealing. Our team donated the pig back to the festival so it could continue the pig-catching fun times. (I refrained from joining the nearby 'Catch the Eel' game).
The way coastal light splits and falls through thickets of slender she-oaks around our little bunch of tents.
Finishing the third Rabbit book by John Updike, and sinking into the warm comfort of Zadie Smith's On Beauty, sneaking peaks between its covers at the beach, between activities, and at night, by torchlight, under the wide and clear sky.
The opportunity to spend much much time with two of my buddies-for-life, the Kate and the Tess.
The sing-song bubbling sound of 25 Morgan kids chanting a vow of gratitude at the dinner table.

So, yeah, sorry: life actually is beautiful, after all.

Our hero hatches a get-away plan

2005-12-28T21:10:00.000+11:00

Nope, it's pretty much only getting worse.

Today's exciting programme of events: a soulcrunching 'workshop' with a couple of cheery Singaporean missionaries, followed by a totally ineffectual one-hour 'English lesson' with the local high school, where the students already have experienced and capable native English speaking teachers (a whole family of American missionaries who wear bobby socks and conservative length skirts and hairties), who we just displaced into the hallways for an hour, only to find we had too many teachers in each class to teach properlly and too many ideas, and not any clue as to the level of their English ability, and no time to actually get anything done.

I am almost about to smash my head in with a rock.

(We Got The) Tsunami Development Blues

2005-12-26T14:43:00.000+11:00

It is a light blue sky, a soft bank of sand, a wonderful ocean. We are beached here, each of us slanted on bamboo mats, absorbing the glow of the sun, eyes closed and alone. It is a break in the program, a moment when we ritually grab our books and towels, mats and cream and walk down the tarmac driveway to the beach. A road that, a year ago, was all covered in water, with garbage, with sections of demolished houses, and with slumped, broken bodies.

Things are getting on here in Phang Nga, the Thai province worst hit by the tsunamis a year ago today. Permanent housing is slowly rising up, cookie-cutter residences whose layout and design depend on the group who is funding their construction - Rotary, Tsunami Volunteers Foundation, the Royal Army, the Princess of Thailand (her special colour is mauve, and her houses match in a strikingly flamboyant bodypaint). Foundations of all sorts have been established, and are being established - occupying women with handicrafts, helping kids with art-therapy, promoting culture with special centres and schools. Little clumps of volunteers from across Thailand and the world are still scurrying like insects to clean up shoes, bottles, and housing & boat detritus from the beaches, jungles and mangroves. Christian aid organisations are still quietly handing out bibles, men are still praying for fishing boats, and many children are still not really smiling, and definitely no longer swimming in the ocean. It has been a year and a lot of work has been done here along the Andaman Sea. But most incredible is the excruciating amount of work that is still left to be done.

In Ban Tung Wa, where we have spent a bit of time, various groups of Morgan people are learning to adapt to their new village, and with it their new lives as Thai citizens. The Morgan, a traditionally nomadic sea-living group of people with a distinct culture, language and religion, have for years been denied citizenship by both the Thai and Burmese governments, thus rendering them invisible, and excluding them from schools, health care systems, and so on. Having been veritably slammed on wave-day, the Morgan people began to be noticed by Thais for the first time, and when it became clear that their lack of citizenship meant that nobody could tell in any way how many of their people had died the government caved and decided to register them all, at last. The past few days have marked the official opening of Ban Tung Wa, a group of pretty wooden huts built up by the main road in Khao Lak, tucked away from the ocean - these 'sea gypsies' having been traumatised away from their traditional island and beach homes. The people again have homes, the kids are in schools - the Morgan are obviously glad to be re-settling down. The worry among the people, however, is what will continue to be lost in this tradeoff, as children learn to speak and act Thai, and the many traditions of the people are gradually abandoned. Suddenly with identity cards, just as the very essence of their identity is most at risk.

We are a group of 23, from Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Sweden, Italy and the USA. We range, in age, from 19 to 57, and we certainly range in our reactions and attitudes regarding disaster and development. So far our activities have been scattered and largely touristic; far from developing strong relationships with local orphans as we were all prepared for, we have been hightailing it up and down the coast in air-conditioned vans, visiting villages and displacement camps, meeting chiefs and teachers, hearing stories of loss and survival. Still: there have been more fulfilling pockets of engagement. A wonderful afternoon spent playing games and painting pictures with a group of children who live in a brand new, extremely ordered and suburban looking village, watching as they filled the pages with images of boats they want for New Year, of massive waves shadowing palms and huts (still), of rainbows and kites and something that looked like a BBQ. Christmas morning was spent on a sublime Khao Lak beach, diamond blue water curving gracefully in a wide bay, me in my underwear wading through semi-stagnant beach inlets stabbing broken buoys with sticks and trudging for trash while striped fish darted around my legs. And so on: tomorrow we begin a short burst of English lessons at two schools in a nearby Thai Muslim communitee, and then over New Years we will be holding a two day camp for Morgan children in a National Park. We continue to jump around, frantically getting the full 'tsunami development' experience, and trying, as hard as we all can, to make, where ever we can, some sort of small impact, a task which is seemingly impossible with such a scattered approach.

Its the night discussions that are the most infuriating, as we all sit and well-meaningly try to solve the problems by talking about them and spouting largely uninformed (and often ethnocentic) opinions on What Has Been and What Should Be Done. But, it is on post-meeting downtime at the beach, staring into the night surf that I realise that it is indeed this portion of the project that we are bound to actually take the most from, as we realise the agony and challenges of working together and the difficulties attached to coming into any developing community armed with the desire to 'help'. And that our fleeting glimpse at post-tsunami life, as limited in delivering positive change as it may be, can only, thankfully, be as limited in its negative impact, and that once expectations are remodeled and we all realise that we are tourists, and that this is a tourist experience, but that we can learn a great deal from it as such, it is easier to see that this can be, and is bound to be, a great and important experience for us all.

(The Standard Line Delivery Corporation would like to wish both the subscribers and casual readers of our electronic periodical a snug, safe and spiritually fulfilling Christmas, and a Super New Year to boot.)

O, the storms

2005-12-16T13:48:00.000+11:00

Waiting for the camp to begin in Phuket, with Camila from Brazil/the United States:

It is raining and windy and has been for two days. It is not supposed to do this on a tropical island which rich and not-so-rich people spend very much money coming here.
At night its like the whole town of Patong is one big, insane go-go bar.
Often we are playing cards and watching HBO in our tile-floored hotel room.
I don't much like this island, not that I've really seen much, but I'm just spiteful (at myself) that I didn't find time to go to Krabi earlier. That said Krabi in these storms would really be no more entertaining than here. At least here we can pose for photos with topless post-op transsexuals in the middle of the street.
Bring on the 19th.

Hangin' with Cambodian kids on the riverbank, Kampot

2005-12-13T00:07:00.000+11:00

(in totally seperate news: I now have my first ever internet 'wishlist', which is a hilarious concept I'm sure you will agree, and you can see this tribute to consumption here)

Bokor Hill Station

2005-12-12T23:37:00.000+11:00

On top of this quite significant mountain, surrounded in dense jungle, overhanging the southern coastline of Cambodia, sits Bokor Hill Station, a once-upon-a-time luxurious and expensive retreat location for French colonialists wanting to escape the hot temperatures of sea-level Cambodia. Sometime since the 1920s however, this whole place was abandoned and fell into disrepair, and crumbled, and grew bright red fungus on the walls. In the 1970s the whole ghost town was of great strategic importance during the Cambodian wars and was one of the last points of Khmer Rouge defence during the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, when the Vietnamese were shooting from the hotel below at the Khmer Rouge guys, who were hiding out in the old Catholic church about 500 metres away.

Perched on the hillside are many many old, falling-apart buildings (including an unfinished royal Palace, a casino, a police station, a post office...), some overgrown with jungle, some (like the watertank) looking all science-fiction and weird and others, the Shiningesque hotel especially (someone had even grafittied REDRUM on a staircase wall), genuinely spooky, even in the daylight hours.

The old settlement, scattered over the hilltop:

Bokor Palace Hotel:

the old ballroom:

Catholic church:

The view from the hotel:The old watertower:

Now I’ve made my bed, I’ll lie in it

2005-12-12T06:01:00.000+11:00

back from Cambodia.
From Kampot (Cambodia): car (2 hours), boat (4 hours), motorbike (15 minutes), [walk across border], minibus (20 minutes), another minibus (1 hour), big bus (3 1/2 hours) -> Bangkok, all lit up and steamy. Slump onto my rock hard mattress in the bright flourescent white boxroom that smells like mildew.

Now, I am just waiting here, waiting for the IPP, truely doing nothing but waiting.

I can't BELIEVE Miss Iceland won Miss World, this is truely spectacular news. I only wish I had put money down on that race. (Although I am surprised that Miss Trinidad and Tobago didn't take the crown after her heartfelt steel drum rendition of the Titanic song during the talent section. Ha!, and hee!)

State Of My Life Address

2005-12-08T22:24:00.000+11:00

(a note: While I have been wanted for some time to write some sort of piece inspired by David Berman's graceful, wonderful poem "Self Portrait at 28", and that was certainly the original influence of what we have here, below, it has happened that the basic premise for this writing is much more close in idea and design to periodic pieces written by my Texan friend Rob for his website. I would like to acknowledge the similarity, in many ways, to Rob's own addresses, and to say thanks to him for demonstrating such a lovely and simple idea. I have enjoyed thoroughly thinking about and writing this piece.)

State of My Life Address, 8 December 2005.

A. Today I have lived for exactly 25 years, which is one quarter of a century. This also means I have been alive for 9131 days exactly.

B. Of this I have lived approximately 3.33% of my life in Canada, and 0.66% of my life in Egypt. I have spent 1.66% of my life attending international CISV camps. Overall, I have spent about 10.83% of my life outside of Australia. Within Australia, I have lived approximately 28% of my life in the small apple farming town of Donnybrook, WA, where I remember cubby houses, and picking chestnuts, and a tame sheep named Bridie who hung out near the swingset. The remaining 61% (or so) of my life I have living in or in the suburbs of the city of Perth.

C. At the moment I am in Phnom Penh, which is the capital city of the Kingdom of Cambodia. There is a steady breeze, sending flags whipping along the banks of the fast-flowing Mekong, where bright orange Buddhist monks stroll in twos and the light is a warm glow against the thin dove-grey sirrus up in the sky. Soon bats will teem from the ceiling of the nearby National Gallery, as the sun disappears, again, behind the horizon, towards Thailand. On the roads, a jumbled flux of traffic - goosehootin' lorries, ambling rickshaws, wedding cars crammed with white dresses, 4WD vehicles, thick wheeled and sparkling, with NGO logos embossed on their front doors, minibuses with hairset Japanese tour groups in matching elasticated sun-visors, and of course, the motorcycles, buzzing and spluttering and weaving and gliding like salmon going upstream. Plus: stump-armed beggars, bare foot kids selling pirated history books, dwarf families huddled and sleeping on doorsteps, young lovers on the riverside, tourists heckling over a dollar, women holding see-through hoses gushing water out on vast green lawns, sparrows and dragonflies, fruit sellers carrying trays of pineapples on their heads, and pencil-thin palm trees, soon to be wrapped in nocturnal smog, the smell of fried noodles, exhaust, and the approaching rains.

D. I currently have no house, no girlfriend, no pets, no car, and no real solid idea of what next year is going to be like, let alone the rest of my life. At the moment my loose and insufficiently researched plan is to complete a Masters programme in Human Rights Practice at Curtin University of Technology, which will take me 18 months or so, although I might transfer across to a Masters in International Development in Melbourne part-way through.

E. There are people in the following places who I miss in varying amounts: Denmark, Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Thailand, the Netherlands, Canada, USA, the UK, Sweden, Palestine, Israel, Australia.

F. I do not belong to any organised religion or sect, but do have a sort of personal faith in the power of creation and nature. I believe in the individual and in the rights of every individual to free-will. I believe most strongly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and believe that there is no action or circumstance which can justify the taking away of these basic rights in any way.

G. I am still most confused about what humans are capable of, about love, and about electronic House music.

H. I currently have 126,000 Cambodian Riel, 233 American dollars, 100 Euro dollars and 140 Thai Baht with me, all of which is due to last me until my arrival home in Perth on January 8th, 2006 (one month, exactly).

I. For most of the coming month I will be participating in my sixth CISV programme, an International Peoples Project, involving about 25 other people from Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Italy and the USA. The project will involve running activities and working together with 60 or so orphans from the Morgan people, a nomadic sea-tribe, whose communities were obviously quite affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami.

J. I have never been shot, been significantly hurt, been arrested, been detained for any long period, been significantly depressed or had anyone particularly close to me die or go missing. I have always had available access to health care, education, emotional support, free movement, clean water, shelter, free speech, food and an income. In all of these ways and more, I am certainly one of the luckier people alive.

K. I am a caucasian Australian male, of British and probably Irish heritage. I currently have very short hair, the shortest hair I have had since Heather's wedding in 2001, and about a half-way growth of whiskers, which tend to grow around my jawline, as well as under my nose, before spreading out a bit on and under my chin. There is very little actual growth on my cheeks themselves. I have brown hair and hazel eyes, and I wear black rimmed glasses without nosepieces. On my wrists I wear: (left) a digital watch I bought in Bangkok in July; (right) a thin pink, blue and orange friendship band Erik from Sweden gave me, a red Brazilian wish ribbon which is frayed and may soon break (making my wishes come true), a blue piece of leather with silver beads on which my name is spelt in Hebrew (a gift from Maytal and Leor), a Palestinian flag velcro wristband I got in Balata refugee camp, and two identical wooden bead bracelets from Bangkok. I also have two plain silver rings, one on each hand - one from my sister Kate, and one from a Thai girl called Katie, who I never called back. Today I am also wearing a blue Gooding Soccer Rec t-shirt, blue denim shorts, olive green underwear, tan socks, brown cord Camper shoes and a black military-style cap I just bought in a Phnom Pehn market. I have two ulcers in my mouth and a slight sunburn on my back obtained from the back of a motorbike around Angkor Wat, and which is leaving behind an unfortunate singlet tan.

L. Recently, I am finding it harder than usual to wake up in the mornings. I am also having significantly more vivid, complicated and surreal night and day dreams. I attribute this to the malarial prophylaxis medication I am currently taking. A recent dream involved saving an orthodox Jewish toddler from a large wave, which is an interesting combination of both prior and future projects in my actual life.

M. I am currently reading Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and listening to In the Reins by Iron & Wine and Calexico. The last movie I saw was Stealth starring Jessica Biel, this was on the aeroplane from Tel Aviv about one month ago. The last girl I kissed was Nam, who was born in the Buddhist year 2529.

N. I can speak a very rougly estimated 500 words in French and 400 words in Arabic as well as tens of thousands of words in English. I can also say small things in Spanish, Swedish, Icelandic and Thai, but not enough that you could say I was even a beginner in any of those languages. I plan to be able to speak English, French, Arabic and Spanish fluently by the end of 2014, as part of my 10 year language goal.

O. In 25 years I have been to 31 countries, earned one undergraduate degree, learned to ski and SCUBA dive, been in love at least twice, seen at least 30 shooting stars, lived in 11 houses and apartments, been to every Australian state except Queensland and acted in 13 plays.

P. On my birthday I am hanging out with two Canadian girls, who I met on the bus from Siem Reap, and who only just met each other as well, and may or not be related. Anna is from Montreal, and her surname is Racine (which means 'root') which it turns out is also the surname of Richelle's paternal grandmother, who is also of Quebecois origin, although she, like Richelle, lives in Nelson, British Colombia. They both have long blonde hair, although Anna's is in dreadlocks, and Richelle's remains flowing and unknotted. We have a one day plan, which involves tomorrow going to Bokor hill station, an abandoned and crumbling French colonial retreat on a mountain in the jungle, and including an old casino, church and a hotel which is apparently very much like the one in The Shining (1980).

Q. I have, so far, received ten (10) emails from seperate friends and family members wishing me a happy birthday, for all of which I am extremely grateful. Almost every single one admitted that they remembered my birthday because of the media coverage of the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's murder, which makes me glad that I tell so many people about the fact that we share this date in such a way. It is certainly these emails which have made this day that little bit better than it would have been otherwise.

R. Today I have eaten: 1 x stick of Wrigley's chewing gum, 1 x plate of spicy ginger beef, with rice, 1 x bowl of museli with fruit salad, 1/2 x bag of dried sweet potato chips, 1/2 x mini watermelon. I have drunk: 1 x can of guava juice, 1 x can of lychee juice, 1 x pineapple shake, a certain quantity of water.

S. I have currently been travelling for five months, less two days. In this time I have participated in a CISV Seminar Camp, as Camp Director, in Beit Guvrin, Israel, for approximately one month; studied Arabic language in Cairo, Egypt for approximately two months; travelled and volunteered as an international activist/human rights observer in the occupied Palestinian Territories for approximately three weeks; travelled and visited friends in Israel for one week more, spent a week doing nothing on the island of Ko Chang, Thailand; worked, in Thailand, for one week as a Fake Scottish Guard in order to promote a new blend of whiskey; and travelled, briefly, in the Kingdom of Cambodia. I have enjoyed this trip very much, mostly because I have met unprecedented quantities of wonderful people, and also because I have been doing something almost the entire time. One of my plans was to write a short novel or a long story or such, while in Thailand, however that has not happened, which is both unfortunate and very predictable. The main reasons for this not happening are the job I got and the trip to Cambodia, which was essential at a specific date (tomorrow) for visa reasons, both of which broke up the time here a lot.

T. The sky outside has blackened, and on the grassy riverbanks of Phnom Penh a group of small tumbling orphans play soccer without shoes, legs twirling and feet pounding on the field, while the girls nearby jump elastics. Their carers, older orphans who now work at the NGO-run resturaunt across the street, look on with extensive grins. The night swells around them, the dark vein of river flowing towards its broad delta in Vietnam, the glow of bars and resturants and street stalls and brothels and mobile phone signs hanging in the roadways. I am here in this internet cafe, and officially I am no longer considered 'youth'. But I'm feeling ok with that, because tonight I could be anywhere on earth doing almost anything possible and virtually no one would know. And then tomorrow I could be elsewhere. In this simple way I feel as though I am pretty much totally free.

2005-12-07T03:35:00.000+11:00

Tuol Sleng / S-21

Choeung Ek Killing Fields

Tuol Sleng / Choeung Ek

2005-12-07T01:37:00.000+11:00

In 1975, the Ponhea Yat High School in Phnom Penh was taken over by the Khmer Rouge and turned into a prison known as Tuol Sleng, or S-21. The school had a large selection of plain classrooms with brown and white checkered tiles on the floor, and a green playing area. It became the largest centre of detention and torture in the country. Between the years of 1975 and 1978 more than 17,000 people were held at the prison before being sent to the extermination camp at Choeung Ek. From all of these prisoners there were 7 survivors.

Each of the classrooms at Tuol Sleng were converted into prison cells. All windows were enclosed by iron bars, and covered with tangled barbed wire. The ground and first floor classrooms were divided into small cells, 0.8 x 2.0 metres each and made from either rough bricks or wood. Each cell held a single prisoner who was chained to the floor. The rooms on the top floors were used as mass prison cells, in which rows of prisoners were made to lie on the floor and their legs were shackled to a long metal bar. Interrogations were done in a neighbouring building. All prisoners were required to ask permission to do anything at all, even change position while trying to sleep, and to follow a list of regulations at all times. Anyone breaking the rules was severely beaten or tortured by a variety of methods, including having their fingernails removed with pliers, then their fingers dunked in vinegar.

Over 1,720 people worked in the S-21 complex over the three years of its operation. A number of these were children aged 10 to 15, who were trained and selected by the Khmer Rouge regime to work as guards. In time, these children became some of the most ruthless and cruel of all the workers at S-21. Eventually, as the revolution continued, many of the prison guards, torturers, executioners and even high-level party cadres themselves were imprisoned and killed as they were seen as posing a threat to the regime.

Every prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed, providing the only record of the thousands who were killed in this period.

At Choeung Ek (out of town, down a peaceful red dirt road lined with white Eucalypts, where today kids fly kites and buffalo graze in water-logged rice fields) tens of thousands of people were bludgeoned to death with the handles of farm equipment. Their throats were then cut, and they were pushed into mass graves, only some of which have since been exhumed. Walking around the green, empty pits today, you step on and over half buried fragments of bone, and bits of cloth. Dragonflies swarm in the humid air. A silence, but for the wind and the distant giggle of children over the fence. Small piles of femurs rest at the base of trees, accompanied by pots of burnt incense.

In three years the Khmer Rouge killed between two and three million people in prisons, toture chambers and extermination camps just like this one, all over the country.

Sometimes it is entirely impossible to comprehend human beings.

enter the tour buses

2005-12-07T01:24:00.000+11:00

The temples of Angkor are indeed very lovely, but I would be totally lying to y'all if I didn't show you the reality of a trip there:

Exploring Angkor certainly aint no solitary, adventuresome type experience anymore, in case you were wonderin'.

Angkor

2005-12-07T00:27:00.001+11:00

(i-iii) Angkor Wat

(iv-v) Bayon temple, Angkor Thom

(vi) Banteay Srei

(vii) boy at Banteay Kdei

(viii-x) Ta Prohm

to Siem Reap

2005-12-04T03:06:00.000+11:00

Took the minibus from the border at Poi Pet, winding slowly on the dirt road, windows rattling, whole bus squeakingandquakingandbangingandbreaking on the corregations and potholes and the intense noise dattadattadattadattadattadattadattadatta - the darkness closing in and the pressure headaches too, moving around in the chair, trying to find a half-way acceptable position for sleep, an impossible task, and outside the men stand to their waists in stagnent ponds untangling fishing nets while grub faced children send serious waves from the waters edge and women stand under signs proclaiming the Cambodian People's Party and the bus jolts and bucks and every passenger has clenched jaws and as the bus finally decends into darkness, at the front, the wide toothy smile of the Cambodian bus guide, beaming back across the slumped corpses of former tourists.

In Siem Reap, a hundred motorcycle drivers holler for business. The darkened streets, puddled with mud and thick with smoke from food carts. A guesthouse is found, a bed is fell upon, a mosquito net tugged to the edges of the soft white mattress. Sleep is immediate.

And long. Awaking far too late for recommended sunrise temple viewing I realise exactly how sick I have become, with hacking cough and dizzy head, but manage to drag townwards to find throat lozenges and food. The first moto driver to approach gets lucky, and after finding a dry and almost tasteless fluffy pancake and a tray of orange flavoured Strepsils, we chug northwards towards Angkor.

four quick points

2005-12-02T10:48:00.000+11:00

An early start this morning, to bring to you all these important announcements:
1. I am about to board a bus to Cambodia, and thus my new mobile phone number will be not usable for the next week or so, until I return to Thailand.
2. I got my haircut last night, short, and it looks baaad - as a result there will be no more photos of me on here for a while. Hehe.
3. On a serious note - you may recently have heard about four human rights observers who have been kidnapped in Iraq, all of them members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who do fantastic work in not only Iraq but also places like Colombia and Palestine. Three of the four captured have been previously themselves to volunteer in Palestine in a very similar capacity to what I and my friends were and still are, in regions like Hebron, Jenin and Nablus. One of them has, in the past, been a volunteer himself with ISM and was planning on going for another, more long-term stay next week. While I myself do not know any of these people personally, good friends of mine do, and I know that they are obviously hurting and worrying greatly about their capture. I urge you to give thought to these innocent activists and if you are in any inclined to do so, to keep them in your prayers. They were doing, and hopefully can continue to do, crucial work for the people of Iraq and Palestine.
4. And related: a friend in ISM, Andrew from Scotland, is about to be deported for his work in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. You can read a passionate and well-worded statement written by Andrew's parents here.

bangkok

2005-12-02T05:52:00.000+11:00

shopping for King-related merchindise:

fireworks, exploding about 40 metres from my hotel room window:

with my new, and quite wonderful, friend kwan:

Kings Birthday

2005-12-02T05:06:00.000+11:00

They came in groups. Thickets of people, streaming, weaving along the roadways, swelling in number as they wait to cross late-afternoon traffic. All of them, every single one of them, wearing yellow shirts, a bleed of bright, glaring yellow forming a river of people. Among them, occasionally - white shirted high school girls, little gangs of orange-wrapped monks, the odd tall, bewildered farang. All of Bangkok moving this way. Then the destination. The royal field, right near the Grand Palace. It is 4 days until the Kings birthday. The celebrations have started. The crowd is assembled.
"The future belongs to crowds".
They stand silent and still during the national anthem. Then they begin to sway, move into and out of position. Like a field full of daffodils, moving in a patriotic wind. And dividing like cells, packing the oval.
Waiting, waiting. Waiting.

yellow behind

yellow ahead

monks section (orange on the sides)

no more kilts

2005-11-30T01:31:00.000+11:00

A quick note to let y'all know that I finally have a lovely new cellphone and with it, a Thai number, which you can message me on if you really wanna make me smile.
The number is:
+666 891 7467 (i hope)
If I don't message back then chances are it didn't work.

And here is a picture of me with one of the many 100 Pipers girls who float like angels around the hotel ballroom:

If all goes according to plan I will never wear a busby ever ever again.

the underwater poems

2005-11-29T06:13:00.000+11:00

So, the job is over, more or less. Today there was a launch party, and tomorrow there will be another, allowing us all opportunities to suppliment our contracted income with another 4000 baht for the two appearances. The parties are held in a swanky ballroom at the Sofitel hotel, and are flooded with skinny Thai hostesses with 100 PIPERS BLENDED MALT written on their dresses, across their little breasts. Basically the gig involves us hanging out in a 19th floor hotel room (watching the cable, wearing the bathrobes, stealing the sewing kits) for a while, then getting fed noodles, then going out and standing in the hall for 45 minutes or so as people arrive, then marching with the pipe band into the ballroom where they unveil the New Product (a blended malt whiskey), we march onto the stage, people find their dinner tables and we go out the back, where we change, eat the vast quantities of left over finger food, ruminate on the best way to get a free bottle of the whiskey, then leave. It is quite easy money indeed.

Meanwhile, I don't think anyone was upset to be saying goodbye to the street-standing section of the job. During our last two shifts (11pm - 5am and then 11am - 6pm) the whole thing broke down and we began to take the whole thing very much less than seriously. Much tomfoolery, as we broke rank, danced in costume, pulled faces for cameras, lied to curious tourists and began a running commentary on the televised Miss World 2005 competition from the TV room via walky talky to those on shift on the street (Go Iceland). Et cetera.

So now I'm back on the old Kao Sahn, reading Thomas Pynchon and drinking strawberry flavoured Mirinda in my little room while the pirated cd stalls down on the street blast The Most Horrible Electronic Music In The World (TMHEMITW).

Other things of recent note:

The other day when we were on the street, working, the road was suddenly silent and cleared of traffic, and then a motorcade came past with a single black car surrounded by many many police vehicles. Inside the car was the King of Thailand. We saluted, loyally, and then the traffic resumed in its regular, congested, fashion.
Walking around a few nights back I found the section of Bangkok which is, I guess, the Islamic quarter, or Arabtown or something, and it was quite amazing how much more at home I felt, suddenly, walking along the dark road, speaking Arabic to the folks in the internet cafe, reading the shop signs with their familiar script and smelling the shwarma spits and the shisha smoke in the night air. Closest I've felt to 'home' since leaving Cairo. Which is funny, no?
I read the book The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and it was really quite bitterly disappointing, indeed.

And, some random news from friends and family:

My sister got accepted to present her kickass table thing that she made at the Milan International Furniture Design Fair (or something). This is because she totally rules.
Maytal, who I visited a few weeks ago in her new home in Kibbutz Dan in the north of Israel spent a fair amount of last week stuck in bomb shelters while Hizbollah blasted the shit out of the upper Galilee. Which is incredibly strange to think about when you've just been there, and, like, hiked to a waterfall about 50 metres from the Lebanese border and the whole place is so beautiful and calm. Also, very inconvienient and also distressing for the people who live there, I assume. Thankfully, Maytal is okay.
Abigail got a longer-term job at the Max-Planck institute in Dresden, because she, also, totally rules.
I just saw a photo on Pandas website of Jackson with a massive beard. Now given that I have been trying to convince him to grow such a thing for years and years, and he chooses the very time that I am overseas to finally take my advice obviously is going to smart just a smidgen. Ha.

Time for bed, as I do believe TMHEMITW is finally over.

as promised

2005-11-25T00:10:00.000+11:00

please excuse the red ribbon - that was an unfortunate costume malfunction.

the full display (me on the left)

... and we keep on going, right through the night.

me, with Honey and Jikky, two of the wonderful, beautiful staff of the promotions company putting this thing on - who, in our rest breaks, provide us with endless drinks, food, massages and pep-talks.

On being a fake Scottish Military Guard in Thailand

2005-11-25T00:03:00.000+11:00

The first two hours were almost unbearable. The mixture of physical pain and pressure not to move, or laugh, or fall over was both unexpected and almost, at times, overwhelming. The most intense pins-and-needles flooded into your fingers and toes, and the idea of 50 something hours standing this way loomed ahead like a grey desert. But then... suddenly a rhythm develops. A calm. Your eyes focus on a single point, a tiny speck of nothing out there in front of you. The smiling Thai faces around you, the digital cameras and cell phone cameras and video cameras, the motorbikes and buses and taxis chugging past you - all of it begins to fade. Your mind empties to almost nothing. Nothing will make you smile, nothing will make you move. You stand, transfixed. Your huge hat is heavy on your head, pressing into your scalp, but you no longer notice. You are beyond tiredness. The light changes across the vortex of colour that has become your vision as you stare into nothing. Occasionally, in lapses, brief but jolting, you see small movements in your periphery - the humming, gliding skytrain above, a young woman posing with a peace symbol beside you, a cloud of smoggy polution lifting off the street. Then back to nothing.

And then, out come the others, and it is a shift change.

This job is certainly one of the strangest, most challenging, most interesting and most tiring things I have ever done.

And now, three lists of 6:

A partial list of things people have said to me and to which I have offered absolutely no reply.
1. Are you Scottish?
2. Are you hot in that?
3. Asshole.
4. Hello! Can I take your photo? Hello? HELLO?
5. Laugh. Hey, come on, laugh. Booga-booga-boo.
6. Can you look over this way? Um. Smile?

A partial list of things I am being paid to stare at.
1. A pillar
2. A McDonalds resturant across the street.
3. Four trees covered in fairy lights.
4. An advertisment, in Thai, for the Loy Krathong Festival 2005 (proudly presented by VISA) depicted two beautiful people smiling into the water, holding an elaborate krathong.
5. Cute girls walking past.
6. A different pillar.

A partial list of things that I will take away from this job.
1. An improved ability to keep patient and calm and perfectly still in moderately stressful situations.
2. A better understanding of the process of meditation.
3. An improved ability to register and process things seen solely in my periphery.
4. A very sun tanned face
5. The ability to estimate a period of 20 minutes fairly accurately without looking at a timepiece of any sort.
6. 16,000 Baht