Love Outside Andromeda

Love Outside Andromeda, Spectrum Sydney, 23 Jun 06

hecate pose
something white & sigmund
raido
the killing moon
bound by hurt disolved
boxcutter, baby
keep looking at the sky
tongue like a tether
achilles (all 3)
measuring tape
gonna try to be a girl
made of broken glass
juno
mercury 2 degrees

Best wishes to Nicole on her special day

rheiner 15:58: IF I READ ONE MORE THING ABOUT NICOLE KIDMAN’S WEDDING I AM GOING TO SHIT IN AN ENVELOPE AND MAIL IT TO HER. I hope someone swaps her wedding cake for a Michel’s Patisserie LOG.

christian 16:20: And inserts it up her wedding dress.

rheiner 16:32: Just inserts it. Period. Followed by Naomi Watts, and a lamb roast.

christian 16:34: “Sorry, mum’s making a lamb roast tonight. And then shoving it up Nicole Kidman’s c**t.”

rheiner 16:36: <sprays water across desk> I love it. I can just see her standing there smiling benignly, giving a thumbs up! sign for the paparazzi while the lamb roast slowly disappears…

christian 16:40: I’m envisaging some shabby, oiled roast held together by greasy string, her inner thighs shiny and streaked with garlic and chopped herbs…

rheiner 16:42: Someone just walks by and sprinkles some rosemary across her lap.

christian 16:46: …or a fistful of chives. I was trying to think of something involving an oven bag, but I was getting into terrifying territory.

mix:tape 4 – Everything all the Time

01 Kira Kira Kittens in his Pockets
02 Ø In Wind
03 Vetiver You May Be Blue
04 Xiu Xiu PJ in the Streets of London
05 Blindfold Myrkfalni
06 Anja Garbarek That’s All
07 José González Crosses
08 This is Your Captain Speaking A Wave to Bridget Fondly
09 Audrey Plain Pieces
10 Zazie Rodéo
11 Bishop Allen Flight 180
12 Britta Persson Defrag My Heart
13 French Teen Idol Your Fault
14 Zazie Lola Majeure
15 Mono The Flames Beyond the Cold Mountain
16 Seabear Robin Sparrow
17 Björk Undo

Festival of the I Couldn’t Possibly

rheiner 09:14: Paris: 18 degrees and clear. I so couldn’t possibly, I can’t even say Je Ne Couldn’t Possiblement.

cvm 09:20: <sobs>

rheiner 09:25: Reykjavík: 10 and sunny. <wails>

cvm 09:30: I don’t care what the weather is, it’s: Bologna — Nicer than here.

rheiner 09:35: I know, “Today’s forecast is you being in Europe. Therefore Paris. Etc.”

cvm 09:39: It’s like “Clouds of Gauloises and nubile young intellectuals a-go-go. And decent coffee.” The outlook will be fine. Really, really, really fine.

cvm 10:40: Meanwhile, I love how Australia’s so proud that we “made it in” to the World Cup. Have you seen some of the countries in there? I’m surprised Vatican City don’t have a team.

rheiner 10:44: Benedict XVI would look so hot in one of those large hats and little soccer shorts. Oh wait, I remember that court case.

cvm: 10:43: At least they’d have a large selection of ball boys…

rheiner 10:47: Ouch.

cvm: 10:48: Mi dispiace, j’ai besoin d&apos;encore du café peut etre. Oh no. The Da Vinci Code conversation is on in the kitchen again. Why does the world hate me so?

rheiner: 10:50: I wear headphones constantly at work for a reason. I also quite like “What’s the Da Vinci Code? No, I haven’t heard of it. A book you say? Sorry, I only read real literature.”

cvm: 10:50: Current favourite: “Trapped in a mine you say? My, they sure kept that quiet…”

mix:tape 3 — Separatist_Moose@ Third_Millenium

01 Ute Lemper The Case Continues
02 Band of Horses The Great Salt Lake
03 Barbara Morgenstern The Operator
04 Casiotone for the Painfully Alone Young Shields
05 Daníel Ágúst The Moss
06 Swissair Your Good Looks (Will ruin what otherwise could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship)
07 Anja Garbarek This Momentous Day
08 Seabear You’re Not Strange Enough (Hey, let’s make some mistakes)
09 Under Byen Den her sang handler om at få det bedste ud af det
10 Greater Explosives Archipelago
11 Piana Spring Has Come!!!
12 Hello Saferide Highschool Stalker
13 Anna Ternheim A French Love
14 Zazie Adam et Yves
15 Thunderbear Pas på du ikke frider i
16 Tujiko Noriko マネキンサーファー
17 Iron & Wine Free Until They Cut Me Down
18 P J Harvey Catherine
19 Calexico All Systems Red

Five paragraphs that almost start with the word Bangkok

This was the piece I submitted in my applicaition for my Masters course. Who knew?

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Bangkok as a city defies the imagination — at 7am it is gleaming white and thick with the smell of humidity. Bangkok challenges the way I usually navigate strange cities. Try and move around the city of Sydney by street map and you should have no problem. In Bangkok the space to be negotiated is vertical as well as horizontal, and traversing the labyrinth of streets on foot is not possible by map alone. This is apparent as soon as you leave the airport: your vertical position in the roadway matrix is determined by the amount of money you decide to part with. Those who can afford the expressway speed above the rest of the city on wide, empty roads; as if the tiniest escape from the earth’s gravity suddenly propels them forward into the metropolis. Those who cannot afford such luxuries are confined to the congestion and pollution that the city has become famous for, inching their way toward the servants’ entrance while the casual visitor glides sleekly to the front door.

Bangkok makes me realise that the idea of a concrete jungle isn’t simply a pithy metaphor for all the urban development that has arisen in the last century. Bangkok’s air is breathed out of concrete the same way the Amazon’s air is breathed out of its forests. Having arrived in the centre, the colossal concrete pylons of the mass transit Skytrain send the traveller once more into the vertical. Where Europe sunk its trains into the earth, Bangkok has thrust its own towards the heavens. So many metres above the crush of the streets, the traffic noise is a little less loud, the crowds of people a little less dense, the air a little less thick. On the Skytrain platform there’s a little less of everything and a much more of a dizzying vertigo that could plunge you back into it at any moment.

In Bangkok, navigation is also temporal, three dimensional space is supplemented by separate planes of three dimensional time. The city interacts with its own past and present, but also with my own present and past; all the experiences and expectations I have carried with me to this point. The physical city collides with a Bangkok of ten years past; the vague memories and alter ego of a briefly lived-in city directing me to turn right here or left there on some long forgotten sense of direction. A decade ago the plane’s evening descent was like being plunged into pure cobalt, the city dark but with a quiet luminescence retained from the heat of the day. I was delivered into a city of emptiness and possibility and stood for endless hours on its threshold while red eye flights dragged the stars across the night sky. Now in the heat of midday, the city drops over me the patchwork quilt of memory: two block here, three blocks there, a not quite uncertainty about what lies around the next corner.

Bangkok’s urban landscape is scattered here and there with giant skyscrapers, halted halfway in construction because the company responsible has simply run out of money. Symptomatic of the variables of the fortunes of the city, and the past-present-future time scale that it seems to have such a healthy disrespect for, many look fully formed from a distance. It is only close up that they are revealed as hollow, the exoskeletons of more prosperous and aspirational years. Now moving neither forward nor backward in time, they are sure only of one direction: up. Along the river, the gleaming new, upwardly mobile apartment blocks of the once gleaming new, upwardly mobile look much as they do anywhere in the world. Until you notice the balconies overgrown with foliage, rough bursts of green cascading down the once white walls, and it’s difficult to decide if the building is still inhabited or this is a tiny foothold from which the jungle might reclaim the concrete.

Bangkok is and is not the left-to-right, x-and-y lines of the map. As a city it can only be grasped at in the subjective, tangential language of poetry, not through the rigid objectivity of the Cartesian grid. It is these poetic cities I am always drawn to: from the black crows gorging on bright mangoes among immodest green countryside of Arundhati Roy’s Kerala, to the plunging eighteen degree cold of Peter Høeg’s Copenhagen where the freezing harbour water traps salt water in pockets with structures like veins, and to the labyrinthine world of Jeanette Winterson’s Venice where it’s never possible to take the same route across the waterways twice. It is these places I am looking for, knowing all the while that having arrived I will both find them and not find them.

Forms of transport that would be even cooler if they could hold a martini glass

Concord

Thalys

Hydrofoil

Mule

MIAT — Mongolian Airways