No Rules in the Playground!

Amid concerns about an economic recession, terrorism and global warming lurks an equally ubiquitous crisis - the erosion of copyright. The big record companies and major publishers sound a little like the dorky kid running to the teacher in tears because those pesky consumers have broken the rules and taken all the lollipops. Brought to the public consciousness with the Napster debacle, the issue of illegal downloading has never really gone away. It’s become almost compulsory to foreground a review of a new musical release with a mention of this apparently inevitable and cataclysmic crisis facing the industry. So much so that Radiohead’s innovative (the cynical might say gimmicky) release of their latest album as a free download made the business pages in newspapers across the world. The so-called crisis is not limited to the music world – new technologies such as photocopying have threatened print media for years while Hollywood’s “Only at the movies” campaign is becoming increasingly hysterical. However, it is in the musical sphere that the average uni student most commonly crosses the line between consumer and pirate – as CD sales have dramatically declined, illegal downloads have increasingly become the norm. Free releases, legal downloading (through online stores such as iTunes) and bundled making of/live performance DVD’s have failed to coax back the proverbial horse.

Looming above the whole debate, and central to it, is the figure of the Author/Artist. A recent ad campaign financed by the Australian music industry put the focus squarely on the difficulties of life as a professional musician. Featuring the Veronicas, Anthony Callea, Jimmy Barnes and members from Silverchair, Evermore and Powderfinger, the video shows the popular musicians talking about the amount of ‘blood, sweat and tears’ spent on each record, followed by anecdotes about how life as a rock star isn’t as rich or glamorous as you’d think (they – gasp – still have to pay their mortgages!). The implication is clear – by illegally downloading music you’re ripping off the hard work of these talented (but poor) artists. When Metallica risk their street cred to sue Napster, drummer Lars Ulrich doesn’t talk about profit margins and cost curves – he relies on this idea of the Artist, the singular, originary creator, whose originality and effort establishes an irrebuttable claim of ownership over the work.

This conception of the Author/Aritist lies at the very heart of copyright’s creation way back in 1709 with the passing of the Statute of Anne. One of the most vocal proponents for the extension of property rights to include intellectual property was William Wordsworth, the poet who also championed the Romantic ideal of the tortured genius as Artist, which survives to this day in our hero worship of figures such as Cobain, Lennon, Kerouac and Ginsberg. The same words and concepts consistently pop up in relation to their art – they’re visionaries, original, new to the point of being difficult and confronting. It is this value of newness which gives copyright law its main thrust – to prove your copyright in something you have to prove that the work is in some way original – that by your hard work and talent you have fashioned something new.

This way of looking at artistic output is so ingrained that we often take it for granted without looking for the truth behind it. However, looking at the history of creative endeavour, the idea of the singular author begins to reveal itself as mythical as some of the stories penned by these geniuses. Wordsworth himself misrepresented his own creative process as a solitary one, where in fact he collaborated heavily with Coleridge and his sister Dorothy. Indeed, before the introduction of copyright the author was often seen on an equal footing with the scribe, the compiler and the commentator. Tellingly, the difference between the author and the commentator was that while the commentator added her words as a secondary resource to the words of others, the author placed her own words as primary next to the words of others – so that neither the commentator nor the author created something that was wholly new.

In music and film, the collaborative process is even more marked – both collaboration with peers (fellow band members, producers, actors, the work experience kid/coffee bitch), and collaboration with sources and influences (Pixies-Nirvana, Beatles-Everyone). Why then is the idea of a singular genius so pervasive? Partly, it’s the same reason why bands splinter into side projects - sheer egoism. Somehow (explicitly) collaborative work is never stuck with the genius tag as often as those creations which seem to have come straight to us from the dark corners of the brooding Artist’s mind.

However, going back again to Wordsworth and the creation of copyright, the far more important rationale behind the myth of Authorship was economical. After all, the genius-Author still had to pay the bills, and feed their family – which is why they needed to be able to see an economic benefit from their literary labour. Wordsworth expressed as much in his public letters, writing that without recourse to financial compensation for his labours the Artist might “turn his faculties…to inferior employments.” It’s the same argument being put forward by the Australian music industry in their recent ad campaign - artists need to eat!

This however has never been the contentious issue for us download happy music samplers. Obviously, free riders are bad for any industry, and to a certain extent illegal downloading of music does prevent some artists from being able to put all their time into the creative process, thus damaging the overall quality of creative output. The problem is that over-regulation is just as bad, if not worse, for industries - especially creative ones. What we are seeing with copyright (which goes hand in hand with the myth of the singular Artist) is that it is in reality about controlling creative output.

When the Statute of Anne was passed it was driven by lobbyists (some things never change) representing the biggest publishers in England. As new technology arrived which allowed for cheaper printing, smaller publishers started popping up reprinting popular works at a fraction of the initial cost - and passing those savings onto the public. The Bill that was eventually passed talked about the rights of the Author, echoing Wordsworth. However, in practice, it merely gave the large publishers a platform from which they could exclude the smaller publishers from the market.

Copyright is in effect a legal monopoly over a certain work for a given period of time. While the drafters of the Statute of Anne may or may not have intended for that monopoly to remain in the control of the artist, in effect what happens is that to see money from their work an artist sells their rights to it to a publisher.

Today, the current business model is that the record company gets almost all the royalties from album sales, while the band keeps most of the money made from touring and merchandising. Not much has changed in 300 years - copyright, nominally protecting the artist’s interest in their work, ends up being owned by publishers and record companies. So the idea of downloading as stealing is already looking pretty suspect, but when you consider the control that this model allows publishers and record companies to exert, the best course of action seems to be to keep downloading until the whole thing collapses in on itself.

The desire for increased control of a market quietly clicking their way to freedom was evident in the recent statements made by Paul McGuiness, manager of U2. He went on record criticising Radiohead’s decision to release their latest album as a free download and suggested instead the establishment of a relationship between ISP’s and record companies - in order that ISP’s can be held accountable for illegal downloads occurring on their watch. I don’t know about you but I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of record executives being the gatekeepers to the so called information super highway. Record companies are not exactly averse to screwing people over to make a buck, and what we could potentially see here is the sudden cot death of a promising new tool for creative play before we’ve even progressed beyond chewing on the Lego pieces. Corporate ownership has never been conducive to unfettered creative expression . It’s great for developing ‘useful’ (read: money-making) ideas, but does nothing for risky, envelope-pushing experimenters.

As with most things, copyright is driven by fear. The spectre of the genius-Author is a straw man set up to conceal the true nature of creative enterprise as collaborative. After all, if we can’t pinpoint the single owner of a work, how do we make money out of it? For Foucault, the fear goes beyond the economic - although part of the ‘crisis’ facing the music industry is a result of record companies’ paralysis over decreasing profits - the idea of the Author is a tactic to prevent the “proliferation of meaning”. That is, through the standard of ‘newness’ and originality, the status quo is able to control what is and what is not worthwhile creative endeavour.

The fistfight over Aboriginal art in the 90’s brought this into sharp focus – a lot of Aboriginal art has ended up on boxing shorts, towels and even bank notes. When we take into account the sacred nature of much Aboriginal art, it only makes their undisguised exploitation all the more repugnant. The reason they are so readily exploited is because copyright is not extended to them - the same goes for folk music, and traditional art around the world. It’s why you can go to GPO and buy knock-offs of hand-made African jewellery without a cent of it going to the people who collectively, own the art. In cases that have gone to court in Australia the argument put forward is that for something to be copyrighted, you have to be able to point to a single, individual artist - or else a group of individual artists. In traditional art forms, as in folk music and folk tales, ownership is collective in the true sense of the word - the community itself owns a particular image (such as the Morning Star held sacred by some Indigenous communities – which ended up on a bank note in the late 90’s), and no single member, or group of members, can claim ownership without the community as a whole. Thus the privileged are often able to enjoy the cultural products of the Third World without rewarding them, while on the other hand, Hollywood and the big record companies lean on their strict copyright to force patrons (whether First or Third World) to pay their asking price.

But just as copyright prevents the protection of traditional forms of art by claiming their lack of ‘originality’, it ironically prevents truly novel creative experimentation in the name of protecting preceding originality! But if the playground rules take the fun out of play, there’s only one option – break them. DJ Shadow’s debut Endtroducing… heralded the emergence of sampling as an art form, but the method is still dogged by the threat of copyright infringement. Public domain materials that were previously thought to be unowned or unownable are increasingly being converted into private intellectual property. The internet has made independent bands more viable than ever before precisely because it allows them to subvert the traditional business model, and to emphasise the entire musical experience beyond buying a CD - which record companies focus on. However at the same time people like Paul McGuiness are looking for new methods of control to shackle these new methods of expression. It’s been widely said that creative theft has always been a part of folk art and blues music, and sampling is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the new ways in which artists are choosing to interact with their collaborators and influences - visual collage, mash-ups and zines are here to stay, despite the fact that they often cross the battle lines drawn up by copyright law.

Sampling, the public domain, independent bands and creative theft are all tools in a vibrant new creative scene less concerned with making money than making art. And while illegal downloading isn’t without its ethical pitfalls, it can be used as just another toy in the playground if we’re willing to be creators rather than passive consumers. Take a little, give something back, and watch your creation grow.

The Modern Myth of Youth

It wasn’t too long ago that the prophets of globalisation were predicting that unshackled economics and vast advances in technology would help eradicate poverty and political instability in the world. The conundrum they now face is that while we have the resources to make global solutions physically and logistically possible, racial and political violence is just as, if not more, endemic than ever. The gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. One of the most common refrains being heard from the media is that apathy lies behind our inability to convert the promise of the worldwide human rights movement into tangible reality – and when it comes to pointing the finger, blame is laid most often and most loudly at the feet of “the youth of today”.

Disengaged and self-centred, we’re supposed to be more interested in self-gratification and cheap thrills than in the lives of people beyond our immediate social circles and the rose-tinted screens of commercial television and Hollywood. But delving beyond sensationalist stories about knife-wielding, brain-dead teens constantly plugged into i-Pods, camera phones and laptops, it becomes clear that young people are not only engaged with human rights but are often the driving forces behind it.

The real problem is not that young people are apathetic. Rather, it is that there is a dearth of forums dealing with the important issues of human rights within which young people are welcome. While the representation of young people in the mainstream media is widespread, young voices are seldom heard amongst the cacophony of tutting elder voices. The top down approach epitomised by the Northern Territory Intervention inevitably marginalises the weaker and oppressed groups. What amounted to military occupation of remote Indigenous communities was always done in the name of the Indigenous inhabitants, yet there was a total lack of consultation before the police and the doctors descended. The repeated cry, ‘what about the children’, while ostensibly a noble one also served to paint those Indigenous communities as unable or unwilling to care for their own – with the result that their voices could justifiably be ignored as the authorities swooped to ‘save the children’.

In the same way, almost all the programs dealing with the rights of young people are initiated by the elder, and without input from the young people themselves. Education and juvenile detention are just subjects whose immense impact on young lives and well-being is contradicted by the lack of discourse between the younger and older generations. Again, the overall picture painted is that we are unable, and unwilling, to know what’s best for ourselves. Despite the enormous enthusiasm and energy behind student and youth driven organisations, they are too often locked out of national conversations as soon as they’re given the politically fatal labels of ‘youth magazines’ or ‘student groups’. The wane in student politics is not necessarily the result of apathy, but rather disillusionment. We still care, but as our voices are increasingly consigned to the periphery, we can’t help but begin to think of our own opinions as marginal and unimportant.

The claim that young people are disengaged is therefore a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with Indigenous people, the homeless and asylum seekers, by not valuing our engagement, wider society makes us irrefutably disengaged. What makes matters worse is that this effective silencing leads inevitably to homogenisation – and if human rights seeks to protect and celebrate human diversity than there can be no greater threat to it than the ever more popular brush of sameness with which our feathers are tarred.

The intervention was an unapologetically one-size fits all solution to the problems confronting many Indigenous communities. This was not only one of the major criticisms of the intervention but of the whole history of European attitudes towards the inhabitants of this so-called terra nullius. By ignoring the fact of Aboriginal diversity, we go against the very spirit of the human rights movement – to treat every human being as an end in themself, and never as a means to an end. A vital part of this is to allow each person to speak up and to speak out, not merely as a statistic but as an individual. This is the only way to combat real and perceived apathy.

For young people, this is both an opportunity and a pitfall. As the media lumps us into broad generalisations, where the flaws of some are taken to be indicative of the whole, our natural inclination is to assert our individuality. However, all too often we fall into the trap of expressing ourselves in a borrowed language of irony and satire that served another generation well in battling the ‘squares’ of the establishment – but which now only serves to further mire us in the semantic bog from which our voices are too easily ignored.

The art, writing and actions of young people today testifies to the fact that us youth are not disengaged or disinterested – quite the opposite – but instead we’re disillusioned (and justifiably so). Anger can, and should come easily in a world of undisguised double standards, as human rights are too often pandered to political interests – Mugabe, Burma and Sudan stand out in recent memory. However, the language of disillusionment, which is the language of rebellion and confrontation is too easily pushed aside and categorised by the older generation as the easy passion of youth. Since the student activism of the sixties young people have been exceedingly good at creating underground spaces within which their creativity, intelligence and opinions can be shared and developed – but now we have been consigned exclusively to those forums, which are simultaneously discounted as immature and frivolous. The challenge now is to emerge into the light and show the grey-haired doubters that we can convert our disillusionment into a new language of engagement they can’t so easily discredit.

The Best Part of the Day*

The best part of the day – he lies in bed and looks at her wondersmile which lately only shows in her sleep. He guesses at what dreams could keep her so eternally bemused. He only ever has the one dream, or at least, different versions of the same dream: he is building a snowman, grabbing clouds that have drifted down close enough to be snatched from the top of extension ladders. When he’s finally finished he steps back to admire his creation, but now the snowman is him and he is the snowman. He watches dispassionately as the snowman walks away, goes to work, does the shopping and comes home, kissing her on the cheek. But over time the wind and the snow aren’t all that cold anymore – he has a mind of winter.

When she wakes up her wondersmile fades and he asks her what she was dreaming about. She says she never remembers her dreams. Later, she eats her oatmeal while he eats his cereal, and in the soft half-light of morning their mouths are still full of sleep – vaguely formed ideas chasing their own tails – so they eat in silence. In the doorway, on her way to work, she reminds him that the publisher wanted the proofs today and then she’s gone.

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Sitting down to work, he doesn’t even know how to begin, much less finish. He wants it to be a love story, simple and uncomplicated. But no one wants to read love stories anymore. Shouldn’t that be headline news, he muses. Stop press: Public Shun Love Stories for Blood Sports and Infomercials. Of course, he already knew what he could write, what people would line-up in droves to read. A masculine historical epic about an elderly Asian man in his autumn years who bids his children come closer; they shuffle over; they are solemn. He gives them his blessing and they set sail for distant lands, over the vast indifferent ocean. When they finally arrive at their destination they are met with the equally vast indifference of a country whose harsh, and unforgiving landscape serves as a useful metaphor for the hearts of its people. But over time, with a smile and a good work ethic, they begin to win over their new neighbours…He knows the story, has murmured it to himself a thousand times before he falls asleep. But every time he tries to commit the story to paper, doubts set in. What if they didn’t make it, what if they were swallowed up by that vast indifference (the sea or the people, it was all the same). And after all, how could he know where history became fiction? Shadowy and ghostly apparitions of fathers unknown were hardly reliable sources. Voices echoed down a long hallway to him but how could he verify them? Newspaper reports, photos, memories can all be fabricated. Just thinking about it he felt himself drowning beneath the words. And if forgiving is forgetting, isn’t it better that he let the words wash themselves away, like tears in the rain? How long can we hold these things in our hearts; the debris from countless betrayals compounding the flood until we’re drowning in our own memories?

No, far safer to write a love story.

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A few hours later he switches the TV on, and flicks through the 481 channels on offer. He settles for a live webcam of Times Square. Amidst the endless coming and going of interchangeable faces, one man stands still in the very centre of all the commotion, staring up at – the camera? He can’t quite be sure. In any case, he likes this scene, with all these people striding about so purposefully, their collars turned up to ward off the cold. He decides to leave it on as he cooks a stir-fry. Every now and again he glances over to the screen, and still, the man hasn’t moved.

When she comes home the stir-fry is cold, and he is camped in front of the TV, watching the man in Times Square. She watches with him for a while, but then she has to go over a brief for a hearing tomorrow. He doesn’t notice her leave. Instead, he sits enthralled, as snow begins to fall in New York. The man has now been there for hours, without moving, amidst the snow and the cold. Sometimes his breath comes out so steamy that you can barely make out his face. Slowly, the snow begins to cover him. Eventually, towards midnight, he is completely covered in snow. Someone comes along and puts a top hat on him and sticks a carrot in his face. He is a living, breathing snowman. And somehow, he can’t quite shake the feeling that beneath the snow, behind the beady buttons the man’s real eyes are wide open – and they’re staring straight at the camera, through it, down the fibre-optic wires, across the ocean floor, all the way to his living room, where he sits in his pyjamas, munching away at a bag of Doritos.

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Later that night, he climbs into bed, where she is still reading from a grey folder, even though she has to get up in five hours. He squeezes her thigh before leaning in to kiss her and – briefly – she smiles, nothing more than a flash in her eyes and an almost involuntary movement of the mouth, but still. He’s reminded with a jolt of those days when they studied together, her mouth pursed together as she read for the umpteenth time some case or other. And he’d find subtle little ways to annoy her, just to procrastinate, until he forced that little surrender smile. She’d been more tan then though, he notices with – surprise? – and he compares her now milky white arm to his own, coffee brown. And they had been more likely to laugh at their differences then, because youth told them that such things were only superficial. Youth told them that the important thing was that they could lie on the beach, like puzzle pieces, interlocked and interwoven, catching the sunlight in their open mouths.

Suddenly he had an urge to turn to her, right at that moment, while she read about mergers and acquisitions. And as if in a dream he saw himself cutting her up, drying the flesh like butterflies, labelling all the parts and storing her in tiny glass cabinets where she would be safe. He knew then, that the puzzle had come apart, and even in the act of thinking so, it came to be. Because if it wasn’t already over, why had he suddenly begun to write their story in the past tense? Was it really too late to put the pieces back together again? Her laugh – that was once piece. The way she tipped her head back, and he could see her top row of teeth, all straight except for one. Which led him to her voice, the way she made the names Dali and Rothko and Duchamp sound like some dark, magic incantation – that secret club she could invite him into, with a quick smile and a grab of his hand she would pull him headlong into it - into the vitality that used to make other people turn up their noses, those dead-on-their-feet people who don’t dance on dance floors – for a glorious instant she could pull him out of the constant flicker of leaky boats, imagined insults and a past inherited in large beaten impractical suitcases dragged through the decades and across the sea - for a moment she could give him a pen, a paintbrush, and tell him to write his own story for once.

Lying there in bed, he knew that he ought to have caught all these pieces, but in chasing he chased them away, just like butterflies. The only way to catch them is to be carefree, laid out on the beach catching sunlight, and then they dance all around you, until the moment you notice and reach out your hand but by then they’re gone…

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…gone where else but down a narrow corridor out into the wafting heat where the mosquitos drive whole families insane. To a village that has no name, or any name that it did have has been lost, obliterated from history and from memory. Where perhaps the venerable old man himself was a boy (that is if we are to believe that old people were ever young), and stood slouching, slim, athletic, pot-bellied and somehow vaguely regal, wearing nothing but a loincloth that stretched down to the ground, glowing green against a brown green sky his face painted an acidic red. Yes, he slouched there looking out with curious, unstartled eyes and a crown of leaves creating a green halo around the slack red face, two bunches protruding like great green ears. He leant on a slender, curved bow, and clutched an arrow in his other hand. Or not. Perhaps the august old codger knocked about in knee high socks and a skinny black tie, centre-parted hair and gangly arms. Maybe daguerreotypes lined the hallway of the family home, and yes, he could well have sat in the back seat of the new automobile, watching the sea of bicycles parting for him as he went to school, church. And who knows, maybe even the comfortably air-conditioned old patriarch-to-be saw the butterflies flitting past on the other side of the glass. But they would be different butterflies in that heat, and he shivers, right there in bed next to her even though really the climate is temperate and the winters quite mild there, but he shivers all the same because in his blood he knows the suffocating heat and the soft orange glow of the unnatural moonlight, the angular bodies of couples embracing each other beneath a palm leaf canopy, their pointed, painted faces bent towards one another; behind them the sky glows with unimpaired stars over distant unreal mountains.

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The next morning, or maybe the morning after that, he wakes from a new dream with a strange idea that neither breakfast nor daytime TV can shake off. It is not difficult to arrange. It arrives in a day or two, carried in by three burly looking men who finish off each other’s sentences. While they wheel it in he relives the dream. Faces peer down at him as if hovering above a cot and their voices coo, gentle and soothing, but the faces are blackened by smoke and their eyes are brightly lit by flames which force his eyes away. The smell of petrol is overwhelming and he thinks of the phoenix and he thinks of a Buddhist monk. He thinks to himself, between waking and sleeping, that this is a furnace. He wonders whether the fire will make him, or consume him…

And then there it is, in the middle of their living room, a walk-in freezer. It sits comfortably next to the old unplayed piano, and actually helps to fill out the room a little which had always been a bit bare. And once the door is closed and your breath rises up like smoke before your eyes it is really quite peaceful. From the outside, even all the way in the bedroom, the faint hum of the freezer is a little invasive, but once inside it kind of sounds like Om Mani Padme Hum, vibrating through to your very bones.

When she comes home, she barely notices it. Eventually though, during dinner, she asks him, in a roundabout way, why there is a freezer in the middle of their living room. It’s research, he assures her, for the book.

He begins in earnest the next day, squatting in the freezer in a fur-lined jacket, sculpting his snowman. Despite his best intentions, the snowman still kind of ends up looking like all the snowmen in picture books and Disney animations, a bit portly verging on fat (or well-built, if you will) but certainly very jolly. He pipes Mozart into the freezer (because Mozart makes babies smarter), read aloud from a chess playbook and from the AFL Record, hangs up prints of Picassos and Vermeers and Pollocks and a gaudy poster setting out the times tables up to 12 – but despite all the expense which he spends on making sure this will be a Renaissance snowman, he is determined that his snowman shall start afresh. No history, no past. No stories which he would later have to verify, cross-checking dates and examining witness testimonies. And certainly no puzzles to be solved. Just a single, formless myth, to give his snowman a heart. He whispered it into his top hat (underneath which must have been an ear):

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A boy lovesick and forlorn meets a girl carefree and lovely. They fall into happiness, their stories intertwine, they co-write many chapters, and one day they decide they want to imprison a piece – just a sentence or two – forever. So they set up the camera and rush to pose. But the boy no longer lovesick trips over the girl still lovely. The camera, in its ignorance, takes a picture of their kitchen wall. However, the boy now a man and the girl now a woman don’t mind. They laugh because the camera doesn’t know any better. The second time they take care not to trip and the camera, having learnt its lesson, takes a picture of the man in love and the woman loved in front of their kitchen wall. Days months years pass until finally the ink on the story of the woman much loved dries. Her story ends. He buries her with a tear or two and feeling his own ink drying he takes out the photo album and flicks through. And there, on the first page, is a photo of his kitchen wall. The man now alone lovesick and forlorn finds a smile breaking into him. And the harder he stares the more the tears samba on his retinas. Soon he hears too, laughing and tickling and kissing. Placing the photo album gently to the ground wet with his weeping he takes out a pen and begins to write. He writes a story about a little girl, a little forlorn but rather carefree, and then there she is, in his kitchen. He nods to her, and she closes his book and places it back on the bookshelf. And although she’s now alone, she’s not afraid because her story is just beginning.

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Once again, he’s watching her sleep and dream. Later on he will go and play some cricket in the backyard with his snowman, although not for too long, because snowmen are not really built for the Aussie sun. Later he might drive his snowman to a display village, and together they can marvel at the planning, the cleanliness, the newness. But for now, he is happy to just watch her chest rise and fall. It doesn’t feel like this is a different moment in time from any of the other countless mornings. It feels like running your hand over an old faded photograph, a moment that has come unstuck in time that you can keep revisiting. Then suddenly, blink, she’s awake - and surely the moment is gone, her wondersmile will fade and her dreams will trickle through her tightly clasped hands – but instead – the film keeps rolling, she just opens her eyes and looks straight at him, still smiling. It’s as if the intervening years have suddenly been rolled back at the force of her wonder – his too. And why not? Time travel is a small thing compared to the startling revelation that beneath the white goods and the nights spent side by side without touching…beneath all that, they might still be just a little bit in love.

Then the normal everyday colours seep back into that sepia-toned photograph, and they have to get up, she has to shower, he has to check on his snowman. He whistles a tune as he approaches the freezer, and from the bathroom she listens and thinks about how he hasn’t whistled in so long – but even as she is thinking this he stops. While still brushing her hair she walks over to the living room, and finds the door of the freezer wide open. But instead of the cold lifeless room she is expecting, she is confronted by impenetrable jungle. The baking heat wafts out of the freezer at her and she realises with a start that where the snowman should have been there is nothing but a sorry looking puddle. She calls his name out at the jungle, but her echoes return to her incomprehensible as if in some unknown Asian language. Out there somewhere, his feet still wet from stepping through the puddle, he waves mosquitoes away with an impatient hand. Equipped with neither machete nor ax, he hacks away at the jungle with his mind, still chasing, first this face; then that one; and finally a third – and each always fading into the tropical mist.

*With thanks to Nicholas for the title suggestion, and the Goose, Robin and Marcus for their insightful comments.

Peach Philosophy

Descending Individualism.

Waiting at the bus stop with Foucault, I realise the extent of my isolation. His bald head reflects the damp streetlights as a faint orange halo - and he sits with his legs crossed at the knee his hands flopped over them carelessly. There are bunch of other people here too, but none of them seem to realise that sitting there, in their midst, is the enfant terrible of French poststructuralism himself.

Or perhaps, they recognise him but like me, they don’t know what to say. What do you talk about with a man that turned Western philosophy on its head?

Everytime I go to open my mouth my head gets muddled and I end up flapping uselessly like a drowning fish. The other people at the bus stop begin to look at me sideways, a young boy hides behind his mother. Fortunately Foucault takes no notice but I keep gulping air like a madman.

The bus comes and everyone gets on board, but I’m drowning in air, my lungs are about to burst. Everyone shuffles on board with their eyes averted - there’s a great weight crushing me as if the sky has finally fallen or else I really am sinking beneath a sea of bald bespectacled men and the bus has left and I am on my own Foucault is no where to be seen.

Left alone at the bus stop I feel an affinity with everyone as I conjure up the image of her face, her full head of hair. Maybe she’ll be on the next bus, I reason, and to hell with French philosophy.

Peach and Radelaide Begin A Marvelous Adventure: All Buttons, Always

On Sunday 11 May All Buttons, Always will be revealed to the world at the Emerging Writer’s Festival Zine Fair! Come along to Fed Square between 12 and 5pm to check out all the zines on display. They’ll be more than 40 tables there, and you’ll get a chance to chat to all the zine makers yourself!

In the meantime, here’s a little something to keep you going ’til Sunday:

As they say, it’s a very modern city after all. It’s built with its back to the bay, straddling a toxic brown river. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen the bay, although every year people ride their bicycles around it. But like I said, it is very modern – people are always rushing about and if you’re not careful they’ll bump into you. We all seem to have insomnia so we arrive at work looking wearied and depleted so we drink coffee to stave off the crash. The dull buzzing is either in our heads or its the fluorescent lighting. It gives us migraines, so we always carry Panadol and Herron and Neurofin around with us.

Our trains and our elevators are silent, people don’t even see each other, bleary eyed and drained voices are barely functional in the mornings, let alone on the way home. And the longer the insomnia lasts, the more susceptible we are to narcolepsy. Construction workers have to be harnessed in case they micro sleep on top of half-built skyscrapers (none of our buildings are ever finished) and it is common place to avoid sleeping drivers on the freeway.

There is a black market in sleep. I don’t go there, I’d feel too guilty about sleeping with all the work that I have to do. But some people do, they pay a fortune for the sleep of poor rural people who come to the city to sell the only commodity they have left. I’ve heard that there is also a black market for dreams – but that they only way to get there is to dream of it. Sitting in my cubicle I often wonder if there is anyway out of this self sufficient labyrinth.

I’m handed one when I get a day off – one day I arrive at work and there is a letter sitting on my desk – my first day off in three years. I think about the black market, but I can’t justify spending that much money. Instead I wander up and down our very modern city, where everyone seems so busy. But for the life of me I can’t think of anything to do with my day off.

Peach Presents: Frank

Who is Frank?

Frank is a time traveller. He is a gender illusionist. He is a six foot tall bunny rabbit.

When you are close to someone, it is important to be frank with them.

“On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” Matthew 2.11

Frank exists somewhere between me and you. When we walked down the road to Emmaus, he was the third amongst us, and yet we did not recognise him. When we spoke quietly about the future, he prophesised both the storm to come and the calm that would remain, but we mistook his voice for each other’s. Fearing the thunder and the lightening we locked ourselves in our homes, where he appeared to us. I looked at your face, formerly so young, so defiant but now browbeaten and cowed, your weather lined face was Frank’s.

and streaming down the road she laughed tears streaming down her face she cried out Frank! Frank! but he was too far away so streaming down the road she

Frank is as Frank does.

Good Peaches and Bad Peaches

Not much can come from writing with emotion, unless of course you are spectacularly gifted at channeling your angst into free verse. Then again, nothing much can come out of intellectualising your feelings either. At some point, we can tend to over analyse , usually because we want to explain away why exactly it is that we insist on treating each other like cunts.

The tendency to over think also makes for pretty dry writing, which is why I shy away from non-fiction. People seem to think that by writing down what happened on a particular day to a particular person, that they are in some way capturing the truth of that moment. But such a telling ignores completely the emotional truth of a situation, which is why we go (or went) to the movies, because a good old-fashioned story can dive straight to the heart of the matter, as it were.

The problem today is that we tend to watch the news or go online to read about the “facts”, because in the wake of wikipedia and CNN information is what we crave, rather than truth. So, onto the peaches.

—

Once upon a time, there was a young peach who had all the best advantages in life. He had a safe spot on his tree, nestled amongst the branches and the other peaches, safe from the prying beaks of passing birds. But he was not too nestled away that he didn’t get enough sun. In fact, his tree was planted in a garden so warm and sun-kissed that he and his brothers grew to be large (but not fat), charming and generally well-rounded peaches.

He had a fine, if rather interrupted education at the hands of the caterpillars who built their cocoons in his tree, before bursting out in a flurry of colour and wings. It was always sad when his teacher-butterflies flew away, but it pleased him to think that they got to soar away over the horizon, to the distant regions Beyond the House, of which he knew very little.

Of course, such a well-rounded peach couldn’t be kept on his tree forever, and he was itching to get away and see the world. But his tree loved him very much, and wanted him to stay. They began to bicker about it, especially whenever the young peach wanted to stay up late and watch the moon rise overhead. The tree didn’t understand. She thought the garden was the greatest place in all the world, and that any sensible peach would want to stay right there. He could, she offered, even fall one day and land in the rich moist soil and grow into a great big tree himself. Wouldn’t he like that?

Unfortunately, he didn’t like it at all. He wanted to be free, unshackled, and though he loved his tree, he couldn’t think of anything more sedate and fixed as the life of a tree. I want to see Beyond, he would say, whenever the wind shook the tree’s branches, whistling about the peaches and whispering too. I want to go where the wind comes from, begged the young peach. I want to talk to the wind and swim in the sea and fly, like my teachers! His tree would shake her branches even more vigorously. There is no Beyond, she would say, and peaches can’t fly.

It went on and on, and all the while the days grew shorter, and the wind bit more than it whispered. The young peach began to grow cold, as his fuzz did little to ward of the elements. Finally one day, when we were playing outside, we hit the tree with our ball, and the young peach flew off, landing in the damp grass. We gathered around, curious and hungry, but time and the cold had done their work. The peach was rotten.

Peach in Fed Square, Four Am

It’s cold, bitterly cold. The only cars cruising past are taxis, which strangely seem to be refusing most potential patrons. It’s late enough that people are just wandering, making up their minds whether to go home or to stay out for another drink.

It’s cold and I’m tired enough that it’s hard to string together thoughts that aren’t incoherent or needlessly bitter. The temperature seems to be able to get beneath by clothes and under my skin. It infects me. A friend once told me that to ignore the biting wind, all you need to do is realise that the wind isn’t going through you - it’s going around you.

Unfortunately this doesn’t really work and so I’m sitting on cafe chair that’s tied to the table, and I can hear the sound of people shouting and glass breaking and buses are leaving but I hope they are the wrong buses.

We always hope that they are the wrong buses, foolishly believing that the right one is still to come. After all, don’t the chances get better and better, the longer you wait?

Only if you believe the buses will keep coming forever. But if you think they will eventually end, perhaps when the sun pokes up above the cathedrals, then really your chances diminish with each passing bus.

But all this is rather a moot point - useless philosophising while my battery runs out and the cold continues to seep and there’s no one to call. And no buses have come past for a while. Perhaps they’ve already finished? In which case I might follow river down to suburbia. A long walk but at least I might get warm.

Peach Enters the Emerging Writer’s Festival Competition

Travellers in search of El Dorado or Atlantis must listen attentively to the natives, who tell of a city without a past – where the people are too busy with the present to stop and look over their shoulders. They say that if you head out beyond the mountains, following the great dirty river that winds its way past well-kept vineyards, you will come across a city that settles on the horizon like a mirage. And no matter how close you get, it always remains there, just out of reach – even as you wander its many grey laneways the city seems unreal to you.

The city is built in such a way that you lose all perspective. Every street seems to head straight on without interruption nor incline nor decline until it passes beyond your vision. Such a flat city causes many travellers to lose their heads, the natives say. They spend many hours underground, throwing their money at polite well-dressed staff who don’t wear watches. The travellers forget the time, their families, their homes across the sea.

To say that the people of this city love their sport is an understatement. They bump and jostle each other on the wide, flat streets with such ferocity that they have little time for love, or politics.

It is a city constantly under construction. Its citizens reinvent their surroundings at every opportunity. The natives will point to themselves as examples, and the traveller sees them transform before their own eyes – noble savages to helpless primitives to national hero to alcoholic. The people welcome travellers because their own ears are already too much abused by tales of glory, discovery and liveability. The city would die if not for the constant influx of travellers who believed in the promise of the mirage they saw nestling on the bay in the distance. It is a city of dreamers.

Secretly, the city realises its own inadequacy. The people know that their fashion is too grey, their laneways too wide and their love too suburban.

Secretly, they hope for an event that will finally put them on the map. (Or at least on a T-shirt).

While Filing Peach Daydreams About Napkin Eyes

She’s the kind of person who thinks of insomnia as something that would be useful to have. She talks too quickly, and never chews her food properly. She’s economical with her laughter, rationing it out so that she has enough for very serious emergencies, when she has a tendency to giggle with hysteria.

He has napkins for eyes. He has different napkins for different occasions. For day-to-day use, he wears plain napkins from cafes and mid-range restaurants. He draws his eyes on roughly with a biro. He wore a fancy emroidered napkin to his Year 12 Formal, and his eyes were drawn with a calligraphy pen his Dad gave him for his birthday. When he’s slumming around the house, or feeling really hungover, he wears McDonald’s napkins, but they tear quite easily, and it’s very difficult to draw eyes on them, even with a biro.

They met on a rainy day. It seemed to her that he was crying. She averted her eyes, because crying made her nervous. The pitter-patter of the rain followed her all the way to her office, where she was distracted from work by the thought of his napkins. She wondered what it would be like to draw eyes onto his napkins for him. As the grey day wore on she imagined drawing happy eyes, bright and sparkling.

They met on a rainy day. It looked as if he was crying, because the rain made his eyes run. He tried to smile at her as she passed, but she averted her eyes. That made him want to take his napkins off and draw on sad eyes. Instead, he went home and watched the television. But nothing could keep his attention. Instead, he thought about her averted eyes, like little shiny mirrors.

The next day, he went to the supermarket. Wandering up and down the aisles he passed the dog food and the tampons and finally found what he was looking for - the al foil. Although he only needed one sheet he bought a whole roll because that’s the way they sell them. Outside the supermarket he drew on the happiest eyes he could think of, and put them on.

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