Author Archives: A. B. Smith

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Destiny

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DESTINYged

Coen, Ethan (in “Gates of Eden”; Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, 2008, ISBN 9780061684883)

Ethan Coen’s Destiny makes a glorious spectacle of the modern male. It holds him up, with all his incertitude and humanity, against the older notion of manful men who have stood in battle, consume bourbon with their steaks and know how to throw a punch. In Coen’s protagonist Joey Carmody, like “The Dude” Jeffery Lebowski before him, the reader observes a modern man like himself (or some man she knows) trapped in an older story, fumbling around in Phil Marlow’s footsteps with his modern enlightenment and uncertainty. Continue reading

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Tim

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MAD MAX 2mmtwo

Dir. George Miller Perf. Mel Gibson and Bruce Spence. Kennedy Miller Entertainment 1981 Film

Tim reminds you of The Humungus from Mad Max 2. Of a barbarian born in the last days who hurtles through life in a dune buggy wearing a mixture of bondage gear and sports padding. Of a man who has hooked a public address system up to his dune buggy so he can proclaim himself to the people of the refinery. Continue reading

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Brought to you by The Provisional Government [pt.1]

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AIR HOG

oxygen

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Flighnay

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REMAINS TO BE SEEN: TRACING JOE HILL’S ASHES IN NEW ZEALANDrema

Davidson, Jared (Rebel, 2011. ISBN 9780473189273)

In a bum one sees the mystery of how he got there. Seasick Steve ran away from home. Joe Hill fell into the Great Depression. Ours came from a tatterdemalion public library on Cooke Street, where he’d spent the morning chroming petrol from a lemonade bottle. Whomever they’d sent to pick him up hadn’t arrived, so we offered him a lift home in Colin‘s Subaru.

The bum lived in a shelter on a street he pronounced, “flighnay!” Continue reading

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Sebastian

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SEVEN SAMURAIsevsam

Dir. Akira Kurosawa Perf. Toshirô Mifune and Takashi Shimura. Toho Company, 1954 Film

If Sebastian taught me anything, he taught me to dial the first two digits of the emergency number first – before you got yourself into trouble. Convulsing from electric shock, you might still manage to fumble the last digit (so that paramedics could come and resuscitate you), but you’d never manage all three.

Sebastian got his start wiring together surveillance devices for mistrustful husbands under Colin Mitchell at Talking Electronics. When ASIO shut Talking Electronics down in 1992, Sebastian started a private company in the city called Teragen International, doing God only knows what. Their only discernable business amounted to a dialup internet service with too few modems called Aardvark Internet. But Teragen worked day and night, propelled to a frenetic pace by ephedrine tea they imported under a loophole in the Australian import restrictions. After working for days at a stretch, they’d retire to electrocute themselves with homemade electroshock weapons. Continue reading

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Tony Vu

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TOP GUN tgun
Dir. Tony Scott Perf. Tom Cruise and Tim Robbins. Paramount Pictures, 1986 Film.
At Yolande’s insistence, a hairdresser shaved my beard in 2009. This shows what I looked like beforehand:

Continue reading

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Bandwagon

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HOME INSULATION PROGRAMaudit

Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (ANAO Audit Report No.12 2010–11; Commonwealth of Australia, 2010; ISBN  0642811563)

When Labor spun open its home insulation subsidy in 2009, a thousand insulation dingoes all across the country started fighting to get their muzzles under the spigot.

When the first one phoned, I explained that I already had grey insulating powder in the crawlspace. When their tradesman came, he found I had too much grey insulating powder to qualify for the subsidy. Continue reading

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Review Of The Cover Of The Warriors Of Batak

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WARRIORS OF BATAKbatak

Campagna, Dan (Task Force Games, 1982)

Somewhere in the last century, the boilerplate book cover for fantasy roleplaying products became a picture of two magical warrior women in cleavage-armour confronting each other from the backs of dragons[1]. Continue reading

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Death of salesmen

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death_of_a_salesmanDEATH OF A SALESMAN

Miller, Arthur (Book Club Edition, Viking, 1949; ISBN (1958 edition) 9786700003299)

Timeworn novels and films have left many of us with the rather outdated image of the door-to-door salesperson as a fast-talking cracker in a suit carrying a vacuum cleaner. “Pardon me, madam. I’ve come from Suction King to demonstrate the unmatched effectiveness of our affordable new Super-Vac, which retails for just 29.99”.

In contrast, the solemn modern energy vendor turns up to your door in shirtsleeves. Sometimes he has a speechless trainee with him who just watches as he runs through his routine. He never looks older than twenty-five. More often than not, he confers the impression of having held the job himself for less than a month. He seems uneasy. You’d swap over to his syndicate out of simple sympathy, but he opens his spiel by telling you that he’s come because they’ve discovered that your energy retailer overcharges you for electricity. As if they’d detected an emergency up at Electricity Headquarters and dispatched him to respond to it. “My God, a household in Clayton overpays for its electricity. Send our best man at once.” Continue reading

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Earlier Work [pt.1]

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PROCLUS: COMMENTARY ON PLATO’S TIMAEUS proc

Baltzly, Dirk (Three vols., Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2009 & 2013; ISBN 978-0521183888)

The masculine squalor of a man’s first share-house often owes as much to his housemates’ incompetence at housework as to their disdain for it. Some may know how to replace fuse wire or unblock a toilet, but few men of eighteen have any tangible notion of how to clean a grill trap or defrost a refrigerator.

When Dirk Baltzly moved out in the eighties, many young men couldn’t even cook. Continue reading

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Blue Oyster Cult

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THE BIGGEST SECRETlunatic

Icke, David (Bridge of Love Publications, 1999; ISBN 0-9526147-6-6)

David Icke believes in the literal truth of the postulate that the rest of us accept only as a metaphor: that the creatures who rule our planet belong to a race of blood-drinking lizardmen.

In 1991, Icke began to wear only the colour turquoise. Continue reading

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David and Goliath

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BOOK OF SAMUEL 1 Holy Bible

Chapter 17 (Holy Bible, ISBN for example 9780060649234)

A few days after Scott started housesitting at a penthouse apartment on Exhibition Street, a mob of us went around to visit him. An ancient tomcat lived in the laundry room. I remember it as Old Pukey. According to Scott, if anything startled it, it could vomit, and anything might startle it.

Old Pukey’s fur had started to fall out in patches. When it tried to purr, it made this awful gulping noise that sounded like it trying to clear its throat and not quite managing it. Continue reading

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      Like anyone who survived the same public school education that I did, I’d hazard to say I know more about ancient Egypt, dinosaurs, and the social and political environments that led to the first and second world wars than I do about Australian history. What I do remember of my … Continue reading