SPARKS
This shows the trails of some sparks. Several objects spit them out as they move. Each of these objects belongs to one of four classes according to the colour of the sparks it spits:
Each class, in turn, belongs to one of two pairs: Continue reading
THE FRANTIC AND EXHAUSTING LIFE OF A PARLIAMENTARY MEDIA ADVISER 
Jacobs, Colin (7 August 2014; Crikey.com.au)
I bundle out of the train in short-pants and find a phone box to call Colin. I’ve started explaining where to meet me when Colin screams and I hear the receiver clatter against the tabletop.
When he comes back on a few minutes later, Colin explains that from his kitchen window, he saw his car start to roll back down the slope out of his garage. He ran out of his house and slapsticked along beside it trying to get the key into the lock as it picked up speed, rolled down the slope and through the neighbour’s fence in front of an audience of staring children. Continue reading
ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN FOR LYNX DEODORANT
At some point we seem to have accepted that, as peasants, if a bank or other large company imposes on us a penalty fee, for instance for paying a bill slower than they’d like, that as long as the company does it following the company’s own rules, we should find it fair for them to charge it. The historian of the future must see us as sufferers of Stockholm syndrome – as forlorn hostages who’ve somehow come to feel they owe something to their captors.
Have we forgotten how we got here? While you and Daisy ran hand-in-hand in the garden, ecstatic in the rain, they set about to laying claim to all the best flowerbeds and fencing them off. Now they charge you for the flowers and have convinced Daisy’s mother that if you don’t send seven a week, you don’t respect her. The Shamshiel they’ve posted at the gate doesn’t even have a flaming sword, just a valium of meaningless apologies. Continue reading
FLOORPLAN
This shows a floorplan for a ring-shaped hall with buttresses.
To support the vaults, I imagine the columns stretched into crescents along the concentric axis. I think it might please the eye if the linear distance between each crescent’s tips equalled a third of the length of the curve between its centre and the centre of whichever of the two neighbouring crescents around from it clockwise or counterclockwise stands the farthest away. Continue reading
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. You’ll have him out of your hair until he comes by tomorrow for his next fish.
Teaching him to fish will feel like teaching a walrus to roller-skate. As soon as you break out the fishing rod he’ll look at you like you come from the seventeenth century – like you tried to tell him he could knap his own spearheads with a hammerstone and pair of reindeer antlers. He hasn’t got time to screw about with bait and fishing rods and sinkers. He just wants a fish.
Even if you get him to try it, he’ll just pretend to pay attention and spend most of the time fantasising about the woman in apartment twelve.
Give the man a fish.
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
Dir. Robert Wise Perf. Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal. Twentieth Century Fox 1951 Film
Dir. Scott Derrickson Perf. Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly. Twentieth Century Fox 2008 Film
Out of everything they might’ve given us, the aliens from The Day the Earth Stood Still decide to bestow the revelation that we’ve put ourselves on the way to destruction.
We know that!
THE ZEN GUN
Barrington J. Bayley (DAW Books, 1983, ISBN 9780879978518)
When I flew into Los Angeles in 2002, the airport strip-searched me. I look about as menacing as a pug dog, but as I walked through the x-ray machine, a woman pointed to me and they pulled me off to the side.
Behind a translucent curtain marked, ‘privacy screen’, they had me strip down to my underpants. A man in latex gloves felt me up. Meanwhile, another man pulled the innersoles out of my shoes and probed around inside them with a plastic wand. Continue reading
DUNE
Herbert, Frank (New English Library, ISBN 9780450011849)
Hilary shared an apartment, and thus rent, bills and housekeeping, with Sophie. Like Hilary and me, Sophie supported herself through a mixture of Austudy and various atrocious part-time jobs. After a brief stint working for a telephone sex line, she found her niche as a telephone psychic.
An ineradicable optimism endeared Sophie to you as a friend, but it made her an appalling housemate. It amounted to the faith that when you found yourself without the time or money to do something, you could do it anyway. Continue reading
THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
Thompson, Francis (Branden Pub Co; 2011, ISBN 9780828314404)
Mr. Gangjeon operates Lairds Pharmacy on Centre Road in Clayton. Three doors up, a rival pharmacy ply their trade at number 1310.
Mr. Gangjeon’s rival participates in a methadone maintenance program. Mr. Gangjeon does not. On methadone day, his rival often closes early without giving warning. By this simple expedient, they bring a terrible weapon to bear against him. Continue reading
STAR TREK
Dir. Cliff Bole and Les Landau. Perf. Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner. Paramount Television.
Star Trek‘s blandness, I think, must develop from the fact that it makes it deities out of middle management. For those of us now so anesthetized against passion that we replicate even in our dreams the elements of our pointless middle-management jobs it provides the perfect fantasy. It gives us gods as bland and as bourgeoisie as ourselves who’ve taken those same jobs to the immortal stars. It gives us avatars of Western suburban emptiness who yet seem fulfilled and respected, and never even think about disintegrating themselves in their dress uniforms.
Have a frustrating day at your white-collar job? Never mind. Put the kids to bed. Sit back and watch an episode of Star Trek. Pour yourself a glass of wine. What comfort! Continue reading
COEN MOMENT
From my backyard in the middle of the night, I can see the cars on North Road whipping past gum trees while five other backyards sleep in silence. In one of them, my neighbour Chen has two identical woollen yellow sweaters drying on his clothesline. Chen has spaced them out so they fill the space, leaving a gap to either side the same width as the space between them. They have crisp black V-necks and no creases or sun bleaching, floating there in a sliver of lamplight in the middle of the night.
