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Tag Archives: fiction
Sebastian
SEVEN SAMURAI
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
Tony Vu
TOP GUN 
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:
Death of salesmen
DEATH 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Timeworn novels and films have left many of us with the rather outdated image of the door-to-door salesperson as a fast-talking cracker in a suit carrying a vacuum cleaner.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
Dreams
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
Impressive
THE 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
Boosterism [pt.2]
BABBITT
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
Poor Pluto
OF 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
Phantom der Nacht
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.
South Central Idaho
GOD’S SMUGGLER, THE LAND OF THE KANGAROO, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1990s, others
Brother Andrew, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill and Pope John XXIII (Chosen Books, 2001, ISBN 9780800793012), Thomas Knox (W. A. Wilde & Company: Boston, 1896, ISBN (reprint) 9781409970385), Peter Townrow and Ron Martin (editors) (Routledge, 2002, ISBN 9780117023659)
A wearisome ancient practice requires the journalist to begin his description of any country or region by describing it as “a land of contradictions”.
The charitable view sees this as the journalist’s admission that he hasn’t comprehended his subject. That he views the disparate facets he’ll go on to describe as contradictions, comprehending too little about the country or region to harmonise them. Continue reading
Gallo
BUFFALO ’66
Dir. Vincent Gallo. Perf. Vincent Gallo and Christina Ricci. Cinépix Film Properties, 1998. Film.
I revere Vincent Gallo’s film Buffalo 66 as a work of genius. From the outset, the film seizes our attention through its humour and stunning photography. Buffalo looks like Orwell’s bright cold day in April when the clocks struck thirteen. Gallo’s flurrying delivery leaves us in hysterics.
At first, we despise his protagonist. After heckling her away from the
payphone, Billy mooches phone change from the tap dancer and then sneers at her in return.
Clearwater Primeval
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Burgess, Anthony (William Heinemann: UK, ISBN 0434098000)
The Monash Transfer and Recycling Station on Ferntree Gully Road gives you the best chance you’ll ever get to tolchock your property without bothering your conscience.
After paying their veck on the way in, you back your automobile up to the edge of a concrete pit three-feet deep. For as long as you want, they let you throw your stuff down there, watching it fly apart as it hits the ground. Boxes tear apart and CDs fly out through the holes. Electric kettles bounce like skipping stones, trailing their electrical cords. You pitch your microwave up into the air as hard as you can, grunting. For one crystalline moment it hangs in the air, rotating with the door open, before it explodes against the concrete. Continue reading