A pirate.

Memories clattering like scuffed, dog-eared cards.
A friend reminded me of an old drinking buddy (we'll call said drinking buddy, Wilf) in a conversation we shared the other night. Wilf would put away more bacardi than any sane human should ever conceivably be able to do. Last time we met, he spoke of hauling contraband from the continent back to Yorkshire and how a recent operation had still left him with at least one and a half lungs, all the while lighting up a Marlborough and giving me an aggrieved look for walking away from St Eeeeeeeeeurgh, the patron saint of alcoholics everywhere.
And the song in the hyperlink...
Wilf loved Bowie's Amsterdam more than just about anything in the world and we'd argue into the small hours at any pub that hadn't yet barred us about its merits and failings, as opposed to Brel's original. And we'd almost throw punches because I'd defended Brel's near-autistic gyrations (having seen a recording of his live performance on an old 16mm print somewhere or other) and Wilf abhorred Gallic displays of emotion of any kind. But instead of coming to blows, we'd just get punted and find another pub somewhere in the amber triangle of East Balmain, Leichhardt and the Cross that hadn't yet put us on their blacklist.
May this dispatch find you still leaving beautiful hells in your wake, my brother.

Amsterdam - Bowie

The drama queen and the storm.

I'll keep this brief because it's another one of those sad sack entries...
I've known, and more than likely still know quite a few, climate change deniers. Their arguments make me pull one of those puzzled smiles often used by comic actors to indicate they're never quite sure what they're hearing.
The deniers's arguments always tends to go something like the following:
  *  technology will save us,
  *  water and nature always find their own levels and it has nothing to do with us,
  *  humans can't conceivably impact their environment that strongly,
  *  you climate change supporters are always crying melodrama and chicken little (my personal favourite).
Melodrama and chicken little...
And now a nepotistic and extraordinarily ill-equipped con artist is about to become president of the USA and no one is more surprised than he, himself.
Melodrama and chicken little...
I don't know about you but I never said it would be the Furies. We never said it would be red buttons, dirty bombs and nuclear winters or even wall to wall tidal waves and earthquakes.
In fact, we barely said anything at all.
Not out of any particular fear or lack of spine or intestinal fortitude but rather, out of the mechanism that creates that peculiar half smile. The one that signifies that we can never be sure of the shit coming out of the deniers' mouths and the possibility those joshing and japing jesters might, in fact, be pulling our legs.
And the fun-loving deniers, so assured within their convictions, who call us doomsayers and pussies do that additional funny thing and cite the likes of Christopher Monckton and his oily and well-paid ilk.  And we laugh till the tears...
And again that smile.
So where am I going with all this?  With this cheap, well trodden and nausea-inducing sanctimony? What have I revealed in the diatribe and pouting and preening thus far?
Nowhere and nothing, I'm afraid.
But consider this...
Here in Melbourne, Australia, we went from 34 degrees Celsius to 19 degrees Celsius in approximately forty minutes on the Monday just gone (21/11/16).  This, in and of itself, is nothing new to Melbourne. What can I say?  It's a crazy place. What IS new, according to the media (no, not the Social Media, you kooky nutty, zany catz - the popular media! You know? The one with an agenda!), is today's report that the fatality count has now hit four and there have been 8500 people treated in the past 72 hours (three still critically ill) for this obscure phenomenon known as Thunderstorm Asthma.
All true, I'm afraid. Please see the hyperlink below.
They say it's the small things that count.
To our heartache and detriment we are starting to realise this and I wonder, as I sit in my Pharisaic and somehow insincere solitude, if we ever needed to.

Here is the news. Here is the future.

P.S. Please forgive the absence of a picture and a linked song this time around.

Hacksaw Ridge

Due to the local cinema being both cheap and excellent, I've probably caught more new flicks on the big screen over the past two years than I have in the past two decades. Mercifully we've had some great films in that time.
Trouble is - and I don't know if I'm alone here - I suspect this has resulted in a case of, often as not, outlining some kind of bombastic blog entry or FB scribbling for an imaginary audience in the never-ceasing delusional quest of self-aggrandisement.
Such is definitely the case with Hacksaw Ridge. I was judge and jury long before I even went this afternoon. If only for my own political and all too pompous and elitist reasons.
So why is it that I'm still asking myself, "Was it more than just a couple of hours of nu-school war porn?".
The bowel loosening viscera and horror is all there. The straight ahead Jobian tales of conviction and Sisyphean anguish are intact. As are all the obligatory tropes and characters. Was it even a good film? Or an important one? Truth is, I can't answer any of these questions. I can only say that in spite of it all, I'm of the mind that it really was something richer.
Just shy of twenty years ago, I went and saw Saving Private Ryan with Jake and his dad. Mister Jake was in Signals in the New Guinea campaign. Must have been nearly half an hour of silent waves of weeping after the flick before he could find his throat again. And then, to cover the tracks of the tears he added, "Of course WE (the Australian 6th and 7th Divisions) would have softened the defences up for a few days, not a few hours." And who was I to tell him that the movie was merely taking liberties for the sake of narrative? He was there and I wasn't. But in that half hour, he was a twenty year old kid again, shaken but perhaps finally vindicated. I learned later that that movie, for all its stereotypes, had freed up a lot of souls who had been emotionally crippled for over half their long and damaged lives, so more power to it.
I wonder then, if it's too optimistic to say that like Band of Brothers I suspect I see Hacksaw Ridge as a love letter to a courage and madness most of us should never hope or need to know.
Heartfelt hats off to all the local talent for making a war film like few others.

Fighting and falling...

There is no clear picture. Even the sound is muffled.

First up, this is purely a rant. Highly personal, at best garbled and of no intrinsic value outside my need for a catharsis.  With little or only marginal coherence and not one iota of new information to assuage, enlighten or ease the complex feelings of recent events. So please proceed with caution and at least one full shaker of salt.

***

I really don't give a fuck what people think my politics are.  If only for the reason that in the past I thought I'd had people pegged and smugly pigeonholed and they surprised me; either often as not with horror, or on the rare occasion with overwhelming humanist delight. Nor am I a skilled polemicist, orator or even debater. So had this been a live broadcast, I'd be the first to crumple into a foetal ball and weep till the auditorium needed life rafts.

I'm simply trying to come to terms with a sensation I get when I see warm, thoughtful, compassionate and through and through humanist people by the hordes self-flagellating over the win by that pale Berlusconi, Trump. Everyone I hold dear is gnashing their teeth, renting their garments and taking birch switches to their delicate 21st century skin in a public display of automutilation that unsettles me immensely. And not one of them has a right to do so.  It haunts me and I find it scary.  Every bit as scary as Trump and his cronies and formative nepotocracy. BECAUSE THOSE I LOVE HAVE DONE WHAT THEY THINK IS RIGHT WITH THE FACTS AS WE COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND THEM.

And I have a small voice inside me that screams, "THIS CUNT IS NOT ABOUT FACTS!  HIS VOTERS ARE NOT ABOUT FACTS! FACTS ONLY ADD FUEL TO THEIR APOCALYPTIC PYRE!".

And I really don't know if any of the above is true. But everywhere I look I can draw no other conclusion.  People don't vote in the Trumps, or the Mays or the Berlusconis or the Le Pens or the Haiders or even the Abbotts, based on any solid and workable facts.  (Let us not even dwell on Putin and his beloved Night Wolves).  These voters can't get behind global warming or bee deaths and colony collapse or plastic in the oceans or oil spills or extinction of fauna and flora.  Not because they're all bad or even stupid or that they vote against their best interests out of some misguided clanishness.  They base it on fundamental and fundamentally flawed syllogisms.  "I don't have a job - therefore Democrats/Labor/Labour/the Left/queers/Latinos/Blacks/Asians/Other/Other/Other are to blame!". They vote on a mood alone.  An ugly and insidious mood.  And even these preceding statements would have absolutely no meaning to them.

They don't blame the companies that ship the work overseas or the governments that offer historically unprecedented bargain prices for land to foreign powers (given the cultural displacement and resentment so often nested in any the economic or commercial dividends).  Should they?  Perhaps.  To a certain extent, yes. But to my mind, history is a profoundly uncaring monster. Please feel free to jump in and correct my often over-imaginative trains of thought but at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, assembly lines were set up in the Hall of Machinery to demonstrate the efficiency of the future.  The spire of the newly completed Eiffel Tower hinted at the spirit of the Indian summer of the belle epoch and the celebratory focus was fixed firmly on commerce and manufacturing. The future was coming and it would mean the death of the artisan. Indeed, if I recall rightly, there was a Craftman's Guild decree drafted and displayed that went to great lengths to point out that the future would benefit many but at what cost?

In short, if the Trump supporters or anyone else thinks that this boorish opportunist of a man is going to make America or any country strong and give them all employment, then they are delusional.  The landscape of work as we understand it is changing.  Potentially irrevocably. And the world leaders are every bit as powerless as the disenfranchised as the unemployed themselves. We have to start thinking of work in a vastly different light.  Even here in Australia where coal is our prime export, we live with this horrific cognitive dissonance  - on the one hand we are killing the planet and ourselves (to mention nothing of indigenous displacement) AND we somehow think this deadly gravy train will continue forever, or even for the foreseeable future. And we too have started to see the rumblings of the pained and blindly disenfranchised voters who also voted in an 'alt right' figurehead (albeit mild by comparison with Trump) who was mercifully knocked out of the prime-ministership in a mid-term leadership spill. Perhaps the only consolation in these - surely the strangest days for many, many decades.

At this point, you could well expect me to holler from the village bellfry, "Blame the bosses! Down with Capitalist pigs!".  I can't.  I like money.  Wish I had more of it, in spite of the fact that it's a limited resource like all else and it goes on doing as much harm as good, in so many quarters. We can name names, we can come down from the blind mantle of history and post name 'n shame faces, addresses, emails on any and every social media weapon of choice.  Yeah, we could do that. After all, each outing would clearly indicate that these wreckers are culpable at every level, to every degree. And we, the proud commentariat and clickbaiting 'netigentsia could gaze out over the wreckage, waving our flag just like Napoleon at Lodi and sigh at the job well done and make sage, stern and sonorous rumblings on all that has yet to be achieved.  But I believe in the rule of law, strangely enough.  And when the law fails, I have a near-Mencian belief in the essential decency of people. So no, this is not the direction I am pursuing.  Nor is it a healthy use of time for anyone I can think of, short of any obfuscating, opportunistic, dollar store ideologue.  I think I mentioned Trump earlier, though.

My contention is that these Trumpsters and any folks, decent or otherwise, on the right or even remotely seduced by the alt right, need other humans for the failings of humanity.  For their own failings, even.  They're scared.  They're in pain. So the idea of blaming computers, roboticisation and technology could not, does not and will not make sense to them.  Because how can the internet, this abstracted mass of ones and zeros, HTML, Java, IP and VLAN addressing, server farm high availability accessing switches, LAN/WAN/WiFi/VOIP and Cloud redundancy fight back?

But, as intimated by that guild decree in 1889, nobody could foresee in short order the leaps and bounds (and consequent fallout at every level imaginable) made with this golden age of (neo-) Fordism and the future does indeed now appear to belong to only two discernible industries: coding and service. Trades and manufacture - as well as natural resources - will still be here, though mainly to support the companies, entities and conduits who are ancillary to the age of automation, as will the workforce that comprise the bulk of said technologies.  But it appears to me that this is the real heart and schism of the societal civil war now being waged. Skin colour, gender, language, lifestyle and religious preference are not the issues. The ongoing lie of free time is.

Or am I making too much of the perceived intrinsic value of the day job?

As an Australian, I am loath to praise the American voting structure. I much prefer our own, with its inherent and often parochial imperfections. A highly modified and compulsory  (though, many might argue, only marginally evolved) Westminster bicameral infrastructure, where we can keep a close eye on all the crooks and cheaters, swindlers, pork barellers and gerrymanderers in one safe place - and occasionally get a useful bill through after much deliberation and backroom testosteronal dick swinging and knife fighting. Add to all of this the strange pride we take in being a country rejected so wholeheartedly by our motherland and our inherent mistrust of guns and God, and you get a more complete picture of why this comically sanctimonious exceptionalism exists, save for a small though ever expanding and contracting amorphous mass of noisy and often violent neo-Cons and would be Nazis. Hardly what anyone could call patriotism in any demagogic sense and for that I'm grateful. But we do love America.  Most people the world over do.  This mythic idea of safe harbour. Of progress. Of the confluence of individual and community. Of making the most impossible odds play in your favour and the most unworldly of dreams come true. So much brilliance - I suspect in spite of, rather than because of the 'roid rage that currently passes for a Protestant Work Ethic.

And it is this love that saddens us at some level, I believe.  Post World War Two, and especially from Reagan onwards, we feel hurt by this capricious, imperious near-mythical lump of land that regulates so much of the globe's daily life, when a person is voted in to the highest position of power in the free world and they are clearly unsuited for the role.  Or worse, they are completely unsuited AND they are a documented thuggish, misogynist, racist fuckwit.  Like Trump.

And there's every possibility he will break (or attempt to sever) the bindings of NATO and possible the lesser Pac-rim and ANZUS treaties too. And those with acute hearing in America will be able to divine the screams and wailings of us apologists and appeasers who once loved and defended at the very least, the idea of the U.S. with as much vigour as any native-born, in our own tepid and foreign ways.

Or possibly he and his nepotocracy will be brought to heel by the IRS and the Supreme Court before too much lasting damage is done.

And although I'm seldom the one to be accused of pissing on anyone's parade, I think as long as we go on forfeiting our independence to the codists and adherents of automation, it clearly feels as though it's only a matter of time before this level of politics is the rule rather than the rare and toxic exception. Or conversely, in the true spirit of progress, whenever we get to these nadirs of conviction and clarity, perhaps it's actually more of a sign that those of us with any heart, compassion or even common-sense have not yet gone far enough.

I wish I could sign off on a higher note but as of this minute, the jury is still out.

Jaysus fucking wept.  After three and a half decades in the IT game, I have finally touched the Luddite within.

9/11/16

And the afternoon rolled slowly on
and I saw but didn't want to see but knew I must.
And Cam cooked up some fish we bought and washed it down with a red wine
While I made myself another interminable cup of tea in the dirty, oversized mug.
All the comforts of home and hearth
but somehow the whole world has changed
And we could almost hear the tears from the one corner. Almost smell the smug from the other.
And we played a card game in which the rules are constantly changing and the heroes are fatefully disempowered or outright discarded before a winner can be declared
And so many evil things can win
in so many evil ways.
The only difference is that here, in this house in this little corner of the world that is not far enough from everywhere,
we laughed.
We laughed loudly
because the fiddle is packed away
And the fire department won't touch this one.

Something that is gone...

Reverence.

I often dream of this strange little chapel. We'd pass it daily when we were working out at Blayney a couple of years ago. We had to stand in the fields around it for hours on end ensuring the bovines, ovines and equines didn't chew our transmission lines.

I would look at this shed and try to imagine the local farmers and miners who might worship here in all manner of weather. And the pastor who might have been tasked to tend the disparate flock, with their irreconcilable differences, generally resolved by a punch up at the Saturday night pissups in Orange or Bathurst and sheepishly absolved the next morning in this small sanctum.

I know nothing of worship outside my own selfish pursuits but this rusting corrugated shed took me back to possibly the only time I got 'it'. A mud brick and lime affair in Azille in France. I was staying with a friend who insisted on showing me what Catholicism meant to him. From the outside, that strange church looked like another of any one of hundreds of buildings in the fortress town that had been partially destroyed and mostly rebuilt for generation after generation through over a millennium of conflict.

Yet inside, you could look at the cracked walls and the hand-hewn pews and the rafters above, blackened by over a thousand years of locally crafted thuribles and you could SEE the hopes and desires and prayers - both answered and unanswered - of those remarkably ordinary and courageous people.

Later we walked to the outskirts of the town where my friend showed me the earthen remains of the wide moat and looked at me and said with a smile, "Now we'll let any barbarian in."

Who needs friends.

Of worship...