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.

My Guilty Conscience About Animal Wrongness

Pony's Saviors

Months ago, I wrote that song about Pony The Orangutan. Yeah, I know, it's really sailing close to the wind of bad taste, but you know, you have to do something when you hear stories like that.
Today I want to link to this article, because I think the plight of the Orangutans is simply terrible.

Smits's work equips him to bring the orang-utan's plight to a global audience. His tales include that of a female orang-utan who stumbled from a burning forest with her child. She waited until a human drove by then remained deathly still as the man raced from the car, rescued her baby and drove away.

"Only when she saw her child was in the hands of humans did she turn around and clumsily go back into the smoke of the burning forest," Smits says.

"I recalled a story from the Old Testament - the mother who loved her child and wanted to save it, so renounced it, just like the female orang-utan did.

"Please do not think now that apes are unable to estimate their situation realistically, because that would be completely wrong. Animals stricken by such catastrophe know exactly that their world is disintegrating and that there is no more chance for them."

That last bit just got me down. It's one thing to be oblivious to your world ending. If you knew your world was coming to an end, it would be that much worse to being that powerless. Then again, that's where we all are. Somehow humans have a capacity to ignore it and keep doing the dumb things.

My Song Of The Week (With Animal Wrongness)

Pony The Orangutan

Based on a truly mind-warping story... It's certainly warped my fragile little mind.

Song Link is HERE.

It's based on this story here. If you can't be bothered clicking, the entire article is thus:

Meet Pony. She is an orangutan from a small village in Borneo, where they cut down the rain forest to render the palm oil that gets sold abroad and made into lip salve, ice cream, chocolates, and cheese crackers.

Vice: So tell us about Pony.

Michelle Desilets [Director of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation]: Pony is an orangutan from a prostitute village in Borneo. We found her chained to a wall, lying on a mattress. She had been shaved all over her body.

I want to cry.

If a man walked near her, she would turn herself around, present herself, and start gyrating and going through the motions. She was being used as a sex slave. She was probably about six or seven years old when we rescued her, but she had been held captive by a madam for a long time. The madam refused to give up the animal because everyone loved Pony and she was a big part of their income. They also thought Pony was lucky, as she would pick winning lottery numbers.

Did the clients realize that they were in fact getting an orangutan?

Oh yeah, they would come in especially for it. You could choose a human if you preferred, but it was a novelty for many of the men to have sex with an orangutan. They shaved her every other day, which meant that her skin had all these pimples and was very irritated. The mosquitoes would get to her very badly and the bites would become septic and be very infected, as she would scratch them constantly. They would put rings and necklaces on her. She was absolutely hideous to look at.

How did you get her away from there?

It took us over a year to rescue her, because every time we went in with forest police and local officers we would be overpowered by the villagers, who simply would not give her up. They would threaten us with guns and knives with poison on them. In the end it took 35 policemen armed with AK-47s and other weaponry going in there and demanding that they hand over Pony. It was filmed by a local television crew and in the background of the film when we are unchaining Pony you can hear the madam crying hysterically, screaming, “They are taking my baby, you can’t do this!” There is no law enforcement in Indonesia so these people didn’t face any sentence or anything for what they had done.

INTERVIEWED BY JACK ADAMS

Yikes!