Stupid fuking humanity, mine. (from 15/06/2009)

Last night I was at the Standard with the Biz trying to trick my hangover into believing that it did not exist and, failing that, soothe the savage beast with a parmigiana, which is the music of the tastebud.  Beautiful women were everywhere, everywhere, herds of them roaming freely through the beer garden, teasing me with their out-of-reach fresh beauty and ripeness and I'm just sat there in a disjointed, I'm-not-here kinda way.  Best of all was the statuesque table service goddess whose graceful passings through the crowd were filling my head with the most outrageous impure and lustful thoughts.  The turn of her neck into her sharp jaw line.  Her studied look of detachment.  Casually restrained strawberry hair.  The appropriated 1950's housewife chic ensemble that made her like a funked-up mannequin from one of those black & white H-Bomb desert test movies where They built towns and populated them with faux nuclear families so that They could blow them up with nuclear explosions.  She was hot like fission.  I was, however, completely out of it - as vacant as a Detroit high-rise - capable of producing only clunky sentences that more often than not constituted two or more disparate themes clumsily bolted together with neither corollary nor segue to save them. One thought at the start, lost somewhere in the middle, and abandoned for a second idea for the sentence's conclusion.  My very own incoherent valueless, Naked-Lunch-gay-Beat-poet, self-indulgent effluvia.  The height of my powers feels like a concept of a long-gone past.  I remember when a hangover lifted me to a state of ecstasy where streams of conscience burst forth in Amazonian torrents to inundate those around me and drown them in my unfettered, luminous brilliance.  Now – though I do so hope it is only then, that time yesterday rather than a resigned from-this-moment-forth – I am as if the Murray Darling basin.  Choked and dying, my good ideas and talent siphoned off by greedy conversation farmers to irrigate the barren plains of their own infertile minds.  But where was I?  She was incredible.  I had cycled through most of my arsenal of non-verbal here-I-am-isms.  Starting with the I-See-You blatant staring for the first few times she floated past the table and moving on to the trickery of the Now-I’m-Deliberately-Not-Looking-At-You-Though-I-Know-You’re-Passing-My-Table.  I even ramped up the later (NIDNLAYTIKYPMT) by inserting the too-hard-laugh that says, “Look how much fun we’re having! If you were with me this is how much fun you’d be having too!! We are great!!!”  Tres cool Kiddie, your machinations are tres cool. 

The food finally arrived as an artery clogging mass that bit its thumb at Life. Be In It! and its gay healthy food eating pyramid (Gay!).  It was brought by the other waitress (boo!) much to my consternation, that is to say it left me in a state of utter confusion and dismay, or made the utter confusion that I was already experiencing more utter.  The Gods had conspired though to offer me an opening, to take some little contact and nurture it in the shallow, foetid waters of my carnal fantasies, as the mountain of chips had no sauce to offset their salty dryness.  Spurred on by a complete lack of self-awareness I timed my lean across the table and out into the walkway to perfection – maybe the only thing that I had done with any level of proficiency for the whole day – to interrupt her passage.  She looked down at me and I paused for far, far too long and I’d love to say it was as my heart skipped a beat but the fact is that I was scant more than a sack of pressed sausage meat incapable of responding appropriately to the world around him and the pause was a product of my emptiness.  “Is there any sauce?”  That was it.  The sum total of me, the best that I had to offer.  No excuse me, no witty dialogue relating my state of disrepair to the healing properties of tomatoes, no charming quip about how the night air reminded me so much of Paris at this time of year, just some dead air and my dumbness write large for all (read: her) to see.  “What?”  That was her reply, what.  Probably more “what the fuk is wrong with you” than “what did you say”.  I stammered the start of a couple of sentences before she gently took the reigns out of my fumbling hands and soothed me like she would a too-excited child or a lovable imbecile, “You mean tomato?” Arched eyebrow. “I’ll get it for you.”  Such a sweet voice she had.  And I spent the next ten minutes listening to Biz squealing with delight at my impotence and inanity.  Of course I didn’t spend the next ten minutes eating chips with sauce as she erased the whole banal exchange from her memory lest it soil her perfection and continued on her way without bringing any sauce and when Biz headed to the bar to refill our cups to overflowing with something to take the pain away I was left alone in a state of increasing dizziness as all the blood abandoned my brain for my stomach. 

She skipped past a few times and I did a passable Deep Introspection that is aimed at making me look as if I’m taking the opportunity of sitting alone to engage with profundities of import and concocted Plan B.  Yes Kiddie, you are brilliant!  Casually twist to catch her eye when she approaches the next time, she will get a glint of recognition and horrified at forgetting the sauce she will apologise profusely, I shall be gracious and we will laugh heartily about the fickle nature of our human foibles and she will be endeared to you forever for the simple fact that you know her.  You old fox!  Ok.  And, twisting now….. good…. catch the eye…. excellent…. and the recognition….. and the recognition…. and…. she is walking straight past you.  Did I let her passage go unhindered and maintain my sclerotic dignity?  Nup.  Casual though I tried to be it was obviously a harried, desperate and too-loud explosion that was thrown at her back as she moved away, “No sauce then.”  Another winning line!  Who can stop me?  Will someone please stop me. She turned with a patience that just made her all the more angelic and which contrasted against my bestial, primordial filth. “Fuck”, she said (so HOT!!), “I’ll get it now.”  Such a sweet voice she had.  And I fell over myself in a conniption of over-stylised, arm waving, lurching forward, apologetic insanity that must have unsettled her with its stench as it rushed toward her like the breath of the diable herself.  “No it’s ok, I’m finished, no really don’t worry about it, the chips were great without sauce, in fact I didn’t even really want it, it was for my friend.” But even that couldn’t sully her, she didn’t even flinch and unruffled she turned with the lightness of the absolutely beautiful and disappeared into the crowd leaving me alone on the plateau flicking through the sharp edges of my thoughts.

An interaction of pure desperation.

Fuk yeah, I'm cool! Aren’t I?

ANOTHER KIDDIE IN CHILE CLASSIC

I overlooked this one. But it's awesome. It starts a theme that he is (self-appointed) 
LORD OF THE CONDORS. And it also heralds his interest in renaming himself due to the lack of gravitas given to the definite article - hence rendering 'the kid' passe'.

Slowly slowly I have been making my way from Man On The Lam gallivanting here and there, someone who the Thin Blue Line would describe as being of no fixed address, to general Man About Town here in Santiago.  I’ve tucked myself into a neat little 3 story house, the owner of which is a self confessed playboy in the true hot-blooded Latino fashion who must be independently wealthy as I’m yet to fully figure out what he does aside from holding the dubious title of being the first champion of a South America wide reality TV show called "Conquistadores" where teams of competitors from different countries were pitted against one another and had to test their mettle in Pepsi-max style extreme sports.  Unfortunately the format was not true to the shows namesake and on their way from Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego they were not required to slaughter Indian populations and/or rape the land of its gold and the women of their virtue.  Mr Extreme proved a good link and I managed to tag myself onto a climbing party the other day to a canyon south of town.  Despite the lack of fitness I managed to walk away with less injuries than the Andes Assault and even though it was wonderful just to be moving over rock again the highlight was when I lowered off the top of a climb just as a Condor soared over the crest of the cliff and hovered no more than 20m above me for a minute.  F*ck they are big and the massive bird was probably weighing up whether or not he could get away with eating me before he saw the 22” guns and decided that in all likeliness, he couldn’t.  My climbing partner, Rasta (everywhere I have been in the world without fail there has always been a local cat named Rasta sporting thick dreads, wearing a Marley t-shirt and smoking spliffs), said it was the first time he had seen one so close to town.  Must have been my lucky day.  I’ve also spent some time helping out a mate building a house, “Have you built houses before?” he asked, “I’ve built fences.” I replied which was about as much as he had done and so that was good enough for him.  Of course everything has adhered to strict Chilean safety standards of rickety homemade ladders to match the homemade hammers and a step-and-hope policy to walking on the roof.

So I’ve spent a couple of days on the Indonesian diet and I can confirm once again (as if the 75 other times that I’ve been p*ssing out of my ar*e were not evidence enough) that there is nothing more lonely and pathetic than a delirious man fumbling around in the dark trying to find sh*t tickets in the middle of the night whilst fighting a war from the stomach on both the northern and southern fronts.  When all you want is a fast friend to pat you on the back and tell you that everything is going to be alright all you have is the thought that maybe the 4.8% of Australian males aged between 16 and 35 who live in rural and regional areas are right when they decide life is not worth living and top themselves.  Anyway I dropped a few kgs and now have that Ready For Summer body that is just to die for this season (and just so you all know, body hair is back in baby yeah!!!)  Though since then I have been experimenting with different combinations of beer and cheap, greasy food to try to put the weight back on with reasonable success.

So yesterday there was this huge cold snap, big rain in the city when it never ever rains this time of year and snow on the mountains around town, everyone is clambering to throw up global warming all of a sudden, which I guess is a good thing considering the scant regard that the environment has received in the media since I got here.  Huge change from ozland where every single news bulletin and paper front page just about is a splash about water (pardon the pun) or the environmental catastrophe that is knocking on our door (car door that is) and may/or may not signal End Times.  Its odd to be a country that is rated to have the second most secure water reserves in the world and see the way that people just throw it around with reckless abandon in a way that would make the blistered gardens back home in oz cry, if they had enough moisture left to work up the tears.  I’m slowly starting to lose my wince at the wastage.

Recent things I have discovered about Chile:

Lying on one’s CV is mandatory.  I thought that I was cheeky and had booked myself a seat on the 2.45 to Hades by saying that I had taught English to orphans in Guatemala but one Columbian cat (probably fuelled by too much powdered Confidence Booster) forged an entire professional career of football and blagged his way onto the squad for the biggest team in Chile, Colo Colo, until the first practice rolled around and they saw that the new signing was awkwardly cursed with two left feet and couldn’t jump over a jam jar. A few quick phone calls to verify his claims and he was back selling crack, between attempted car jackings, on the streets of Bogata.  Chileans love Inxs, you can’t drink your way through one bad, watery beer at a seedy bar without them breaking out something from Kick. Obviously language develops as a reflection of the context in which it is used and in Chileno everything is small.  It doesn’t matter what they are talking about everything gets the ‘small’ suffix, aguita, Maxito, tesita, cervazita, platito, besito, and my theory is that size being a relative measure, it can only be the result of living in the shadow of such huge, omnipresent mountains against which a cup of tea does look kinda piddly.  In spanish everyone is a definite article, The Simon, The Waton, The Toni which means that me being THE Kid is of no special consequence and I am going to have to come up with a new nickname for myself to spark things up a little, any suggestions????  Lastly, the mighty A-Team, icon of my youth, are badly translated into Spanish as Los Incredibles, not as cool as the original but not worthy of the death sentence, the real travesty is the butchery that they have done to Mr T.  They have changed him from powerful BA Baracus to some shump named Mario Baracus.  Mario?  Does T look like a Mario?  (I’m not getting on that plane, sucka).

Score update: Number of answers discovered:  0.  Number of new questions:  3.

I hope that you suckers are all well.  Keep sending strong thoughts.

Check this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_vUSpVNZzs for the view from my new rooftop terrace, you can spy the first snow of the year and a cracking, thanks smog particles, sunset.  (Hi my name is Simon, I love sunsets, long walks on the beach and books about robots.)

Anyone who feels like sending an old school letter, here is my address:

[redacted]

ciao.

KID MEETS JUNKIE

I love how the Kid has no clue what's going on here. Reminds me of the time I was working in a supermarket and an old lady approached me seeking the direction of the 'condiments'.  Lets just say I thought she meant contraception and asked as much. She did not appreciate that.

I’m no Fitzroyalty, I’m not nuts deep in the milieu of faux New-New-Romantic chic that the cool kids are resplendent in these days as I probably lived through too much of the 80’s the first time around, but I had thought of myself as at least landed gentry.  That if I wasn’t a part of the beating heart itself, I still knew its cadence, had my finger on the pulse. I was holding onto my youthful hipness/general relevance without the need to yet grip too tightly and show the white knuckles that are a dead set giveaway.  But a little of my cool has died and my forearms are tired from holding on that much tighter.

It was a Thursday night and I was in a weirdly disjointed state. It was for the promise of a night with the soothingly uncertain conversation of Biz and Dig born out over stewed meats and Czech beer orderable only by the litre that I stiffened a will that was only ephemerally committed to its surroundings.  I stepped out of my joint and the streets were warm and grey and expectant, the kind of quiet waiting that encourages introspection not interaction and the iPod bubble that I immersed myself in made that removal even more acute.  Those cool kids are all walking around to their own personal soundtracks and fair enough I might have been listening to an audiobook but surely its all about the look isn’t it?  And to the outside eye I could just as easily have been lost in some electro-pop Miami low-fi collective soundscape experiment.  For some fucked up reason I started walking, pushing my bike, an unexamined walking.  When I’d taken about ten steps the stupidity of pushing a working-order bike for no reason dawned on me and I jumped on and peddled off thinking more about the words in my ears than the world at my feet but even they were only half engaged with.  I thought I was running late, I thought about how it was dumb to ride iPoded, I thought about how I hoped the ATM god would smile on me when I stopped there. Turning left into Rose the buildings washed by.  I thought about why the fuck I was walking in the first place, I thought about the words, but all the thoughts were distant.  He stepped off the curb and slipped into my version materialising out of all-background world, “rrroraggh mmrranddd rarrrr.” 

Of course I couldn’t make out a word in my little Me bubble, just that he had spoken and that it had probably been to me.  Sure in the retelling of this bit I could bang on about decisions, about the ‘what I should do’s’.  Let the natural force of my momentum carry me off in a no-loose-change kinda way?  Or stop and engage with humanity? But the truth is that there was no deliberation, it all just soft of happened. I braked and rolled in a long leftward arc, looping back to where he stood in the street.  Maybe the deciding is a subconscious thing, needing of only the briefest moment to realise all the potential permutations, exclude them all but one to set you on that course so as to seem such a natural thing.  I slowed, stopped, put my feet down, pressed pause, took my ear-phones out.  Sorry mate, what?  I took part of the guy in with that first look. He seemed to be moving.  A girl stood back on the footpath behind him.  A whole bunch of thoughts slid across my serene calm as my mind idled but I couldn’t be arsed grasping any of them, “Orr mait ya know where the plug eschange is?”  He spoke with the full force of the Aussie accent and that always makes me think about Ned Kelly.  I guess that’s the persecuted Mick blood that my pops always says is in me.

Step One: Assessment. He may not have looked 100% but he did look like he was functioning within normal operating parameters.  He didn’t appear completely washed out, a little grungy verging on scungy maybe, but still completely acceptable in an inner-urban, (post-)GFC way.  He had a backpack and a cap and a jumper tied around his waist.  It was the jumper that should have set the bells to ringing now that I think about it.  Dudes were definitely tying jumpers around waits in the 80’s but that part didn’t make it back in a fashion cycle largely focused on neon. 

And this is exactly where the first little bit died, my cool started to atrophy, you don’t need to look too close.  “Ahh (brain stalling for time as it tried to become co-present) dunno mate.  D’you mean… electrical outlets? Power points?” My own world wasn’t a centre of awsomeness it was a place far, far distant from that, sort of like a house in a Caroline Springs personal hell. He didn’t look at me in confusion.  He didn’t look irate, but fuck what was that moving about?  Sort of a jerky inability to hold his body – all of it – firm in one place.  This death was not going to be quick or painless.  “Narrrr (so many r’s in that no). Ya know mait, the fit exchange.” No facial expressions, no normal non-verbal language, just the wobble, a constant jerky struggle against his body doing things that he didn’t want it to do.  I wasn’t sure exactly where he was.  Was he blurring? Is this guy the missing link who’s going to reconcile the great gulf between general relativity and quantum mechanics because damn straight he was a giant super string, a macro-sized version of the uncertainty principle? Did he have Parkinson’s?  Confusion breeds confusion and I was begetting like a catholic family whose favourite tune was Every Sperm is Sacred.

Here though kind reader, is the only tenuous strand in my very, very weak defence.  On the corner directly behind him and smack bang in the middle of my field of vision was the post-apocalyptic gym Crossfit.  The badass Mad Max of personal training where Hard Yakka ads are played out live as people whose arses are as big as their wallets hit giant truck tyres with sledge hammers MOTHER FUCKERS!!.  Fitness for when society has collapsed and we, the broken remnants, are eking out a desperate shadow of existence amongst the detritus.  “Ahh (brain still stalling, not very sharp was I) you mean the gym?  Crossift? The gym?” Either the jerky-wobble had intensified or, as I suspect, I was being dragged out of that comfort-goop in which I usually ensconce myself and further toward Reality and the powers of observation demanded of being there.  “Orgh narrr fuck’t” It wasn’t aggressive, it wasn’t frustrated, it just was. “Doen wah-re bowdit then mait.”  There’s that accent again.  The kind of quintessential Australian accent that hates akubras, that reminds you although this is a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, that really there are fuck all people who don’t live in the big bad city.  And with that he walked off executing a dramatic body flicking that matched perfectly the jerky-wobble thing.  The girl was waiting for him passively and I looked at her as she fell in beside him.  She was sort of tidy in a lived way, a used way.

As the two headed down the street away from me I slowly turned my bike completing the circle that had brought me to him in the first place (Symbolism 101) and peddled off sans iPodding. The whole interaction was probably 20 seconds but now distance and the inevitable reflection that it provokes was unifying the pieces to very gently click into place and form a whole.  It was tectonic rather than cataclysmic this coming together and so I wasn’t jumped by my stupidity or bum-rushed by realisation.  It was odd how light death’s touch was, rendered quietly and calmly, it settled on me softly. Obviously I had just sought to point a conscientious junkie looking for a clean needle with which to take away the pain first toward home-handyman’s heaven Bunning’s and then to a gym.  My street smarts are undeniable.

KID - SPECIAL REVIEW OF 8 APRIL 2010

Anyone who can review a day (yes a day) is alright by any standard. This is one of my favourites. (Note the Biz is referenced - his and other names changed to protect their innocence)


I went along to 8/april/10 under some duress after being wholly under whelmed by earlier instalments in the series such as 7042010 and 6-april-10.  Despite the obvious effect where such duress establishes a low bar over which to climb, not even this great helper of all mediocre performances - all-but sunken expectations - was able to inject enthusiasm into your reviewer.
 
Firstly, the positive.  The mis-en-scene was adequate.  The somewhat-clichéd set design faithfully captured the banal realities of inner-urban life - all cold, grey concrete though most of the action was to take place in the laden environment of an enclosed room - and this was aided by both costuming (normal) and lighting (natural).
 
That's over with then so, the not so positive.  Confusingly the work appeared to almost take as its genesis Seinfeld, the prototypical show about nothing.  Unfortunately in this case though without the saviour of comedy the emptiness was not to be filled by laughter, not even of the canned variety. Nothingness does not provide for much in the way of dramatic tension.  Perhaps the piece could be positioned within the farce tradition or even tragi-comedy though I fear that such generosity would not only be drawing the long bow to breaking strain, it would also involve the reviewer-cum-archer shooting themselves in the spleen with the cruel-tipped arrow. 
 
The sparse dialogue resulting from the fact huge tracts of the piece were performed with the main character alone on stage failed miserably in its attempt at putting the audience into a trance-like state of higher consciousness, unless of course you consider abject boredom punctuated  by brief hot flushes of frustro-anger to be the next level on the path toward enlightenment.  I do not.  The overplayed metaphor attempted through the repetitive presentation of our "hero" endlessly cycling through the same websites with his only engagement being the pressing of the refresh icon was clumsy at best and at worst a childish and insidious misrepresentation of the power of electronically mediated communication.
 
Ancillary characters gave mixed performances.  The Father conveyed a reasonably believable struggle with a humanity forced upon him by the creeping realisation of his own mortality.  The lunchtime scene where his inability to express his love for his child was writ large provided the work's most poignant moment. You are left with the feeling this is something that will never be resolved so much as manfully ignored and shared in the eye contact that provides the true meaning behind lines such as "You just have to keep plugging away."
 
The insertion of an idiot-savant finance wiz appeared an obvious tip of the hat to the GFC as the work arrogantly attempted to position itself in the grand sweeping themes of our times.  Despite the brevity of the contact, the protagonist and he did appear to share genuine chemistry.  Though capably played by newcomer BIZ, he was ultimately hamstrung by the lack of substance the cameo offered.  The same could be said for the other bit-part players who did not move the narrative forward through no fault of their own, rather there was no narrative to push.  Perfectly positioned to play nemesis, the foil of HUNTER was used to reiterate and reinforce the listlessness of the protagonist.  This interaction occurred in a scene set in a climbing gym that attempted to portray the desire to control the physical world as a response to lack of control over the world’s of mind and emotion. Interestingly, though better known for his Hip Hop performances than his acting, DIGGA turned in an acceptable lovable sounding board.  Some have suggested the lack of any female characters could expose the piece to the charge of misogyny.  The reviewer remains open to this criticism but is as yet unconvinced.
 
Part (though unsuccessful) meditation on Camus' absurd struggle, combined with Kafkaesque undertones circa The Metamorphosis, 8/april/10 was somewhat effective in the Brechtian sense of removing from the audience an emotional connection to the protagonist but being bereft of events - let alone narrative arc - it was ultimately incapable of providing an analytical focus point for critical engagement.
 
The quotidian drama(x)/tale(x)/pastiche(??) was overly long and cursed with an unsatisfactory ending, I was left with the uneasy feeling that with neither a sense of foreboding nor the hope of redemption 8/april/10 was probably a story that need not have been told.
 
3/10.

KIDDIE STILL IN CHILE

Yep, he certainly wrote some stuff from Chile.


¿Que honda weones?  Hace mucho tiempo.

So I’ve been teaching English at an “institute”, I swear here you can get two blokes that passed year 8 together in a room and call yourselves a University but it makes me feel important when they call me professor and I’m saving for my tweed jacket.  I am however slightly disappointed that it’s not like I had envisioned beforehand.  I was thinking that it would be all hilarious and poignant like Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam but considering how I have run directly into the fact that I really don’t know anything about the English language, I think that my performance in class might be more akin to Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy, complete with verbiage, silly pants and general lack of meaning.  The English teaching is also terrible for the Spanish but still it has evolved to the level where the mispronouncing that I held up as ability at the onset is becoming more of an embarrassing hindrance, although it is a constant source of amusement for the Chileans who think that I am mildly retarded.

The other day I rubbed the raw stinking fat of a pig on my boots in a bizarre almost-traditional ceremony to make them waterproof and apparently if I make it down to the wilds of Patagonia (unlikely) I have to slay a lobo (sea lion) with my bare hands and cake myself in its fat so that I can swim in the artic waters.  Sounds like a fair deal to me and it does fit nicely into my “if-you-want-to-eat-you-should-be-able-to-wring-the-life-out-of-it-with-your-own-hands” theory.  I figure it will probably taste somewhat like salty chicken….. The waterproofing was in preparation for some soul cleansing wandering through the silent splendour of the big big Andes.  Went on a trip for the weekend with the other cats in my house and hiked around volcanoes and up to glaciers by day and then warded off the biting, mountain night-time cold by slipping into the starlit thermal baths and rubbing hot mud over my naked flesh.  Not a bad gig.  Then when I was suitably refreshed and at ease, my good mate the Biz dropped in from Land of Oz for a week in which I was able to erase the last remnants of brain cells that were precariously clinging to life in my fuddled brain.  There was the usual eating drinking and being merry but the standout has to be that in the catalogue of available stories to regale mates with I now have one that begins thusly; “so we went on this f*cking huge bender, and I sh*t you not mate I still don’t really know how but we ended up in another country…” Hilarious from the distance of the future, not so funny when we sobered up and were waiting for two hours at the border.


Death threats:

I’ve taken up smoking and am busily sucking down 30 a day, or so the experts tell me.  Apparently spending an afternoon cruising leisurely through the streets of Santiago is the equivalent of a pack.  This is bad.  I get all the down side of lung cancer and emphysema without the accompanying looking cool and sexy – which obviously is what smoking is all about.  Added to this I get stinging eyes and am trapped in torturous purgatory with a sneeze constantly threatening to erupt from my nose but never, ever, ever arriving.  So we are desperate for rain here as well though not to fill the dwindling water reserves so the populace can stop bathing in their own faeces like in Melbourne town, but to clean the fetid air.  Apparently only the rain can do it though I was speaking to someone the other day who told me they didn’t understand why the government just don’t blow up one of the mountains to make a hole for the smog to escape.  This is the sort of brilliant environmental logic that typifies this joint.  “Hang on, we’ve planned the city poorly and stuffed 6 million people into a f*cking great big hole and plonked a bunch of smoke-belching industry in there as well just for good measure.  Sh*t.  Ok, um, ok, lets blow one of those mountains up then.”  The news reader (not Brian) told me that the situation is now critical and the city is on High Alert though I don’t really know what that means or what I should do aside from breath less, which would be equally fatal.  Speaking of futility the other day I was woken from my drunken slumber into confused consciousness in the dead of night.  After the mandatory system evaluation to gauge wakefulness I realised that Chicken Little was right and that the sky was falling.  It was a good ol' fashioned earthquake.  I sat there like an idiot thinking that there was probably something that I should be doing like running and screaming or at least knocking the top of it one more time so I could die happy as the roof buried me but the rumbling slowed and stopped and I passed out again.  It was a surreal and disconcerting experience and made me wish that I had paid more attention to the safety demonstration of the stewardess.  I still don’t know what to do, they tell me pray but I think my atheism may get in the way so I feel impotent to the threats of this place, at least back home I know that I can wrestle the croc and charm the snake (“Yes, I do know the Crocodile Hunter’s dead.  Yes, we do all have pet crocs and I do ride a roo to work”).  

My devil-may-care-roguish-step-out-in-front-of-cars-I-am-walking-here-and-you-shall-stop attitude has taken some pummelling by a Chilean driving populace who care very little to nothing for the lives of pedestrians.  In terms of wanting to stop their cars they are probably only slightly behind white South Africans (boo!) driving around Joburg, only since the death squads of Pinochet are no more they are largely without the excuse of a 38% chance that you are going to be carjacked and shot execution style that the Afrikaners can at least call on.  So there’s a kind of feeling about that if the smog don’t getcha a lunatic in a Dodge Ram is going to plough you down.


Chilean culture 101:

Chileans love an excuse to riot. To go marauding through the streets smashing things, taunting the police and generally bemoaning the state of affairs.  It’s good to see the communists and the anarchists throwing stones at each other while riot cops rush around in Mad Max-style armoured vehicles spewing out tear gas and drenching the combatants with water cannons.  Every other day there is a rampage of some description to quench my thirst for civil disobedience.  When they are not rioting it seems that, according to themselves, they are all either rooting or robbing each other.  The first two things that a Chilean will tell you about other Chileans is that they are all ladrones, the worst kind of robbers, (“no you can’t walk there”, “you can’t do that, it’s too dangerous”, “don’t take your camera”, “better to go naked that way they have nothing to steal”) and that infidelity is a national sport.  I’m starting to believe them.  A chick that I live with, slightly oxymoronic in that she is a tiny, sweet, little German, was mugged as she fumbled with the key in the lock of our door.  A Bad Man ripped her pack of her and told her that he was going to stick either a knife or a spoon in her (I always get confused with these two words in Spanish, they’re just so damn close).  Then I spent my Saturday afternoon running through the streets of the centre chasing some muggers who had jumped some old guy in broad daylight.  When I set off I had visions of a pose of concerned citizens hankering for a-lynchen but despite the crowds of rubber-neckers the Mob turned out to be mostly-to-completely comprised of one Aussie screaming in English and clearly not thinking about what he would do if he were to catch them.  Needless to say they gave me the slip and all I had to show for it was their jackets, which they ditched in a clever chameleon act of identity shifting.  That’s the thievery part confirmed, the infidelity bit is not quite as immediately noticeable as Chileans are not the most overtly sexualised bunch getting around.  At all.  It took until I was watching daytime TV the other day and stumbled upon Pasiónes.  A show where they dramatically recreate the affairs of their viewers who in bizarrely anonymous exhibitionism send in their sordid secrets to be aired and celebrated by all.  The bad acting makes me yearn for the quality that we skips are spoilt with on Home and Away and the titillation for the heady days of Jeremy Sims in Chances.  

There has been a little climbing adventure of late, the results of which have been smashed together with some Final Cut fiddling, which I am enjoying, and you can see them here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0g7tTsXWWg.  endulgently constructed for my own gratification.  A million thanks are shouted out from my incredible terraza (Biz now you know just how incredible that is -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCS1zfGNS98 ) to Lisa who clung to the cliff in the freezing cold in order to get the footage.  It was also the second time that a condor has watched over me when I’ve been clambering and so I think if I were to take peyote and fall into the spirit world I’d find it to be my spirit guide.

Eso es toda, hasta la proxima.

Send powerful thoughts.

El Cabra.

KIDDIE IN CHILE

In 2007 or something, the Kid lived in Chile for a period.  It had a fairly transformative impact on him, and led him to attempt to rename himself as "cienfuegos" (unsuccessfully) (have you ever heard that said in a strong aussie accent?). Anyways, he wrote this missive, unto which I share with thee

hola weones,

The Chileans missed out on the 80’s.  Instead of bubblegummers and Mullets Mark I they were hiding under their beds and not telling jokes about the government as Pinochet was busy running around burying them under football stadiums.  It’s for that that they have a good excuse for being 20 years behind and so they are doing the 80’s for the first time which means that I am doing it over again.  Everything is 80’s, but most notably their clothes and taste in music, and I don’t meant the fly sort of cyclical return to the fashions of the past in an everything-comes-back-into-style sort of way, I mean it’s all brand new to them.  Half the populace have long, greasy hair down to their ars*s and dress in all black, never have I seen so many bad heavy metal t-shirts depicting devils since I was a 15 year old chasing my brother and his mates around, while the other half are waiting for the new New Order album, think Depeche Mode are the greatest band ever and are still stuck on Madonna in her pre-Kabala years.  The only other music they have is Ragaton, which is like a horrible version of Hip Hop with crappy 80’s beats and a couple of Whacckdaddies pouncing around trying to be all South Central and ending up more South American trailer trash instead.

There are no tunes in this country.

I just spent four days solid buried deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy battling the evils of being illegal, apparently I had 30 days to register with the International Police after I arrived though no one told me.  The International Police sounds impressive but they are just glorified stamp monkeys who wear their cop badges hanging from chains around their necks as if they are worried about not being identifiable in a high stakes under cover drug raid and thusly getting shot friendly fire-style although the only clicking they hear is not the hammer of their .44 discharging rather its only the duller thud of the Approved stamp clonking onto some German exchange students visa form 7,000 times a day.  So refusing to believe their stone faced no’s I basically kept walking up and down stairs knocking on every door I could find until they eventually let me off.  In the end the guy who was supposed to fine me was on holidays and no one else wanted to deal with my incessant whining so they drafted me a letter attesting to my extreme stupidity and excusing me for it and no fine for the kiddie!!!  Part of what i learnt navigating this maze was that Chile is about the perception of doing things rather than getting things done. People may be at work for 10 hours a day but they have the same level of productivity as I did in my last year at Macquarie when I slipped through the cracks and was accountable to no one.   Everyone wears a suit, has a lofty title and wants to feel self-important by trying to impress themselves on their underlings. Its hilariously predictable.  I have been pursuing the teach English vibe and the company is exactly the same as The Office I shite you not.  The boss is David Brent down to the bad goatee and I am waiting for him to get the guitar, the assistant to the manager is a skinny geezer who could very well be the real Gareth and the interaction between the two is priceless.  I’m trying to keep a straight face around these cats but it’s not easy.

It really shouldn’t have been such a whopping surprise for me to run into a so many hunting pairs of Mormans here in Santiago, trawling the streets and looking smart in their starched white shirt and black pant combo-uniforms that are helpfully accessorised with a name badge.  After all those literalists believe that SOG (SonOfGod) whence he woketh upon the third day, the lord said unto him, passeth thou over the seas in thine very fast boat and visit upon the peoples of the New World.  The pictures in the front of the Book of Mormon of the white bearded and robed Jesus probably delivering that Turn The Other Cheek sermon and hanging out on Inca pyramids with the feathersintheirhair archetypal noble savage Indians are worth picking up a copy for yourself.  I bet they wish now they had believed and got on board the organised Catholic religion train before the Conquistadors arrived or at least that they got the Eye For An Eye serman instead given the reaming they received by 50 blokes riding horses and carrying smallpox.  I am however disappointed by the lack of Scientologists over here because right about now I could really go in for a free personality test as I don't have too many people around here who know me well enough to tell me to stop acting like a d*ckhead.  Speaking of blood thirsty conquest I am on the look out for some art depicting the colonial times in South America.  What I really want are paintings of conquistadors with rivers of gold reflected in their eyes mounted atop nasal flaring steads with a cross held aloft in one hand, smiting cowering Indians with a broad sword wielded in the other.  Unfortunately it’s harder than you would think it would be to come by depictions of the slaughtering Spaniards doing it for God, gold and king.

My housemate’s Chilean girlfriend who was unstable at the best of times, and unhinged most of the times, tried to stab him through the heart with a stiletto and bit a nice chunk out of the end of his nose in a drunken rage the other night because in her rabid mind she was convinced that the two of us were gay lovers.  Don’t worry, I’m confident that she will be ok as she’s a psychologist so she’ll be able to sit beside herself on a comfy couch and talk about her father, to herself.  I think though that its probably because she wants me and it’s a projection thing.  In response to this though I have taken to sleeping with an old flip flop beside my bed for protection and have decided that I’ve probably gotta get a bird so as to stop the spread of this nasty slur.


The (bad) Sounds of Santiago.

-    Trucks cruising slowly up and down the street with music playing should signal that the ice cream man is coming, fair enough the ice cream man is probably also the local Scout Leader and you should take as much care around them with the fruit of your loins, the apple of your eye, as you would with the parish priest, but it should never mean that the gas man is coming.  In a Santiago without gas mains it does and I truly pity the poor ba*tard that has to drive around at 10kph all day, every day with a horrendous song lifted directly from Colin Powel Selecta! GitMo Bay’s Greatest Torture Tracks blaring out at an offensive level of decibels.  I yelp and cringe in a Pavlov’s Dog kinda way every time he is within range and have seriously thought about blowing him up (al Qaida would get the blame anyway so I'm sure I'd get away with it).
-    The Evangelicals who serenade me early on Sunday mornings, while I love the Muslim call to prayer in Marrakech, Seventh Day sods screaming half in tongues and off-key about servitude and god in Santiago at 8am on a Sunday morning outside my window is less the cool.  Why can’t they take a vow of silence os at the very least do their repenting on, say, a Wednesday arvo?
-    The sound of a million nuts slapping the nut rests of a million b*tches as all the not-spaded streetgang dogs hump at the same time, like a giant rhythmic metronome of puppylove.  Like all joints in Latin America they are in desperate need of a Dogs Are For Life Not Just For Christmas ad campaign or a bit of Nazi-inspired doggy eugenics/forced sterialisation.

Someone please tell me that grey hair is “distinguished” and that I am now just a little bit more like that Scottish actor bloke Sean Connery.

For more hair related material, click this:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn0BJ7j3A4A

Adios.

The Goat.


Because one likes to think of oneself as grand and dramatic I’ll include this.  It seems everyone is doing quotes these days:

“You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and you now inhabit a foreign land.”  Medea.

KIDDIE RESPONDING TO BIZ ON MATTERS HIP-HOP RELATED


First post - yeah boy.

In response to an email from a very cool, languid character known as the Biz (which it must be said is awesome and may warrant capturing in a blog):


basically i don’t fuck with communicating with you people about hiphop related matters cuz there is only one person on this email who declared that one day he was gonna own this city and it sure as hell isn’t any of you.  some of y’all get all touchy about hiphop shit, some of you had careers in hiphop, and some of you even accused others of purposefully holding out on others (of you) in relation to the doctrine of hiphop to retard personal development, and while that’s all very clever and presumably interesting, being as hiphop as i am i actually don’t give a fuck. 
  
having said that, if the own the city guy did one day go on to own the city he would probably dance a little bit like drake does in his new clip ‘started from the bottom’.  which incidentally, is the way the own the city guy felt when he talked about doing that. 
  
i want you to observe the steps, and know something. 
  
bitches. 
  
ps. if your name is james on this email you an extra bitch. 
    
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RubBzkZzpUA 

my mate the Kid said this:

The track is something. The clip is something else. But the email is something else again. It could be one of the most fascinating missives I have ever received. Now that I am a failed banker, failed entrepreneur, failed henchman and failed publisher, I got time, I'm going to turn my hand to failed faux-academic and write a PhD on this. Incredibly incendiary, angry and needlessly provocative, frothing with the angst of perceiving yourself as misunderstood, the unnamed known characters, this is derogatory and dismissive by establishing a created and homogenous plural 'other' - honestly 'you people' can't be merely spoken it must be spat - yet inclusive in a your-last-chance-learn-someink-right-here way and offering the hope of redemption but the knowledge is ultimately elusive as demonstrated through the seemingly truncated sentence 'I want you to observe the steps and know something'. It is short a final clause that would otherwise convey that which we are supposed to know. What is it that we are supposed to know? Everything? The steps? Does its ambiguity an exasperation, implying the audience know nothing at all, so know something (anything!). A declaration so passionate this email channels the aggrieved boy who was burning with a rage at not owning this city. TIA? No, TIHH - This Is Hip Hop. In that way as a performance I would cast you as Daniel Day Lewis, the great modern day method actor, deep in the role, still, though the voice is largely characterised by the grammar of ebonics - the method - there are passages more reminiscent of your normal metre as if there is a battle going on. What does it mean? Is it style not substance and therefore all this content analysis is entirely the wrong framework? The psychology of this has left me enrapture, nose-diving down my own filthy rabbit hole of over-analysis and paranoia and whole fractals full of Death-Of-The-Author interpretations that slide wonderfully about as if tossed like a scared sailor on the heaving deck of a ship caught in a Southern Ocean storm. Where am I?

5 out of 5 cornrows

Awesome. Just awesome.