I’ve always been fascinated by Wales. It’s something to do with my interest in ‘edge culture’, with distorted cultural mirrors sharding mainline nationalism into fragments. I used to hear English people put down the Welsh, mocking their accents and their tradition, and it fascinated me. Not the racism, but the existence of a culture that seemingly had the power to undermine, or threaten in some way, the monolithic Britishness of those insecure people. Such regions, such dichotomies, always hold up a dirty mirror to the dominant culture, and it’s for that reason I’m always drawn to them: places like Tasmania (considered by mainland Aussies to be full of inbred bestiality merchants) and Tohoku in northern Japan (a largely agricultural region sneered at by southern city slickers as a no-go zone full of witches, superstition and general farmhand stupidity).

So, as a kid growing up in an expat English family, I always wondered about Wales, this little territory to the west of wherever it was we came from. Living in Australia, I couldn’t get my hands on a lot of info about Wales, which meant that random bursts of popular culture filled in the gap. This is what I associated with the place: big rugby blokes with mutton-chop sideburns; the world’s longest place name, as satirised in The Goodies; Monty Python and the ancient Welsh martial art of LLAP-Goch; leeks; Welsh rarebit; those tall, funny black hats; cottage burners; Shirley Bassey; Tom Jones; Griff Rhys-Jones; Terry Jones…

Thinking of all the places I’ve since travelled to as an adult, that’s as bizarre a set of cultural associations as I can muster up for any country. Totally exotic to a 10-year-old.

Then there’s the language, with its soft hissing and guttural clucking. I tried learning it from a book when I was young, then when I first started using the internet I tried an online course. Too hard. Can’t remember any of it, but I do remember being terribly disappointed on my first trip to Wales in 1996 and not hearing it spoken at all. Granted, I was in a town (name escapes me) just over the border from England, but still…

On this trip I had a few days to kill and my embedded Welsh memories surfaced so I found myself in Cardiff. Again, it’s not the most Welsh of places but I had the vague idea of visiting all the British capital cities this time around.

Surprisingly, on the walk from the train station to the hostel I heard almost nothing but the Welsh language, mainly yelled and screamed by youngsters. Welsh pride has clearly picked up in recent times, as confirmed by the hostel receptionist who told me it’s now taught as the first language in schools.

LEFT: Welsh rugby bloke with mutton chops (Gareth Edwards, I presume?) outside Millennium Stadium (photo: Simon Sellars).

My room overlooked the Millennium Stadium, where the FA Cup final was held over the last few years; it’s also the new home of Welsh rugby. The weather was completely grey and miserable. Rubbish was being shovelled by the driving wind into the River Taff. The street outside was blocked off by two police vans and the coppers seemed to be conducting a door-to-door search. I went to a pub, had some of the local Brains beer — what an awesome name for a beer — and went to bed.

The next day I went for a walk and found Cardiff Castle just down the road. I’m told they don’t like the castle much here except as a source of tourist revenue. Given it’s a symbol of English oppression, I can see the point: it’s not really much to be proud of. I passed through the tiny city centre and walked down Bute Rd through the area known as Bute Town. In the heady days of the coal-mining industry, Bute Town was where all the immigrant workers were dumped and housed. It became a little micronation, a zone where city people would never go; Bute people would never go into the city, either. Instead they developed their own lifestyle and their own polyglot culture, some kind of multicultural nirvana according to the little Bute Town Museum I visited. I suppose the area was quite groundbreaking in terms of social engineering in the 1940s and 50s, although as poor and rundown as you’d expect.

Millennium Arts Centre (photo: Simon Sellars).

Bute Town is still multicultural today and still looks a bit shabby, although right at the end is the once-infamous docks. Now, we all know what happens to waterside areas in a time of rampant late-capitalism and accordingly Cardiff Bay has been redeveloped as a ‘waterside precinct’ complete with a new, Armadillo-shaped Millennium Arts Centre and bars and restaurants lining the wharf. In the tourist literature I was promised a buzzing, vibrant hub of opportunity and fun and frivolity — ‘Europe’s most exciting waterfront’, no less!

Abandoned Bute Town building (photo: Simon Sellars).

Maybe it was the weather, but there was hardly anyone around. I had lunch in a Thai restaurant and was fairly underwhelmed by a runny noodle dish and a flavourless Tom Yum. Then I went outside and marvelled at the strange arts centre. It seems that all recent arts centres I’ve seen have to look like armadillos or Giger skeletons. The Dutch are like that, too… There were a number of old buildings nearby, but they were completely deserted, abandoned. Does it make sense to waste these shells in favour of wasting millions on po-mo monstrosities? Maybe, like all governments, this one insists on investing every new architectural line with ‘forward-thinking’ design that they hope will take the place of forward-thinking action in day-to-day policy.

Cardiff Barrage: I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in all my life… (photo: Simon Sellars)

When I visited the Netherlands in 2006, I spent a lot of time exploring its astonishing system of locks and sluices — gigantic gates and computer-controlled flood systems that seemed to have been designed by a race of giant robots and then abandoned like discarded playthings. Similarly, here on the Cardiff waterfront there was the Cardiff Bay Barrage, among Europe’s largest civil-engineering undertakings, essentially a system of locks that have a created a freshwater lake that has in turn enabled all sorts of developments around the disused docks.

I caught a water taxi there. The nice Welsh lady crewmember told me that she had recently visited the north of Wales and was ridiculed for her Cardiff background — the purely Welsh-speaking locals mocked her as ‘English Welsh’. But I still couldn’t understand everything she said to me; although she spoke no Welsh, her accent was as thick as the bilge pumping from the boat.

The boat dropped me off at the Barrage and the captain told me he’d be back in an hour to pick me up. The complex looked high tech and I could feel a million CCTV eyes on me. I saw a sign that amused me, aimed at the boats entering the lock: ‘Speed limit: dead slow’. Beautiful: such imprecise, old-fashioned language in among precision-tooled weights and pulleys.

Yellow lines: nothing yet (photo: Simon Sellars).

Men fished. There were no women here. I was on island of pumping industrial hardware. The sky was steel grey but that only seemed to enhance the surroundings. I picked out accents against the sky, against the steel and concrete. A pink hut; yellow hazard markings. They seemed like codes to consciousness, signalling to me as if I was an airline pilot travelling through inner space looking for a place to land. I wandered around and noted that the yellow lines were vaguely semi-circular, yet frustratingly disjointed; they seemed to be straining to resolve themselves into some coherent shape or pattern. But I couldn’t see what kind of shape exactly, other than their intended function as beacons of distress and danger.

Still nothing… (photo: Simon Sellars)

After almost an hour I walked back to where the boat had landed; I could see it chugging away in the distance. Idly, I looked back over my shoulder and it struck me: the yellow markings had finally resolved themselves into an op-art, bumblebee hive of concentric circles, as beautiful and as glorious as the shimmering brushwork of the greatest art. I felt delirious with joy that finally this terminal zone of quietly thrumming machinery, designed for man’s absence, had in fact — like a tacky 3D poster — revealed its greatest secret to me at the very last moment. In fact, this *was* art, all of this landscape, every bit of it — much more so than any flashy arts centre dome could ever hope to signify.

(’These are our poems,’ Carlyle exclaimed in 1849, looking at a departing steam train. Well said, that man!)

Ah, all is revealed (photo: Simon Sellars).

When I got back on the boat, the captain said, ‘Did you see them? The lines? Work of art, that is.’

Indeed it is. But that was my gut feeling the moment I laid eyes on the Barrage, even before those mysterious ley lines had resolved themselves… On the boat there was a very large group of drunken senior citizens on their way to Cardiff. My God, they were loud. I wanted them to shut up! I needed to reflect…

LEFT: This is a multistorey carpark; park your car here, you may never leave (photo: Simon Sellars).

…and to consider the rest of this lovely city, with its cathedrals and steeples and atmospheric old streets and pubs. Indeed, it’s a nice old place but it was constantly raining and there was no one around, in contrast to the Lonely Planet, which had promised a buzzing hub. And I wasn’t doing ‘touristy’ things this time around, as I outlined in my first post for this Brit Blog. Instead, I preferred to remember my time alone on the lock and the moment when, in isolation, my deepest fascination was revealed to me in a micro-dose of crystal-clear reality.

In the evening I walked back through the town and I still had Children of Men on the brain. At that moment, Britain seemed really photogenic — if you wanted to make a film about a prisoner of war camp in a totalitarian near future. Brutalist architecture, and its descendants, scares me — the message it sends today, divorced from whatever context it may have had to begin with, is threatening and oppressive. Look at the complex below: it’s a shopping centre. I could have sworn I was outside Cardiff prison. Now, I know Brutalism is not the fault of the Welsh, but still…

Cardiff Prison (photo: Simon Sellars).

That night, at about 2am on the street below my window, a young guy with severe acne in a tracksuit with a hood pulled down menacingly over his head was arguing with the hostel’s security guard, who had asked him to move along. The hoodie kept yelling, ‘You don’t fucking own the road, cunt’ and something glinted in his hand. I couldn’t tell whether it was a beer can or a knife, or a hallucinogenic trick of the street light.

And that pretty much sums up, for me, the strange mystery — and the indescribable appeal — of the United Kingdom.

—————————————————————————————————————

..:: PREVIOUS STOPS
+ Norwich
+ Heathrow
+ Melbourne

I woke on the train to Norwich.

I don’t know much at all about Norwich, except a bit about their football team. In John King’s book The Football Factory, the narrator, Tom, recalls how a gang of Norwich football hooligans beat him up after a game. He’s very bitter about it; he makes jokes about farmers and sheepshaggers when he talks of Norwich, out on the southeast coast, but experience tells me that wherever city slickers fear to tread, that’s where I want to be. I like edge culture, the margins, and London did my head in last time I was there (I was actually living there in 2001, trying to juggle a bad breakup and chronic unemployment and the city ate me alive, some kind of aversion therapy; it’s no place for troubled souls).

There was a stray newspaper next to a half-eaten cheese-and-egg sandwich. On the front page was a picture of the little girl, Madeleine McCann, who had recently been abducted in Portugal. The media had been whipping itself into a frenzy, strangely reminiscent of the all-in public mourning over Baby Diego in Children of Men. Footballers were joining in the campaign to ’save Maddie’ — King Beckham and so on. Somehow the whole nation was becoming complicit with guilt. I didn’t understand how a footballer pleading on television could suddenly jog’s someone’s memory about whether they’d seen the poor girl or not; or indeed whether the magic of Goldenballs could persuade the kidnapper to suddenly show remorse and hand her over. All I could see, given the level of hysteria that was building, were witchhunts on the horizon, trial by media, lynch mobs all around, and the same saturation coverage of the same wafer-thin conjecture over and over again — the kind of saturation coverage that Madeleine’s parents are now starting to realise is detrimental to their cause.

Baby Diego: public grief (still from Children of Men; dir. Alfonso Cuaron 2006).

I had to focus.

In Norwich I was to give a paper at a conference on the work of J.G. Ballard. I was slightly apprehensive. I commenced a PhD on Ballard 10 years ago, back when he was a guilty pleasure, a true cult figure. His influence was of course strong in cyberpunk literature and industrial music and culture, but he had barely penetrated academia. In some ways I felt like I was blazing a new trail back then — until I quit from exhaustion and walked away from it. Now ten years later, I’ve returned to university and I’m attempting to finish my thesis…and everything’s changed.

Ten years ago Ballard’s predictions seemed so weird, so uncanny, so exotic and seductive…I felt part of an exclusive club. Now his worldview is the air we breathe; some commentators have argued that Ballard’s influence on other writers, as well as musicians and filmmakers, has tailed off dramatically, that Ballard’s own writing is suffering from exhaustion. But that’s because the early 21st century is so very Ballardian. Ballard has lived to see the world he was writing about take shape around him, with its hypermagnified celebrity culture, with its obsession with death and torture as public spectacle, as entertainment, with its breed of ‘me me me’ posthumans welded to gadgets and consumerism, obsessed with the self to the exclusion of all traces of community.

I feel like I’ve been asleep for 10 years and have woken to find the mental landscape surrounding Ballard has completely changed. I’m 10 years out of the loop; most of the academics at this conference will have been at it for years. They’ll have lit crit on their side. All I have is observations on the world around me for ballast. Would it be enough? I’ve never gone in much for hardcore critical theory; I’ve tried to locate the subjects I write about in terms of influence, to contextualise them within the machinery of cultural production that surrounds them. For example, my own paper was on micronationalism and the vocabulary of secession in Ballard’s work, specifically the types of autonomous enclaves he has written about since his very early career, and the political potential of these ‘non-places’. I focused on how the later works — from Cocaine Nights onwards — were explicitly concerned with defending physical space, a process that leads to the actual secession of the Metro-Centre as a ’shopping republic’ in Kingdom Come, and I tracked the simultaneous real-world successes and failures of actual micronations, such as Sealand and the Hutt River Province. This of course was a direct result of my role as a co-author of Lonely Planet’s recent guide to Micronations.

My original idea for the conference was to look at two early Ballard short stories, ‘Track 12′ (1958) and ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960), both specifically concerned with the psychological properties of sound and the ghosted layers of musique concrete that build up in concentrated technological zones — such as big cities. I was going to commission Mel Chilianis, a very talented friend of mine, to record a sound score based on those stories, which I would then play at the conference while examining the intent and context behind the source material. Mel was keen but in the end I plumped for micronationalism; it seemed logical, as I’d just completed the Lonely Planet book.

Never mind. I was sure it would all work out in the end.

I arrived at Norwich and checked into a B&B on Earlham Rd, run by a lovely couple. I love British B&Bs: tea and coffee next to the bed; flowery toilet seat covers. Hmmmm. After a good night’s sleep it was straight to the conference Saturday morning. No time to sight see; all I really saw of Norwich was Earlham Rd., at the end of which was the University of East Anglia, the conference HQ.

Another view of the UEA’s ziggurat, quite the finest Ballardian building I’ve ever seen (photo: Simon Sellars 2007).

The first day was fun. I ‘knew’ a lot of people from online and meeting them all in the flesh for the first time was a bit disconcerting to begin with. When all you know of someone is their online persona, it’s like you’ve been reading their thoughts, or you’ve been imagining their existence. To have them suddenly materialise in front of you after a year, two years, can verge on serious existential overload. Luckily, they were all nice people who liked a beer, so all was well on that score.

By and large the conference was most enjoyable and my paper, given on the Sunday, went well, although I was really kicking myself for not following through with the original ’sound design’ idea. For me, and this is well documented over at Ballardian, one of the more fascinating aspects of Ballard’s work is the influence it has had on filmmakers and musicians. Disappointingly, no one covered this at the conference. As I’d imagined, it was all firmly text based. So I had the chance and I missed it. Doesn’t matter — Mel and I will make that piece one day.

And that’s about it for Norwich. I did want to have a look around as it seemed a genuinely nice town, but my schedule was so tight. I was due to visit my sister in a few days and there were a few places I wanted to get to in between.

So I awoke bright and early Monday morning for a good start. I’d had a few drinks the night before to celebrate the end of the conference. I was a bit tipsy but nothing out of control, although I didn’t really remember going to bed. But that morning, as I pulled the bed covers back, I saw that the white sheets were completely covered in a sticky, brown…mass. I was mortified. I’ve seen Trainspotting. I know what happened to Spud the morning after. He couldn’t remember the night before either. Then he had his nasty accident. I was in shock. I didn’t know how to get out of this situation, as I hadn’t paid and there was no chance of just slipping away. I lay there for a few seconds, stewing in what I thought were literally my own juices.

And then it clicked. I’d slept on — and smeared — the complimentary chocolates that my lovely hosts had placed on the pillow. I felt one of the sweetest of all human emotions: sweet, sweet relief! God bless good old British B&Bs! I was still in a bit of a pickle, though. Sheepishly I trudged downstairs, apologised profusely and explained the state of the sheets. The good lady of the house replied, ‘Oh, don’t worry, love. Bet you thought you had a little ‘accident’, eh? That happens all the time.’

She peeked into the hallway. ‘Jim! We’ve got to stop leaving those chocolates out for the guests! It’s happened again!’

‘No love, don’t stop the chocolates,’ Jim called from the top of the stairs, ‘just don’t leave them on the bed!’

Jim saw me out. He said, ‘So you’re from Australia, eh? Big drought there’.

‘Yes, there is,’ I agreed. ‘It’s becoming quite a problem. The politicians don’t seem to know how to handle it. No one seems to.’

”Your government should be investigating the oceans,’ Jim said. ‘You know, desalination.’

Eureka! Maybe he’s right. I know there are environmental concerns with desalination, but maybe, just maybe, it’s preferable to this.

Jim had left me with a real poser, something I considered long and hard as I walked down Earlham Rd. to the train station. Then, as I passed the old Norwich castle, symbol of ancient military might, the rain came pouring down and there were newspaper sellers wearing cloth caps. I even saw an old timer pushing a barrow of what looked like fruit and vegetables. I thought of the old bloke reading the old-time Britain book on the train from Heathrow.

He would have liked it here.

Next stop: Cardiff (to be written up some time this week).

..:: PREVIOUS STOPS
+ Melbourne Airport
+ Heathrow

At one stage I used to listen to people whingeing about long plane flights and think they were dullards with no imagination, that I was above them (literally) because I was a space nut and flying to me was the closest I’d ever get to floating in space. I positively relished 24-hour flights from Melbourne to London. I was a fool.

When I was considerably younger and embarking on my first flights, I would carry in my mind a story far more essential than any hand luggage. It was something I’d read about old-time astronomers who were so puzzled by the lack of landmass on gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn that they had to invent bizarre aliens. They told the world that these unfeasible creatures — shaped like fleshy zeppelins — populated the swirling clouds and raging storms of these enormous gassy planets instead of giving the world the truth: that space was as sterile as their research. But it was inconceivable to the humanist mind that barren energy could exist, devoid of life of any sort, so the myth caught fire.

I used to make sure I had a window seat on long-haul flights, and from there I’d recall those ancient astronomical images, artists’ renditions from yellowing copies of Time-Life that my parents owned. Pressing my nose against the jet’s tiny window, I would populate Earth’s skies with them, visualising among the clouds those hovering, billowing puffballs with their huge, rounded eyes, bared razor-sharp teeth and enormous mouths, which served as air-intakes for the wretched creatures, sucking in the methane-poison of Jupiter (or, in this case, the clouds of Earth) to be ejected out the back of their ridiculous bodies, propelling their pulpy bulk through that hell-world.

I made my own fun.

Now I hate flying. It’s become possibly one of the most stressful ‘elective’ activities a person can put themselves through, except for moving house and divorce. I hate having to seal my toothpaste in a plastic bag. I hate the notion that someone thinks my toothpaste could blow up a plane. To wait an hour, two hours, while my bag waits to be searched, despite the fact its sole contents are a pair of dirty boxer shorts, a can of deodorant and a belt, and they can see that on the X-ray — that’s hell. Smelling the paranoia in the queues as we are all herded towards security and through the metal rings like cattle to the slaughter, cattle that’s beside itself with fear because it *knows* what’s coming. Terrorist culture — maintaining the fear — keeps us all in line.

I no longer have the brain-space to devote to alien fantasies. Now when I fly I just want to sleep and get it all over and done with and wake up at the other end. Valium might help. Or smack. But I’ve never been into either so I resort to gin and tonic in the hope that I can knock myself out. But the seat, made for thinner, shorter people in a different age just won’t do and the food is unrecognisable, but that’s always been a given, nothing that can be done about that.

It’s just not fun anymore is it? And I know I’m not the only one who thinks that way because I know there’s a global movement underway, a mass-psych experimental travel meme to find and make viable means and ways of ‘flightless travel’, and I’m definitely investigating that for my next trip, but for now I simply have to make do. Watch a movie perhaps, but inflight movies are as crap as the food, everyone knows that. ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’; ‘Rocky Balboa’; chick flicks; Steven Seagal; unspeakable Tom Hanks atrocities; Guy Ritchie and Madonna.

But I was flying with Emirates, thank God, and Emirates has ICE, a ‘next-generation’ in-flight entertainment system. ICE has a ‘classic movie club’ — around 30 selections including 2001, perhaps the ultimate inflight movie (any Kubrick would do me) and the original Dirty Harry, which still packs a punch, and which contains a Lalo Schifrin score that’s funky, fuzzed out and completely over the top; D.H. is always worth seeing/hearing for that reason alone. Plus another 50 recent releases including Children of Men, something I missed when it came out. A lot of recent TV, too, like Life on Mars. Plus classic-rock albums on the audio channels, and not just overrated cock rock like Zeppelin but quality dirge-metal like Sabbath, and even some new wave and postpunk like Siouxsie. Best of all, it has the facility to rewind, fast-forward and pause films. It seems incredibly complex to set up separate feeds for each seat, but that’s exactly what they’ve done: movies are stored in a central computer and accessed by each viewer as required. I couldn’t quite believe that someone, somewhere, had finally listened to consumer demand, that someone had finally recognised the keyword ‘choice’. I felt a huge wave of relief wash over me when I discovered ICE.

ICE, then, made the flight basically bearable. But so did the lady next to me. She was rocking her little boy to sleep and he was clearly terrified by the turbulence. But he was being a good little soldier, keeping quiet and trusting mum. And mum was a real angel, with a smile that told him all he needed to know. When he was finally asleep she struck up a conversation with me and we managed to kill a few hours. Sometimes that’s all you need to iron out the stress. And I was smitten with the boy’s demeanour — he really was such a good kid — because the plane was really bumping; it gave me pause, to say the least. Then they were both asleep and I turned to 2001.

I knocked back a few more gin and tonics and then I watched Children of Men. And the impact blew me backwards. I’ve noticed (noticed? I’ve been disturbed by) a peculiar apocalyptic shakedown on the streets of Melbourne over the past few years, following a similar undercurrent that shook me to the core when I lived in London in 2001. It’s actually too huge to go into here, but it’s something I’ve been trying to articulate over here and here. To be confronted with this on the screen was just too much — Children of Men’s scenes of urban anarchy were chilling. They synched exactly with this vision in my head. The impact, even on this tiny back-seat screen, was immense, especially in a sleepless, semi-tipsy state. I couldn’t get over it and I kept rewinding and watching that unforgettable scene where the forest-dwelling crusty-feral traveller types ambush Clive Owen and his gang. There’s a lot of detail in that film, detail that’s just so jarring. The unexplained attack on the train by some vicious, half-seen gang; the doped-up guy with the tattooed face and neck playing some kind of virtual reality game that seems directly wired to his skin; the Pink Floyd pig floating past the window; the ultra-strange choice of very early King Crimson on the soundtrack, in among kode9 and Aphex Twin tracks; the rubbish and absolute despair etched into the buildings and street scenes…yes, the story has severe melodramatic flaws, but so does Blade Runner. Sometimes the setting is the story; the streets live and breathe as characters; the city is alive in these films, pulsing with an artificial intelligence that, in this case, is fetid, rotting at the core.

When you’re on a plane watching this, who needs puffball aliens?

The scene that did my head in (still from Children of Men; dir. Alfonso Cuaron).

I fell asleep to anarchic dreams and woke on the descent to Heathrow. The weather looked cold and grey. From the air I could see some urban ruins. Some smoke in the distance. We landed. It took forever to get through customs. People were in endless lines, looking miserable. The film was replaying over and over in my head; there’s a scene where illegal immigrants are herded into a refugee camp in a future dystopian England. It meshed with the scene at Heathrow. I was descending into the uncanny valley, that most spooky of voids: culture shock; the crushingly familiar made utterly strange. Future now, literally; I’d crossed however many time zones and my brain was still 24 hours into the future, superimposed onto a steel-grey past.

Jetlag. A bucking horse to be ridden. It flattens perspective, time and memory. I hadn’t said goodbye to the lady and the boy. I was shunted along ahead of them and then they disappeared. Our conversation seemed decades in the past. I was confused and sad. I’ve been through all this before and still it gets me. Circadian rhythms; do not mess with them, ever.

Then I was out of Heathrow on the Tube train to London without really realising it and I noticed that every bloke was wearing similar boot-cut jeans and patterned t-shirts. Some of the t-shirts were pink. The Beckham fauxhawk still, somehow, remained a popular haircut for males. There were big sunglasses on all the women and fake bling everywhere. Tottering high heels were common. Lacquered hair was popular. There was an old huge bald man reading a huge leather-bound book called How We Used to Live: the Britain of Old. He kept looking up at the passengers then darting back to the pages as if seeking solace. He was in very good nick for his age and looked like he wanted to bust some heads. But all the lads on the train were huge, too. Roid rage.

I was close to passing out from exhaustion. My backpack weighed a ton. I’d brought too many books as usual. I just knew at that point that I’d never read any of them. I felt like handing them out on the train. They were mostly Ballard and experimental travel books; would anyone even want them? We’d just passed Osterley and there were 15 more stops to go until Victoria.

From there I had to interchange to Norwich.

I watched the two girls across from me. They were speaking native Spanish and they were tall and their nails were pink. They were super supreme and confident and they were eating Big Macs. They weren’t trash; their grooming smelt of lots and lots of cash. They just didn’t care about eating Big Macs. I remembered being in a McDonalds in Munich where you could buy beer and where there were Salvador Dali prints on the walls. Depraved, decapitated vaginal Dalis, too.

Europe sure is different; in Australia we have Formula 1 cars on the walls of our McDonalds.

‘England is not Europe but it does have McDonalds’ — that was all my sleepy brain could think of. I couldn’t even summon up the energy to recognise that these Spanish girls were incredibly beautiful.

Because I’d fallen asleep, finally.

..:: NEXT STOP
+ Norwich

..:: PREVIOUS STOP
+ Melbourne Airport

Best Film Award, Tropfest 07: ‘An Imaginary Life’ (Steve Baker).

On April 7 Channel Nine, accompanied by the still-infuriating-after-all-these-years Richard Wilkins, screened the films from the finals of the Sony Tropfest 2007 short-film festival, which was held on February 18. Tropfest purports to showcase the work of ‘Australia’s emerging filmmakers’ and there’s a big focus on numbers (it’s touted as the ‘world’s biggest short-film festival’, with a live audience of 100,000) but, as far as I can see, not so much attention to quality. I mean, is this really the future of filmmaking in this country: a crop of short films that feature talking dogs, fart jokes, faeces galore, cutesy kids…and sneezes? The Tropfest ’signature item’ — where each entry must feature an action or object chosen by the organisers — always makes for the most embarrassing moments each year the festival is held. In 2007, each short had to feature a sneeze somewhere in the film; wince as even the most promising scenes are suddenly deflated by this most saccharine of human sounds, or are ruined by a character sneezing in a totally haphazard and incongruous manner, thus ruining any tension, humour or romance the filmmaker may have been trying to generate. Imagine if the Tropfest organisers really had a desire to nurture challenging films: why not God as the signature item? War? Murder? Time-travel? UFOs? Uzi 9mm machine guns? Chainsaws?

(more…)

Last night I attended the second (and last, for now) screening of Philip Brophy’s 50-minute film Northern Void, billed as a “live cinema performance” accompanied by the real-time sonics of Ph2 (Brophy and Philip Samartzis). Northern Void is set along Plenty Rd, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston — specifically a three-kilometre, decaying industrial zone. The film is divided into three sections: The Present, set in 2013; The Future (2085); and The Post-Future (3079).

“The Present”: Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

In “The Present”, a series of tableaux unfold: factories, blank business parks, decrepit office buildings, brutalist petrol stations. They look like still shots, but close examination reveals subtle motion: clouds inch along; a bird flaps in the distance. There are no people. The shots are looped; almost imperceptibly, the clouds return to their original position. Is this a deliberate aesthetic? Or a a necessary suturing to prevent the intrusion of offscreen elements irrelevant to the plot? In any case, it’s very effective: nothing happens. Everything remains the same, trapped in an eternal loop. The sound design begins with processed field recordings: birds, insects, magnified to unbearable levels. It settles down and melancholic piano chords pick their way through.

(more…)

I was asked to contribute some thoughts about my family’s immigration story to the second book in Jim Hammerton’s ‘Ten-Pound Poms’ series. Ours is a strange tale, in that when we emigrated to Australia from England in 1970, on the Greek ship RHMS Ellinis, we left my brother and sister behind — they were old enough to do what they wanted and so they stayed put. I didn’t see them again for 20 years. This was clearly the most painful decision my parents ever had to make, but the context is that the grimy, economically depressed England of the time held limited prospects for working-class people like them.

Postcard depicting the RHMS Ellinis.

Although I was three years old when we came over, I used to have a recurring dream about the voyage when I was about 10. In the dream I was flying through the air, above the Ellinis, with all the passengers below, pointing up at me and gasping. The wind was very strong and everyone seemed afraid that I would be carried away, although I can remember thinking, “What’s the problem? I know what I’m doing.” Like crows do, I was able to manipulate the wind, soaring and sinking according to the thermal currents. My mum tried to reassure everyone. “Don’t worry” she’d announce. “He’s just playing on the humps of air.” That’s what she said — “humps”. This odd, out-of-place terminology has remained with me to this day. The dream is as vivid now as it was then.

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And the winner is Adam Kadmon, whose Terra Nova outline can be found below. Adam’s entry pushes towards the farthest limits of what a micronation could conceivably be, while actually making a modicum of sense and being entertaining to boot — a tricky balancing act that has been executed skilfully indeed.

Congratulations, Adam — a copy of the book is on its way to you.

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Terra Nova: proposal for a micronation of undersea spreading zones
Adam Kadmon
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The surface of the earth is constantly moving: loose plates grind, collide and rub past one another - but they also move apart. These sites of surface expansion are dubbed tectonic spreading zones, and they represent where new land is generated, causing both continents and seafloors to grow wider.

It is this new land, belched forth from the underside of the planet, that our micronation will claim.

There is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Atlantic-Indian-Ridge, the Scotia Ridge — these, and others, are now ours. We will construct expandable cities of submarine architecture upon their mobile terrain, and we will watch as our air-locked buildings grow, rooms popping out from other rooms, whole corridors stretching, insect-like, across the bottom of the sea. Our constitution will speak of Jules Verne, China Mieville, and the International Law of the Sea; our king will be a geologist.

We will cultivate vast hydroponic gardens and tan ourselves under sunlamps.

Rightfully outside the sovereign reach of today’s established nations, this new planetary matter will greet the world as already ours. Hundreds of millions year hence, we’ll rule endless swaths of undersea basalt, unmappably grand canyons of darkness in the deep.

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…:: MORE ON MICRONATIONS
+ Sleepy Brain Micronations Special, Part 1: introduction from the book
+ Sleepy Brain Micronations Special, Part 2: interview with the book’s co-authors
+ Sleepy Brain Micronations Special, Part 3: an extract from the book
+ BLDGBLOG: interview with Micronations co-author Simon Sellars
+ Yahoo News: interview with Micronations co-author John Ryan
+ Lonely Planet: podcast interview with the King of Lovely, conducted by Micronations co-author George Dunford

More soon.

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For the third part of our special feature on Lonely Planet’s new guide to Micronations, we present an extract from the book – the entry on the Republic of Molossia.
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THE REPUBLIC OF MOLOSSIA

His Excellency, Kevin Baugh, President of Molossia (photo courtesy Republic of Molossia).

The Republic of Molossia is surely the most delightful micronation on earth. While it describes itself as a ‘developing country’, this republic – surrounded on all sides by Nevada, USA – has a long and fascinating history, an incredibly detailed sense of national culture, and a beautiful insight into the ridiculousness of the modern world.

Formed under the auspices of Article 1 of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which recognises that all people have the right to self determination, this Nevada-based republic is a light-hearted antidote to the gun-totin’, government-hating secessionists so common to micronations on the North American continent.

LOCATION
Molossia is located in the western US. The Molossian Home Territory (aka Harmony Province) is situated within the Province in California. Desert Homestead Province is near the town of Twentynine Palms, home to the Joshua Tree National Park and the world’s largest marine base.

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