Stray 21Apr05 - Fuck the Vote.

First off, I’ve finally done myself a new portfolio
website: www.sugarandfat.info


Well. Enough of you have mailed to inquire what I’m
doing with my life, so it must be time for another one
of these.

Basically, stuff all. Not much stands out as worth
mentioning in the three months I’ve been in Western
Australia with my mum and granny. Went to a couple of
one day music festivals and have so far seen: Jack
Johnson, Xavier Rudd, G-Love and Special Sauce, The
Violent Femmes, Gomez, The Cat Empire, Ash Grunwald,
The Living End, The Waifs, and one or two others.
That’s a surprisingly good spread for WA, which
usually gets half a gig a year, which no one goes to.

I stayed two nights in a Perth hostel for one of the
festies. Very early in the morning an extremely drunk
Englishman staggered in and collapsed into the bunk
below mine. I was woken by the noise and immediately
knocked out by the fumes. If he’d lit a cigarette
you’d all be hearing about suicide bombers targeting
half jewish backpackers in Western Australia.
The snoring was one thing, but I’ve never met someone
who swears and threatens people in their sleep before.
At one point he reached out, grabbed someone else’s
pack, muttered ‘this isn’t my gear, I’ll fucking kill
you if you touch my stuff ARE YOU FRENCH?!’, passed
out again and started snoring like he was being
choked.
I swear it wasn’t me choking him.
Honest.

Dorm Dynamics (1) If someone is snoring in your dorm
room, the absolute best place to be is directly above
them. It makes the whole poking and dropping things on
their head much more practical and easier to get away
with. Having to get out of bed, walk across the room
and smack someone in the ear is very hard to pull off
without recrimination, and you’ll only have so many
rolled up socks available to throw.
Whenever the guy started gurgling away I just, and as
subtly as possible, violently shook the whole bunk,
which usually got him to stir enough that I could get
a couple minutes more sleep before having to go
through it all again. Over the course of the night,
however, he became desensitized to this, so I had to
resort to poking him and then pretending to be asleep.
Pretend sleep’s about all I got that night.

The next morning I was sitting in bed getting ready to
go out, i.e. eating an orange, securing my gear, etc.
I guess I might’ve been moving round a bit. He gets
out of bed, glares at me, and says ‘not much chance of
sleeping in with you around is there?’
I declined comment. He did apologize afterwards, I
changed rooms for the sake of a night’s sleep.

I’ve been having my annual forty thousand kilometer
tune up. My dentist waited till I had a mouth full of
metal before saying that I, ‘lead a charmed life of
decay’. I think I swallowed something, but he meant it
as a good thing. Despite my pretty shoddy tooth care I
only needed one small filling, and that was in a
wisdom tooth that doesn’t usually get x-rayed so
would’ve taken years to appear.

Last year the bed I slept in here was pretty saggy,
and my back went a bit gamm. A month later in
Christchurch I jumped backwards out of a tree, fell
over, and couldn’t get up again for a while. Two trips
to the osteopath and it was fine, but with three
months in bed now it’s starting to feel a bit tight
again.
So I went to get some Bowen therapy, apparently quite
good but which I knew nothing about. Whereas
osteopathy is about bones, Bowen is all about the
muscles. I have two problems which pertain to this: a)
I’m ticklish. b) I don’t like massage, (i.e. being
poked.) So having a guy trying to tweak a muscle
around my spine -through my abdomen- with very strong
fingers was, unpleasant.
And I’m not sure what it’s done for my back, but it
did have a very interesting secondary effect; when the
guy rolled the muscle I started snickering. I wasn’t
feeling particularly amused, quite the opposite
actually, but these uncontrollable waves of mirth were
rolling through me from my stomach and I ended up
giggling away for about ten minutes.
According to the Bowen theory emotion is stored in the
body. Dude said he’s had people actually live out past
experiences on the table. Makes you wonder.


Electile dysfunction: the sense of growing dread that
you’re about to get caught up in another goddamn
election.

I need to work on my timing. Five elections in three
years.
One in Ireland, one in Scotland, British Columbia,
America, Western Australia. I’m being stalked by
democracy. I know how the Middle East must feel. The
first three weren’t so bad as little more to me than
roadside signs, the American one was downright
entertaining (in much the same way as professional
wrestling: don’t watch for more than two seconds and
know the predetermined outcome will always favour the
biggest meat puppet).
But this West Aussie one has been at a time when I’ve
been watching a lot of TV and it’s forced me to leave
the room a couple of times.
Luckily the conservative candidate completely
self-destructed on the home stretch, declaring he’d
decided to dig a three thousand kilometer open ditch
from the far north to carry water down to Perth. It
was never going to be a good idea, but bless him he
stuck with it to the end, basing his campaign on the
presumption that what West Australians appreciate is
people who make decisions, even if they’re bad ones.
I’m actually kind of surprised it didn’t work.

Gotta say I’m a bit disappointed with the new popedom
going to Benedict XVI, formally known as Joseph
Ratzinger. (I never really wanted to see him in the
papal reign. Ha ha.)
I had hoped for a little change in the church, I’m not
sure an ex-member of the Hitler youth with the
nickname ‘God’s Rottweiler’ is the man to do it.
O well. He’s 78 so it shouldn’t be too long before we
get another one.


I love that we have reality TV. It is, seriously, one
of the few things that really pushes the limits of my
imagination. It is unnnnn.believably bad. And every
time a new show comes out I think, ok, this is the
absolute lowest that they could possibly ever go, and
I’m always wrong. It’s fascinating.

There was one show here, just now finished, called
Outback Jack, in which half a dozen American women
were shipped off to the Australian back country to
bounce about and compete with each other for the
exclusive right to mount a guy called Jack on
international television.
Which, you know, would be bad enough, except that it
wasn’t even real. Scripted.

There’s a website now where you can pay to remotely
operate a hunting rifle and shoot real live animals,
which are then butchered and couriered to your home.
I’m just waiting till they start using that camera to
film Pop Idol.


I want to depoliticize these mailers a little. Less
ranting about everything wrong with the world. In
light of this, I shouldn’t be in Australia. Maybe if I
vent it all at once. Stand by.

First though, the good news.

I sent a portfolio to Weta Digital, the production
house what done Lord of the Rings and is currently
doing the ill-conceived King Kong with Peter Jackson.
I got an email from them last week asking if I was
available to start work within the month.
I said YES, they said they’d gone with someone else.
But this is good news, although it obviously could’ve
been vastly better, because it means that one of the
top five cgi houses in the world looked at my reel and
seriously considered hiring me. And of course there
will be more openings in future.

In other good news: although the federal Australian
government still won’t enter into the Kyoto accord,
the state governments are talking about overriding
that and setting up their own carbon trading scheme.
Go the states and territories!

Also, check out www.hospitalityclub.org
It’s a site where you can hook up with people around
the world and arrange places to stay with locals. I
will definitely be using this myself.

And finally, although I really despise chain letters,
following this mailer will be one that I kind of
liked.

Now to the rabidly negative diatribe on all things
fucked up and Australian.

The third through fifth highest points in Bunbury are
three massive piles of wood chips. Admittedly, Bunbury
is a pretty flat place, but each of these things is
over three storeys high. One is Jarra, a threatened
hardwood.
Back in the day the chips were sold at a loss to Japan
for paper and disposable chopsticks, but since the
Asian recession the market’s dried up. Now the logging
companies are being solely funded by the government to
keep chopping down trees anyway, in the hope that the
market may someday return. The piles keep growing, and
presumably, rotting.

Soil salinisation is a huge problem in Australia, with
over-clearing of the land dropping the water table and
leaving the soil so salty it kills almost everything
trying to grow in it.

There was a small anti logging demonstration here a
few years ago, couple of dozen greenies and kids doing
the usual protesting thing in the main street. A group
of forestry workers showed up and attacked them. At
least one small child dressed as a tree was set on
fire. I think she was put out before suffering any
serious injuries.

The government here recently paid America 1.1 billion
dollars for eleven Seasprite helicopters, which were
used in Vietnam and it’s now been found can’t fly in
bad weather or low light. The states had offered them
to Turkey, Thailand and Greece for free, but they
didn’t want them.

All environmental groups here recently received a
letter from the minister for the environment informing
them that they were now forbidden from spending their
grants on any form of political activity, and they
must focus on ground level things like tree planting
and picking up litter. Also that the grants will now
be capped at ten thousand dollars (they used to run
around seventy thousand). It is expected that many
groups will have to close down.

I’m not sure how much you know about the current
immigration situation in Australia. Basically if you
arrive and ask for protection as a refugee you will be
mandatorily detained in what is essentially a
concentration camp, with electrified barbed wire,
armed guards and a pretty bad track record of physical
and sexual abuse, for anywhere between six months and
four years. After that time chances are you’ll be
deported, regardless of the situation in your home
country.
You’ll have to pay for the flight back. Sometimes, if
there is a perceived risk of terrorism, it’ll be a
chartered flight and the cost has been as high as two
million Australian dollars for a family.
The best case scenario is a one-year entry visa which
can be, and usually is, not renewed.

Lawyers and journalists are forbidden by law to
communicate with the detainees. There are regular
hunger strikes with people sewing their mouths closed
and children throwing themselves on the electric
fences.
It’s actually really really horrible. The UN and
Amnesty International have both described it as one of
the worst human rights violations happening in the
world today.
There’s one Cashmerie guy who’s been inside for seven
years because neither Australia nor India will take
him. Unless something changes he will be there for the
rest of his life.

A group of thirty Muslims were considered for entry
recently only after they converted to Christianity.

I’m not sure if it’s still gong on, it probably is,
but a few years ago I saw a report on the people who
live on an island chain off WA’s northwest coast,
completely surrounded by Australian national marine
park.
By a bizarre ozzie law they’re forbidden from using
any sort of navigational equipment on their fishing
boats, which has the twin effect of making it really
hard for them to not get killed by hurricanes, and
impossible to realise they’ve strayed into the park.
As soon as they do the navy imprisons them, sinks
their boat, and they go through the detention process
listed above, eventually deported back to their
families who haven’t had any income for the last four
years and now owe the price of the boat to its owner.

There’s more, but I should probably stop there.


This Saturday I’m flying to Melbourne. My first
priority will be getting a good place to live,
secondly sorting out an income. My list in order of
desirability is:
3D animation (preferably for film), making fire gear,
fire performance, trading second hand computers,
computer techie, production assistant for film,
labouring, and if someone puts a gun to my head and
forces me, drywalling.

So, Jo, see you then. Rest of you, take care and be
all like happy and stuff.