anti-anaesthetic

Direct Enquiries to Exileinspades.net

2009-08-01T15:34:00.001+10:00

Please direct all enquiries to http://exileinspades.net.

Thank you.

050609

2009-06-05T22:08:00.001+10:00

Crowd of expensively dressed supermarket shoppers discuss William S Burroughs in West Brunswick. There goes the neighborhood.

210509

2009-05-21T15:33:00.000+10:00

Eyelash on a Coke can.

140409

2009-04-14T14:03:00.002+10:00

O My God does your own blog make you cringe.

Wait, God prolly doesn't have a blog as he can appear as a blinding light over people's beds at night if he wants to talk to them etc.

270209

2009-02-27T10:16:00.003+11:00

I've got an article up at Foxy Digitalis. Interview with Treva Dea of the Mauve Sideshow, Kangaroo Kourt etc.

210209

2009-02-21T10:35:00.004+11:00

Yesterday on the way back from my weekly permaculture website consultation a guy got on the tram near the zoo looking like a an SS officer: gloves, a military peaked cap, knee high boots, surplus army jacket and pants, dark goggle-glasses; and a utility belt with a torch, a water bottle, a Swiss Army Knife. It took him about 10 minutes to get on the tram as he was pulling a trolley sporting the biggest plasma screen TV I'd ever seen. When he finally maneuvered himself through the doorway a woman offered him her seat (?!). His face so pasty white like he hadn't left the house in years.

Obviously the Howard era isn't completely dead.

290109

2009-01-29T20:00:00.004+11:00

"You've gotta stop doing this. You look like some kind of hippie chick."

280109

2009-01-28T23:01:00.003+11:00

Hexagons of brightly coloured light exploding in tightly constrained but mathematically even spheres; green-blue, fluorescent red are the gates of heaven and they arch in a triangular pattern over coral outcrops of industry.

270109

2009-01-27T14:04:00.009+11:00

North Coburg is not the kind of suburb where you are in danger of being hit by a chubby graphic designer who can barely control his/her fixed-wheel bike; it is outside that ten-kilometre radius and probably has a low 'bohemian index' ranking if you talk to Richard Florida (that might be changing). Instead, greasy long-haired men in their 40s drive past, singing earnestly the lyrics to a late-nineties Dannii Minogue number that thumps sugar from the car stereo. Old couples waddle down the main street. Dogs bark in the distance, interrupting the wind gently moving in the wind chimes. It's suburban, not that that's bad, or maybe it's only bad when you are walking five blocks in baking-heat and there are no trees, just bare footpaths and rows and rows of houses. Supposedly it is a home office I'm looking for, or at least that's how he described it in his emails. Upon reaching the front door 'office' does not seem like the right word: the lawn is overgrown, the house (army green in colour, free-standing, weatherboard?) is slightly dilapidated. The inside is in similar disarray; toys and children strewn across it, dishes piled high. He is friendly and the short black he makes is pretty good. We chat about working from home, school holidays, the basics of the business: a software company that develops a product that assists in the navigation of seismic vessels. My role will be to update the help file, creating new entries as the developers make changes, respond to bugs and problems. Out through the hallway/tunnel to the actual 'office', which is a small room at the back of the house facing another unmown lawn and filled with well-worn lounge chairs, about five in all. There is a desk and an air-conditioning unit from the 70s, several old computers. The work is difficult: I know nothing of navigating seismic vessels, eastings and northings, tide and feather. Apparently I will pick it up quickly. Basically, the software developed by the company assists the navigators of said vessels to plot the most efficient course when surveying a particular area. The ships string behind them six kilometres of cable that need to be dragged in a relatively straight line. Obviously maneuvering such a vessel is difficult. The cables pick up soundwaves that are bounced off the ocean floor to produce an image of an area, usually to uncover any gas or oil deposits under the ocean floor. The running costs are astronomical, and so reducing the survey by even one day can result in a saving of millions of dollars. While I'm working, sweating at the computer trying to grasp the details and implications of these slippery concepts he is talking to E., a Canadian girl who comes in occasionally to help with administration (it's pretty cosy). He is telling her about his weekend: a trip down the coast to some kind of hippy festival. Who knew that gen-X ex-hippies get lucky with decentralised software businesses that cater to a tiny but lucrative niche market in the engineering sector?

220109

2009-01-22T22:19:00.003+11:00

Is it working, at 9:30 at night on the phone to your new employer trying to sort out a software problem? I can't access the online project management tool that we use to track updates and issues. I can't see any issues where they should be in a lollypop list with a filter. The program is called Mantis, an insect poised over us with limbs that extend into homes and home offices. Hovering like the dragonflies at the lake, huge and blue and green on the green water, and a huge bird - some kind of heron, blue grey. Less a lake, in fact a quarry, perhaps it was once a copper mine as in winter the water is supposedly bright blue - or for extracting quartz or bluestone? I know nothing of quarries. Two-hundred metres across, sheer cliffs with bent gum trees; the reeds move with the wind that pushes the water, whips across it from over the hill and down the cliff face making snake patterns on the surface. The sky full of dust so thick and the air is stifling. On the dirt road on the way down we joked that if someone dropped a cigarette the whole area, dry bark and dead branches, would go up and we'd be cooked alive though we could take refuge in the centre of the quarry, in the water; slowly boiled might be better than quickly seared. And now that we float in that bottomless centre: phosphorous missiles that ignite the air itself and burn the flesh off Palestinians in Gaza.

150109

2009-01-15T23:35:00.003+11:00

From: Kemper Blada
Date: Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:10 PM
Subject: I love my babee

How to Give Heer Absolute Pleasure?

Click HERE

Young man of about thirty, dressed in a neat suit there's
something. No, there's nothing. Nothing he said with a trifle
of course I haven't should be yes, I can hear, she answered.
But how cases of all these items made a queer kind of.

110109

2009-01-11T11:19:00.003+11:00

I walked past a little white hatchback parked in the street the other morning and written on the driver's side window in huge red lipstick letters were the words, "U R THE BEST PASH EVA!!! XXX".

090109

2009-01-09T17:05:00.004+11:00

Cream the joose
sluice the sloop, John B.

and bring some internet poetreee
drinkin all night
got into a fight
I feel so broke up
I wanna go home

080109

2009-01-08T15:24:00.003+11:00

Job interviews are weird - start up businesses, tiny ugly dirty offices with carpark views in up-market, old-moneyed suburbs. "We've got offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Tel Aviv", where else? Advertise for a writer but really it's a defacto call centre and you're gonna be on the phone all day. Maybe you can move on to writing after 3 months, taking into account KPIs and conversion rates. I don't think so. Or CBD location start up 'media company', $15 an hour to churn out 5000 words a day on hundreds of different topics: content for microsites created purely to generate traffic and 'monetise' it. "We're looking to hire 3 resources to create articles and blog posts for these domains." 'Resources', ie writers? What? I don't think so.

O to stick out the freelance work and take a few hours after lunch to listen to the Paul Bley and Bartok records I got from the op shop. Coffee at 9 in the sun in the garden, start writing at 10. One day soon.

060109

2009-01-06T11:57:00.006+11:00

I've been trying to unlearn everything I learned at film school. It really wrecked me: the Hollywood conflict theory of narrative, the emphasis on high-end production values and expensive equipment, the bitchy and competitive 'industry' (if you can call it that in Australia), people ripping off your ideas. It's taken me two years to recover, two years of trawling the far corners of the internet to find people who are doing interesting things (often quickly, cheaply and nastily), two years to restore my faith.

281208

2008-12-28T19:22:00.008+11:00

This afternoon I sold my tape recorder with seven reels of tape (brand new, sealed and usually worth around $40 each) for a token amount. The tape recorder, an eight track reel-to-reel, does not work properly as there is a problem with the rewind. I hadn't the heart to throw it in the garbage as I spent many hours recording music on it until it broke. It is fixable and I have enquired, but really I just wanted to get rid of it. The boy who took it was no more than nineteen, pimple faced, scrawny and odd. When I helped him carry his purchase out to the car I was surprised to see that he drove a brand new BMW. Once his booty was secured he quickly sped back to the eastern suburbs, in my experience the birthplace of Melbourne oddness. I had originally thought that he would take all fifteen reels of tape, but he only wanted seven. I was sure that I would give him three used reels also but it was only after he left that I had realised the stupidity in that decision. I feel relieved that I still have them as these are the master tapes to a different era, songs I recorded for a CDR the best part of a decade ago. I don't care much for it now but they may be valuable to me in the future.

When my father died my brothers and I were cheated out of any serious inheritance by his then girlfriend. This was not so bad as my father was not particularly wealthy. The only thing I really wanted was a collection of poems he had once shown me, in a plain blue folder, hand written on different scraps of paper. The cow threw them away with everything else he owned. The only line I remember is "Ant and molar..." When he showed me the poems I found it awkward. I was too young and stupid to realise the value or the seriousness of the situation, just how vulnerable he allowed himself to become. Too young but I'm not sure we get any smarter as we age; perhaps more convincing in our posture, yes.

261208

2008-12-26T21:41:00.004+11:00

I was digitising video with a mouthful of apricot and honey. The apricots from Wednesday are soft and overripe. Though they still have a tang even with a mouthful of honey. I cut off the bits that were dimpled and dissolved in my fingers, rotten or almost rotten. My stomach is still fragile. Yesterday I ate too much cheese, brie, and fell asleep in the afternoon. Everyone knows that cheese makes you dream and in my mind appeared a woman, a willing amputee who had made a decision to remove both of her arms. I don't usually dream or at least I don't remember my dreams and I don't generally consider them important. Many do, I know. Distracted by the screen - a woman, an actress, eating a Big Mac meal in a McDonald's restaurant. Some drawings on the wall: a militant, a bleeding heart, a city in the clouds, blood or red paint, a cat woman, an angular woman who seems to be dissolving. "One day in Paris I was waiting in a bank. It was being renovated. So, between the scaffolding, on a section of condemned wall, I put up a graffito. By the time the construction work was completed, it had disappeared. A few years later, because of a modification of some sort, my graffito reappeared. People found it odd and learnt it was by Picasso. The bank director stopped the construction work, had my carving cut out as a fresco with all the wall surrounding it, and inlayed it in the wall of his apartment. I'd be happy if you could photograph it one day." - Picasso (in an interview with Gilberte Brassai)

241208

2008-12-24T20:05:00.002+11:00

"Hello is this the police? I rang before. My mum is trapped inside the shopping centre..."

221208

2008-12-22T15:13:00.006+11:00

It takes a little while to get going with the blog, to find yourself in the public eye and develop a marketing strategy that resonates with the cynical youth of today (especially those very young ones around the age of 35). I contemplate writing in my blog on the tram with the broken air conditioning, it's hot and I'm traveling to find a cable that will connect my cheap video camera to my expensive computer. I have the intention of making a boring film, if not boring then at least pretentious and if not pretentious then at least intellectual. They have the cable I want in the electronics shop and I get lunch from the Lebanese bakery next door. On the corner is a new and empty building, red and grey shops and apartments done in the style of a cheap development. I feel the sun making my neck red also. Across the street there is a garage sale. A Lebanese family has a front yard full of clothes and computer parts. In one box, a battery powered webcam. Several boxes are full of circuit boards, hard drives and RCA cables. There is also a Lego jumbo jet missing only a few pieces and a suitcase full of complicated and ugly toys. I spend a few minutes looking at the webcam, "It's so hot!" the woman complains and sits down between two pot plants. Yeah, it's horrible. "3.1 megapixel", is that too much or too little? And it needs to be connected to the computer. Cables. I was thinking of Teen Wolf Too, I saw it the other night in the park near my house. We watched it projected onto a tree from a data projector and they ran cables through the park to the house, a friend's house. It was a friend's birthday. I enjoyed the film though the ground was cold on my arse and I felt like smoking a joint but the whole family was there and the vibe was wholesome. I don't mind wholesome. I enjoyed the film which was essentially like fast-forwarding through the original Teen Wolf with a slab of obscure 80s synth pop over the top. Teen Wolf in a convertible, Teen Wolf in the boxing ring, Teen Wolf gets the girl, Teen Wolf sings an Elvis number at the party. It was kind of uplifting and I really thought that I don't want to be a cynical arsehole because it destroys your life.

201208

2008-12-20T12:37:00.003+11:00

Lurid, loo red, Lou Reed. I saw a man in the street, a busker who had constructed a set of bagpipes from the bladder of a wine cask, a few pieces of plastic tube and one of those pumps you use to inflate an air mattress. I do not know the tune he was playing, however, it did have an actual melody. It may have been a Christmas carol (it is that time of year) but if it was a carol it was an obscure one. He was chubby and white-haired, white-bearded, in his fifties, probably Santa Claus himself. Though no one else in the crowd seemed to notice, too busy with their Christmas shopping or avoiding the drunken naked men being evicted from the strip club at the bottom of Elizabeth Street. The kids love Christmas (not mine, I’m speaking in general as I have no children), and that’s great but I am relieved to be spending Christmas on my own this year. Perhaps I will try baking a chicken or a turkey or some other bird. A lemon inside I have been told (the chicken - can you bake a lemon inside a turkey?), salt, oil, some potatoes. And yes I have been sorting through my collection of psychedelic Christian rock for a tasteful yet reverential backdrop. I was reading about the Trees Community and they say this of their music, "We were part of a living, breathing unrehearsed story -- a symphony. God handed us each separate parts yet no one knew the script." Don't we all feel like that occassionally? "Sometimes it was as if thousands of voices were joining and pouring through our own, like several Mellotrons being played at once in different keys, the music liquid, dynamic, ever changing. One night we might travel along a hot, dusty road in Ancient Egypt, with the sounds of donkeys' hooves and clanging pots. Another night we were adrift in a foggy sea, the boat groaning and creaking and a distant bell tolling."

191208

2008-12-19T16:59:00.003+11:00

The internet erodes retinas, slowly. The light it emits also illuminates the neglected corners of culture dragging out into the glare what was once mysterious, and subjecting it to an endless proliferation of inaccurate Wikipedia entries, Youtube comments and Facebook groups. Not that I am complaining, in fact I am complicit. The internet erodes enigmas, slowly. The light it emits also illuminates the boring corners of culture dragging out into the light what was once of little interest to sentient beings, and subjecting it to on endless proliferation of innacurate Wikipedia entries, Youtube comments and Facebook groups (and blogs). Not that I am complaining, in fact I am complicit. You see as we sit here and chat (just shut up and listen, that's how we will define "chat") I am actually dragging my incredibly boring, incredibly mysterious self out into the glare of the internet. My retinas are eroding while I type obnoxious and pretentious text vomit that erodes your face, slowly. Not that you are complaining, in fact you are complicit. And if I gave you the chance no doubt you would be ready at the keyboard to leave a comment and interpret this mess as something to do with "stuff" from books and etc. Well don't. You can't, but don't.

181208

2008-12-18T22:14:00.002+11:00

I've got a fragile stomach and when the gut meets too much gut meat or some kind of prolonged and drab vegan/aryansim (what happened to the cult/ural studies slash any/wayz?) it aches. My ecosystems survive best on modicum and moderation of each treat so to speak. I don't dream I just lean to with visions of chemical perforations and cancerous inclinations, knots of tissue that take hold of the body in the brain and drive one to 'creative writingz' and a train of thought that is totally fucking lame.

o_O

Er...I just need to watch what I eat.

131208

2008-12-13T12:05:00.006+11:00

Often we find ourselves in ugly buildings whose foundations are so deep that they make contact and draw current from the upper levels of Hell (let me indulge my moral pleasure and lash out in self-righteousness). And in Hell there is only the distant sound of the acoustic sorting of timber - vibrations that reveal quality. At the bar: Aquarians in the aquarium, shooting fish in the breeze: Really I just want to work in youth marketing and make money from my xreativez lol cuz thats all thats left.

041208

2008-12-04T12:59:00.002+11:00

What happened to the creepy scene where the fridge comes to life? Dry ice mist and a blinding light from the crisper. Eggs explode into the faces of Howard the Duck and ET the extra-terrestrial. The theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays softly from a children's mobile above the cot. Monkeys shine and etc.

301108

2008-11-30T12:29:00.002+11:00

Another love is turned to hate,
As this life plays out its role.
Another heartache led by fate,
On this heart its takes its tole.

Evil reigns whilst lovers bleed,
Through lesions jagged and deep.
Hearts adoring lust and greed,
Stray while the honest sleep.

Listening through naive ears,
As so many lies were spoken.
Staining the soul with crystal tears,
When promises made were broken.

- Sarah Thomas (recovered from teenpoetry.com)