One of my favourite cinematic characters would have to be one I like to call the pissed off sociopath. It’s usually a guy, and he’s the kind of guy that’s a loner, an outsider. He’s often typically amoral and morally ambiguous, and may even operate on the wrong side of the law. However, he always has a strong personal code of honour, which he struggles to uphold in the face of overwhelming odds. The journey he undertakes is always one of redemption, and this character always has to face up to a moral dilemma, a choice, which inevitably ends in violence. The violence is something he is trying to avoid, to get past, to put behind him, but his antagonists always force his hand and back him into a corner, until he has to react.

The Western genre in particular is filled with these characters. Think Clint Eastwood, in The Unforgiven and Gran Torino (a western set in suburbia) and years before that in Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter.

Harvey Keitel also played this role well. In Bad Lieutenant and also in the Piano, where as George Baines to Holly Hunter’s Ada McGrath, he is both tender and at the same time somehow dangerously psychotic. To the extent that we don’t know whether he’s going to fuck her or beat the shit out of her – possibly both. Apologies if that comes across as horribly violent and sexist. I mean it tongue in cheek. Don’t mess with the K man is all I’m saying.

Dennis Hopper also played this role quite well, as Did Bobby De Niro, although both of them tended to stray across from sociopath into full on psychopath territory.  Think Hopper in Blue Velvet and De Niro in Taxi Driver, Cape Fear, or more fittingly, in The Deer Hunter.

Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson have also had a crack at this role on occasion. Hackman in Mississippi Burning, Nicholson in The Pledge.

A classic character in this genre is Guy Pearce’s portrayal of the reluctant outlaw Charlie Burns in The Proposition, a man caught between love of family and his inner drive to find redemption, in this case through killing his own psychopathic brother, Arthur. Although it’s an Australian film, it is still a classic western story. Even the scenarios are the same. Law and order trying to impose its will on the untamed wilderness.

For me perhaps the best proponent of the pissed off sociopath character doing the rounds today is Woody Harrelson. Woody’s got the role down pat, so much so that he can convey it with a single look. It doesn’t matter which character he is portraying, you know you’ve stepped over the line with Woody when he gives you that look. He even does it to comic effect in Zombieland, portraying a man in a desperate and often bloody search for Twinkies.

He does it in No Country for Old Men, where unfortunately for Woody, psychopath trumps sociopath.

He does it in the first series of True Detective as the conflicted compulsively womanising detective, Marty Hart.

In fact he does it in damn near every film he’s ever been in. He’ll probably keep doing it. Woody is the Hollywood version of Stone Cold Steve Austin.

 

Blog 18 – Conspiracy theories

I love a good conspiracy theory. In today’s world, thanks to the majesty of the Internet, we have access to every wonderful conspiracy theory that ever was, and because there’s no control, no censorship, no filters, they’re all out there for you to discover.

These are some of my favourites.

Time travel

This one is a beauty. Old photographs and movie footage, even from famous movies, where somebody just looks out of place, or even better, appears to be carrying and using a piece of modern technology, familiar to us, but not even dreamed of in the bygone era where the film was taken. Check the two ‘cell phone’ users here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkmYbwGXgYA

Now, far be it from me to sneer at the concept of time travel, I think it may even be within the realms of scientific possibility one day. All I will say is this. If we were in a crowded city space in 2016 and we saw somebody using a piece of technology that as far as we were aware did not exist – say if they were hovering above the ground on a board – do you not think mobs of people would crowd around that person, fascinated, and ask them what the hell they were doing? Now, picture this happening in the less enlightened times of the 1920s and 30s. The people in these films are walking among crowds, supposedly using mobile phones (despite there being no satellites to bounce signals off), and nobody is batting an eyelid. Do you not think there would be mass hysteria, followed by a lynching?

The fake moon landing

Why did we spend so much to get there? Because it was there and our closest satellite. Why have we never been back since the early 1970s? Cos it’s boring and played out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQyS-5ZmO_E

Neil Armstrong saw aliens on the moon

Alright then, if you insist we really did go to the moon, then the aliens were already there. Neil Armstrong saw them. Listen to this, and it’s not an outtake from ‘Lost in Space’, Will Robinson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EOWqB_xVWA

Aliens live among us

Course they do. Always have. Rowdy Roddy Piper was right man, they live, and they’re right wing conservatives. Again, as much as I believe it highly unlikely that we are the only sentient species in this entire unknowable universe, and there’s got to be something out there somewhere, some of these videos are a bit out there. This one for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aguEFSBbIi8

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Who invited all the religious freaks to this alien’s shindig? Or perhaps, who invited Aunty Alien to the wedding? Or who brought the zombie?

Reptilians

Okaaay. You know where I could go with this one. Either some humans are descended from reptiles, or, a lot of pretty girls just have really long tongues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSKhiwzxf8Y

Elvis is alive

This one is pretty easy to understand. From Jesus Christ all the way through to Michael Jackson, hard core fans have never been prepared to accept that their idol has really passed away. So in a mixture of devotion and desperation, they conjure up these sightings, through lookalikes, to keep the myth going. Elvis is one of the most prominent of these. See also, Paul McCartney is dead, for a tweak on this theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6lUM1rWOYU

Actually, I know for sure that the King didn’t die in 1977. Here he is wrestling in the WWF a decade later. Living proof, bubba.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzmWjqzOtfk

Ok, this is way too much fun. I’ll wind up by briefly touching on the Kardashian conspiracy theories. Not that I want to give these foul soulless beings any more publicity. Suffice to say that much like the Devil’s greatest trick being to convince the world that he didn’t exist, the Kardashians greatest trick was to fool an entire generation into believing that these talentless social parasites, who produce absolutely nothing of value or worth, are somehow immensely talented and worthy of mass public adulation, fame and fortune. That my friends is the greatest con-spiracy of all time.

 

 Out there in cyber space there are well known lists of Dead Porn Stars and Dead Wrestlers. Both professions have an unfortunately high mortality rate due to various circumstances. However, from my own career perspective, there is another list I would like to add to this sad pantheon. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to the world the list of…

Dead Public Servants

Now I’m not referring to this guy – http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/fivedays.asp Rather, in the office last week, a departing employee was gushing to a couple of us how he would keep in touch and never forget us, and I replied, no you won’t. We’ll never hear from you again, and in a few days we will have forgotten you ever existed.

Because it’s true, in the public sector, there is such a high turnover of personnel, that once a public servant leaves – they are dead to us!

A point well illustrated this week when I turned to the other party in that conversation and asked, ‘Hey, who was it that left last week, and we said we would forget they ever existed in a couple of days?’

‘It was Nigel.’

‘Christ, that’s right. I’ve forgotten already.’

In my lengthy public service career, which has gone on far too long cos I never got a real job, like decades, but it feels like centuries, I’ve palled up with so many people. People of both sexes with whom I’ve established a wonderful rapport because we all had some common quirk or interest which we could riff off endlessly and lighten up the endless hours of meaningless busywork.

But in almost every case they have gone, moved on, and we’ve never kept in touch. Not one of them. Dead to me. I’m dead to them. It’s like they never existed. Well, except for the ones who did something really naughty and really memorable and were forcibly removed from their positions, and of course that guy in Queensland when I was passing through in the eighties, who turned out to be a serial killer with a penchant for cute young guys like me. Boy we never forgot him… except I’ve even forgotten his name. Which I guess illustrates my point succinctly.

Which makes me ponder, now that I myself am entering the last lap so to speak, the final years of my stellar public service career, will I too be forgotten the day after that last tearful day I walk through the revolving door, probably pissed out of my head after one final knees up with all my great pals. Eh? Will they be gathered around the water cooler a few days later asking, hey, who was that guy who left last week? What was his name?

Well fuck that. That’s not how I want to go out baby. When I go I want them to remember me. I want them all going, ‘Boy, now that guy really got canned.’ In fact I want to go out like this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yngq9NmOnFw

But sadly that’s the lot of the public servant, the anonymous cog in the wheel. There’s no list of Dead (to us) Public Servants. The Dead Porn Stars and Wrestlers get a gong, but for us, it’s just a couple of people gathered around a water cooler going, ‘Damn, who was that dude who left last week?’

 

 

 

 

It’s just a personal, silly thing, but I always mark with silent acknowledgement the date of 25 June in the calendar. It’s a date of personal remembrance for me alone, because it’s the date on which I lost my virginity.

I am aware there has been much written on this subject, indeed, books have been published on the collective memories and often embarrassing recollections of the first time. There are novels and films centred on it, and of course, for many people the memories are not that pleasant.

I was perhaps fortunate that my first time coincided with someone I loved, or at least assumed I loved, as I had no prior experience of the concept and was very emotionally immature at the time. It was her first time too, and she was slightly younger than me. I assume she loved me too, in fact I am certain that we shared that kind of naïve, desperate first love where the whole world seems oblivious outside of you and her. Kind of embarrassing in retrospect, but also sweet. A wonderful experience to go through.

I can still remember standing at the edge of my parents’ front garden waiting for her. I had cut school for this pre-arranged event. She was also cutting but would be along later, having let her parents assume she was on her way there. She lived several blocks away from me. She was a couple of years younger. I was just over the age of consent, she was just under it.

The seduction was a drawn out affair, carefully constructed and administered as best as possible by a clueless teenager taking his queues from television and movies, and who had inculcated a certain old fashioned romanticism.

I recall I had to coax her along to quell her nerves. Alcohol was never part of the equation, nor any other substances. Just pure love and rampant desire.

For some reason I decided to consummate the relationship in my parent’s bedroom in their double bed. I guess just for the fact that it was a double bed and we had plenty of room to thrash around. Big mistake as it turned out.

The event itself was surprisingly long lasting and exceptionally clumsy. I for certain had no idea whatsoever what I was doing, no conception of what a clitoris was or any idea of where to locate it. I can’t recall if there was anything much in the way of foreplay, apart from a lot of kissing and mutual undressing.

The event was certainly unrushed and took place strictly in the missionary position. Sexual adventurism would come along much later, in conjunction with oral sex, role playing, locational opportunism, and all those other high-brow sexual escapades that linger long in the memory over many a cold night in later life.

So there we were, rutting and thrashing away and trying to reach some orgasmic goal – orgasmic for me of course, her pleasure never really came into the equation, nor did she ask for any.

When it was finally done, that first clumsy coupling over, we parted and rose for the shower to discover that my parents’ double bed was now coated in what seemed like a tsunami of blood. It was everywhere, so much of it that it looked like I had stabbed her multiple times. A wave that had swept through our lives and washed away our innocence forever.

In a blind panic sheets were stripped and tossed into the washing machine. The stained mattress flipped in desperation and the bed re-made, something else she had to show me how to do.

We didn’t get away with it of course, my mum and dad worked it out pretty quickly. Mum gave us both a stern lecture, and dad secretly high fived me when mum wasn’t looking and told me all about contraception. It was okay, I already got that bit right. They were good enough not to share the news with the girl’s parents, which was decent of them.

That was all so long ago now, but still remembered with a smile. Our relationship lasted several months, though I know now that I treated that girl disgracefully in my awful impetuous, macho youth. I don’t blame her for leaving me eventually.

Occasionally I wonder where she is now and how her life turned out. Did she have children and marry? Quite probably. I know she lives in another country and has done since before her twenties. I have occasionally searched the name on various social media, but I would never contact her now. She would be in her late forties and that was another time and we were two different people then.

It’s about this time that Leonard Cohen’s ‘Chelsea Hotel’ kicks in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx11oNHPDrA

 

Downsizing

 

A funny thing happened to the world while I was growing old in it. Over the years, everything got smaller.

A lot of it has to do with advancing technologies and the diminishing availability (and affordability) of space. The housing sector is a prime example. When I were a lad, everybody wanted a massive house on a quarter acre block with a huge garden. This was seen as a great status symbol in the post war era up until around the 1980s. At some point around then, city planners, or whoever thinks about these things, realised that the statistical population growth in conjunction with the diminishing lack of space meant we had to have a re-think. Ergo communal living, multi-storey housing, smaller blocks and the gradual decline of the expansive back and front garden. Houses are spreading vertically instead of horizontally.

Bloody good thing too, cos I’ve got an old style 1980s house with huge gardens and they are a bastard to maintain as you get older, especially with the endless heat we endure in Western Australia. No wonder everyone is selling off their backyards to stick another house on.

Stereo systems also grew inexorably smaller, and oddly enough, cheaper as well. When I got my first job, I rushed down to Alberts Hi Fi (RIP) and got myself a bloody huge fuck off Kenwood sound system. Cost me about two grand and took up the entire lounge room. Had to chuck out the sofa and the telly, no room for them as well. The speakers alone were bloody enormous. Talk about embarrassing.

Then when that monster finally packed in around 2010, I went down to the local discount hardware store and bought myself a complete stereo system with twin speakers, and carried it home under my arm on the bus. Cost me $200 and I’ve got it in the study sitting on a piece of A4 paper. It’s so small I sometimes forget it’s even there until I tread on it and it lets out a tinny squawk like a radio shock jock.

Cars are getting smaller and more efficient, and fuel efficient too – oh except for four wheel drives which are becoming increasingly massive, about the size of rocket launchers. But they don’t count because you have to be an arsehole to drive one in the first place. My love of four wheel drivers hovers down around my level of respect for wankers who drive V8 utes – Excuse me, I’d like to buy a V8 ute please, preferably in an obnoxious shade of green or baby shit yellow.

Well, are you a violent racist homophobic misogynist pig ignorant bogan bastard with an IQ that doesn’t hit double figures?

Errr… no.

Well you can’t fucking have one then, can you? Cos we only sell them to cunts.

Computers got inexorably smaller. From the warehouse sized jobs we had in the 1970s to the tiny almost invisible jobbies you get today. I still remember when one of the teachers at my high school proudly showed us the school’s first computer. He threw open the door to a big room and -the computer WAS the room. It took up the entire room and looked like a set from an early episode of Doctor Who.

Intellectually we are downsizing as a species as well. We spend years and years hoarding and collecting all this ephemera, all this stuff, all this shit that interests us, and we look at it once, if that, and just stick it away somewhere in the house. Until eventually, all this stuff starts to leak out and spread all over the house, and before you know it, you’ve got a house for your stuff to live in and no room for you.

Then you get old, and you suddenly realise, hell, I can’t take all this shit with me where I’m going, I better get rid of it. So you have a garage sale, at which a crowd of other people who have already got too much shit of their own flock around to gawk at your shit, but it cheap, and take it home to cram into their own space.

Oh, and music itself got smaller too, from the big LP disk through the cassette tape, the CD, to the MP3 or selfie stick or whatever it is you young punks use to store 15 million songs on these days and it’s all about the size of a thumbnail.

Think you’re so bloody clever, go on, go and queue up and sleep outside the Apple store overnight for your new iPhone. The one they only updated 2 weeks ago. By the time you reach the front of the queue it will be time to start queuing for the next one, and then you’ll be thirty and out of touch anyway.

Back in the olden days, product placements themselves used to be huge. I don’t know if it was because people read more or had broader attention spans, but even on 33 LP record covers and sleeves you got a whole spiel, usually penned by some middle aged square in faux hip youth Austin Powers type slang, which was quite amusing. I recall an old Rolling Stones LP I bought in a second hand shop was full of such voluminous piffle:

Get down my droogs, cos you’ve just plucked the new Stones platter. Don’t be a square, daddyo, don’t Bogart that joint, secrete it in yon sleevie before heading to the homester pad for bit of the old in and out… okay I’m channelling A Clockwork Orange now, but you get the picture.

Anyway, I’m quite happy that stuff got smaller over the years, cos now I can cram more of it into my house.

I tell you what else shrinks as it gets older too – people. My parents seems so huge and full of life when I was growing up, and now they’ve shrunk and faded away, almost gone. Their minds are gone, and their bodies are following them out of this world. Just lately I’ve noticed the first hint of that change in myself as well. The long inevitable decline and the shrinking away toward nothingness.

See the clouds gathering on the horizon, hear the bell toll, it tolls for thee – but you can’t bring all that stuff with you.

 

 

In late 2015 a documentary aired on ABC television in Australia about a generation of people who were born in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of anonymous sperm donations. Apparently there are around 60,000 of them. Long kept secret, this information finally came to light in the second decade of the twenty-first century as these children grew and parents chose to reveal to them the source of their origins.

This in turn raised a number of philosophical arguments on legitimacy. The discussion centred on the rights of the anonymous donors to their continuation of the privacy they were promised decades earlier when they chose to donate for a fee, and the rights of the subsequent offspring to track down their biological fathers.

The documentary – Sperm Donors Anonymous tracked the stories of several of these people, now approaching early middle age themselves, as they attempted to contact their hitherto unknown fathers. Both sides of the equation were given an equal airing and it made for fascinating viewing.

From the perspective of the offspring, there is the shock of discovery, and the desire to know the truth. From the side of the former donors, there is an insight into the progression of the mindset from the young men who chose to donate on the promise of anonymity for the want of a few extra dollars – to the more reasoned moral compass of the middle aged man. Both curious to meet any potential offspring, and acknowledging the right of that offspring to know the truth.

Then of course there is also the feelings of the donor’s own families – wives and children who were not in the picture many years earlier, but who will also be deeply impacted by the potential sudden appearance of a previously unknown blood relative. Thrown into the mix is of course the mystery of the search, and the emotion of that first contact. These stories write themselves without need of fictional embellishment.

Australia was one of the first countries to recognise the rights of donor offspring to know the truth of their origins, but the information is sporadic and State specific. Here in Western Australia, there is a central register of donors, the women who received the donations, and the offspring. The register allows the parties to seek information about each other, if they choose to do so. Anonymity is still an option, but it is being overridden by curiosity and natural justice for so many people.

You can almost picture the young man making his way to the hospital to make his regular series of donations for a handful of cash in the late twentieth century. Perhaps he is a university student, perhaps he is unemployed. No doubt he desperately needs the extra cash. Maybe he can’t even afford to run a car. Has to ride a bus or even a bicycle to get to the hospital, where he goes into a sterile room and picks up a small glass container with a screw top, and hopes that someone else hasn’t stolen all the pornographic magazines or he’ll have to use his imagination for inspiration. When he finishes, he places his sealed container on a shelf and pushes a button on the wall. A panel slides back to reveal a laboratory full of white uniformed personnel. A gloved hand reaches through the space in the dividing wall and removes the container, and the panel slides shut again. He opens the door and walks out into brilliant sunshine, or indeed driving rain. He doesn’t appreciate the import of the chain of events he is about to set in motion. He is barely twenty years old. Little more than a child himself.

Here is a link to the documentary producer’s statement:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/sperm-donors-anonymous/spermdonors_producer.pdf

Here is a link to the donor’s register in Western Australia:

http://www.voluntaryregister.health.wa.gov.au/home/

I need to add my name to that register.

Blog 13     Information Rich – Time Poor

 

In this age of downsized shrinking hand held technology, a funny thing is happening to the human mind. As the luxury items in our houses grow smaller (outside of televisions which are getting exponentially bigger and flatter) so the amount of information they contain grows bigger. As a corollary, the amount of information we attempt to cram into our minds is overloading, and we are becoming cluttered.

Well at least I am. When I were a lad, we had to rely on our imagination for most of our entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. Most of our time was spent on imaginary sporting encounters where you represented whoever your heroes were. If you were really well organised or perhaps a Virgo (ahem!) perhaps you might have recorded all of the scores in an exercise book, which you hung on to for years and years afterwards.

Other games generally included playing soldiers and cowboys and Indians. Hell yes I am that damn old. Oh and in my case, imitating professional wrestlers off the Saturday afternoon shows, whereupon mum and dad’s big double bed represented the ring, and my four year younger sister my unwilling opponent. After I had slapped and slammed her around for long enough and finally pinned her, all the while doing a running commentary, she would invariably run screaming to our parents for help. This inevitably resulted in my dad running in and chasing me around the bed (ring) while I commentated aloud that ‘this is no way to treat the heavyweight champion of the world!’

Anyway, that was then but now, there is just so much information and entertainment out there that I can’t keep up. The Internet for a start, is crammed full of enough knowledge and crap to keep me busy forever. Old TV shows and movies, new TV shows and movies, utube clips, and every piece of information ever created by humankind.

Even a technophobe like me knows how to download movies, and if not, other people download a whole bunch of them and give them to me on thumb drives. Add these to the multitude of bargain DVDs and all their added extras which clog up my shelf space.

My television is now so smart, it not only has at least 20 channels of crap, but I’ve also recorded a crapload of shows and movies that I’ll never have time to watch. Then there are books. I love them but I can only read about 50 a year, so the rest sit in growing piles on my study floor, alongside the already crammed wall to wall shelves. Yet I can’t resist buying more, online (ridiculously cheap or free), in second hand bookstores, at remainders sales, markets and op shops.

In addition to this there is the nostalgia network. Everything old is new again. Meaning that sad middle aged gits like me can once again access all the lost toys and shit we loved as kids on sites like eBay and Gumtree to recapture our misspent youth.

I’m just thankful I never got into gaming otherwise there would be another 23 hours a day gone into the ether. I never got past Leisure Suit Larry, the very first iteration of WWE wrestling, and football manager when there were the proper 4 Divisions, although I am proud to say I did fully conquer Wolfenstein 3D AND Spear of destiny – when I was supposed to be writing my Master of Philosophy dissertation on a university scholarship.

As a full time employee, and part time writer, I’d never get any writing done if I played online games. Oddly enough though, a lot of writers seem to be gamers. It’s like their reward for hitting a word count target. In fact a writer friend put me onto the online demo of the NEW Wolfenstein… Jesus H Christ. Talk about realistic and complex. Despite the fact the protagonist looks a bit too much like John Cena.

The only thing that hasn’t changed is the phoney American bravado. That’s still totally unrealistic, because let me assure you if you put me in a battered old warplane in a modern day dogfight and the thing was going down, or a shell racked building with incoming fire on all sides from a vicious enemy, I wouldn’t be standing there giving it the big bollocks. Nup, I’d be curled up in a foetal ball on the floor whimpering, ‘I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!’

Hey Cena, why don’t you run through this channel of bombed out buildings while the enemy fire on you from all sides and take out that tank launcher 500 metres away single handily while we give you covering fire?

Yeah, nice one chuckles. How about I stay here and YOU fucking do it?

That’s my idea of fighting. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and polish my world wrestling heavyweight title championship belt.

Merry Christmas.

 

In these sordid time that we live in, where hard core pornography is readily accessible to children 24/7 and pornographic images can be easily uploaded onto social media in an instant, it is difficult to imagine a world not so long ago where sexuality and all its manifestations were somewhat more restrained.

When I was a pimply youth, my mates and I would have cut orff our left arm just for a glimpse of tit. Porn was a seedy soiled magazine that you might be lucky to find handed around the schoolyard, or at the back of your dad’s cupboard, or under mum and dad’s bed, or stuffed inside the torn frame of the old sofa in the lounge (it didn’t matter where you hid it, Dad, I had a sixth sense for porn. I smell naked chicks). If you were really lucky, you would find some detached pages of a wank mag floating on the breeze when you were out rambling in the bush. I understand this type of material is called ‘grumble’, and can often be found in ‘grumbleweed’, look it up.

However, my real interest lies in the different social attitudes evinced between now and then, then being the early 1980s, around the time I was first lucky enough to get my leg over. With particular reference to the accessibility of condoms, the gentleman’s first line of defence against nasty unexpected guests which might linger after a visit to the perfumed garden of delights between a lady’s thighs. Our protection against having to shuffle off to the special doctor’s clinic to have our shameful dripping members tapped with a cold spoon by a sultry but disinterested nurse (always female, bet she had some tales to tell her mates down the pub) and even worse, have our urethras scraped by a savage hook like implement wielded with more menace than any dentist’s drill.

Ee it takes me back.

So anyway, condoms, rubbers, Johnnies, balloons, frangers, French letters, blobs. Call them what you will. I understand they practically hand them out by the dozen at school now. High school only I hope. You can buy them out of a machine in pubs, you can get them in Coles and woollies for Christ’s sake. The condom has become ubiquitous, like the Kardashians. You can barely turn around without having one thrust upon you (condom or Kardashian).

Well, let me tell you sonny, it wasn’t like that in my day, oh no. I have it on record that the experience I am about to describe was a common one for young males from the period spanning the 1950s to the 1980s, if not longer. When I reached a certain age in my youth, and a young lady actually deemed to have regular sexual relations with me, I did what any sturdy red-blooded young male would do, I took myself down to the local apothecary (chemist to you) and determined to purchase me some rubbers.

This ritual involved loitering nervously outside the chemist shop for around 30 minutes, looking frantically up and down the street, over your shoulder, making sure that nobody you know witnesses the shameful ritual you are about to undertake. Eventually, you stumble across the threshold into the shop itself. Immediately, the whole place goes quiet, heads turn and all eyes are trained on you. It’s like one of those Western movies when the nervous hero walks through the doors of the tavern. The cards hit the table, the banter stops dead. Everyone knows there’s a gunfight brewing.

So you nervously hover around the aisles, trying on sunglasses and pretending to be interested in the aftershaves. All the while your eyes are locked on the counter, waiting for the female staff member to occupy herself with another punter. Please please please, not her. I want the bloke, not her, the bloke. Seeing the bloke, the male chemist, finally become customer free you suddenly sprint toward the counter and look eagerly up into his eyes, deep, dark and rich, a repository of knowledge and all good chemisty things.

He looks down upon you expectantly, and asks what he can do for you today. Inhaling a huge lungful of air, you whisper urgently, …’A packet of 12 condoms please.’

You have to ask for them you see, because they’re not readily available on the shelves, oh good lord no no no, son, this is 1980. They’re hidden away under heavy lock and key with all the other dirty, unmentionable things. Speaking of, he looks down on you, and says, ‘Sorry?’ He’s tormenting you now, by pretending he didn’t hear what you just said, like that teacher at school who took an instant dislike to you.

So you repeat it, ‘A… packet of 12 condoms please,’ your face turning a darker shade of scarlet.

At this point he looks at you with a face filled with utter utter contempt and outrage. ‘CONDOMS!!!’ He repeats at unnecessary velocity so that now everyone within earshot really is looking at you. His lip curls up into a snarl, as if to say, this snivelling little troll has the audacity to believe he needs the unnatural protection of vulcanised rubber to stop his filthy seed polluting a woman. Before he reluctantly walks back behind that closed off bit of the chemist shop where they keep all the hard stuff, and returns with the secret forbidden item, which he drops in a paper bag which may as well have the word ‘PERVERT’ written on it, takes your money and watches you scurry away.

I’m sure it wasn’t just me who experienced this phenomenon. Otherwise these guys wouldn’t have written this song in the 1980s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ2X9SANsME

So what happened? How did we go from this pseudo-Victorian age of sexual repression full circle to the age of wanton promiscuity we now enjoy, where condoms are practically handed out to randy teenagers by the truckload?

Well I reckon this bastard had something to do with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo

Pretty frightening stuff eh? The grim reaper and the onset of the AIDs virus. No doubt a boon to the Catholic Church with its hatred of poofs and promiscuity. Actually the church frowned on frangers too, so maybe it was the State (Nanny State) who quite warmed to the idea of controlling our sexual urges. AIDS was gonna kill more Australians than Hitler!!!!

It certainly put the skids on my sex life, I can tell you… or maybe it was just that I was a hopeless social inadequate who didn’t know how to talk to women. Actually, yeah, it was probably more that come to think of it. Oh well, pass the frangers. Just another ode to my long lost youth. These days, the only time the wife and I use them is when we go on holiday, cos we don’t like to stain the nice hotel sheets.

 

 

                                       In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep

 

Shameless plug time this month. In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep is a recently released anthology of some of the best and brightest new work emanating from the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA). A collection of short horror fiction selected and edited by Cameron Trost and the AHWA committee, released in September 2015 and available on Amazon and Booktopia among other outlets.

Herein lie fourteen tales of antipodean horror covering the broad scope of our weird and wonderful wide dead brown island continent. A few random thoughts on some of the work of my peers.

In no particular order I’ll start with Cameron Trost’s Veronica’s Dogs. I loved this story. Possibly one of the most eloquently penned and subtle pieces on the unsavoury subject of bestiality I have ever read. If not for the subject matter the tone of the piece reads as if it could have been crafted by a respected author from the Victorian era, but it quickly segues and becomes quite Freudian. What begins as the tale of the protagonist’s dangerous and obsessive desire ends with him left in the doghouse, so to speak.

Marty Young’s nautical tale Upon the dead Oceans is a well-crafted dystopian piece about a ship of doomed souls traversing the seas in a desperate search for signs of life in a dying post-apocalyptic world. It reminded me somewhat of the bleakness of Neville Shute’s On the Beach, but when I put this to Marty he said the piece was actually inspired by the early twentieth century English author William Hope Hodgson. Naturally, I researched said author, and yep, Marty was right, it is a good tribute. A wonderful fleeting glimpse of hope permeates the darkness at the story’s conclusion.

I rather enjoyed Natalie Satakovski’s Beast, not only because she’s a mate of mine and I edited the story in its early guises, but also because it’s a bloody ripper of a nasty little story. The protagonist is an unpleasant fellow whose disgusting perversions turn out to be surprisingly profitable. It also gets a tick from me because it’s the only story in the anthology with the “c” word in it. There’s also a bit of a nod to Patrick Suskind’s Perfume in here, for those with long memories.

Dan Rabarts takes us back to the trenches of old Europe and the Great War in Elffingern, a blood soaked tale about an ancient German demon stalking the war zone for human flesh. Digits to be precise, fingers, which ties in nicely with the interspersed tale of an Antipodean printing press in the immediate post war era, where the nightmares shared by a young boy and his returned serviceman Uncle threaten to resurrect the demon through the power of the written word. This one is pure quality.

Joanne Anderton’s Bullets is a wonderful mediation on love, loss and loneliness set deep in the Australian bush. An ageing widow finds love in the strangest place, but comes to learn of the terrible price she must pay to keep it. A very evocative piece, steeped in the lore of the Australian country town.

If Joanne Anderton’s tale evokes the spirit of the Australian bush and forbidden desire from the feminine perspective, then Mark Smith-Briggs’ The Hunt does the same from the opposing masculine view point. A story of mythical Australian beasts and shape-shifters, in which a pair of hunters get more than they bargained for when they stumble across an old house hidden in the bush.

In another ode to the Australian bush, J. Ashley Smith invites us to partake of Our Last Meal, in which a spurned lover retreats to a secluded log cabin to indulge in sad memories of love’s labour’s lost. Beautifully written, the story is one of a long drawn out suicide note. Visceral certainly, but very well crafted.

Meanwhile, Jason Nahrung continues his series on Australian vampires with Triage, another well-crafted tale from a writer whose work I’ve always enjoyed. Steve Cameron’s Bloodlust is another tale of vampires and those who hunt them. Stuart Olver’s The Grinning Tide delves into the psychology of loss and grief in another parched and rustic Australian setting. This story is so good I can barely do justice to it in a few words.

Space prevents me discussing them all, but these are a few of the excellent stories contained in this collection, and all of them are worthy of attention. Well worth shelling out just a few of your hard earned dollars to enjoy some of the best the Australian horror world has to offer.

Oh, and I’m in it too, with a story about two feuding hitmen who take a wrong turn on a road trip and don’t live to tell the tale.

 

In the 1950s, as the Iron Curtain drew down across Eastern Europe and spread across parts of Asia, the United States rose in economic and military power and came to position itself as the defender of the democratic world. Under the aegis of this new world order a Cold War escalated between the Allied Western nations and the former Soviet Union.

Okay, that’s enough of the history lesson. You’re probably drifting off already and starting to wonder what’s happening on ‘The Block’, and that’s not good for anyone.

Hollywood was also subject to Senator Joe McCarthy’s pledge to oust any surreptitious Reds under the bed. A corollary of this movement saw the release of a number of feature films and in particular science fiction movies which acted as fairly unsubtle metaphors for the threat of communism to the democratic way of life. ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ for example, is perhaps the most famous of these propaganda style movies. There is a substantial list of these films at the website, ‘The Red Scare: A Filmography’: https://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/AllPowers/film.html

This leads me to wonder if any Hollywood films were made from the opposing ideological perspective. The only one which comes immediately to mind is the John Carpenter directed cult classic, ‘They Live’ (1988). Long a favourite of mine, not least because it stars my favourite professional wrestler of the 1980s, the recently late, great Rowdy Roddy Piper. As far as conspiracy theories go, this one is a cracker. The plot concerns a group of unemployed homeless radicals living on the edge of an unnamed American city, discovering that the world is actually under the subliminal totalitarian control of a race of reptilian neo-con aliens, who are able to hide in plain sight and manipulate humanity by way of sleep induced hypnosis and superior technology. The rebels are able to see the world as it really is through specially designed sunglasses and contact lenses.

The nefarious uber-capitalist aliens are aided and abetted in their economic rape and pillage routine by the elite one percent of wealthy and privileged humans, whom they quickly recruit and reward by way of further financial gain. These economic traitors are inevitably men and women in suits in powerful positions in business, the media and politics. The film is drawn from a science fiction story called ‘Eight o’clock in the Morning’, written by Ray Nelson, and published in 1963 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Carpenter was inspired to acquire the rights and based the subsequent screenplay on his personal disenchantment with the politics of Reaganomics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live

One of my favourite moments in the film, apart from the ridiculously over the top fight scene between Piper and co-star Keith David (who suplexes a guy in an alleyway during a street fight!) is the moment of revelation when Piper first puts on the sunglasses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVgl1HOxpj8

I still remember seeing it for the first time as a young man and thinking ‘Yes! That’s what I’ve always thought too – that there is a great secret conspiracy to keep the rich on top and the rest of us as slaves.’ Which is why, in this Internet age, after watching the film again on utube, I was quite amused to discover a whole gamut of related clips and documentaries which reveal that there is a whole sub-culture of people in the world who seriously believe that we are really living under the control of a race of psychopathic alien reptiles.

At the forefront of this spectacular conspiracy theory is an Englishman named David Icke, former professional footballer and sports broadcaster. Here is a link to his Wikipedia page which outlines his theories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke

To summarise Icke’s philosophy in a few words, he believes that the world is controlled by a secret group of reptilian aliens or humanoids called the Babylonian Brotherhood. They have been manipulating the human race for centuries and their bloodline, interbred with selected humans, includes British royalty, the famous, the rich and powerful. If you ever have a few spare hours you could enjoy reading into his theories in detail. In essence his beliefs are a metaphor for the struggle of ordinary people against an invisible totalitarian regime which seeks to control and enslave them (us).

So how far out there is the reptilian alien conspiracy theory? Well essentially, these aliens sound a lot like neo-conservatives to me. Consider for example, the US Government initiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) a proposed trade agreement between several Pacific Rim countries which will basically allow powerful corporations to sue governments if certain laws and regulations stand in the way of their right to profit at the expense of protectionism, ethics and possibly human rights. This assessment is posited from my own personal ideological bias. You can judge for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership

Ultimately, I can see where Icke and his ilk have got it wrong. They are on the right track. The world is controlled by a small group of powerful beings. However, they are not alien reptiles in human skin – they are in fact just right wing sociopaths. In that regard much like the imaginary alien reptiles they are not really human, because they lack a moral compass, empathy and a social conscience. Their only god is mammon.

John Carpenter’s ‘They live’ wasn’t a film – it was a documentary!

Rowdy Roddy Piper, he knew. That’s why they had him killed (RIP Roddy).

*No just by corporate sociopaths.