'Dungeon Dad'

The Criminally Insane Patriarch

Sometimes the new you read is so horrible you kind of have to get it into some kind perspective. Which is why I do tracks like this one, about Josef Fritzl of Austria, who imprisoned his own daughter for 25 years and repeatedly raped her, and much, much, worse along the way. It's pretty mind-warping stuff.

Sometimes people abreact to songs like this thinking that somehow I approve of this kind of behaviour. Quite to the contrary, I utterly disapprove of behaviour like this; and yet it needs to be commented upon with maximum derision and contempt.

If you're the sort to shoot the messenger, fine, shoot away, but I'm telling you right here you'd be shooting at the wrong guy. It might make you feel better to shoot at me, but that's just your own problem. The real problem is that there are many, many criminally insane assholes like this all over the world. Just look it up. Then have a deep think if you really think I'm promoting this kind of shit behaviour.

Really. I mean it.




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Project Update (of Sorts)

Life In The Weird Lane

Gra-Gra (of 'The Ownerless Mind' blog) sent in the lovely picture above. It's a metaphor for our existence. There's the fat cow of capital, with the regulated flow of milk controlled by fat capitalists squirting this stuff in tiny portions into our tiny little waiting mouths, bit by bit. Or perhaps not.

Film Projects
Got a short film coming up. Might be exciting, might not. It's a courtroom drama set deep in space on a mining colony, except it's more a Spanish Inquisition than a proper courtroom. The Corporation is big and fact and nasty and extremely exploitative so the law is a flimsy thing. The interesting thing about the project is hat it coms attached with somebody with a name, which I'll reveal at some point. It's still being fleshed out, but the script is just about ready.

'GAD' is still in limbo. We're waiting for some people with a name to do something worthy about it. Beyond which, I'm reallynot in a position to say much.

'Crashing by Design' is also in limbo because neither I nor Kendal have had time to sit down and plan the next draft. I hate it when projects lose their steam, but that's where we are, working in a vacuum while holding down day-jobs.

Recording Projects
With any luck, I'll put out a couple of more CDs by the end of the year for you all. That's right, coming soon are a couple of CDs with songs that date from my Satellite City days which either never got played with that band or were played but never recorded. These songs represent a chunk of my life that was consumed with Rock music. Yeah, capital 'R' Rock, man.

I promise it has some really cool songs - possibly the coolest songs I've ever bashed out, with none of the Zappa-esque lyrical excursions into deranged, warped, obscene human foibles that is more manifest in my recent works. Damn it, some of these are indeed love songs - love songs I wrote for women whose names, birthdays and postcodes I remember - who probably don't remember squat about me. Such is life for the errant songwriter.

The two CDs will be titled 'Escape From Satellite City' and 'Tales From Satellite City' respectively.

Another Thought I Had On Bill Henson
The press is having a field day since it was revealed that photographer scouted for talent and the principal of the school *gasp* let him. In principle it's not that different from if a talent scout for an athletic or sports organisation, or an acting/modeling/dancing agency scoped out the talent at the local Primary School but society being what it is, it has one rules for 'healthy' sport and another for 'degenerate' artists.

Of course nobody even reflects on the abject hypocrisy, instead they're focused on Henson as some kind of child-porn producer of their worst nightmares. In a sense, Henson's work sails very close to the prevailing moral winds, but at the same time, nobody with an artistic education/training has come out and said, "you know what? Bill Henson is a pornographer." That alone kind of flies in the face of the media sensationalism.

And in all this media shit-storm, Bill Henson seems largely unmoved. If it had been me I think I might have gone spare at the abject misrepresentation of my work. Even a Labor PM and his Deputy are saying how revolted, disturbed and concerned they are by this development. You'd think the principal allowed him to physically molest them (or take photos without consent), but clearly that is not what happened.

So my conclusion is this: Bill Henson is an inordinately brave artist - much braver than I; and for that fact alone is deserving of much admiration. I would never undertake his subject matter, given society's willingness to deliberately misinterpret his work as 'child porn'.

Yes, I might write songs about Pony the Orangutan prostitute or Josef Fritzl the Austrian Dungeon Dad, or David Hicks hanging out in Five Dock, but I sure as hell am not going to write songs about celebrating the nascent sexuality of a low-teen girl lest the AFP come surging through my door to confiscate my computer.
So much for my weirdness. I guess it shows I'm a pretty ordinary guy, which probably explains why my creative output is never going to change the world.

Dungeon Dad - The Sequel

So Far, No Hate Mail
That's right. Since posting my song about Josef Fritzl the Dungeon Dad, I haven't exactly received any hate mail for it, which is pretty good going for me. Anyway, seems there's now another Dungeon Dad, this time in Poland.

The case in Poland involves a 45-year-old man identified only as Krzysztof B, in keeping with Polish privacy laws. Police detained him on Friday in the eastern city of Siedlce after his wife and daughter came forward. Police said they believe the man was trying to flee Poland.

His wife, identified as Teresa B, said on private TVN24 television that the man used to order her to watch television whenever he went into the girl's room, closed it and took out the door handle.

"My daughter was frightened and did not want to talk about it," the mother said. She learned the facts when she found her daughter's diary, the mother said.

She said the man beat her and her daughter when they asked that he stop the abuse.

"He intimidated us; he threatened that my daughter will be dead, that he will destroy us all, if anyone learned about it," Teresa B said.

Investigators collected the hospital records of the children and were trying to find them and carry out DNA tests to determine their paternity, national police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said.

Prosecutor Miroslaw Zoch in Siemiatycze cautioned that it was too early to say whether the man fathered the two boys.

This is the picture of the guy getting carted away:

Not surprisingly, his fly is undone.

My Song Of The Week

It's More Like Song Of The Quarter

I've been preoccupied with lots of other things so I have not managed to record at a pace of a song a week, let alone, a song per month. That's how life goes, sometimes.

I've posted up a song about Josef Fritzl, a.k.a The Austrian Dungeon Dad.
The song is imaginatively called 'Dungeon Dad'.

The Absurdity of News

The Corbys

I've stayed away from passing comment or judgment on the Corby case in most part because I can remember how Barlowe and Chambers died in the 1980s and think that a jail sentence in the Indonesian jail system has to be much better than the Malaysian noose. The other reason is that the whole Corby family seems to be some kind of feral humanity that brings out the worst snobbery in us all, which in turn brings about the kind of media beat up that Current Affairs programs are so *good* at, and the ensuing media circus is unpleasant to say the least.

Now the media circus has gone to court. The paragon of virtue that is Mercedes Corby filed for a defamation suit against her old friend Jodie Power and Channel 7. Turns out Jodie kept a few photos from when they were friends.

Photographs of Mercedes Corby allegedly smoking marijuana and handling drugs in other situations were released in court today during her defamation case against Channel Seven.

The former best friend of Mercedes, Jodie Power, has told the court this week that she had taken drugs in company with Ms Corby and others and had communicated with her about drugs such as ecstasy, speed and marijuana over several years.

In July 1998 they had travelled to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. In Bali, where they had stayed at a resort, they met a friend, Steve Reuben, and Ms Corby and Mr Reuben were photographed allegedly smoking marijuana through a "penis pipe".

The photographs, including one of Ms Corby with the pipe in her mouth, were tendered into evidence on Wednesday by Tom Hughes, QC, representing the defendants in a defamation action brought by Ms Corby.

More photographs were tendered by counsel representing Channel Seven this morning.

Justice Carolyn Simpson said today that although counsel for Mercedes Corby did not approve of the release of the photographs, they had been tendered into evidence and were therefore public exhibits.

Also tendered into evidence in the Supreme Court this week were letters Ms Corby had sent to Ms Power. Ms Power said that the term "mo" allegedly referred to marijuana, "stoned" referred to being under the influence of marijuana, "e's" referred to "ecstasy", and "speed trip" referred to taking the drug speed, which suppressed appetite.

Ms Power said Ms Corby had allegedly taken a drug called "shabu", and she had taken it as well. When Mr Hughes asked what it was like, she said she and Mr Reuben had had "sex all day". Mr Hughes: "It worked."

In one of the letters, Mercedes also said that she was concerned about losing weight and that she was about to go on a speed diet which Jodie Power said was a reference to taking the drug speed as an appetite suppressant.

It's not a nice picture we're seeing of Mercedes Corby as a person. Or maybe I'm meant to simply accept her as the flower of post-modern Australian Womanhood - self-assured and strong, independent, adventurous and not scared of pulling a few bongs.

Or perhaps it really is the case that the Corbys are a pack of drug-fiends.
Wonderful. Either way, could things get any richer in the news? But wait, yes they can...

Dungeon Dad

The mind-warping story of the week was about one Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years and had her pregnant seven times. Apart from having the most aesthetically-challenged hairstyle to grace front pages in a long time, he did a lot of wacky stuff on top of that.

The children born of the abusive and incestuous relationship between Josef Fritzl and his daughter Elisabeth, and imprisoned in a basement dungeon their entire lives, speak to each other in a private language of growls and gurgles, authorities revealed yesterday.

Both Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, are hunched from the cramped conditions in their 1.7m high cellar and Felix prefers to crawl, although he can walk. Elisabeth reportedly walks with a hunch and appears decades older than her 42 years. Their sister Kirsten, 19, and critically ill in hospital, has lost most of her teeth.

Chief Inspector Leopold Etz, from the lower Austria region, said he was "staggered" to watch the boys initial bewilderment and shock as they found themselves in a world they had seen only on the television screen in their cell and known from their mother's descriptions about the life she had led until her incarceration at the age of 18.

Inspector Etz said when the siblings emerged from their cellar on Saturday night, they thought they were in heaven, having always been told by their mother, Elisabeth, "heaven is 'up there'."

The children were "wide-eyed and open-mouthed" when they encountered police officers; the first real faces the siblings had seen apart from each other, their mother and Josef Fritzl.

Felix is said to have raised his hand to his eyes at the sight of the sun and then taken it away again, as if not able to believe what he saw.

"When the sunbeams struck his face, he squealed loudly," Inspector Etz said.

He said the two boys spoke their own dialect consisting of gurgling sounds: "To say that the children speak is only a part of the truth. It is a mixture of gurgling sounds and noises, a kind of a dialect of their own.

"When they want to articulate what they say in order for us to understand them, they do make an effort - presumably out of politeness. But it does cost them a lot of energy."

Details also emerged from police interviews with Fritzl of his attempts to maintain a normal life with his "cellar family", watching car races on television with them for hours on end.

The Times cited a report in the Austrian magazine News referring to claims made by Fritzl that he would buy the three children toys and play with them while he discussed their upbringing with their mother.

He reportedly told police he took only three children to live upstairs with him and his wife, Rosemarie, because she would not have been able to take care of another child at her age.

It's just too sick. There's so much wrong with this story, it too probably deserves a song but I'm having a bit of a block trying to come up with a chord progression that suits this subject. How do you play incest in the key of 'C', for instance?

What I don't get is the insistence by psychiatrist that the kids are psychologically damaged. As Danny DeVito says in 'Twins', "Well, Obviously!"
What they're not talking about is the possibility that the dungeon kids are sub-normal because they're congenitally fucked, thanks to being products of incest. Why don't they just spell it out?

Anyway, the world is abuzz with the perversity of the whole story so it's not exactly we can tune it out. Wasn't it weeks ago our fragile little minds were warped by the story of the Deaves family where in the incestuous father and daughter claimed they didn't have a problem, but that it was the world that had a problem?
*sigh*

Anyway, speaking of wrong...

What's Wrong With Austria?
Here's this piece I came across.

It is useful in this context to mention some other things going on in Austria that have been overlooked by the international press - including a series of investigations that threaten to envelop the Austrian police. These suggest a force so allegedly riddled with corruption and incompetence that even those responsible for handling the Kampusch case have been implicated.

There is also the country's apparent problem with institutional racism. There is concern over a number of deaths and injuries in police custody of foreign nationals. (There have been no convictions; Amnesty International has made a formal complaint.)

Then there are the controversial photographs that have surfaced of Jörg Haider, the former leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party; the increasing tendency of Austrian politicians to sue journalists who dare to look into their affairs; the BAWAG banking scandal - which resulted in the loss of billions of euros in questionable investments - and the revelation in 2006 that this well-to-do Alpine country had slipped five places in Transparency International's corruption index.

There is a theory that Austrian culture is somehow to blame for the cases of child imprisonment that have come to light. Certainly it is true that in two of these cases, neighbours admitted to reporters that they knew the perpetrators and victims of the crimes only by their surnames.

There is a petit bourgeous formality in Austria, a hangover from imperial times, an assumption that a respectable member of the community - a lawyer or engineer, for example - could never be the author of a serious crime. It explains why a mother of three can take her children out of school without generating much suspicion, for instance. And, conversely, why foreigners - especially foreigners of non-Austrian appearance - tend to be treated with, at best, scepticism. A native of Ghana or Turkey travelling on a Vienna tram can expect to have his or her ticket scrutinised by inspectors far more often than white, German-speaking passengers.

Furthermore, Austrian privacy laws ensure that the private lives of prominent people are rarely exposed. Roman Abramovich retreated to Austria after his divorce.

Data protection means that it is virtually impossible to find out simple things: why a person has received planning permission, for example, or who put the advertisement in the newspaper for which only whites needed to apply.

But there is another reason why such crimes can happen in an otherwise affluent and civilised society. When neighbours of the middle-class lawyer noticed that she took meals only in her car, for example, the authorities were promptly and repeatedly informed. But, for reasons we may never know, they refused to act. No police officer or social worker was forced to answer for having failed to intervene.

It's certainly interesting. Why do these things happen in Austria, home of Adolf Hitler? Or is it one of those, "you just can't say that!" kind of comment?
Let's face it, I think Austria has gotten off lightly for giving us Adolf Hitler, its contribution to the NAZI thing and 'Sound of Music' thing. What if Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best thing they've given to the world, apart from... okay, Mozart. What if there really are sinister social forces in Austria that give rise to Adolf, Kidnappers and Dungeon Dad?

"What is it you cun't face, Maria?"

Are We Still Talking About Maddie?

First it was Natascha Kampusch, and now it's this Fritzl Family Robinson saga; now the McCann's are claiming the rescue gives them hope.

Speaking ahead of tomorrow’s first anniversary of the night her blonde girl disappeared, Kate told The Sun: “It proves that people can go off the radar, doesn’t it? But they are still there – and you owe it to that person to keep looking. It gives you hope. It’s horrible to think of the length of time, but Elisabeth being found gives you hope.

“It could be today, it could be tomorrow, it could be next week. You just have to hold on to that hope.”

I guess that's the kind of world it is. Maybe it's not just Austria - People get locked up in dungeon basements for years and years like Natascha Kampusch , the Fritzl Dungeon Kids and Kasper Hauser. It's simply a dog-keep-dog-in-a-cage kind of world. Just ask my parrot. He says "oui oui!"