St. Sasha of the Night – Part One
August 6, 2014 § 2 Comments
Tuesday evening
The conference officially ended three hours ago which would make it now eight or a touch past eight, and the four gastroenterologists – or rather, three with one aspiring – are now commemorating their five-day makeshift friendship at a pub in the dapper locality of The Rocks.
Three laminated passes hang visible at the end of Pfizer and Sanofi lanyards slung around necks recently freed of ties and shirts buttoned-up to the collar. This flagrant display of professional status could be due to simple absent-mindedness, or it could be that some men still believe their vocation to be sexy and simply irresistible to the lay pub-going masses.
Hamburg Iiver physician Darius Renker strongarms them all into one more round of this charming beer Asahi, Japanese, crisp and light on its feet unlike the obese, warm, frothy brews Sasha is accustomed to being forced into sipping on. While Renker is off at the bar buying, local boy Cal Marvale informs Sasha and their Tampa, Florida, colleague Kermode that Asahi is so widely guzzled in Sydney that it may as well be an Aussie brew. “Kind of how Foster’s is almost considered a Yankee drink now,” Marvale adds with a smirk.
“Yeah…nobody in Yankeeland considers it a Yankee drink,” says the Yank.
“Okay. Ouch. Imagine: you have a divorce. Mum’s trying to toss full custody of the kid to dad and dad’s like ‘no, he’s better off with you.’ Foster’s Lager: the unwanted child.”
Kermode’s grin has a wonky skew to it. He downs the last bit of foamy piss from the bottom of his schooner and straightens his lips with the rim of the glass. He doesn’t care an inch for these young cowboys who make a good bit of coin running cameras up people’s backsides in place of real doctoring; who talk like adolescents.
To avoid the tensed-up silence, Sasha looks around the interior of Oddknots Hotel bar floor. He figures you can tell a lot about a place by the way its people go about public drinking on midweek evenings. If Oddknots was anything to go by, he’d say Sydneysiders don’t drink much, that they drink at home, or that they drink in pubs other than Oddknots. And that they all drink cider.
The hepatologist approaches their tall and slender roundtop table as though walking on the thinnest ice, four dewy bottle huddled together in his warm palms. He’s clearly never waited a table in his life, the way all his thought and effort is focused on his not dropping thirty four dollars’ worth of imported alcohol on the carpet.
“Of all the people to encourage drinking,” Kermode says as he gratefully receives a slender, chilly Asahi from Renker.
“Drumming some business up for himself,” says Marvale as he clinks bottlenecks with his three drinking buddies. “He’s a smart bugger this one.”
Sasha smiles as openly as he can as he sets his bottle down unlike the other three who – no time wasted – inaugurate theirs with hungry glugs.
Marvale considers Sasha for a moment and seems to think of something which he chooses not to say. Instead he says, “craft beers are the thing now. Guy I went to med school with, really smart, good doctor…started a craft beer label a couple of years ago: Yardmen/Poolboys, with a slash – a forward slash – between the Yardmen and Poolboys. Doesn’t want to be a surgeon anymore, wants to make esoteric beer. Good on him. I think they’re expanding overseas now, to Bali, and Thailand, two honorary members of the Australian empire.”
“He’d do well in Portland. He should take it there,” Sasha says, relieved that he has now spoken.
“Why Portland? You mean Oregon Portland?” says Renker.
“That’s where all the hippies who drink weird beers are…is what I’ve been told,” Kermode clarifies.
“Hipsters,” Marvale corrects.
“Hippie is short for hipster.”
Marvale rolls the crisp coldness around his mouth, chooses not to respond, and swallows. He knows that the others know that Kermode is full of shit. That’s why Renker is glancing elsewhere. And this guy Sasha…
He looks at Sasha again, at his general otherness. “What do they drink where you’re from? Where’s it that you’re from again?”
“Bristol.”
“Is that a Bristol accent you’re wearing, mate?”
“It’s a diasporic ECOWAS accent.”
“A what what?”
“Lagos via Bristol. In Lagos they drink Gulder, Star and Guinness because I remember having to get Gulder, Star and Guinness from the fridge for my father and my uncles and their guests when I was a boy. I really don’t know what people usually drink in Bristol.”
“Okay. Then what do you usually drink in Bristol?”
“Milk. Occasionally I drink Coke, or fruit juice mixed with tonic water.”
Marvale smirks, unsure of how much sarcasm Sasha’s sentence was laced with. A great quiet descends on the table and the quartet finish off their beers in the midst of it.
It’s soon a touch past nine and the general body language that the four men display is that of the common breadwinner rounding up their after-work drinking session and preparing to return home to the house-spouse and the children.
“Well…I have an early flight tomorrow so I’d better get moving,” says Kermode, stepping off the tall stool. “Gentlemen: it’s been a pleasure…”
Renker says, “Me too, I fly in six hours.” He holds out a hand first to Sasha (“nice to meet you, Sasha”) and then to Marvale (“Callum. When you’re next in Hamburg.”)
Kermode does the same, shakes hands. The American and the German then conspire to share a taxi and leave the pub doing so. Sasha and the local conspire to remain seated.
“So when’s your flight?”
“A few days from now.”
“Taking some time to see the sights?”
“I suppose.”
The crowd has grown ever so slightly more boisterous and Sasha must now draw his voice out from deeper down within his innards in order to be heard above the tipsy hum. When he is forced to do this he often squeaks from the strain, and once in a while a gnat of spit will set flight from his mouth and attach itself to the listener’s face and melt into their skin, sometimes going unnoticed by either.
“So, you’re from Sydney,” inquires Sasha, or rather, reiterates.
“Dee Why. Ever been to Dee Why? Know where Dee Why is?”
“I’ve never even heard of Dee Why. How do you spell it?”
“D-double-E W-H-Y. It’s up north, north of the bridge, sits right on the pacific. The ocean’s my bathtub, mate, my washbasin.”
Sasha leans back in his chair and nods absently. The two men look at each other for a moment, but there isn’t much at all in the look they share. Ambient chatter displaces what would normally be called awkward silence. Sasha shuffles forward on his stool and rests his elbows on the table.
“So…like…where are the best places to have a good time?”
Marvale stares; smiles. “A good time? What do you mean by good time, what type of a good time?”
Sasha looks around Oddknots, which has admittedly picked up, and says, “there’s nothing much happening here. I’d like to see where things are really moving, where there’s a buzz, action. Energy.”
“Mate, I haven’t been in that arena for — belch — some time, pardon me.” He leans in, half whispers: “Are you looking to get laid?” He lets the question hang unanswered.
Sasha’s mouth twitches, microscopically. He says, “I just want to have something to talk about when I fly home.”
“You don’t seem to be the biggest fan of talking.”
“Because I have nothing to talk about.”
Marvale holds Sasha’s eyes hostage in a brief but intense stare match. He then leans back. “Come back here on a Friday night, or Saturday. What’s wrong with this place?” He looks around. “There’s nothing wrong with this place, it’s a bloody Tuesday.”
“But you must know other bars you could show me.”
“Nooo no no no no no, there’s nothing to show, buddy, you just walk in, order a beer and see what happens. Chat someone up; leave your tag on as a talking point.” He presents the back of his very vascular left hand. “I’m no longer on the market, as you can see. And I’m too chickenshit to cheat, so I can’t be your John Stockwell. But you’re a big lad. No offense, but you’re black – which women love; you’re a pom, sort of – which may not necessarily help, but it may; you have your whatever accent you call it…you’re reasonably young I assume, you have money and you’re in a foreign land where you have no bridges to burn for the next — when did you say your flight was…?”
“Sunday Morning –”
“– one, two, three, four days in a land that won’t remember you when you’ve fucked off. You don’t need me, mate, what you need is more alcohol.” Marvale shifts off his stool, readies himself for the dismount. “And what I need is to get my hide home soon before I get in trouble. Have you tried Kirin? I’ll get us a couple of Kirins and then I’ll disappear so you can get on with business.”
“Kirin?”
“It’s Asahi for men with testicles. Watch my satchel.”
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Brief impression: “Summer of Sam”
July 30, 2014 § Leave a comment
If Spike Lee’s underrated (I would argue) ‘Summer of Sam’ is more concerned with the effect that the year-long Son of Sam killing season had on the general atmosphere in New York City during the summer of 1977, then I wonder about the scenes featuring Michael Badalucco as the titular figure; I wonder about the presence and the significance of these. Are they intended as periodic reminders of the ‘madman’ whose relatively simple acts had an entire city by the throat for twelve whole months, or are they part of a narrative device by which the concurrent ratcheting of tension in both the character-drama storyline and that of the crime-thriller feed into and feed off one another? Perhaps they are simply obligatory inclusions of an individual in a film whose overall existence is largely dependent on that very individual. Once the film comes to a conclusion though, it is clear that the explicit depiction of the true killer is a kind of dramatic irony: Adrien Brody’s Ritchie, one of the film’s key characters, is increasingly believed to be the Son of Sam by his ‘friends’ on account of his adopting the confronting dress code and lifestyle of the late 70s British Punk establishment (though anyone who knows the actual name of Son of Sam would realise that poor mohawked Ritchie is innocent,) with some fairly unfortunate consequences.
Each time Berkowitz is shown thrashing about in his morbidly lit abode, being tortured – presumably – by the voices chewing at his brain, or when Lee follows Son of Sam or his silhouette from behind as he stalks his human prey in the darkened streets and shrubs, there is almost undeniable deliberateness to the way his identity is concealed. Now while it is common practice to shroud dangerous and shadowy characters in mystery, either for purposes of suspense or to create a sense of otherness, the portrayal of the killer in this film highlights the frustration and tension inherent in his behaviour, or at the very least it seems that this is the case; that he is a wound-up, frustrated man with no other conceivable outlet but the barrel of a pistol. The strong sense I get is that this man is not so far removed from the ‘regular’ folk on whom he preys. Vinny, Ritchie, Ruby, Dionna, Joey and the rest of the cats that populate Throgs Neck, the section of the Bronx that serves as the film’s setting…these characters are all in some way trashing around their own personal hells, victims of their own personal demonic forces, their own 2000-year old black dog (an entity to which Berkowitz actually attributed his crimes): whether it’s Vinny and his irrepressible, wandering eye which finds him repeatedly cheating on his gorgeous wife Dionna, or Ritchie’s immersion in various subcultures that may or may not weigh on him but which certainly contribute to his being ostracised and viewed with undue suspicion, ‘Summer of Sam’ is bold enough to draw parallels between the psychic struggles of these characters and Berkowitz’s rage, confusion and enslavement to his violent urges.
Spike Lee has always been a filmmaker who appears obsessed with the psychological complexities – no, the schizophrenia – of the cultural broth that is New York City, the psychosocial inferno that is created when ethnicities, generations and disparate value systems not only co-exist but frequently clash. In ‘Summer of Sam,’ Berkowitz is less a character than he is a personification of a community’s state of mind at a particular time in its history. Now, whether or not this film successfully explores exactly what state of mind the city of New York was in during this period is a difficult assessment to make, but there is no shortage of first-hand testimony of the fact that the late-seventies saw New York going through a very rough period indeed. Perhaps Berkowitz’s reign of violence was simply one of several possible outcomes; maybe it was even somewhat ineviable. That being said, this film is not so much an exploration of his crimes as it is one which uses his crimes as a way in, a way into the soul of a little section of the Bronx in the summer of 1977.
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Brief impression: “A Face in the Crowd”
July 23, 2014 § Leave a comment
All of a sudden Sidney Lumet’s 1975 masterwork seems that much less original. Of course, there is a rich history of great films being informed by other great films, but Elia Kazan’s 1957 gem pre-empts ‘Network’ so thoroughly that it is simply hard to ignore the latter’s indebtedness to the former. Strangely, while both films dissect, by way of dogged satire, the phenomenon of cult of personality and its place in popular media, ‘A Face in the Crowd’ may be a much more apt commentary on the current culture of ‘following’ and being followed than a film of its age has any right to, particularly nowadays during which it seems to take less and less for one to acquire a posse or legion of fans and adorers, whether in the flesh or otherwise.
In ‘Network’, news anchor Howard Beale’s dwindling audience share only skyrockets once his impending axing flips his switch and turns him into a crazed or perhaps pseudo-crazed mad prophet of the airwaves, one who seems to echo and articulate the frustrations of the average television viewer in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate United States of America. In contrast, ‘A Face in the Crowd’ gives us Andy Griffith in a loose-limbed, powerhouse performance as song-singing drifter Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes, a self-professed “just a country boy” whose small-town charm, charisma and latent narcissism is snapped up by sharp-eyed Arkansas radio promoter Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal in perhaps the performance of the picture) only for him to snowball into a national television sensation. It turns out that there’s just something about this fella Lonesome that millions of Americans seem to love, so much so that he wields an immense influence in fields that your usual TV personality perhaps ought not to. Sure, Rhodes may very well have been a composite of the Elvis Presleys and Buddy Hollys of the day (as well as media personalities like Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey), but beyond the effect Lonesome has on his legion of screaming adolescent females, this film takes a peek into the socio-political implications of a personality this big and this self-assured. Rhodes’ mentorship of a presidential hopeful is a sad reminder of how personality can and often does supersedes policy and principle in The People’s choice of a leader.
Preventing this film from floating off into the stratosphere where overly brash satires that sadly disappear into a vortex of their own cynicism go to die is Kazan’s dedication to a sort of grassroots realism that tends to wheedle its way into his generally baroque approach, acting almost as a sobering reminder that the mythical heights to which Lonesome Rhodes rises in the film do not exist exclusively in a world of cinema and fantasy but in the same world that is home to the everyday, the average. This is perhaps no more evident in Lonesome’s grand homecoming when he is treated to a routine by the local high-school cheerleading team (a slight call-back to the forbidden sexuality in Kazan’s previous film ‘Baby Doll’). The choice of interweaving of candid-looking, almost verité shots of the small-town American crowds that have come to see their local hero with more staged and stylised depictions of Lonesome’s antics and reactions seems to suggest that there is an element of mutualism at play here; that Lonesome satisfies his fans’ need to adore, to worship, to elevate as much as they feed his need to be adored and worshiped and elevated. The truth of course is that this not quite mutualism or commensalism but a kind of mutual parasitism whereby both parties feed off each other to satisfy needs that do not in any way benefit either of them in the long term.
But for all the socio-political commentary, as is true of a great deal of Elia Kazan’s work, ‘A Face in the Crowd’ is great entertainment in the broadest Hollywood sense: it’s classical rise-and-fall storytelling that moves at a cracking pace, populated by the faces that have a certain star quality. This picture is one strong piece of evidence in favour of the idea that a film can package intelligence and insight in a snappy, flashy package of song, sass and swinging style.
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Brief impression: “Manakamana”
July 18, 2014 § 1 Comment
Aside from the incomprehensible technical prowess it must require to craft some of his sculptures, the genius of Ron Mueck’s work – most of which depicts not mythical deities or surrealistic peculiarities but what one might call “average human beings in various states of vulnerability” – is that it renders the commonplace inexplicably captivating; no, hypnotic. It was only on viewing a Mueck sculpture that I realised, perhaps with a slight shudder of inward-directed horror and shame, how rarely I consider the physicality of my fellow humans with any degree of vested interest, with the slightest bit of genuine, unadulterated curiosity. Even those whom I consider beautiful, sexy or pleasing to behold only tend to register in my mind as a combination of features, broadly speaking: nice eyes, full lips, hourglass figure, ample bosom, a stately pair of legs; even in as intimate a situation as sharing a bed with such an individual, how often do my eyes scour every inch of their face in simple wonderment, as opposed to focusing on the moistness of lips or the shimmering of eyes? Of course, it is not often that one is offered the opportunity to visually explore the raw, physical humanity of another person, one whom they encounter walking down the street or sitting in a café or travelling on the train. But how often have I thought to myself “if only I could study the very pores on this individual’s face, only then would my curiosity be satisfied?” This is the magic of Mueck’s sculptures: opening one’s eyes to the endlessly fascinating bodyscape of the human creature, stirring up latent curiosity or curiosity which previously did not exist and, in doing so, dragging the beholder from their cocoon of self-interest and propelling them into a state of social and spiritual receptivity that may pave the way for greater empathy. Similarly, this is the magic of a film like ‘Manakamana.’
The Manakamana Cable Car runs between Cheres station in the Chitwan district of Nepal and Manakamana Temple located in the neighbouring district of Gorkha. Since 1998 the Austrian-imported cable car has transported locals, tourists and cargo over and across the surrounding valleys and mountain ranges, back and forth, from nine in the morning to five in the evening when the system shuts down for the day. The average trip from Cheres to Manakamana takes roughly ten minutes and for a touch under two hours Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab dare to subject viewers to eleven uncut, static shots depicting exactly eleven trips between the two stations. It is evident after a handful of these segments that the filmmakers probably shot a wealth of footage and that the final cut of the film is comprised of a considered selection of trips shot in different cable cars at different times as opposed to it being eleven consecutive journeys in one particular car. One of these segments actually takes place in a cargo vessel transporting a bunch of goats through the Nepalese sky, recalling – whether tongue-in-cheek or not – ‘Sweetgrass’, a film also produced by HSEL. Apart from the goats, the subjects are largely locals going about their daily business or on pilgrimage, though there are some English-speaking tourists and a trio of young, blackclad, long-haired Nepalese metalheads, for a touch of variety.
Interestingly, thirty-plus minutes into the film, long after I found myself subtly hoping and pleading for the film to offer up subjects other than locals quietly exchanging everyday banalities or sitting in utter silence for minutes on end, the metalheads appeared on screen. But by this point, ‘Manakamana’ had taught me how best to watch it, how best to appreciate what it had to offer, which was (and continues to be) the opportunity to be simply and selflessly fascinated. Rather than being a cute little bit of cinematic tourism that seeks to provide a box-ticking portrait of the cable car and the various types of passengers it services, ‘Manakamana’ is an anthropological exercise, albeit one which requires nothing more than patience, curiosity, but mostly a generosity of spirit of the kind that is rarely allowed to exist let alone thrive in a decidedly impatient and breakneck world. While the gently rocking landscape outside the cable cars is splendid in its natural beauty and soothing in its repetitiveness, and while there are endless moments of raw human behaviour in each segment that are both funny and sobering, it may very well be that ‘Manakamana’ is less about what is projected onto the screen and more about what it demands of the willing audience member, which is ultimately empathy in its purest form; the selfless desire to appreciate and perhaps understand the existence of another. Like Mueck’s sculptures, ‘Manakamana’ constructs a situation in which patrons are given the opportunity to do that which either time, social decorum or both prevent them from attempting or even considering.
Much as Ron Mueck’s sculptures were a sobering experience for me in highlighting, on my part, a disappointing lack of curiosity about things, ‘Manakamana’ challenged me to consider why it is that sitting quietly in the presence of a stranger can be so uncomfortable. I suspect it has to do with the fact that inquisitiveness of this kind – being selflessly interested in others and their plights – has become so darn unnatural. Perhaps it has always been. If so, bravo to ‘Manakamana’ and other such work that seek and strive to undo this state of affairs one film and one viewer at a time.
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Swordsman’s Glory’s Not So Glorious Retirement
June 30, 2014 § Leave a comment
By Janus Qillemaning
March 17, 2014
A healthy pinch of trepidation would diffuse through anybody’s body as they coasted up the driveway of the sprawling home of a moneyed old bachelor with a taste for the grotesque; a tiny voice warning of dark things to come would not be unwarranted either.
It’s not an unimaginably long driveway, but every metre of it is a metre by which you can clearly sense yourself deviating further and further from the comforting arms of what the average person would call “normal.” It is untarred and ever so winding – the driveway – and is lined by (probably) gum trees that may or may not be dying or already dead. All that is certain is that they are leafless and a little scoliotic. The car is trailed by a parade of unsettled dust for a half kilometre or so and when I bring it to a halt outside a squat but broad house we – the car and I and the settling dust behind us – are met by the unassuming gaze of a lean old man in a fitting jumper and jeans: ‘I eased up on wearing black when Jobs’s get-up became iconic, so now I wear greys and tans and even patterned ones when I’m feeling a bit silly. But you can’t beat black on top and denim down below.’
Alan Saville is the kind of guy whose impressive wealth was probably acquired so modestly and legitimately that it could not be expressed in more extravagant a way than its being used to accrue a large collection of useless oddities. A retired small-business owner and a long-time “amateur” shares investor (an activity from which he has certainly not retired), Alan spends much of his free time sourcing, bidding for, paying for, and collecting objects that fascinate him as much as they repulse most. Not yet a tourist attraction – which Alan assures me it will never become – his expansive single storey abode which sits nestled on a 50 acre property named “Goorman’s Hive” located somewhere between inner Sydney and the Blue Mountains houses what must surely be one of the largest private collections of stuff this side of the equator.
‘It probably began with me collecting my own teeth,’ Alan tells me as we briefly sit to a black coffee for me and a green tea for him. ‘Now you can imagine how young I would have been when I started doing this, maybe four or five. There was no method to it initially, no reason, but I would just keep the teeth wrapped up in a tissue or in one of my father’s handkerchiefs for whatever reason, and then one day I sourced a jar my mother had washed and de-labelled for general use – it was an ex jam jar if I recall correctly – and I put the teeth in it, and by this time I had three or four less teeth in my mouth and enough in the jar to make a decent rattling sound. But I can vaguely remember the moment I realised that this hobby was more than something I just did to pass the time. We had family over one weekend and an older cousin of mine discovered the jar with its tiny white contents lying somewhere around the house and he vomited all over his shoes and my folks weren’t too pleased with me and my aunt and uncle weren’t too pleased with my cousin soiling his shoes or with the jar and its contents even though they didn’t say anything about it, but I remember looking at the tooth jar and getting a new kind of kick out of it. The value of it suddenly skyrocketed in my eyes, I was kind of proud of it, about what it could do to someone. Kudos to my parents for letting me keep the jar despite the obvious ickiness of it, but I completely understand why they put their collective foot down when I announced that I would branch out into collecting my siblings’ teeth as well. That was probably a bit much on my part.’
‘Some would say that what you’re doing is still a bit much,’ I offer, playing the role of hell’s advocate.
‘A bit much for who though?’ he responds with well hidden irritation. ‘You know, I think this may be the reason why I still do it; or at least one of the reasons I still collect all these blatant offenses to good taste. Bit childish, no?’
I refrain from commenting, using a mouthful of hot coffee as an excuse.
Over the years Alan has managed to amass a grotesquery of objects including everything from real shrunken heads and deformed foetuses, to authentic (he claims) nooses and injecting apparatus used for state-sanctioned executions carried out within the last half century. He even has a screening room for snuff films and other audio-visual material which would be best left undescribed. His latest acquisition, and the reason for which I ventured out to Mr Saville’s property, is Swordsman’s Glory, the contraption which has been described as a sex arcade game by its inventors but which caused one hell of a stir when it was successfully sold to an underground Sydney sex club after reputedly being rejected when pitched to Sexpo. It’s the contraption that was labelled the “rapist trainer” by some fervent detractors, which is probably the moniker that sufficiently raised Mr Saville’s interest in it: ‘humanity’s potential for darkness and depravity has always fascinated me, as well as anything that seems to trouble people deeply or take an axe to social norms. I don’t necessarily consider myself a dark person, just a curious one.’
With money.
‘With a few dollars to my name, yes.’
We enter a fairly spacious but musty room with high ceilings and a decidedly warehouse feel. Suffice to say, my neck hairs are quite erect.
‘This is the room where I keep objects I haven’t quite found a place for. It’s like a quarantine zone. Some of these things have been here for months.’
His eyes and attention are briefly drawn to a book bound in what seems to be rough pig-skin but which Alan informs me is cured human hide. The topic of the book seems to be cartography-oriented and by a layman’s guess the pages probably date back a century or two if not more. I’m assured by Alan that this and other such books would have been – at the time – fairly legal (if in bad taste) in that the skins would have been respectfully peeled from corpses belonging to universities which offered classes in anatomy and dissection and which had their own printing press. Alan decides to hold onto the book as he leads me to the item of the hour, Swordsman’s Glory.
It turns out that the little warehouse-cum-shed which houses the thing I have come to see contains, mixed in with all the weirdness, items as mundane as those that clutter the garages of the militantly non-eccentric. Boxes of…
“– oh, those just contain old kitchenware, pots, pans, plates…unusable really if only because I’m sure whatever you cook with them would taste of dust and cardboard and age however much you scrubbed.”
Many of the boxes it turns out contain his children’s old toys, which he retains for sentimental reasons. The fact that he has adult children and ex-wives works to unprickle my skin a great deal, and Alan Saville begins to come across as more of a charming hoarder than a twisted fetishist, the kind of assertion of mutual exclusivity one should always be careful not to make. Surrounded by these boxes, perhaps perversely, is an object hardly bigger than a pinball machine. What catches the eye first and foremost is the life-sized replica of a female’s body from the waist down as though it were a mannequin sawn in half; and, like a mannequin, little attention has been paid to detail and realism apart from size and general anthropometry. The hips are flexed to ninety degrees and so are the knees; it’s the position the lower half of one’s body is in when on all fours, the butt protruding somewhat and the knees hovering a good foot and a half off the floor. A medium-sized screen sits at the far end of the machine, presumably to display high scores and the like. Across one side of the contraption’s body is the title Swordsman’s Glory, scrawled in a disappointingly juvenile font similar to that in which titles like “Tekken” and “Mortal Kombat” are written. After we’ve both silently assessed the item for a good minute or two, Alan proceeds to explain its workings.
‘It’s a deviously assured piece of design if you think about it. Our lady’s bottom half actually turns on its horizontal axis like so –’
Alan grabs the calves – which he informs me are mostly plastic not fibreglass – and swivels the model 180 degrees such that its knees are up in the air and its – for want of a better word – gash sits out and in the open, not quite flapping in the breeze; to call it a vagina would be frankly insulting to vaginas. It’s also clear that little attention to detail has been paid to the intricacies of the vulva. One can only hope that gifting the poor mannequin with a clitoris at the very least was a consideration on the parts of the clearly male inventors.
‘What’s more extraordinary,’ Alan says with measured excitement, ‘is how the hips can be abducted, splayed open, up to thirty degrees,’ which he demonstrates for me with utmost care while kissing the model’s groin with his.
I can only assume that my disgust is already beginning to show because Alan decides to lament the fact that ingenuity of this sort could be put to such chauvinistic use. He says this while straddling the mannequin which now has its legs open wide, in waiting for a cock to be thrust inside it.
So what does the screen look like?
‘Well…I unfortunately don’t have a power point around here…so I can’t plug it in and show you what it looks like. But I have seen it and I wouldn’t call it the Swordsman’s strongest feature. I mean, it has the usual high scores and all that, but while a player is…playing…the screen has a point-of-view depiction of a woman’s face and the player has a choice of six or so ladies to choose from before they start the game. It’s live action actually, not animated, which is quite impressive because as far as I understand the responses of the virtual sex partner are directly related to how good or how poor a lover the player is.’
‘The guy,’ I say.
‘Pardon?’ he says.
‘You’ve been saying the player, but it seems to me that the player is always going to be male. Or were there any lesbian players?’
‘I don’t have any definite answers to that, but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t or couldn’t have been lesbian players. I actually believe that cunnilingus is a mode of play. That’s all I know, but that’s a valid question.’
I can feel myself smile at this though I do not quite know why.
So why did he decide to spend $78000 on this thing?
Alan Saville stares for a moment before breaking into a laugh and playfully gesturing to the absurdity that is the Swordsman’s Glory as if to say “why the fuck would I not spend $78000 on this thing?’
*
Bernie Josiah Collins (or BJ) and Len Dolan do not seem to have been particularly stung by the furore, backlash or outright hate surrounding their creation.
As we sit down for coffee at a café half a minute’s walk from their temporary office/studio in Marrickville, BJ and Len are largely as one would expect them to appear, apart from the fact that they do not strike me as being dangerously undersexed men who guzzle down porn and are unable to converse somewhat naturally with women. They’re both approaching thirty and have receding hair lines to varying degrees but nonetheless have an air of early-twenties what with their mild fleet-mindedness. They’re also the kind of guys who absorb fashion trends without being overly aware of this and thus come across as unwittingly modish, which is probably a significant portion of males in inner west Sydney.
‘What did you think of it?’ Len asks.
I express my honest opinion and he does not seem too fazed. He simply says, ‘cool.’
‘Did you find it actively sexist though?’ BJ says, continuing the line of question that Len was perhaps to coy to press on with.
‘I generally ask the questions,’ I say with a smile, and so proceed to ask him if sexism must by needs be active in order for it to be unconscionable.
BJ consults his friend-partner with a glance and they both consider the question.
‘Well, no…’ begins BJ, ‘but I do think that active hate is a greater sin than passive hate.’
Passive hate?
‘Like…can anti-Semites who sit quietly hating on Jews ever be comparable to Hitler and his goons? Sure, they’re terrible people too, but they don’t necessarily torture or kill, and maybe we need to accept that passive haters will always exist but that it’s kind of okay as long as they remain that way.’
Okay, but what about ideals? ‘Forget the practicalities,’ I say. ‘What about ideals and values and the upholding of these?’
Len pipes in after spending a minute cooling his coffee with his breath: ‘I totally disagree that Swordsman is sexist though. It says nothing about women, at least nothing that either of us intended for it so say; if it does, no one has properly explained to me what that is. Like…the game ranks guys based on how well they have sex…it’s guys competing to please the virtual woman better that other guys. I’d say that the game reduces men to objects just as much; it plays on the anxiety society places on us to be great lovers with large cocks.’
‘Just as much as what?’ I say.
‘Sorry?’
The game reduces men to objects just as much as what?
‘Well…just as much as it may be perceived as reducing women to mannequins that are just expected to open their legs for men.’
So could the game be a social comment then?
BJ steps in: ‘Uh…I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but I don’t believe that social comments have to intentionally come out of the mouths of people to be real and valid; they can be implied in inanimate objects without anyone meaning for this to be the case. Maybe that could be true for Swordsman.’
Len says, ‘sure, that’s true, but I just don’t appreciate the whole sexism uproar crap. The game could be seen as sexist to men or women, depending on who you are. Actually, I remember some guys complaining about how much it plays on the perception of male sexuality being mindless and the idea that guys approach sex like sport, flexing their sex muscles and ranking their exploits and all that.’
‘Yeah,’ says BJ. ‘And there were quite a few gay guys who called it homophobic too.’
‘Yeah,’ echoes Len.
‘Well, I didn’t say it was only misogynistic,’ I say, to be a nuisance.
BJ smiles into his coffee and Len is a little taken aback. BJ asks me if he can smoke and I bid him be my guest.
I comment on the fact that they’ve just tightened the noose around their invention during the last few minutes. BJ states that the thing is already well and truly hung. He seems the more philosophical of the two whereas Len appear somewhat more attached to Swordsman’s Glory, more sensitive and defensive. Is it purely personality-related, or does the Swordsman’s ultimate failure have a greater meaning for this particular member of the design duo?
I ask the pair about the machine’s conception. Who came up with the idea and so on and so forth.
As it turns out and as could be expected with such an invention, Collins and Dolan, both studying industrial design in one shape or another, were “shooting the shit” one day when one of them – they claim to have forgotten who it was though I suspect Len Dolan is the most likely candidate – narrated to the other his experiences playing an online game in which getting his avatar to have sex with the avatars of other online players was the ultimate aim and in which points were awarded for sexual prowess and skill and for Game, or at least the virtual iterations of these. What commenced as two male friends in their mid-twenties joking about the absurdities of such a game morphed into two friends joking about the absurdities of a game in which a player engaged in simulated sexual activity much as they would brandishing a fake pistol while playing ‘Time Crisis’ at an arcade or hopping into a simulated rally car a few games down and turning the steering wheel wildly. As they joked and kidded, the frat boys and the industrial mavericks within them merged and mutated into sleazy geniuses and they that very day left whoever’s room they happened to be in with plans to design and build what they believed to be the first ever coitus simulator that judged sexual performance in a competitive context.
‘We never expected this to be anything more than a pet project which would at the very least get us attention for our originality or innovation or whatever,’ Len explains. ‘The sex aspect was kind of secondary, secondary in the sense that it wasn’t something we envisioned people getting off on, you know? We’re not like…pornographers. Sex just happened to be a there and we never thought too much about it.’
‘You’ve got to understand,’ says BJ, ‘that we – well, at least I – didn’t really expect to get past the “we’re sort of thinking about making this random thing but it probably won’t happen” stage. I never ever saw myself, saw us, actually building this thing, but by the time we were in fact actually building it we had completely overlooked all the social aspects because we could hardly believe that we had gotten from the stage of just fucking around with ideas to actually trying to study the anatomy of the vagina and how its sensation is mapped and researching different materials and circuitry and all that –’
‘– and where all the cum goes,’ pipes in Len, at which they both stumble into fits of laughter; not brash and extroverted laughter but rather a more inward, half-swallowed kind.
The cum was in fact to be collected in large condom-like films of non-latex plastic which would have been worn by the mannequin like a brief, with a large vaginal pocket that would line the appropriate space. The coital diaper would be spat out by the machine once payment had been received after which the player would then dress the mannequin, assume a position – either missionary-based or doggy-style – and begin fucking, watching the screen intently for points awarded for criteria such as rhythm, stamina, clitoral and G-spot stimulation, and even size (for which there is an inbuilt handicap system.)
Bernie explains: ‘We actually bounced around the idea of the virtual vagina being like a real one in that it would be cleaned out by its own juices or whatever. We were trying to figure out how it could constantly wash itself out so that the players could just use their own condoms and feel confident that they weren’t significantly touching swords by proxy. You can probably tell that we didn’t expect that Swordsman’s Glory would ever be used. Anywhere. We made it for us really.’
There is a very pregnant pause after which Len begins to snigger. BJ smiles. ‘As a creative challenge for us, not to get our rocks off.’
Who came up with the name?
‘Well,’ says BJ, ‘we’ve never be that satisfied with the name, but we didn’t have anything better to call it so we just went with something obvious and a bit cheesy. The “glory” part is a bit of a play on glory holes…even though it’s more a fleshlight than a glory hole.’
And did they consider the utter impracticalities of such a game, aside from all the social implications?
‘We kind of did,’ says Len, ‘but maybe too late? Like, obviously the impracticalities and health issues and social bullshit was why Sexpo was like “uh, no we’re not having this abomination in our show.” And which is why only one underground, pretty dirty sex club was like, “sure, whatever, how much?”’
How much did the sex club, Marquis Descending, pay for ownership of Swordsman’s Glory?
They consult one another once again. $12 000…? Something in that ball park..? In all earnestness though, how could they not know?
By this point our brunches have arrived and been devoured and round two of coffee commences without any reservations.
‘How shocked were you by the uproar?’
This question hangs in the air for quite some time.
‘I was probably mostly confused by the fact that this thing we’d basically made for fun and which was sitting in some dark room in an underground sex club where people fuck goats for all we know was suddenly a thing,’ Len says; ‘a thing that people were getting upset about, like…how the fuck do you even know it exists? Did you just happen to run into it while you were wiping the goat cum from your mouth?’
BJ extends a gentle ‘dude’ to his friend and business partner. I smile. I’m correct in thinking that Len is a little more sensitive about the matter than is BJ.
‘Sorry, I don’t mean to be such a foul mouth.’
No, not at all. So what’s next for the duo?
They are currently in the process of starting up a design and development firm which they hope will be a frontrunner in all things design and innovation, at least in Sydney to begin with though with enough grease and sweat it will have a global reach at some point in the future. They both agree that Swordsman’s Glory is not worth disowning or relegating to their respective skeleton closets though they pray every day to every conceivable deity that it does not end up becoming their ultimate legacy.
*
‘I thought it was kind of funny. But let me be plain and honest with you: I run a club who’s “come one, come all” policy stops just short of permitting murder or child molestation. Everything goes here, man, as long as it’s in the dark, as long as all parties involved gain some measure of satisfaction, and as long as everybody walks out with the exact number of body parts that they expected to walk out with. So, to summarise: I thought it was funny and unique, I figured some of my clients would be into it which some of them were, and I had the money to waste, so I wasted it.’
Arianna M, as she likes to be known, is the personification of an out-of-body experience. Seeing her and hearing her are strangely disjunctive and I find myself wondering, how does this husky and commanding voice emanate from so petite and pretty an entity who at the same time dresses like a ballerina who quit the stage to become a mechanic while retaining the delicate makeup and nimble grace. Think about it.
Sitting in Arianna’s office, one would have zero idea that they were in the control room of a hard-core sex club that caters for all sexual predilections and tastes from simple swinging to BDSM and most flavours of fetishism however extreme. Bestiality is one of the few partialities not permissible at Marquis Descending because (a) human-animal relationships tend to have a significantly skewed power dynamic and (b) even if both parties consented to sexual activity i.e. the dog were wagging its tail or sporting a moist pink boner, reason a still holds. A shelf standing against one wall in Arianna’s office houses neatly stacked folders and books, and two of the other walls are adorned – one each – by two cheap-looking Degas prints. No framed smiley pictures of hubby and the kids sitting askew on the table though, so I can be assured somewhat that this is not a David Lynch movie, which is exactly why it probably is a David Lynch movie.
‘I haven’t had sex in a week,’ Arianna says to me from the other end of the desk, leaning forward across it.
Uh…why would she tell me this?
‘Just so you realise I’m not a sex fiend, that I don’t have semen and pussy juice coming out my ears. Not to blow my own horn but I’m kind of gorgeous – as you can see – and I know what I’m doing most of the time, but I have standards, and standards aren’t always easily met. Sometimes I have to go a week before my standards and criteria are even close to being satisfied.’
‘So how did you get into this?’ I ask.
‘Into what, running a sex club? You know, I always wonder, “how do people get into insulation, or piping?” You’re driving down the road and you see these trucks with piping hanging off the back and on the side of the truck it says “Speedy Piping or Hunter Insulation or Someone and Sons.” How do they get into that? Anyway, with me…I’ve always worshipped sex and I think it’s as vital a part of a healthy, happy life as is twenty-one percent oxygen and regular bowels, and like a doctor or nurse who is there when you need pain relief or antibiotics or an enema, I’m here when you need to get off or feel sexy or feel good about yourself. I’m no less important than your cardiologist and I’m definitely more important than your shrink. As for why I actually decided to open this place? No idea. I just felt like it. Sorry.’
Arianna surprisingly goes on to ask me if she answered my question which she clearly knows she did not on account of the apology she offered a few seconds earlier.
‘So,’ I say, ‘tell me more about Swordsman’s Glory and how it landed up here.’
‘I get a lot of unsolicited shit from lots of people, you see, amateur pornstars and people who want to do exotic dances and whatever they think it is that we provide here. We’re not a strip club, and we’re not VideoSleazy. But when these two guys emailed me about this machine they’d made, I took a bit more notice. Firstly, it was novel — I’d never seen or heard of such a thing; secondly, they sent me a pretty long and detailed email which was a far cry from all the poorly written ones that say “here’s me and me niece fucking, hope you like, here’s me bank details, money please.” So we met up and they showed me the Swordsman and explained how it worked.’
‘And what did you think about it?’
‘I thought they were fucking insane and kind of creepy for even thinking to make such a thing, but brilliant at the same time. Look, sex is strongly subconscious and as a result it often has a hilarious side, so to run a sex club you need to see the funny side of sex, to appreciate the humour inherent in it. Their machine made me laugh, which put it in good stead.’
‘Did customers enjoy it? Did they offer any feedback?’
‘The funny thing about the Swordsman is that it was more the kind of machine you would find in a sex gym, if such a thing existed. As far as I know the virtual vagina didn’t simulate secretions or contract and relax like the real thing does, so I don’t imagine it was the kind of toy that people would rush to in order to get their rocks off. It was really a technique enhancer, and I think the clients who gravitated to it used it as a way to hone their penile dexterity, or even their finger or tongue skills…to a limited extent of course, granted the virtual vagina was not super-detailed anatomically and whatnot. You know how there’s scoring and ranking –?’
I do.
‘– well I’m not aware that my clients actually embraced the competitive aspect of it. It was all about personal bests I guess.’
And the hygiene issue?
Arianna M shrugs.
‘Are you aware,’ I ask, ‘that some people nicknamed it the “rapist trainer?” Was that one of the reasons you decided to offload it?’
‘I’m not that beholden to public opinion; I run a sex club. The problem was more that the machine was now tainted and doomed to just sit in the corner collecting lint and dust like an artefact. I’m not an antique collector. It was going to get offloaded sooner or later after shit hit the fan.’
As for it being called the “rapist trainer…?
‘Rapist trainer…hmmm. I don’t think I really want to comment on that.’
Not even a little?
‘I think it was an effective but unfairly inflammatory term. I don’t know many rapists. In fact I don’t know anyone at all who has confessed to or been convicted of rape, but I’d imagine that rapists don’t really give a damn about pleasuring their victims, which is kind of what you score points for when you fuck the machine.’
But the machine does dehumanise women. You’re fucking a machine with a pixelated personality that has no sovereignty and no say with regards to the acts it is about to be subjected to.
‘Well, I don’t believe blow-up dolls create rapists. Look, without being overly aggressive, I must say that I really don’t appreciate being placed in the position of having to defend that stupid, juvenile and somewhat depraved invention. I bought it on a whim, a regrettable whim, that’s all. But I also hate people getting so sensitive about something so benign.’
Understood, and no aggression perceived, though her claim that Swordsman’s Glory is benign is contestable.
There were some parties who slammed the Swordsman for practically alienating straight women and gay men. Thoughts?
‘I figured it was meant to [alienate straight women and gay men]; in the same way that tampons alienate straight men and lesbians. That’s a joke.’ I guess I mustn’t have smiled appropriately.
‘But honestly,’ Arianna continues, ‘I didn’t think it was logical to expect a sex toy to cater for all genders and sexualities. When it comes to that level of versatility you’ll never beat the vibrator. So I figured it was worth the purchase. Plus, something about the fact that Sexpo found it too risqué made it irresistible.’
‘Did Sexpo say that they found it too risqué? I ask.
‘Knowing Sexpo, they probably did. I’m kidding, I love Sexpo. I go every year. I should have season passes.’
‘So who brought Swordsman to who’s attention exactly?’
The business owner in Arianna comes out, finally: ‘I won’t go too much into the details, but a former staff member took issue with the machine and escalated things by contacting the press when they felt that I wasn’t doing enough to…get rid of the thing for which I had just paid fifteen thousand big ones. But I don’t blame them, and no, I didn’t fire them, they decided to part ways with the sex industry. I’ll be the first and last to admit that Swordsman is a ridiculous creation, that it was a ridiculous move on my part to even think of buying it and putting it in my club. But I did turn one hell of a profit selling it to some weirdo, god bless him.’
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June 9, 2014 § Leave a comment
I got on me knees and looked in the cupboard under the sink. Mum said why would she keep them under the sink, they were in the next one over, behind all the pots and pans she abandoned when she got the Teflon non-stick ones. So I pulled all the plastic plates and bowls out from behind the pots and pans and stacked them up but mum said why did I put them on the bloody ground. Now she’d have to wash them again.
Dad said it said in The Advertiser that the Africans were dentists.
Mum said, ‘all of them?’
Dad said just the bloke was a dentist. ‘Got a wife and three kids it says here.’
Mum was scrubbing the plastic china with Palmolive and a sponge and I stood and watched because I thought I deserved it. Dad twisted his neck over the back of the sofa.
‘Em. Emily. Oi! The bloke’s a dentist, they can afford their own crap,’ he said but mum said that third world dentists weren’t like dentists here. That’s why they came to Australia. Besides, a church ladies group was behind the whole thing, just to make the Africans feel at home. And to add to their congregation she guessed. Said it wasn’t her idea, calling dibs on the new people. Just that she thought she didn’t want to waste decent dinnerware.
Dad said what about a garage sale, he’d been thinking about having a garage sale. Mum said that was another story, put the soap and the sponge back under the sink and said we might as well throw in the pots and pans too. Dad said what if we need them one day.
Mum said, ‘it’s not a gift, Roger, it’s just a bloody loan.’
*
We’re playing handball in the quad, me and the other retards, because that’s what they call us, the other kids, because they can’t be bothered talking to us. There’s ten squares crushed into the cement with chalk some dickhead nicked from roll call. Shetty’s in king, Trent the ranga’s in queen and I’m in jack but I think the ranga’s trying to get me out because he’s hitting all these low fast balls at me. It’s like everyone’s trying to get me out ‘cause they’re all hitting low fast balls at me. Brendan Carter’s just got out but he won’t get out and people are yelling at him, ‘get out of it!’ But Brendan’s saying ‘nah! Bullshit! Nah!’ throwing his arms around and pushing everyone away. But then the principal walks out of the office with one of the Africans mum was talking about. A boy. Brendan is so busy looking he gets shoved out of his square and everyone up to that square moves up one. Some of us are also looking at Mr Woz(niakiewicz) and the African boy. I’m one of the ones also looking.
Turns out he’s in me roll call, him and his sister. They look heaps like each other, not like twins, but they’ve got the same nose and lips sort of. And apparently their hair’s like carpet, at least his is. They sit right up front in front of Ms Jarra’s table, talking to each other so quiet you can’t hear them. You can’t even hear them say yeah when Ms Jarra says Tu-Too-Toondie? Where’s Toondie? Ne-Nu-Na-Nagozie? Maybe because she’s saying it wrong or maybe because they can’t understand Australian. But their names aren’t even Australian. A few names later Ms Jarra says Matthew, Matthew Rusk, and I say yeah. That’s the only thing I say the whole time because I’m up the back and no one is talking to me.
The African girl Nagozie ends up being mates with Bec Dunner and Kayla Redman and the other sluts but I don’t think she knows they’re the sluts. Toondie’s all over the place, hanging around with the boofheads that reckon they’re awesome-as and the careers lady’s weird son. I even see him talking to some of the cooler retards between class because he’s in the same classes as them, all the harder ones, like harder Science and harder English and yeah all the harder ones. After like a month the African kids don’t talk to each other as much ‘cause they’ve got their new mates. But it’s still a pretty quiet one for me, roll call, ‘cause I’m up the back and no one’s saying anything to me.
*
Dad’s back from the mine because I can hear him stomping his steel-cap boots outside the front door. I’m in the kitchen pouring some lime cordial because that’s all that’s left. Luce finished off the raspberry I reckon, and I can’t stand lime, but I can’t get enough of Cottees. I don’t know why but I sneak off to me room before dad comes in but I listen to him rumbling to mum about work as I sip me cordial and wait for me PlayStation to startup. But mum yells tea before it starts up.
We have lasagne for tea, the one we had for tea yest’y and the day before. Mum’s passing dad a massive plate when she says did he hear what the Africans did with all the stuff the church ladies rounded up for them. Dad says what and mum says the Africans said they didn’t need it because they had their own stuff coming by ship from South Africa and besides they were living in the Keenans’ old house on Colin street because the dad knows Mrs Keenan and she’s renting it out to them and it’s fully furnished and everything. Dad’s up for another plate after mum’s said all this. So I pass him the casserole dish.
‘Heard their boy’s in your year,’ dad says to me as he shovels lasagne with the cake scoop. I nod with me mouth full. Mum says do I know him and I say not really. But I seen him around.
Mum says, ‘don’t you want to invite him over? Show him your PlayStation?’
I stuff me face again when she says this and I think dad notices because he says ‘Matty’s not into inviting people over much, are you mate?’
‘Be good to know the new dentist in town,’ mum says into her plate. Dad says yeah, if it happens it happens, if it doesn’t it doesn’t. Lucy isn’t saying anything. She never says much round the house, only when her mates are over, then she’s talking loud and acting like she’s king shit. Mum’s just drank some water and she’s picking her teeth with her tongue.
No one says anything for ages, and then mum says why don’t I take me bike and ride over to Colin street tomorrow and give them new people some cassette tapes or something, just a taste of real Aussie music and hospitality, maybe a bit of Farnsey for the grown-ups and a bit of INXS or Barnesy and maybe some of me own CDs. She says the boy is probably wanting to make some friends but I reckon she means me. Dad says what about some Troy Cassar-Daley but mum says they might not get it; what about all that Aussie rap I’m always playing in me room and I say um…like I don’t know, but I think she means The Herd.
*
Sweat’s running into me eyes it’s so hot. And every time I stop me bike at a stop sign the flies are all over me like those stars when a cartoon gets whacked in the head. Our town’s streets are wide like highways, and the sky’s blue like it didn’t want to be blue but was forced to be blue and now is like you wanted blue so here it is. The road’s so hot it’s like I’m looking through water and as I’m riding I’m wondering will he know who I am, will he remember. I’m thinking why did mum have to make me do this.
Once when I seen Toondie in the corridor at school I said how’s it going and he said ‘good and you?’ He sounded not how I expected him to sound. He didn’t sound that African. It was weird. Then once, he came over to where we retards eat lunch and play handball and he was sitting with Glen and Spandy Lachlan and they asked him did they have TV in Africa and he said yes like it was a stupid question and they asked him like what shows do they have and he shrugged and said the usual like The Simpsons and Buffy and CSI and Egoli and Carte Blanche and Jam Alley but I don’t know if he was making it up ‘cause I’ve never heard of them last ones. Then Toondie said he saw a dead roo on the road, are there heaps of them around town hopping down the streets and someone said nah it’s not like in South Africa with the lions and all that. Then Glen asked Toondie if he wanted to come to youth group on Frid’y (‘cause Glen and Spandy are churchies) and Toondie said he’ll think about it. I stopped listening in and kept eating me ham cheese mustard sambo. Then a tennis ball rolled up to me feet but I was too busy eating me sambo to pick it up and Bowdy said ‘Oi, Rusky! Rusky, you ugly cunt, chuck us the ball!’
So I turn into Colin street and keep an eye out for the Keenans’ house cause I seen it before. Looks pretty much the same now, just that the front lawn’s now sand. I ring the doorbell with me free hand. Toondie opens the door but not the flyscreen so I can’t see his face too good because of the glare. I say g’day and he says hello. I think he remembers who I am. I hold up me hand with the CDs and tapes and say just wondering if they wanted to have a listen to these, they can keep them for a bit if they want. He looks at the stuff in me hand and says no thanks, they’ll be fine. Then he slowly shuts the door but he doesn’t even touch the flyscreen because it’s already shut in me face.
*
‘Decent bloke. Got a bit of an accent on him. Good thing he doesn’t talk much.’
Dad had a pretty bad toothache the other night. Heard him from me bed yelling bloody fucking this and bloody fucking that and mum saying bloody fucking watch your language.
‘They’re arrogant,’ mum says as we watch Eddie McGuire trying to throw someone off the answer they’ve locked in: B, Bay of Pigs. She says they just walk in and act like they own the place. We’re just trying to make them feel at home. Dad says yeah. ‘Good dentist but. Fixed me tooth up.’
I’m on the floor with me back and me head against the hard chair arm. I say something about youth group on Frid’y night and dad’s like, you’re not a churchie now are ya. Mum’s like, let him. If you want to go you should go, Love. Like it’s me last hope of being cured of something, some disease.
‘Why don’t you go to the disco thingamajig with Luce, meet some real people?’ dad says, but I can’t dance for shit and I don’t want to do it with me sister.
So I turn up at the Uniting Church with me bike. The parking lot’s almost empty and there’s light coming from an open door. It’s almost eight but it’s like the sun doesn’t want to move from where it was at five and it feels like someone is breathing in me face it’s that stuffy and warm.
Spandy calls me Ruskie when I walk in. Ruskie’s what everyone calls me because they reckon I’m an idiot. There’s about eleven people and that’s about it. Eight kids and three grown-ups. Spandy’s dad says dig in, there’s plenty to go around so I stuff me face with lollies and pizza and weak-as cordial and pretend to listen to the churchy stuff. Toondie and Nagozie and their little brother I never seen before look how I reckon I looked when I fell asleep on CountryLink and missed me stop and ended up in Gunning. But the grown-ups are trying to get them into it, like it’s a matter of life or death. Because when they come to school to talk about God and stuff all the kids think it’s a bunch of shit even though they act good and pretend to listen.
We play games all night and eat sour worms and I’m drinking cordial like I’m me uncle Lance and Cottees stands for Tooheys.
When I’m chucking me plate in the kitchen Toondie’s getting a plastic cup so I ask him how’s he liking it here and he says it’s alright, then I say has he got a PlayStation and he says no and I say I’ve got one and he says cool. After games Mr Lachlan gives us a talk. Says Jesus says we should come to him with all our problems and that he wants to be our friend and that he’ll be the only friend we ever really need. But I reckon if Jesus was here he’d call me Ruskie and not talk to me ‘cause he’d reckon I was an idiot.
*
Maybe if people knew who he was they’d be sad and not just act it. I never seen him before but he sounds like he could of been one of us even though I never seen him or heard of him or remember him playing handball. The whole town’s going on about it but out of respect or something it’s not in The Advertiser. But I reckon one day they’ll have one of them notices in the back with all the birthdays and weddings and old people who died and hot country girls looking for love.
They say his nan saw something in a tree across the paddock and thought it was just a big branch that lightning had snapped that was just hanging on by the skin. After the coppers took him down they say his dad stayed up all night hacking down the tree with a chainsaw and his mum can’t walk past his bedroom without having a scream. Heard all this from mum ‘cause all dad can say is that it’s bloody disturbing just thinking about it.
Luce says I should of seen Mr Driscoll at assembly today, he was spewing, but in his quiet Mr Driscoll way, like he’s a bottle of coke that someone shook hard, and he said that this is a lesson for everyone, that we should look after one another and we should have respect for one another and compassion and this is a bloody disgrace. One of them boofhead bullies was having a guilty cry and Mrs Callaghan told him to go do it outside. I wish I’d been there to see him crying like a poofter but I went shithouse in me School Certificate last year so now I’m working at the sausage factory. Dead set, it doesn’t stink as bad as it makes the rest of the town stink.
‘Funeral’s Monday week,’ mum says to I don’t know who. She loves this kind of thing, the kind of thing she can shake her head at and wish she’d never heard. Me head’s in the fridge, so I don’t say anything. I just grab a bunch of seedless grapes and close the fridge door and am walking to me room when mum asks did I know him and I say the one who necked himself and she stops mashing potatoes and says what’s wrong with me, why would I say that.
I say, ‘never seen him. Maybe I seen him once.’ Me head’s down when I say it.
Mum’s looking at me funny and I wonder what she’s doing. It’s not like I’m sick or anything ‘cause that’s her sick face, the face she has on when I have the flu or gastro and am spewing me guts up.
The doorbell’s just rang and mum says go get it. She probably reckons it’s Luce come back from Nagozie’s house ‘cause they’re mates now. I been to their house once. They’ve got a new house and a pool and everything so we went for a swim but Toondie never come in because he doesn’t like water much. But I reckon he doesn’t like me much. I reckon his mum said I could come round just to be nice. Yeah, the swim was good but Nagozie kept saying I peed in the water. I don’t know how she knew, it was just a trickle.
Saw Toondie in IGA the other day but. Buying spinach for the old lady ‘cause I saw her parked in the car park waiting, and he nodded his head at me and walked past and I spent the next minute trying to figure out who he was nodding at until I figured that maybe it was me.
It’s not Luce at the door, it’s me old man in his orange Hi-Vis shirt and his Hard Yakka pants and his boots. He’s about to stomp when I open the door and he looks at me through the flyscreen and I say dad and he nods, still looking at me.
‘Thought you might be having a beer with the boys from work,’ he says through the flyscreen.
I say I didn’t feel like it and he just looks at me through the flyscreen with the sick face. His sick face is different to mum’s sick face but it’s dead-set his sick face and he’s looking at me with it.
‘Righto.’
That’s pretty much all he says. Then he looks down at his Blundstones and gets on with stomping the dirt out from under them.
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Brief impression: “On Dangerous Ground”
June 3, 2014 § 2 Comments
Is the latter half of ‘On Dangerous Ground’ undone/done-in by the former, which is to say: has my being slightly underwhelmed by the romance and intrigue of the final forty minutes anything to do with the sense of breathless awe that I had when watching the film unfold in its strong, silent, semi-procedural way? A simple tonal shift is probably not reason enough to dismiss a vital portion of a film seeing as, in this one, the protagonist must undergo an inner softening similar to the way the movie itself seems to soften visually and with regards to pace and manner, taking on a more pastoral rhythm. I wouldn’t like to think that I value somewhat gritty matter-of-factness above romanticism and honest sentiment, at least not unequivocally.
I suppose the reason for my reactively lukewarm feelings towards ‘Casablanca’ and similar mainstream canonical “classics” from the Hollywood “golden age” is the fact that these films, which tend to be among the few “older” pictures that the general film-viewing public have seen, colour the way in which cinema from this period is widely perceived. Having spent a good deal of my university days wading through the file sharing networks through which my fellow dorm residents and I could access each other’s legally – cough – obtained movie collections, I can remember being struck by how often ‘Casablanca’ and co (‘co’ being other mainstream canonicals i.e The Magnificent Seven, The Wizard of Oz, It’s A Wonderful Life, West Side Story) were the only representatives of pre-1970s cinema on lists that almost suggested that the art form was invented in the mid-80s. So when the commonly held idea of a quintessential “golden age” film involves fast-talking-high-pants, swooning dames and swelling strings, soft-lighting, staginess or air thick with naiveté, it’s no great surprise. Of course, ‘Casablanca’ at times has a mildly tough edge to it, relatively speaking, but if I thought old-timey film romance was a little ‘cute’ after watching that sacred cow, then watching an alternative sacred cow – something like ‘Brief Encounter’ – made me think twice.
‘On Dangerous Ground’ opens with a shot that typifies the movie’s old-school modernism: a gun-in-holster is carried and fastened to a male cop’s body by his female better-half, quietly, without musical accompaniment, with understated gestures and few words, and this moment is repeated with several fellow coppers in a way that is haunting by way of its suggestions of impending doom, but in a way which also proves to be thematically indispensable. The visual demonstrativeness of Ray/Lupino’s very classical filmmaking is balanced out by a streak of naturalism in the performances and even in the dialogue at times, the result being that the movie looks and feels to me like a stylistic portrayal of an era that has its own peculiarities and rhythms, but which is by no means exponentially different to the one in which I exist; almost as if its otherness is only an artefact of cinematic representation. As the cops go about their business of catching a cop-killer there is a sense of simmering danger and intensity to the procedural sparseness with which the cop-catching business is captured, so much so that it renders the overbearing cheerlessness of present-day police procedurals tired and artless. But as world-worn detective Jim Wilson ventures out into snow-laden small-town USA, and especially once he encounters his eventual love interest Mary Malden, the movie takes on a quality one could consider to be more in keeping with what people expect of a film from the era of shimmering eyes and string swells.
Jim’s affection for Mary appears to be predicated on pity more than genuine attraction, and pity seems to be the means by which his misanthropy eases, but maybe this is an unfairly cynical assessment, more cynical perhaps than Jim himself. It is of course implied that Mary’s lack of distrust despite her being practically blind forces Jim to reconsider his own hard-hearted attitude towards humanity at large, but I wonder whether or not the film’s flirtations with sentimentality were an earnest change in tone on the part of the filmmakers, or if Ray, Lupino and company simply fell into certain stylistic rhythms which continue to misrepresent mainstream American cinema from that period as being invariably maudlin. But seeing as I’m loath to end a piece of writing about this wonderful film with the word ‘maudlin’, I shan’t.
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The Perry Doer Discrepancy
May 27, 2014 § Leave a comment
by Conrad Babayaro
May 8, 2013
IT BEGAN WITH A MISSING PERSON’S REPORT TO THE GANTON-TURSERVILLE DISTRICT POLICE, something Perry Doer would never have dreamed himself being at the centre of.
Eadie Furrows, she who came forward, wondered about the whereabouts of her next-door neighbour, the aforementioned Perry Doer, a fellow resident of low-cost Banskia Mews in east Ganton, unseen for weeks by the time the report was lodged; days shy of a month really. She and Mr Doer weren’t achingly close or chummy in any sense of the word, but they saw enough of each other to expect to see each other often and with little fail. Fleetingly, yes; awkwardly even, but often.
She also had a favour to ask of him, soon.
“What was the name again?” said the lady at the desk who did not look like a cop but was in fact a cop, a senior sergeant; Snr. Sgt. E.B. Dell.
“Perry…?” Eadie asked herself, asked the lady, asked the universe, wondering how it was that she could not state with any certainty what she felt so certain was his name, no, knew to be. The lady’s eyes pressed for more: a last name, a middle name, an initial, anything.
“I had nothing, only Perry — that was all I’d bothered to know. I just stared like a moron at the receptionist lady [sic]. She had a look on her that was like, you couldn’t come up with a more creative way to waste my time, sweetie?”
Yet seeing the speckle of urgency in Eadie’s manner convinced Snr. Sgt. Dell, despite a creeping tension headache, to ensue with a standard stream of police questioning: did Eadie have a photograph of the missing? No, they weren’t nearly that close. When and where did she last see the missing? A little over three weeks ago, in a stairwell. At Banksia Mews? Yes, at Banksia Mews. When did she last hear from the missing? A little over three weeks ago, in the stairwell — he didn’t say much. Any particular place or places the missing might visit? No idea. Did the missing have any medical conditions or require any regular medications? Wow. Wouldn’t have a clue. Any friends or contacts the missing associates with or might associate with?
“She shrugged, pouted her lips, shook her head. I was tempted to ask why she even cared,” Dell recalls. “I think I was even tempted to tell her to eff off, stop wasting my effing time — I had such a headache.” She reconsiders. “Maybe I did.”
Eadie nonetheless insisted that she could provide an accurate identikit of this fellow Perry, which so goes: tall (over six foot) with a very lean build; skin, a dusty, even, unblemished gray; long neck with a prominent apple; close cropped hair of the negroid persuasion; cheekbones high but blunt; apologetic brows roofing the blackest brown eyes; a gaping doorway between his two front incisors; full brown lips of equal size, often dry; something attempting to be a moustache rimming his top slightly pinker lip — otherwise, he is clean shaven; and of all things, an aquiline nose, broken. He has small, low set ears on either side of his head, free-lobed, and a strong, masculine chin — a jaw. Not the most or second-most handsome face by any means, but a strangely pleasant one.
“Oh, and frown lines,” says Eadie, as though she’s only just remembered, no, realised.
“It wasn’t an unpleasant face as it turned out,” recalls Vin Campesino, police sketch artist, nodding. “Yeah, very non-threatening. Forgettable. Something about it was vaguely familiar though. I was sure I’d seen it before. ”
When Campesino casually questioned Eadie regarding her relationship with the missing (was he a loved one, so on, etcetera) she stated that he was just a neighbour albeit one she quite liked, and that she had a civic duty to report his noticeable absence to the relevant authorities. In truth, a truth she could not bring herself to air to the police, she had only knocked on the door to Perry’s flat five days that week on account of her dog, Karl, an aging white-haired Puli who needed baby-sitting.
*
KARL, A FRANTIC WET MOP OF A POOCH, SEEMS TO HOVER GIDDILY OVER THE LIVING ROOM RUG, letting off little Morse code yaps here and there, suspicious of my shoes yet curious of their scent. Eadie tickles the back of his ear and then shoos him away, looks around her flat, and kneads her hands with a pathos one can’t quite get a handle on. And then Karl is back again, yapping.
“I didn’t want to come off like a selfish, dog-obsessed bitch. I genuinely did wonder where he was, you know, not just for my sake. I mean, you live next to someone for some time, they become part of your — I don’t know — your normalness; your normality? Yeah, sure, it was a little bit about me I guess, but it was definitely about him too.”
What Eadie failed to tell the sergeant and the sketch artist was that, as had been the case on numerous occasions, she wished to leave Karl in the care of Perry while she spent a few days out of town in the coming weeks, reasons for which varied from year to year, some years being writers’ festivals, professional-development workshops (she is a defected bookkeeper), weddings, wakes; other years family get-togethers, school reunions; in the latest instance, some kind of women’s retreat. Eadie always gave fair warning and he always agreed, “as though he couldn’t not.” She was inclined to consider theirs a symbiotic arrangement, but one might call it more a form of commensalism.
A few days passed and Perry persisted in being a no-show, and Eadie still hadn’t a contingency plan regarding Karl should Perry’s reappearance have become indefinite and up in the air.
“I always take siesta,” says Eadie, “don’t ask why. I was taking siesta after lunch and the phone almost rang itself off the receiver, so I rushed over to it all sleepy and it was some lady from the missing persons unit, but not the one I’d spoken to when I was there, at least it didn’t sound like her.”
Ruth Paisi was an intern at the unit and this was one of her first solo deliverances of unsavoury news, over the phone, “which I thought was heartless. At least let her come in to the station in person. I asked her if she was Eadie Furrows, which she was, and if she’d filed a missing person’s report regarding a Perry Doer, which she had.”
“Hearing his last name made me sort of well up,” Eadie says. She has a moment. “Anyway –”
Ruth then proceeded to inform Eadie that Perry was deceased. That he had been involved in an accident roughly three and a half weeks before, run down by a newspaper truck careening through the streets in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning. He was dead on impact. Body had been unclaimed, stowed in the city morgue and later incinerated. It might have ended up in an anatomy lab had the skull bones not been so thoroughly splintered, had it not been a coroner’s case (as are all road fatalities). Perry might have at least been useful in his demise.
Both ladies recall a shrieking silence at the other end of the line punctuated by the odd intake of breath, and closer to home an unease much less bearable, right where they were, where they sat so very still, clutching their phones to their heads.
Eadie couldn’t cry. Crying didn’t make any sense, as though she hadn’t any right to. Her mind was a fog, visibility zero. She was clueless as to where her responsibilities lay with regards to Perry, his remains, his personal effects — the artefacts of his existence, and those by whom he was survived if in fact he was survived by anyone. Legal matters had always raised her pressure, made her fidget, even though she was no more than an acquaintance of Perry’s and no more responsible for him than the street vendor from whom he habitually purchased freshly-pressed waffles.
Wasn’t this the kind of thing that happened to strays, Eadie wondered, dabbing at dry eyes with Kleenexes as though this might inspire them to seep. To die and be scraped off the streets and thrown into a fire? An odd sense of complicity held her captive for some time and she felt driven — compelled — to atone.
“I’m a keen blogger, have been for a year or so,” she says. “I felt as though I owed him a tribute, and an apology for not knowing his last name. I thought I might do a post; say a few words about him, like an online eulogy, a eulogy blog.” A eublogy? “He was the sweetest man; boiled but sweet. He was a — how would you say it — a gentle soul, really gentle, like one of those monks. He didn’t say much, I don’t know why. Maybe he was shy.” She cocks her head in reconsideration. “He didn’t seem that shy; just kept very much to himself. Wouldn’t mind you telling him your whole life story, but wouldn’t so much as tell you whether his day had been okay or not so okay. He was always up to nothing. Nothing much was ever up with him.”
*
OUR INTERNET IS LIKE A SEWAGE SYSTEM PULSING WITH EVERYTHING IMAGINABLE. FLOATING AMONGST THIS MUCH, of course, are gems and masterpieces of the information era, dynamic, intelligent discourses on politics, science, arts and culture, big business and bigger personalities, this thing the economy, sports, life in the public sphere and all things plebeian, and those beloved Bushisms; there are our watering-holes of knowledge that render our world ever more so a village, yet one progressive and informed. There are these. Then there are the thousands upon thousands of opinionated, well-meaning folk who publish their thoughts and whims in blog form, freely available to whoever might fancy a wander through. The likelihood of being heard, of having a hit, varies. Who knows: perhaps it comes down to nothing more than mere luck. But there clearly is some skill to it, some knack. This is generally understood.
Furrowed Brows is Eadie’s baby, a blog she has maintained for some months, on which she routinely deposits nuggets of amateur social commentary. Much of it is quite readable. Some of it has valid points to make as evidenced by the thoughtful comments she receives, forgiving their grammatical shoddiness and rickety spelling. But most of it is unseen as she has very few subscribers and nary a promotional bone in her being. Consequently, it remains very much a private journal.
So when she laid down a few words in memory of Perry it was no surprise that no one seemed to care by way of simply not knowing. It was at this point that Eadie’s guilt sparked in her a sort of guerrilla creativity.
*
PETER RICHARDS WALKS BY THE OLD, BOARDED UP REVIVALIST CHURCH ON PENNANT STREET EVERY MORNING, on his way to the Pennant Street bus stop where he waits for the bus to work. outside the church is a large notice board that once sported posters with slogans such as “Don’t let Christians put you off Christianity” and “You think Jesus holds onto your sins? Take a look at his hands”. When the congregation packed up and moved to snazzier premises the board became public property and fell victim to people selling puppies, students wanting roomies (read: fuckbuddies), nightclub party promo, a thousand and one indie bands playing at the local pub, neo-communist clarion calls and flyers insisting that you “VOTE DENNIS CURTIZ”. There is no courtesy amongst people who use this board. Things are pasted over things, things are scrawled over with crayon and sprayed over with spray paint, things are torn down for the heck of it. It’s a fight just to be seen.
“I never take notice of it,” says Peter about the board. “I never took notice of it when it was about God and I didn’t take notice now that it was about rock and roll. And raves. I just walk by and stand and wait for my ride.”
Peter Richards works in Water and Sanitation and puts in his nine to five, and like most ordinary folk he has developed a way of engaging with the world and its inhabitants, at arm’s length so as not to rouse its underlying viciousness. He is perfectly content riding the 442 into the city with the same people, day after day, getting off at the same stop as them, walking down the same stretch of sidewalk to the same coffee cart and sipping from the same type of cup. And he won’t know their names or what line of work they are in. And it won’t bother him. And it didn’t.
“It didn’t. Why should it have? I had my own life and they had theirs.”
He shrugs. He means it.
Weekly meetings are held on Thursday mornings at the office. It was sometime past eight and Peter was half-jogging to the stop when he came to a halt in front of the old, boarded up church. Something on the notice board had stolen his eyes’ attention.
“I remember thinking to myself, I know that man,” Peter recalls. “I must have stood there a full minute – people were already queuing alongside the bus, taking out their passes. I knew I should get going but I wanted to know why this face meant something to me.”
There it was. Vin Campesino’s imperfect but precise greyscale representation of Perry Doer stared at the passing public, its starkness standing out from the spastic papier-mâché mess surrounding it. It was black on a plain white background. The words ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?’ hung like a manifesto above his head. Underneath, in slightly smaller font, it read: IF NOT, GO TO furrowedbrows.blogspot.com.
No number, no police contact, just a blog.
If Peter had ever been hook-line-and-sinker, he no longer was. He had no patience for juvenile silliness, so he went on his way. Decided to think no more of it. But that face…
It was at work, in his spacious-enough cubicle, that Peter realised. He felt like he’d just free-fallen ten metres.
The same thing would happen to almost a dozen people over the next couple of weeks. But back to Peter for the time being: “Three months earlier my wife had walked out on me,” he says. “She didn’t fight for the house, not for anything. Didn’t once raise her voice or blame me or hold me accountable for anything. All she wanted was out. Said she’d decided to wait for our youngest daughter to leave home before she came clean. Like it would hurt her any less. It was clear that she was seeing someone else; that she must have been for some time. And it killed me.”
Peter spent weeks holding back tears. But in his line of work this doesn’t matter. Anonymity is such that even a severe flaky skin disease might have gone unnoticed for some time. Funnily, this applies to the wider world just as much even though, to the grieving man, everyone’s eyes are watching. Add to this the fact that standing in line, waiting for the bus to work, only magnified his self-pity.
“I was trying to keep it together, make sure my look wasn’t any more miserable than anybody else’s.”
Not that anyone would have cared. Anyone besides Perry, who wound his neck round to look at the man to his left, a little to the rear. It was a long, heartbreaking look. He then asked Peter, in the most tentative voice, if he was okay — sir.
“Of course I said I was fine, and gave him a bit of a look. I was a little annoyed that he didn’t mind his own business.”
So what was his impression of Perry Doer?
“I don’t know. He struck me as ragtag, calling me sir and all. Not like a homeless person or anything, but he wasn’t the first person I would want prying into my affairs — it made me uneasy, the look of him. He could have been the nicest person on earth but he could have also been bad news. But I guess that’s true of anybody, I guess.”
Whilst taking a piss at work, Peter broke down: “things like that eventually get to you — someone you don’t even know caring enough to give a shit.” The man at the adjacent urinal made a note to quicken his stream and promptly left Peter to his tears.
Twice, thrice, four times, five, Peter walked past the poster of Perry which was surprisingly undisturbed, probably as a result of unanimous respect for the missing. He spared a glance each and every time. The lucky sixth, on his way home, Peter copied the website onto a loose Post-It and later that night paid a visit to Eadie’s blog.
“What I read made me sick. I felt sick at myself, knowing what I’d thought of him. I felt I should post a comment but I didn’t. Not that I knew how anyway.”
Peter hit up Furrowed Brows with increasing frequency, especially after he conceded to moving out of the house he shared with his then wife and shacked up in an inner city apartment not dissimilar, one could imagine, from the one in which he currently resides.
“I wouldn’t say that it was a phenomenon from what I could tell…I mean, I wouldn’t have known how to know, but when you read a bunch of people expressing regret for never learning the name of some guy who showed them some kindness at some moment…you begin to think. Like…who the fuck is this guy?”
Peter apologises for the expletives and offers more tea. I reject the former and accept the latter.
“I never did leave a comment,” he says after pouring two more cups. “Sometimes I still tell myself that it would have been perverse if I had said a big heap of nothing about a man I had totally written off one time and I kind of still believe that, sometimes.” We observe a moment of silence.
“For all that internet stuff I wonder if anyone actually knows who he was and what the fuck he was really about.”
I waive away his second apology and prove how much I don’t care by drinking some of that tea.
While Peter chose to pay his respects by being silent, others opted to offer tentative public tributes to an individual who for all intents and purposes thrived on not being recognised. What follows is a tiny selection of these e-bituaries, errors left uncorrected so as to honour the spirit in which they were written:
“just ti let you know, i really appreciated it. thanks” j_stamos
“rest easy, Dude” not_THE_anonymous
“Sorry for looking at you weird. I just didnt expect anyone to give a damn. I feel as though you’re at peace. Mad appreciation vibes, Leia” lcmahmood24
“Hey. Why d’you leave before I could say what’s up? Peace” G. Paul Oneros
”RIP strange beautiful man” DDparsons
“I was tempted to feel sorry for those who knew and loved you. then I realise, they were the lucky ones.” patstamp
“doer of good things, lame but true. rip” bleachmeRingo
“My dad asked of you – yeah, I told him about you. I’ll tell him you say hi. wish I could have gotten to actually know you or at least say thanks or something. lesson learnt: notice the people around you and say shit now. Rest inn peace” Argoss
“Heaven clearly wanted it’s angel back. Enjoy!xxx” Dana Brand
“good people should never die bad deaths but they sadly do. So rest now, good sir.” Mrs amherst
“Thank you. our thoughts go out to your family, many condolensces .” sadmangladman85
“ENJOY ETERNITY PERRY DOER! X” randy_dogette
Interestingly, none of the tributes or anecdotes gives evidence of grand sweeping gestures of philanthropy. Nobody publicly declares that they would be dead this very day if not for Perry’s generous donation of a kidney. No one was pulled out from the base of a debt mountain or saved from an assault in an alleyway.
In the spirit of journalistic inquiry, emails were sent to most of the authors of the above tributes, but while roundly received with a decent sprinkle of enthusiasm, there seemed to be a general poverty of memory when it came to reminiscing about what Perry Doer actually did so as to mean so much to so many people he hardly knew, who practically new nothing of him.
“Its kinda disappointing when you think of it,” writes Patricia Stampton in one of the more heartfelt emails, “disapointing because you think this person has had such an impact on you but when you’re pressed to talk about it your mind goes blank, at least mine does. and it’s not because there’s nothing there, but it’s like how things are more defined when you’re in the moment, more concrete than when you think back on it and it seems vague even though you know it was actually significant at the time. He was a guy I would run into years ago, maybe 8 years, cause we lived on the same bolck and would run into into eachother because we went to the same pizza place or laundromat. But we never became friends. We were hardly aqcuantiances but when I look back I realise how unhappy I was and how I felt okay being unhappy after sharing a word or two with him, or lend him some coins for laundry or whatever we did back then. It sounds weird, but I felt as though he allowed me to just feel and be human and miserable and not care about seeming okay — I didn’t feel I had to smile and be happy like I had to with my friends, or felt I had to. And he was the kind of person you noticed, you know? like there was something about him that you remembered, something physical. Maybe it was his skinnyness. Or maybe it was because he seemed sad himself and I gravitated to that. Who knows.”
It seems that Perry’s contribution was to notice that which most people have gotten so good at hiding out on the street while it erodes them from within, and which so many people are so good at not noticing.
Noticing, it seems, was Perry’s gift.
*
A LITTLE AFTER 2:30 IN THE MORNING, JANUARY 23RD, THE STREETS WERE AT THEIR DEADEST. LAST NIGHT’S OWLS HAD GIVEN IN TO SLEEP and whatever bars were still open closed up. Unsuccessful prostitutes put out their last cigarettes and reported to their pimps, and brief light breezes rolled empty bottles of booze off the sidewalks and into the gutters where they could be a little more comfortable.
Llewellyn Slater was finishing off his coffee while taking two aspirins while doing up his buttons while watching infomercials on mute so as not to wake anyone. He remembers thinking “that’s a pretty sweet deal”; considered ordering a pair of the super-absorptive dish towels for Julie, the woman he was living with, the mother of his second child. For a change, he decided to do his hair up in a bob instead of a ponytail, and ended up looking like a middle-aged samurai, thanks in part to his balding crown. A quick piss and a gargle of mouthwash later and Llewellyn was ready for work.
The big man quietly left the apartment and walked eleven blocks to the head office of the Greater Ganton Gazette, to the back of the building where the loading dock is. For the hairdo, he copped some congenial teasing from co-workers that were filling his truck with bales of newspapers, ready for delivery to 47 outlets across the district. All to be done before 8 am. It’s a rush hour most people don’t know about — trucks loaded with ‘fresh produce’: bread, fish, milk, the morning paper; rushing to provide what the consumer has come to expect in the same way they do the sunrise.
“I’d been feeling pretty poorly for a while to tell you the honest truth. I didn’t know why at the time and I didn’t want to see anyone about it because I didn’t know that it was actually a thing and I didn’t want to have to take any time off work if there actually was a thing and it wasn’t compatible with work. Turns out it was something not so great, but I don’t really want to go into it too much.”
Llewellyn is however willing to go into the fact that he had been passing old blood with his stools for some months by that point. He was, at the same time, plagued by dreams of having a colostomy bag like his granddad and having to empty it several times a day only to fail at it horribly and get watery shit all over himself.
“That’s the kind of stuff that was going through my mind, plus I’m thinking, what if it’s worse than that, you know…my kids, what happens to them if a bag is the least of my problems? I’m thinking all this as I’m driving. I really shouldn’t have been driving but I know guys who drove with bad appendicitis and broken hearts so I got in the truck like a man; like a delivery man. They say ‘don’t drive drunk, don’t drive tired’. What about ‘don’t drive anxious and anaemic?’”
Llewellyn shifts in his chair, quietly enjoying his line, and his new partner, Margo, watches him do so with an air of very gentle supportiveness.
“No wonder I hit him. I was fucking anaemic.”
Margo smiles at Llewellyn. She then smiles at me. “Are you going to run all these cuss words?”
I tell her that I’ll try and we share in the laugh.
By around a quarter to five that morning Llewellyn had covered a very serviceable proportion of his route and was making his way along the southernmost half of Milton road which is in a part of the district of Ganton-Turserville in which the Gazette has never had much popularity for reasons unclear. Llewellyn had two paper drops which he completed relatively on schedule and therefore had no undue need to hurry. Being that he had encountered next to no traffic whether meat or metal for most of that morning shift, Llewellyn was utterly blindsided not just by the fact that there was a man at the side of the road on Milton road at that hour, but that this man had – in half a blink – walked into the grille of his moving truck.
“I don’t doubt that he intended for it to happen now that I think of it. I was there, I saw it. I mean, I didn’t see his face enough to say man, that guy is suicidal, but when I found out that he wasn’t deaf or blind or retarded or anything I figured it had to be that. I could be wrong but what does it matter now anyway? He stepped off the kerb, in front of the one truck in sight on a super long road at four in the morning. And I hit him.” He glances at Margo. “I remember thinking he timed it really well, for like maximum impact.”
Was he speeding when he hit Perry Doer?
“Was I speeding? Maybe. I don’t know. Probably. The limit was seventy and I may have been five over or something. I try not to think about it. I honestly couldn’t tell you because I honestly don’t remember if I even knew at the time.”
According to the coroner’s findings there was no evidence of intoxication on the part of the victim or the driver, no evidence of foul play, and there was definitely no mention of deafness, blindness or mental retardation. It was noted, however, that Perry Doer was in generally poor health which may not have given him the best chance in the face of such a physical insult. On initial impact some ribs were snapped by the truck’s bonnet. The thing which killed Perry, however, was a large and fast intracranial bleed. Perry’s virtual anonymity certainly helped to ensure that the case was wrapped up with little ceremony. A cremation was organised and within three weeks Perry Doer went from carbon-based life form to carbon and a couple of other bits and pieces. The coronial verdict was probable suicide.
“Some insensitive prick – I don’t remember who – said that it was like hitting a really sick dog. Even the slightest knock just ruins it beyond repair. Maybe he was right but I didn’t think the wording was great.”
The incident did very little to derail Llewellyn professionally, something which didn’t sit right with the lapsed Baptist.
“I remember being a little…” he smiles to himself and then his face falls serious again in an equally quick instant. “I remember being a bit hysterical, in like a quiet way, like quietly freaking out. Because I remember going up to my boss and asking him what was going to happen…whether I would have to face some disciplinary board hearing or lose my license or whether the state or district or whoever was going to bring some kind of charge against me. Even though the only thing I could remember having done wrong was having bled out my ass — god, my mouth is really trashy today.”
Margo tells me that he brushes his teeth three times a day but that maybe he should just wash his mouth out instead to which Llewellyn responds with an absent-minded grin.
Llewellyn’s boss told him not to worry too much about the matter and within a fortnight he was back on the road earning his keep and worrying about his health. Soon after, his then partner Julie convinced him to get his bowels checked out.
“I really don’t want to talk about that.”
I assure him that this is fine. I’m here to talk about Perry.
“Well,’ he says, scanning the carpet as though it is his mind, “that’s kind of all I know about the guy, what I’ve already told you. I was kinda hoping you’d tell me a bit more.”
*
REINER’S PEOPLE REALTY AND HOUSING IS A GANTON-BASED ESTABLISHMENT THAT’S BEEN IN BUSINESS SINCE THE LATE EIGHTIES, PATIENTLY BOLSTERING ITS REACH from local to regional to statewide over the decades. Debbie Reiner derives a measure of pride from the fact that – even as she is both president and CEO of RPRH – she still hosts showings and open houses just as she did when her fledgling company was still scrounging around for a market share. Admittedly, humility is built into RPRH’s particular real estate niche and, admittedly, she engages in the grassroots aspect of the business far less often than she would ordinarily have herself do.
“We’ve always had an issue with destitution and bummery in this part of the world,” says Debbie as we sit in her not so humble office, “and after twenty-something odd years in this business — I still couldn’t tell you why that is. But my philosophy, our philosophy, the RPRH philosophy is that sometimes a roof over one’s head is exactly what some people need and that’s it, at least for a start. I’ve been passionate about low cost housing for quite some time because it seems like such a practical real-world solution to such a pervasive problem in our little locale. No one should sleep out in the cold, not even dogs. Maybe cats; they kind of deserve it.”
Debbie doesn’t remember personally handling the rental application that Perry Doe submitted when he first moved to east Ganton from out of state, but she is more than accommodating with whatever records are available. Together we peruse these.
“…so it was a shared rental, him and someone else — Carson Manit it says, don’t remember him — they must have met through work maybe…which probably made it doubly difficult because they were both new to town with pretty low-paying jobs and zero rental history we could base any of our decisions off of, so we had to get co-signers for both of them who themselves weren’t super watertight …and the landlords at the time didn’t care that their properties were basically four walls and a floor and a ceiling and a door and maybe a window if you were lucky…they just weren’t willing to take the risk and they made things unnecessarily difficult even though they’d eventually cave and randomly approve one of the damn applications. They’d say who are these kids?! And I’d say these aren’t kids, these are grown men that deserve every chance in the world. They never really got my point, but they quickly came to realise that these kids were the only ones willing to sweat out a double shift just to pay for their little brick boxes.” Her fingers ski across the dully white application papers.
“7/45 Inverness Avenue…” reads Debbie. Perry’s unit in Banksia Mews was obviously not his first home in Ganton-Turserville district.
She continue: ”Yeah, there’s a bunch of super cheap flats there, super basic, but we try to get good people in there so it doesn’t turn into a ghetto too quickly.”
That was when ago?
“Seventeen years.”
So would it be safe to say that the neighbourhood is now a ghetto?
“Well…I don’t think it would be unsafe to say.”
Perry’s co-signer was his mother Eloise with whom, it can be assumed, he was living prior to his migrating. His first employer in the area was the proprietor of a local fuel station chain who hired Perry as a cleaner, mainly of restrooms and diner kitchens. The position paid poorly but it paid well enough for him to make the rent slightly late, provided roomie Carson pulled his weight which it seems he frequently did not.
And it seems that, towards the end of his time on this planet, Perry was struggling to pull his weight too. The most recent five years’ worth of rental records is news to Debbie, who goes on to postulate that Perry must have been a “shit of a tenant” what with the scores of rental reminders, threats of eviction and incomplete bond refunds. At the time of his untimely passing, Perry had placed an appeal with the department of fair trading regarding his tenancy, the details of which are unclear but which could not be far removed from the picture of rental discord Debbie and company at Reiner’s have dug up.
“So he killed himself?” she asks. I explain that it is the predominant theory.
“Theory?” she says as she draws the mess of paper back into one pile and rounds up our session.
Mohan Emerson, manager of Motormouth Fuel & Food Co circa 1993 declined an interview on the grounds that (a) he was no longer affiliated with the struggling company and therefore did not feel comfortable accepting the role of “spokesperson”, (b) he could not for the life of him remember hiring anybody that went by the name Perry Doer and (c) that even if he could recall such a person, what could he possibly say about a man he’d hired to wipe up piss and spilt gravy?
In deference to Mr Emerson’s rhetorical skills the interview request was pursued no further.
Obviously, Perry’s portfolio of jobs grew with time, but horizontally as opposed to vertically, almost always menial and frankly a bore to investigate. He did a lot of cleaning, a lot of stacking, some hammering and screwing, a bit of packing and the devil’s share of heavy lifting. Whether this vocational stagnation was for a lack of effort, ambition, aptitude, fair opportunity or fortune is any man’s guess but suffice to say, Perry did it tough and did so for quite some time. During the six months predating his untimely slaughter, Perry landed a job, through an employment agency, as a nightwatchman in a largely industrial neighbourhood that had fallen victim to artless graffiti and assorted vandalism. This nocturnal posting was his steadiest job in years though it lasted only seven weeks on account of the appearance of some arguably artful pieces of street art on various walls in the area.
Lydia Korsakoff, acting manager for vOKation, an apparently not-for-profit undertaking that sources employment for those without much of an ego to stroke or lifestyle to maintain, states that the only feedback received from the strata group that had employed Perry to watch their premises at night, was that he was “abrasive and argumentative” and that he “display[ed] little evidence of remorse for his incompetence.”
This will be the first explicit mention of Perry Doer’s aggressively less pleasant side.
*
IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT A NEWSPAPERMAN IS EXTORTED BY A POTENTIAL INFORMANT, AT LEAST NOT IN THE MANNER that Cosmas Nero goes about it, exchanging a bit of scoop for grocery supplies.
At the risk of stereotyping, for a grubby blue-collar man scrapping a living as a low level council worker, a job that mainly involves him holding up “slow” and “stop” signs during late night roadworks, Cosmas’s requests are surprisingly gourmet. The shopping list he submits, which really finds him pushing his luck with admirable success, feature foodstuffs like kielbasa and ackawi and an assortment of spices, many of which this newspaperman has never heard.
Cosmas (“Call me Cossie”) shrugs as he fries up some haloumi. “I’m a foodie, I like to cook. It’s the only good thing my mum taught me. Unfortunately she also taught me to hate women, which I’m trying really hard to unlearn. That’s off the record by the way.”
Everything’s on the record; it was our deal when he agreed to have his shopping done.
“Fine. But I’ve never been a sexist, just a sometimes misogynist. That’s got to count for something. You know, Perry wasn’t a bad cook either.”
Is that right?
“Yeah, after a long night we’d sometimes head over to one of our places, either his place or my place, and we’d cook up a bloody storm for breakfast. We figured the heavier we ate the heavier we’d sleep. He was into cooking common dishes well, with a bit of zing. I’m into the weird stuff; goat’s brains…Polish food.”
Is Polish food weird?
“Where I come from it is.”
On and off for years, Perry was on the Ganton-Turserville Council casual payroll and would spend many night holding up signs alongside Cossie, striking up a nocturnal friendship in the process, something at which it appears Perry was not a natural, that is to say, friendships, whether at night or during the day.
“I’d talk and he’d listen, that’s usually how it went. When he did say something though it was kind of…” he thinks for a moment. “You couldn’t really just shoot the shit with him and tell him your stories and hear him tell you his stories. Like…I think it was cooking that got us being friends because, now I think of it, food was the one thing he could talk about without sounding like he was going to, I don’t know, cave in, like his soul was going to cave in. I can’t explain it.”
What kind of things would he say?
As we eat our haloumi – and it must be said that Mr Nero can fry his haloumi excellently – Cossie considers what to tell me, perhaps in order that he may portray a dead man with honesty without painting him in an excessively defamatory light, one in which the man in question is too dead to contest. By the way, Cossie’s reaction to the news of Perry’s passing is understandably subdued. Shocked and saddened, sure, but in muted tones.
“I remember him once saying something like…” Cosmas begins to speak with the rubbery cheese rolling around his mouth, “…something about how the most honourable thing he can do is to not let the inside of him get onto the outside, or something like that. He’d say to me, Cos – he called me Cos – he’d say, Cos, when I’m in my apartment, sitting on the couch, I hate everybody, I hate myself, I hate you, I just hate everyone. But I can’t take the hate with me out my door. I just can’t. I walk out and I care about people. I want to protect them from me and from all this dark stuff I represent. That’s almost word for word. And then he says, I’m Mr Jekyll and Dr Hyde [sic], I’m a two face. Shit, I’d hate to have been in his head, but somehow I liked the guy. He was honest is what I thought at the time.”
And now?
He shrugs.
Can one be both honest and two-faced?
Cosmas thinks about this one for a while. Tired of waiting for a response, I dig back into the relish he’s ladled onto my plate, lapping it up with oily slices of fried haloumi.
“I don’t know,” he begins, out of the blue. “I’m not a philosopher but…if a man is actually two people, is he a liar by being this guy one day and that guy the other day, or whatever?”
He offers more haloumi and, to be honestly, refusal is close to impossible.
*
“MY BOY WAS ANGRY AND I DON’T DOUBT THAT HE DIED THAT WAY.”
ELOISE DOER SPEAKS OF HER DEAD SON with a resignation so dignified you’d think he was born to die by newspaper truck. If she is grieving, then she grieves like a person who believes sadness is as essential as joy, like someone who does not deem themselves fit to question pain. Or perhaps Perry’s death is a tragedy for which she has been long prepared.
She is one of those people who can hold a stare so strongly that one feels as uncomfortable looking away as they do matching it. But it’s not so much a questioning stare as it is one that forages and scratches at the sand covering another’s soul. And her face is concurrently younger than would be expected for a late septuagenarian and old beyond her seventy-plus years: younger in that she has a certain aura, a vital glow; older in that her face is a maze of shallow wrinkles and shadows.
She doesn’t offer me tea or water or Digestives. We simply sit on old couches, facing each other across a short oak coffee table, hearing the grumble and beep of what sounds like a garbage truck that slept in and decided to do its run in the mid-late afternoon.
“Did they tell you the details of how Perry died?” she asks me.
Being too unsure to open my mouth and speak I decide not to speak, to which she responds saying, “it’s okay if you can’t or won’t say, I shouldn’t put you on the spot like that.”
“But…” she continues, “the truth is, whatever you tell me would only make me feel a bit better because all I can imagine is him dying in fear and being so very angry, and it hurts, to think that those were his last feelings ever as a person. So if you told me the truck hit him so hard that his — that his brains came spilling out too quickly for him to know that it was all over…if you told me that, I’d take some comfort. I’d like to think I would.”
What a large intracranial bleed or a brain splatter would do to the consciousness of a man is probably a mystery to most people, but mentioning this as a if not the cause of death seems to please or reassure Eloise somewhat, although not enough for her to offer a drink.
458km northwest of Perry’s place of death is his place of birth, 116 Quinn Street, Trimsolna, or rather the place to which he was brought when he was torn out of Eloise’s belly at Trimsolna Civic Hospital in the same way that his three older siblings were welcomed into the world.
“I know it sounds wrong but when they cleaned all the jelly off of him and checked that he had an anus or whatever they do when they pull babies out, they wrapped him up in a blanket and handed him to my husband at the time, Perry’s natural father, and he brought him over and I took one look at him and I knew he would be the kid that made my heart heavy. There’s always one in every litter, every decent-sized litter. I have sisters and they’ll know what I mean. You just look at a child and you know that this kid and this world are not going to get along. And I knew it; as I was lying there while they were sewing me up I had his head against my bare chest and it felt so heavy, supernaturally heavy. His eyes were open in a way you don’t see on most newborns and he looked at me but in a way he didn’t look at me, and I just got this overwhelming sense of sadness and I began to sob. Of course everyone thought I was overcome with happiness so I just let them think that. How was I supposed to say, oh, my son’s a sad baby and I don’t know if he’ll ever be happy? How do you say that?”
Eloise’s is an old terrace nestled amongst similar terraces populated by old folks whose kids have left home either for good or with a return ticket tucked in one of their back pockets. All five of Eloise’s have flown the coop and none have yet come a-calling. Perry never did and certainly won’t be doing so now.
Contrary to the picture of lifelong hardship that this profile hitherto seems to paint, Perry was not born into disadvantage but into the middle class from which he would eventually drop out. Unlike him, Perry’s siblings either remained hovering around the median-most social stratum or – in the case of brother Nathaniel and sister Lux – ventured into the dollarsphere with mixed success, the point being that Perry was not necessarily fated to suffer and die as a flag-bearer of society’s underclass. So why then is this where he ended up? And why he of all is siblings?
Perry is survived by all four of his littermates. Apart from Lux, Perry’s immediate elder with whom he shared a close bond in childhood, the Doer children were essentially a pack of boys, and boys’ boys at that. Rough and tumble and gregarious by constitution, the Doer brood required a firm hand if they were to be moulded into men and woman of reasonable social conduct. Perhaps as a habit or due to some inborn belief that mild religious influence in the early stages of life contributes positively to the task of child rearing, Eloise and the Doer kids’ two main father figures (Leroy and Davidson) took them to church on most Sundays. Of course, once they had departed the church grounds, god was simply a figurative entity though it must be said that an element of the concept of a Beneficent Deity would eventually play a large part in fostering in Perry a rage and disillusionment of the kind that makes Eloise still quiver inside. Some of those who bore witness to the very peak of Perry’s meltdown prior to his leaving Trimsolna and heading southeast remember a man who was so internalised as to be virtually absent. Perry frequently wondered what he had done to displease a god for whom he’d honestly rarely spared a thought and he seemed to have an on-and-off belief that the universe had a malicious streak, randomly honing in on people who were already doing it tough only to twist their nipples just that little bit harder. He raged against everything from his apparent ugly duckling status in the family to his tongue-tied ineloquence to the gap between his front teeth to his natural air of aloofness.
Gabby Homan is an ex-classmate who still lives in Trimsolna and still calls in on Eloise every once in a while for the sake of neighbourliness. She and Perry were childhood friends of circumstance; the circumstance being that Gabby lived close-by and was one of Perry’s few peers lonely enough to put up with his brewing unpleasantness. She would frequently present at the Doer home on her bike and ask if any of the kids wanted to ride with her. Eloise, desperate to rid the house of Perry’s gloom for even a good half-hour, would force her second youngest onto his squat little dirt-collecting BMX and watch him ride off down the street in the straightest line, Gabby on her taller mountain bike swooping around his peripheries like an eager bird. A sort-of friendship eventually developed though Gabby denies any romance: “I was lonely, but not that lonely. Besides, he would not have responded well, if at all.”
“He wondered why he couldn’t relate to anyone,” Gabby goes on to say, “but people were spooked by this brooding angry black dude who was constantly muttering to himself all pissed off and whatnot; not like a crazy person but someone who was perpetually frustrated and down on himself. It just wasn’t the greatest combination to be perfectly honest.”
“It was bad,” says Elouise. “There were days when I was certain he would stab someone with something; maybe not there and then, but someday. He wasn’t very external about it, the rage; he never threw tantrums or fits or punches, but you just didn’t want to be around him too long, the intensity of his anger…you could feel it. But at home we didn’t talk about things, especially if it was something that was a little uncomfortable, and none of Perry’s teachers ever mentioned anything to us to make us think that he was struggling. As far as I knew and still know, he sat and did his work and didn’t cause any trouble.”
In fact Perry was a moderately bright student, or rather, a bright student with moderate grades. No one was ever particularly certain of what dreams or plans young Perry had for himself, but it seems no one really asked either. The Doer household was not big on dreams and fostering self-esteem and giving due praise let alone undue praise; you just got on with life and followed where it took you, a philosophy which was likely championed by both his fathers, neither of whom were particularly aspirational men to begin with.
Older brother Lanyon Doer recalls Perry’s possible interest in the electrical: “he was always fiddling with Walkmans and radios and wanted to be like Benjamin Franklin or something. He’d take them apart and put them back together again but they wouldn’t work after that. I remember my father shouting him down for wasting money just because his fingers couldn’t sit still. After a while he stopped talking about Benjamin Franklin and electricity. I didn’t hear him talk about too much before or after that.”
Lux Doer works in airline catering in an administrative and logistics capacity and has been based in the UAE for the last seven years. She hadn’t spoken to Perry much in the last thirteen years when I contacted her by phone. Like her mother there is a determined resignation in her voice but it’s obvious that her line of work does not encourage such passive fatalism and so there is a business-like can-do quality to her speech.
I did not expect to be the one to inform Lux that her brother was dead, and great care was taken to slyly gauge how informed she was of the tragedy that had befallen him. Unfortunately much of the Doer family are estranged from one another to the point that nobody, not Eloise nor Nathaniel nor Randy nor Lanyon and certainly not Lux, has a clue in hell as to whether any of the others know about anything, take your pick of what anything is. So when I explain to her that I am writing a feature article about her brother, Lux asks if he is okay.
Unfortunately, no.
There is a dreadfully long pause. “Is he hurt?”
I answer saying, “I’m extremely sorry.”
After the silence that follows I expect to hear a slow wail or sudden deluge of tears, but there is simply a shuddering intake of air and a plain “what happened?” I provide the details within the limits of my knowledge while she quietly listens.
“So this was definitely Perry…” are her first words after my storytelling has concluded.
What about the story strikes her as unconvincing?
“Perry and I don’t talk much, but we did speak in the last year and he was in a pretty bad way. He had to convince me not to fly down to see him. I‘m not saying that things couldn’t turn around in a year, but I’m just trying to figure out what all this online tribute business is about. What’s the blog URL please?”
furrowedbrows.blogspot.com
Who would think that listening to the over-the-phone silence produced by a somewhat estranged sister as she peruses a blog page dedicated to the memory of her recently deceased younger brother would contain such dramatic tension, and one so sustained?
“What exactly did he do for these people that they feel the need to write obituaries online with bad spelling?” Her voice is tinged with anger; I wonder if there is an element of guilt somewhere in there as well. “Hardly any of these say anything about what he actually did. Like, what did he actually do? It just feels like a bunch of people who don’t want to feel as though they contributed to the death of a stranger. Not that they did, but he died, possibly intentionally, after he’d met them all. If he had such a positive effect on them, then why didn’t they have a positive effect on him? Why did it have to take him being hit by a bus (I abstain from correcting) for anyone to notice that he had even had an impact on their lives?” She exhales. “I’m sorry, I just finding it hard to reconcile what I’m reading with what I know. For the love of god, people use the word ‘angel’. I just don’t see it.”
Does she at all wonder if Perry’s apparent rage was related to his home life, his up-bringing?
“But he’d been away from home for years, years, when I spoke to him, and he sounded terrible still. Everyone blames everything on childhood, it’s such bullshit, no offence. I mean, ours wasn’t perfect, but most of us turned out reasonably okay. I just can’t help but feel that this website is getting him wrong. These people obviously don’t know him.”
But does it negate the possibility that he had some sort of a positive effect on them? Or even the possibility that he had found a way to exorcise himself of rage and frustration and whatever else was eating him up?
“No, of course not, I’m not saying that. But, he was so troubled and for this to be how he’s remembered at the end of the day seems almost like an insult to his life. You were talking about negating; doesn’t this blog negate all the pain he went through, painting him like some kind of ghetto saint or something? No, not even that, saints at least suffer. It makes him look like he was kind of simple, like a holy fool or something. I don’t know. I just feel so bad for him, which is so unfair because on the surface this looks like a good thing.”
“What did he want from life; do you know?” I ask.
“Look I don’t know.”
If silences can ever get pregnant, this one has quintuplets. I wonder if that small stuttering breath I can hear for the briefest moment is the remnant of an aborted sob.
Lux quickly apologises for having to hang up on me as she has some errands to run and some places to be, but she is deeply appreciative of the call and would be very happy to be contacted once again if there are any further questions or developments.
Randomly perusing Eadie’s blog some weeks later, I notice that the tributes dried up quite some time ago. But a new post sits at the bottom of the page without any comments or likes or shares:
“Should have flown down back when we talked about me coming down, I kick myself every day but anyway, hope you’re in a better place now, or at least happy wherever you are as long as it’s not hell, lol. Love you much, as always” anonymous
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Forget sexinema, here’s cinempathy: a brief appeal for a more active viewership
May 26, 2014 § 1 Comment
Of those who watch films and complain that they didn’t feel anything I ask: whose fault is this? If there is a door and the door is closed, can I really blame the door for my not having gotten to the other side of it if I have not even endeavoured to turn the knob? If I turn the knob and the door does not open, have I checked under the mat or above the doorframe for a key? Only after I’ve done all these things and perhaps more can I say “this door cannot be breached.” Unless, of course, I decide to kick the door in, which may be a useful approach if kicking the door can be considered analogous to breaking a film down and analysing it in its innumerable pieces; perhaps not.
The point being that a lot of folk seem to think that art can be indulged in passively, and maybe a lot of art unwittingly or perhaps less innocently encourages this mode of thinking. Written word literature may be the most purposefully active popular art form (with regards to the spectator/patron) in that the content must first be consumed by sensory perception (seeing/hearing words or feeling braille) and then digested by intellectualisation (appreciating the respective scripts and symbols that the eyes or fingers are perceiving right through to comprehending and/or interpreting the literal or expressive meanings or connotations that result from the structural relationship between the scripts and symbols that the eyes or ears or fingers are perceiving), even though reading can still be done with semi passivity if one skim reads and forgets half of what their eyes are half-seeing or their fingers half-feeling. Compare this process to that of viewing a movie or listening to music or watching a ballet or strolling through a gallery. You can exit the Louvre and know that you have seen a beautiful image by van Eyck without having spoken a word of Flemish in your life (or whatever language Jan spoke). You may even attempt to describe ‘Madonna of Chancellor Rolin’ despite having only seen it as opposed to having truly looked at it and still be able to convey, with some success, something of its content or essence. On the contrary, hand me a Pablo Neruda poem in its original Spanish translation and I could tell you that the words look pretty on the page but probably little else; hand me something by Li Bai untranslated and I’d be able to tell you even less. Admittedly, though, a poem’s appearance on the page may be the one literary instance in which an individual can partake of artistic expression by simply seeing (if due only to the reality that the physical structure of a poem is often less of a slave to variations in publisher typography than is prose). To summarise, film is arguably more subject to viewer passivity than written literature is to reader passivity.
It seems that mainstream film-going culture (at present, but probably always) relies largely on passive absorption of image and sound. People can sit and let images cascade over them, images so obvious and plainly telegraphed that an individual with cortical blindness might process the content simply via thalamic pathways requiring little conscious registration. What’s more, mainstream cinema, particularly of the Hollywood major studio ilk, seems to be of a certain school of filmmaking: that which seems to believe that the more obvious and visually assaultive a film is, the more its spectators can be permitted to sit passively in the dark munching on their popcorn and slurping on their icy sodas, or twiddling with their smart devices on their sofas at home, ultimately walking away with the sensation and impression that they have partaken of something. Admittedly, there is a certain breed of film which encourages a certain type of active viewership, to an extent. ‘Inception’ is a great example of a film whose rabid following stems, I suspect at least partially, from the fact that it seems to validate viewer intelligence by explicitly challenging viewer attention with its “levels” and by concluding with an image whose ambiguity does not seem to infuriate or alienate in the way that other ambiguous endings do, simply because it is largely irrelevant whether A (the top continuing to spin) happens or whether B (the top dropping) happens because the fact that C (Cobb reuniting with his children, whatever the reality) happens is really the crux of the film’s conclusion, I would argue. While delivering the kind of SFX extravaganza and breakneck action that seems to bring in the bucks at the box office, ‘Inception’ also provides viewers the relief that comes from knowing (believing) that they are not simply brainless consumers but “active” participants. This may be a cynical stance, but when a film’s ultimate legacy is that it inspires endless debate about whether or not a spinning top stops or doesn’t stop spinning (aka whether chocolate ice cream or strawberry ice cream is better when the real issue pertains to ice cream versus lack of ice cream), I count this a general loss for the concept of active viewership.
A lot of people expect theme, ideas, emotion, to be pumped into them, to be drawn out of them. They say, “the movie didn’t make me feel anything.” Well, whose fault is that, I ask. People say, “This movie didn’t make me care for the characters.” Well, whose fault is it that you don’t have it in you to give two shits about a two dimensional representation of a human being which is what – to be perfectly honest – the overwhelming majority of people on earth will ever be to any of us, if that even; if not just a CIA World Book statistic.
Let’s talk about digestion.
You eat a meal, say a meal consisting of some meat and some vegetables. You end up shitting it all out and find yourself malnourished and upset. Whose fault is it that the food was not properly digested? Was the food supposed to digest itself? Your gut failed, my friend, either because you have IBD, or celiac, or some intolerance, or an infective colitis, or you swallow but don’t chew, or maybe your gut is in shock from some assault it endured. Maybe it a whole lot of it was cut out and doesn’t exist anymore to absorb anything. Either way, you cannot blame that poor lamb shank and those broiled silverbeet leaves for having gone through you unused. Your body was required to engage in an active process but this didn’t happen. The food is not at fault. Okay, so you say, what if the food is not digestible? For example, what if it’s made of wax or plastic or rock? Well, you’ve got to put the damn thing in your mouth, chew it and swallow it first before you extricate yourself of blame.
I will be the first to admit that a lot of art is bad food, either fake food made of wax and PVC, or junk containing too many calories and deficient in its variety of nutrients. But in order to know this we’ve got to open our digestive tracts and eat, right? We’ve got to ingest these foodstuffs only to realise that we’re fatigued and not satiated, agitated and hypoglycaemic, stunted and underdeveloped, overweight and diabetic with arteries on their way out. Art forms will struggle to achieve the level of purpose and social significance they can and should have until that vital feedback loop is completed.
“We want passive nutrition,” some may say. “What’s wrong with it if it gives you what you need?” Do you really want passive nutrition? Do I really want MY muscles to grow without my having to lift a finger? Want my intellect to burgeon and my soul-life to blossom without ever sitting myself down with a decent book that really challenges me or without crossing my legs on a mat and meditating? Sure, get that cannula into my arm, get that total intravenous nutrition running; strap those electrode patches to my pecs and my thighs and run electricity through them. Let’s see how vital that leaves me. My gut will wither, my digestive hormones will lose their bearings and the day I decide to stick something in my mouth and eat it I’ll find myself utterly ill-equipped. Cinema should be – at least in some ways – an active art form. It should be a mode of intellectual, emotional and psychological exercise. As a spectator, one should be required to bring something to the act of viewing. Emotion should not just be drawn out of a spectator; it should also be invested into the film by the spectator. It’s okay that a film portrays a scene of profound and obvious sadness such that tears spring to the corners of your eyes. But not all moments of emotional intensity are visually obvious, and in these circumstances that which is required is that thing which is so sorely misunderstood: empathy. Which is where this monologue was always heading.
Empathy is not a passive emotion, I’ve come to understand. To empathise is to act. But it’s not just an action that one engages in haphazardly; it’s an endeavour, the pursuit of a particular psycho-emotional ideal. It is to repeatedly subject yourself to a level of emotional skepticism and self-questioning. It is to be aware of who you are in relation to who other people are, what your values are, and why you believe the things that you do, and in doing so to forego them momentarily and in those moments to imagine and to infer that which your own experience might not necessarily bestow. Empathy is goddamn hard. Feeling sad for a weeping widow is not empathy if you know what it is to grieve, whatever the loss might have been which caused the grieving. It’s generally easy to know that she is sad. Sociopaths and psychopaths get their kicks by being able to know when someone is sad, or in pain, or afraid. To empathise is to encounter a stoic widow who you believe should be inconsolable and in tears and to not simply dismiss her as a cold and unemotional and a murderous spider, but to seek to understand how she might be feeling or what she might be thinking, to understand in however miniscule a way what her experience might be, even if you ultimately feel that she is cold and emotional and a murderous spider. You may never get anywhere but you tried and in trying I believe you empathised.
For this reason I admire and hail the films of Antonioni and Altman and Kubrick and Rohmer and Bunuel and all those film artists (and artists in general) who were clearly striving to understand or at least gain some semblance, however minor, of the experiences of others, however close to or far removed from their own experiences, their own milieus, those experiences might have been. People might consider Antonioni’s films emotionally vacant, but the more I watch them the more I get the sense of a man trying desperately to empathise with a particular mindset of a particular section of society at a particular time in the 20th century. There is no judgment, only a desire to understand. As a spectator of his work one is required to invest and inquire and question the inner state of the characters he paints and portrays. These are human beings on screen. As I have previously said, I probably know more about those beautiful, tortured, closed-off individuals Antonioni is showing me than I ever will most of the people I see around me, at the bus stop, on trains, in shopping malls and cafes, even some people to whom I speak more than once. What a sad and terrifying day it will be for me should these individuals cease to be human beings in my mind simply because all I see are creatures with a couple of physical dimensions standing, texting, eating, walking, largely unemotional on a surface level (let’s be frank about it: most people are damn good at keeping their emotions in check when in public) What a sad existence it has been for humanity considering that this seems to be an alarmingly common mindset, whether or not it is acted upon or not by the majority of people.
Empathy, I guess, is to appreciate that each individual you encounter, however two-dimensional and unconvincing they might appear to you is a human being however ‘other’ they might seem, and in appreciating this, to strive to understand what their experience might be. This is why I believe cinema can be, should be and is a premier art form of empathy. In order to live up to this though, it requires an active spectatorship who will guide and develop sincere and purposeful artistry, and vice versa and so on and so forth, until it all comes to some sort of end at some point in the future near or far.
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Brief impression: “Only Lovers Left Alive”
May 19, 2014 § Leave a comment
After the initial giddy feeling inspired by the geeky, cheeky last shot of Jim Jarmusch’s newest picture, I immediately began to wonder if the white-haired iconoclast had unwittingly undermined the preceding two hours of his movie or whether he was making some kind of a statement with this image of married vampires Adam and Eve approaching the camera, fangs drolly bared, coming in for their close-up, for their kill.
This drily romantic movie infuses Jarmusch’s aloof, absurdist style with moments of sensual expressiveness that I can’t remember seeing much of in his previous work. Considering the movie’s setting is entirely nocturnal, source light plays a key visual role in all its forms, from dull glows indoors to effervescent streaks and pulses out on the streets; this somehow provides an ambience that suggests both a sense of nostalgia for the past and a zest for the present. Adam is fed up after being exposed for centuries to the eternal foolishness of mankind (though there is a strong possibility that he is just as equally fed up with himself), but Eve, on the other hand, seems to lack Adam’s misanthropic depression; she has soul, a love of literature and knowledge (hence the biblical namesake?) and the ability to marvel at a breed of fungus and quote its binomial nomenclature. The one thing they do seem to share unequivocally and in equal measure is a love for blood, which they acquire illegally, lap up from little crystal chalices and respond to as if it were grade-A heroin.
So when Eve travels from Tangiers to Detroit to once again free her reclusive rock god husband from his Cobain-as-portrayed-in-Gus-van-Sant’s-“Last-Days” style melancholy, one could be forgiven for expecting Adam to gradually – perhaps painfully – gain a newfound appreciation for life and all its wonders. But being a Jarmusch film, this isn’t quite the case, and though there is a moment towards the end when Adam seems to experience awe for what may be the first time in decades if not centuries, the truth is that when life is stripped down to its bare scaffoldings and they are forced to reconsider their priorities, the only thing that either Adam or Eve seem to give a shit about is blood. Five hundred years ago they would have feasted on the necks of victims; today they acquire screened blood from dodgy doctors. But in the event of a shortage of good sangre they are willing to abandon their modern, civilised methods to get their juice of choice. Even Adam, a man who is practically suicidal, will kill to live. Funny.
Getting back to that final shot: I wonder if Jarmusch is suggesting that human endeavour and human values are ultimately subservient to our innate desire to survive, to simply exist as living beings at the very least. While we are here on this rock we may seek knowledge, expression, love and companionship, pleasure…but above all we just want to breathe. Perhaps this is the irony of Adam’s disdain for mortal men whom he nicknames “zombies” assumedly on account of their (our) mindlessness and their (our) being relative slaves to their basest and most basic instincts. But isn’t Adam, he who is the only living true Renaissance man, just as much of a zombie as the next warm-blooded individual when it comes to his utter dependence on his crimson life force? And isn’t Eve, who seems to think she is Gaia incarnate, no more than a junkie with a predilection for reading and music? Perhaps Jarmusch is gently ridiculing his creations while adoring them with his camera (an approach that scores of film artists over the decades have taken), though I will say that he clearly admires Eve’s considerable verve.
I still think there is more to “Only Lovers Left Alive”, or would at least like to think that there is, but am not quite sure what this would be. This movie’s final image is either loaded with subtext, or it is Jarmusch saying “hey, it’s just a vampire movie after all – this is what they do, is it not?”
* As an aside, I wonder if “Only Lovers Left Alive” would make one half of a fitting immortals-living-amongst-us double-feature when paired with Wim Wenders’ magnificent “Wings of Desire”, if only to contrast Damiel the angel’s desire to become human and to feel human in the latter with Adam’s sheer disdain for mankind and everything it stands for in the former, though one could argue that the very thing which Damiel envies about humanity is precisely what Adam feels our species has lost or perhaps never did have and that Damiel is in for a nasty surprise. But then again, Eve represents much of what Damiel romanticises about the human experience, and she could very well be seen as an analogue of Marion, the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds-loving trapeze artist with whom Damiel falls in love and who is as much a muse to him as Eve clearly is to Adam.
the odd employment 