yup

holidays - done. mardi gras - done. recovering - done. i think im back :)

duration

im back in sydney. the holiday is well & truly over. The contrast in time, in pace, is profound.

on the boat there was little point in keeping time. Days passed, not hours, and when they did there was little point in keeping track. each day was like the last, perhaps not in substance but rather in quality. there was relaxation, there was a calm rocking, a adventure with out the adrenalin. time is nothing within the space of duration. it is like when we say we "wait for the second to pass" we induce a paradox of time for time. Time as this is only ever a perversion, a disavowed reality, a induced fantasia.

the second i leave the boat, time enacts its return. i am dated, i count by the minute - 'give me a minute. ill be there in 5, in 10, in 20'. mardi gras i s a season of dating..not just fucking. we make our must see lists & hesitate at double bookings. i live life or does it live me? its an uneasy truce, or a make shift alliance where movement is the compression of duration.

trip is fun in the sun

a sailor went to sea sea sea

st(r)ailyan

The following is the questions as supplied by the SMH Quiz Page. The quiz will provide information on your level of fair dinkum-ness.

Just so you know Fair Dinkum is a term which generally refers to something being truthful or in good faith. The question is of course - how 'fair dinkum' is this quiz itself. Is it truly testing to see one's level of australian-ness or is it just testing your knowledge of facts relating to what some people consider australia to be? I'd take the latter to be true.

I think the best thing to do is to await the discovery of the Australian Gene - after which point we can begin a process of anal swabing the nation in order to identify among us who is truly...

er i mean a fair dinkum st(r)ailyan.

Are you fair dinkum?

1. Who was Australia's first Prime Minister?

2. Who was the chief architect of the Sydney Opera House?

3. What do we celebrate on January 26?

4. How many states are in Australia?

5. In what year did Australia become a federation?

6. Which Australian female surfer holds the most world surfing titles?
cause surfing is as australian as cronulla is

7. Who is this man? (picture of Captian Cook Suplied)

8. Who wrote Waltzing Matilda?

9. What does ANZAC stand for?

10. Which highway connects Darwin and Adelaide?

11. What animal group do echidnas belong to?

12. Where is XXXX beer brewed?

13. What year did Australia win the Americas Cup?

14. What is the 23rd word of the National Anthem?
counting is sooo australian

15. What was Sir Donald Bradman's career Test batting average?

16. Who is this woman?(picture of cathy freeman supplied)
the token indigenous question

17. What is the main ingredient in Vegemite?
because reading lables is what makes us ocker

18. How many stars are on the Australian flag?

19. Which Australian snake has the deadliest venom?

20. Which Australian has won the most gold medals at the Olympics?


Ohh.... so if thats what being ausie is, well thennnn....

are the following un-australian?

Scientific, Academic, Poetic, Artistic, Altruistic & other achievements that are not directly related to sport or politicians

Anything relating to migrant histories... or anything that might suggest that australians consider having chinese food once a week

Anything realating to indigenous Australia... because thats not 'our' australia.

Wine Drinking.

On an interesting side note - We may test an persons knowledge of what it is to be fair dinkum, the person may even pass with flying colours, but what do we do when that person - well versed in australian-isms decides to opt out & not bother to live in the australian idom?

Robot Chicken: pokemontastic

Summer sun, had me some

At the moment im avoiding any big post untill i fix up my blog. Both in terms of looks & purpose. So in leiu of doing a seroius post - here is a picute of me & steve having some fun at palms. I think its sooo cute!

up against love

ok, so i posted on against love last time - but considering my life is boring at the moment & this is such a great book, im posting on it again. i've finished it & it concludes with a great take on the american psyche & the whole clinton affair...

....more importantly, without giving too much away - it ends with a reference to george simmel (think 1901 sociologist who wrote one of my favorite books 'the philosophy of money' - yeah im a geek ;P) & her reflections on his thoughts about the flirtation. its such an eye opener & soo good.

she also does video too

for a review..erhm

Ms Laura

I am at page 169 of Laura Kipnis' Against Love. She writes:

"Why should the state license marriages, by the way? Don't ask, just play along because if you do, the state will show its gratitude by conferring numerous special privileges on you: there are reportedly over a thousand places in federal law where marriage confers benefits not allotted to the non-married. (And arguably why the fight for gay marriage takes up the wrong battle: rather than marriage as a prerequisite to access government privileges, shouldn't the fight be to uncouple resource distribution from marital status?)"

Kipnis is fantastic - so simply spot on. *sigh* soo cool. Shes come along way from here coarse academic writings & video works. This book is devoted to defending the over 50% divorce rate in America. Considering that adultery is the norm - after all even presidents do it, why not say bye to this 'love' thing? Against marriage, intimacy and other touts of love. thanks Laura

updating

soo need a new look for my blog...

100 meters of black chiffon

leather pup

all leathered up for lawn bowls at clovelly

cheers & beers

a pic from my work christmas party. Me and alfie share a moment.

good days

christmas is over - and surprisingly it was a good one.

pre-christmas was an entorage of parties & friends. went to kooky with W & G. played around with R, and ended up back with my friends partying the morning away.

Decided to go out again sunday morning (christmas eve) to dayclub. Bumped into J, his boy, as well as S and then mr M, an old uni friend. All this was most unexpected & quite a nice lead up to christmas...

...besides being drug fucked, i managed to stay awake for christmas lunch. Mum luckily ramained in her bedroom for the most part. I avoided dad & was given a low-down no the wonderful world of hair dressing by my sister. My younger brothers have grown soo much, they have hit their puberty groth spurt. Upper lip hair & pimples abound. its so cute. My older brother unfortunately is still depressed & remained a recluse in his bedroom for the most part.

Back in newtown - i drank the rest of my christmas away with mr B, listening to snatches of music & making friendly banter...

and then slept through the night in a warmly drunk sprawl on the couch. bliss

mean words

hard cover. bound spine. a stiff black card encasing all that is truth. I opened the book to find the pages torn. ripped to shreds. a story is placed into hiatus. desperate urges for a conclusion are stifled by a maze of pulp fragments. tape & time will not ease the pain borne by the destruction.

Without the possibility of reading - how could we align ourselves to the memory of meaning?

A horse tied to each corner of the page. Paragraph severed from paragraph. Sentence drawn, sentence quartered. Sickly smiles & laughters abound from the onlookers of this destruction. Stanza reduced to words, words reduced to letters. The letters are buried deep in the sand, & only the bitter head of the bastard vowel sticks out. A long and drawn out howl, a desperate & despairing question - Y? Y? Y-Y-Y?

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'

I try to read this book. I am desperate, I yearn what is destined to be denied. I am without hope. My eyes tear up. My body stretches into the form of some tragic figure. Anxious whimpers as my hands scramble. I jerk my body forth. I heave it back. I desperately try to pull these words together. As if to re-animate stanzas. As if to set into motion the frame of meaning. As if that would suffice to make the word living. to make meaning. To make sense of what is this paradise lost.

It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown...

need i say more....
i have to get off youtube...

the gravity of cheese

Im not ure if this is meant to be a science presentation or an infomercial, an advertisers pitch or a envrionmentalists educational. But here is a clip explaining the ideal of fuelless flight.

thanks to bunny for directing me to damn interesting.

how to break dance

omg - i love it!!

dance bitch, dance

my singlet top is drenched with sweat, my feet are desparately sore... wounded infact - i can see the makings of bruises and blood. "...sweat & tears!? huh?" i think to myself.


the good news is that my dance teacher gave us the go ahead to move onto elementary/intermediate classes. YAY !!! so i'm moving forward. classes are over for the year...

next year is a commitment to:
1 class of classical ballet - to help develop - posture, stretch & strength ie refine
2 of contemporary
PLUS yoga & gym three times per week each if i can manage... or plan B - doing pushups, situps etc, streching, skipping and a less intense gym/yoga schedule ontop of that... basically the idea is try to make sure that im doing something 6 of the 7 nights in the week to help my skill level... or atleast trying to hehehe

my goal over the holidays is to work on doing hand stands & working on doing the splits... maybe even a cart wheel if i can manage lol

Dematerialise! (take 2)

"Isn't it just reducing? Are you making up words... Agaaain?!" inquired Mr W.

"Nuh - Nuuuh" i responeded... "I was perhaps just being a little more poetic that informing... is it such a crime?" Mr W replies with a cheshire cat smile, a laugh & a nod in the affirmative.

So what does it mean to dematerialise & why isnt it reducing?


Well in a way it is reducing - it does involve using less - but not in the traditional sense. De materialising is about the evaporation of the very materials that produce particular objects/commodities & not about the reduction of the object itself.

Take for instance water heating. Having a hot shower usualy involves the use of electricity. Electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels (coal). If we have a shorter shower then we would have less demand for energy & less fossil fuel burning etc. This is a typical model for reducing. Using less means less impact on the environment... yay for us :)

So how is dematerialising different? Well there is a way we can have a hot shower that goes for the same time & that involves burning less coal. we can use a solar hot water heater. We may not be using less hot water - but the way the heat is produced involves alot less energy to produce and is more sustainable*.

Another example is online resources vs paper resources... Less material is used on the net, less production, but still the same product/object. Basically dematerialising is using less resources in making objects/commodities, while reducing applies to using less of the object itself.

Dematerialising usually requires/casues changes in the way the resource is produced & distributed in society. Solar pannels can atomise energy production, users produce energy locally & not in a mass/grid fashion. On the other hand the internet tends to network & proliferate information production, as oposed to a book which tends towards a static & isolated existance on a shelf. So energy is no longer as much a social crisis of concern, and information is not limited to discrete books in particular orders.

Ideally we should both reduce & dematerialise. But if dematerialising is done with a bit of thought it can lead to one really cool thing - sharing. you dont really get that with reducing. Laundry mats are all about "sharing" resources (well, for a cost). Think about the amount of time that your washing machine spends NOT being used... now if someone else were to use it instead of buying their own machine - we've just saved ourself the production of one more machine**

The question is -Is this reduction or dematerialisation. The argument for reduction would go: well we're making less machines so its reducing. The arguement for dematerialisation would say: the same amount washing is happening, nothing has been reduced, but the way in which the washing has changed to use less resources, so its dematerialising.

*Solar power can be probelmatic its not always as eco friendly as envisaged, the problem is there is not enough money being put into it tgo work out the bugs.

**Now if only there was a co-operatively run laundry around the corner, with low prices, eco-friendly washing powder & front loading machines that uses less water??

some where else

This is Skin 'purple'
- one thing i always found interesting about her lyrics was the way the perspective shifts between the two people involved in the song. Between the cheater & the cheated, between the one who gives & the one who takes. Both the lover & the fool - and so we cry with a tinge of anger, and we shout with a thread of forgiveness.

Purple washes over me
Seeping through my open seams
Im stained all over

You pretend weve started again
Waiting for me to say when
But I say purple

[Chorus]
She wont go
Where I
I would go for you
Id curse my heart
For you

Silence makes a girl talk fast
Speeding but Im gonna crash
And burn for loves sake

Duty keeps a lover loyal
(But) is it really worth the spoils
When I dream purple