we goes with the prose

I have been avoiding this post for a month or so. As part of a regular full-scale retreat, from the world, from my mire of contradictory desires pulling me apart, to opposing poles. So thin I've been clinging to the bare bones routine of workdays - work, sleep, and nothing, nothing. Television. Magazines. Nothing of substance. Nothing that might actually cause me to think.

There was just so much noise in my head.

All of it whispered, sneered, pitied me with the same accusation : failure. I'd convinced myself I was somehow immune to the whole concept of failure. By upbringing, by character, by determination, by luck - mostly luck - I was simply meant to be something big. An incredibly indeterminable something, but a big one.

Which is all very vain, typical and young, I know. My middle-aged colleague (let's face it, when you wander into academia at 23, everyone is your parents' age. Plus five years or so) found out I had a highly romantic literary streak and shared love of 20th century history (it's like watching an action movie, but you feel very highbrow)...so he gave me a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I don't know why it offended me at the time. Probably because I fell right into the whole 'mystical conception of destiny' belief. Maybe that's a Gen Y view of life: Go, Be, Better! You can do anything! Go be everything! (OK, my flawed interpretation, yes.)

The quote was this:

“...... Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to willpower – at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will-power & fate have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will-power alone .... The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.”

Well, at least I'm romantic.

Here, I should clarify. To classify the last year as a failure is a bit of an insult. It's like watching Madonna whine about being barred from adopting another Malawi kid - it's ridiculous, self-centred, and almost embarassing. So I feel a little ridiculous, self-centred and embarassed to admit that I could be anything less than totally assured of my own grand vision, replete with a five, ten and fifteen year goal-set plan of attack. Actually, the thought of long-term plans makes me claustrophobic sick. Shh.

So I feel a bit lost. My jobs finish up end next February, and from there, I could go well, almost anywhere. I could recklessly spin the globe, choose a spot, take a plane and spend my savings dry. (Yes, this involves the least planning and as such, is the most appealing.) My brief stint in NYC was a total giddy love plunge, but I have a feeling the halcyon glow might dim a little if I had to actually work there. Perhaps I'll take on an internship somewhere. Like, this international development online magazine, development industry resource site...thing...is offering a journalism fellowship for its offices in TOKYO and WASHINGTON. (tokyo, my choice, obviously.) That could be fun. Learn Japanese. Live in a cubicle. Run through the Imperial Palace Gardens. OK. Maybe I need to grow up and stop choosing jobs on the overriding criteria of amusement/interest/fun. (This is what happens when you have no financial responsibilities whatsoever, and a sensibly growing truckload of savings.) Maybe I should get a serious job worthy of all those years (and dollar bills) spent on study. There's a reporter job at LexisNexis now. That seems like a sensible option. I mean, don't I want a clean, impressive, chic Pyrmont apartment filled with Ikea furniture? Don't I want to fill my life with stuff, with success, with my 2br/1bth contribution to humanity, with coffee table books of naked Greek statues from the Medici era? How else am I going to unravel at age 30 and live out my schizophrenic Fight Club fantasies? (See, there is a plan here.) Hell, maybe I should join the circus.

See: here's the rub. I like my squeaky impressive track record, my unblemished professional CV, my smooth-sailing personal life. I don't want to make a mess.

I suspect though, that life's in the mess.

And I bet that's where the fun is, anyway.

An American Ramble.

Why read?

For no reason at all
The simple, useless pleasure
Of a world unfolding
Layered thin & light
Like so many crisp Fall leaves

Watch each as they lift
That vital dusk gust
As if a dancer's offer, a hand
To waltz a swan song circle to the forest floor.
This Park though, is an echo
Of a wilderness Ramble
Lost long ago to looming towers, steel, glass

And subways! So old! Smeared greasy dirty
Thunderous, clanky like a fall-apart toy
Filled with miniature toy people, mad people
Business people, touring people, student people
Uncivilised - and damn proud.

Every subway is marked by green bulb lamp posts
Every neighbourhood looks like Sesame Street.
Pedestrians disappear into the dark by these posts
Like well dressed British moles.

Everybody has loved this city, but it's a Mormon lover
It can have another!

And I - well I
Delight in shotgun marriage impulse
Is there any way to be more American?

We could contemplate Buddhist scripture over Fifth Ave brunch
(The King, Not Content Until All Questions Found Answers)
We could laze at the Met
We could sit by the teen girl and her friends at Times Square as she compliments each passing pedestrian sing-song (Saturday night, for an hour.)
We could catch a show, catch a bite, catch a ferry (to Staten Island, free)
We could never sit still.

Don't you know though,
the answer is obvious.

You need a hot dog.
Ketchup. Mustard.
Go on. Get lost.

I turn my camera on.

I turn my camera on.

Nerve ends - nude

Flickering electric

Meeting - fleeting

Anonymous

As the sea

Grey and blue and

Ever so deep.

I make films

You said to me

Really.

The kind, you said, nobody sees.

(By the street red stoplight

You - new to this city

So this city was me.)

Come over

My kino-eye

Take what you will.

For your red light

Darkroom.

For my pen-slicked

Bare page.

...

Ah, tis a damn good song...

Love is as good as Soma, baby.

The Soma Cafe
Hangs deep in cigarette smoke
Everyone puffs
But me.

The clean gaijin
Asking, 'What do you love most - Tokyo?'
Most at ease
Posing questions
Gauging wisdoms

Strung thin and measured
Treasured
Single lines for the safehouse.

"I've seen the light and dark - "
(Takeshi, the DJ delivery guy
Who gave us chilli sake)
"Light and dark, and I
(you know)
Love them both.
In this city.
Tokyo."

Slipstreet lost
The Soma Cafe
Like love and wisdom
Hidden.

...

In other words...
"Do you really want to know
How they live in Toky-ooo
If you seen it, then you mean it
Then you know you have to go!!

FAST AND FURIOUS!!"

...

Take it from the guy who photographs the city...from an emergency staircase.

Where did I go wrong? on Channel V

My uni friend, Rosie, has just recorded a song with Little Birdy in Melbourne. Her song will be featured on Channel V's 'MySpace Mixtape' Show on Monday July 13 - 10.30am or 1.00pm.

The song is 'Where did I go wrong?'
Check it out on Little Birdy's MySpace here

Totally proud right now. I did catch one of Rosie's first shows in her pub-playing outhouse days ;) Bleary and skin bleached from not-enough sun, I'd just done the first draft of my honours thesis, knocked over a multiple choice ethics exam (you read that right) and hitched a ride in my friend's tiny green little mini cooper to the gig in Balmain. Along the way, we saw AJ, our one-time Catfox photographer, taking photos of Sydney Uni park on Broadway. It was one of those days, full of incidental social crosswires.

I was dressed for law school, so naturally I looked like I could board a yacht at any given moment. Embarassingly preppy in contrast to the shaggy arts crowd there - but hey, if you must be a dork, be proud. Sunday afternoon. Rosie's self-depracating wit and habit of letting loose everything thought that runs through her mind is actually quite endearing...well, it won me over, but I'm a loyalist.

To cut short the ramble, Rosie's band, The Rouge Balloon, is damn good. Jazzy-cool, bemused, ruminative, it's the kind of music well-attuned for late nights alone, or lazy days with little to say. Rosie is a talented writer, which shines through in her songs. And I really, really hate bad writing (tis in fact a pet hate, along with weasel words like 'nice' and 'great' and grammatical errors and spelling mistakes...yes. dork.) - so when I say good - she's good.

...

Rosie once asked me to do a review for her and get it published, due to my general knack for being able to do that. I said yes then said no because of the crush of other commitments. This is my small way of making up for that. I'm glad she's getting the audience she deserves. A slightly kooky mutual friend and occasional reviewer for The Brag did offer to do a review, noting that as a reviewer for a free street press music magazine, he had power and influence - it would be foolish to turn down his offer. She did the foolish, crazy thing - and turned him down.

Yep. Yet another reason why Rosie is so very cool. She's actually the second friend I met while studying Writing...and it turned out that she was already friends (from high school) with the first. Sydney. It's about as big as a fishbowl ;) I kinda love that.

...

In other news, my law school site launches in 2 weeks. Oh dear god.

Free-thinking hedonists.

I've been reading up about my favourite writers lately. F Scott Fitzgerald, W. Somerset Maugham, John le Carre, Michael Ondaatje, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Haruki Murakami. I'm not sure what in particular binds them. Each write of wealth and corruption, politics, romance, human flaws and foibles. Foibles, incidentally, is one of the funniest words ever made. Foibles. You can't say it aloud without giggling. Don't deny it. Also, kumquat. Onion-domes. There's more, definitely.

I like their restrained styles (ok, Plath excepted, comparing yourself to a Jewish holocaust or Hiroshima bomb blast victim isn't restrained at all.) To me, the mark of a truly good writer is to say so much with so little. The art of the understatement. Like evidence in a courtroom. Let it speak for itself. Let the world judge. They're my heroes, if you could ever speak so grandly. Some of them, like F Scott Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath, ended up spiralling into hedonistic self-destruction (or less hedonistic and more feminist martyr.) Still, I love what they were trying to do. Free-thinking hedonists. In life, they wanted only the absolute. The unattainable highs. By drugs or sex or success or wealth or wild company. Silken moments to forever play. Life at full volume. Now that's interesting.

"We die. We die, rich with the tastes of lovers and tribes. Characters we have climbed into as if trees."

- Michael Ondaatje, 'The English Patient.'

I have this feeling that people are watching, and wondering what I will do next. Perhaps this is pure vanity. Probably. It's the product of walking past your face on a wall every day and being told you are a person of promise and potential by your professional mentors. By professors and strangers, family and friends. Promise and potential are fickle. I'm very lucky. My sheer academic indecision prompted me to choose courses of study that fit my passions - creativity and high ideals. But you know, now what? My job contracts expire at the end of the year. My editorial team - essentially, talented friends - and I have, at most, six months to prove that this wild idea dreamed up over law school coffee does have an audience, can attract advertisers/sponsors beyond a seed money Law faculty grant, and ultimately, can change the systemic flaws that feed a law school culture of ruthless competition, suicidal anxiety, and ambition without real purpose. These are issues that really aren't exclusive to law school - they are just more prevalent and obvious here than elsewhere. So, perhaps we'll succeed. Then what?

You know, you can rule nations. You can lead companies. You can make grand speeches. You can be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a circus sideshow. You could be a writer. You could be an artist. You could be a film-maker. You could be an Indian seamstress or a Indonesian maid or a Columbian drug runner or Sudanese rebel leader. It really doesn't matter. It's not about you, or your talent, or your ambitions. No, life - and death, god or whatever your name for it, and love - is about something more ephemeral. You can't hold it, but you can taste it. You can't own it, but you can feel it. Your moral conscience. The flow of life. The Holy Spirit. The Four Noble Truths. Turn from these, and life grows claustrophobic.

Anyway, that's the realisation I've reached in these past few months, perhaps years. It has no practical advantage - nothing obvious. It's not a degree or a job promotion or a legal victory. But I have a hunch that these beliefs will lead to a very untidy, deeply fulfilling life. Life ends anyway. If you are not meant to survive, then life can't be about accumulating great material wealth by which to gratify your visceral senses. Sure, I like expensive living. But sustaining such a life is not the purpose of my actions. I wake up everyday never quite sure what will happen next. But I guarantee it will be interesting. It will be worthwhile. It will be something from which to learn.

2.04AM at the Hotel Costes

...I miss Japan. Or wherever. Wanderlust. All kinds of lust, really. For the late, late night. For a man. For the world. For recklessness. For cycling downhill in the face of a midwinter chill. For calculated indiscretions engaged upon a whim. Now, isn't everything better in cloaked insinuations? And rain. Everybody seems to hate it, but the truth is, I love it. I want to be bone-drenched. I want a complicated way of living. "Desire, like a promise in the year of election."

2.04AM at the Hotel Costes.

It's dark in the night, the city
Brightening, its arteries - roadways
Aglow with wandering cars
I can't sleep tonight.

I want you.
Simple. Untainted by contrary ambitions
The drive over, the June rain
Pulling up to park
Doused headlights

"You know, I read somewhere
The spaces between objects, inanimate and alive
Are not empty."

Molecules and chemicals and rain.
Rain.
Slipping from my skin to yours

"You're soaking. Come in.
Shower."

Marble tile, floor heated
Glass to ceiling
Steam billowing
Fogging my windows
Beyond, the sleepless city.

2.04AM. Daylight seems
Like another life.
Now, the rain, the night
Stretched bare.

All we have is time.

(c) Wenee Yap