I Feel Almost Normal

The last few weeks I have used this blog not to chronicle my American adventures as usual, but to interview people involved in aspects of Australian cultural life I find inspirational. This is because my quick dash back to Australia in December turned into a four month hospital holiday due to the discovery of a large endometrial ovarian cyst which necessitated the removal my right ovary and most of the fallopian tube. There is only so much entertaining material that can be extracted from chronic pelvic pain and lying horizontal for long periods of time, although the heroin strength pain-killers, and subsequent withdrawal from them, certainly makes me feel like I now have a right to shove up next to William Burroughs as a giant in opioid inspired scribblings. Instead, I talked to people doing great, non-drug induced things in Australian environmental politics, independent film and electronic music. And I had lined up more wonderful people to talk to about our vibrant community radio sector, our excellent healthcare system and the wisdom of indigenous spirituality. But the bad news is, you are not going to hear from these people who are inherently more interesting than me because the good news is I feel almost normal again, and my life transmission via this blog is about to resume. I head back to the States this Wednesday.

Here is a brief final wrapping up of the medical saga, for the benefit of some women reading this who have, or who might encounter, a similar problem to mine. Heres a multiple choice question, can you guess which advice my gynecological surgeon gave me in relation to my condition?

a) After the operation, you will be pain-free for at least 3 years;
b)You will recover 6 weeks after surgery.
c) You will recover 3 months after surgery.
d) I never tell anyone they will be pain-free, there is always a risk of ongoing pain after this kind of surgery.
e) All of the above.

If you guessed e), then you’d be right and you win a year’s supply of Oxycoffin.

Nevertheless, my lower abdomen has now lost is iron grip on my consciousness, the aches and pains now huddle, increasingly enfeebled, at the back of my mind, and I do believe that I will wake up in my comfy bed in Pittsburgh one day in the near future to find my mind scarcely aware of my nether regions at all.

Its an expectation of the public that, after an artist experiences an intense bout of pain and anguish, a masterpiece should be forthcoming in the near future. This is a reasonable expectation and one I will not disappoint. Here it is, entitled “The Tragical History of a Spermatoza Finding Itself Indisposed and Quite At A Loss in the Unfamiliar Environs of a Mono-ovarian Chamber Located in the Inner Parts of a Female.”

There once was a sperm called Jim
Who was lazy and incredibly dim
When injected inside
It just couldn’t decide
The easiest way to swim.

To the right it finally swam over
In the hope of caressing an ova
But instead of an egg
It banged its head
On the stump of an endometrioma!

I look forward to that finding its way into the next updated Oxford literary companion to medically inspired doggerel.

Meanwhile, the other useful thing I’ve done is digitize a bunch of old moth eaten VHSs, videos and interviews from the late ’90s and early 2000s, something I would not have gotten around to doing had I not been detained in Australia for this long. I’ve just uploaded a couple on my video page under the 1999 header – the clip B(if)tek shot with Julee Cruise in New York, which is a cover of Cliff Richard’s pop classic ‘Wired for Sound’. And a lo-fi hillbilly acid tribute to Captain Beefheart called ‘Fallin’ Ditch’, which I put together around the same time.

I am breaking my journey back to Pittsburgh by stopping off in LA for a few days, where I will hang out with the sensational DJ Dougee Dimensional – of The Gentle People fame, whose electro-lounge confections and dance moves go way beyond Beyond the Valley of Dolls. I think I am going on a live webcast for a local radio show while I am there, stay tuned for details.

So my next posting will hopefully be from the City of Quartz, maybe from the Viper Lounge, maybe from Venice Beach, or more likely from Dougee’s Santa Monica lounge room with an orange decaf frappuccino close at hand:-)

This is the third in a series of interviews with people who are committed to aspects of Australian cultural life that I find inspirational. This time I talk to Nick Wilson, electronic noodler and independent label manager about the illustrious history and output of the Australian electronic underground.

Nick Wilson has a long background in electronic music and sound art, having performed and recorded music with acts such as Continuum, Random Acts of Elevator Music, Space Is Ace and Tiatto, and worked solo as Reductionist. He is currently the Label Manager for the Australia-wide electronic arts collective Clan Analogue and produced the compilation Habitat: Environmental Sound Research, nominated for an Australian Dance Music Award. He collaborated on the City Frequencies installation at the Melbourne Town Hall for the 2000 Next Wave Festival and the Café Voyeur installation at Kent St for the 2004 Melbourne Fringe Festival. He has composed music for the Re-Sound ensemble in Melbourne. During 2008 and 2009 he managed Institute of Sound, a year-long series of electronic music production and performance workshops. Recent projects have included impromptu office building performances in Sydney and Melbourne with Random Acts of Elevator Music and the sound installation Bush Resonance created during an artist-residency in Eltham, Victoria.

Nicole: The Australian electronic underground has a long and noble history. Could you give me a brief sketch of some of the key periods, artists and labels over the decades?

Nick: In the 1970s electronic music was a very obscure part of Australian music. There was an experimental electronic music scene in Melbourne focused around the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre which produced notable artists such as David Chesworth and Philip Brophy .

Electronic music became a feature of post-punk music in Australia as elsewhere although the rock-oriented groups gained more attention at the time. Notable electronic music artists from this era include Severed Heads in Sydney and Ollie Olsen’s various bands in Melbourne.

Following on from this, synthesizers gained a foothold in new wave pop, with bands such as Models , Real Life and Icehouse making extensive use of new technology.

In the late 80s rave culture began to infiltrate Australia and became immensely popular in the 90s. Labels such as Volition Records released popular records by crossover acts such as Single Gun Theory and Box Car, Itch-E & Scratch-E winning an Australian Recording Industry Award for Best Dance Release heralded a newfound acceptance of electronic music in the mainstream media.

In the last decade, with a resurgence of rock, electronic music slipped back into an underground vibe. In the last couple of years there has been a groundswell of electro in the Australian scene, with bands such as the Presets and Midnight Juggernauts making it big, while female singer/songwriters such as Bertie Blackman have turned to electronic music to broaden their sound.

N1: Clan Analogue holds a unique position in Australian music culture, as a long-standing national collective of electronic based artists, both sound and vision. Can you describe to me in more detail what Clan is, and how did it all get started?

N2:Clan Analogue began in the early 90s when Toby Grime and Brendan Palmer met one night at a bus stop in Sydney. Toby was carrying a Casio CZ101 synthesizer so Brendan approached him to compliment him on his taste in musical instruments and they proceeded from there to form an electronic band called Telharmonium and lay the plans for a collective of local electronic music artists. In Sydney at the time the live music scene was very rock-oriented. There was a thriving nightclub scene centred around Darlinghurst where house and disco could be heard but there was no space between these two extremes for live electronic music. Brendan placed an ad looking for other like-minded musicians and the inaugural Clan Analogue meeting took place with five people attending..

The collective grew from here to put on live events, publish a newsletter and start releasing music. Although it did spread to most capital cities in Australian, it is mainly focused these days on Sydney and Melbourne. Over the years it has evolved in a chaotic way, going through many phases. In the public eye it is often seen as an independent electronic music label however members also produce podcasts, run workshops, put on radio shows and lots more. It has remained as an artist-run collective.

N1: What are some of the highlights of the collective’s history?

N2: Hard to think of any one highlight, just a general trajectory of greatness I hope! Throughout the ‘90s, regular Clan Analogue nights were held at venues like the Hopetoun Hotel, the Manning Bar and Good Bar, all of which contributed to the breaking down of the notion that electronic music wasn’t a serious live music format. The earliest Clan Analogue releases were cassettes sold at gigs but soon a series of vinyl EPs were produced, leading to a distribution deal with Mushroom Records and, later, Festival. Members started playing on bills with touring international acts like On-U-Soundsystem. The live events moved out of pubs and clubs and into warehouses and forests, with DJs and visual projection artists joining the collective.

Highlights of this time include dub and ambient compilation CDs, the nomination of the compilations 20 Disco Greats and Habitat for Australian Dance Music Awards, and great releases by artists such as Deepchild, Winduptoys and Telemetry Orchestra.

N1: Its not easy keeping any kind of 100% volunteer based organisation running for two months let alone a bunch of crazy artists for almost 20 years – what have been the key enablers for Clan’s longevity?

N2: The main enablers have been the variety of people who have come on board at different times. There have always been enough talented musicians on board that we’ve been able to consistently release interesting stuff. Also, we’ve always had at least a few people around who are motivated and know how to organise stuff. Also, the collective doesn’t have any particular musical direction other than a general interest in electronic music so we’ve never been locked into a particular genre and hence become stuck in one time and place. We’ve been able to release diverse styles of electronic music as new artists have come along and hence evolve with the times.

N1: Do you think there is something distinctive about Australian electronica, either in terms of its sound, or the sub-culture that surrounds it?

N2: I think electronic music is reasonably global these days. There is so much new music being produced around the world that is readily heard online or over the airwaves that it’s really up to individuals to develop their own styles. So I’m not convinced there is a distinctive Australian sound, although audiences and critics may judge otherwise.

N1: One lovely ‘institution’ I think is the free Ozzie ‘bush doof’. Do you want to describe what that is?

N2: This is a fun event where anywhere from 50 to many thousands of people gather in a secluded bush location for a dance party. There tend to be huge sound-systems, great lighting and of course a lineup of great DJs and musical acts. Many of the early bush raves were small illegal gatherings but they’ve become a big thing, such as the Earthcore raves in Victoria which became quite important to rural economies. These events are often dominated by psy-trance and chill-out music but there is also some great diversity in sounds.

N1: When I was in Brooklyn over a year ago, the warehouse party was starting to have a big comeback, which was very exciting. There are no warehouses left in Sydney or Melbourne – where can you go in these cities now to see live electronic acts? Or are there no more live acts – just DJs and boys with lap-tops?

N2: A lot of the live electronic acts are downsizing to laptops which is a bit sad for an old analogue fan like me but you can do some great stuff with software these days. Logistically, the laptop live act fits into a club environment a lot more easily than bringing lots of gear. There are some venues which have live electronic music music from time to time such as Loop, Horse Bazaar, First Floor and Bar Open, it’s just a matter of seeking it out. Of course the big raves, bush parties and festivals often include sizeable lineups of live electronic music.

N1: You and I have happily reconnected again because of the release of an EP which includes some excellent B(if)tek remixes by those sly groovers Bleepin’ J Squawkins and Koshowko. But you are also about to launch a triple album Clan retrospective (and DVD doco is that right?) which I think will be a landmark in Australian sub-cultural history. Can you please tell me about that release and DVD?

N2: The release is called ‘Re Cognition: The Clan Analogue Legacy Collection’. We have combined the album and the DVD into one collectible three-disc package. The first disc is a collection of some of the greatest tracks from the collective’s history. The second disc is a selection of new remixes, with Clan Analogue’s current artists choosing their favourite moments from the back catalogue to remix. The third disc is the DVD which collects together filmclips, a discography, the new documentary ‘Clan Analogue: Plug In & Switch On’ and the remastered rare mid-90s VHS release ‘Clan Analogue Live at the Goethe Institute’, a groundbreaking audiovisual live performance from the early days of Clan Analogue. There is actually a bonus fourth disc of rarities, called ‘Cognition X’, available as a free download to people who buy the album in physical format. It will be available soon from the Clan Analogue website as well as iTunes etc.

N1: Thanks very much Nick. Best of luck with the releases and happy noodling!

N2: Same to you!

POSTSCRIPT: Congratulations to Marty Batfreak who won the rare vinyl prize in the gravestone epitaph competition!

As I remain in Australia slowly recovering from surgery, I have started a series of interviews with people who embody inspirational aspects of Australian cultural life. This is the second in the series, and it looks at independent, radical filmmaking as practiced by George Gittoes.

George Gittoes (b. Sydney, Australia 1949) has been working in the medium of film, for 30 years – he is also an exhibiting artist, photographer, and published writer.

Gittoes studied art in New York 1968-69, and returned to Sydney to form the infamous experimental artists co operative, the Yellow House, with Martin Sharp and Brett Whiteley 1970-71. He has represented Australia in Identities exhibition, Taiwan (1993), Inneseite, Documenta X (1997) and has been artist in residence at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (1998) and a Fellow of The School of Humanities, Michigan University (2002).

In 1997 he was awarded an Order of Australia, AM for his services to the arts and international relations, and in 2008 he was awarded Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of NSW.

Gittoes has been working on themes of cultures in conflict since the 1980’s. He has worked in many regions including Afghanistan, China, Philippines, Russia, Middle East, Africa, Northern Ireland, and Nicaragua. Gittoes’ three most recent films (Soundtrack to War, Rampage and The Miscreants of Taliwood ) make up the trilogy ‘No Exit’ all made on the front line of the so-called War on Terror. As a film Director, he has been profiled in Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Raindance-London, Chicago, Vancouver, Montreal, Africa-Diaspora and MOMA Doc weeks, New York Film Festivals (2006-7).

Gittoes is currently working out of a studio in Berlin, but in mid- September 2010 he will be relocating to Houston, USA for an extended period. For more information on his prolific and provocative career, see his website.

Nicole: George, I know you as one of Australia’s most radical and innovative independent film-makers as well an award winning painter. War and conflict are major themes across all your work, what draws you to these themes?

George: The themes to do with war and its victims are my life’s work. To my knowledge I am the only artist in the world who has continually gone to the frontline of conflict to be a witness . I do it because I care about the people who are affected by the trauma of war and want to show them that I care. I also do it because I think it is important to create in the face of all that destruction. The anti war movement in the 60′s used to advocate love instead of war, I am from that generation and my way to demonstrate love opposed to war is to create in the midst of it .

N: Although you are Australian, you spend most of your time travelling the globe in search of subject matter, often documenting incredibly dangerous situations such as war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Bosnia. I’ve often wondered how you overcome sheer gut fear in those situations – does the adrenaline combined with the quest to highlight humanitarian plights do it? Or do you just have an unshakeable conviction that you’ll somehow come out unharmed?

G: I have seen so much death, often close by me, that I do not have any illusions about the possibility of being killed. It is worth risking your life for something worth dying for and for me it is art. I think more artists should do it and do not understand why it is only journalists who go to contribute about war when artists can communicate the experience in such a different way. I am not drawn to an adrenaline rush and find war very harsh and difficult to live through. Anyone who had been with me in these situations will testify that I am very calm and nothing like the stereotypical journalist as expressed in movies and books. My life out there is very insecure and uncomfortable.

As I prepare for another 5 months in Afghanistan my stomach churns and like always I worry that this next project could be my last. However, I am very happy to have the resolve to continue with this work despite all the concerns and anxieties because I can now look back on a huge body of work which is absolutely unique and full of meaning. War has made me appreciate life more. Rather than saying it has caused post traumatic stress and depression I would like to say it has had the opposite affect. I value every minute of my life and get incredible joy from the simplest of things which others would take for granted. Nearness to death makes you value every minute that you are alive. A patch of sunshine on some spring flowers.

N: You are a lauded veteran of the Australian arts and film scene, but you have also spent a lot of time in America, starting way back in the ’60s when I believe you first went to NYC to work with Andy Warhol. In relation to independent, political film-making, what differences do you notice between the Australian and American scenes and has this changed over the years?

G: I can not talk about either the Australian or American scenes as I have never belonged to any scene or taken notice of the circumstances of those who do. Usually I have to patch the funding together in an inspired way that does not follow any general film financing guideline and it is the same with my art. It has been a difficult struggle and at 60 I feel as insecure as ever.

America is starting to open up for me in a way Australia never has. The difference is that the gatekeepers in the Australian art world are extremely conservative and frightened to make decisions about art like mine. I have always been made to feel like a maverick outsider in Australia and my paintings still have not been collected by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery in Canberra or the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney). The curators in these institutions are frightened to include or show it. Critics such as John McDonald attack my work at every opportunity and I have never been considered for a Sydney Biennale or the Asia Pacific one in Brisbane. It is difficult not to feel excluded and hurt by this. The US on the other hand is enormously supportive. All three of the recent films have been shown at MoMA (NYC) and I have major Museum shows, such as the one at Houston Station Museum of Contemporary Art coming up . I also have a huge support base among critics, curators and festival directors in the US who take my work very seriously. A quick google search will verify this.

N: As a musician, I was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by your portrayal of the role of pop music in motivating troops in your unforgettable documentary Soundtrack To War, shot in Iraq and also referenced in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11. What inspired you to make that film?

G: I love popular culture and cannot live without music as a background to my life. Soundtrack to War came about when I realized most young people in America who were the age of the soldiers being sent to Iraq do not watch the news or documentaries but do watch MTV and VH1 . I decided to do a portrait of this MTV generation going to war and have it seen by them on MTV’s VH1. I was successful in doing this. It mainly shows the role of popular culture in war in both positive and negative ways.

N: In Rampage, You take some of those soldiers in Soundtrack to War and follow them back to their homes in Brown Sub (Brownsville), a ghetto in Miami, where you vividly make the point that these people grew up in a war zone. Its a gripping portrayal of the desperate situation of black youth gangster sub-culture, and the role of rap as offering both a mirror and a kind of poetic escape. Its one thing, though, to highlight American foreign policy failings overseas – its quite another for an Australian to dig around American tragedies on their home turf. How was the film received in the US?

G: American audiences get a lot of the references better than Australians who are less familiar with this scene. Rampage is a hard pill for Americans to swallow just as a film on the stolen generation or petrol sniffing among aboriginal youth would be for Australians. I considered Brownsub another war zone and that horrified Americans who only want to see war and poverty like this in other countries.

It is still a powerful film to show in the US and does not date, especially with Obama in the Whitehouse. I have recently been showing it at various University Campuses throughout the US and getting even stronger and more appreciative reactions than when it was first shown there and I think it is because the recession has made Americans more aware of the poverty and the growing hopelessness within their borders. When the film first came out Americans knew the poverty was there but did not want to admit to it and certainly did not want a foreigner putting it up to their faces. I remember when Penny Tweedie, the English photo journalist, did a slide show to music for the first Sydney Festival, called The Fat Australians, it contrasted the wealth of much of white Australian society with the poverty and desperate look of aboriginal settlements and camps. White Australia did not like it but liked it less because it was an outsider who showed it to them.

N: It looks like the US is embracing your latest film The Miscreants of Taliwood. I haven’t seen it, but I understand the title derives from the Taliban’s list of ‘miscreants’ which includes singers, dancers and store owners who sell music videos of any kind. You shot most of the film in Pakistan’s Taliban controlled tribal belt, in the North West Frontier Province. I see the film has caught the attention of CNN, and was recently on exhibition at NY’s MOMA. Can you tell me about this film and why you made it?

G: I made Miscreants as a way of defending the artists of the Tribal Belt of Pakistan’s North West Frontier who have been prevented from making films, singing, dancing, painting and creating poetry by the Taliban. I have a level of access to this region impossible for other foreigners. This is because of the many years I have worked with NGO’s in the region to assist landmine victims and promote mine awareness. This is a time when bridges of understanding need to be built between Islamic cultures like this and the rest of the world. I felt I had an obligation to be a bridge builder and give insights into this poorly understood region. I have a real love of Pashtun culture and have even contemplated buying a studio in Peshawar and making it my main base in the world. I have studied and enjoyed Islamic art and literature since I was at Kingsgrove North Highschool where I chose to specialise in Islamic art as an elective. I also feel closer to sufism than any other system of philosophical thought and Peshawar is a centre for Sufi scholars .

N: No-one working in independent film finds it easy to find finance, and in Australia $2m is considered to be a pretty good sized budget. Can you find the backing you need in Australia for your radical films, or do you need to go overseas?

G: I tend to get a portion of my funding from organisations like Screen Australia although they were not involved with Miscreants except for a small research loan. Most of my funding is scrounged together from painting sales and returns from the previous films . I have never gained any funding from overseas sources.

N: Finally George, have you ever met George Romero ? I recently moved to Pittsburgh which is George’s old college town. He shot his most famous films Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) there, and Tom Savini, the legendary make-up artist and ex Vietnam war vet, used to work out at my local gym! Pittsburgh is as beautiful and hilly as San Francisco, except most of the best views are dominated by graveyards: it is rightly considered the zombie capital of the world. Although Romero uses horror as his genre, he is, as you know, an extremely astute and critical observer of Western consumerism and many of his films are quite subversive. Have you ever considered doing a zombie movie? (Please come to Pittsburgh if you have!)

G: It is amazing you ask that. I wrote a zombie story a few days ago and am working on a Living Dead painting at this very moment. I have considered doing a Vampire and Werewolf movie in Afghanistan with my Pashtun drama crew of actors and filmmakers. This would be a background to a documentary.

I would really like to meet George Romero and would be very happy if you could put us together. I have not seen either of those movies but will have to do it soon. Horror movies give me bad dreams in a way that the worst experiences of the atrocities of war never do. I really am too sensitive to watch horror movies as they awaken a fear deep in the soul and I believe there are much worse things to fear than physical death.

I will attach my recent Inferno Texts for you to read. I am exhibiting these texts with my recent paintings done in Berlin and visitors to the exhibition will feel they are walking through a graphic novel or rather an illustrated Tibetan Book of the Dead .

N: I don’t know George Romero personally, but am currently working on a little mini-doc about Pittsburgh zombie culture so hope to get in touch with him soon – will attempt a virtual introduction when I do! Thanks so much George, good luck with your forthcoming exhibitions.

G. Thanks. Might see you back in the States.

Celebrity death drugs

Last week, I was walking down Sydney Rd with Tia my good buddy and fellow veteran of the breast cancer wars. We had just finished lunch at the A1 Middle Eastern Food Store and Cafe, which consisted of a heaping plate of falafel, dips and salad – all still brilliant value for only $6. Tia had that morning kindly ferried me to my post-surgery appointment with my gynecologist, then whisked me back to my old stamping ground in Brunswick for a feed and debrief. As we made our way back to her car, I was struck temporarily motionless by a bout of knife like cramps, which made fish in my handbag for my post-operative pain-killers. As I drew them out, Tia immediately recognized them and remarked cheerily “Ah, Oxycontin – the drug that killed Heath Ledger.”

Of course, even I knew that Heath Ledger, like all modern troubled celebrities, did not die of a single drug but rather a cocktail of drugs, most of them prescription. In America, if you have the money and the will to get high, you can get whatever you want from the right, compassionate doctors. But I was impressed that I’d managed to get my hands on something that powerful and addictive without even trying. Where most schmucks are shoved out of the hospital door clutching a prescription for boring old Panadeine Forte which can hardly kill a hangover, I had been issued with no less than the painkiller of choice for celebrities. Subsequent Googling found that Oxycontin had apparently also been implicated in the deaths of Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith. Florida, apparently, is the site of an “Oxycontin epidemic” and something like 11 people a day die from prescription drug overdoses. And finally I realized I had in fact read about the drug and its lethal properties only a few weeks ago, in Carrie Fisher’s wonderful autobiography Wishful Drinking : one of her closest friends dies suddenly in his sleep due to a combination of sleep apnea and Oxycontin. Carrie explains that the Hollywood cognoscenti know the drug by its nickname – Oxycoffin.

The fact that Tia knew more about the drug that I was on than I did typifies our very different ways of dealing with powerful threats to the body. When Tia was going through radiotherapy, for example, she found out the makes of the radiotherapy machines that were being used by her hospital and researched their comparative efficacy and longevity. When I was going through radiotherapy, I hunched next to Byron in his (then) little Sydney Rd studio and spent day after day nit-picking the mixes of the Dust album and chewing on Lebanese spinach pies. Tia wanted to know as much as possible about her treatment and had the formidable intelligence to absorb a great deal of medical and statistical information. I wanted to know only the bare minimum, supplemented by the intuitions of tarot readings and the murmurings of nice reiki healers. When it comes to certain kinds of facts, you could say I am a bit of a scaredy-cat.

But I wasn’t scared of Oxycoffin. To the contrary, I was delighted to be introduced to its dark glamor. And I could readily understand why it was such a popular way to cast off this mortal coil. To quote America’s hippest gothic country and western stars, The Handsome Family:

“Remember the first time
We slept together
You said it felt like when you learned to float
This is why people OD on pills
And jump from the Golden Gate Bridge
Anything to feel weightless again”.

Thats what Oxycoffin was delivering, beautiful weightlessness. Except for the few traumatic days after surgery, when nothing could have alleviated the pain except a morphine drip, an induced coma, or death, Oxycoffin had heroically stepped up to the task of severing my consciousness from my body, the peak experience of several months climbing the opioid mountain. I started to steadily work at on-line tasks for Squonk Opera again with effortless concentration, enormously relieved to be earning an income again. I started working on an arts grant. I serenely packed my bags for the millionth time in two years and relocated from Aaron and Lisa’s house (they left for New York) and unpacked them again in my brother’s flat in the outer suburban wilds of Altona. Last Wednesday, I even drove Nick’s Volvo out to the local gym and gingerly did some light weights. However, by Friday I realized that something was amiss. To quote Charlene , yet another American music legend, albeit of a significantly different psychological and aesthetic bent to The Handsome Family:

“I’ve been to Niece and the isle of Greece while I’ve sipped champagne on a yacht
I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me.”

I realised that I’d been spending so much time in controlled release oxycodone hydrochloride paradise, I had no idea what ‘me’ was up to, specifically whether my body was actually healing or not. Was I really able to go to the gym less than three weeks after a major operation, or was that as stupid as someone on LSD jumping off a cliff because they are sure they can fly? So on Saturday, I resisted creating the happy wake-up ‘snap’ sound of punctured foil with its promise of ‘here we go back to Niece and the isle of Greece, crack open that champagne’ set to lush early ’80s string arrangements, and instead started to plunge, slowly but surely back into ‘me’. And a few hours later, me, unfortunately proved to be more or less as I had left it, bruised and aching, not even able to sit at the computer for very long, and not a place you’d want to visit unless you liked smelly old vacant lots strewn with empty beer bottles and black dogs.

The Punk Tarot

At about 3.00 am last night, I woke up in my smelly old vacant lot body, profoundly miserable and shit scared of the implications of not being able to work again. It was then that I belatedly had the perfect idea for the comic strip that Aaron and I could have worked on when I had been that rough beast that had slouched towards his couch and curled up there for a month and half. That idea was The Punk Tarot.

Or not so much The Tarot, which can be plenty dark enough if the situation warrants it. But a card set nevertheless, a punk divinatory set of cards.

The New Age has produced scads of divinatory card sets, all of them brightly if generally tackily illustrated, with soothing spiritual and inspirational advice. I have a particularly garish set which I like a lot and only consult when I am sure I just want a really nice airbrushed message -a set of Doreen Virtue’s ‘advice from angels’ cards. Doreen is a “angel therapist” and is lucky enough to be able to converse with angels intimately herself, and can even see them. This later clairvoyance has been particularly handy in designing her angel card sets, as she can describe to the artists what each archangel looks like: they all appear to be caucasian, have great skin and really healthy looking hair. Angels dispense advice like “Thats a brilliant idea!” or ‘Your prayers are being answered!” etc and the enclosed booklet is choc full of Wisdom McNuggets.

But there are times in dealing with spiritual realms, just like there are times here on earth, when surely the best attitude you can adopt is one of righteous anger and outrage. If God did indeed ‘make man in His own image’, then you have admit He must have had a hell of a lot of issues, and the sooner you get that off your chest, then the healthier (or more ‘authentic’ to use pop psy parlance) your overall relationship with divine destiny is likely to be.

So a punk divinatory card set would have images and advice like these:

Image: A picture of a beautiful woman on a beach with bird shit on her head
Interpretation: God has just shat on you from a great height
Advice: Look up to the sky and give God ‘the bird’.

Image: A picture of a beautiful woman with mussed up hair crying into her hands.
Interpretation: Your latest haircut is a disaster, even though you paid $80 for it.
Advice: You better get used to it.

Image: A flopped expensive looking cake.
Interpretation. Lately, everything you’ve tried has turned to shit.
Advice: Find a Tibetan Buddhist temple, find someone to drive you past it, stick your butt out the window and moon it.

You get the idea. The marketing schtick could be something like “Sometimes you gotta replace that ‘attitude of gratitude’ with ‘an attitude of attitude‘. ” Maybe call it simply The Bird Oracles, with a cover picture of the glowing pentecost dove making the eponymous universal sign of dissatisfaction with its wings. I might just do it.

And just in case anyone fears for my soul and believes I will be smote down for my sacrilegious ideas even more than I have been recently smoted, I can only say that after this series of visions, I fell asleep again and when I woke up, lo, I felt much better, well enough in fact to sit at the computer and deliver unto the masses these revelations:-)

This Australian Life

I want to end here by sharing a couple of lovely images, aspects of Australian cultural life that are truly admirable.

The first is self-explanatory; I found it a few weeks ago, pasted to the entrance of The Retreat Hotel – one of Brunswick’s finest watering holes, and a good place to see local bands.

The second image I stole off the net and requires some explanation. On Tuesday last week, thousands of Melbournians (up to 20,000 according to some estimates) swarmed into the city protesting the imposition of new draconian laws on live music establishments. These laws were starting to send live music venues broke: they required vast increases in expenditure on security guards and even closed circuit televisions – supposedly to ‘curb violence’ when in fact there was no evidence at all linking live music with some of the appalling outbreaks of violence that have erupted from time to time in downtown Melbourne over the last few years. Thanks to months of intelligent campaigning by supporters of live music and Melbourne’s thriving band scene, the Brumby government was forced to back down on its idiotic legislation.

Soon I hope, I will be well enough to make my way back to The Retreat, down a few champas, listen to some excellent local musos and trade insults with Jesus:-)

Ovary in a jar

On Tuesday, I caught the train out to Clayton, an outer Melbourne suburb, comfortably middle-class and economically boosted by the presence of a major public teaching hospital (Monash Medical Center), and other private health providers. One of those providers, Monash Surgical Private Hospital (MSPH), was my destination.

MSPH is one of those new generation of hospitals which functions less as a hospital in the traditional sense – ie a building with wards where you lie around for days being examined by kindly doctors with stethoscopes and noteboards before and after your surgery – and more like a MacDonalds – where there the objective is fast service and delivering the customer with an operation ‘to go’. This is the modus operandi of the day procedure hospital where no-one waits around: there are no beds, no wards, only operating theatres and recovery rooms. Within a few hours you can expect to have your credit card swiped, your body slapped onto a trolley, knocked out, sliced and diced, shaken awake, then guided carefully towards the exit sign, where you wobble uncertainly away clutching sutures, sick bag and meds. The number of day procedure hospitals has increased exponentially over the last decade or two, following incredible advances in clinical practice and technology. For example, coronary heart disease, which once would have landed you in hospital for days after fairly risky open surgery, can now be treated same-day, with a coronary angioplasty. And another example is the removal of an entire internal organ, say an ovary. The removal of my right ovary, the third part of my reproductive machinery to dangerously malfunction in less than three years, was the reason I was heading out to the Monash clinic for a new (mini) hospital holiday. Again.

Melbourne’s trains are bright, comfortable and relatively efficient. In the forty minutes it took me to get from downtown Melbourne to Clayton, I lent back in my window seat, threw my feet up on the seat opposite and enjoyed the panorama of flat Melbourne suburbia flash by under typical intense Australian blue sky. I liked noticing how the ‘feel’ of each station we passed was different; and that some of the older platforms suggested sleepy outback towns, they were so empty and the wooden fences were fringed with overgrown grass, dappled in creamy sunshine.

I thought again about the web search I had done just before leaving Lisa and Aaron’s that morning. I had gone to E-Bay and typed in “ovary in a jar”. I had wondered with dark curiosity “Do people sell organs left over from operations?” My latest hospital holiday was setting me back thousands in costs and lost income. “You probably couldn’t even get an ingrown toenail removed for $2,000 in the US” my GP, Jeff, had remarked a few days earlier, trying to cheer me up. He was right of course, and this was no minor procedure after all: it was nothing less than a “complicated operative laparoscopy to execute a right salpingo oophorectomy” performed by a leading surgeon in state of the art facilities. I had a huge amount to be grateful for, falling ill in a country with a functioning, high quality affordable health care system, a country where the population pays on average the same rate of tax as US citizens, but who get a much better health deal for that money. If I had been prepared to chew prescription pain-killers for several more weeks, I could even have had the procedure done for free in one of our excellent public hospitals. But I couldn’t wait that long to get back to the States, the private system was the only alternative and it came at a price.

Ok, I knew I couldn’t actually bring myself to sell one of my own body parts, that was really, well, a sick idea. But once the thought entered my head, I pursued it a bit. It was a shiny, rounded, kitschy idea that embraced the pain emanating from my ovarian cyst and my credit card and reduced them into twee, amusing objects inside a snow dome.

The term ‘ovary in a jar’ yielded no results. Nor did ‘body parts in a jar’. A refined search of ‘human organs in a jar’ under the sub-category ‘collectibles’ also yielded nada. I had thought collectibles was the most likely category. There is a macabre collectibles shop in Melbourne called Wunderkammer that has for years been doing a brisk trade selling antique scientific and natural history equipment, medical specimens of various kinds preserved in vintage glass canisters, human bones, wax anatomy sets, grotesque insects pinned in boxes, in short anything old and creepy that could “inspire wonder”. But maybe a contemporary body part didn’t have any historical value, nor was it likely to inspire wonder anymore, even if you could find an original Vegemite jar from the 1930s and whack it in that.

What about the biology junior high school teacher who wanted to grab kids’ attention and interest them in human innards by grossing them out– surely an actual body part in a jar was a good way to do that? Or a graphic visual aid for a sex education teacher? Or a still-life art class? But then I realized that the market for body parts put to educational use was probably unfairly monopolized by corpses. Like many others, I was a registered organ donor, so after my death my bodily parts could be chopped up by a hospital or anatomy class and put to a good use in other people’s bodies or on their shelves. Although I spent a few more minutes googling ‘human ovaries in a jar for sale’, it became apparent that the trade in second hand ovaries from live women was not exactly booming.

As I got off at Clayton station, and made the short walk up the hill to MSPH, it became apparent, however, that the trade in manipulating ovaries and sperm from living humans was thriving. The hospital’s biggest money spinner was IVF and related gynecology, and the footpath leading up to the entranceway was dominated by wide-eyed women with puffed bellies of various sizes bulging out of their track suits and loose dresses. As I made my way past them into the air-conditioned reception area, I noted the irony that the same facility that could give you a take-away embryo, could also take away your capacity to breed, all within the convenient space of a day.

Lose weight now, ask me how!

I’m writing this on Friday, the first day I’ve been able to get out of bed for a sustained period. I’m now at the dining room table two feet away from what, since Tuesday night, has been my infantile sensory world. Lying on the right of my couch-bed is my current toy, Levitt and Dubner’s provocative classic ‘Freakonomics’, next to a half –full packet of jellybeans and a water bottle. To the left of my pillow, on a little stand, is a brightly arranged display of painkillers, a veritable lunch box of opiate derived delicacies ingested in various combinations at ritual intervals. Over the last few days I have been able to reach these necessities with no movement of the abdomen at all. Lying quite still, I have just been moving my arms up and down to get what I need, just like a sea anemone whose greater bulk is riveted to the ocean floor, but whose tendrils wave freely groping for nutrients.

When I have needed to get up, I have flailed and writhed like a grub in slow motion for up to two minutes at a time, until I have finally managed to get my feet on the floor, then willed the rest of the torso semi-upright. Then I’ve lurched uncertainly like a cartoon buzzard the few feet to the bathroom, then lurched back to the cot again where the whole process has to be executed in reverse. Its times like these one is so grateful not to be a international superstar; if I were, there could be a dozen paparazzi hanging from the trees across the road in Fitzroy Gardens with telephoto lenses trained through the windows onto my undignified movements. Then fuzzy pictures of my swollen torso flailing in my K-Mart pajamas would appear on the front pages of women’s magazines, underscored by accusatory captions like ‘Grub!” and “Buzzard!”. (Then again, if I were an international celebrity, I suppose I’d have a buffed butler/ personal trainer who I’d summon with a bell and who would gently sweep me up, clasp me to his massive pecs and deliver me to the toilet.)

I do have a picture I might be able to sell to New Idea or Marie Claire though, and that is just how much weight you can lose living primarily off a pain-killer diet for several weeks. Almost 5 kilograms (10 pounds) apparently! A fact I discovered when I was weighed at the hospital as part of the admissions process and the LED registered 44kgs (97 pounds). The bathroom basin and towel in the picture below have been added to give you a sense of scale. This is a pre-admission picture, however; theres no way I’m letting anyone, including me, take a picture of myself post-op. No way. My buzzard period must remain shrouded in visual mystery.

As anyone who has got this far in this post would probably agree, medical problems are dull. Clearly, however, this surgery will take many weeks to recover from. How then to put a period of confinement and convalescence to best use? Perhaps, like Proust, I will pen my masterpiece, my very own A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, with the excised ovary replacing the tea-dipped madeleine, but everything else more or less analogous in historical sweep and poignancy. Or maybe I’ll get back to comic book writing again – Aaron, with whom I am currently lodging, is after all the graphic genius who illustrated our subversive and highly irregular comic Pigeon Coup for many years. And after reading Nicki Greenberg’s superb graphic novel, her take on The Great Gatsby , followed by Dr Doris Haggis-on-Whey’s (Dave Eggers) equally brilliant Giraffes? Giraffes! , I certainly do not lack recent inspiration.

I’ll think of something. Meanwhile, its time to be driven to the doctor’s to get my stitches out, followed by some serious grubbing back into bed.