your pen is the barrel of a gun.

Economics Notes 'n' Quotes.

2010-11-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

The argument for meaningful sustainable living, in the language of economics:

"Since the 1980s we've been drawing down the biosphere's principal rather than living off its annual interest. To support our consumption, we have been liquidating resource stocks and allowing carbon dioxide to accumulate in the atmosphere."

- Wayne Ellwood, 'Nature's Bottom Line,' The New Internationalist, July/Aug 2010.

"The battle between Wall St and Main St may be a caricature of complex conflicts among different economic groups...

In this new variant of the old conflict, the banks held a gun to the head of the American people and said, "If you don't give us more money, you will suffer."

- Source: Joseph Stiglitz, 'Freefall', p50

"It has become cliche to observe that the Chinese characters for crisis reflect "danger" and "opportunity." We have seen the danger. The question is, Will we seize the opportunity to restore our sense of balance between market and state, between individualism and the community, between man and nature, between means and ends?

We now have the opportunity to create a new financial system that will do what human beings need a financial system to do; to create a new economic system that will create meaningful jobs, decent work for all those who want it, one in which the divide between the haves and the have-nots is narrowing, rather than widening; and most importantly of all, to create a new society in which each individual is able to fulfill his/her aspirations and live up to his/her potential, in which we have created citizens who live up to shared ideals and values, in which we have created a community which treats out planet with the respect which in the long run it will surely demand.

These are the opportunities. The real danger now is that we will not seize them."

- Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall, p 296 - 297.

"Everybody drank the Kool-Aid" said David Zugheri, co-founder of Texas-based lender First Houston Mortgage. They knew if they didn't give the borrower the loan they wanted, the borrower "could go down the street and get that loan somewhere else."

The loans were also immensely profitable for the mortgage industry because they carried higher fees and higher interest rates. A broker who signed up a borrower for a liar loan could reap as much as $15,000 in fees for a $300,000 loan. Traditional lending is far less lucrative, netting brokers around $2,000 to $4,000 in fees for a fixed-rate loan.

During the housing boom, liar loans were especially popular among investors seeking to flip properties quickly. They were also commonly paired with "interest only" features that allowed borrowers to pay just the interest on the debt and none of the principal for the first several years.

Even riskier were "pick-a-payment" or option ARM loans _ adjustable-rate mortgages that gave borrowers the choice to defer some of their interest payments and add them to the principal."

- Source: "Liar Loans" Threaten to Prolong Mortgage Crisis', The Huffington Post (Aug 18 2008)

Summer Days, Winter Days.

2010-11-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

Publishing these before they're lost in my poorly organised files.
...

It's Saturday mornin'
I'm feeling sinking.
Six feet underwater.
Above, the summer blue.

My watch has stopped.
All waterlogged.
It's 3.15.
Forever, still.

Oh these are -
Our summer days,
Languid easy
Under sun, by the sea
These are our winter days
Crisp-cold, the air's
Hot still beneath sheets.

You wake and you ask me,
"How does the time go?"
I say, sir - I don't really know
So let it flow.

Pack your bags and passport
There's a whole world to find
You say you're now falling -
Truth is, so am I.

These are our Summer days
Languid easy
These are our Winter days
Hot still beneath sheets.

I suspect, I suspect
That this too shall pass
Outside I know a world
Filled with plain compromise

So right now, right now
I've only one thing left to ask -

Again?
Again.

Freefall.

2010-11-05T03:53:00.000-07:00

"Let the stars plummet to their dark abyss..."
- Nick and the Candlestick, Sylvia Plath

...

Slash, burn
Repatriate

Tell me
Where is the room
Without the lover
Troubled brother

Where is the woman
(In nude) alone, standing
Needing no man.
No other.

Give me the clarity of rain out of season
Falling bone drenched.

Give me the drive of ambition
Its meticulous strategems.

Give me death in its depths
Plunging anonymous

Give me a blood red rose
By any other name.

Let me slip left
Elusive
Next exit
Heading west.

Honest, God.
Let me rest.

...

Brought to you by another marathon work meeting.

Last Chance to Lose Control.

2010-07-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

Switchblade
Fight/flight
Say, you might
Find

A sudden evacuation of -
- Air
- Gravity
- Fleeting sense
Of sanity

All overrated phenomena.

Your life in details
A man, a wife
A child, a life
Home - three storeys up
By the folding stair
The wind - her hair
Flayed to the strands
Caught to reveal its deep brown hue in the dusk light.
Though black it feels
In the deep night.

It is not the minute details
The placement of a chair
Or a bed lamp or thrown sheet

No, what you remember -
A silk sense of slippery recollection
Bare skin, a grin, a kiss

A rush of blood
Yes, to the head
A song, you know
That played between you
Cued to candle flicker-light
Of a room service dinner
Those little table trays, with fold out wings - left/right
Blackouts
Emergency lights - then
Finally
Candles

It was 1998. The hottest summer
In KL, the hottest metropole
On this mad planet.

You remember, remember, remember
Even now. 6.16AM
Deep in winter
One spin of the world away

Sydney.
Film-makers shun this city
Its basking sunlight
They claim - "so overexposed"

Like an X-ray
As Sylvia Plath would say
You loved those burning words of hers
What a model for a life.

What a wife
You might have been
What kind of happiness
We might have known.

One spin of the world away, you're -
Locked in a glass case museum
All our memories
Under guard, lock, key
And always out of reach.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

2010-07-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

From the city, the sea is seen
As a value
Measurable
Saleable
Waterfront property
To be career-climbed
The rightful prize
Of the inheritors of this material world.

It is not -
A tempest
It does not -
Swallow your lovers
For ten years or so
Odysseus to the nymphs of the sea
So succumbed
If briefly.

From a stranglehold land
We imagine
Ourselves impossibly
Conquering

We tame seas to cross them
To raid, to love, to bleed
To believe and find new believers
In savage lands.

The sea between - submissive.

We imagine our return
An inevitability.

I walk out now
Each step I take will fall first
And end there.
Each step will not be retraced.

Down the dawn street which dips
To the bluff
Beyond, the plunging deep

The Pacific
Which swims and swallows
All kinds of life

Which meets other oceans -
The Indian Ocean

They meet and nod
They wave
They acknowledge similar predilictions
Life - and their tastes
For the giving and taking
Of life.

The sand between my toes
Grows damp the further I go
To the very edge of my world.

To you, you know
To sea.

...

Liberal Education.

2010-05-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

I came. You called.
I paced -
In and out of hours
Blind
The kind poets sing of
Blind love
Beautiful, pulled gold
From the cold earth
Torn, tarnished
Polished - alive.

Bleeding, beating hearts
Thudding unsteady,
A metronome tick - click
The pace of ordinary life
Too ordinary for you

You, destined for greatness
Or the grave.

Should I have followed?
Half a decade later
I should know.

Know myself, at least
If not how, or why
For me, the remains of
Our bleeding hearts still smoulder.

I don't know why.
I don't know how.

To truly know, I've been told
Is to know you don't.

To truly be - well, at ease?
Signpost the way, stranger
Please.

10 Virginia Lane.

2010-04-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

Urgent

The flit-moth, distracted

A metropolis of lights

Delights

So many to tempt

Too many to taste

Lay waste

Ravished in an hour

Left to wilt

These cities, charred skeletal

A winter, nuclear, for fifty years

Ash rain to fall what followed

Our first chemical burn.

And the others? All those others

Feed and flicker by the lick of light

Of a low wick flame

Kissing the peeling walls

Tentative, exploratory

Tender kisses, each for a streak

Of cracked wall paint and plaster

A wrinkle of character

For these observing walls

Watching all, feeling keenly

Every cry and whisper

Surprises them.

Every flit-moth born - by the day

Winding their way through the windowpane

Attracted by - their delight

The swinging bulb light

Single strung, wire to ceiling

Surprised. Why?

For every temporary resident of this room

Derives their wonder

(That old, familiar feeling)

As if it was theirs alone

To feel for the first time.

New - and never known again.

in just this way.

2010-03-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

"'But what are we doing? We're talking.'

'Still,' said Hatsue. 'you're not Japanese. And I'm alone with you.'

'It doesn't matter,' answered Ishmael.

They lay beside each other in the cedar tree talking until half an hour had gone by. Then, once again, they kissed. They felt comfortable kissing inside the tree, and they kissed for another half an hour. With the rain falling outside and the moss softly under him Ishmael shut his eyes and breathed the smell of her fully in through his nostrils. He told himself he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never again happen in just this way no matter how long he lived."

- Snow Falling on Cedars, David Gutterson.

Where does the line lie between telling yourself how you feel, and feeling? I wonder that from time to time, as I think thoughts I never thought I'd allow, say mellow truisms to suit the circumstance and company, let the world flow by, and me in it, a leaf in the stream to the sea. Alike, in almost every way, with the full forest of falling leaves losing themselves to the river tides. Is it humility to feel this way? Or resignation?

Snow Falling on Cedars is a story of so much love, aching love, from a very teenage affair between an American boy and Japanese-American girl. The seductively forbidden kind which flared bright and burned deep. As a man, he returns to his hometown to cover the trial of his lover's Japanese husband, accused of murder. The novel traces, ever so delicately, his regrets and untidy longings. He questions whether his feelings were ever real or true. Certainly, there's nothing left for either of them to pursue in this life. She's loyal to her husband, and more loyal to her sense of being Japanese - a point sharpened by years in an American internment camp during WWII.

I guess in this reading - it's really just a skim-read over a book which I read and left years ago, unimpressed at the time with its plain language style and subdued descriptions - those are themes that stood clear. What is real? What do you do because you feel you need to? And where does right and morality come into all of this?

If anyone was to ever ask me why I work so hard, so relentlessly, in so many directions, I would probably tell them, 'To buy freedom.' It's a capitalist world we live in, cold and contractual. I know the world doesn't have to be this way, but for now, it is, and we have to abide by its framework of laws. You need money to buy comfort - a home, clothes, food, travel, free time. You exchange your time and skills for money. And if you're shrewd, strategic, and very lucky, you might build a business, write a book, make a film, which allow you more choice - freer time, endeavours to enjoy - like work, but better. And at some point, you could choose to exit completely - do your Dharma Bums mountain watch. That's where I sense, under the day-to-day muddle of doing, I'll understand the truths that elude me. Painful, honest, obscure, elegant. And maybe I'll wring art from the experience. Or maybe become something else, someone else I never imagined.

Just as I have today.

You lose, you gain. Nothing stays the same. It is merely energy, transmuted. Still, it aches.

You Shall Know Our Velocity

2010-01-05T03:38:00.000-08:00

"Not the first world," says Annette, "the world we are from, not the second or third world, so many people treading water. This is different. The fourth world is voluntary. It is quick, small steps from the other worlds ... Everyone is sleeping and we are here, in the sea. That is the fourth world. The fourth world is present and available. It's this close."

- You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers.

After watching Where the Wild Things Are and Away We Go, I'm reading the screenwriters' first works - his novel and autobiography. I love it. I haven't been MOVED by writing - the act of or reading - for so long, the air around me felt thin for it. Now I can feel it. That irrational, urgent desire to scribble until you kick up gold from the dust. I'm envious of Dave Eggers (though according to the Salon.com articles I've been reading, this is hardly a unique response) - he's fearless to the point of egoistic. It reminds me of Jack Kerouac's philosophy of writing - don't look back, assume everything you write is inspired.

Though Haruki Murakami sees it differently. As a steady whittling, carving a work of art by your will, your patience, by sheer stubborness alone. Elemental forces as the wind on a cliff face. He compared it to marathon running, quoting a famous Japanese marathon runner who said:

Pain is necessary. Suffering is optional.

Just my thoughts of the day. And that passage from You Shall Know Our Velocity. Is it just a spoilt, second-gen immigrant way of feeling? That you are free - free, that is, in the sense that you reject traditional 'treading water' ways of being so you can be instead a volunteer periphery dweller. At best, the latter day equivalent of a Taoist immortal hermit, living in the Wu-Tang mountains. At worst, a huge cock-up of life's opportunities deliberately missed.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

we goes with the prose

2009-11-24T00:18:00.000-08:00

I have been avoiding this post for a month or so. As part of a regular full-scale retreat, from the world, from my mire of contradictory desires pulling me apart, to opposing poles. So thin I've been clinging to the bare bones routine of workdays - work, sleep, and nothing, nothing. Television. Magazines. Nothing of substance. Nothing that might actually cause me to think.

There was just so much noise in my head.

All of it whispered, sneered, pitied me with the same accusation : failure. I'd convinced myself I was somehow immune to the whole concept of failure. By upbringing, by character, by determination, by luck - mostly luck - I was simply meant to be something big. An incredibly indeterminable something, but a big one.

Which is all very vain, typical and young, I know. My middle-aged colleague (let's face it, when you wander into academia at 23, everyone is your parents' age. Plus five years or so) found out I had a highly romantic literary streak and shared love of 20th century history (it's like watching an action movie, but you feel very highbrow)...so he gave me a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I don't know why it offended me at the time. Probably because I fell right into the whole 'mystical conception of destiny' belief. Maybe that's a Gen Y view of life: Go, Be, Better! You can do anything! Go be everything! (OK, my flawed interpretation, yes.)

The quote was this:

“...... Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to willpower – at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will-power & fate have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will-power alone .... The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.”

Well, at least I'm romantic.

Here, I should clarify. To classify the last year as a failure is a bit of an insult. It's like watching Madonna whine about being barred from adopting another Malawi kid - it's ridiculous, self-centred, and almost embarassing. So I feel a little ridiculous, self-centred and embarassed to admit that I could be anything less than totally assured of my own grand vision, replete with a five, ten and fifteen year goal-set plan of attack. Actually, the thought of long-term plans makes me claustrophobic sick. Shh.

So I feel a bit lost. My jobs finish up end next February, and from there, I could go well, almost anywhere. I could recklessly spin the globe, choose a spot, take a plane and spend my savings dry. (Yes, this involves the least planning and as such, is the most appealing.) My brief stint in NYC was a total giddy love plunge, but I have a feeling the halcyon glow might dim a little if I had to actually work there. Perhaps I'll take on an internship somewhere. Like, this international development online magazine, development industry resource site...thing...is offering a journalism fellowship for its offices in TOKYO and WASHINGTON. (tokyo, my choice, obviously.) That could be fun. Learn Japanese. Live in a cubicle. Run through the Imperial Palace Gardens. OK. Maybe I need to grow up and stop choosing jobs on the overriding criteria of amusement/interest/fun. (This is what happens when you have no financial responsibilities whatsoever, and a sensibly growing truckload of savings.) Maybe I should get a serious job worthy of all those years (and dollar bills) spent on study. There's a reporter job at LexisNexis now. That seems like a sensible option. I mean, don't I want a clean, impressive, chic Pyrmont apartment filled with Ikea furniture? Don't I want to fill my life with stuff, with success, with my 2br/1bth contribution to humanity, with coffee table books of naked Greek statues from the Medici era? How else am I going to unravel at age 30 and live out my schizophrenic Fight Club fantasies? (See, there is a plan here.) Hell, maybe I should join the circus.

See: here's the rub. I like my squeaky impressive track record, my unblemished professional CV, my smooth-sailing personal life. I don't want to make a mess.

I suspect though, that life's in the mess.

And I bet that's where the fun is, anyway.

An American Ramble.

2009-11-12T04:13:00.000-08:00

Why read?

For no reason at all
The simple, useless pleasure
Of a world unfolding
Layered thin & light
Like so many crisp Fall leaves

Watch each as they lift
That vital dusk gust
As if a dancer's offer, a hand
To waltz a swan song circle to the forest floor.
This Park though, is an echo
Of a wilderness Ramble
Lost long ago to looming towers, steel, glass

And subways! So old! Smeared greasy dirty
Thunderous, clanky like a fall-apart toy
Filled with miniature toy people, mad people
Business people, touring people, student people
Uncivilised - and damn proud.

Every subway is marked by green bulb lamp posts
Every neighbourhood looks like Sesame Street.
Pedestrians disappear into the dark by these posts
Like well dressed British moles.

Everybody has loved this city, but it's a Mormon lover
It can have another!

And I - well I
Delight in shotgun marriage impulse
Is there any way to be more American?

We could contemplate Buddhist scripture over Fifth Ave brunch
(The King, Not Content Until All Questions Found Answers)
We could laze at the Met
We could sit by the teen girl and her friends at Times Square as she compliments each passing pedestrian sing-song (Saturday night, for an hour.)
We could catch a show, catch a bite, catch a ferry (to Staten Island, free)
We could never sit still.

Don't you know though,
the answer is obvious.

You need a hot dog.
Ketchup. Mustard.
Go on. Get lost.

I turn my camera on.

2009-08-18T02:35:00.000-07:00

I turn my camera on.

Nerve ends - nude

Flickering electric

Meeting - fleeting

Anonymous

As the sea

Grey and blue and

Ever so deep.

I make films

You said to me

Really.

The kind, you said, nobody sees.

(By the street red stoplight

You - new to this city

So this city was me.)

Come over

My kino-eye

Take what you will.

For your red light

Darkroom.

For my pen-slicked

Bare page.

...

Ah, tis a damn good song...

Love is as good as Soma, baby.

2009-07-25T18:17:00.001-07:00

The Soma Cafe
Hangs deep in cigarette smoke
Everyone puffs
But me.

The clean gaijin
Asking, 'What do you love most - Tokyo?'
Most at ease
Posing questions
Gauging wisdoms

Strung thin and measured
Treasured
Single lines for the safehouse.

"I've seen the light and dark - "
(Takeshi, the DJ delivery guy
Who gave us chilli sake)
"Light and dark, and I
(you know)
Love them both.
In this city.
Tokyo."

Slipstreet lost
The Soma Cafe
Like love and wisdom
Hidden.

...

In other words...
"Do you really want to know
How they live in Toky-ooo
If you seen it, then you mean it
Then you know you have to go!!

FAST AND FURIOUS!!"

...

Take it from the guy who photographs the city...from an emergency staircase.

Where did I go wrong? on Channel V

2009-07-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

My uni friend, Rosie, has just recorded a song with Little Birdy in Melbourne. Her song will be featured on Channel V's 'MySpace Mixtape' Show on Monday July 13 - 10.30am or 1.00pm.

The song is 'Where did I go wrong?'
Check it out on Little Birdy's MySpace here

Totally proud right now. I did catch one of Rosie's first shows in her pub-playing outhouse days ;) Bleary and skin bleached from not-enough sun, I'd just done the first draft of my honours thesis, knocked over a multiple choice ethics exam (you read that right) and hitched a ride in my friend's tiny green little mini cooper to the gig in Balmain. Along the way, we saw AJ, our one-time Catfox photographer, taking photos of Sydney Uni park on Broadway. It was one of those days, full of incidental social crosswires.

I was dressed for law school, so naturally I looked like I could board a yacht at any given moment. Embarassingly preppy in contrast to the shaggy arts crowd there - but hey, if you must be a dork, be proud. Sunday afternoon. Rosie's self-depracating wit and habit of letting loose everything thought that runs through her mind is actually quite endearing...well, it won me over, but I'm a loyalist.

To cut short the ramble, Rosie's band, The Rouge Balloon, is damn good. Jazzy-cool, bemused, ruminative, it's the kind of music well-attuned for late nights alone, or lazy days with little to say. Rosie is a talented writer, which shines through in her songs. And I really, really hate bad writing (tis in fact a pet hate, along with weasel words like 'nice' and 'great' and grammatical errors and spelling mistakes...yes. dork.) - so when I say good - she's good.

...

Rosie once asked me to do a review for her and get it published, due to my general knack for being able to do that. I said yes then said no because of the crush of other commitments. This is my small way of making up for that. I'm glad she's getting the audience she deserves. A slightly kooky mutual friend and occasional reviewer for The Brag did offer to do a review, noting that as a reviewer for a free street press music magazine, he had power and influence - it would be foolish to turn down his offer. She did the foolish, crazy thing - and turned him down.

Yep. Yet another reason why Rosie is so very cool. She's actually the second friend I met while studying Writing...and it turned out that she was already friends (from high school) with the first. Sydney. It's about as big as a fishbowl ;) I kinda love that.

...

In other news, my law school site launches in 2 weeks. Oh dear god.

Free-thinking hedonists.

2009-06-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

I've been reading up about my favourite writers lately. F Scott Fitzgerald, W. Somerset Maugham, John le Carre, Michael Ondaatje, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Haruki Murakami. I'm not sure what in particular binds them. Each write of wealth and corruption, politics, romance, human flaws and foibles. Foibles, incidentally, is one of the funniest words ever made. Foibles. You can't say it aloud without giggling. Don't deny it. Also, kumquat. Onion-domes. There's more, definitely.

I like their restrained styles (ok, Plath excepted, comparing yourself to a Jewish holocaust or Hiroshima bomb blast victim isn't restrained at all.) To me, the mark of a truly good writer is to say so much with so little. The art of the understatement. Like evidence in a courtroom. Let it speak for itself. Let the world judge. They're my heroes, if you could ever speak so grandly. Some of them, like F Scott Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath, ended up spiralling into hedonistic self-destruction (or less hedonistic and more feminist martyr.) Still, I love what they were trying to do. Free-thinking hedonists. In life, they wanted only the absolute. The unattainable highs. By drugs or sex or success or wealth or wild company. Silken moments to forever play. Life at full volume. Now that's interesting.

"We die. We die, rich with the tastes of lovers and tribes. Characters we have climbed into as if trees."

- Michael Ondaatje, 'The English Patient.'

I have this feeling that people are watching, and wondering what I will do next. Perhaps this is pure vanity. Probably. It's the product of walking past your face on a wall every day and being told you are a person of promise and potential by your professional mentors. By professors and strangers, family and friends. Promise and potential are fickle. I'm very lucky. My sheer academic indecision prompted me to choose courses of study that fit my passions - creativity and high ideals. But you know, now what? My job contracts expire at the end of the year. My editorial team - essentially, talented friends - and I have, at most, six months to prove that this wild idea dreamed up over law school coffee does have an audience, can attract advertisers/sponsors beyond a seed money Law faculty grant, and ultimately, can change the systemic flaws that feed a law school culture of ruthless competition, suicidal anxiety, and ambition without real purpose. These are issues that really aren't exclusive to law school - they are just more prevalent and obvious here than elsewhere. So, perhaps we'll succeed. Then what?

You know, you can rule nations. You can lead companies. You can make grand speeches. You can be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a circus sideshow. You could be a writer. You could be an artist. You could be a film-maker. You could be an Indian seamstress or a Indonesian maid or a Columbian drug runner or Sudanese rebel leader. It really doesn't matter. It's not about you, or your talent, or your ambitions. No, life - and death, god or whatever your name for it, and love - is about something more ephemeral. You can't hold it, but you can taste it. You can't own it, but you can feel it. Your moral conscience. The flow of life. The Holy Spirit. The Four Noble Truths. Turn from these, and life grows claustrophobic.

Anyway, that's the realisation I've reached in these past few months, perhaps years. It has no practical advantage - nothing obvious. It's not a degree or a job promotion or a legal victory. But I have a hunch that these beliefs will lead to a very untidy, deeply fulfilling life. Life ends anyway. If you are not meant to survive, then life can't be about accumulating great material wealth by which to gratify your visceral senses. Sure, I like expensive living. But sustaining such a life is not the purpose of my actions. I wake up everyday never quite sure what will happen next. But I guarantee it will be interesting. It will be worthwhile. It will be something from which to learn.

2.04AM at the Hotel Costes

2009-05-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

...I miss Japan. Or wherever. Wanderlust. All kinds of lust, really. For the late, late night. For a man. For the world. For recklessness. For cycling downhill in the face of a midwinter chill. For calculated indiscretions engaged upon a whim. Now, isn't everything better in cloaked insinuations? And rain. Everybody seems to hate it, but the truth is, I love it. I want to be bone-drenched. I want a complicated way of living. "Desire, like a promise in the year of election."

2.04AM at the Hotel Costes.

It's dark in the night, the city
Brightening, its arteries - roadways
Aglow with wandering cars
I can't sleep tonight.

I want you.
Simple. Untainted by contrary ambitions
The drive over, the June rain
Pulling up to park
Doused headlights

"You know, I read somewhere
The spaces between objects, inanimate and alive
Are not empty."

Molecules and chemicals and rain.
Rain.
Slipping from my skin to yours

"You're soaking. Come in.
Shower."

Marble tile, floor heated
Glass to ceiling
Steam billowing
Fogging my windows
Beyond, the sleepless city.

2.04AM. Daylight seems
Like another life.
Now, the rain, the night
Stretched bare.

All we have is time.

(c) Wenee Yap

Harvey Wallbanger

2009-05-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

You say hello

I say, "Stranger, I don't know

Who you are, how you've been

Here - pour your story in a drink

Let's kick back and

Solve nothing.

Let's talk til 2."

Or let the night wind down

Tell me your troubles

Without a word.

In your manner of kiss

By the lamplight flicker

As the cold burning stars carve their arc

We, beneath their collisions.

Unravel.

Disassembled.

By four in the morning

Birds call

From tree to telephone wire

News of the world.

Turning now, toward our nearest star

Light up the darkness.

By the dawn

You remain.

As do I.

Ourselves.

Without a trace.

LLM v PhD. It's a matter of inches.

2009-05-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

"We need to break the cycle of take, make, break."

- Panelist, AHRC Corporate Social Responsibility Evening

I attended the Australian Human Rights Centre CSR event this evening. A week's worth of sustained sleep deprivation, mad deadlines, strained overcommitment and strong coffee couldn't keep the nerd within away. It was good. More than. Satisfying. Challenging. Inspiring. Realistic. Provocative. It is what you experience when a group of highly intelligent people come together - that synapse-buzzing rush.

I am considering postgrad law. Intriguing choice for someone who really did believe they were going to fail, every single semester. Sigh. I just want it. To live the big idealist dream. I want to go all the way to the Un-i-ted Na-tions. (Imagine that, hissed in Hannibal Lecter voice, when he says to Clarise, "You wanted to go all the way to the F...B...I...")

The big dream. Mmm. Minimum qualification for admission is an LLM. Apparently I did well enough to consider a PhD. Indulged in silly Lisa Simpson fantasy as my former thesis supervisor proposed the idea. ("Dr Yap. Paging Dr Yap!" ..."I'm sorry nurse. I only fix...THE LAW.") My friend who studied Landscape Architecture (but, with typical North Sydney Girl bent, could not exit her degree without first gaining First Class Hons, as a kind of par minimum for our peers), is considering postgrad in the States. Which is what I'm considering too.

Then, PhD. I mean, seriously. Now that we're talking crazy here (and I always proposed even honours as a crazy wild idea. My boyfriend has the email entitled: "Crazy wild idea" to prove it), doing an LLM without going on to PhD (esp since I refuse to become a practitioner) is like reaching third base and backtracking. Deeply unsatisfying for all concerned.

Tenuous innuendos aside. I've been mulling over a story I read somewhere many years ago. Possibly Reader's Digest. What? Don't judge me. Sometimes it's good.

Three brothers found themselves stranded ashore a fertile volcanic island. Discussing amongst themselves, they decided to share the island equally between them, and each set off to claim his stake in the virgin land. (No dinosaurs ala Lost, don't worry.) The first brother, the eldest, found a fruitful stretch of land just within the rainforest. Close to shore, close to water, warm. There he settled. The next brother, the middle child of stranded history, climbed further up the mountain island until he found a more temperate region - further from water, but cooler with views of the sea. He stayed.

The youngest brother left them both as he climbed up the volcanic mountain. Steep and sharp, the forest gave way to ash and craggy rock, moss and snow, crisp winter chill year-round. Still he climbed. He left behind land suited for planting vegetables, rearing animals, pitching tents (presumbly of palm tree leaves and well placed logs.) The air grew thin. The island fell away beneath him. Still he climbed. The peak in view, he looked from the top of the mountain and saw the world stretched out before him, as far as he dared to look. Vertiginous and dizzying. He saw how the sea met the sand, how wild animals hunted their prey, how the weather ebbed and crackled. He saw the connections and patterns underpinning world order. There he stayed. Far from food and water, eating moss, watching the world unfold.

...

As I recall, this story was given as a scenario test to prospective entrepreneurs as a means of measuring where they 'fit' in business. No prizes for guessing how it worked. I think, however, it's a far more telling story. About what drives us.

Honestly, I don't know. Dizzy with altitude sickness, I can feel my addiction. Not to a substance or a product or even a person. To this feeling. Even if it means scraping moss and never sleeping. It's a dopamine rush within the foggy glass of a car under the thin cover of night, knowing only metres away are a group of prison escapees totally unaware you're even there. (It's a long story.) It's payoff. Knowing all you've worked for is meaningful, is recognised, is...remunerated. Half the time, I'm afraid of being found out to be completely incompetent. The rest, I relish the labels. Star student. Amazing. All of it.

Even though I know it is meaningless, in many ways. Even though I am the same person today as I was five years ago, or ten, or the day I was born. I have simply followed a course of events, seized upon opportunities offered and run with whatever luck came by. I can't claim to be special, but I like the idea of somehow - yes - being unattainably unsurpassed.

"I find the impossible far more interesting."

- Elizabeth, The Golden Age.

Haha. Some days, I just want to walk down the street ala Will Smith at the end of The Pursuit of Happiness, applauding. Quiet. Unrecognised. Just for me. Just to know. It's not about you or me, of course. Life. It's about leaving the world better than you have found it. It's about doing good, if you can, where you can. It's about life full volume - the big blind, the rags-to-riches risks.

Somedays, I just want to celebrate another day of living. Whether you live at the base or the peak of that mountain.

Like today.

Cue applause.

Go down in style.

2009-05-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

Brink.

"On the verge, as always."

- 'In the Skin of a Lion', Michael Ondaatje

It's the end of the world

All over again

Pack your history

In a suitcase

Flee urban living

The free open country, hills and dusk

At the leatherbound wheel

Of a tax deductible Maserati.

Dr Phil will tell you how

To live, rebuild.

His New York Times Top 10

Told you so, years ago

It's love - the lack of

It's heart attacks and hydrogen bombs

It's all there

In ten easy chapters.

Slick your hair

Black suit - a Zegna charcoal

Pour Homme cologne - essence man

Cuff links by Vuitton, a grab bag of Vicodin

Black suit

You always knew

How to go down in style.

Down the barrel of a gun

You can't think of anything

Clever to say.

Your heart in your mouth

Still beating.

Breathe.

In. And out.

All life's essential rhythms

Fall this way.

Here you are

On the verge

Of life, death, sex, conquest

Winning and losing and all that

Never mattered.

You pull up to the drive

Your name on the space.

Another day

In a world of plenty.

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

2009-04-28T04:05:00.000-07:00

...is a damn good poem.

This one isn't quite T S Eliot. But I try. Humbly speaking. Everyone at (one) of my workplaces is getting married, mortgaged and relishing these marks of adulthood. Because I spend half my week in the Peter Pan-struck postcode of 2010, I also live and breathe the aging hipster fear of growing old, as shown by inappropriate age fashion and mass love of Cheap Mondays jeans.

Enough granny griping. Here's the poem.

Lie to me.

"There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet..."

('The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.')

I write you no letters.

I give you no rings.

In these modern times

Of obligation free, no guarantees

Consenting liaisons

Quid pro quo

We have an understanding.

You say this is honesty

As the sun shines cold, stolen warmth

For a distant summer.

As dusk drops its shadows in your room

By tree-lined street, the city lights flicker

We are being honest.

Honesty, I replied, is a fallacy

A cool mask cover for whatever agenda

You require.

Love is a game, not a gamble

I always win.

"I've never been in love," you said.

"But I believe in it."

Like God.

Like Radiohead lyrics.

Like freedom, truth, justice, beauty

Love.

So I will write you no letters.

I will give you no rings.

If in the street tomorrow, you passed by and asked

I would tell you, under the cold light of day

"No, no. I have never known love."

Psychiatry is this year's candy pink stovetop.

2009-04-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

Don Draper (Mad Men, 1950s Madison Ave Ad Man):

I can't tell whether you have everything...or nothing.

Midge Daniels (Don's mistress, an artist/commercial illustrator):

I live in the moment. Nothing is everything.

- Mad Men, Ep 2.

...

I've had a line running through my head for the past month. It's from Lupe Fiasco's 'Superstar' from The Cool. "I try to believe my own hype, but it's too untrue." Mingled in like lemon lime, the various obiter* comments of academics, interviewees and friends on the inherent nature of 'intelligent people.' Call it a vanity interest. What are these comments? That intelligent people are given to peculiarity, idiosyncracy, 'bed-hopping', bent morality and a sense that the rules governing social interaction apply only to the proles, the common people. For whom we may fight, but certainly do not belong in their ranks. We are the special people. As one interviewee told me, "It's disturbing. Here are people who would rather die than be ordinary."

Because as Angela Hayes in American Beauty put it, "There's nothing worse than being ordinary."

Hrm. Does that mean that we strive for only the impossible? Do we get our thrills from doing something that's never been done? I was asked once, as part of some classroom meet+greet, what drove me. I said, "to do something that's never been done."

Doesn't that stink of vanity? I keep saying that my ultimate ideals are to embrace, cold and clear, the flaws of this world - from markets left to the whim of neo-capitalism to dictators whose rule of law is down the barrel of a gun, or to show a way out from the closing four walls of depression - and from there, from within, from understanding and research and constant questioning, to improve the world's ills. To leave the world better than how I found it. I know - how humble. Haha.

Sometimes, every so often, I love the glow and glory. Pride and vanity. The by-lines like 'star student (wherever you go)' and 'amazing', 'driven', 'ambitious', 'genius'. Sometimes, I want to be a beautiful and unique snowflake, dammit. Haha. Tell me Doctor, is that ego? Is that bad? Do you have a fix-it? A pill cure or expensive rest house in the mountains, by the sea?

Sometimes, I spend so much of my waking life in a pitch, developing palatable spins, window-dressing disasters, being as creative with truth as I am with words, that I can't tell my own hype from what I believe.

(And on those days, I must be doing a good job.)

Haha, no, that's too cynical. Perhaps I just realised that you can make a comfortable living from being unusually persuasive, from a heady mix of idealistic dream-selling delivered in a proven formula package.

"I want you to manipulate the media. What else do I pay you for?"

- Head of Lucky Strikes to Don Draper, Mad Men.

Oh well. Perhaps it's all delusions of grandeur and I have nothing to worry my sensitive conscience over. Perhaps the ad-savvy audience of latter day noughties know better than to believe what they read in the news, on TV, on the internet, from their friends, from their favourite stars and pop culture icons. Ah. My conscience. It's very sensitive. (Some would say that's a plus. ;)

So - assume that audiences know exactly what you're doing when you say, position an article, or write one, or pitch a story you know slants facts a little. I'm not saying I've done this. After all, my clients are completely harmless...for now. There's nothing to slant, really, which is why I chose this industry to learn the fine art of media...'relations.' If you assume this, doesn't your act still deprive them of the true variety of thought, opinions and debate a free democracy needs to truly thrive?

Or in this spin-driven world that we live in, should we just forget it, channel some Paul McCartney, and live and let die?

Have a drink. Have a painkiller. Forget about it. The ability to persuade is like law itself - a tool. The law is not necessarily justice, and nor is persuasion necessarily about offering truth. Truth is personal. Truth is an understanding you hold as you crunch through autumn leaves with nothing but the ground beneath your feet and above, the blue open sky. Knowledge is not a checkbox right answer in the exciting life challenges of academic exams or career climbing. It's cycling in the dawn through the streets of a foreign city, on a bicycle so unsteady you expend every effort just to stay upright. Your mind clears. It forgets to think. A definite virtue. The mind too, is a tool. We - the 'intelligent people' with our brains packed full of IQ points and pride bursting with all our brilliant possibility - are so busy worshipping our clever minds, we forget this fact.

And if you let your mind rule, it will forge an empire for you alone, within the confines of your own skull. You, as the warm burning heart of the universe. With your life of dramas and affairs, scandals and successes. Your narrative arc. Your three act finish.

This, of course, is untrue.

Still, we are living. The dramas keep rolling. The camera's on you. If you don't 'do something', some very great something within the designated time appropriate with your so-called 'life plan', you're clearly a lost cause. You know what I'm talking about. The life plan that some might say ensures you are engaged by 22, married by 24, scaling Everests and conquering the wild unknown on the cover of Time by 27, ready for children by 29, and onward, upward. Ad altiora. No? Don't know it? Your life plan might be a little different. I'm referring to the overachiever's life plan. Lisa Simpson. "Grade me, grade me!"

I am not sure whether I have deftly sidestepped that life plan or found an even more novel way to fall right into it. What I do know is that when you step close to the vertiginous abyss, the blank oblivion depth...and find within it, the possibility of freeing yourself from the tangle of all these...dramas...you are craving peace. The kind you can find deep in a forest. High on a mountain. "I know this from gazing at mountains months on end," said Jack Kerouac.

I know this from watching the dusk strike the sky alight, a smoky sunlight, ignored by the world below. Busy and important with their own private concerns. I know this from watching a girl cry over scoring 97% on a meaningness mid-term Maths exam - because it wasn't 100%, and this clearly meant her life was doomed. (I wasn't this girl, by the way. I was a consistent 80%...97% would have had me in serious hallelujah.)

Mmm. I know this from the way words, strung together, mere symbols of our language, of our souls, can sink a writer, reader, into reverie. Which some say is better than sex. Some, I said. Not...in my experience. Haha.

Ah. I know this from those very few moments you might let yourself be. Breathe, and be.

Maybe, Doctor, you just think I'm crazy. What else am I paying you for?

Still. Talking this way helps me feel a little less crazy in what is really a mad, mad world.

Or perhaps all of you out there know exactly what you mean to be, need to say, wish to do, and no such questions trouble you.

So, thanks for listening. How much do I owe you? $400 for an hour? Give me a receipt. I'll claim it as a business expense.

...

* Obiter: legalese to mean a comment made 'in passing.' Frequently turns up in judgments where a judge expresses a digression which might later become law. Or cloaks an irrelevant remark on say, the importance of realising international law via case law, as a human rights norm, bypassing parliament. Obiter. Because even passing comments are a betrayal of intentions perhaps more subversive.

Nicholas Hughes

2009-03-29T01:57:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Hughes (1962 – 2009)

The spaces echo empty

Vast black, an eclipse

Of all memory of light

Of solid form.

Nothing lives. Nothing dies.

No conflict or oxygen

Nourish the blood pulse.

It is the longed-for oblivion

Desperate and craved

Annihilation.

A million splintered filaments

Hurled by one’s own hand

So the hand, too – crumbles

Melts and vanishes

Without a history.

Though the void cannot hear

A static radio call

A sister’s eulogy

A husband’s poetry

Splinters are left for the living

Shards of the bomb in their hearts

Inoperable. Holes and spaces

Sewn closed. Locked.

Oblivion.

...

One of my favourite songs is Bob Dylan's 'Tangled up in Blue.' In an interview, Dylan said he aimed to portray a tangled relationship from multiple points of view. He does so well - very well. It's Dylan lyrics at their best, and I'm a writer at heart, so I can't go past some well woven lines.

"From what I've tasted of desire...I hold with those who favour fire."

I suppose this poem has a similar aim: to examine both sides of suicide. The desperate, single-minded intent of the perpetrator, and the living left to shoulder the blame, account for the mess, seek to understand. And sometimes I think there is nothing to understand. As the Holocaust survivor said in The Reader: "If you want catharsis, go to the theatre. Nothing comes out of the camps."

Or the very famous line by Jewish poet after WWII: "No poetry after Auschwitz." As if to say, here lies humanity at its darkest. Its most irrational. Its twisted and broken ends. There is no meaning here. Just consequence. Action taken to see what would happen. To watch the world burn.

...

Fire and Ice

2009-03-21T09:57:00.001-07:00

I can't sleep tonight. More accurately, I have a few crazy deadlines to meet, and I haven't tried, nor have I worked to meet them. Structure and discipline, the very skills I'm advocating in my latest project, are eluding me completely.

So I listened to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', wrote a little, sipped my oolong tea (not so sexy as martinis, but if I'd had those, I'd be asleep by now!), mused some, found some dark Lindt chocolate. Life is good. "Simple pleasures", said an ex-CEO and current public interest champion I met last week. "This is what I enjoy now."

This is one of my favourite poems. Robert Frost's 'Fire and Ice.' Hope you like it.

Fire and Ice.

Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire

But if we had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is just as great
And would suffice.

...

goodnight. off to write. or try...again.

Who said committees were a waste of time?

2009-03-07T01:08:00.000-08:00

...after all, following three pages of careful point-form, underlined notes on booking group meeting rooms and the slick new website, my very first work meeting gave me musing time to write these two poems.

Leaving at Morning (or) Cycling.

Headlong down the Gulf
Last port before Papua
(Cannibal tribes reign still -
From village to city.)

We pick up speed as the road
Winds down
Drops sheer cliff to sea
Steady wild, as it sweeps in

Ragged as our breath, the wind
Meeting
In the breaking dawn.

You & I
Under the sun.
By the sea.

(4/3/2009)

Himeji Castle - Execution

Suicide alley
Was an honour
Wandering ronin - warriors without a cause
Or a master
Left this world
By their own sword
Their own will.

A single stone stair leads down
The only way out is up and back
Dead end alley
Black bark trees
Etch skeletal
Against a sky, cloud grey

From the fortress, the city vista
Spread far as the eye can gaze
Men dreamed of this horizon
Of conquest and map lines
Of wars, wars, wars

Himeji on the hill
Rules cold.

(4/3/2009)

(c) Wenee Yap

Shoveling Cultural Snow (Pt 2, The Japan Suite)

2009-02-20T12:32:00.000-08:00

Hikari 425, 18.40 (Shinagawa to Kyoto)

20.01.2009.

To tie down these kite-flown thoughts
Into well-formed expression.
A single string, buffeted by wind -

Rushing from here - to there
With an essential Japanese efficiency
Slipping by the sleeping towns and warehouses
Bullet-speed - so swift it's as if
We are still.

Walking the streets feels like this.
Noise - hopeful bargains, sex hecklers, vending conveniences
Reach for your brief attention
Late stage capitalism -
Shoveling cultural snow.
'Nani?!'
Really. (Really really.)

Sex as a business expense.
Lovers in Japan
Are full volume or mute.

Pain in Japan
Must be screamed aloud
ah - hysteria. Or
Left to simmer
A low pilot light burn
Awaiting the trigger
Innocuous - as gas filling your Ikea apartment
Of all those things you kept buying to persuade yourself
To keep living.

Flick. Boom.
Nani?
Really.

...

Hikari 366 Kyoto to Tokyo (In Praise of Shadows.)

24.01.2009

Clear blue cold day.
Fuji-san to the left; low stormy seas on the right
Sleep like a soothing balm
By the growl and hum
Imitation of...

Tao - the many named, and nameless
We doze our last before Shinagawa
The train shoots through - Tokyo Station
Where the municipal salarymen go
Flow to the East
We, of the West
Come for nothing.
To laze under a sky of nothing
Deep sunk well where only an oval
Blue snow cloud shows

"We will soon be arriving at Shin-Yokohama
In 4 minutes."
In minutes leaping distances
By foot - days

Roll on. Doze.
Dream of shadows.

...

Paper Chaser (Fukuoka - Beppu, Arr. 23.39)

Looking to live in my own skin
Pen spinning Paper Chaser
Left to the devices
Of the world's whims

14.05. INT. CANAL CITY.
I'm watching from 1F
A handsome juggler
Yoyo thrower, men's joker
Rhythm flow to the to/fro
Gypsy accordian song
Chords plyed
By a classic kawaii girl
Love, is who they are
And radiate.

They play anarchy - with ease
Their practised chaos
Is really a departo store joke
to delight the Japanese children (Fukuoka size!)
We're laughing along, us camera-hanging gaijin

Together, they love as love is and should be
Mr Juggler & Ms Accordion.

Mia, from the Shire ('but don't hold it against me')
Turns between photographic capture
And grins:
"Everyone in Japan is dating!"

Nani?
So des ne!

I found it.
What I longed for -
Paper chaser's dreams
(It was on the Sonic 57 to Beppu
All along.)

I'm ready. Alive and entirely
Here and now.
Singing
(I dig it.)

----

Before/After

----

White Lillies (Hotel Costes)

4.2.2009

White lillies
Views of the city
Summer in Sydney: $200
Breakfast (American) for two

Wine, well aged, cooling by the mini-bar

Skyscraper lights leading the way
To the Bridge, to the glimmer Pacific
Wilkommen.
Konbanwa.
This is our city in Summer
Say the street banners on George

Most definitely.

Home is this hotel room.
Home is the space left quiet
Between 2am conversation
Between your hunger and my
Back pressed against these anonymous white walls

Say nothing.
We are East. The sun peaks to glitter the CBD glass
Law firms, banks, Ernst and Young auditors
Aflame by the dawn.

Shimmer on the ranging glass
City, and Hyde Park, the Domain
Sunday morning.

...

Shinagawa 304

9.2.2009

Let it come as it goes
Fall in with the flow
Be, wherever you are
'Now, life is living you.'

... (That line was on a poster outside Higa...something temple on Karusuma-dori, Kyoto's main street.)

...

Isn't it good.

You.
Always trying to undress me.
My beautiful clothes

'Leave them on, then.'
Sure.
And as I do, I sing
'Isn't it good
Norwegian wood.'

And you say - again.
Again.

...