Author Archives: A. B. Smith

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Tour Scenic Cesta Punta

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werner_herzog_eats_his_shoeWERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE 

Dir. Les Blank. Perf. Werner Herzog, Alice Waters, Tom Luddy, Michael Goodwin, Chris Strachwitz and Phil Harberts. Flower Films, 1980. Film.

After cooking and eating his shoe in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog explains that he ranks a lack of adequate images as one of the gravest threats to civilisation. He puts it on par with overpopulation and ecological devastation.

For the man who fixes his focus well into the future, it cuts to the marrow of his fear that human progress in his society may’ve ground to a standstill. Without adequate images to knit its dreams from, can his society dream dreams of significance? Or will it spend its time perfecting the Slurpee and finding Australia’s Next Top Model, as its citizens grow more and more isolated from each another? Continue reading

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PAIRS

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PAIRSpairs

This shows the paths of some specks of colour as they emerge from several moving bodies. Each body belongs to one of four breeds: those that emit teal specks of colour, those that emit orange ones, those that emit white ones or those that emit violet ones. Each breed, in turn, belongs to one of two pairs. Each body accelerates with a constant magnitude of acceleration towards the closest body among those belonging to the other breed in the pair to which its own breed belongs.

Meanwhile, each body emits specks of the appropriate colour in the direction opposite to its acceleration. All the specks of colour move at the same speed and fade as they move. Continue reading

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Keep On Shulgin’

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myersbriggs

GIFTS DIFFERING: UNDERSTANDING PERSONALITY TYPE

Myers, Isabel Briggs & Myers, Peter B. (Davies-Black Publishing, 1980; ISBN 089106074X)

The clock showed three when the speeding person made his move. He’d stalked me since two, prowling around the edge of the conversation, waiting to detach me from the herd. The need to verbalise his jumbled thoughts to some listener beat like a fever behind his eyes.

I knew a carnivore when I saw one, but the room’s shadows made him almost invisible. I think the Goths who decorated the place must’ve concocted them on purpose. Draped in costume-shop gloom for the occasion, their apartment looked like a Tim Burton exhibit realised in eight dollars of black and purple crepe paper. When I looked away for a twinkling moment, he pounced out of the shadows. Continue reading

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Four

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FOURfour

This shows the trails of some specks of colour as they emanate from four moving masses. Each mass attracts one of the other masses and all the specks of colour that emanate from it with a force that diminishes with the square of the distance: the mass that emits specks of green attracts the specks of violet and the mass that emits them, which in turn attracts the specks of blue and the mass that emits them, which in turn attracts the specks of ochre and the mass that emits them, which in turn attracts the specks of green and the mass that emits them. Each speck of colour fades as it moves. Continue reading

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Dreams

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imaginarium

IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS 

Dir. Terry Gilliam. Prod. William Vince. Perf. Charles McKeown, Christopher Plummer, Heath Ledger, Jude Law, Verne Troyer, Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp, and Tom Waits. E1 Entertainment, 2009. Film.

Watching the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus feels like hearing somebody recount their dream. Both bore you for the same reason: because anything can happen at any moment, there exists no suspense. We feel no anxiety when thugs chase the hero, since at any moment the sky may spit asunder and disgorge platoons of patchwork pharaohs or motorcycle-riding crayfish to rescue him. The ground beneath the pursuers’ feet may turn to treacle. The wind may blow in an opaline mist of bumblebees in frockcoats that halts everybody in their tracks. Even as they herd him to the edge of a precipice, we know that a flying teacup may appear to whisk him out of their reach. Continue reading

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Prince of Databases

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gideons_bibleNEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE

Foundation Publications (1997, ISBN 978-1885217721)

A few years ago I attempted to rent advertising space in The Bible between the Old and New Testaments. I created a website for a fictional business called ‘Prince of Databases’ at:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/princeofdatabases/

I then emailed The Gideons International, who print and distribute Gideon’s Bible, at tgi@gideons.org: Continue reading

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Impressive

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the_godfatherTHE GODFATHER

Puzo, Mario (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969, ISBN 9780399103421)

Visiting Matt and Darryl meant sneaking through the lair of a cranky, nocturnal gremlin that had lodged itself in their living room. Tread too hard on a loose floorboard and it would jolt awake. In almost one breath it would shout obscenities, accuse you of freaking it out, demand to know your name and ask to borrow twenty dollars until Sunday.

The gremlin had a fringe of long hair around the edges of a bald scalp. In front, a silvered chain linked a piercing through its nose to a piercing in its right ear. Out in public it affected a knobbed staff and a billowing khaki duffle coat. In Darryl’s living room it wore a bathrobe (supplemented on occasion by something it’d “found spare” in Darryl’s clothes hamper). Continue reading

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Royal Park Reds

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das_kapitalDAS KAPITAL

Marx, Karl  (Penguin Classics; Reprint edition, 1992, ISBN 978-0140445688)

In all probability, Marxist sport associations have existed for as long as universities have funded student clubs. After nine meetings over boiled lentils, a few may even have contrived to play their first games. However one communist cricket club in Melbourne, called ‘The Royal Park Reds’, has fielded teams for more than thirty years.

Amateur cricket clubs in Australia play on two types of pitches: turf and matting. The former refers to the type of pitch professionals use: prepared strips of grass cared for by groundskeepers (often at copious expense); the latter to a concrete pitch dressed on the day with Astroturf mats brought by the teams. Continue reading

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Boosterism [pt.2]

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babbittBABBITT

Sinclair Lewis (Bantam Classics, ISBN 978-0553214864)

Clayton’s households divide into two genera: proletarian families (and students) who accept Clayton’s wonderful seediness and property-amassing twenty-first-century Babbitts who resent it.

Amongst the latter, Bill Pontikis stands out for his efforts to assemble Clayton’s residents and businesses into a community. As one who has experienced Mr. Pontikis in person – sometimes at distances as little as five feet, I must conclude that rather than acting from any humanitarian motive, he simply wishes to enlarge the opportunities for commercial rapine. Nonetheless, the fact remains that unlike the majority of Clayton’s other petty napoleons, Pontikis has shown himself willing to take a hand in civic life. Continue reading

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Poor Pluto

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of_mice_and_menOF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck, John (Covici Friede, 1937, ISBN (reprint) 9780749717100)

The educational films they showed us in middle school seemed all at least twenty-years old. On flickering projector film, scientists in brown suits took us on a tour of the body’s respiratory system while sanitised hipsters with pompadours showed us how to resist peer pressure. Crew-cutted schoolboys discovered the power of lunchroom manners while other sons and daughters of white hegemony learned how quiet helps at school. Deep-voiced fabulists sold us a version of the American legislative process with no pharmaceutical or energy lobbyists. Other narrators, whose measured delivery somehow conveyed the vastness of space, described the then nine planets of the solar system as the viewpoint swept out towards poor Pluto (of late expelled from the League of Planets for conduct unbefitting a solar planet). Continue reading

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Organisms

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ORGANISMSorganisms

This shows the trails of some dwindling specks of colour as they radiate from several energetic organisms. Each organism belongs to one of two contrasted species: those that give off green specks and those that give off yellowish ones. Each organism accelerates with a constant magnitude of acceleration towards the closest organism of the opposite species. Meanwhile, each organism expels a stream of specks of the appropriate colour in the direction opposite to its acceleration. All the specks of colour move at the same speed and fade as they move. Continue reading

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Phantom der Nacht

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heart_of_darkness

HEART OF DARKNESS, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP

Joseph Conrad (Dover Publications, 1990, ISBN 978-0486264646), Philip K. Dick (Doubleday, 1968, ISBN (reprint) 0-345-40447-5)

By law, every commercial street in Australia must contain either a fish and chip shop, a laundromat or a milk bar with a sandwich board showing pictures of the ice creams. Streets, like mine, that have all three can apply for a government grant to construct a newsagents next door, which thereafter will support itself, in the main, by peddling lottery tickets. For lunch today, I ordered a vegetarian burger from a Chinese restaurant between the laundromat and the fish and chip shop. I believe the restaurateur must once have seen a hamburger at some distance and then deduced its contents. It had its points, but no person who’d seen a burger at close range could’ve classed it as one. In place of the bun, it had two chive pancakes with soy sauce. For the patty it substituted a loose shred of cabbage, slivered black mushrooms and bean shoots. Not one to skimp on the essentials, the restaurateur served it with chopsticks and a selection of dipping sauces.

I ate it with the chopsticks while watching Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. Even Herzog’s monster film somehow reminds me of Joseph Conrad; more human than human but unafraid of the truth about the world. I watched it on a television projector plugged into tiny, quiet speakers, but the source volume set to maximum. Every time the music swelled the speakers rattled and distorted like Hendrix wailing the seventh sharp nine in Heart of Darkness.

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